Russell Muirhead: The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Hand-wringing over the partisan animosities of the day bore me somewhat, as it strikes me that the day deserves them. Legal abortions or not? An administrative state oligarchy or a constitutional republic? And what about China? Given such conflicts, political tranquility would be a very bad sign. Under these circumstances, lack of animosity would betray weakness of anima in Americans.
Professor Muirhead understands the thumotic dimension of politics. “I prefer the eighteenth-century phrase ‘party spirit’ to the social-scientific ‘partisanship'”; “party spirit” captures the spiritedness of politics, its characteristic claims to rule and demands for ‘recognition.’ “Reason can—and should—inform, guide, and chasten party spirit” (why else write a scholarly book about it?) but politics will never be purely rational, whatever Enlightenment worthies may have believed. “Rather than expect that partisanship can be overcome, or transcended, or simply turned off in those places where its presence would be corrupting, it, is better—more true to the real possibilities for democratic politics—to differentiate between more elevated and more base expressions of party spirit.” American politics needs “not less partisanship, but better partisanship,” party spirit aiming not merely at victory but at the implementation of policies informed by “convictions, principles, and perceptions of the common interest.” As it will transpire, he understands that victory is indispensable to the implementation of such policies, and also that a tyrant might have convictions, principles, and perceptions of the common interest.
In contemporary America, “intense partisanship is the new normal,” as “government has become a theater for entertaining partisan true believers rather than a setting for brokering, negotiation, deliberation, and compromise.” Party spirit now pervades the souls of many people, not only “political elites.” Lack of shared “values and goals” makes people distrust one another, which in turn “can threaten the unity of the political community” because “losers to political conflict have less reason to abide by the constitutional processes that delivered their loss” and may even “decide that violence or secession is preferable to peaceful opposition and constitutional obedience.” This is why George Washington warned against what he called the “baneful effects of the spirit of party” in his Farewell Address. Thomas Jefferson concurred, but nonetheless “founded the first opposition party” out of concern that elements among those who had supported ratification of the 1787 Constitution surreptitiously harbored monarchist ambitions. Muirhead sympathizes with Jefferson’s dilemma: “No open society over the past three centuries has succeeded without parties and partisanship.”
Moving ahead to the present (for him, this is 2014), Muirhead remarks the increasingly “conservative” (and therefore partisan) character of the Republican Party, but oddly contrasts this with the Democrats, whose party, he claims, “retains its catch-all flavor,” “continu[ing] to cover a greater variety of ideological views.” At best one might say this is no longer true. The statement that “the tactics that the Republican Party uses in office appear to be less compromising and more destructive of the trust that governing requires” than those of the Democrats is equally dated. Again dubiously, Muirhead equates ‘liberalism’ with ‘progressivism,’ following the old New Dealers’ self-description, which was plausible only when New Dealers contrasted themselves with Marxists and their ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ And of course his suggestion that liberals, so defined, “might be more effective if they could see themselves as more partisan, and as engaged in a partisan fight” hardly applies to American politics now, even if it did in 2014. (It didn’t.)
What Muirhead “want[s] to defend” is “a kind of party spirit that is worn lightly, one that is open to facts and revision, and tolerant of—even appreciative of—opponents.” Partisans animated by that spirit would serve the right functions of partisans: with “a shared memory” of past achievements,” they “come together, and stay together, to protect these achievements.” What partisans should avoid is erecting “a ‘perceptual stream’ that filters out all information embarrassing to one’s own party,” thereby suffering “epistemic closure that makes it impossible to contemplate one’s own party’s errors and misdeeds.” Individual partisans must do a bit of that, anyway, simply in becoming partisans—that is, in joining a party that includes fellow-citizens who do not agree with every detail of their own opinions on all ‘issues.’ If partisans refuse to, as it were, lighten up, they might “render the government incapable of governing.” As he knows, this is what more-or-less happens in civil wars, and (as he seems not to know) this is what foreign enemies want to happen, as they essay to divide us preliminary to ruling us.
