by Anthony Gucciardi

On any given day you can find a news story that focuses on the conflict between democrats and republicans, or Group A and Group B. These groups could be anything, but as long as they are toted as being the opposite of each other, they will clash. When one party supports a bill, the other tends to oppose it. This holds true for both sides, creating a never-ceasing battle over political parties, as opposed to policy.

The change in each party’s fundamental policies has been warped into an infinitesimally minute amount of distinction from one another. When one does not agree with the “Republican” stance, they generally lean towards a “Democratic” stance. The guise of the two parties creates a false sense of freedom and liberation from a structured ideal.

The Soviet Union’s single party system was a failure due to it’s inability to withstand a dissident attack. The United States two-party system is simply the post-beta form of the Soviet-style political spectrum, with the guise of liberty upon it’s aging fangs.

Holding Hands

The word paradigm (paradigma), compounded from it’s Greek root word ???????? “to show”, accurately describes the dimension between the left and right party. This paradigm requires a vice grip of social ideology held together for stability. A single party’s influence can break, without a backboard to cater towards any dissidence.

Two parties can stand up against one another to create both geometrically and intellectually a more powerful structure that can withstand intense dissidence from each party for one reason: the rebellion of the first party’s ideals are reciprocated by the second.

Real Issues

The war between left and right diminishes the focus on real issues. A frighteningly large number of people will make all their decisions based upon their party leaders. The debate turns into left verses right, instead of what is best for the country. The mainstream media loves to turn everything into a matter of “party wars”, instead of discussing the actual issue at it’s core.

Instead of thinking “left” or “right”, think about it from a human perspective. What will this do to our country? How will it affect me? How will it affect my neighbors?

Thinking for yourself

Imagine for a moment that your car has broken down. You go to a used car dealership and search around for a nice car. There are no price tags on the cars, but the place seems rather professional. You find a car you like, and it looks like it’s in pretty decent condition. You ask about the price, and the salesman says it will cost you $95,000.

In this case, most people would first investigate the true value of the car before purchasing it. While it seems completely logical to find the true value of the car, many do not take this metaphorical step when it comes down to left verses right. Placing blind trust in the leaders of a political party is just like trusting the used car salesman to give you the best price. Find out the truth for yourself, as it’s the only way to truly find out what’s going on.

Media Spins

The mainstream media loves to take legitimate topics and turn them into a battle between political parties. A perfect example is the Healthcare bill. Even though it has ridiculous policy changes, and a eugenics-based provision system, it is still turned into a left verses right issue by the media. Luckily people have begun to see through this false two party system, and are beginning to realize they are being played.

The mainstream media’s deception is wearing off quite rapidly, as the public begins to realize that they are being duped. The public is realizing that regardless of which party the current political figurehead (puppet) is affiliating himself with, he is still the same as the previous leader. It is a vicious cycle that continues to this day. The difference is that now the people are waking up to this cycle, and opposing it.

Ally yourself with humanity, not parties

You do not have time to waste on petty arguments that center around the false “party wars”. Use your time to get real information out, like the implications of the Healthcare bill, or theshocking dangers of vaccinations. True patriotism is to have thoughts that do not derive from the structured and targeting news media, or the most famous political puppet in your region.

by Robert Higgs

Because I despise politics in general, and the two major parties in this country in particular, I go through life constantly bemused by all the weight that people put on partisan political loyalties and on adherence to the normative demarcations the parties promote. Henry Adams observed that “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” This marshalling of hatreds is not the whole of politics, to be sure, but it is an essential element. Thus, Democrats encourage people to hate big corporations, and Republicans encourage people to hate welfare recipients.

Of course, it’s all a fraud, designed to distract people from the overriding reality of political life, which is that the state and its principal supporters are constantly screwing the rest of us, regardless of which party happens to control the presidency and the Congress. Amid all the partisan sound and fury, hardly anybody notices that political reality boils down to two “parties”: (1) those who, in one way or another, use state power to bully and live at the expense of others; and (2) those unfortunate others.

