Opus 2018-253: The Balance of Partisanship

One of the characteristics of the American Republic is the division of power along with checks and balances.  We often credit Montesquieu with this but if you read his The Spirit of Laws you find that he did a lot of looking at the English system which had two houses of legislature plus a monarchy.  The Founding Fathers dug even deeper than that.  They did a lot of research into the Greek democracies and the Roman Republic.  One of the examples of divided power was found in Sparta even though it was not a democracy.

    “The Spartan people preferred two kings at odds, rather than one directing affairs with unchallenged power.
    “The two-king system, although it produced its own difficulties, did prevent the rise of a Mesopotamian-style monarchy”, p. 421

I am not sure how we would recreate that today but I would suggest the two political parties as candidates for kings.  They are constantly fighting each other for control and to set the agenda.  I don’t know how many times I have heard “this is the end of the _______ party”.  And then a few years later I hear it the other way.

Partisanship is part of the reason our system works.  If you only have one party then you end up with the kind of brutal repression common in the socialist systems of National Socialism and Communism.  Anyone who ever gets out of their bedroom realizes that large number of people never agree on things.  The only way you can have one party rule is by severe repression of any dissenting voice.

So let’s here it for partisanship.  That is the point of the First Amendment.  The Second is there for those times when the left forgets the boundaries of discourse.

November is coming.  Let the anarchists and socialists feel the burn.

Bauer, Susan Wise.  The History of the Ancient World.  New York: 
      W. W. Norton, 2007.

homo unius libri