Are the Parties Over? Gary Hart

[undeterred]

By Gary Hart, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted June 21, 2005.

American political parties, as we have known them for two centuries, are disintegrating. They are being replaced by shifting coalitions that are forming and reforming constantly. This transition is leaving an awful lot of Americans adrift.

Because most of our founders did not trust the idea of political parties, they came into existence only reluctantly. Parties seemed too much like the dreaded "factions" that had arisen in Europe, what today we would call interest groups, concerned more with their own good than the common good. America's founders, steeped in the ancient Greek and Roman republican ideal, wanted their new fellow citizens to be concerned with the commonwealth. The more people fell into or formed narrow or special interest groups, the less they would be committed to the ideal of the new republic, that which was held in common by all and over which all were sovereign.

One of the highest compliments for a citizen of the founding era was to be called "disinterested." That did not mean uninterested. It meant not interested in one's own concerns at the expense of the commonwealth. The founders held the quaint notion that if we were all concerned, or interested, in what we held in common we would all benefit individually. Likewise, the more a citizen was interested in getting only what was best for him and those like him, the more corrupt the American republic would become.

But, by the late 18th Century, parties arose, largely dividing between the Federalists led by Hamilton who saw the need for a strong central or national government, with a national bank and national army, and the Republicans led by Jefferson who suspected the power of the state and preferred local authority and local control. As the Federalists were by and large Northern merchants and traders and the Republicans were by and large Southern landowners and farmers, the issue of slavery, unresolved in the founding era and documents, also came forcefully into play.

http://www.alternet.org/story/22256/

[tk2kewl]

1. This is a case for a term limit amendment IMHO

I really think the Democrats should make it a plank

[cprise]

2. Gary Hart must be a part of the problem.

Political parties are disintegrating only in America.

No wait... Only one political party is disintegrating. In America. Therefore all political parties are disintegrating, right?!

Hmmm. Now which one particular party is that, pray tell?

The Democratic Party.

Now we have to ask why? Well after reading this article it seems likely to me that great-white-moneyed-hopes like Hart do not feel compelled to advance the interests of minorities-eviros-labor because the former simply do not identify with the latter. So the 'GWMH' are cashing-out along with all their neoliberal friends.

Thanks for telling us gently, Gary. But many of us already knew when we saw how you all handled Florida and then Ohio.