Founding Fathers did not want a two-party political system.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., one of the Democratic Party's most left-leaning liberals, expressed concern about the future of the Republican Party during a recent radio interview, saying the GOP needed to save itself – in order to preserve his own party.
He made the remarks while discussing the future of the two-party political system on "The Rita Cosby Show" on WABC Radio.
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"My concern is the destruction or the imploding of the Republican Party," he said, Breitbart reported. "They're so torn apart and as partisan as I am, I really think the salvation of this republic is the two-party system. Democrats need another party in order for people like me to see what we think is best."
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Rangel spoke minutes later of the Founding Fathers belief that politicians needed contrasting forces to keep them in check.
"If there's no opposition," he said, "if there's no challenge, then this is not the country that our forefathers were thinking about. So we have to have healthy political parties. The two-party system is just as important as having a Democratic party ... to me."
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The Founding Fathers did desire a government with checks and balances that served to oppose and challenge. But they actually fought against the idea of a two-party system, saying such a break-down would, in the end, bring about a political system that favored the parties over the people.
John Adams wrote: "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."
And George Washington said similarly, in his farewell speech to the country.
He said, in part: "The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty."
