Never Trust The Party!

After making a comment here recently about Canada's current crisis being a threat to Democracy, I found similar sentiments over at Publius Pundit.

Go to the entry, and follow the links. This is one of the only western nations that we can call our neighbor. Its decay will effect us as much as anyone.

Some are calling this a constitutional Coup. The Mark Steyn piece that Publius links is a bit more indicting than even that.

Quote:
Like Robert Mugabe, Paul Martin has simply declared that the constitution is whatever he says it is.

I don't think that we're looking at a dictatorship in our backyard. I think that this is temporary, and that the Canadian people will ultimately resolve it. But this will not be an incident that they are soon to forget--and it's one we can all learn from.

The ideological stance of a political party varies greatly with time, if it survives long enough. We should never forget that political parties are institutions whose sole purpose is to survive and stay in power.

I don't understand people who align themselves so closely with either the Democrats or the Republicans. Believe what you want to believe about right and wrong and how the country should be run, but why tack yourself to a particular party? At any given moment, that party might shift so that it can better accomodate itself; get more votes and get more of its people in power. Do you really want to be taken along for the ride when it leads not to integrity or ideology, but to simple Machiavellian tactics?

Case in point: one of my favorite blogs, Cynical Nation, linked to this extraordinary piece at Slate by one Timothy Noah.

Quote:
I never thought I'd see the day when preservation of the filibuster became a grass-roots liberal cause, but that day seems to have arrived. College students are staging mock filibusters at universities across the country. Once upon a time, student activists decried the immorality of the Vietnam War and U.S. investment in the apartheid regime in South Africa. Their protests helped change the world. Today student activists are defending a parliamentary rule that enabled southern bigots to block civil rights legislation for nearly a century! They're defending demosclerosis! They're defending the right of the minority to thwart the will of the majority! Oh sure, it all has something to do with bad judicial nominations, too. But the street theater isn't about bad judges. It's about Robert's Rules of Order.

The Filibuster. The Filibuster. Let's think about this now--there are college students that are passionately defending The Filibuster.

I am neither defending it nor arguing against it. I am merely stating--in a world with war, starvation, and dictatorships--why the fuck are college kids getting their panties in a bunch about the Senators' right to read from phone books?!

It's not about right and wrong any more for these kids. It's about the party. Even if it isn't about being a democrat (as it isn't trendy at the moment to "label yourself", even if you follow a particular party line to the letter pretty obviously) it's about seeing things in terms of parties. The Republican Party is so big and scary and evil right now, and the majority of voters are too stupid to do anything about it. So we need to empower their opponents!

We need to trust the Democrats to block the evil crusade of the Republicans! But no, I'm not a Democrat myself, really. Just a liberal, or just a progressive, or just an intellectual who believes that people are idiots for not seeing the evil that the Republican party has wraught!

If they weren't so stupid, they'd know we should keep the filibuster.

And trust the Democrats? Because even without explicitly aligning yourself with a party, that's exactly what you're doing by getting so passionate on this trivial issue. You're saying, don't trust the Republicans. They're trying to get rid of the Filibuster because they're power-hungry. Trust the democrats with the Filibuster.

So why am I talking about this? Why did I go from Canada's scandals to how some college kids feel about the Filibuster? What is this long and winding rant about?

It's about the party.

The Democratic Party is in the minority, isn't sure how to get out of it, but still wants to hold on to as much power as physically possible. There is no ideological framework here--certainly not a democratic one, as giving more power to the group that fewer people voted for doesn't seem all that democratic to me.

The Republican Party is in the majority, and wants to use that to grab even more power than that status has entailed historically. I can't believe that their motives are democratic either--they've made the same arguments that the Democrats are making now, when they were in the minority. They are just an organization built for the express purpose of expandings its own influence.

That makes sense to me. I can see that.

But beyond the layer of politicians and party officials involved here, there's the American citizens. I'm talking about the citizens who at some point in their lives, for one ideological reason or another, aligned themselves with one party or the other. And I'm sure that they really believe whatever side of the debate they've taken as far as the filibuster is concerned, because they either trust their own party or they strongly distrust the other one, and trust their party enough to argue for their side.

Party structures need to be weakened, and party unity needs to be discouraged. We are not Democrats or Republicans. We are Americans. Aligning ourselves with parties only empowers self-serving institutions.

In Canada, the Liberal party has been in power for so long that it feels it deserves to stay, regardless of what the voters have to say about it. Do we really want to empower the party structures that exist in our own nation, when the Canadian situation is exactly the sort of scenario that such empowerment leads to?

So I'd like to end this rambling entry of mine with a few questions: Have you always voted for the same party? Have you ever, on the local, county, state, or federal level, voted for someone affiliated with the party you don't usually vote for?

Are you a Republican, a Democrat, or an American?