Simone Weil on the Madness of Political Parties

The poem I posted the other day sprang in many ways from the sentiments expressed below by Simone Weil. Don't get me wrong, I'll continue to vote, and vote Democratic, but I have the sense that if I were a Republican I could easily construct all the rationales I would need to remain so. That's the point of this excellent Krista Tippett interview with Daniel Kahneman, which you should read. There's an arbitrariness to things like political parties that is belied by the amount of passion aroused by all things political. Unfortunately the current occupant of the White House is only able to do one thing well, and that's to provoke, divide, ridicule, and defame both his perceived opponents (anyone who doesn't support, no, worship him unequivocally) and institutions of democracy (you know, the press, the electoral system, the intelligence community, protesters, government itself, etc.). And so we are all stuck in an absurd yet nerve-wracking nightmare.

In her excellent essay, Christy Wampole, professor at Princeton contextualizes Weil's three attributes of political parties like this.

A Weil revival is underway, in part due to the surges in nationalism, populism, tribalism and nativism about which she had so much to say in her work. Weil, a firm believer in free thought, argued that: ‘The intelligence is defeated as soon as the expression of one’s thought is preceded, explicitly or implicitly, by the little word “we”.’ Uncritical collective thinking holds the free mind captive and does not allow for dissent. For this reason, she advocated the abolition of all political parties, which, she argued, were in essence totalitarian. To substantiate this claim, Weil offered three arguments:

1) A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
2) A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
3) The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.

These tentacular organisations make people stupid, requiring a member to endorse ‘a number of positions which he does not know’. Instead, the party thinks on his behalf, which amounts to him ‘having no thoughts at all’. People find comfort in the absence of the necessity to think, she claims, which is why they so readily join such groups.

The only place I would differ on this is the part about the party always doing our thinking for us. I'm well aware of the shortcomings of liberalism as expressed in the Democratic party, but as long as we're a two party system, there's only one choice for me. (Third party votes are a de facto votes for Trump.) Question: If we had proportional representation, would I vote for the party that most closely matched my views, or go for the more dominant lesser of evils option?