Poll-Which is the Native Political Party of the U.S.A.? (ethic, radical)

[Know Nonsense]

Which one of the current political party best represents the essence of the United States as it was originally intended?

[2nd trick op]

I'm going to lead off by characterizing a libertarian ethic (not to be confused with a doctrinal party) as the obvious choice.

The American nation was built by rebels and outcasts; people who were either well-aware that they had little opportunity for advancement in class-structured Europe, or were exiled here because they would likely have ended up on the end of a rope, or a headsman's axe, if they had not moved on -- whether by their own free will or coercive measures.

Once they got here, and survived the initial threats, the development of an economy naturally required the development of a power structure, and for better or for worse, that led to an uneven distribution of wealth and power (Where hasn't it?) and in part of the new enterprise, to the import of slavery. (And please, left-leaning idealists, don't dismiss the fact that slavery, in some variation, existed in most of the world at that time.)

And it needs to be understood as well that the original limitation of the franchise to male property owners was imposed because a developing economy (as best embodied in the dispersed small entrepreneurships of the early Nineteenth Century) was all that could be sustained at the time. The French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville theorized that democracy would survive and thrive only as long as the ignorant masses were restrained from looting the public treasury via the ballot box. And the single greatest triumph of the American system is that it has prevented this by selectively and carefully expanding the franchise, while emphasizing that the responsible voter enters the booth more concerned with what might be lost, than with what might be redistributed at a cost to some demonized, but out-voted opposition.

We have endured six years of egalitarian rhetoric from an Administration which has clearly identified with one side of our current polarization and shown a disturbing willingness to tamper with the Constitution in order to gain its ends; that circus was preceded by another clique of charlatans with too much faith in a privatized bureaucracy which is similarly rigged to stifle individuality and ambition, The pursuit of power, rather than the pursuit of wealth, lies at the heart of most of our discontents, and neither of the two major parties, nor the more-radical egalitarian socialists, have shown any interest in the renunciation of over-centralized power.