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In regards to parties I believe our founding fathers put it best:

1) Nearly a third of Washington’s farewell address is devoted to warning his fledging country about the dangers of political parties and encouraging his fellow citizens to never allow political parties to gain control of the government. Here is part of what he had to say:

“[Political parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests....Let me now...warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party...It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeebles the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption...A fire not to quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into flame...”

Washington must be rolling over in his grave, watching what is going on in our country today. And he was far from alone among the Founding Fathers in his views on political parties.

2) John Adams in letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.: “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

3) Alexander Hamilton once called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments.

4) James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

5) Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Francis Hopkinson, 1789: “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a political party, I would decline to go.”

6) Thomas Paine, The Opposers of the Bank, 1787.: “Party knows no impulse but spirit, no prize but victory. It is blind to truth, and hardened against conviction. It seeks to justify error by perseverance, and denies to its own mind the operation of its own judgment. A man under the tyranny of party spirit is the greatest slave upon the earth, for none but himself can deprive him of the freedom of thought.”

To begin with, the Constitution did not provide for any political parties. It’s not that the Founding Fathers didn’t think about them but, to them, even the word “party’’ was anathema. They preferred a presidential election, the linchpin of our political system, in which the top vote-getter got to be president; the number two man, vice president. Why would you need parties?

To the Founders, opposition to the new nation’s political leadership meant opposition to the government — treason. Many of their families, including George Washington’s, had fled for their lives from the bloody partisan warfare of the English Civil Wars

One thing Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton screwed up on was generating contentious factions that led us down the party path.

All this except the last paragraph stolen joyously from multiple pages throughout the web. I’ve been an independent since I was in the service, though a libertarian leaning conservative in principal. Rarely have I voted in primaries as I refuse to bow to the party.