This is a two party country, and has been since the Federalists squared off against the Democratic-Republicans after President Washington left office. We either take back and take control of the Republican Party and make it conservative again, or we can sit, gnashing our teeth and crying in the wilderness while Mr. Obama completely transforms this nation into the Soviet Union. Which do you desire?
Straw man. A HUGE swath of tea partiers are independents. Go ahead, keep insulting their intelligence.
“This is a two party country, and has been ......blah, blah....”
Give us a BREAK. It is NOT! The founders warned YOU about parties...they’d have done away with them all. There have been more than 2 viable parties several times, until the R’s and D’s put a stop to it because they’re both as corrupt as can be when it comes to ‘representation’. Having 2 parties is like having only 2 branches of the government. And because of your precious ‘2 party system’ they’ve just about destroyed that too!
I’m happy you feel ‘represented’...MOST of us do not!
Yes, and what happened then represents a split in Western civilization. Two spheres. Church and state. The Germanic Empire vs Rome. Guelphs vs Ghibellines. Unitarian Harvard (statist) vs Calvinist Yale. Christians in the north which, in the words of Julia Ward Howe, who would die to make men free vs individual piety in the south whose members would die to remain free. Even as religion has waned, the moral beliefs remain and contest each other.
The Federalists attempt to heal the fissure by creating a Federal, republican government which was strong in only certain areas (primarily taking away the power of states to issue funny money) and delegating the rest the states. They failed. They knew they failed. The democratic impulse they attempted to tamp down won. Fisher Ames, a Federalist who wrote the first amendment and was critical to the ratification of the constitution, lamented in 1805:
Federalism was therefore manifestly founded upon a mistake, on the supposed existence of sufficient political virtue, and on the permanency and authority of the public morals. The party now in power committed no such mistake. They acted upon what men actually are, not what they ought to be . . .They inflamed the ignorant; they flattered the vain; they offered novelty to the restless; and promised plunder to the base. The envious were assured that the great should fall; and the ambitious that they should become great . . . we are descending from a supposed orderly and stable republican government into a licentious democracy . . .