American Political Parties

Front matter

American

Political Parties

Why They Formed, How They Function, and Where They’re Headed

CHAPTER 9 Third Parties in the Twenty-First Century 153 Conclusion: Where Are We Going? 174 Notes 190

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book always incurs more than the usual number of obligations. We are grateful to the University of Kansas Press, particularly David Congdon, for sharing our vision and guiding this project toward publication. We are also indebted to the reviewers, especially Mark Brewer and Samuel Rosenfeld, who greatly assisted us in making this a better book. We are grateful to the Catholic University of America and the dean of Arts and Sciences for helping to fund this work. We are likewise grateful to our students who have asked us incisive questions and helped to sharpen our thinking about American politics. Once more, we dedicate this book to our daughters, Jeannette White and Gabrielle Kerbel, who have followed our work from childhood into adulthood.

This book is completed during a time of intense partisan polarization and disillusionment with politics. We remain optimistic about the future, although we know that our democracy is in danger and the events described in this volume are ones we could have hardly imagined. But our optimism is rooted in the fact that the history of American political parties is one of constant adaptation and renewal. Once more, we are at a moment where renewing our parties will, we believe, ultimately strengthen our democracy.

xi

PREFACE: HOW WE GOT HERE

There is reason to worry that our two hundred-plus-year experiment with democracy is in danger. On January 6, 2021, insurrectionists invaded the US Capitol, interrupting the official congressional certification of the 2020 electoral vote and Joe Biden’s victory. Then-president Donald Trump successfully encouraged protestors to march from the White House to the Capitol and disrupt the solemn proceedings, and unsuccessfully urged his vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to certify enough electoral votes to reverse the election outcome. As demonstrators neared the House and Senate chambers, members of Congress were hustled to secure locations while Capitol police, National Guard, and Washington, DC, police officers fought the rioters, often in hand-to-hand combat. For the first time in US history, a sitting president was accused of inciting an insurrection that, if successful, would have led to a constitutional crisis the likes of which Americans have never before seen.

The Republican and Democratic Parties were obvious sources of blame for this discord, especially from those who questioned the election result after their passions were inflamed by Donald Trump. Deep fissures in our politics are reflected in sharp divisions between the political parties. A metaphorical canyon divided Republicans from Democrats in 2020, with 85 percent of Trump and Biden supporters each saying the other side did not understand them.! Foreign actors, especially Russia, were accused of using social media to enflame these tensions by planting false narratives designed to cause chaos and exacerbate social divisions. Consequently, partisan animosity boiled over.

This hostility may feel extreme, but it is not new. In fact, it goes back to the very beginning of the constitutional republic. George Washington understood the problems partisanship could create, and in his 1796 farewell address, Washington denounced “the spirit of party” in words that have an eerily contemporary ring:

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. ... The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose xiii xiv Preface: How We Got Here 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...

[The spirit of party] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with illfounded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus, the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

Washington’s wish for an apolitical, unified nation did not come to pass. Instead, parties became pillars of American political and social life. Fledgling parties vigorously contested the presidential elections of 1796 and 1800, resulting in division, chaos, and contested results. As parties became more ingrained in the American psyche—and later enshrined in election law—a two-party system took root. Soon, it became impossible to imagine the political system functioning without parties. Partisan newspapers became features of public life, conveying the positions of the earliest American parties to their supporters. Later, the two major parties acted as vital agents of political socialization for a wave of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and a historic number of European migrants in the 1890s.

George Washington Plunkitt, boss of New York City’s infamous Tammany Hall machine, candidly told a reporter in 1905 how he wooed young men into his Democratic organization:

I hear of a young feller that’s proud of his voice, thinks he can sing fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join our Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball club. That fixes him. You'll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day. Then there’s the feller that likes rowin’ on the river, the young feller that makes a name as a waltzer on his block, the young feller that’s handy with his dukes—I rope them all in by givin’ them opportunities to show themselves off. I don’t trouble them with political arguments. I just study human nature and act accordin’?

