As President Bush becomes more and more of a lame duck after only a year of office in his second term shift begins to focus on the 2008 election. Speculation over who will be running for office and whether or not Republicans will retain control of the executive and legislative branches has been thrown around, especially as of late. The problem that I see is that everyone is still thinking in a partisan fashion. It seems that the problem with politics in modern history has been due to partisan politics and the ruin they have had on democracy.
The news media never covers this, but what happened to having more than two parties actually having a chance in a presidential election. With all of the corruption within the parties, especially Democrat and Republican parties, the best solution would be to elect someone who is independent.
The main problem with this is that the little guy has a hard time competing against the corruptions of corporate contributions and lobbying. So whenever someone small wants to even try to become big time they have to soil themselves by playing dirty politics. The question then comes up, is there any way to have a fair election without infringing on the rights that are outlined by the Bill of Rights? I don’t see a solution in sight.
As a proponent of near absolute free speech and free media, I don’t want to hinder what the candidates can do or say. I also support capitalism and free market for the most part. That throws campaign contributions out the window. Or does it? Should corporations really be able to contribute to a candidate? Well, legally a corporation is considered a person so they can. But the truth of the matter is that corporations are not legal citizens of the United States in the sense that they cannot vote on a candidate. So perhaps we should just outlaw the financial contributions of corporations in political elections. The problem that arises from this is that then the corporations can funnel money to executives and workers with an implication that they contribute it to a corporation. Although this is possible, it still makes is more difficult for candidates to get corporate contributions, but doesn’t really solve any problem in the long run.
So what can we do to fix partisan politics? Well without infringing on rights, I don’t see how it can be done. Does that mean that we are doomed to live with a corrupt political system, where true democracy cannot thrive?
Well all hope is not completely lost. Americans can be quite resourceful if they want to be. If the majority of voters decided not to back anyone who took in a corporate contribution or affiliated themselves with a party then maybe there is some ray of hope in all of the corruption.
As Madison said in Federalist Paper #10, “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.” Without faction, in the theory of pluralism, democracy cannot truly thrive. But if you only have two factions running the government pluralism doesn’t work. Many factions need to contribute otherwise stagnation occurs and the idea of a republican government fails. To fix this we need to break down these factions farther than just Democrat and Republican otherwise you will get what Madison feared with a tyranny of one faction controlling the majority of the government, i.e. Republican control of Congress and Executive branch.
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