Hurray for Party-Line Pols
The recent vote to hold
impeachment hearings over Flytrap, we know, hewed closely to party lines; only
31 Democrats and one Republican broke ranks. But the Democratic and Republican
leadership did purport to agree on this: The vote was supposed to be one of
"conscience." Responding to reports that he was muscling Democrats for support,
President Clinton insisted the day before the decision that everyone should
"cast a vote of principle and conscience." Likewise, Republican Speaker Newt
Gingrich promised, "There will be no arm-twisting. Members need to take this
vote as a matter of conscience."
Washington suffers such bouts of conscience periodically, usually when Congress
faces a vote with dicey political consequences. During the Gulf War, House
Speaker Tom Foley assured reporters, "Individual members are going to vote with
their conscience and their judgment on this matter." The Bush White House
agreed: "This is a vote of conscience and not something you can involve party
loyalty on."
It's not hard to hear in all these comments the
reverberations of people protesting too much. Most of the time, we're left to
conclude, these craven, opportunistic pols will crumple, tossing aside their
deeply held convictions at the slightest blandishments. Only on an
extraordinary occasion do principles carry the day.
The
conscience talk also suggests something else that's taken for granted: Voting
with party is bad and voting according to conscience--and potentially against
party--is good. "I wanted to show my constituents I wasn't afraid to go against
my party," Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey told the New York Times ,
explaining why he supported the Democratic proposal. Voters endorse this
premise, affiliating themselves less and less with either party and splitting
their tickets in the voting booth more and more.
How did party loyalty get such a bad name? In
his new book, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life ,
Michael Schudson divides American history into three periods, each governed by
a different notion of civic participation. In the early Republic, parties were
anathema, viewed as self-interested cabals whose aims conflicted with an
otherwise discernible common good. In his famous "Federalist No. 10,"
James Madison wrote of "the mischiefs of faction"--taken to be a synonym for,
or the worst manifestation of, party. George Washington, elected unanimously
and without party affiliation, cautioned in his Farewell Address against
"the baneful effects of the spirit of the party." Everyone was expected to vote
according to conscience all the time.
The
conceit of government by peaceable consensus was soon exposed as chimerical. By
the 1790s, the young nation's leaders promptly split into warring parties: the
New England-centered Federalists and the Southern-based Republicans. (For more
on the confusing history of U.S. parties, click .) The problem was that each
party had different ideas about what the common good entailed: For the
Federalists it meant a strong central government, an expanding economy, and the
stewardship of an elite ruling class. The Republicans envisioned a weaker
federal government, an agrarian society, and an infusion of democracy.
Though the Federalist-Republican split was short-lived,
Americans were recognizing parties as inevitable in a democracy. In New York in
the 1810s, future president Martin Van Buren led a coalition called the
"Bucktails" or the "Albany Regency" against the elites who dominated state
politics. One of the great forgotten figures of American history, Van Buren
pioneered party discipline as a way to muster the strength of numbers against
the entrenched closed-door aristocracy, transforming state and later national
politics. (It was Van Buren's ally William L. Marcy who famously said, "To the
victors belong the spoils," making the "spoils system" of rewarding supporters
a fixture of party politics.)
Van
Buren's politicking ushered in the second era of citizenship in Schudson's
scheme. During the 19 th century, parties thrived. Andrew Jackson's
election as president in 1828, for whom Van Buren would later serve as vice
president, crystallized his supporters into the Democratic Party, his opponents
into the Whigs. By late century, elections had become ebulliently partisan
affairs. Republicans and Democrats paraded in torchlight processions, waved
banners, sang songs. Newspapers unabashedly pitched the news from a partisan
slant. On Election Day, party leaders handed voters tickets with slates of
candidates printed upon them; the voter just dropped the ticket in the ballot
box. Turnout was never higher. Whatever its faults, democracy was bustling and
vital.
Elite reformers of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era put a stop to all this. Appalled by the rampant corruption of
the spoils system, they instituted civil service reform and the "Australian"
secret ballot. They crippled parties by empowering voters through the
referendum and the popular election of senators. The times celebrated
objectivity, expertise, and efficiency: Voters now had to stay informed and
engaged to make more choices independently. Since then, parties have continued
to lose both power and credibility. "Today the labels [of party] are shunned as
an offense to a thinking person's individualism, and a vast majority of
Americans insist they vote for 'the man, not the party,' " writes political
scientist Larry Sabato.
There's
no arguing that a democracy needs representatives and voters who can think for
themselves. Perhaps one day we'll even achieve that. Still, there are some
reasons to prefer the 19 th century's embrace of partisanship to
today's exaltation of the conscience-serving, hyper-responsible individual--or
what I once heard called the "David Broder/League of Women Voters school of
politics."
As Van Buren knew, parties are inherently democratic, the
most effective way of organizing otherwise powerless individuals. With $4
billion, Ross Perot can avoid party ties and just run for president. For most
people to compete they need to come together and to raise funds, agree upon a
platform, choose candidates, and so on. Party loyalty and discipline make that
possible, and that sometimes means both voters and representatives must
subordinate individual differences.
There's a
conservative case for parties, too, articulated by the 18 th century
philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke believed that the principles shared by party
members should bind them together, even when they encounter particular
differences about their application (and despite some blurring of lines, party
members do still ). Indeed, representatives owe it to the voters not to discard
the party line for personal gain. Connecticut Democrats who voted for Joe
Lieberman over the liberal Republican Lowell Weicker have every right to feel
betrayed when Lieberman deserts a Democratic president in a partisan fight.
It's basic truth in advertising.
What's more, the decline of voter turnout this
century shows that our current arrangement leaves many voters feeling
ill-equipped to participate in democracy. Who hasn't entered a voting booth and
been utterly baffled about how to vote on a referendum or whom to choose for
some lower position? A party line comes in handy. The notion of the informed
citizen puts too much pressure on individuals, where the cruder but more
inspiring politics of the Gilded Age mobilized voters on Election Day.
Finally,
parties help keep political power in balance, as even the anti-party Alexander
Hamilton saw. In "Federalist No. 70," he wrote, "the jarrings of parties
[in Congress], though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often
promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the
majority." If you think Clinton should be ousted, surely you're glad the
Republicans have united to impeach him. And if you think the Republicans are an
out-of-control majority bent on revenge, surely you're happy to see Democrats
rallying to stop them. When it comes to extraordinary moments of political
crisis, "conscience" sometimes just gets in the way.
If you
didn't click the sidebars in the text and would like a brief reminder of the
tangled history of U.S. political parties--and the enduring differences between
them--click and .
