Thoughts on Partisanship
Recently, I have been asked why we in Yellowbanks political action committee call ourselves nonpartisan, and questioning whether we are in fact nonpartisan.
We are not affiliated with and do not in any way work with any political party or party committee. We owe no allegiance to any particular party. That makes us nonpartisan.
We are ideas-based, not party-based. This does not mean that we must split our favorable comments evenly among parties or candidates. There is no “quota” system.
One might ask: why be nonpartisan? Why shouldn’t people of like mind band together for political power? The answer is: there is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with people forming factions to advance their interests. It’s a fundamental right in our democratic republic.
The problem is HYPERpartisanship. The founding fathers knew this, and tried to set up a system to allow special interests to pursue their goals, but without letting any one faction gain permanent domination.
George Washington, in his farewell address after having served two terms as president(he declined to seek a third term….imagine that), warned against extreme partisan polarization: “….the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption…..”.
James Madison, in the Number 10 essay of The Federalist, wrote that factions cannot be eliminated without destroying a free society, but “….[since] the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed….relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS”.
This was done by setting up a three-branch government with an elaborate systems of checks and balances, so that no one ideological group can ever achieve permanent dominance; the majority cannot achieve tyranny over the minority and neither can a minority permanently dominate the majority. What this means in real life is that there is continual political conflict. (And this is a good thing! A society without disagreements is by definition not free.)
Elections are won and lost; issues dominate and then are defeated; one group runs things for a while, then another; one party controls, then another. The defeated factions can always live to fight another day. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best system the world has ever seen, and the closest the world has come to seeing a government truly seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
In the United States in these 2020’s, this carefully built system is being destroyed. Candidates from the lowest local level to the highest federal level are hostages to the extremists( you’d better toe the line or we’ll primary you!) so that compromise and middle ground are sneered at. And the opposition is worthy only of being destroyed, not tolerated. This leads to fatalism and cynicism, with noncompetitive elections( of 17 races in Daviess County this cycle, 9 are unopposed!). Not to mention low voter turnout.
Yellowbanks PAC is our attempt, beginning at grassroots level, to improve life for ALL people in our community by helping to begin a return to true competition in the political arena, elections without predetermined outcomes, no one-party rule, peaceful transfer of power.
References:
George Washington farewell address(1796). www.constitutioncenter.org
The Federalist Papers; No. 10. https://avalon.law.yale.edu