Stuart, your comment makes a lot of sense and in the 20th century 3rd parties revolved mainly around one person, T Roosevelt, Wallace, Perot. If 10 current US Senators and 30 current Representatives defected to a 3rd party Congress would have a "modifier" which could motivate agreement on major issues and modify the President's policies.
If neither major party works to pass anything then, at worst, Congress would accomplish nothing....which may be an improvement. if there is a better way to end the corruption of the two major parties I wish someone would talk about it.

The US Constitution doesn't authorize or prohibit any number of parties; in fact there is nothing in the Constitution about political parties at all.

Washington hoped that the new Republic would avoid the problems of "faction", but it was clear even before the end of his first term that there were profound fundamental differences dividing members of his own cabinet (Jefferson and Hamilton) as well as the House of Representatives and the Senate. As these differences were indeed fundamental, they could not be papered over, and so factions (political parties) began to coalesce around the intellectual leaders of each group--Jefferson leading the Anti-Federalists (later the Democratic-Republicans, and eventually the Democrats), Hamilton the Federalists. Washington was careful to remain above factions, but after his second term, the battle between Adams and Jefferson was fierce, and the election of 1800 positively vicious even by modern standards (it may have been the dirtiest campaign of all time, and saintly Thomas Jefferson was a master of the low blow).

Despite the emergence of political parties, the U.S. system works well, if your definition of well means avoiding radical change in the absence of an overwhelming consensus for change.

No there isn't, and God is not mentioned at all in the entire document. It was written to govern a number of sovereign states and bind them into a Union. The people of all these several states are first (We the People...) and the states through elected representatives relinquish some of that sovereignty to a federal government for the sake of Union. The Constitution does not establish a national religion or church, but guarantees the right of every single individual within that union the free exercise thereof. They can believe or organize any religion they want, or choose not to believe, as long as their belief or non-belief does not prevent anyone from exercising theirs. It is not a religious document nor is the government formed by this Constitution a Christian or even a religious one, even though most of the people of those several states were Christian and religious. Now more than 200 years later, those several states have become fifty-one; each composed in various degrees of an extremely diverse people with unimaginably diverse mores and beliefs, all of which need to be protected under this same Constitution whether we agree, consider them evil, like or hate them or not.

Come on guys. I really do not think that either of the major candidates, or the parties they represent are evil, and you do not have to choose between the lesser of the two...or three or four. Is our government evil? William Loyd Garrison called the Constitution that "document of the devil" because it specifically allowed slavery in any state that wished to sustain that institution. Is it because it allows the free exercise of religion and we have to stomach every belief and practice, evil or otherwise known or unknown to man? I think not. In fact, religion flourishes in this pagan land perhaps more than at any time or place in history. Whether we have four more years of President Barack Obama, or have a new president, former MA Governor Mitt Romney, I really feel it will continue to flourish. We have to make sure ours -Orthodox, Greek, Melkite or Roman Catholic - florishes by the holy, authentic lives we lead.

As an aside, I just want to remind those who have followed this interesting thread that Greece, whose national church is Orthodox Christian, has permitted abortion since 1987. Are the Greeks evil? As I said in another post, we will always be "strangers in a strange" land. Try not to get discouraged. Sursum Corda!

You answered your own question.

The more support candidates like that have, and the less support GOP establishment hacks like Romney can count on, the sooner we will have a candidate that we can truly be excited about.

Since we can't start a third party, we need to overtake one of our own. It's not a quick fix, but in 20 years it will have done a LOT more good than a Romney pesidency.

This means that they need to know that they must EARN your vote and don't get it unquestioningly by default to do with as they please.

Not only is this better for the country and the GOP in the long term, you will actually feel good about your vote. If you take any of this more seriously, activism within the GOP for these candidates will further the change.

But if they know that you'll toe the company line and march behind Romney when told, it all just becomes empty bluster. Just keep sending the checks.

Very true, especially when the status quo can be profited from by the right lobbies/interests regardless of the party in charge.

jjp,

What have you done in this regard to help change the GOP? What would you advise that the rest of us do? Surely, just not voting seems rather fruitless.

1. How active are you in the local Tea Party?
2. Do you pray regularly for conversions of heart in these matters?
3. Are you a precinct committeeman or have you run for office?

CDL

I have a dimmer view of the future. The legal framework is set for the persecution of Christianity. We live amidst a time of great freedom, thanks be to God, but do not take it for granted.

Once Christians are labeled "domestic terrorists" it will all change. The seeds are already being planted, domestic "right wing extremism" has been suppressed by our own military. That's one reason I am wary of demonizing Muslims in the US, it won't take much of a change at all until it's you and I in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib, and then we (or God forbid our children or their children) will be asks to be martyrs, in our own land.

Yes to more than one of these. We can get into more detail over PM if you are that curious.

The point, however, is that it looks like you know very well how to promote the worldview politically that you hold privately.

Whether or not you feel morally obligated or choose to do that, or to live in compromise and half-measures, is up to you and your conscience alone.

