Political parties aren't professional organizations

There’s no small amount of anger right now from MAGA Republicans at those party members who are refusing to support the president’s agenda. Our agenda. It seems like it’s been forever that some of us have been watching as things deteriorated.

Now Congress is doing the same thing it did during Trump’s first term and slow walking as much as possible. For some people, especially those who became disillusioned with the Democrats and are not Trump supporters, this reluctance is shocking.

It shouldn’t be.

We often think of political parties as a bastion of a particular set of standards. A group of people who will fight for articulated values. on our behalf, if we join the party and vote for their candidates and support them financially.

We shouldn’t.

Parties are no more reliable than governments.

Dan Schultz, who literally wrote a book on what he calls precinct strategy claimed the Republican Party in Arizona for Donald Trump, and thus, for the values of making America great again. Decades before, Newt Gingrich, through a much slower process, claimed the party in Georgia.

But without deliberate attention, the Republican Party falls into comfortable victimhood, and a way to raise easy money for those running it.

The Democrat party is no better. Without deliberate attention the Democrats moved so far to the left that they lost not only independent voters, but some of the best members of their party. If corrupt Republicans seem to be run by money, it appears to me that corrupt Democrats want power. [By that time, they already have our money.]

It’s open to question right now whether either the Democrat or Republican party will survive the coming years. But is it the structure of the party that is at fault?

Or is it us?

In any group of people there is going to be a certain percentage that are happy to take advantage of the group effort, while not putting in as much as they take out. That’s a fact of existence.

Capitalism’s intense specialization has encouraged us to think of politics as a profession, and parties as the professional organizations that represent that profession. But politics by its nature, is parasitic. Opportunities to take advantage of people just going about their lives is a constant temptation. Unlike business, there are no real consequences and no oversight for elected officials, and especially not for bureaucratic officials.

Is it any wonder that people fall? Even people who start out honest can be corrupted by the process. Tulsi Gabbard once told a story [in a podcast] about what happened on her first day as a Representative. She described not getting down to the business of standing for the interests of the people of her district, but being inserted into a round of instruction and demands for fundraising for the party. If she didn’t do this, then she’d be excluded from committees.

She chose exclusion, which says a great deal about her principles. But it’s obvious that most don’t. I don’t know if Republicans do the same thing and knowing that would be instructive. Fund raising in politics comes with an unbelievable amount of moral hazard.

We need to stop thinking of politicians as a special class of people. We need to stop thinking of parties as a group of people who represent our values and who will fight for us in government.

We have to represent our values ourselves. This isn’t something we can outsource. Government is something in which we must all participate whether by being active in our individual parties, [whatever those become] by being a bureaucratic whistleblower, or by holding office for a time. We need to keep an eye on the process and not leave the inspection of voter roles to ‘professionals.’ We need to volunteer for elections and hand-count votes.

Democrats bring a bit too much credulity to the table, giving inordinate trust to members if their party simply because they hold the name Democrat. Many times, I’ve asked friends on the left if they trust their elected officials. They say, “Yes. I’m know there’s a few bad eggs, but most of them are good people.” That response has been surprisingly consistent. This isn’t something someone on the right would ever say. The anger, frustration, and sense of betrayal currently being modeled by people on the left who are finally seeing what their party has done isn’t surprising. At least, to anyone on the right.

Republicans on the other hand, upon seeing the endless rallies mustered by the left, often joke “Don’t these people have jobs?“ Conservatives have often said they’re too busy with businesses and families and churches to participate in government. Then they pitch raw anger at the Left for making the place they love impossible to live in.

How tragic is that?

We’ve done this to ourselves. Not intentionally, but from a sense of excessive optimism, people on both left and the right failed to see the scorpions in their own garden. The scorpions aren’t going to go away. Bad actors are part of human existence and they’re only kept check by individuals who are paying attention. If we catch them early, they don’t have a chance to do so much damage. But if we don’t pay attention, they gain control of the system and generate havoc for their own benefit.

Both left and right are going to have to start making sacrifices. The right is going to have to spend a little less time building businesses so that they can show up at their Republican town committee meetings and run for office. This will involve breaking into a resistant, old-boy network that doesn’t like change.

Democrats are going to have to sacrifice some of their sacred time and freedom to participate in boring committee meetings to ensure their party or institution isn’t getting hijacked by people who don’t share values they hold dear.

The hijackers are few, but if they’re not checked, then they have a chance to get loud, and seem bigger, more righteous, or more intimidating than they actually are.

But if they gain actual power, then they corrupt the values of the entire society, no matter which side of the political aisle people once stood.

We can form new political parties, but the problem isn’t in the party. It’s in us: our willingness to be involved and participate in the process. If we don’t identify scorpions, they’ll simply scuttle under the leaves and pop up elsewhere in the new parties that get created.

We need to engage in the process of deciding what we expect from elected officials and bureaucrats. We need to make conscious decisions about how long they stay in office [as opposed to relying on term-limits], what our expectations are, and make sure those expectations are fulfilled. It is not enough to vote and then assume that our candidate is going to do their job. It’s not even enough to assume that our chosen professional organization will supervise them on our behalf.

The thing we forget is that they work for US. WE are the boss and the boss has a job too.

I recently had a nice chat with a man who thought we should go back to monarchy, ‘Because then you know who to be-head if they get uppity.’ The trouble with this proposal is that the cost of change is high. There is a lot of tearing down, not to mention blood, involved in such a venture. Citizen representation is supposed to cut out the blood part, and minimize the tearing down of structures so we can spend our time building new stuff.

The US has been very good at building new stuff. So good that people who want to build something try hard to be here. The scorpions - the parasites - have been carefully using those structures against us.

Many people want the satisfaction of an accounting. But happens after that? We go back to our lives feeling vindicated?

There is no going back. We all have to step up and take responsibility or government become just another tragedy of the commons.

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