Would we be better off without political parties?

Choose your answer to the question above:

1. Yes.  
2. No. 
3. Maybe.  
4. Who knows?  
5. Who cares?  
6. It's just a party, try to enjoy it and don't fret about it!

The last answer might be the one that is best for our mental health.  However, it's the first one and the second-to-the last one that seem to be the off-the-cuff answers for many people.

The major political parties in America and Europe have become unattractive to people.  Does this mean that political parties are doomed?  If they are doomed to irrelevance, would that be a good thing for us?

Once every four years the Democratic and Republican Parties hold their big shindigs to nominate their candidates for president and vice president.  The Republican gathering is taking place right now; the Democrats do theirs a few days later.

Unfortunately for the Republican Party, their convention--located in Tampa, Florida--is being rained on by a hurricane.  Nobody is going to accuse me of being overly-sympathetic to their cause (whose idea was it, anyway, to hold a national convention in a hurricane-exposed city during hurricane season?) but I still think that the Republicans deserve their time in the limelight without the interference of a natural disaster.  Well, it looks like the darn storm will pass through pretty quickly now.  And then they can do their business and state their case and look for as much news coverage as possible.

(Here's my partisan commentary; it's brief:  If part of their convention business is to preach about the evils of the big, bad, Federal government, how will they do that and expect to be taken seriously when there's a storm outside that might be flooding and blowing things down across multiple states?  In addition to adequately providing for critical emergency needs, does it make any sense to advocate for a shrunken Federal government that is replaced by a largely local response to an event that can pound a locality--let's just randomly pick New Orleans, for example--and where said pounding will affect outbound grain shipments from Illinois and Missouri and other places up-river and in other states?  No, of course it doesn't make any sense.)

Political parties -- helpful or hurtful?

Back to the central question:  Does all this political party stuff help us or hurt us?

Well, if you're going to have political parties, then you're going to have these conventions and other gatherings.  The old days of the dramatic entertaining suspense in the convention nominating process--the "roll call of the States"--seem to be gone forever, what with all of the elections and caucuses of the so-called "primary season."  But, for anybody who wants to pay some attention to the quadrennial convention, I believe that there's value to be had in learning first-hand what the official party line is on the issues of the day and of the upcoming election.

If the conventions come through and make these positions clear, whether they do it via the party platforms or in some other way, then they score some points.  Clarity is more helpful to the general population than is obscurity.

We'll see something about how much of this clarity shows up later this week as the Republican convention proceeds, and then also a few days later with the Democratic convention.  Assuming, of course, that the Democrats aren't interrupted with a new storm, or power failure, or who-knows-what type of problem that could beset their convention. This is one of those times where both parties will probably take their cues from the motto of the U.S. Postal Service; if they have to, they'll just slog through and get things done.

As for the concept of the political party itself -- I think it's here to stay.  And I think that in the long run we are better off for having them around, even if they sometimes seem out of touch, or conniving, or secretive, or controlling, or just plain freakish.  It's natural for people to group themselves with others who share similar interests.  These conventions might make us think that the similar interests revolve around having lots of balloons floating in the air, wearing funny hats, eating, drinking and yelling (go back to the beginning and see #6), and maybe for some people that's all that it amounts to.  But I think that for most of the people involved, there's more to it than that.

Are they here to stay?

The political party is a concept that has been around for a very long time.  It's part of human nature to freely associate with others of like mind.  More than twenty-five hundred years ago, the peoples of the Roman Republic and Golden Age Greece created the far-distant predecessors to the institutions that we now call political parties; they probably built on things that they picked up from older cultures, so we're talking about something here that has roots that go back thousands of years. 

The methodical Romans--obsessed with property ownership, status, family heritage and accumulation of more of the same--formalized political power structures based on class distinctions that persisted for centuries.  The Greeks--more volatile and disputatious by nature (still true today)--tended to group themselves according to ideas in order to support a preeminent leader.  That practice worked for the Greeks for a few hundred years, even if the affiliations themselves lasted only for a few decades at most.  Admittedly, that's a very superficial historical summary, but better than nothing, and probably all that is needed.

Our American Democratic and Republican parties evoke ancient themes, starting with their names.  Politically, we've been working on it for a couple of hundred years now.  The old Greeks and Romans would probably feel that such a passage of time just barely qualifies us to be considered as adolescents in the games of politics. 

We've made progress over that time, what with decreasing the number of fist fights and gun fights among the various participants, whether elected or not.  Nonetheless, it's true that there's a feeling that the political parties--all of them, not just the Republicans and Democrats--are not meeting the needs of the country.

However, since we Americans are a prideful folk, we do not take well to defeat and we like to keep whacking away at something until it ends up looking the way that we want it to.  Unless an electoral and political replacement of compelling success shows up, we are not likely to be throwing the current design of our politics into the trash bin and trying something radically different anytime soon.  We'll probably just keep whacking away at the parties' current formulations to try to make them more useful, and be content with that approach.

So, this is the week for the GOP to have its fun, try to get its show on the road and strut its stuff.  A few days later the Democratic Party takes the stage to do the same. 

And then--after the conventions--there will be lots more to talk about.