Political Parties Then And Now
Marc Landy
Political parties are supposed to be good for the republic. Their apologists point to
the seminal role parties play in binding citizens to the regime; simplifying and clarifying
political choice, disciplining potential despots and promoting democratic accountability.
This paper examines the arguments made in favor of parties in the past and assesses how
well they apply to parties in the present. Unsurprisingly, the most astute analyst of parties
past and present was James Q. Wilson. In his seminal book, Political Organizations
Wilson provided the most comprehensive and analytically acute description of “how they
are formed, why people join them, how leaders and policies are selected, and by what
strategies they deal with other organizations, especially government agencies.”1(9) This
paper seeks to build on Wilson’s insights in order to more fully grasp the role of parties
in contemporary political life. ‘Now’ means now. ‘Then’ is a slippery term. Some of the
most important and convincing defenses of party apply to a party system that was
characteristic of the 19th Century but was severely undermined by the New Deal and
critically weakened during the late 1960s. This paper establishes no clear cut off point for
‘then.’ Rather it permits party apologists to incorporate whatever timeframe enables them
to make their best case.
1
This quote applies to all political organizations not just parties. Political Organizations
p. 9.
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Wilson’s Theory of Organizational Incentives
At a time, the early 1970s, when political science was most interested in
atomizing the study of political life, concentrating on the attitudes and behaviors of
individuals Jim Wilson stood up for the importance of studying the enduring
combinations that he called political organizations. In his view, the impulses and passions
that provoke individuals to political action are ephemeral things. “Organization provides
continuity and predictability to social processes that would otherwise be episodic and
uncertain.”(7) Political Organizations is a natural history of this phenomenon.
Wilson approached the natural history of political organization as a survivalist (as
if a driver of red Porsches could ever be overly concerned with survival). “Whatever else
organizations seek, they seek to survive.”(10) Thus the most important question to ask
about political organizations was not what their objectives were or even how successful
they were in meeting those goals but rather how they managed to convince their
members that membership was sufficiently worthwhile to make whatever sacrifices and
commitments were necessary to enable the organization to endure. Therefore he focused
his study of political organizations on the effort to understand how organizations enticed
members to join and encouraged them to remain.
The incentives for organizational membership fit into three categories. Material
incentives are tangible rewards – money, contracts, jobs, discounts etc(33). They operate
at both the elite and the mass level. Ordinary people who serve the party could look
forward to becoming assistant postmasters, road workers or file clerks. The higher
echelons of the party could look forward to lucrative paving contracts, legal fees or, when
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the Second National Bank was still operating, large bank loans at favorable rates with
little collateral.
The role of material reward in developing party loyalty is more complex and
ambiguous than Wilson’s schema suggests. According to conventional economic theory,
in order to encourage party membership, material incentives have to be exclusionary. One
can only obtain them through party service. Material benefits resulting from party
endorsed policies that are non exclusionary do not qualify. For example Social Security
was a Democratic Party inspired program but its benefits are not confined to party
members. 62 year olds need not join the party to receive and old age pension. Such
qualifying non - party members are classic free riders.
But in fact free riders often abjure their freedom. They do in fact identify with
and contribute to a political party because its program benefits them even though they
could still benefit from those same programs without becoming party members. As we
shall soon see, Wilson recognizes that people have non-material incentive for joining
parties and that those motives are largely non exclusionary. My principled support for
my political party does not suffer because you too are supporting it and my pleasure in
playing cards at the party clubhouse may actually be enhanced by your party involvement
if it provides the extra hand we need for the poker game. Rather than limit the role of
material incentives to those that are exclusionary one should simply deny the
psychological premise it rests on. Free ridership may well explain many aspects of human
behavior but it appears to fail to explain the zeal with which people act as partisans in
defense of strong, albeit non-exclusionary, material interests.