Even when politics seems to involve life-and-death issues, the partisan divisions often only obscure the overriding political realities. So, Democrats say that anti-abortion Republicans, who claim to have such tremendous concern for saving the lives of the unborn, have no interest whatever in saving the lives of those already born, such as the poor children living in the ghetto. And Republicans say that Democrats, who claim to have such tremendous concern for the poor, systematically contribute to theperpetuation of poverty by the countless taxes and regulations they load onto business owners who would otherwise be in better position to hire and train the poor and thereby to hasten their escape from poverty.

If the unborn children happen to be living in the wombs of women on whom U.S. bombs and rockets rain down in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, however, all Republican concerns for the unborn evaporate completely, as do the Democrats’ concerns for the poor children living in the selfsame bombarded villages. Both parties’ positions would seem to rest on very flexible and selective morality, if indeed either party may be said to have any moral basis at all, notwithstanding their chronic public displays of “moral” wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In any event, the parties’ principles of hatred have never passed the sniff test; indeed, they reek of hypocrisy. Thus, while railing against the “corporate rich,” the Democrats rely heavily on the financial support of Hollywood moguls and multi-millionaire trial lawyers, among other fat cats. And the Republicans, while denouncing the welfare mother who makes off with a few hundred undeserved bucks a month, vociferously support the hundreds of billions of dollars in welfare channeled to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Electric, among many other companies, via larcenous “defense” contracts, Export-Import Bank subsidies, and countless other forms of government support for “national security” and service to “the public interest” as Republicans conceive of these nebulous, yet rhetorically useful entities.

Notice, too, that although ordinary Democrats and Republicans often harbor intense mutual hatreds, the party leaders in Congress rub shoulders quite amiably as a rule. Regardless of which party has control, the loyal opposition can always be counted on to remain ever so loyal and ready to cut a deal. And why not? These ostensible political opponents are engaged in a process of plunder from which the bigwigs in both parties can expect to profit, whatever the ebb and flow of party politics. At bottom, the United States has a one-party state, cleverly designed to disguise the country’s true class division and to divert the masses from a recognition that unless you are a political insider connected with one of the major parties, you almost certainly will be ripped off on balance. Such exploitation, after all, is precisely what the state and the political parties that operate it are for.

Yet, rather than hating the predatory state, the masses have been conditioned to love this blood-soaked beast and even, if called upon, to lay down their lives and the lives of their children on its behalf. From my vantage point on the outside, peering in, I am perpetually mystified that so many people are taken in by the phony claims and obscurantist party rhetoric. As the song says, “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,” but unlike the fellow in the song, I am not “stuck in the middle.” Instead, I float above all of this wasted emotion, looking down on it with disgust and sadness. Moreover, as an economist, I am compelled to regret such an enormously inefficient allocation of hatred.

by Bill Kauffman, The American Conservative

In Edward Abbey’s after-the-collapse novel Good News, Sam the Shaman tells the valiant anarchist cowboy Jack Burns, “There’s one thing wrong with always fighting for freedom, and justice, and decency, and so forth.”

“Only one thing?” replies Burns. “What’s that?”

“You almost always lose.”

In deference to Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology poet and anti-imperialist states-rights Democrat, I shan’t quote Clarence Darrow’s line about lost causes being the only ones worth fighting for. Masters had been Darrow’s law partner, and he disdained the Chicago loudmouth as a headline-hogging welsher.

Still, there is the matter of the lostness of our cause. Peace, it seems, often passeth understanding.

Is The American Conservative a contrail in the sky of a dying America or the bright harbinger of revival—of a better, more humane Little America? I do not say this better America would be a more conservative America because for half a century, “conservative” has been a synonym of—a slave to—militarism, profligacy, the invasion of other nations, contempt for personal liberties, and an ignorance of and hostility toward provincial America that is Philip Rothian in its scope. The conservative movement, like the empire whose adjunct and cheerleader it is, is a daisy chain of epicene dissemblers and vampiric chickenhawks who feast on the carrion of our Republic. The c-word is quite simply beyond reclamation. The anarchist founder of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Frank Chodorov, had the right idea, even if it did contradict his pacifism: “Anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.” If we have to play Name that Tendency I’d opt for Little American, front-porch republican, localist, decentralist, libertarian, or, to borrow Robert Frost’s term, plain old Insubordinate American—anything but C! (With a nod to Shel Silverstein.)