Preface: How We Got Here Xv

During the nineteenth century, presidents were often secondary in prominence to local and state party leaders, who doled out thousands of patronage jobs to their most loyal supporters—positions that often made the difference between prosperity and ruin. But party influence wasn’t always about jobs. Party leaders were vital intermediaries—assisting those in trouble with the law; providing aid to victims of fire or some other tragedy; and creating fraternal organizations or other social outlets. Former first lady Michelle Obama remembers how her father, Fraser Robinson, acquired his patronage job at the Chicago water filtration plant and, in return, served as a neighborhood precinct captain. Obama writes:

He’d held the post for years, in part because loyal service to the party machine was more or less expected of city employees. Even if he’d been half forced into it, though, my dad loved the job, which baffled my mother given the amount of time it demanded. He paid weekend visits to a nearby neighborhood to check in on his constituents, often with me reluctantly in tow. ... When somebody had problems with garbage pickup or snow plowing or was irritated by a pothole, my dad was there to listen. His purpose was to help people feel cared for by the Democrats—and to vote accordingly when elections rolled around.‘

Time eroded the power of these local party organizations as an expanding civil service substantially reduced the number of patronage jobs. Today, national party organizations like the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, and their congressional counterparts have subsumed the once-powerful party bosses to dominate national and (frequently) state politics. This centralization of party power coincides with a partisanship that sees fewer voters split their tickets between Democrats and Republicans; more citizens contributing small dollar amounts to the national parties and candidates of their choice; and opportunities for wealthy individuals to contribute vast sums without any public attribution (a phenomenon known as “dark money”). Party identification has become the most important factor in how people vote, transforming elections into a kind of political Armageddon. After the 2020 contest, 66 percent said it was either the “single most important election” or “one of the most important” in their lifetimes.’

The partisanship we live with today can be traced back to different views of American government that divided the nation’s founders. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, two members of George Washington’s first cabinet, were adversaries whose differences were so contentious they eventually caused both xvi Preface: How We Got Here to resign. Hamilton believed that freedom was a peculiarly American trait but needed to be paired with a strong central government led by a strong executive to prevent it from running amok. Jefferson also believed freedom to be a core American value, but he felt it could only be preserved by local civic virtue nurtured in the absence of a strong central government. In Jefferson’s view, there were substantial differences among the states, and local authorities should have the power to determine what works best in their communities.

For more than two centuries, the debate initiated by Hamilton and Jefferson about the size and role of government has imperfectly but consistently shaped partisan divisions. Although the issues separating the two sides have changed and changed again, the central tenets of their disagreement have not. Since the Democratic and Republican Parties began regularly competing after 1860, each party has at times embraced elements of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian position. In the late nineteenth century, Democrats advanced agrarian interests by advocating Jeffersonian localism while Republicans promoted a rapidly nationalizing industrial sector. Then, during the Great Depression, Democrats became the party of Hamiltonian nationalism and oversaw an unprecedented expansion of the national social welfare state. In the late twentieth century, Republican Ronald Reagan gave voice to Jefferson’s ideal of local control even as he presided over an expansion of the federal government. Subsequently, Bill Clinton bowed to the popularity of Reagan’s appeal and modified the Democrats’ Hamiltonian stance of relying on government to solve problems, going as far as to declare that “the era of big government is over.”

In their current incarnation, Democrats align more with Hamilton and his approach to vesting major responsibilities in a federal government that can respond to the exigencies of the moment. This is particularly true in a post- COVID 19 world where Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats want to use federal power to address looming crises—be it with direct relief for those displaced by the pandemic, investing in physical and human infrastructure, or dealing with climate change. Republicans in turn have long advocated limited government with less taxation and regulation—defending Donald Trump’s tax cuts and viewing states and localities as the appropriate locus of government activity. Congressional Republicans unanimously opposed Biden’s American Families Plan to deal with COVID-19, which included direct payments to families and childcare tax credits, and also unanimously opposed his Build Back Better legislation, designed to expand the social safety net. They are backed in these efforts by rank-and-file Republicans. After the 2020 election, 62 percent of Trump

Preface: How We Got Here xvii voters said congressional Republicans “should do their best to stand up to Biden on major policies, even if it means little gets passed.””

One reason why the parties have not been steadfast in their embrace of the Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian position is that Americans prefer some combination of both. Bill Clinton drew this simple analogy between Jefferson’s embrace of liberty and Hamilton’s advocacy for community:

Take a penny from your pocket. On one side next to Lincoln’s portrait is a single word: “Liberty.” On the other side is our national motto. It says, “E Pluribus Unum’—“Out of Many, One.” It does not say, ‘Every man for himself? That humble penny is an explicit declaration—one you can carry around in your pocket—that America is about both individual liberty and community obligation. These two commitments—to protect personal freedom and to seek common ground—are the coin of our realm, the measure of our worth.’

