The United States of factions

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (and we’ll tip our Stetsons when that name is mentioned) was a keen and surgical observer of politics in America. He once famously said, “It never got weird enough for me.”

It’s a crying shame that Thompson didn’t live long enough to see the current political food fight over the gerrymandering of our country to favor one political party or another. Red states and blue states are stumbling all over themselves to redraw congressional district maps so they can send more talking heads to Washington, D.C. than the other team.

In the normal course of events, congressional redistricting occurs right after the census, every 10 years. This redrawing of district lines — meant to account for population changes —  ensures adequate representation for every citizen. The new district boundaries represent the fluid nature of population — numbers of people moving around, being born and dying. All this is laid out in our Constitution.

Political parties have hijacked that process.

Due to the gnarly influence of political parties, we now see district lines drawn to represent the shifting reality of power, not the shifting around of people. In trying to draw lines that concentrate power in one party or another, we get the squiggly boundaries of congressional districts that make no sense in any reality other than political power.

The United States is splattered with districts that resemble Rorschach inkblots, spaghetti spilled on a tile floor or roadkilled prairie dogs that have been smooshed and smeared by traffic, all in an effort to consolidate political power in the hands of parties.

The weird thing about this is that the term “political party” occurs nowhere in our Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Nor is that term present in the Wyoming Constitution. The closest that our Founders came to talking about political parties was James Madison’s warning in the Federalist Papers #10. Madison didn’t call them “parties” but rather “factions” and he didn’t have any complimentary things to say about them.

My reading of Federalist 10 leads me to conclude that Madison cautioned that the presence of political parties in our republic would weaken rather than strengthen our system. While citizens are free to do so, adherence to the dogma of political parties diminishes the citizenry as well.

Think about it. We are a nation of 350 million or so individual citizens, each with our own freedom to think our own thoughts and to see the world around us through our individual eyes. Yet, despite our individual intellectual free agency, many of us identify as either Republican or Democrat. We have collectively permitted partisan dogma to override the uniqueness of our own minds.

How can a nation of millions of free thinkers be reduced to only two ways of thinking? What is the allure of political parties that drives us to sacrifice our own intellectual freedom for an imposed system of groupthink? It is mathematically impossible for 350 million to equal two.

Whatever that attraction is, it’s what makes us divide up our country into squiggly lines around political districts that favor one party or another, but do absolutely nothing to improve the lives of citizens living within those lines.

Madison also warned that factionalism and hyper-partisanship would produce the kind of strife that we see in America today. And he warned of demagogues who would capitalize on that strife for their own selfish advantage.

So, before you pledge allegiance to any political party, make sure you pay attention to the fine print at the end of the advertisement and understand all of the side effects.

Aside from the us/them strife that partisan factionalism produces in our society, it also places unnatural limitations on our thinking. Consider the spectrum of political thought available to us in our country — myriad colors that we don’t even consider or appreciate because we’ve been conditioned to see only red or blue.

Our democratic republic is a sumptuous buffet offering its citizens all manner of tasty treats for our political appetites. Yet we fill our plates with only liver or turnips, because political parties tell us that’s what we’re supposed to eat, and anything else will make us sick.

So if we want to un-weird politics, we need to reduce or eliminate the power exerted over us by political parties. We can relegate parties to the private social clubs that they truly are, like the Elks or the Rotary. And we can reassert our rightful place in society as free-thinking Cowgirls and Cowboys.

As Hunter Thompson would say, “Selah.”