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The absence of non-exclusionary material benefits from Wilson’s schema did not
greatly detract from its explanatory power as long as the schema was only applied to the
time period when the federal government remained limited because the principle of
limitation minimized the availability of non-exclusionary material rewards. In the 19th
Century the key example of such rewards was the tariff and indeed beneficiaries of high
tariffs, many manufacturers and their employees, did join the pro–tariff party, the
Republicans. Conversely, many low tariff beneficiaries, farmers and merchants, joined
the anti–tariff party, the Democrats. As we shall see later on, the issue of nonexclusionary material incentives becomes much more critical to party life after the
waning of limited government when much more in the way of programmatic rewards
became available.
Wilson’s second category consists of purposive incentives. In contrast to material
incentives, these are intangible. They consist of “the sense of satisfaction of having
contributed to the attainment of a worthwhile cause (34).” They pertain to all the nonmaterial motives that individuals have for seeking programmatic change. Wilson divides
his third category, solidary incentives, into two subcategories. The first consists of
collective solidary incentives. These derive their value from the act of association
itself,(34) from the conviviality and solidarity gained from the organizational activity but
also from the sense of exclusivity and superiority that such membership may confer. My
satisfaction in belonging to the Rotary Club may come both from the savory rubber
chicken and lively conversation served up at the monthly meetings and also from the fact
that not everyone in town is eligible to join. They are exclusionary but on a collective
basis. Members have access to them, non-members do not. Specific solidary incentives
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“are given to or withheld from specific individuals.” (33-4) Like the exclusivity of
membership itself, the offices and honors that organizations derive a good deal of their
value from the fact that others do not get them.
Material, Solidary and Purposive Functions of Party
Wilson does not go beyond the general endorsement of the virtues of organization
I have already mentioned to consider how political parties do or do not contribute to the
overall wellbeing of the regime. But what he treats as explanations of membership in
party, others have used to explain the functions of party. They defend parties largely on
the basis of how the material. Solidary and purposive incentives parties provide bolster
the regime.
This positive function has been ascribed to all three forms of membership
incentives even the one that might seem least edifying, the material. The first truly
partisan president, Andrew Jackson, defended the spoils system not merely as a tool for
doling out material rewards but as a critical means for ensuring democratic
accountability. If the national party leader, the president, failed remove those who served
in the prior administration, those office holders would come to believe that those offices
were their own personal property. As property owners do, they would avail themselves of
that property as they saw fit. The Jacksonian spoils system deprived office holders of this
antidemocratic sense of entitlement and instilled in them the recognition that the offices
they temporarily occupied belong to the people and that they served in those offices
entirely at the discretion of their politically accountable superiors.
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The functional aspect of spoils extends even to that most materially grounded of
all political organizations, the urban “machine.” Its defenders argue that its ability to
distribute patronage to the urban poor, particularly to newly arrived immigrants, enabled
poor persons to obtain shelter and sustenance at a time when government did not offer an
economic safety net. Immigrants were of no value to the machine if they could not vote
and therefore the machine equipped them with the civic knowledge and the language
skills required to pass the citizenship exam. Out of the crassest of motives there arose a
dynamic engine for civic improvement.
The purposiveness of political parties has likewise been views as critical to
successful democratic politics. V.O Key’s Southern Politics and James Sterling Young’s
Washington Community describe the incoherence into which political life descends when
the principled and programmatic cues provided by competitive political parties are
absent. Both Key and Young argue that parties are necessary to simplify voter choice and
provide potent ideologically redolent symbols for luring voters out of apathy.
Schatteschneider went so far as to claim that: “Political parties created democracy and
that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties. The parties have thus both
simplified and democratized the Constitution.”(Party Government). They promote
democratic accountability by providing purposive symbols and slogans uniting voters and
political candidates. By associating like-minded candidates they have the capacity to
simultaneously gain majorities in both Houses of Congress and win the presidency. Thus
they overcome the inertial bias of the checks and balances system to enable bold
purposive programs to be enacted. The purposively based principle of “responsible
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party” became so widely accepted among political scientists that an official APSA
publication was issued in support of it.