Nevertheless, the political parties have often forced Americans to choose one side or the other—sometimes resulting in their hatred for both. Herbert Croly argued that Hamilton “perverted [the] national idea as much as Jefferson perverted the American democratic idea, and the proper relation of these two fundamental conceptions one to another cannot be completely understood until this double perversion is corrected.”? Thus, there have been historic oscillations as both parties adjusted their perspectives as to whether Hamilton’s emphasis on authority and a strong federal government, or Jefferson’s preference for a devolution of power to state and local officials meets the moment. Often, Americans want both even if they can’t have both.

The Hamilton-Jefferson debate has even extended to what parties should look like and how they should act. Hamilton’s preference for a strong, centralized approach to politics has seen both parties become much stronger at the national level in terms of organization and money—sometimes using these resources to shape elections at the state level. Yet when it comes to selecting their presidential candidates, the party establishments have weakened. Democrats have long been unable to dictate their party’s nominee, allowing primary voters to make that decision since 1972. Historically, Republicans deferred to their party’s leaders to select their presidential candidates until Donald Trump smashed whatever power a weakened national Republican establishment retained. Indeed, Trump’s go-it-alone, one-man control over the GOP—even in his post-presidency—is unlike anything we have ever witnessed. Even past xviii Preface: How We Got Here strong presidents (Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind) had to defer to party bosses whenever the situation required.

Thus, even when they have been sympathetic to Jefferson’s preference for a weak national government, organizationally the parties have transformed themselves into national behemoths that Hamilton might have welcomed. Still, the groups that identify with the two parties are very different. Democrats have a multicultural appeal and a broad, at times unwieldy coalition that includes progressive, liberal, and moderate elements. This diversity of supporters can complicate governance when the party holds power, especially when it has exceptionally narrow congressional majorities like it did following the 2020 election. Republicans are more monolithic, especially since Donald Trump took control of the party rank-and-file, although there are differing opinions as to whether Trump’s position as a modern-day party boss will last. Outright near-unanimous Republican opposition to Joe Biden in the early days of his presidency put tremendous pressure on the Democratic party’s coalition to hold together despite internal differences.

This book tells the story of American political parties—why they formed, how they function, and where they are headed. It is a saga filled with many twists and turns, surprises, and uncertain outcomes along the lines sketched out between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Chapter 1 describes in greater detail the emergence of the arguments developed by Hamilton and Jefferson about the appropriate scope and nature of the federal government that have reverberated through the long history of political parties in America and provide the backdrop for the framework of this book. Chapter 2 details the first century of American political party development and explores how parties forged a uniquely American character while adapting to new times and technologies. Chapter 3 takes this history into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on forces that molded party organizations into powerful institutions at the turn of the twentieth and on forces that eroded and then helped rebuild them at the turn of the twenty-first.

Chapter 4 describes the ongoing evolution in how parties choose their presidential nominees, with emphasis on how the rise of personality politics and the emergence of social media have shaped nomination politics and undermined formerly powerful party organizations. Chapter 5 notes how party loyalties can strengthen during periods of realignment (when new coalitions of voters upend previous political coalitions) and erode during periods of dealignment (when independent voters become decisive in elections). Chapter 6 looks closely at the challenges posed to parties by social media. Chapter 7 explores the importance

Preface: How We Got Here xix of money in politics, examines the current state of campaign finance laws (or lack thereof), and considers how the Internet and super-rich individuals have revolutionized fundraising. Chapter 8 examines the role of the party in government, including the importance of the national party organizations. Chapter 9 looks at the role of third parties in the American two-party system and notes that at key junctures they have helped the major parties adjust to changing public demands. We conclude by considering what lies ahead for a party system that appears to be buckling under the weight of a rapidly changing America.

In its complexity and entirety, the saga of the US party system is fascinating because of the continued evolution of its actors. With each election, we learn more about how the two major parties address the eternal and emerging questions of our politics. We will begin most naturally with an election like no other in our lifetimes: the extraordinary story of 2020 and how partisan combat and its aftermath upset centuries-old norms of party behavior while bringing the republic itself to the brink. While the 2020 election and its aftermath add an important chapter to our story, as we note in the conclusion, the final ending has yet to be written.

E HAVE NEVER WITNESSED anything like the 2020 election

and its aftermath, where the centrist tendencies essential to the

success of the American two-party system gave way to a politics of absolutism that manifested in an insurrection against the government. Consider the extraordinary events of late 2020 and early 2021, when expectations of a peaceful transfer of power were superseded by partisan violence.