Be not deceived that a few opportunistic Republicans who said absolutely nothing in defense of our America during the Bush octennium are now sending up false flags of state sovereignty and the Tenth Amendment. Their Contract with America doppelgangers pulled the same stunt a decade ago before signing on, without any apparent qualms, to the brutally consolidationist Bush-Cheney regime. Recall that Bob Dole carried a copy of the Tenth Amendment during his flaccid 1996 presidential campaign, presumably in the same pocket that held the pills he needed to gulp in order to entertain the gracious Liddy. If these people were anything other than cynical party hacks I would be enthusiastic, but for God’s sake, Charlie Brown, how often does Lucy have to yank the football away before you wise up?

The national “conversation,” to misuse that word, is and has been limited to belligerent neoconservatives and liberal imperialists for many years now. Ed Abbey’s Jack Burns is sooner to wind up on a Department of Homeland Security watch list than he is on CNN. But so what? We dishonor our forebears if we whine that the rulers and their lackeys are nasty, tyrannical, and placeless. Of course they are—they’re rulers and lackeys.

The great John Randolph once explained his contumacy: “I found I might co-operate, or be an honest man. I have therefore opposed them and will oppose them.” This is even truer today, though mere opposition is a debilitating condition for all but the most friendless crank. Standing athwart things is a good way to get neutered. Luckily, we are for things—a restoration of the Republic, the rebirth of citizenship, social and political life on a human scale, a peaceful America that minds its own damn business. These goals will confound those who mimic the attitudes (never the Beatitudes!) blared from the rectangular soul-stealer in the living room, but among those who think up their own notions and sign their own names, to borrow Edmund Wilson’s phrase, we have company. Anyone who engages in authentic civil or social life—ref in a pickup basketball game, drummer in a cowpunk band, secretary of a ladies’ study club, rhubarb-cutter in a community garden—is acting upon the healthy, voluntaristic, small-is-not-always-beautiful-but-at-least-it’s-human impulses that animate the first, last, and best alternative to the empire.

Whether we ever get together politically remains an open question. Protest politics is mostly boring street theater overseen by puppet-master choreographers in service of the two parties. True dissenters who undertake national campaigns—Ron Paul, Ralph Nader—are mocked, libeled, or ignored. Words are stripped of their meaning, even inverted, so that a vote for change produces Joe Biden, and a cheer for family values brings forth Newt Gingrich. I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused, though how much, really, can one take? And for how long? Sixty-one years ago the disgusted but amused H.L. Mencken covered his last campaign, which pitted the double atom-bomb dropper Harry Truman versus the little man on the wedding cake, Thomas E. Dewey. Was Obama versus McCain really that much worse a choice?

Our decline predates the Bushes, the Clintons, even the Kennedys. Trace it, if you like, back to the overthrow of the gentle Articles of Confederation and the triumph of Hamilton, Madison, and James Wilson over Patrick Henry, Luther Martin, and Melancton Smith in 1787-88. We have a helluva losing streak going, but there is a value in showing up for a game and taking your swings even if you have no chance. To give in is a sin.

So many of the vital and flavorful American political traditions go utterly, offensively, incredibly unrepresented in national discourse: the Anti-Federalists, the Populists, Brahmin anti-imperialists, independent liberals, prairie socialists, Old Right libertarians. It is our ennobling duty to keep these fires burning, even in the present darkness. For they illuminate the hopeful signs in our midst: homeschoolers, community-supported agriculture, independence movements from Vermont to Hawaii, the kids fired up by Ron Paul.

“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” advises Wendell Berry. Excellent advice.

Our country is Wendell Berry, Townes Van Zandt, Mavis Staples, Ken Kesey, Cormac McCarthy, Levon Helm… How can one despair with these by our sides, at our backs, in our heads? Editorialists in the New York Times and Washington Post, shouters on the television, sallow callow master bloggers who jerk out their vitriol over dissenters: they aren’t worth the scorn in a thumbnail vial. Their depressing and ephemeral work dissipates with the air it befouls, the paper it poisons, the screen it scars. The real country endures. It produces whatever books and songs and films and paintings add up to American culture. It is where sandlot baseball and farm markets come from; it is where peace dwells in this nation of perpetual war.

Sursum corda, pals. We ain’t dead yet. Turn off the TV. Reject the chains they have fashioned for you. Live as if in a free country. Look again at the things nighest unto you. That’s America. That’s worth saving.