Hang Some of Those Politicians!

“It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.” - G. K. Chesterton

We just finished an election here in the United States. Well, almost finished. With slow coun ting, odd systems, and possible lawsuits the final results might not be clear for days, or weeks.

The campaign was full of false claims, insults, personality clashes, and lots of passion. Like a football match indeed.

In the U.S., the two main parties are the Democrats and the Republicans. If Chesterton was with us in the flesh, I suspect he would not belong to either of them. The Democrats have strayed so far from reality on a number of moral and common-sense issues they are in danger of exploding. And the Republicans are dutifully following their lead.

Chesterton did at one point flirt with politics, but reason prevailed and while he commented on political winds and nonsense, he remained apart from them. And he was very clear about his rejections of socialism and communism - with which the Democrats are playing these days.

There is only one political party around now that Chesterton might have at least appreciated: The American Solidarity Party.

The ASP has a platform that very much aligns with Catholic social teaching on multiple issues. And the party embraces a form of distributism. Indeed, the party's platform plank on Corporate and Monetary Policy declares:

The American Solidarity Party believes that political economy is a branch of political ethics, and therefore rejects models of economic behavior that undermine human dignity with greed and naked self-interest. We advocate for an economic system which liberates people from being cogs in a pitiless machine, instead creating a society of widespread ownership, or distributism.

The plank goes on to say:

We believe the American economy should be reordered to place human dignity first and to recognize that the family is the basic unit of economic production. We are committed to policies that emphasize local production, family-owned businesses, and cooperative ownership structures.

Policy should encourage and incentivize families who run their own small businesses and help them to provide just wages to their workers. Government policy must not favor large corporations, help them to outcompete small businesses, or encourage administrative bloat.

One can imagine Chesterton applauding enthusiastically.

I could go on.

I believe the ASP has been represented at at least one a past Chesterton conference. I don't know if that connection has continued.

Indeed, I don't know what future the party has. They have run Presidential candidates, each time getting more votes. And some people have run for state and local offices as a member of the party (including me). I don't know if any of them won (I didn't).

It's something to watch, though, as our two main parties continue their downward spiral and ultimatley fail to improve the lives of so many. As Chesterton noted:

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

He is right that government in an "ugly necessity,"

However, he may also be right when he says, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”