It was a moment of outsized participation marked by great partisan energy, when 159 million Americans voted in person or by mail amidst a once-in-a century pandemic. After days of counting ballots, Joe Biden emerged as the winner, having secured 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232. This was a devastating loss for Republicans, who in the space of just four years had surrendered the presidency, House, and Senate—the first time that had happened to the party since Herbert Hoover was defeated for reelection in 1932.

But the counting of the ballots marked only the beginning of an unprecedented moment in American history. On January 6, 2021, President Trump incited a crowd to stop the official certification of the electoral votes by a joint session of Congress. Inflamed by Trump’s rhetoric that urged his supporters to “fight like hell” because “if you don’t fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” thousands marched from the White House and stormed the Capitol.' Armed with guns, bear spray, zip ties, and other weapons, the rioters constructed a makeshift gallows on the Capitol grounds intended for congressional leaders, including Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Members of Congress scrambled to get out of harm’s way and into secure locations, while congressional staffers barricaded their offices, hid under conference tables, and feared for their lives. Five people died during the insurrection, including one Capitol police officer; two officers perished by suicide shortly afterward.

One week later the House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time. House Democrats were unanimous in their support for impeachment, and they were joined by ten Republicans, including the then-number three GOP leader, Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, the daughter of a former Republican vice president. Following a Senate trial held just days after Trump left office in February 2021, fifty-seven senators voted to convict the former president— including seven Republicans. Despite falling ten votes short of the two-thirds needed for conviction, it was the most bipartisan judgment ever leveled in an impeachment trial and marked the first time that multiple members of a president’s party supported conviction.

Inaugurated as the nation’s forty-sixth president two weeks after the attempted insurrection, Joe Biden made a plea for an American democracy that he called “precious,” yet “fragile.”? He was not the first or only figure to take note of the tenuous nature of the American political system during a fraught moment in history. Former President Barack Obama saw an American system of government under siege:

America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven't been enough of them to say for certain that it’s going to work.?

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, saw the zero-sum stakes of the 2020 election this way: “This is not just a choice between Republican and Democrat or left and right. This is an election that will decide if we keep America America—or if we head down an unchartered, frightening path towards socialism.”

Biden struck a hopeful tone at his inauguration, but the proceedings were set against the threat of additional violence and a pandemic that by then had already killed more Americans than a// of those who died during World War II. Ringed by thousands of troops, Biden took the presidential oath just hours after Donald Trump departed Washington, DC, for his Florida estate. For the first time since Andrew Johnson refused to attend the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant in 1869, a departing chief executive was nowhere to be found on the inaugural platform. It was a symbolic statement about resistance to the peaceful transfer of power that echoed the rebellion days before.

The only other comparable precedent was 1801—the first time an American political party handed over the reins of government to its opposition— when Thomas Jefferson was sworn into office just hours after the defeated John Adams decamped for his native Massachusetts. Like 2020, the Adams-Jefferson contest of 1800 was an ugly, highly partisan affair with ramifications for the continuity of government. Federalist John Adams loathed Democrat Thomas Jefferson who, in turn, lambasted his opponent for approving the Alien and

Sedition Acts that made criticism of the president a crime and landed pro-Jefferson newspaper editorialists in jail. One Jefferson supporter captured the election’s importance: “To reign by fear and not by affection was ever bad policy. I am confident that the people of America are too fond of freedom to surrender it passively; and that whenever any body of men disclose views inimical to their interests, they will hurl them into insignificance.”

Like 2020, the contentious election of 1800 was followed by an even more contentious aftermath. Owing to an Electoral College mechanism that didn’t account for the emergence of political parties, Thomas Jefferson’s running mate, Aaron Burr, won an equal number of votes to Jefferson in the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives had to resolve the matter. Controlled by the Federalist Party, whose most well-known public spokesperson was Alexander Hamilton, members of the congressional majority were confronted with an unappetizing choice: which of their rivals would they select to be the next president? After a weeks-long deadlock and with Hamilton’s endorsement, the Federalist House chose Jefferson as the lesser of two evils. Adams left office, but a period of political vitriol followed. Four years later, Burr assassinated Hamilton ina duel. Within a decade, the Federalist Party itself devolved into political insignificance.

