Depending on the issue, different coalitions were possible, which allowed for the kind of fluid bargaining the constitutional system requires.īut that was before American politics became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades, powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two parties. You could have once said the same thing about liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative Kansas Republicans. Conservative Mississippi Democrats and liberal New York Democrats might have disagreed more than they agreed in Congress, but they could still get elected on local brands. The parties operated as loose, big-tent coalitions of state and local parties, which made it hard to agree on much at a national level.įrom the mid-1960s through the mid-’90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. It was that they were too similar, and that they stood for too little. Presidents, senators, and House members all had different electoral incentives, complicating partisan unity, and state and local parties were stronger than national parties, also complicating unity.įor much of American political history, thus, the critique of the two-party system was not that the parties were too far apart. Yet separation of powers and federalism did work sort of as intended for a long while. However, political parties formed almost immediately because modern mass democracy requires them, and partisanship became a strong identity, jumping across institutions and eventually collapsing the republic’s diversity into just two camps. Combine the two insights-a large, diverse republic with a separation of powers-and the hyper-partisanship that felled earlier republics would be averted. By separating powers across competing institutions, they thought a majority party would never form. The Framers thought they were using the most advanced political theory of the time to prevent parties from forming. But in a large republic, with more factions and more distance, a permanent majority with a permanent minority was less likely. In a small republic, he reasoned, factions could more easily unite into consistent governing majorities. James Madison, the preeminent theorist of the bunch and rightly called the father of the Constitution, supported the idea of an “extended republic” (a strong national government, as opposed to 13 loosely confederated states) for precisely this reason. This was how previous republics had fallen into civil wars, and the Framers were intent on learning from history, not repeating its mistakes. The fragile consent of the governed would break down, and violence and authoritarianism would follow. If a consistent partisan majority ever united to take control of the government, it would use its power to oppress the minority. The theory that guided Washington and Adams was simple, and widespread at the time. America now has just two parties, and that’s it. Until then, the two parties contained enough overlapping multitudes within them that the sort of bargaining and coalition-building natural to multiparty democracy could work inside the two-party system. Though America’s two-party system goes back centuries, the threat today is new and different because the two parties are now truly distinct, a development that I date to the 2010 midterms. The existential menace is as foretold, and it is breaking the system of government the Founders put in place with the Constitution. George Washington’s farewell address is often remembered for its warning against hyper-partisanship: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” John Adams, Washington’s successor, similarly worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the great political evil.”Īmerica has now become that dreaded divided republic.
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