Why America needs thousands of political parties

Forget red and blue America. It's time for magenta and gold and ocher and smaragdine.

The more the merrier?
(Image credit: Mike Kiev / Alamy Stock Photo)

Plenty of Americans — millions of them, in fact — will disagree with the argument made by Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes in the March issue of The Atlantic that boycotting the Republican Party is "a moral necessity." I am not one of them.

"Metaphysics," F.H. Bradley once wrote, "is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct." The Oxford philosopher might have been talking about a certain kind of middlebrow intellectual journalism. After a long self-indulgent parading of their own centrist virtues and hatred of partisanship, Rauch and Wittes argue that no decent American can vote in good faith for any candidate with an R after his name. Not because the GOP is an intellectually moribund party whose only natural constituency is persons whose economic well-being is for them at best a matter of indifference, a party that in the last two decades has been responsible for two failed wars, a party that came within a few votes of handing over Social Security to Wall Street on the eve of the 2008 crash.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.