Funny, I was just talking about this...

Political parties are a bad idea. George Washington himself went to great pains to explain why in his farewell address.

The gist of it is, political parties divide us, and the goals and motives of the party start to take precedence over the goals and motives of the people the party is supposed to represent. To bring this home, if you think the choice between two political candidates amounts to a choice between the lesser of two evils, then the parties have failed us completely and ought to be ousted. Both of them.

I highly recommend every American read it. The prose is beautiful. [Here's the full text.](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp)

A couple of excerpts concerning the warning against political parties:

>One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

Political parties are deceptive and divisive...

>They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

Parties can get co-opted by those with the time and means to do so. For example, the 0.01%. The Koch brothers, etc. And government becomes a fight between the parties instead of an operating government. Sound familiar?

>However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

People who control the parties may become ladder kickers. Removing the things that helped them rise to power, so that they cannot be easily usurped once ensconced. Like the Romney family. Mitt's father was a beneficiary of the social programs Romney claims to want to terminate. The very definition of a ladder kicker.

>The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

Democrat vs. Republican.

>The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Yeah, he saw [this](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2nzBwb5Cea4/T9KJYicYRFI/AAAAAAAARt...) coming too. Parties take precedence over the people themselves, and when coopted by special interests, such as our 0.01%, or big business, turn into a nightmare.

>Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

Keep an eye on political parties.

>It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

[These are now called wedge issues.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#Wedge_politics_in_t...) Ostensibly issues everyone cares about, but really a tool to separate us into chunks and have us at each others' throats while those actually in power do as they please while we are fighting amongst each other over issues that ought not be the government's business.