Muirhead steps back to consider party spirit as understood by Americans in the past, and by the ‘ancients’ as well as ‘moderns.’ In America, the Progressives hoped to reduce that spirit to an absolute minimum because they regarded contemporary parties as defenders of oligarchy, “corrupt[ing] government of the people by substituting for it government by party bosses and special interests,” such as big industrial corporate bosses who paid off those bosses. Not only did Progressives valorize “the ideal of the independent citizen who could think and vote free from the influence of party,” their “lasting reforms” (i.e., not prohibition of alcoholic beverages) “all aimed to circumvent the parties and directly empower the people.” These reforms included the secret ballot, the direct primary, direct election of U.S. senators, ballot initiatives, and recall of suspect public officials. Crucially, he ignores the new oligarchy Progressives substituted for the parties: tenured civil servants in an ‘administrative state’ or bureaucracy. Woodrow Wilson wrote as tellingly about that as he did about the ‘democratic’ side of his proposed ‘new-republican’ revolution.
Muirhead sees that there’s much more to it than that, however. The modern critique of parties comes from the modern reconception of parties themselves, itself a part of the modern reconception of politics. “The modern conception of politics is founded on principles of political morality that are taken to be true (and thus beyond contestation) in contrast to the traditional conception of politics, which denied that any political regime could be founded on truth.” Both modern party spirit and modern anti-partisanship share “an exaggerated sense of the work that moral principles can do in politics,” thereby “inflat[ing] expectations for a commonsense pragmatic politics that can only, in the end, leave citizens disappointed and confused.” Traditional anti-partisanship makes more sense because it shifts the highest moral expectations away from politics.
By traditional anti-partisanship Muirhead means Aristotelian regime theory, not the actual practices of partisans in the ancient polis. Aristotle understands partisan politics as fundamentally a contest between oligarch and democrats, each faction making claims to rule, and each finding their claims “convincing and complete,” matters of “right and wrong, justice and injustice.” Aristotle disagrees. Political philosophy distances itself from such claims; that’s what got Socrates in trouble—eventually, Aristotle too. “To the philosopher, the claims each group advances look more partial than they seem from the inside” because those claims “reflect a group’s particular interest” rather than any dispassionate, reasoned consideration of the political community as a whole. To understand a political community as a whole includes seeing the reasons for the claims to rule made by partisans, some of which are more reasonable than others. Such claims “involve arguments about who deserves what; they are connected to ways of life and understandings of character that are nourished by and sustained by these ways of life.” They are claims about not only who should rule here and now but about the best regime, what the best way of life is, what the best human ‘type’ is, and what place each human type justly occupies in the political community. Every regime has one set of rulers and not another; every regime remains incomplete for that reason, while mistakenly believing itself to be complete. Questioning that completeness will likely enrage the rulers.
Muirhead rightly notes that “traditional partisanship is motivated fundamentally not by selfish interests but by pride.” He means that Aristotle understands claims to rule to register not material desires primarily but honor: the desire for the prestige of office. This sense of honor or pride tends to foreclose reasoning. “Citizens must be unaware of their own—and their regime’s—partiality,” and when the annoying reasoner points this out they do not to it kindly. This inevitable and to some extent indispensable prejudice can be tempered by civic education. In its mild-mannered, eminently civil way, Aristotle’s Politics consists not only of thoughts interesting to philosophers but of considerations thoughtful if non-philosophic citizens need to weigh, teaching them (among many other things) why their partisan enemies think the way they do.
James Madison shared much of Aristotle’s understanding of the party spirit. The tenth Federalist “adapts the traditional worry to the circumstances of commercial society, where the fundamental classes of the ancient polity—the demos and the oligarchs—are fragmented into a multiplicity of interests.” Although Muirhead doesn’t say it (persisting in his neglect of modern statism), Madison’s solution to excessive partisanship or factionalism depends in part upon the scope of the modern state, as well as upon the form of that state Madison famously commends: federal republicanism, the “extended republic.” Within that state, Madison would encourage a vast free-trade zone, fostering “a dynamic and extensive commercial society” that will multiply factions, preventing any one faction to become strong enough to dominate the others. By so “offer[ing] a modern solution to the partisan threat, he saw the threat in traditional terms.” Modern political parties would aspire to a size big enough to win national elections, and in so doing would encompass many of the factions seen in that nation. ‘Extended’ political parties would therefore be somewhat more faction-like than the American nation, but not nearly so factional and impassioned as the ones that troubled the small poleis of antiquity.
