I think a major contribution to our problems of governement are politcal parties. I remember learning about how George Washington didn't want political parties. He wanted people to vote by ideology, and not by a clique or group. I feel the same way. Should they be outlawed? If so it would make it harder for some people to get finacial backing, and it could increase the select few who are in office. However, this might not be the case.
I think that parties prevent important law from passing and allow rediculous legislation to pass, i.e. CISPA + NDAA.
What do you think the pros or cons maybe of banning/outlawing political parties?
I have mixed feelings about political parties. I can see Washington's point, but the country has grown significantly since then, and in modern times, people just don't have the time to research extensively. Putting politicians in parties based on similar ideologies is smart. I just don't see a no party system really working these days.
However, the US is doing it wrong. We effectively only have two parties to choose from, both are deeply corrupt.
The real issue isn't the parties, but rather money in politics. Campaigns are privately funded, and competition is fierce. The average winning campaign costs something like 10.5 million - how is a smaller politician going to win? Politicians have to take bribes if they want to be competitive.
If campaigns and elections were publicly funded, it would put smaller politicians and independent parties on the map and the voter more choice.
During the last elections, I voted Green Party, and I thought they ran a great campaign, but they were totally blacked out by the mainstream media.
Australia is in a similar situation - we really only have two parties to choose from. Also similarly, the two we have to choose from are very different on paper in terms of their ideologies, but decades of competition has driven them to near homogeneity in practical terms.
This leaves Australians constantly having to choose between the lesser of two evils, usually with neither fully representing the positions of a lot of voters.
I too would be more supportive of a party-free system. In fact it has been the internal power struggles of the Labor Party here in Australia (currently in government) that have been bringing them to their knees in terms of capacity to actually get anything done. Infighting like this over what the direction the party should be taking would be avoided if individual politicians could vote on ideological grounds rather than having to tow the party line.
Where Australia is interestingly different from the US though is in the fact that the amount of money that can be spent campaigning is very tightly regulated. They simply cannot spend their way to a whitewash of minor parties in terms of marketing.
Another interesting difference is that voting is compulsory here. You are fined if you do not vote. This means that a lot of Aussies who would otherwise pay no attention to the goings on of politics do pay at least some attention to it.
It's not a matter of banning political parties, its a matter of disenfranchising them. Right now, political parties are nonformal government institutions. They're not technically part of the government, but their existence is heavily facilitated. The main issue with parties is money. If you're running for president, congressman, senator, governor, etc, you get money from either the RNC, DNC, and special interest groups that support either of those institutions. On top of that, party PACs determine what the actual platform is rather than the candidate. We need to be rid of labels and let candidates run on their own perspectives rather than their party's perspective.