Offsite Post: ‘An Alternative to the Political Party System’

 

The limits of how much good political parties can do for a people are once again being illustrated here in Louisiana, as the Republican Party leadership is quietly trying to kill legislation that would protect what is left of Christian culture in this State.

The early leaders of the American union were unfriendly toward the idea of political parties.  But it is a Spaniard, Victor Pradera (1872-1936), an enemy of the egalitarian revolutionaries who were ravaging his homeland, to whom we turn today to illustrate the true nature of political parties.  He lets some of the politicians of his day hang themselves with their own words:

 

‘ . . .  “minorities constituting the strength of parties have no other ideals and principles than those of their leaders, who become real dictators.” ’

 

‘ . . . “the interest of party and group was notoriously of higher import than the public interest.” ’

 

‘ . . . “a lamentable tendency to dictatorship.  . . . instead of the country availing itself of the parties, and the parties of their leaders, these make use of the parties, and the parties profit by the country.” ’ 

 

--The New State, B. Malley, trans., New York, AMS Press, 1974 [1939], p. 134; italics in original

Given the real failures and the real dangers that lie within political parties, it is very much in our interest of Louisiana and the other Southern States to find an alternative to this system.  We can find it in the system of corporatism that existed prior to the rise of political parties.  In this system, representation in government was according to the various institutions/organizations that made up a society - churches, the guilds that represented various private occupations (doctors, carpenters, mechanics, and so forth), and actual, historical political entities like cities above a certain population and parishes/counties.  Each of these would be represented in the government, not a clump of people from make-believe, gerrymandered districts who have no organic attachment to one another.  The corporatist system is closer to human reality, as society is not made up of separate, isolated individuals, but of people who exist within a complex matrix of connections:  family, Church, neighborhood, job, region, etc.

Vice President John C. Calhoun, the great Southern statesmen from South Carolina (who is much maligned today by the Cancel Culture crowd, though he shouldn’t be), described the functioning of such a system in his Disquisition on Government.  He also thought it the best way to establish representation in government, so that, using his analogy of a living organism, through the deliberation of all the different organs of the social organism, the whole body would act harmoniously, for the good of all.  . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/an-alternative-to-the-political-party-system.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!