Muirhead adds the familiar argument that modern political thinkers set a somewhat lower bar for political life than the ancients did. “No more is politics about justice in the sense of upholding an idea about which way of life is most worthy”; modern politics aims “principally” at “self-preservation and commodious living,” while ‘privatizing’ the quest for higher things. Its way of life is commercial, leaving room for religion but not establishing any particular church or creed, “tak[ing] rival conceptions about how best to care for the immortal soul out of politics”. Those thinkers did so in a largely successful attempt to end religious warfare in Europe and, in consequence, prevent its appearance in Europe’s North American colonies.
This did not, and was not intended, to preclude the formation of what Muirhead calls a “last party,” that is, a party “distinguished by its commitment to the rational first principles of political morality at a moment when these principles remain in dispute.” He gives Whigs, Marxists, and John Rawls’s “deliberative democracy” proposal as examples of such parties, although he unaccountably ignores the Founders and their distinguished defender Abraham Lincoln. He objects to such efforts: “This is the wrong way to conceive of political unity. What defines a liberal politics is not an agreement only to disagree within certain bounds (never touching foundational ideas), but to disagree in a certain way; according to constitutional procedures, in a certain manner.” Whether Progressives, Whigs, Marxists, or Rawls would endorse this is irrelevant, however; it is the Founders who count when it comes to the United States Constitution and the regime it fortifies. If ‘liberalism’ now means ‘Progressivism,’ or some closely related phenomenon, then that simply means that Progressives have likely departed from Constitutional principles.
Muirhead commits this error because he misconceives the “fundamental points” underlying “modern representative democracy,” at least as the Founders stated them. He cites rule by consent of the governed, liberty (especially liberty of conscience), and “the affirmation of political equality” (especially the rejection of slavery). But the Founders base their regime not on political right but on natural right, and the regime fought a civil war in large measure over just that point, which was denied by the regime of the secessionist entity.
He continues, quite reasonably, to say that “We agree, while disagreeing about procedures, Court decisions, and the ends politics should serve, to keep our guns in their holsters.” That is the core of liberalism as Muirhead defines it, and it means that neither the Founders nor the Progressives (to say nothing of Marxists and American Whigs) were liberals in his sense. He reaches firmer ground when he observes that partisanship “ultimately concerns the most fundamental questions of politics,” the regime questions: Who rules, and who deserves to rule? What are the purposes of the political community? And what does it stand for?
Since “being reasonable is never sufficient to permanently and justly settle conflict” in practice, he turns to a modern liberal who recognizes that fact and addresses it, well, reasonably. John Stuart Mill acknowledges the partial cogency of both Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian rationalism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s esteem for tradition. Muirhead rejects the argument of the Declaration of Independence because its “self-evident” truths are not really self-evident. Mill’s version of utilitarianism, at once more capacious and refined than Bentham’s, comes close to appropriating Aristotle’s sense of the philosophic umpire captured, however imperfectly, by the mind of the civically-educated citizen, one who tests his own convictions against those of others and against stubborn realities of everyday life. If “what we need is not less partisanship but better partisanship,” then Mill’s brand of utilitarianism may point the way to it. It might, except that it’s hard to distinguish Mill’s mild skepticism from ‘being reasonable,’ the very stance that Muirhead finds insufficient to settle conflict.
