From the New York Times:
“[T]he National Republican Senatorial Committee this week informed a prominent Republican advertising firm that it would not receive any contracts with the campaign committee because of its work with a group that targets incumbent Senate Republicans. Even more striking, a senior official at the committee called individual Republican Senate campaigns and other party organizations this week and urged them not to hire the firm, Jamestown Associates, in an effort to punish them for working for the Senate Conservatives Fund…” NRSC spokesman Brad Dayspring said, “Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”
Slogans such as “party purity” with associated practices such as gerrymandering and closed primary elections make me once again reflect on the insight and wisdom of the first two Presidents of the United States.
George Washington: “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.”
John Adams : “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.”
Ref: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/the-founding-fathers-tried-to-warn-us-about-the-threat-from-a-two-party-system.html