But I reject the notion that half-measures are necessary, you have spelled an alternative out pretty well.

I'm doing all three. I hope you join us.

Since I'm an historian, my time horizons are measured in centuries, at the very least. Just let me point out that Romans were crying "O tempora, O mores" at least from the time of Cato the Censor. Two centuries later, Cicero was crying "O tempora, O mores" over exactly the same things. And two centuries after that you can find Tacitus doing it yet again. And moralists in the early Christian Empire had exactly the same gripes.

From which one can only conclude that the world is constantly going to hell in a handbasket--that's why it's "the world"--and, since Rome lasted for a good two hundred years after Tacitus, we can conclude that the Empire (which in the East lasted a thousand years beyond Romulus Augustulus) was a good deal more resilient and robust than the moralists thought.

And since the moralists have been saying the same thing about the United States almost from before the ink was dry on the Constitution, I think perhaps we are also more resilient and robust than they credit us, and will be around for a lot longer than those whose time horizon begins on the day they were born might believe.

Stuart,

Regarding the continuance of the USA....sure it will probably continue for at least a few more decades. What foreign power could manage it.
The vital questions are:
Will our Constitution still be the guide?
Will it become near-anarchy?

However, the family unit will continue, for it is the nucleus of civilization. It will be challenged but it will remain the anchor of stability. That is why it must be defended; unfortunately the ethicists, Church, philosophers and voters have been sleeping for the past six decades on this issue, starting with no-fault divorce.

True the Roman Empire continued in the West for additional centuries...but it was but a shell of its glorious period.

Taking the long view again, I can say, as James M. Barrie says at the beginning of Peter Pan: "This has happened before, and it will all happen again". Social mores run in cycles, swinging back and forth between virtue and license. The louche morality of Jacobean England gave way to the Puritan moralism of Cromwell's Republic, which in turn gave way to the riotous sensuality of the Restoration, which then gave way once more to the domesticity of Queen Anne, which was followed in turn by the depravity of the Georgian era, which gradually yielded to the bourgeois morality of the Victorian Era, which gradually gave way to the laxity of the present day. All evidence points to the pendulum swinging back once more. Most people don't realize just how religiously and morally indifferent the United States has been for much of its history. Similarly, most people don't know that, in the middle of the 19th century, during the reign of Queen Victoria herself, there were more brothels in Metropolitan London than there were churches.

Precisely. I don't take much comfort in any type of permanence such as the Roman Empire. Though the comparison is apt.

Hmmm.

M. Porcius Cato the Censor, ca. 200 BC: Rome is going to hell. Rome then embarks on an unprecedented period of imperial and economic expansion.

M. Tullius Cicero, ca. 50 BC: Rome is going to hell. Rome then weathers a long civil war and opens the Augustan Age.

P. Cornelius Tacitus, ca. AD 100: Rome is going to hell. Rome then enters the century of the adoptive emperors, characterized by Gibbon as perhaps the one time in human history when the vast majority of people were peaceful, prosperous and happy.

Dio Cassius (3rd century AD): Rome is going to hell--and he was almost right. But the Empire was restored and stabilized under Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, setting the stage for the Age of Constantine.

Ammianus Marcellinus (4th century AD): Rome is going to hell. Well, in the West, it finally did--half a century later, and not in any one great, catastrophic fall. Rather, the whole system came under new management, leaving the old Roman aristocracy in place, with a recognizable Romanitas for another two centuries at least. In the East, of course, the Empire kept chugging along.

Zosimus (6th century AD): Rome is going to hell. Well, he was a pagan, so he might have thought so. But under Justinian the Great, Rome was about to expand to boundaries she had not seen for more than a century. And, but for a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague, the restored empire carved out by Justinian, Belasarius and Narses might have lasted for several centuries.

The fortunes of the Byzantines also fluctuated according to fortune, but the one constant in all its history were moralists insisting that Rome was going to hell. It finally did--after a run of more than a millennium. All good things come to an end, because that is the nature of the world, which will not change until the Parousia.

Our country is just little over two centuries old--not even to adolescence according to the history of other countries. Those who think we're doomed are like people who look at a teenager and say, "He'll never amount to anything", only to discover, twenty or thirty years later, that the teenager grew up to be a titan of industry, a great scholar, or a political leader (OK, in that case, he didn't amount to much). Still, extrapolating in straight lines from a single data point is always a good way to be caught out in false predictions.

You keep demonstrating the stability of the Roman Empire as if that is what I am referring to. It's not.

We all are aware of the stability of the Roman Empire and the comparison to the United States, it is not in dispute here, at least not by me.

What will life be like within that long-lasting political entity called the United States?

Rome began pagan and ended Christian (to put it very generally), whereas we seem to be following an opposite trajectory, beginning Christian (again, generally) and evolving more and more pagan.

I am talking about life in Christian America. Rome had its martyrs, and I fear we will as well, while the flag still flies.