One thumotic characteristic of political life is loyalty. “It is possible to be loyal and to see the object of our loyalty as it is, with all its faults.” Indeed so: Christians call this agapic love. (This is a point that Dartmouth political scientists may be excused for not noticing.) In ordinary circumstances, however, loyalty is double-edged, as it may lead both to crucial support in difficult times and to foolish assent to evildoing. “If loyalty were merely strategic, it would boil down to a form of prudence.” True enough, but there’s more than one form of prudence, as when Jesus tells His disciples to be innocent as doves but prudent as serpents. To love my friend, in the sense of desiring the best ‘him,’ will require me to know him, to know the good, and to figure out how to fit those two knowledges together. (The same goes for loving my enemy, or myself.) Muirhead sees some of this when he writes, “to be loyal we do not need to close ourselves off to the terrain of elemental facts.” We can ‘fact-check’ our own party’s candidate, not only the other party’s candidate. What is more, in doing this and in undertaking other political tasks we can exercise “remembrance and patience,” the latter again being a consequence of agapic love. “The judgments we make today are subject to revision in light of events and developments that have yet to take place.” Partisanship coupled with patience proves “necessary to any government that tries to serve a popular purpose” and, one might add, any government that serves nearly any purpose.
Having availed himself of Christian virtues without invoking Christianity, Muirhead now turns to several specific matters relating to modern-day democratic politics in the United States. The first is the primary election. Progressives advocated ‘primaries’ as a device to reduce the power of party ‘bosses.’ This didn’t so much eliminate party spirit as extend it to the voters who show up to vote in party primaries, who no longer necessarily expected government jobs from winning candidates (those were increasingly filled by professional administrators) but instead were motivated by ‘issues’—very often advanced in a manner that stirred passions strong enough to impel party members to show up at the polls. Following his prescription, Muirhead wants simultaneously to elevate and moderate the many issues-oriented voters. This is hard to do, and “few democracies in the world today routinely invite the general citizenry to participate directly in party nominations,” as Americans have done in the past 120 years or so. Here, only primaries closed to everyone except registered party members can make it likely that the candidate will be a genuine representative of his party, but the logic of inclusion characteristic of democracy has made closed primaries things of dubious legitimacy, even in the eyes of loyal partisans. He sees nothing more than increased “civic knowledge” among voters as a possible solution to this dilemma. The real solution would be to get cut back on the administrative state and offer spoils to the victors, again. Is this any more corrupt than a primary system in which special-interest money will always get in, somehow, and an administrative state and a popularly-elected legislature both far from immune to cozy alliances with oligarchs.
Of the three branches of American government, the legislature provides the most natural home for partisanship. “This is where modern partisanship was born, and where it continues to be nourished.” Organization along party lines is the only way to get things done in such a body, an excellent point, given the common assumption that parties in legislatures lead only to ‘gridlock.’ Further, “without party unity, voters would have a far more difficult time sorting out what their vote is endorsing or rejecting,” as they “would need to track the voting records of individual legislators.” Like any good follower of Mill, however, Muirhead finds an exception to this rule: the unicameral legislature of Nebraska, “one of the only nonpartisan legislatures in the world” and also one of the most popular with citizens. It is true that this results in piecemeal, even incoherent, legislation when an observer searches for any overall policy and purpose in Nebraska lawmaking, as shifting coalitions vote for laws on a case-by-case basis. The legislature’s designer, the well-known early Progressive George Norris, wanted government to run ‘like a business,’ solving concrete problems; in this, he partook of the pragmatic Progressivism of (for example) John Dewey, rather than the German-idealist Progressivism of a man like Wilson. This is all too businesslike for Muirhead, who protests that the business model exists to maximize profit, but in government “there is no single purpose that must be prioritized over all rivals”. But if the Nebraska legislature proceeds piecemeal, and yields no coherent overall policy, how can it be criticized for being too businesslike, too focused?
Another proposal for legislative reform is the establishment of a “Centrist Party,” which would perform the same function in a legislature as the middle class would do in Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’: serving as a balance wheel between the two more extreme, and possibly larger, parties. Unlike the Nebraska system, this “does not suppose that politics, ideally, will lack partisan conflict.” Muirhead doubts that it would work, as the Centrist Party itself would still be a party but at the same time “could not easily elicit passions and devotion because it can offer no stead principles, it can invoke no social or historical history about itself, and it cannot connect in a stable way with concrete social groups.” In this it would be quite unlike Aristotle’s middle class.
