There’s no finish line in democracy
Parties help sustain the endless give and take of politics
Democracy doesn’t have a finish line. Democracy doesn’t work if there’s a point where the fight ends, where a winner is declared, where a vision for the future becomes the vision. The only sustainable system is one characterized by a neverending back-and-forth, one that finds stability in the endless tension of competing beliefs, ideologies, and convictions. One that, in the United States, takes the shape of political parties.
Today’s partisan divisions are a direct descendant of the core disagreement — namely, the size and scope of the federal government — that divided Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson more than two centuries ago. American democracy is founded on this disagreement, which is why the modern political class is still having many of the same arguments the Founders had in the eighteenth century.
But the fact that the Hamilton-Jefferson dispute has never been resolved isn’t the cause of political gridlock or polarization — it’s a source of stability and continuity. As historian and author Joseph J. Ellis argues in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, what’s kept the United States united is precisely the fact that one side has never secured a permanent victory. Neither has vanquished its opponent by permanently imposing its own vision on the country. “In the battle… for the true meaning of the revolution,” Ellis writes, “neither side completely triumphed.” Democracy has found stability and staying power in the tension between these sides.
A similar tension has evolved within humans themselves, moderating not just political debate but also the emotions that determine how people relate to each other. In Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, author Sebastian Junger posits that human beings evolved with two competing traits: a visceral aversion to “freeloading,” or taking what wasn’t earned, and an deep-seated desire to take care of others — what Junger calls a “culture of compassion.” These competing traits are both innate and irreconcilable. They are baked into the human psyche, and they “will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.”
These tensions are inherent in American history and inherited in the human condition. The sources — our democracy and our DNA — are distinct. But they’ve been channeled into the same place: political parties.
As Junger writes, the aversion to “takers” (as Mitt Romney famously put it) and the inclination to compassion “have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system.” Ellis makes a parallel argument, writing that political parties have “institutionalized and rendered safe” what he calls “the explosive energies of the debate.” An irresolvable disagreement between two men, Hamilton and Jefferson, reflects a core human contradiction. And in the form of political parties, that disagreement has become a stabilizing force for the world’s most successful democracy.
Today, political affiliation is charitably described as a signifier of shared beliefs and values, and more accurately defined as a tribal identifier that renders independent thought or analysis unnecessary. But in Vox shortly before the 2016 election, Julia Azari describes political parties as more complicated and significant than that. The “team-spiritedness” of partisanship, Azari argues, “needs to be balanced out by organizations that have an interest in the next fight: robust party organizations that want to win next time, and believe that they can.”
It’s the “next time” that’s particularly important here. Politicians come and go, but parties, like other democratic institutions, should not. Parties preserve the long-term mindset — the understanding that the game never ends — by holding together irreconcilable disagreements and contradictions. That’s why Jonathan Rauch, in a 2016 article in The Atlantic, calls the party structure “a second, unwritten constitution,” bringing order to the chaos of a country whose Constitution leaves much for interpretation and whose core disagreement would otherwise threaten its very stability. In other words, partisanship matters, but not for the reasons we hear on cable news.
The ongoing collapse of party influence doesn’t have a single cause, though Rauch makes a compelling argument that the individualization of politics has played a role. Pointing to the rise of party-less political actors like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and even Ted Cruz who, while a Republican, has shunned most of the GOP’s traditional infrastructure), Rauch argues these candidates reflect a new normal: that “political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.” They’ve been replaced by “individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly.”
American democracy has long specialized in harnessing individual egos and channeling short-term, personal interests into a system designed to outlast them. The collective understanding that there’s always another election — that the losing side today could be the winning side in two years — has helped preserved this system for centuries. Americans have always debated, sometimes viciously, the appropriate role of the federal government, but with one (very notable) exception, the tension between factions has never become unbearable. (It’s worth emphasizing that this tension hasn’t ruptured in part because the United States has refused to confront its original sin of slavery and white supremacy, choosing instead to paper over its most contentious, and shameful, historical stain.)
Human beings have always feared being taken advantage of and desired to take care of each other, but for the most part these competing tendencies have managed to coexist. Democracy has taken hold in the tension between the two extremes, yielding a stability that forces some level of policy moderation and compromise from the party in power, which implicitly or explicitly accepts it won’t be there forever.
But the same tension that stabilizes the way humans govern themselves can easily be stretched beyond a breaking point, lurching the system to an extreme fringe. Democracy frays, snaps, and ceases to function when politicians find checks and balances an inconvenience rather than an institutional force. Or when established and accepted traditions and precedents, and even the very definitions of “truth” and “facts,” come under repeated assault.
Or when short-term political wins make long-term sacrifices irrelevant or not worth pursuing. Or when gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement make primary elections decisive and general elections undemocratic. Or when shame ceases to restrain behavior and discourse. Or when moral equivalency becomes an excuse for normalizing behavior that through a rational lens looks completely irrational, but through irrational glasses looks like “very fine people on both sides.”
Each of these hallmarks of twenty-first century American politics threatens the fundamental norms of its political process. The two-party system, while far from perfect and far from the sole source of democratic longevity, represents one of these undervalued norms.
Political parties have constrained the permanent tension between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions. They have balanced the competing human needs to protect one’s self and one’s community. They have built long-term incentives into a debate that too easily devolves into a short-term, zero-sum game. They have preserved the understanding that there’s no finish line in a democracy — just a constant pulling back-and-forth, forcefully enough to move the debate but not so aggressively as to rip it apart. They have built a system in which permanent victory is impossible, and trying to achieve it is self-defeating.
The argument in favor of political parties is not without flaws. It’s difficult to reconcile the fact that a system designed to prevent a permanent victor has entrenched generations of winners and losers. Since before independence was declared, white Americans, mostly men, have built and perpetuated a system that disproportionately benefits them, often explicitly and intentionally at the expense of women and people of color. One need look no further than rates of incarceration, income inequality, financial wealth, or educational opportunity — to name but a few — to see that some continue to benefit far more than others from the status quo. But the question is not whether political parties are perfect; it’s whether the alternative system — one characterized by short-term, zero-sum tribalism — is any better, or offers more hope for progress.
Political parties have helped preserve the core tensions of democracy. Today, we’re testing how much that system can withstand without them.