"Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" I asked, hoping to surprise my grandfather with how clever I was. I can look back now and realize the social media of the day, black and white television, was full of news and discussion around the upcoming presidential election of 1964.
I was surprised by how sternly he looked at me. "I vote the man, not the party." I like to think now he would have said "person" but it was a time that public office was almost exclusively a male domain, notwithstanding the remarkable political career of Margaret Chase Smith. He died before seeing his daughter, my mother, hold local elected office for an unbroken twenty-five years, only stepping down, she told me, "to give someone else a chance."
At the time, political parties encouraged what was called then, "straight-ticket" voting, which meant voting one's entire ballot for one party. I learned that day my grandparents and parents considered that, somewhat harshly, to be ignorant. One was to learn the character of the candidate along with assessing the considered judgment the candidate would bring to the job. Each candidate was to be examined as an individual.
Around the same time, Gore Vidal -- and here are what I hope to be key words for your study of him, rather than identities, writer and political philosopher, defined politics in its simplest form as: who pays the money; who benefits from the money. In our system, people pay money in taxes in all their complex forms: income tax, property tax, sales tax, licensing fees, parking meters and parking tickets, ad almost infinitum. And we benefit from the money through roads and bridges, schools, public safety, public transportation, national defense, government purchases of goods and services from the free market, weather forecasts, food and drug inspection and testing, public ownership of shared spaces: the Washington Monument and the Grand Canyon, air traffic control, ad almost infinitum.
And we engage this taxing and spending from the very local level -- I paid property taxes and got the road past my driveway plowed in winter, and got to send my children to excellent public schools, albeit in modest facilities -- to multinational group efforts like the United Nations, NATO, and The World Bank.
None of us can monitor all this, so there's a complex system of monitors for both the paying and spending, starting with the IRS and the Federal Office of Personnel Management, down to my local School Board. Then there are independent monitors: citizen watch groups, journalists, lawyers, unions, independent research institutes, busybodies, you, and me.
And there are opportunists, con artists, charlatans, criminals organized and unorganized.
Just writing this makes my brain hurt and I'm not even beginning to touch the massive complexity. I remember driving north on I-95 -- benefiting from a whole lot of tax dollars -- out of New York City at 2am one night. The other side of the highway leading southbound into the city was fully crowded with fast moving tractor trailer trucks heading into New York. The city is refilling itself. How does it know?
It's too complicated for "We're right; they're wrong."
I thought my grandfather was stern. I just read George Washington's take on the two-party system in his Farewell Address. I have nothing to add, delete, or explain.
"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), 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, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
References:
Margaret Chase Smith: https://www.mcslibrary.org/bio
Gore Vidal: https://achievement.org/achiever/gore-vidal/
Farewell Address: https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/george-washington-farewell-address-1796