The Solidary Admixture
Wilson Carey McWilliams made the best case for the great functional importance
of partisan solidary incentives, but he did not claim that those incentives should be
understood in isolation. Taking his cue from that decidedly anti-party thinker, Alexis De
Tocqueville, McWilliams stressed the need for the development of local attachments as
an indispensable source of attachment to the regime. The national government was too far
removed from the ordinary citizen to sufficiently establish the strong emotive ties needed
to secure the loyalty of a heterogeneous mass citizenry. Inevitably, the United States writ
large would always remain a nation of strangers.
But De Tocqueville placed no faith in political parties. If they were essentially
purposive, as the parties of the French Revolution had been, they would disagree about
fundamental things and therefore tear the regime apart. But, if they were fundamentally
materialist, as he thought American parties to be, they debased the political order causing
politics to degrade into nothing but the pursuit of personal gain. Thus they were either to
high or too low to serve as bulwarks of the political order.
By contrast, McWilliams had a middling view of party that derived from his more
subtle appreciation of the political philosophical and the structural context in which
American political parties operated, at least in the 19th Century. This exceptional
combination of regnant political ideas and federal structure enabled parties to concoct a
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recipe comprised of material, purposive and solidary ingredients that nourished the
democratic political order. The American Creed as propounded in the Declaration of
Independence enabled parties to be purposive without becoming excessively polarizing.
The Federalists and the Anti–Federalists differed about serious but not fundamental
things. They were all liberals. Theirs was a lover’s quarrel. This was equally true of their
successors, the Republicans, the Democrats and the Whigs. Therefore losing power did
not need to involve a trip to the gallows.
Because party conflict was tolerable, party statesmanship was possible. If
Alexander Hamilton had viewed himself as the leader of a De Tocquevillian “high” party,
he would certainly have encouraged the Federalists to exploit the Electoral College tie
between Jefferson and Burr in the presidential election of 1800 for its own partisan
purposes. Instead he rallied his party in support of Jefferson ensuring the victory of his
bitter, but not mortal, enemy, enabling the first peaceful and orderly partisan transition in
history. In his Inaugural, Jefferson performed a reciprocal act of party statesmanship,
soothing the partisan sting of his victory by declaring “We are all Republicans, We are all
Federalists.
Thus McWilliams’ case for solidary incentives is not a pure one. All three forms
of incentives needed to mix together to sustain the parties’ middling position. The
pleasures of parades, picnics, Jefferson Jackson Day dinners and whiskey flavored poker
games mixed with the sweet scent of spoils to engage the affections of party loyalists in
ways that muted, but did not extinguish their purposive partisan commitments.
But it was the constitution itself and the federal form that it embodied that fully
enabled the parties to work to attach citizens to the regime and to create affective and
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purpose ties among the nation’s strangers. The requisites imposed by the overall
governing and electoral system impelled the parties to establish a federal associational
structure that paralleled the constitutional federal one. As Sid Milkis has shown, this
structural imperative turned political parties into a complex mix of decentralization and
hierarchy. Parties were rooted in locality, but they required sustenance from the higher
levels of government to achieve both their material and purposive ends. Above the local
level they formed federations at the state and at the national level. The act of national
association, the presidential nominating convention, was brief but decisive. It picked the
presidential candidate who, if victorious, would provide a vital source of patronage and
equally vital symbolic and programmatic succor for the leaders and followers down the
ladder.
This mix of constitutional and ideological conditions accounted for the deep
differences between American and European parties that existed until very recently.
As Bertrand de Jouvenel recognized, “responsible” European political parties resembled
centralized monarchies. Their national governing body, the cabinet, dictated the party’s
programs and policies to the party’s member-subjects whose duty it was to obey.
American parties, on the other hand were essentially feudal. A king, the president, sat
atop that order and elicited homage and fealty from those below. But he was more a
dependent than a sovereign. The real power lay with the barons, the local political
leaders, whose sphere of authority was limited, but whose powers within their domains
ran deep. They possessed the critical resources, votes, in exchange for which the
president provided them with the jobs and other valuable material possessions of the
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realms that they required to reliably produce those votes. He could not command them.
