Exhibit A: Political ATTITUDES
Political attitudes are relative things. There are four basic political attitudes: liberal, conservative, radical, and reactionary.
Radicals and reactionaries are the easiest to understand, and while they are polar opposites in one sense, they are strikingly similar in another. Both want their way, and they want it NOW. A reactionary wants to reorganize the existing political regime into the way it was in the past-- for example, a person who wanted to go back to the Roman Monarchy's state of affairs during the Roman Republic would have been a reactionary. A radical also wants change-- forward change. By "forward" I mean change to some kind of state of affairs that is "new," that has not yet been tried. So Maximilien Robespierre of the French revolution was a radical. What characterizes reactionaries and radicals is their methods. Both tend to favor violence and upheaval-- they often employ political tools such as terrorism and coup d'etat. This makes them extraordinarily similar. Their main difference is what exactly they want to change to. Of course, some radicals and reactionaries are nonviolent, but still radical or reactionary. Some examples include civil disobedience leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both wanted fairly immediate change (both radical), but chose to use tools such as boycotts, sit-ins, and other forms of civil disobedience, rather than the more violent methods traditionally used by people who want immediate change.
The Boston Tea Party: 18th-century American radicals
The American Tea Party Movement: 21st-century American reactionaries
For the more mild-mannered individuals, there are two other political attitudes: liberal and conservative. Liberals are a bit like radicals in that they also want the state of affairs to change to something new, but they are more realistic and support gradual, nonviolent change. Conservatives are different from the other three attitudes in that they don't want any change at all-- forward or backward. They are related to reactionaries, though, in the sense that one way of looking at a reactionary is as a conservative who didn't get her way. Conservatives are all about the status quo, and reactionaries want to go back to a former status quo.
So you see, political attitude is relative to the status quo. The US Founding Fathers tended to be liberals, until they realized that dear King George III was so implacable that the only way they were going to get what they wanted was through a more radical course of action-- namely, revolution. On the other hand, someone who wanted to go back to the status quo of, say, 1815, would be a reactionary (even though in 1776 many of the ideals of 1815 were liberal or radical).
Exhibit B: Political PARTIES
Political parties are organizations within a country that are trying to achieve certain political goals. The number of dominant parties varies widely from country to country-- from communist Russia, where there was only one party in power (this party considered itself to be the "vanguard of the proletariat"; see previous blog post), to the US, where there are two dominant parties, to places like Canada and the UK, where there are three or more.
The two dominant parties in the US are the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republican party tends to be more conservative while the Democrats are more liberal, but that is not a matter of definition and it has not always been that way. In the 19th century, the Republican party was the more liberal, progressive one, because it favored (among other things) the abolition of slavery. Both parties have evolved over time. They are not ideologies; they are organizations.
In fact, it is common for a party to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others (radical and reactionary attitudes tend to be quite rare in political parties, for reasons I'll talk about momentarily). For example, a party could favor conservative domestic policy and progressive foreign policy, or vice versa.
Because of the way the US representational and electoral systems work, the two dominant parties are the way to control politics. Since the US is democratic/republican in nature ("democratic" serves as a general term meaning that the demos-- the people-- are in charge of things, and "republican" is a more technical term referring to the specific system of government), the parties have to cater to the people. Since they want to attract the largest base of people possible, they tend to be more moderate in nature-- liberal or conservative. Radical or reactionary platforms tend to strongly attract a small segment of the population while alienating the rest. This is why the Democrat and Republican parties tend to be so similar, and why independent-thinking American voters often feel as if their electoral choices aren't really choices at all.
Exhibit C: Electoral Systems
The number of dominant political parties in a country is intimately tied to its electoral system. The US has a majoritarian electoral system-- meaning that whichever party wins an election gets all of the electors in the electoral college. The alternative is a proportional-representation system (often referred to as PR), which means that seats are apportioned based on proportions. Any party that can get more than a certain percentage of the vote-- usually 2%-- gets the same percentage of seats that they got of the vote. Personally, a PR electoral system makes a lot more sense to me.
Firstly, it eliminates the dual-party monopoly on politics. Voters don't feel that they are "wasting" their vote if they vote for, say, a Libertarian or a Green party candidate.
Secondly, it allows for more accurate representation of the demographic. The US is an especially diverse nation culturally, ethnically, religiously, ideologically-- any way you slice the pie. PR representation allows these differences to be more accurately represented. Minorities don't get trampled on by the majority.
Thirdly, the more diversity there is among government representatives, the harder it will be for them to get anything done. By that, I mean that they have to compromise more. It is a lot harder for any one party to get control of the representative body. Parties often have to form coalitions in order to get any kind of a majority, which means that they have to debate more, argue more, compromise more, sacrifice more. All this takes time. All this involves dropping more extreme ideas. The more time the government spends arguing among itself, the less time it has to mess with the people's business. It is limited to doing those government jobs that are more noncontroversial, that don't step on people's rights, because it is so difficult for them to effect change in the governmental infrastructure. There is always going to be somebody who disagrees. It seems to me that all this would keep the government busy among itself, and out of the people's business.
Peroratio: Sententia
It is my opinion that political parties are basically useless. Unfortunately, the US's majoritarian electoral system means that it is virtually impossible for third parties to get anything done. The Democratic and Republican parties remind me of a king on his throne, complacent in his power. Both parties need a rude awakening-- let's get the Libertarian party, the Green party, the Constitution party, and all the others upsetting the monopoly of power that the two big parties currently hold. How this might be accomplished is quite complicated, though, even in theory (and practice always seems to be more complicated than theory). Many countries that use PR also have a parliamentary system of government, which may not be the best idea for the US. In any case, though, it seems apparent to me that the US government has become destructive of the ends for which it was created-- namely the protection of inalienable rights. Given that, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government. Abolition seems a bit extreme to me, but some alteration may be in order. Since, in my view, the principal problem the US faces in terms of good government is political parties, whatever solution is employed ought to diffuse the power of political parties so that Americans are accurately represented ideologically, instead of having two enormous and mostly irrelevant parties running things to nobody's satisfaction.
