Can't the Parties Just Get Along?

Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail ... Sometime early last May, I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy. It went like this: One morning, I would wake up to the news that the previous evening, with no advance warning to the media, Mitt and Ann Romney stopped by the White House at the invitation of Barack and Michelle Obama. No one was certain what happened while they were there or what they talked about or how it came together, though eventually some details would trickle out. The couples told funny stories from the campaign trail and shared pictures of their families. Mitt drank lemonade, and Michelle led a moonlit tour of her garden. Everyone ate hot dogs loaded with toppings, which inspired a cable christening of the "Sauerkraut Summit." − New York Times

Dominant Social Theme: The political system in the US would be better if it were not so hostile.

Free-Market Analysis: This is some daydream that New York Times political correspondent Mark Leibovich has regarding the main candidates of the main US parties! He wants everybody to just get along. We'd argue at the top they already do.

Of course, we wouldn't mind seeing America's political parties collapse. But we are not speaking of their MERGER. People like NY Mayor Mike Bloomberg want the parties to merge. He's suggested as much.

For Mr. Bloomberg, it's all about technocracy. The best "manager" is to be elected, not the best or most popular pol.

This is convenient for people like Bloomberg who are enamored of the status quo. In Bloomberg's universe, central banks print endless torrents of money and technocrats pass endless torrents of regulations to manage it. The state swells endlessly until technocrats manage all.

Discouragingly, George Washington had something of Bloomberg's vision, though not with such grandiosity. He warned against political parties because they created hostility and a hunger for revenge. But he also worried they would interfere with the smooth (technocratic) workings of government.

Certainly Washington would find much that would dismay him today. On the other hand he might not be surprised to find that both of America's powerful parties actually work for the same institution ... Money Power.

This is true throughout the West, in fact, though the US with its entrenched political parties offers some of the starkest choices.

The modern political system in the US found its momentum with President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, also known as the GOP.

The Democratic Party received a final polish during the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took the party in a deeply leftist direction, creating a "New Deal" of government activism.

Today, it is taken for granted that Democrats to varying degrees seek public solutions to private problems. Since many Americans partake of a free-market tradition that emphasizes free markets, families and communities, Democrats have traditionally found support among certain sectors of the population.

Democratic influence has been big in the North where Wall Street and the big banks provided support. Democrats have been popular with the urban poor, with the elderly, with the upper classes and elite educators and media professionals that use a political affiliation to make common cause with so-called "have-nots."

It has been relatively easy to identify Democrats and the Democratic constituency over the past decades. Less so, however, Republicans.

This is because the Republican constituency was a good deal more circumspect at the leadership level. A good deal of Republican rhetoric emphasized free markets and focused on empowering small business.

Mitt Romney's recent acceptance speech was notable for what it left out more than what it emphasized, specifically the wars in which the US is currently embroiled.

He could have admitted, for instance, that the US was destabilizing upper Africa and the Middle East. He could have admitted that the current idea of the power elite is to create a religious war between Islam and Christianity. It is for this reason that the West is destabilizing secular countries and emplacing the CIA-controlled Muslim Brotherhood in seats of power.

But the Republican establishment has always been circumspect when it comes to the real reins of US leadership that are firmly in the hands of what is popularly known as the military-industrial complex ... under the watchful eye of Money Power.

It is only in the past decade that the deep Republican ideology has been unearthed. It has been revealed by what we call the Internet Reformation and by a libertarian-Republican candidate for president named Ron Paul.

Ron Paul may be the world's most honest politician (we write that with a modicum of facetiousness) in that he evidently and obviously set out to educate the electorate about his free-market viewpoint.

Today, it is fashionable for some to pillory Paul as a rich conniver. But for decades he pursued politics as a libertarian outlier. And his portfolio of gold stocks was sneered at as a nonsensical investment strategy.

Today his enemies attack him as a creature of big business and as a political backstabber. But Ron Paul has seemed honestly surprised by his success and perhaps by the success of his portfolio as well. Failure has a way of diminishing expectations, after all.

Ron Paul was certainly the vehicle for discovering the deeply entrenched corruption that sits like a stain at the center of the GOP.

Who can forget the presidential debates when he faced down a half-dozen other contenders for the nomination and insisted that America's wars were not right and that the administration ought to bring the troops home?

He was laughed at and mocked. One candidate who had destroyed all his office computers in the parking lot outside his gubernatorial offices, spoke eloquently of the "nation's sacred honor" as if he were channeling it. As if a nation that poisons millions including its own soldiers via depleted uranium weapons has "sacred honor" to begin with.

But those who laughed at him, shrill and sputtering as he was, must have known deep down that their time was almost up. Just by running for office and "speaking truth to power" Ron Paul pulled away the curtain and exposed the naked reality of the Republican war machine.

The pretense has been ripped away. The socialist bent of the modern Democratic perspective has always been available. But now the Republican mechanism lies exposed.

One party makes war on people around the world. The other makes war on domestic markets. But at the edges, these wars blur into one steady campaign for domination everywhere. The goal is global government. America and the West are a common enemy of the power elite that controls both parties.

Conclusion: Obama and Romney don't have to sit down for hot dogs at the White House. They already work for the same employer and are attempting to fulfill the same agenda.