The two-party highway to hell
...and how President Trump has changed the way we interact with it
Image: Pixabay
In 1780, John Adams remarked in a letter to Jonathan Jackson that there was “nothing I dread So much, as a Division of the Republick into two great Parties, each arranged under its Leader, and concerting Measures in opposition to each other.”
He called this the “greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.”
Today we stand divided between two towering political behemoths, a two-party system rooted in political theatre between Democrats and Republicans – an age-old back-and-forth of legislative bickering and drama.
However, since President George Washington held the reins of power in the U.S., there has been a long-standing history of two-party rivalry in America, beginning with the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.
Not since former Whig President Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) has the United States had a president who was not either a Republican or a Democrat, illustrating a 170-year reign of concentrated political power between the two established parties.
In the meantime, Democrats and Republicans alike have tossed power back and forth like a basketball, swinging partisan deals behind closed doors for decades, casting secret ballots away from the prying eyes of their constituents, and clandestinely making millions of dollars on insider trading.
Gone are the days of men like Davy Crockett, a rough-and-tumble frontiersman and war veteran who served several nonconsecutive stints in the U.S. House of Representatives before heading to Texas, where he died defending the Alamo against General Santa Anna’s Mexican armed forces in 1836.
These days, running for the House and Senate requires millions of dollars, which means that the average, hardworking American could never dream of holding public office. To have a shot at winning, candidates must get money from somewhere. And, inevitably, the billionaire donors and corporate lobbyists who pour money into those campaign coffers control what those candidates can or cannot do. In other words, those representatives or senators can’t work for the American people, because they’re too busy working for the other people who are funding their political careers.
It's a corrupt system, reminiscent of how mafia mobsters run a criminal empire – a pay-to-play scheme. Where the Founding Fathers envisioned public service as just that – a service to one’s country – longtime politicians like Rep. Nancy Pelosi, R-Calif., have turned it into a lucrative, multi-million-dollar career.
The price of running for office is so astronomical that it is impossible for anyone to run a campaign without massive funding behind it. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that to even qualify to stand on stage at the third Republican primary debate in 2023, candidates had to accrue a minimum of 70,000 unique donors, 200 of which had to be from 20 different states, The Hill reported.
While each party is entitled to have its rules about competing in the debates, it is truly a disservice to the democratic process that out of the hundreds of millions of people in the United States, only those who manage to court the biggest donors in the country can possibly have a chance at winning the nomination.
Quite frankly, the concept of Mr. Smith going to Washington died a very long time ago.
And that’s the point: Americans, whether they realize it or not, have been shackled to an established and oligarchic two-party system that maintains a status quo of power for Washington elitists while projecting a theatrical façade of bipartisan bickering that makes it look like there’s a power struggle between the right and the left.
Naturally, it is this same disingenuous system that has viciously been kicking back against the American people since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. When people say that he is a Washington “outsider,” that hardly does justice to exactly what he represents.
For the first time in decades, a man emerged on the political scene who didn’t need outside money or big donors. Trump, like him or not, represented something that the corrupted Uniparty cannot contend with: He is not controllable, and therefore, he is a threat to their centuries-old ironclad balance of carefully curated power.
In 2015, Trump explained the weakness of other GOP politicians to Newsmax.
He said, “They're politicians. Remember this: A politician is all talk, no action. They're not going to get us to the Promised Land and I've been saying this … They're controlled by lobbyists, they're controlled by their donors, they're controlled by special interests. … If you're looking at making our country great again, they're not going to do it."
And how could they? Public service is a thing of the past. Politicians are beholden to their financial overlords, many of whom have a much darker agenda than most Americans are willing to admit. But, with the Biden administration pushing the country toward World War III and the Republican Party essentially doing nothing to stop it, it is clear that, regardless of party affiliation, Washington politicians tend to act as one unified body.
Trump may be running on the Republican ticket, but his agenda does not represent the weakness of the Republican Party. His agenda, rather, represents what could be a return to American common sense and basic conservative policies that have stood the test of time. And, because Trump does not answer to globalist campaign donors or corporate giants, he has the freedom to fulfill his campaign promises in a prospective second term – as he did during his first term in the White House.
There can be no doubt that America’s political apparatus has fallen to new lows over the past few decades. As John Adams warned, the two-party system has indeed turned out to be “the greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.” It wasn’t until Donald Trump burst onto the scene in 2016 that Americans realized just how evil such a system is, and how desperately we need to escape it.
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