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The Single Party
 Many
pundits have noted that political conventions
no longer excite us.  They
bore us to death. The
nominations are already locked up before conventions even begin, so there
is no suspense. Why even hold these empty political orgies?
Well, they do serve one function:
They support the fiction of the two-party system. Both parties pretend it
makes a big difference which candidate wins. Both sides agree to pretend
they aren’t essentially the same party.
Hollywood is about to give us
another candidate: The Manchurian Candidate, a remake of
the 1962 satirical political thriller. This time, the Cold War being behind
us, the villains aren’t Commies; they’re corporate
executives, in keeping with Hollywood’s preference for
conspiratorial businessmen. Sounds pretty implausible.
I can imagine a more believable
version for our age: A robotic Texan from a prominent Republican family is
kidnapped and brainwashed by a shadowy group of political
“progressives.” He is then set up in a political career in order
to subvert the conservative movement. His mission is to keep expanding
the government, while using conservative rhetoric in order to fool gullible
talk-show hosts whose support he needs. When he is elected president of
the United States, he is to complete the consolidation of the two parties
into one huge big-government party.
Chilling, eh? But of course such a
conspiracy would be superfluous. The same result is being achieved
without it.
G.K. Chesterton long ago
identified the flaw in a two-party system: “The democracy has the
right to answer questions, but it has no right to ask them. It is still the
political aristocracy that asks the questions. And we shall not be
unreasonably cynical if we suppose that the political aristocracy will
always be rather careful what questions it asks.”
![[Breaker quote: The two-party masquerade]](2004breakers/040727.gif) The
question our own two major parties always ask is this: Do you prefer
Democrats or Republicans? It’s a loaded question. The voter
isn’t allowed to reject the shared premises of the two big-
government parties. And George W. Bush is completing the transformation
of the Republican Party into a full partner of the Democrats in making the
government as big as possible. The conservative or libertarian voter can
no longer enjoy even the illusion that the Republicans offer a principled
alternative to limitless government.
The myth of democracy requires
the voters to be assured that they are making real choices. It won’t
do to admit that the choices that count have already been made for them.
The Single Party must go on pretending that it’s Double.
The surest proof that we
don’t have two opposing parties (as distinct from two
power-hungry factions) is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans
ever try to reduce the existing power of the government. The only
“debate” between them is over what new powers shall be
added to those already in place. Both promise, at their conventions, to take
the country in a new direction; but that direction is never back toward the
limited government described by the U.S. Constitution. It’s always
toward an even bigger, busier government, whether making war, tightening
security, providing universal health care, or going to Mars.
To be sure, each party also
routinely charges that the other party’s agenda would overburden
the taxpayer and result in a ghastly deficit; but somehow the taxpayer
never gets relief and the spending never takes more than a brief, slight
dip, no matter which party wins — or rather, no matter which wing
of our Single Party wins.
The overall pattern is so
gigantically clear that you have to wonder how anyone can possibly fail to
see it. Yet most Americans seem to believe that the voters can change the
pattern by electing one of the two alternatives, both of which are
committed to it.
Correction: Half of all Americans
seem to believe this; the other, more sensible half don’t bother
voting. Partisans of the system regard this as a worrisome sign of civic
sloth. It’s actually a sign of realism. What’s more, if you
vote for a minor party offering what you really believe in, you are said to
be “wasting” your vote. What a comment on democracy!
Men will fight and even die for
freedom. I suspect that they might even vote for freedom, if it were
offered in an unrigged election. But our Single Party isn’t about to
put this to the test. It will continue to ask us whom we want to have
limitless power, not whether we want that power to exist in the first
place.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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