Democratic-Republican Party Government is Practical Political Nihilism: the Spirit of Party is Incompatible with Individualism and Collectivism

Partisans of the Republican and Democratic parties flatter themselves that the two-party state and duopoly system of government is, in one way or another, a concrete embodiment of an eternal struggle between world historical principles. In one of its most common forms, this conceit is framed as nothing less than an opposition between good and evil, in which the aims and goals of the political other are conceived as an evil that must be avoided at all costs and confronted at every turn, with the implication that this purely negative activity on one's own part is the very form and content of "fighting the good fight."

In another common variant, the opposition between the Democratic and Republican parties is framed as a grand struggle between competing philosophical visions of the nature of politics and government, distinguished by their respective emphases on the individual citizen or the aggregate social body, and by their reflexive positions regarding the proper role of government, its ideal size and scope etc. This presumption is shared by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, and thus constitutes a primary element of the common ideology that sustains the reigning two-party state and duopoly system of government. But what if the spirit of party that characterizes Democratic-Republican politics and government is incompatible with both individualism and collectivism?

Though they agree on little else, ideologues of the Democratic and Republican parties rarely disagree when it comes to affirming their own self-importance. At Hullabaloo, Digby describes the development of her political consciousness as a liberal Democrat in the following way:

I came to see American politics as an endless struggle between two big competing visions with progress being made by two steps forward one step back most of the time.

Her understanding of the interrelationship between the Democratic and Republican parties is strikingly similar to that of conservative Republicans such as Manly from Manly's Republic, who argues that the Democratic and Republican parties are the heirs of the great foundational debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. He has written, for instance:

Americans are used to two major political parties because these represent the two differing approaches to the size and scope of the federal government.

At the Think 3 Institute, even Sam Wilson more or less tacitly accepts this general characterization of Democratic and Republican politics and ideology, though he explicitly states that the political and philosophical possibilities are not exhausted by the binary opposition. In a discussion of morality and democracy that is well worth reading in full, Sam writes:

we may as well recognize some kind of plurality of morality, with one morality placing an absolute priority on individual liberty, another on collective well-being, and others with different priorities.

Of course, an alleged concern for individual liberty and collective well-being on the part of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, is the result of nothing more than an abstraction from their rhetoric and common policy prescriptions. Because the GOP supposedly values individual liberty Republicans call for low taxes and small government. Because the Democratic party is supposedly concerned with the collective well-being of Americans, Democrats call for social programs and robust government. And this tension and opposition is seen as a decisive factor in the grand opposition between the ruling parties. In reality, however, it does little more than provide each side with the primary terms they employ in their criticism of the other: Republicans lambaste Democrats as totalitarian socialists and Democrats lambaste Republicans as individualist extremists.

The tragic irony is that Democratic-Republican party government results neither in the protection and expansion of individual liberty, nor in the effective establishment of and provision for our collective well-being. The reason for this is simple. The spirit of party that characterizes Democratic-Republican politics and government is incompatible with individualism and collectivism.

Insofar as a party mediates one's relation to government, society and fellow citizens, insofar as it serves as a mass vehicle for and medium of one's political activity, it is based on the negation of the individual through his or her subsumption into the mass of the organized group. On the other hand, even though it is a mass organization, a party is a necessarily partisan, sectional, political formation, which is thus predicated upon the negation of the collective in its totality, and therefore incapable of representing the social body as a whole.

Democratic-Republican party politics and government is based on the negation of the individual citizen and the collective social body. It is practical political nihilism. That nihilism is perfectly expressed by the bipartisan consensus in favor of the eternal reproduction and expansion of the global warfare and corporate welfare state over and against the expansion of individual liberty and the safeguarding of our collective well-being.