You’ve heard it said, “The real problem is our two-party system.”  This philosopher will wax on as follows:  “It’s insane that we have only two parties.  That’s the real source of all our political problems and why nothing ever gets done.  We’re the only country with a two-party system.  What we need is multiple parties, like most countries have.”

When he starts in thus, ask him, “Why do we have a two-party system?”  He may give you a non-answer: “I don’t know, man.  It’s crazy.  It’s been that way forever.”  Or, he may give you this answer, “It’s built into the founding, man.  This was the Founding Fathers’ biggest mistake, if you ask me, making this country a two-party system.”  He may even claim, “It’s in the Constitution.”

If he does, feel free to ask him for a citation.  Which article mandates a two-party system?  And if the law requires that we have only two political parties, then why do we have a Republican party, a Democrat party, a Green party, a Socialist party, a Libertarian party, and so on, all at once?  That is, after all, more than two.

“Yeah,” he’ll say, “but most of those don’t have any real power.  Everything comes down to the main two.  And that’s the problem.”

Is it?  Maybe.  But why?  Why does power consolidate into two parties, and why has it done for as long as the United States has existed?

It is likely that you’ll never be able to explain to him the answer.  He has found his solution, one which is tidily unachievable and therefore liberates him from any responsibility for engaging in real politics.  You can’t blame him for not getting involved (as discussed previously) because there’s not point as long as we have a two-party system, because that’s the Real Problem, and there’s no fixing it.  There is an explanation, though, as to why our politics are so structured, and in that answer, vital wisdom.

We have a two-party system, uniquely in all the world, because our nation was founded on a unique question, and our political system evolved around the contest of answering that question.

In the nations you observe which possess myriad political parties, a great, disparate cacophony of political voices, the national debate grows out of one foundational question:  “How should government power be used?”  To this question there are infinite possible answers, and so infinite parties representing all the disparate ideas about how to use and apply government authority.

The United States was, by contrast and entirely uniquely in human history, founded on a deeper, more fundamental question:  “Should government power be used?”  The Founding Fathers recognized that government power should not be used, that every time it is used, it is at best a necessary evil and usually base tyranny, only harmful to the people.  They recognized that government is inevitable, and that it can perform certain functions (namely national security) better than a private enterprise, but at the same time they recognized that any exercise of its power over the people was counterproductive, except that exercise meant to improve the freedom of the people by protecting them from some greater or more immediate tyranny of their neighbors.

Should government power be used?  This is a yes-or-no question.  It creates a division between those who say “no,” and those who say, “yes,” even if they say, “Yes, but only a little.”  It creates an inevitable tug of war, between those fighting to reduce the use of government power and those fighting to increase it.  It is, in short, a question of principle which precedes any question of application.

Any debate about how to use government power presumes that it will and therefore should be used.  As long as the underlying question exists, though, in any mind among the populace, then any group of people arguing about how government power should be used will incite an opposing group who rises to say, “Wait a minute; government shouldn’t have the power to do any of those things.”  The more fundamental question demands to be answered first in any reasonable mind, and it cannot be answered satisfactorily except as the Founders answered it: that government power should not ever be used against the people.

In all those other countries, growing as they did out of the primordial evolution of human society, the national debate has glossed over the deeper question, come to a social consensus on an answer to it (that the application of government power to control the people is legitimate), and proceeded on to the subsequent questions of application.  When someone raises the deeper question, he is simply eliminated by the mob.  In the United States, though, that more fundamental question is baked into the founding documents, the nation’s highest law.  It cannot be ignored.  As such, all political debates inevitably become this political debate, and the people bifurcate around it, into that camp which thinks the powers in question should be used and that camp which thinks they should not.  The poles of American politics are always defined by the Yes and No answers to this question, because any time someone says yes, or begins speaking in a way that presumes a yes, there is someone to say no.

In such a binary contest, it is inevitable that all the people arguing for the use of government power would consolidate, because before they can have their debates about how to use it and propose all their various ideas, they must first defeat or eliminate the people who think none of them should use it in any of the ways they propose.  And when all the disparate voices advocating disparate ideas about how to use government power ally at least in favor of the notion that it can and should be used, when they consolidate around the affirmative answer to that basic question, then all those left who oppose the use of government power fundamentally must consolidate in opposition.

Understand this, and you will understand so much about the American political landscape.  It will suddenly make sense to you that the party in favor of using government power seems like a conglomerate of interest groups which would otherwise be at each other’s throats, with mutually exclusive ideological goals.  It will suddenly make sense to you that this party, despite being at so many crossed purposes within itself, always seems to be the party of political initiative, always trying to change things and create government action, and that the opposition party always seems like an opposition party, reacting to those radical activities, digging in its heels, fighting against “progress.”  It will also make sense to you why the opposition party always seems like a tool of convenience for its ideological base, separate from them, used by them with mutual reluctance.  (If you’re having trouble making that leap, let me explain it:  People who are opposed to the exercise of government power, and whose political action is fundamentally to react in opposition to its exercise, would not naturally create a political party, since a political party is by its nature a tool for the use of government power and, as an organization, must be created proactively.  A political party also is fundamentally an organization of politicians, and politicians are defined by the application of political and government power.  They achieve identity thereby.  Thus it would be against the nature of a politician to be against the use of government power.  Thus, as they never form a political party of their own and almost never give rise to politicians from among them, the people who answer “no” to the fundamental question, when they unify, must select an already extant party and its politicians as their tool of convenience.)

You can see also, in this, the reason that the people who answer “no” always lose, eventually.

So you see, it is not arbitrary that we have a two-party system while other nations have many-party systems.  Nor are their many parties analogous to our two.  Rather, their many parties, all of which are founded on the assumption that government power should be used in one way or another, are the disparate factions which in our country inevitably unify into the single party of government power.  For example, the many parties of Great Britain (yes, even the “conservative” ones) are analogous to the many factions within our Democrat party.  And our Republican party has no analogue in other countries.  Our Republican party is the party of moderate political operatives who find it most profitable to them personally to posture as the representatives of the ideological base which answers “no” to the fundamental question, even though they, the Republican politicians, do not. To your friend who insists that the two-party system is the problem: it is not a “problem,” because it is not a system which was implemented by choice; it is a natural outgrowth of the founding soul and fundamental question of our nation, and there is only one circumstance under which that two-party structure goes away: when the people of Liberty finally lose, when the question of “should government power be used” is answered in the affirmative by the elimination of all who might answer in the negative, and the opposition party ceases to exist.  Then the amalgam of those interest groups who agree that the answer is “yes” will fragment into individual parties and you will see here exactly what you see elsewhere: petty powermongers fighting for control over a decaying tyranny.