On the Abolition of All Political Parties

That is the title of a book written in 1942 by a French woman, Simone Weil. It is quite good and I highly recommend it. You can find it here:

On the Abolition of All Political Parties

In 2019, the Washington Post published a piece about the book and its relevance to the current political climate in this country:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/18/this-french-intellectual-diagnosed-americas-current-political-malaise/

For Weil, all political parties, regardless of their ideological coloration, share three basic traits. They are dedicated to nurturing collective passions, designed to exercise collective pressure upon the minds of their members and devoted to their collective self-preservation. These traits, in turn, make it nigh impossible for the members of political parties to think and act as individuals.

Current psychological / neurological research supports this judgment. We are basically tribal. We defend our membership in the group that gives us identity and purpose. Rational arguments will not dissuade us, and we are rarely able to separate ourselves from the group.

The author makes excellent points, and with  bit of research you can find all manner of organizations committed to this cause. No political parties are supporting this. Interesting, right? Great idea, but how on earth do we do that? Being a member, being tribal is one of the basic core things about homo sapiens. It is how we defeated all of the other hominids that were in competition with us. When stressed, we identify with our core membership group, and we will even sacrifice our lives for the good of the tribe. This is pretty well documented at this point. Giving up our rational thinking to belong to the group is pretty easy, compared to dying for it. 

How do we overcome that strength or weakness, and turn it into an advantage? We have managed to do that with some other traits that are just as powerful. Take for example our need for strong leaders, or our selfish need to acquire things. These are great strengths, but if left totally unchecked we are have despotic tyranny, and unbridled monopolies. 

Some form of democracy seems required to constrain our lust for strong leaders. We have them, but they are constrained, restricted, limited. That is a pretty amazing accomplishment. 

For our need to acquire everything we can, some market restraints have generally been required - anti-trust, price fixing controls, SEC, etc. They work somewhat. We make it illegal to have too much control of our "free" market, because that option is not the most "efficient" or effective. This one slips a bit now and then - libertarians seem oddly bent on destroying it, but most of us understand that if you build a wonderful economic engine with NO controls, it is like designing a super fast car with no brakes. You can get one of these up and running, but it is destructive to its surroundings, and it takes forever to get anywhere because you have to coast to a stop. Brakes really help you get to where you are going quickly and in one piece.

So, my thinking is that we need to change our form of government to make political parties unnecessary, to make them powerless. I doubt that we can make them illegal. This tendency to tribalism is so ingrained in us that I doubt it could ever be directly constrained. Instead, let's structure a government form where it is simply powerless. You can belong to a political party.You can gather in crowds and cheer your leader, or your ideas, or your membership. Fine. But for choosing a leader, the party or group has no role. 

Good idea - now how on earth do we do that? Parliamentary seems a bit better. It gives us one more layer of decisions before we have the "supreme leader" appointed. Completely indirect elections at the federal level might do that. I wrote a piece on that a few years ago. A true "face to face" democracy - not a party based system. 

https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2013/06/face-to-face-democracy.html

What is your take on this? We clearly need to do something! NOW!