The last two months in presidential campaign politics have been, in a word, eventful. Donald Trump won a significant victory in the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity (though how much damage the ruling does to his ongoing prosecutions remains to be seen), and then was nearly killed by a disturbed young assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, having turned in a debate performance in late June that revealed how rapidly he is aging, bowed to pressure in the Democratic Party and withdrew from his campaign for reelection. In very short order Vice President Kamala Harris, with Biden’s endorsement, sewed up the necessary majority of party delegates to secure the presidential nomination in advance of the Democratic National Convention.
Not a soul, of course, had voted for Harris in any of the party’s primaries or caucuses earlier this year, which caused many critics to cry foul. “Undemocratic!” Perhaps so, but it was also a partial throwback to earlier patterns in American politics, when presidential nominations (made in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”) were decided by savvy party leaders from various parts of the country working out who could best represent their party’s diverse coalition and win the election. The selection of Harris was compressed in time and proceeded less like deliberation than like a desperate stampede to the most obvious choice. The old-school political scientist in me really wanted to see an open convention with several possible outcomes. But on the question whether it was “legitimate” for the party delegates to make the choice without the party electorate’s input, my answer is an emphatic “yes.”
The instinctive complaint that the delegates’ nomination of Harris was “undemocratic” is a sign of how far we have come from an understanding of political parties as mediating institutions. Today we want an immediate relationship with candidates for office, even or especially with presidential candidates, and we think we achieve that by casting ballots for them, first in the primaries and then in the general election. We don’t actually have such a relationship, of course, yet it comforts us to think we do. But a mediated relationship would be a healthier one.
Two things are true about American political life that seem at first hard to square with one another. Large numbers of Americans have never been more partisan—more polarized, even sorting themselves geographically among the politically like-minded—and steeped in fear and loathing of the elites in the party they oppose. Yet equal or greater numbers of Americans are thoroughly disgusted with the choices presented to them by our two parties, more or less as dismayed by the candidates in the party with which they usually identify as by those in the opposing party. And there is significant overlap between the partisan citizens and the disgusted ones. (I would venture to guess there is practically no one who is not in one of the groups described.)
What accounts for both facts, I think, is that American politics is ill-served by its two parties today. There was never a “golden age” in which they functioned just right, but as Yuval Levin points out in his new book, American Covenant (which I reviewed for National Review), “weaker parties . . . mean more intense partisanship.” Why this should be so, and how we reached this pass, are best answered by a tour through some classic books on the parties.
It is a commonplace observation that the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate parties in its institutional design, and their apprehensions about “factions” are well known. But they understood the country’s division into interests—economic, regional, religious—and the Constitution was crafted to compel those interests to compete with and accommodate one another within and across the institutions of the new government, each possessing a distinctive authority, representing distinct constituencies, and even operating on different electoral calendars. Sharp differences of opinion, above all about what was right and proper under the new Constitution, naturally fed the impulse to organize partisan coalitions of interests to compete in those elections. Understandably, because everything done under the first few presidents and the earliest Congresses set a precedent on how to understand the Constitution, the first parties—the Republicans of Jefferson and Madison and the Federalists of Hamilton and Adams—spoke and acted as though everything was at stake about the nature of the American republic.
As Michael Gillespie argued in an essay included in an excellent 1993 book edited by Peter Schramm and Bradford Wilson, American Political Parties and Constitutional Politics, each side was convinced, to use concepts later employed by Tocqueville, that there was a “great party” division between them—a division over the most fundamental questions about the political order, rather than a “small party” quarrel over competing interests in the same republican tent. Each side was astonished to be regarded by the other as inimical to the Constitution; each was equally convinced that the other side was. Gillespie argues that the paradox of our first parties was that neither was inimical to the foundations of the political order, but that they could not have organized so rapidly and effectively for electoral competition if they had not both been convinced that this was so. This misunderstanding of our partisan adversaries has been a recurring event in our politics.
But why did America develop a two-party system? And what exactly is the proper function of these extra-constitutional organizations? One of the best works on the subject is still E. E. Schattschneider’s 1942 book, Party Government. “A political party,” he straightforwardly avers, “is an organized attempt to get control of the government.” However, parties “are not associations of the voters who support the party candidates.” After all, if voting for a party’s candidates makes one a “member” of that party, it’s an awfully easy club to enter—and to exit again at will. No, for Schattschneider the party is its officeholders, candidates, and non-officeholding professionals, supplemented during campaigns by amateurs and volunteers. For him, in the era before primary elections were a widespread nomination method, democracy was not the system within the parties; it was the system of choice between them.
As for the dominance of two major parties, that is easily explained by America’s electoral environment. Single-member legislative districts, with plurality elections (“first past the post,” with no need of a majority of voters), and the organizational imperatives of legislative majorities, are enough to make third-place finishers not just losers but irrelevant competitors, on whom we are loath to “waste” our votes. Schattschneider might have added that the electoral college, particularly with the adoption by nearly all states of a “unit rule” awarding all electoral votes to the winner of the state’s plurality, in combination with a majority requirement in the college as a whole, firmly cements the dominance of two parties.
