If Only We Had Listened
A handful of lonely, historical voices tried to point out the flaw in our system
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
“[Parties] serve to organize faction… to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and… to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction.” — George Washington
“The happiness of society depends so much on preventing party spirit from infecting the common intercourse of life...” — Thomas Jefferson
“...Nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.” — Alexander Hamilton
And, of course, from the header of the email version:
“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” — John Adams
We can’t be too hard on ourselves, though, because even among these most prominent of the Founding Fathers, only Washington stayed true to his convictions.
Jefferson helped establish the country’s second political party in 1791, the Democratic-Republicans, and, by 1824, he was declaring that “men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties.” In 1789, Hamilton created the first U.S. party, the Federalists, two years after he had called out parties for their “intolerant spirit.” And, in 1796, Adams became our first president from a party, the Federalists, and second president overall, succeeding Washington—16 years after calling parties “the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
Yet, the statements of the Framers, including those of the partisan flip-floppers, can serve as a useful checklist to evaluate the results of party systems. Washington’s criticism, in sum, was that parties subvert the desires of the country with their own agendas, which commonly just reflect the desires of a small number of partisan elites. Does that sound at all like contemporary U.S. democracy?
Check and check. To parties, their agendas outweigh the common good every time. And a small network of public officials and other partisan luminaries wield enormous influence over parties’ agendas.
Jefferson implored Americans to keep partisan discord out of the social arena, fearing that it would cross over from politics to other spheres of life. Anyone who has seen TV or movies, read books or periodicals, used the Internet, taken classes, attended cultural and arts programs or attended church could tell you that his fear was completely warranted. In other words, check.
Hamilton skewered parties for their intolerance of other sides’ values and with good reason. Parties epitomize intolerance of opponents’ beliefs. They have to. They have to delegitimize their opponents’ ideas to voters, as well as define themselves. Tolerance never stood a chance. Check.
Finally, Adams worried that parties would divide the country into two camps who would each view the other as an enemy that has to be fought and defeated. Sound familiar? Check.
Since the Founders’ abandoned warnings, the bluntest anti-party criticism has been offered by 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil. In her essay, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties,” written in 1943, Weil is unsparing, declaring that “...the institution of political parties appears to be an almost unmixed evil.” Parties, she writes, are “publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.”
Meanwhile, rampant, partisan polarization is an “intellectual leprosy,” Weil says. “This leprosy is killing us,” she concludes. “It is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties.”
Weil’s essay was published in 1950, but it had no impact on the conduct of democratic politics. “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” has even been compared to Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which facetiously suggested cannibalism as a fix for Irish starvation. Writing in the Houston Chronicle in 2018, Robert Zaretsky claimed that “Weil’s proposal for solving democratic ills was no more modest, or serious, than was Jonathan Swift's proposal for solving endemic poverty in Ireland.”
Responses like Zaretsky’s are understandable. Having existed in the U.S. for more than 230 years, political parties have long been inseparable from Americans’ concept of democracy.
Also, even if parties disappeared, people would still initially approach politics in partisan ways, given how ingrained partisan ways of thinking are in our society. A lot of voters would still pre-select their candidates based on ideological preference. Candidates would still misrepresent opponents’ views, which would still enrage opponents’ supporters and foster outrage among their own. Media outlets would still hype the dissension to draw in viewers. People would still yell at each other about all of it on social media.
In the lawmaking arena, ideological factions would still assemble and promote their own separate and opposing policy goals. These factions would mirror the different wings within our current parties. And these divisions would carry over into elections, as ideologically similar candidates would still morally and materially support each other.
So, if we concede that the disappearance of political parties would still result in a type of “politics as usual,” doesn’t that make the idea of getting rid of parties as Swiftian as critics like Zaretsky claim?
The short answer is no: eliminating parties would take away the structural hubs around which factions organize.
Yes, factions would be created that would be similar to the wings of our existing parties. So, if we assume, for simplicity’s sake, that each party has its own left, right and center, then that immediately triples the number of competitors vying for power.
Partisan-like sorting among policymakers would be further diluted by policymakers’ collegial and geographical ties. These connections would lead to new and shifting coalitions, which would eventually lead to officials prioritizing the interests of their constituents above those of their factions and approaching their responsibilities straightforwardly rather than strategically. The explosion of mini-factions and their lack of cohesion would also lead lawmakers to decide that, since no group has any chance of achieving political dominance, they should concentrate on what they are actually there to do: working together for the good of Americans.
Also, the removal of parties would make it much harder for ideological partisans to force their side’s officials to adhere to any political orthodoxy. One of the most effective tools to make lawmakers comply with an agenda is the threat of an intraparty contest for their office, which in the U.S. is known as being “primaried.”
Even if officeholders don’t face the prospect of a direct challenge, they can still be controlled by the possibility that influential individuals, groups and networks from their side could cut off their financial and other forms of support in future elections. This threat discourages cooperation between opposing policymakers and deters attempts to find cooperative solutions.
The jumbling of factions and the elimination of the threat of legislators being primaried are structural effects of party removal that would substantially reduce conflict. But, the truly transformational potential of making parties disappear would lie in its psychological effect: the disappearance of partisan mentalities.
Even if parties were gone, we would have a long way to go to reach that point. But, a good, first step toward stopping America’s endless partisan wars would be to dissolve our armies.
* Portions of this post have been adapted from my upcoming book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down (2024).
