Outlaw Political Parties

We need to outlaw political parties. The Republicans, Democrats, and the diverse slew of third party parties, all need to be outlawed. We need to ban the practice of forming political parties.

There have long been cries from the political fringes that the two party system of our country is a scam that makes a mockery of the claim that we are a democracy, which it is and which it does. They’ll often declare the need to split up the two parties colluding in the strangling of the nation and having a wide array of smaller, more diverse parties, along the lines of what they have in most other countries that call themselves democracies, which is a decent idea but not the best one. The best idea is to eliminate all parties, big and small, progressive and destructive. What would be best would be to disband all existing parties and disallow the formation and any future ones. We need to make it illegal for politicians to organize.

Organization is often a good thing. If you want to get anything done on a large scale, you will have to organize with other like-minded folks. But organizing isn’t an intrinsically good thing. While organizing can lead to the ending of wars and ensuring people’s civil and human rights, it can also lead to pogroms and genocide. Few genocides have had success without at least some effective organizing. Sure, a well organized government is more successful, but so is a criminal syndicate. Both are an achievement, but it’s the moral parsing of their actions, what they do with their organized power, that determines whether that’s a good thing.

There’s also a fine line between an organized group and a mob. All it takes to meet the bare minimum of organization is to get a group of people in the same place doing the same thing. That isn’t necessarily something to be that proud of. As horrific, and seemingly chaotic as we imagine them being today, lynchings, for example, were quite organized affairs. People left work, kids were let out of school, their were picnics and photos and macabre souvenirs; it was like a relatively spontaneous neighborhood fair, with ritualized murder and degradation that would condemn all participants and spectators to Hell, if there were such a place and if it were worse than the core of such despicable people’s beings.

We see in our political duopoly just how little good and how much bad can be done by the organization of these parties. While not directly participating in crimes, they are either in the party enacting crimes, or in the party allowing them to be enacted. They are mobs, of a sort. Mobs who ramble and tweet rather than personally torch and murder, but mobs all the same.

What’s often called tribe mentality is behavior that is often interchangeable with that of mob mentality. A gang of people come together and enforce their will on others. They act in tune with one another, without requiring their ideas and actions be logical or moral. They demand loyalty and punish any who stray from the party line. The exception there being when Democrats side with Republicans; there’s rarely any real consequence for that.

Outlawing organization between politicians wouldn’t mean that civilians couldn’t organize. If you want to assemble and march and petition and revolt for a cause, then by all means, do. If you win a politician over to your way of thinking, you get their vote. If two or a dozen more politicians come to your way of thinking as well, then good on you, that’s progress. But God help those politicians if they should try to organize or collude with one another. They’ll be shoved blindfolded against a wall and have a cigarette stuck in their mouths, alongside any politicians who took bribes (campaign donations) or served their personal interests rather than those of their constituents. The difference between them being that the latter group, having committed a more serious crime, will have endured some public shaming and possibly torture first.

Those dedicated to the parties champion the idea of collaboration and consensus building, rhetorically. They praise the mission of making common cause. The problem with that is the consensus they are trying to reach is between the already flawed consensuses of hive-minded mobs. Two groups with two shitty ideas struggle to meet halfway in the river of shit. Better that we have each person not representing their party, or themselves, but only their constituents, no one but the people. Rather than vestigial appendages of the body politic, each and every politician should be the independent champion of those they serve.