The relationship was reciprocal and therefore each exerted authority over the other.
Just as the baronial system limited the power and discretion of the king so the
party system restricted the discretion and power lust of the president. As James Ceaser
has shown, America’s first potential man on horseback, Andrew Jackson, willingly
dismounted in response to party discipline. His Whig foes called him King Andrew, an
apt moniker as long as he was understood to be a feudal king not the tyrant the use of the
term ‘king’ was meant to evoke.
As late as 1944, the Democratic Party barons could exert their will against as
mighty a king as FDR. Roosevelt’s health was failing. He sought to control the Vice
Presidential selection so as to promote his chosen successor, incumbent vice president
Henry Wallace. In the eyes of party barons Wallace was an interloper, a Republican in
New Deal clothing. When they met with the ailing president’s representatives to choose
the vice presidential candidate, they refused to back Wallace. In the face of this resolute
opposition, the king’s minions backed off. Lengthy negotiations ensued in which the
party leaders rejected a long list of proposed candidates. FDR was no fan of Truman but
he accepted the Missourian because Truman was acceptable to the barons and he could
find no plausible grounds on which to veto the Missouri Senator.
1952 marked the last time party barons exerted collective leadership to determine
the outcome of the presidential nominating process. Robert Taft came to the Republican
Convention as the front runner, having dominated the primaries. But the barons had both
self interested and principled reasons for defeating them. Taft was so conservative that he
might actually lose an election that was eminently winnable. His rival for the nomination,
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Dwight Eisenhower, was a sure thing. Also many of the barons had a purposive
commitment to the Western Alliance and the Cold War strategies of containment and
deterrence. Eisenhower was steadfastly committed to those principles. Taft was not. And
so the barons used the delegate votes they controlled to throw the nomination to Ike.
Anti-Partyism
These same party characteristics that apologists view in functional terms,
disparagers of party, going back to the framers themselves, view as threats to republican
government. We have already seen that Tocqueville feared purposiveness as the source of
insurrection. Material incentives breed corruption. The collective discipline exerted by
the barons prevents great statesman from rising to the fore and promotes the choice of
mediocre presidential candidates.
But, on the whole the historical evidence does not support the anti-party view.
The nation’s one prolonged experiment with non partisan government, the Era of Good
Feelings, betrayed its name. The Era encompassed two presidential administrations. The
Monroe administration was at best average while the Adams administration was a
dreadful failure. By contrast, two of our greatest presidents, Lincoln and FDR were
chosen by party convention and were active party leaders. As depicted by James Stirling
Young, the “Good Feelings” government lost all sense of purpose and its standing among
the public declined precipitously. V.O Key’s depiction of one party(read no party)
politics in the South paints an even grimmer picture. In the absence of party competition,
politics lost all purposiveness and bred a political order rife with corruption ruled by a
self serving elite committed to keeping both the black and the white poor in thrall.
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Parties Now
That was then. This is now. In the preface to his final book, American Politics
Then and Now, Wilson laments that those “familiar institutions,” including political
parties, that he had analyzed several decades earlier had changed fundamentally. They
had been weakened or replaced by “a commitment to ideas and ideologies the
consequences of which we do not fully understand.” I will argue later on that this quote
applies with equal cogency to both parties but Wilson focused solely on the Democrats.
He labeled the congery of those ideas and ideologies to which that party was
increasingly committed “social democracy.” A previously heterogeneous and heterodox
party was coming to resembled a conventional European social democratic one. “The
chief mystery of contemporary politics is how such a fundamental change(from a regime
of limited government to a social democracy) was possible.”
