For years, there's been a running point of contention here on opednews between me and some other here on this point: should we support the Democratic Party, with all its defects, against today's Republican Party? I say yes, and here I offer what seems to me an airtight case for my position.

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On this forum over the years, there has been a recurrent dispute between me and others over how to think about our two major political parties. In this article, I want to put forward the case for my position as strongly -- and, as I see it, irrefutably -- as I can.

My position is that anyone who cares about a good future for the United States should back the Democratic Party -- for all its defects -- in the battle to defeat today's Republican Party.

My interlocutors here have argued that the problems in our politics are not confined to the Republican Party. They say that there are many elected Democrats that are serving the Big Money power that's been stealing our democracy. And that neither party deserves their support.

My response to that argument is that they are right in their observations, but wrong in their conclusion, which is along the lines of "a plague on both your houses."

In several steps, let me show why I think that conclusion to be a complete -- and dangerous--non sequitur.

1) It matters greatly to our future who controls the government of the United States

I doubt anyone will dispute this point. While there are other components of our society -- in the economic system and in the cultural system -- that are important influences on the path America takes into the future, the decisions made and enforced by the government are crucial.

The state is the element of the whole civilized society that is defined as having "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force." And those who control the government have their hand on the helm of the nation.

2) America is -- and will almost certainly remain -- a two-party nation. Therefore the battle over whose hand will be on the helm is a battle confined to two combatants -- our two major parties.

The system as set up by the Constitution tends inevitable to produce two and only two parties that have any real chance of winning power through the electoral process.

It has been more than a century and a half since any new political party has emerged to become one of those two major parties. The circumstance of that emergence -- the manner in which the slavery issue demolished the Whig Party in the early 1850s and the rise of the Republican Party to replace it -- were quite exceptional. There is no visible reason to expect that a new party would emerge now. It is especially improbable that the Democratic Party -- which is not now in disarray -- will be replaced as a major party by some new party more pleasing to the left.

Therefore, in the battle for power in the political arena -- for any foreseeable future -- it is only our current two major political parties that are on the fight card.

3) Since there are only two possible winners in the political battle over who will have the power to steer America, what we need is for the better of them to prevail. And it is absolutely clear which is the better of the two.

For a decade, I have been writing here on opednews about what an atrocity the Republican Party has become--indeed, that in its pervasive and consistent destructiveness and dishonesty, it is virtually unique for a major American political party in this nation's more than two centuries of history. (The only remotely comparable time would be the politics of the Slave Power's party in the 1850s.)

I will not dwell on this point here. (It is substantiated in some detail in my just-published book

WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST

Suffice it to say that the Republican Party has become something that poses a major threat to the survival of democracy in America (already greatly damaged) and to the livability of the planet our children and grandchildren will live on.

It is easy to see that the Democratic Party, whatever its faults, is clearly the better of the two. One need merely look at all the various political battles that get fought, however unsatisfactorily, between the two parties to see that it is ALWAYS the Democrats who are fighting in the direction preferred by liberals, progressives, leftists, or whatever.

Can anyone think of an exception, where a progressive would prefer the outcome that the Republicans have been fighting for? I cannot.

On climate change, which party has made it dogma to deny the science and which has made efforts to move us in the right direction?

On voter disenfranchisement, which party has passed numerous fraudulent Voter ID laws, and which party has objected?

On tax policy, which party has made it a top priority to reduce taxes on the wealthiest, and which has said they should be made to pay their fair share?

On gun laws, which party has sided with the absolutists of the NRA and which party has called for reasonable restrictions on guns?

On immigration, which party has been feeding the hatreds of American nativists, and which party has sought to resolve the festering problem of millions of undocumented non-citizens in some reasonable way?

On campaign finance, which party's appointees on the Supreme Court gave us the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions, and which gave us the justices who wrote in dissent.

And on and on. Pick any issue, look at the directions in which the two parties are pushing, and it invariably the case that the Republicans are pushing in the wrong direction and the Democrats in the right direction.

Whatever one's dissatisfaction with how they fight, or how modest their goals, or how much the party is infiltrated with elements of the force that must be defeated, there is no escaping the conclusion: Anyone who cares about the direction that the U.S. government will take us should have as a major political priority assuring that the Democratic Party succeeds in taking power away from today's Republican Party.

4) This is not an argument for simply accepting the Democratic Party as it is. While working to assure that it prevails over these Republicans, one can also work to make it more what it should be.

Parties change. Today's Republican Party is a grotesque deterioration of what it was not so long ago. That demonstrates that parties can get worse. But by the same token, they can also get better.

So my counsel -- that everyone should work to make sure that the absolutely crucial battle being fought out in the political arena is won by the better of our two options -- does not in any way signify complacency about the Party remaining just as it is.

I myself don't like the influence of Big Money on the Democrats. Nor especially do I like the weakness and blindness they've shown in the battle in these times.

But our choices must always take into account what our options truly are, and if we don't have an ideal option, we are called upon to choose the best of those we have. "A plague on both their houses" is clearly not the best options in these times.

5) In normal times, there could be a place for people who choose to hang out on the fringe, criticizing all the actors for their short-comings. In normal times, it could be an acceptable -- even a constructive -- role to take positions of purity and reject the requirements of practical realism. A society has need of voices in the wilderness that provide alternative visions and stand up for the ideal.

But these are not normal times.

Normal times might be described as times when the costs of having the worse of the possible outcomes are negligible. If what we had today was the Republican Party of, say, Dwight Eisenhower -- or perhaps even Ronald Reagan -- it would be acceptable to choose the path of general protest and of purity of vision. But that's not what the power on the right is nowadays.

Today the issues are whether our children and grandchildren will live in a society where the many are wholly dominated by the few, where truth is regularly defeated by the lie, where democracy is but a distant memory, and where the disruption of the climate system leads to a many-dimensional global disorder that degrades and endangers the lives of our children and grandchildren.

We cannot afford to be spectators -- criticizing from the fringe -- to a battle at which such vital values are at stake. With so much at stake, and the outcome seriously in doubt, we need every person who has not been deluded by the right to put their shoulder to the wheel.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.