House Majority Leader Mike Johnson sure looks like got away with something. Credit: Shutterstock / Joshua Sukoff

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

“A ‘progressive’ is just a socialist with the brains knocked out.” — Wisconsin State Assemblyman George Tews, Jan. 5, 1932

The United States of America was not yet “a great nation,” George Washington said in his Farewell Address almost 230 years ago. But he said we had potential.

Washington wanted his parting words to “now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, and to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

Long story short, we haven’t heeded a friggin’ word.

Washington said we should “indignantly frown” at “every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest,” yet we still speak in terms of Red states and Blue states, and party polarization is off the charts.

He also said we should avoid “overgrown military establishments,” which are “inauspicious to liberty” and “particularly hostile to republican government.” Yet the recently passed Big, Beautiful reconciliation bill adds $150 billion to a so-called defense budget that’s already a cool trillion.

Washington said it’s in “the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain” partisan rancor as it “agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms and foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

Think of Jan. 6, incited by bogus allegations of widespread election fraud.

He added that “those entrusted with the country’s administration” should “confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.”

Think of the despotic chainsaw DOGE took to agencies like USAID, a defunding likely to result in 14 million preventable deaths around the world over the next five years, according to medical journal The Lancet.

Washington said “one of the most baneful foes of republican government” is “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” since they create opportunities “to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion” and “dooms a small or weak nation to be the satellite of a great and powerful one.”

Think of the Israeli lobby, though Washington failed to consider how a powerful nation might counterintuitively become the satellite of a smaller one. “Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite,” Washington said, “are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.”

In this case, New York City mayoral candidate Zohan Mamdani or Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — harsh critics of our complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza — appear to be the “real patriots” while President Trump Donald Trump and Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman sure look like “tools and dupes.”

The country also should avoid “the accumulation of debt,” Washington admonished, so as not to “ungenerously throw upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

And how best to address that? “It is essential that… there must be revenue; that to have revenue there must be taxes.”

So, was he suggesting that now, as the nation is saddled with more than $36 trillion in debt, isn’t the best time to gift the richest 1% with a trillion dollar tax cut?

If militaristic plutocracy is what the United States has come to, why are we still committed to the party system that got us here, especially after Washington’s unequivocal condemnation?

Even so, establishment fogies such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden are easily mocked for spouting clueless cliches defending the existence of a strong Republican Party.

“Of all the sad things that America is now facing, I would submit that a weakened Republican Party doesn’t rank especially high,” former New Republic staff writer at JC Pan dryly remarked back in October 2020.

But how ought we reply when even well-intentioned progressives parrot the supposed truism that we need the GOP around?

Michelle Davis, who runs the Lone Star Left blog, imbibes countless hours of floor debates and hearings at the Texas Lege, mining the minutiae to keep exasperated Texans informed. Yet, in an otherwise spot-on post celebrating Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ recent victory, Davis slipped in, “We should want a functioning two-party system, not one held hostage by extremists cosplaying as patriots.”

What if hostage-taking extremism, as Washington foreshadowed in his Farewell Address, is exacerbated by the two-party system?

Would the sky fall if we increased the number of nonpartisan races from the local level up, or expanded ranked-choice voting, or aspired to become a nation of independents, with candidates who don’t rely on party allegiances or big-money donors to fund campaigns? Why, at the very least, is it unreasonable to so much as want that?

A full 71% of U.S. adults told the Pew Research Center they wish there were more political parties to choose from. That percentage rises to 81% among those under 30.

A Hillsdale College explainer video tries to explain why that thinking is wrong. “For instance, if you are inclined to vote for the Green Party in America, you’re probably more closely aligned with the Democratic Party than you are with the Republican Party,” political science professor Joe Postell says in the clip. “Every vote you cast for a Green Party candidate is actually taking votes away from the Democratic candidate.”

Unless, of course, a certain number of Green Party enthusiasts would never vote for a corporate Democrat anyway. More and more we seem to be a four-party country masquerading as two: libertarians, religious conservatives, liberal moderates and socialists jammed together.

“Every member of Congress who voted for this disastrous piece of legislation … must be defeated,” the longest-serving independent, Bernie Sanders, posted to Facebook July 4 about the reconciliation bill. That doesn’t leave much room for a strong Republican Party.

All for the better.

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This article appears in Jul 10-23, 2025.