Wilson did not offer a definition of Social Democracy but his meaning was clear
enough. The leadership, most of the national office holders, local activists and party
identifying intelligentsia had adopted a view of the role of government that emphasized
cradle to grave security for its citizens and that took a very expansive view of
government’s right to intervene in matters previously considered to be beyond the
purview of government. Social democracy was not socialist in that it did not make overt
appeals to class conflict nor did strongly favor public ownership of the means of
production. But it did fully embrace what Sidney Milkis terms “programmatic rights” by
which he means the use of government to secure an ever increasing panopoly of rights
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that go well beyond the old age income security established in the New Deal to include
healthcare, gender equality, marriage rights for homosexuals among others.
Wilson acknowledges the seminal importance of the New Deal in bringing about
this transformation, but he is at pains to remind us that this profound change was not fully
realized during the New Deal nor, indeed, during the remainder of the 20th Century.
Social democracy was the ambition of Left New Dealers, but the politics of that era
forced them to “settle instead for an American state, that is, a sense of national identity
managed by a national government to achieve national purposes.”(xii) Wilson recognizes
that key steps in the direction of social democracy were taken between 1933 and 2009,
but he views the policies of the Obama Administration as much more fully and
ambitiously furthering that cause.
The determination to create a social democracy was reborn with the advent of
Barack Obama to the presidency. In his first few months in office, Obama ordered
the merger of several banks, passed out stimulus checks directly to the people,
gave money to the auto companies (on condition that one company get rid of its
chief executive officer and that all make the kinds of cars federal officials liked
(auth note: and JQW didn’t). and called for a federal health plan…(xii).
In his previous work, Wilson had already described the two related elements
behind the rise of social democracy: the decline of what he termed “the legitimacy
barrier,” and the accession to political pre eminence of a social democratically minded
social, professional and educational elite. The legitimacy barrier, while it existed
throughout he 19th and into the 20th Century, was the practical incarnation of the
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constitutional principle of limited government( American Politics Then and Now7-8).
While it was in force, the first question policy makers asked about a policy initative was
“is it constitutional?” The constitutionality test required that the policy objective fit one
or another of the enumerated powers listed in Article One of the Constitution. The
decline of that barrier meant that the only two questions to be asked were: “is it a good
idea?” and “can we pay for it? (although with the increasing tolerance of debt financing
this “fiscal barrier” has also declined).” If those questions, or at the least the first, were
answered in the affirmative, the policy deserved to be adopted.
The decline of the legitimacy barrier was a gradual process. Wilson does not
attempt to chronicle and explain that decline nor do I. I merely offer some suggestive
comments. First, FDR’s commitment to engage in “bold and persistent experimentation”
to end the Depression was a critical early step. It began the disassociation of policy and
law. Limited government is inextricably bound to the rule of law. Law is the opposite of
experimentation. Its great virtues are that it is fixed and predictable. The reason to
experiment is because one does not know what will work. Therefore a policy experiment
is a stab in the dark. One hopes for but cannot predict success. Experiments provide none
of the regularity and certainty of law. Luckily for the country, but not for the
maintenance of the legitimacy barrier, many of FDR’s experiments were successful.
Hence the public became accustomed to and enamored of the idea that the federal
government could and should be creative and flexible and not be excessively encumbered
by rigid legal and constitutional restrictions.
Second, The Supreme Court’s willingness to expand the constitutional meaning
of interstate commerce enabled Congress to pass laws without much consideration as to
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whether or not they exceeded constitutional bounds. Third, resort to arguments based on
claims about the prerogatives of the states and the autonomy of the private sphere lost
legitimacy because they so frequently served as rationales for sustaining racial
oppression. Respect for the principle of a private sphere unencumbered by governmental
regulation might have enabled barbershops, lunch counters and hotels to retain the right
to determine whom to serve and whom not to serve if they had not so egregiously used
that discretion for racist purposes.
