Damage Control

Let us, then, consider our present situation.

The United States has a "two-party" system of government. Where has this state of affairs been legislated? Search the U.S. Constitution: you will find no mention of the "two-party" system. In fact, you will find no mention of any system of political parties anywhere in that document. This is because the framers of the Constitution, in their "infinite wisdom," wished to spare this nation the troubles that they associated with party politics.

This is not as noble as it sounds. The truth is that the framers of the Constitution did not trust democracy: their opposition to political parties was an expression of elite (not "enlightened") self-interest. Remember that the framers were landed gentry. They did not believe that an urban rabble of middle class renters could be trusted to act in their own "best interests"--and they were quite certain that, given the chance, the rabble would not act in the best interests of the framers themselves. So they provided for a paternalistic electoral college to intervene on behalf of the political elite should democracy endanger its interests. And they omitted any mention of political parties in the country's founding document.

Things went quite smoothly for a short while: until republican democracy reared its ugly head in the form of Thomas Jefferson's opposition party (the virile ancestor of today's Democratic Party).

Now, you may ask yourself: how could Jefferson have founded an "opposition party" in a party-less political system? Great question. The answer is that there was a "party" in place--the ruling party--only its members never referred to themselves as a "party" and, probably, did not think of themselves as such. As far as they were concerned, they were simply in charge. They had instigated the revolution against the British crown--some had even fought in the war. They had formed the government and had taken positions within it. There was no party, only a ruling class. And there would be no parties--especially no "opposition parties" composed of the unfiefed--so long as they all stuck together and watched each others back.

Jefferson turned out to be a wild card. He was an anomaly. He was Virginia gentry, but his imagination had been fired by radical Jacobin ideals imported from France. He believed in democracy and the fairly even distribution of what Noam Chomsky calls "Cartesian common sense"--at least among white males. And it was this common sense and not property ownership that, in his view, entitled an individual to a share in governance. He saw the political potential of the "great unwashed" and turned to them to form his opposition "party of the people." This move infuriated the likes of Alexander Hamilton but, once the bottle was opened, the genie was out; now the only option left the ruling class was to engage in damage control.

There is no need to rehearse the complicated history of party politics in the United States any further except, perhaps, to say that, over the course of the last two centuries, the efforts of the ruling class to control the damage wrought by Jefferson's "radicalism" have been largely successful. In the year 2012 of the Common Era, two parties (and only two parties) control the political life of over 300 million people. Their "opposition" to one another has become the set piece of American political theater, but lacks any genuine substance. The ruling class is no longer the "landed gentry" but a militarized corporatocracy. As a consequence, this is what "damage control" looks like in 2012:

Do not be fooled by the public theatrics of our professional political class. Whenever you see Republicans and Democrats posturing about their differing political positions, recognize that what you are in fact witnessing is ELITE DAMAGE CONTROL.

Or, in the alternative, the "theater of the corrupt." The players in this drama--Republican and Democrat alike--share a common political philosophy of "Anglo-American Whig liberalism" (Michael Lind, The Next American Nation, 273) that promotes capitalist corporate welfare at home, military adventurism and imperialism abroad. The two parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of a corporatocracy that is staffed by individuals who fully subscribe to Whig liberalism. If you don't believe me, review the public records of monetary contributions made to the campaigns of candidates for both parties in any election cycle. You will notice that the same donors routinely appear in the lists providing financial support to candidates of BOTH parties. This is true in elections on the local, State, and Federal levels. And these are just the disclosed "hard dollars." Our political system is awash in "hard" dollars and "soft" favors--I.O.U.'s as it were, collected by the lobbyist-donors in the form of enabling legislation, executive orders, court decisions, no-bid contracts, etc.

As if this were not problematic enough, the Whig liberals serving as Justices on the United States Supreme Court have declared that monetary contributions made by business corporations to political candidates represent Constitutionally protected "free speech" (the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010).

What more can one say? The principle of "one citizen, one vote" has finally been exposed, pragmatically, as a fraud: the emperor of American democracy has no clothes.

In the year 2012, the two-party system of the United States does not enact a democratic polity so much as contain one.