The party-in-government precedes the party-in-the-electorate, Schattschneider observes, and this was certainly true in the United States. Even the party-as-organization was effectively located in government at first, as the congressional caucuses in each party chose presidential candidates until the 1830s, when national conventions of delegates chosen locally and statewide began to make presidential nominations. This innovation, as James Ceaser pointed out in his seminal work Presidential Selection (1979), was largely the brainchild of Martin Van Buren, who conceived of pyramid-shaped party organizations, strongly built from the bottom up, as a way to “help eliminate personal factionalism, manage electoral conflict, and prevent presidential elections from being decided by the House,” as they had been in 1800 and 1824. This began what political scientists call the Party Period in American history, which lasted about 125 years. For a vivid picture of what presidential nominations looked like during this period, read Edwin P. Hoyt, Jr.’s 1960 book Jumbos and Jackasses. Subtitled “A Popular History of the Political Wars,” Hoyt’s book has an engaging narrative chapter on the parties’ national conventions and campaigns for each election from 1860 to 1960, and includes an appendix with popular and electoral vote tabulations, as well as seats won in Congress by each party.
Elections were the destination, but the fuel that powered the locomotive of parties during this era was patronage—the distribution of government jobs (federal, state, and local) to loyalists as the “spoils” of electoral victory. The corruptions associated with the patronage system led to federal civil service reforms, beginning in the 1880s, but there was still enough fuel to keep the system running until the mid-twentieth century. For the federal workforce, the patronage boss was traditionally the postmaster general, a trusted confidant of the president given cabinet rank. (The postal service alone was a major jobs bank, but the postmaster general’s remit ran informally throughout the federal workforce.)
For all his keen-eyed analysis of our parties, Schattschneider railed against the “bosses” who ran the organizations, and led the mid-century “responsible party” school of political science that advocated nationally centralized parties, sharply defined ideologically in opposition to each other, their focal points being presidential leadership. This movement failed to take into account the fact that the strength of American parties came from their foundations in local and state politics.
The godfather of the “responsible party” school of thought had been Woodrow Wilson, who had a low opinion of the separation of powers and once advocated the adoption of British-style parliamentary government, in which the partisan executive cabinet is also the legislative leadership. Wilson ultimately espoused a highly rhetorical form of presidential leadership intended to overwhelm the separation of powers, and proposed the adoption of national party primaries to choose presidential candidates. American federalism made such a proposal a non-starter, but over the course of the twentieth century state party primaries came to dominate the nomination process, making the conventions rubber stamps of the choices made in primaries by the 1970s.
In two ways the rise of presidential power made political parties weaker. First, as Sidney Milkis argues in his 1993 book The President and the Parties, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the Democrats into the “party of administration” in such a way that the modern welfare state, administered by the executive branch, would make parties less and less important as vehicles for the service of voters’ interests. In Milkis’s view, FDR was quite deliberate about the aim of the administrative state’s taking the place of parties, but had to strengthen the Democrats’ New Deal coalition in order to pull it off—strengthening the party, for a time, with a view to weakening the people’s allegiance to parties in the long haul. One way in which Roosevelt accomplished this was by hiring scores of thousands of New Dealers into the government’s new agencies, outside the normal hiring channels, and then securing legislation to give most of them civil service employment protections.
The second way, and in my view the more important, was the aforementioned increase to critical mass of primary elections to choose the delegates to nominating conventions. The parties, led by professionals invested in them as institutions, had once been a restraining influence on presidential ambition. Now the parties are a “capture the flag” prize to be won by the most effective primary campaign organized around one individual. This is the liberation of ambition, not its restraint. As Ceaser puts it in Presidential Selection, “a party in this view has no long-term identity that is determined by the concerns of an activist cadre; rather, it assumes its identity at the last moment in the voters’ choice of a particular candidate.”
The race to accumulate convention delegates also has a tendency to push each party toward its most committed “base” voters, the ones who turn out in primaries. And the system tends to award victory to the candidate who can win the early contests with a small plurality even of those voters. Hence Donald Trump, never favored by more than three or four in ten of voters in the 2016 primaries, trounced a crowded field who represented, but fatally divided, the much larger mass of “he’s not Trump” voters. Now the party is largely a reflection of him, though he remains unpopular even with large numbers of self-described conservatives. For their part the Democrats, in 2016 and 2020, barely avoided nominating their most populist left-winger, Bernie Sanders, and the nominees they put forward were pushed to the left by the party’s base.
And so here we are, with hyper-partisanship and extremely weak parties, largely because earlier generations of “reformers” wanted to make them more “responsible” (read “ideological”) and more “democratic” (read “responsive to a narrow base”). It’s past time to have a conversation about reforming the reforms. Yuval Levin, in American Covenant, suggests ranked-choice voting in primaries, which is a promising idea. More creative thinking about how to make parties again represent the great middle of the country would be most welcome.
Image by Framestock and licensed via Adobe Stock.
