I just finished reading Chesterton’s “What’s wrong with the world” on my Amazon Kindle. The book is so full of keen insights and enduring truths that you don’t really notice he’s writing about the early 1900s. The whole book can be read here for free.

Early in the book, he introduces us to two archetypal characters – Hudge and Gudge. One represents a Business mindset and the other a Socialist one. One can easily recognize that today’s contemporaries easily fit in a similar ideological framework.

Toward the end of the book, he revisits these two archetypes, with the following suspicions…

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader’s ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other’s hands is not an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of anarchy.

…

Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.

I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless.

I believe the time has come to move away from the political party system. I’m probably hopelessly idealistic in working toward this goal, as there seems to be a natural social gravitation toward political bi-polarity. I will work toward it anyway.

The existence of a natural bi-polarity doesn’t mean that we need to keep these two parties, nor that we need parties at all. The bipolarity is merely a function of the constant struggle between Freedom and Security. We can, and should, have that debate without the mentally and socially retarding influences of the now wholly counter-productive Democrat/Republican Hegemony.

There are millions of decent Democrats and Republicans, some even occupying an elected office. Sadly, the parties have become co-opted by corrupt influences (See Goldman Sacks, FNMA, Disney, Banks, Unions).

Our founding fathers thought that the competing “factions” would provide “checks and balances” on each other. That may have been true up to a point, but it is breaking down. The level of wealth and power created by billions of free people has allowed for the concentration of that massive wealth and power. The “competing factions” now realize that they can conspire with each other, as long as they dis-empower the individual and the family, and prevent the rise of political competition.

If Chesterton was right (and I think he was), then it is time to destroy the party system. Any ideas on where to start?