What Is The Responsibility of Citizenship In An Oligarchy?

In his farewell address, the last American president quoted the first American president. “George Washington,” Obama said, “wrote that self-government is the underpinning of our safety, prosperity, and liberty, but ‘from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken…to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth;’ that we should preserve it with ‘jealous anxiety;’ that we should reject ‘the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties’ that make us one.” Unfortunately, those alienations dawned at the end of Washington’s second term, when the two-party system was enacted, despite the warning in his farewell address that though political parties “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

This back and forth game of Republicans and Democrats we’ve suffered through so gloriously, although it has created collateral opportunities through competition, has weakened those “sacred ties that make us one” for the last two centuries, and has allowed “our…