The lowering of the legitimacy barrier enables the government to widely expand
its policy prerogatives but it does not indicate what direction those policies will take. It is
therefore a necessary but not a sufficient explanation for the proliferation of social
democratic policy. In Wilson’s view, policy has moved so dramatically in the social
democratic direction because of the transformation of the ideological predilections of the
most critical opinion molders, America’s professional, educational and journalistic elite:
(90-91) the graduates and the faculties of the most prestigious colleges and law schools;
the opinion writers for the leading newspapers and news magazines; and the most
respected and prominent policy intellectuals inhabiting Washington thinktanks. As early
as 1979 Wilson showed that “the most privileged elements in society considered
themselves to be Democrat…(This) New Class is responsive to and provides support for,
politicians who favor abortion on demand, environmental and consumer-protection laws,
and equal rights for women.”
Had Wilson written about the New Class in 2012 he would have included gay
marriage, universal healthcare and massive reductions in carbon emissions in this list of
policy preferences. He would also probably have noted that the New Class has expanded
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beyond the highly educated to include the highly celebrated. Rock stars, famed movie
actors and actresses and other media celebrities have become far more outspoken in their
involvement in causes like global warming, world poverty, gay rights and animal rights.
There are a conservative outliers in the celebrity orb, most notably Mel Gibson and Clint
Eastwood. But they are far outnumbered by those who seek to push politics Left. In both
2008 and 2012 the Obama campaign exploited this New New Class by not just obtaining
the endorsement of these celebrities but actively involving them in widely publicized
staged events.
The Right has also greatly increased its use of the media, but it’s tilt has been
decidedly anti-elitist. Ivy Leaguers like William Kristol, Ross Douthat, and Charles
Krauthammer continue to uphold the tradition of learned rightwing TV commentary
pioneered by William F. Buckley and George Will. But the conservative airwaves are
dominated by the populist personae of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and their emulators.
The rise of the New Class to ideological dominance of the Democratic Party has
been widely noted but the causes of its coalescence are not well understood. To
adequately explain it, Wilson says, “ we require better knowledge about the organizations
that shape opinion – mass and elite media, the universities and those acronomyic groups
that manage to devise and disseminate compelling slogans,” (15). I have little to add to
these suggestions other than to highlight the seminal role of the 1960s. During the short
period from the assassination of President Kennedy through 1968 a drastic delegitimation of crucial institutions of the regime took place including but not limited to
the prestige and authority of college faculty and administration and the loss of respect and
deference to the presidency.
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As we have seen Wilson wrote of the damage done by “a commitment to ideas
and ideologies the consequences of which we do not fully understand.” Although he
restricted his analysis to the impact of relatively new social democratic ideas and
ideologies his insight is equally valid when applied to ideas and ideologies that have been
rescusicated by conservatives in opposition to social democracy. The impact of old ideas
in novel situations is every bit as unpredictable as that of new ideas in new situations. A
commitment to the principles of limited government does not imply that Eighteenth
Century understanding of market forces, appropriate for a nation of small farmers and
mechanics can provide adequate guidance for the pursuit of happiness in the Twenty
First. Social insurance and business regulation are essential aspects of governance in a
post industrial mass society. Less is not always more.
The increasing commitment of Republican intellectuals and grassroots activists to
reflexive laissez faire dogmas in the face of contemporary economic and societal
challenges is as debilitating as the Democrat’s commitment to social democracy. At the
grassroots, the Tea Party is engaging in intraparty self-immolation that make FDR’s
purge efforts look like a walk in the park. The defeat in primaries of conservative
Republican candidates by Tea Party radicals has already cost the party several seats in the
Senate and, more importantly, the continued threat of such challenges pushes
congressional incumbents further to the right than their minds and hearts would otherwise
take them.
Among the conservative elite a revisionist understanding of modern American
history threatens to lead to as dangerous a misunderstanding of the proper role of
government as does the uncritical Progressivist interpretation that it seeks to overturn.
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This view consistently overlooks the threats to social and political stability that
Progressives and New Dealers were responding to and which their conservative
opponents blithely ignored. As James Q. Wilson understood, the New Deal did not
overturn a sound regime in order to create a Nanny state but instead created “a sense of
national identity managed by a national government to achieve national purposes.”
Washington and Hamilton would have supported such an objective and therefore those
intellectuals and activists whose heart is in the 18th Century should support it as well.