The election of 1800, and John Adams’s acceptance of defeat, created what James MacGregor Burns described as a vital extra-constitutional right: the peaceful transition from a party-in-power to its opposition. Burns noted that this customary transfer of power from one political party to another—one that still eludes many other nations—showcased America at its best:

A crucial liberty, one that had not been tested during the twelve-year hegemony of Federalist government, was established in the election of 1800—the freedom of the opposition not only to oppose, but to prevail peacefully. Not only did this constitute evidence to the world that the American polity was far more stable than it may have appeared, it was a notice to future American political leaders that they need not contemplate coups or venture violence in order to succeed. Much to the contrary, the path to political power in the United States was shown to lead directly to and through the ballot box, ensuring for generations to come the freedom of meaningful political opposition and the regular, orderly peaceful transfer of political power.°

This peaceful transfer of power and acceptance of constitutional norms shaped how American political parties developed around a set of democratic values. Louis Hartz, a political theorist best known for his commentary on American political culture, maintained that the United States had achieved a national consensus centered on the importance of individual freedoms: “It is a remarkable force this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling aspects of American cultural phenomena.” Englishman G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1920 that the United States was founded on a “creed,” saying: “That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.” This creed allowed for little tolerance of extremes and was decidedly centrist in nature. Lewis Cass, the 1848 Democratic nominee for president, once told a Tammany Hall audience of party bosses in New York City that he was “opposed to all the isms of the day” like “communism and socialism.” Abraham Lincoln warned that if the Declaration of Independence were amended to read that “all men are created equal, except Negroes, foreigners, and Catholics,” then “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The American penchant for middle-of-the-road politics formed a foundation for our two-party system. President Dwight Eisenhower once noted, “There is in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless.” The search for the middle led to the development of two broad parties, a phenomenon that happened almost simultaneously with the adoption of the US Constitution. Although the names and allegiances of the parties have changed many times, a two-party system with its origins in the formative years of American political parties has endured for more than two centuries. As political scientist V. O. Key observed: “Human institutions have an impressive capacity to perpetuate themselves or at least to preserve their form. The circumstances that happened to mold the American party system into a dual form at its inception must bear a degree of responsibility for its present existence.”!

As the two-party system began to form, a public consensus about the boundaries of political debate formed with it, the product of the disagreements between Hamilton and Jefferson and their influence as party leaders. They established the parameters of conflict that would take place between two dominant parties by posing and answering several key questions:

1. How do we limit our freedoms and still possess them? 2. How much government should we have, and when is it too excessive?

3. When do we need a national government to act in the interests of all our citizens? 4, When is it appropriate to leave matters to local customs and practices?

Hamilton believed that Americans were inextricably linked by a common bond of citizenship that required action by the federal government, and especially the president, when times demanded it. Writing in The Federalist, Hamilton observed, “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Hamilton added that energetic executives were “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks” as well as the “steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” For Hamilton, the best presidents were proactive executives who protected individual rights and acted on behalfof the nation.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, preferred a more limited federal role, believing local communities should take the lead and act in the citizen’s best interests and that the nation’s diversity meant that different states and locales would choose different alternatives. In 1825, Jefferson warned about the expanding power of government and believed that “the salvation of the republic” rested on the regeneration and spread of the New England town hall meeting,

As two-party competition developed between Democrats and Republicans, vigorous debates emerged between them revolving around these poles. From time to time, the leading parties shifted positions. Democrats began their storied history as devotees of Jeffersonian Localism, espousing the doctrine of “states’ rights.” Republicans initially staked their political fortunes on a Hamiltonian Nationalism that would keep the Union together amidst a Civil War. Later Republicans espoused building railroads, creating land-grant colleges and universities, and giving the federal government a powerful voice in protecting industrial workers as the nation’s economy shifted from an agricultural to an industrial base. The Great Depression altered the parties’ accustomed roles. Democrats, led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, wanted the federal government to bring relief to the nation’s unemployed and provide greater economic security, including passage of Social Security. Republicans took Jefferson’s side, believing that Roosevelt’s New Deal programs infringed individual freedoms and threatened the sanctity of local rule.

The parties never quite played their assigned roles perfectly. During the Eisenhower years, Republicans presided over a massive expansion of the federal government, including creating the nation’s interstate highways. In the Clinton years, Democrats scaled back their expectations about what the federal government can and should do. Complicating matters is the tendency for the public to want some combination of Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian localism. Journalist Walter Lippmann once observed that Americans did not like to choose between these two schools of thought: “To be partisan as between Jefferson and Hamilton is like arguing whether men or women are more necessary to the procreation of the race. Neither can live alone. Alone—that is, without the other—each is excessive and soon intolerable.” Throughout history, voters have reversed course when they perceive that one party offers too much government and the other too little. But if either Hamilton or Jefferson had come back to life at any point in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries, they would have recognized themselves in the tone of Democratic and Republican Party leaders.