Thursday, June 9, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Political parties have become increasingly dysfunctional. Whether officials vote along the party line for reelection positioning or choose not to negotiate solutions because it makes the party in power look good, or they simply become so entrenched in their own partisan methodology, nothing works.
In 1796, President George Washington tried to warn us when he lambasted political parties for allowing “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to “subvert the power of the people.”
Carol Weissert, a political scientist, said people think of themselves almost exclusively in terms of their political affiliation. “It’s almost like, ‘I’m a Democrat; therefore I believe in this,’ rather than, ‘I believe in this and therefore I’m a Democrat or I’m a Republican.’ ”
We need people to think of themselves as Americans working together to solve a problem. Designations just contribute to political divide. Another political scientist, Stuart-Sinclair Weeks, asserted that without political parties, there would be no more need to mount expensive media campaigns or to compromise principles to bridge political divides. Because essentially, those divides would disappear. The best people for the job would naturally be chosen for office.
Social media has further complicated the issue, with people spewing bias and sometimes malicious statements as fact. This vicious partisanship would disappear if candidates simply stated their position on important issues in writing for everyone to evaluate. Then we could hire the best person for the job and evaluate that person on their performance when they consider re-election.