True, left wing New Dealers, and their ideological descendants, bemoan the limits of this
accomplishment. But sensible conservatives should strive to conserve the New Deal’s
critical contributions while restraining the inevitable urges of progressives to push
beyond sensible economic security considerations to ensnare an ever expanding set of
social objectives into government’s web. War is too important to leave to the generals.
The difficult task of maintaining a creative tension between undisciplined destabilizing
market forces and obtuse and infantilizing government intrusion is too important to leave
to social democrats.
Incentives, Functions and Dysfunction
Let us now examine contemporary political parties in the same terms we deployed
when we analyzed their predecessors, looking both at the incentives they provide their
members and the functions they do or do not perform. Exclusionary material incentives,
are still part of party politics. But, whereas they used to be both an elite and a mass
phenomenon now they benefit mostly those on top. Automation, civil service rules and
unionization have vastly reduced the supply of low level party patronage jobs and an
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overall rise in living standards has reduced the demand for them. At the high end,
ambassadorships and upper echelon executive branch jobs are still distributed on a
partisan basis to large campaign contributors and campaign officials. More importantly,
as the Solyndra case shows, despite supposedly stringent review procedures there is still
room for valuable contracts and grants to be steered to be distribution on a discretionary
basis to party worthies and their associates.
This change in the role of material incentives deprives them of the functions they
used to perform. They no longer serve to attach the least advantaged to the regime nor do
they promote political accountability via rotation in office. Rather they undermine the
legitimacy of the regime by fostering public cynicism about the role of merit and equity
in politics. Or perhaps someone would want to defend the proposition that editing Vogue
qualifies one to be U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain?
Purposive incentives are as potent a source of party identification as ever. As
Wilson and many others have described, the homogeneity of opinion among party
identifiers is very great and the divide between the opinions of Republicans and
Democrats about a whole host of issues has grown sharper. Indeed American political
parties are becoming “responsible” much like their European counterparts. As APSA’s
responsible party advocates would wish, these sharpened principled differences provide a
clearly etched roadmap about how to interpret the political world to those who devote
little time to studying the issues .
But this growing polarity of purpose comes at a steep political price. The
systematic nature of partisan differences threatens to move the party system upward from
McWilliams’ safe and functional middle ground to De Tocqueville’s high and
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treacherous peak. As Jefferson said, every difference of opinion is not a difference of
principle, but the argument between Republicans and Democrats is no longer about a
series of political opinions. It has crystallized into a highly principled dispute about the
relative merit of social democracy and limited government.
Therefore, those scholars, most notably Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who
accuse congressional Republicans of obstructionism miss the point. Political rivals can
only afford to accommodate one another when their differences are relatively superficial.
Accomodation becomes ever less likely as those difference become more profoundly
principled. For example, room exists for compromise even over a highly controversial
issue like immigration reform because many members of both parties have come to
accept a common goal – strong border enforcement and lenient treatment of current
illegal aliens. Over the next few months they are likely to overcome their differences
over the means to achieve those goals. No such commonality of ends exists regarding the
most serious party differences regarding the entitlements because those issues expose the
cleavage between the social democratic and the limited government worldview. So, the
Republicans obstruct Democratic efforts to move in a direction they disapprove of and
Democrats use dubious tactics to skirt those obstructions( the very questionable rule
interpretation that enabled them to avoid Senate filibuster of healthcare reform, for
example).
Because Mann and Ornstein are themselves inclined towards social democracy,
they don’t recognize that what they view as mean-spirited tactical obstruction is better
understood as a principled last ditch effort by Republicans to alter what they see as a
disastrous course. Unless there is a decisive election, meaning one party wins the
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presidency and both houses of Congress, the deep differences of principle dividing the
two parties will continue to fester and to feed public cynicism about government and
politics.
With the advent of social democracy, there is no longer a clear analytic
distinction to be drawn between purposive and non-exclusionary material incentives. The
prevalence of social democracy creates a political coalition to promote more social
democracy. As Mitt Romney infamously pointed out, 47% of the population are
recipients of some form of national government transfer payment - be it food stamps, old
age pensions, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicare, Social Security,
anegative income tax paymenta or some other benefit.
