America has a two party system for very good and very legitimate CONSTITUTIONAL reasons–even though the parties might be said to be “extra-Constitutional.” The two parties still perform a constitutional function in focusing our minds on the issues of that Constitution. That’s why wierd parties (like the Greens, for example) never do well in America–they seem to be out to lunch because they disregard our system in favor of some other ideology. If an American party wants to do something that is outside of the bounds of our Constitution–they at least have to wear the window dressing of constitutionality. They have to stretch the bounds of credibility by employing the talents of “constitutional scholars” who can find “legitimacy” for their arguments in that venerable document. Fortunately for our republic, the great thing about stretching is that even if the thing stretched gets alittle mishapen, it still retains its form. We can deal with stretch marks if we keep our soul. ~Julie Ponzi, No Left Turns

Actually, we have two parties because of historical accident and the inheritance of the English Court-Country dichotomy. When the Founders gave political factions any thought, they viewed them as pernicious, destructive of the common good and injurious to the stability of republics, as Roman and medieval Italian history had taught them. In this they were right. Unfortunately, the wisdom of that lesson was quickly lost in the hurly-burly of grabbing for power.

So Ms. Ponzi doesn’t like Peggy Noonan’s suggestion that the time may be coming (indeed, it is already here!) for a viable third-party alternative to offer people some kind of representation to replace the sham government they currently have. Here are Ms. Noonan’s concluding remarks:

I don’t see any potential party, or potential candidate, on the scene right now who can harness the disaffection of growing portions of the electorate. But a new group or entity that could define the problem correctly–that sees the big divide not as something between the parties but between America’s ruling elite and its people–would be making long strides in putting third party ideas in play in America again.

Between these two assessments is an enormous, unbridgeable gulf. On the one side, someone who thinks that the parties serve some kind of valuable function that only works as long as there are two parties and no more, the other who sees them more or less for what they are: the two identical shells in the permanent shell game of our own brand of managed democracy (Putin has nothing on us in this regard), in which the people running the game always win and keep compelling us, the suckers, to play yet again.

There is every reason to believe that factions are mechanisms for controlling people and making them dependent on a set of alliances that they soon believe they cannot do without. This breeds servility and encourages a lack of civic responsibility–you become simply another foot-soldier in an unwieldy army of hangers-on being mobilised to support politicians and policies that in all likelihood have nothing to do with you and do not serve your best interest or the interest of the commonwealth. The factions inspire narrow, limited passions dedicated to interests that are at odds with the good of the commonwealth. Just as there ought to be no permanent or entangling alliances with other nations, and we have gone horribly wrong in creating such alliances in the last century, I suggest that our people also went horribly awry when they entered into the habit of creating permanent and entangling alliances domestically. Instead of “permanent interests,” that key phrase for all activists, what if we all simply minded our own business?

The factions are unnatural tribes that claim your allegiance on the basis of your horror of the other “tribe” having power over you and their manipulation of what you hold dear. It is perverse to think that the Republicans and Democrats give a moment’s notice to the Constitution, much less “focus” our attention on it and its “issues.” I don’t know how many “constitutional scholars” are on the Green Party’s payroll (my guess would be zero), but even a handful of the Greens, Libertarians and Constitutionalists have more common sense understanding of what the Constitution says and what the Old Republic was supposed to be than the entire leadership of both major parties put together.

If you must endorse the duopoly, do so for the pragmatic reasons that you don’t want the other fellow to have power–don’t kid us with these appeals to a Constitution that the Red Republicans have spent the last five years gutting like a trout. Ms. Ponzi’s waxing rhapsodic about “our system,” which those “wierd” [sic] third parties want to supplant, seems to confirm a common libertarian critique of many “conservatives” that the latter have no idea what “our system” is or what the Constitution actually says.

Update: Caleb Stegall at Reactionary Radicals had already started an interesting discussion of the potential for “neo-populism” in the situation Ms. Noonan was describing. It seems to me that the question for the Radicals is this: how do you have a vibrant populist movement that does not turn into the nationalists who understandably fill Prof. Lukacs with such horror?

In mass electoral systems, mass parties will come into being to organise and control large constituencies. This has nothing to do with constitutional republicanism and is actually the ruin of republicanism. When these parties become, as they have been in our system for a very long, co-opted by plutocracy and the interests of the state, there are no longer any trustworthy guardians of the public interest. The two parties become integrally linked with the government and the private oligarchs against which they are supposed to represent the public interest, all of which reinforces the tendency to distance themselves rhetorically and politically from their own constituents, whom they must suffer only at the occasional ballot and whom they can usually bribe with the right appeal to “values” or with the right-sized subsidy. The mass of voters falls for this, because they have never known anything different and because they have never been educated in the proper virtues of republican politics to find this sort of cheap swindle obnoxious or offensive to their status as citizens.

Ms. Noonan may be right that our tolerance for this sort of sham government may be coming to an end. She is to be congratulated for having moved so far beyond the deleterious, preposterous mental prisons of partisan attachment to see the bankruptcy of both party establishments and their alliance against the public. Ms. Ponzi, alas, remains in the fetters of these attachments, unfortunately only too serious in her conviction that die-hard GOP loyalty is somehow safeguarding our system of government. But if the GOP is constitutionalist, we cannot stand much more such constitutionalist government!