In addition, there are large numbers of people who making their living as
providers of those payments and services. These include, but are not limited to, public
employees. In the modern “hollow” state, services are very often provided by private
contractors and grantees. Paul Light has estimated that the total number of contractors
exceeds the total number of federal employees, including military and postal personnel.
Since the federal government contributes substantially to state and local government
budgets, beneficiaries also include all the teachers, fire, police, and clerical workers who
work for these other government entities. Now that government is the leading payer for
healthcare services one ought to include all the nurses, doctors, menial hospital
employees among those who have reason to support social democratic expansion.
To bring this topic directly home, if Marc Landy supports expansion of the
student loan program is this evidence of his purposive commitment to universal higher
education or of a self regarding recognition that cheaper student loans fuel higher
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tuitions at Boston College and therefore make possible a raise in his salary? In other
words, does the shift to the Democrats that has taken place among highly educated
professionals like doctors and college professors to the Democrats represent an
ideological shift or merely a recognition of the excellent rents they obtain from the social
democratic state the Democrats promote? Is there really a distinction to be drawn
between these two propositions?
The embodiment in one political party of a majority rent seeking coalition
produces the shift of ever more resources from the private to the public sector and from
public policies and programs aimed at investment to those aimed at consumption. State
governments are already suffering the ill effects of having to spend the largest chunk of
their budgets on Medicaid at the cost of increasingly severe reductions in spending for
infrastructural improvement and maintenance. As the Democratic Party come more
closely to resemble a European social democratic party, the likelihood grows that the
nation will come to ever more closely resemble those European nations whose public
sectors have grown to debilitating and unsustainable levels.
Conclusion
Political parties now perform, perhaps better than ever, the goals that responsible
parties advocates endorse. As the strict party vote over healthcare reform exemplified,
parties are capable of overcoming the barriers to policy change that the constitutional
separation of powers erects. Because they are passionately polarized regarding not only a
host of specific policy issues but also regarding the size and scope of national
government, they clarify and simplify voter choice. And, as the success the Tea Party has
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had in defeating those that deviate from its view of party principle, party members can
use the party primary process to hold the party’s representatives accountable.
This increased purposiveness comes at a high price. Parties no longer adequately
perform those functions that nurture republican government by encouraging collective
decision making and nurturing civic attachment. Because states and localities do not have
strong political organizations there are no longer baronial state and local leaders capable
of disciplining the president. Although individuals remain staunchly loyal to one or
another party, this party attachment is no longer rooted in solidarity, locality and
particularity. Party identifiers relate to their parties as atomized individuals involved in a
mass phenomenon that is subject to the whimsicality and instability characteristic of
atomistic mass phenomena.
Wilson laid the major blame for this increasingly debilitating purposiveness at the
feet of the Democrats and their transfiguration into Social Democrats. But, as I have
argued, the Republicans, intellectuals as well as grassroots activists, are increasingly
devoted to divisive and destructive principle.
Jim Wilson’s intellectual comrade, Aaron Wildavsky, spoke of the obligation of
social scientists and policy intellectuals to “tell truth to power.” Had Wildavsky lived to
witness the increased polarization of today’s “high minded” parties he might have revised
that slogan to read “tell truth to partisans.” Jim Wilson did that. His skepticism regarding
governmental capacity and concern for social stability made him a natural conservative
but those same qualities of mind and soul made him recognize that the fragility of the
private order might sometimes need public bolstering. He knew that neither ideological
camp had a monopoly on truth and he was prepared to throw cold water on overheated
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political passions generated from either Right or Left. He was more of a navigator than an
advocate, trying to steer policy and political discourse along a reasoned and empirically
grounded course and away from the poles of ideological excess. These navigational
talents form an integral part of his intellectual legacy and should serve as an inspiration to
those of us who seek to perpetuate that legacy.
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