Beyond legislative politics one finds the executive and judicial branches. In them, partisanship works less well than it does in the legislature. The original duty of the executive under the Constitution as originally understood was precisely to execute, and nothing else: to execute the laws passed by Congress in accordance with the constitutional framework and to defend the country against any sudden foreign attacks or domestic violence on those occasions when there was no time to consult Congress. The original duty of the judiciary was to “say what the law is,” and surely not to ‘interpret’ the Constitution in such a way as effectively to amend it. But “in the twentieth century, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and even more notably with Woodrow Wilson presidents became partisan in a new way: they were charged”—by themselves, it should be noted—”with formulating and advancing a program that would orient the actions of both the national legislature and the executive administration.” The intention to “us[e] the presidency to transform eighteenth-century constitutional democracy into twentieth-century party democracy was Woodrow Wilson’s idea,” Muirhead rightly remarks. As a result, when Ronald Reagan essays ‘conservative’ policies, he could only act as a ‘visionary’ Wilson-like president, exercising ‘leadership.’ That was the way the circumstances of the office of the presidency effectively had been rearranged. By contrast, but still within the same framework, President Barack Obama presented himself as an above-the-fray manager, as if he were the Bureaucrat of all bureaucrats. “Hidden in this [was] an arrogant insistence that everyone should agree with us, without the bother of explaining why.” Obama’s difficulties in justifying his national health care program were self-created; he pretended that a partisan, indeed socialist or quasi-socialist policy could be fobbed off as a mere tying-up of a governing loose end. Muirhead goes on to criticize Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, not for Olympian complacency but low-minded, partisan use of the Attorney-General’s office.
The Department of Defense also has become partisan in the wrong way, Muirhead charges. The white, male, and Southern enlistees who predominantly populate the American military vote Republican. “The specter of a military coup seems fantastic only because the nonpartisan posture of military officers has made it so unthinkable.” But, according to him, “this professional norm is the principle that retired generals invade when they endorse political candidates.” Given the fact that numerous retired generals have not merely endorsed political candidates but have become political candidates—Washington, Jackson, Grant, and Eisenhower being among the more prominent—with no ill effects, it is hard to take this complaint seriously.
Muirhead concludes, “The modern conceit—that having discovered the first principles of political morality, we have escaped the partisan predicament of traditional politics—is overdrawn.” It is, although neither the Founders, nor Lincoln, nor any of the major political figures of eighteenth and nineteenth century America thought of politics that way. The “self-evident” truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence were a casus belli, not a settlement, of a partisan dispute; those same truths also saw not merely partisan but violent partisan defense in the Civil War and in several foreign wars.
This notwithstanding, Muirhead correctly observes that “the realignment of conservative southern whites away from their habitual attachment to the Democratic Party”—it had become “habitual” during and after the slavery controversy, in opposition to the Republicans—”and toward the Republican Party is what allowed the parties to become more ideologically distinct.” The “bipartisan consensus” that had prevailed, rather briefly, from roughly 1940 through the mid-to-late Sixties, came at the price of tolerating systematic violation of the natural rights of the descendants of slaves. But he misreads the immediate future, supposing that the “disconnect” between the American people and the political elites will hinge on popular disinclination to pay higher taxes colliding with the elites’ sober recognition that higher taxes will be necessary to pay the national debt. The actual “disconnect” has in fact been not financial but moral—or, as one says now, ‘cultural’—and economic. A substantial portion of the American people reprehend the libertine morality of the elites, and their attempts to prevent the practice of traditional morality by that portion of the American people. At the same time, many of these same persons have lost well-paying manufacturing jobs as the result of internationalist economic policies designed by the elites. Hence Trump—much to the dismay of the elites. ‘Conservatives’ have been saying such things for years; seldom heeded or even noticed by the elites, including those ensconced at Ivy League political science departments, and have only begun to take notice in the years after Professor Muirhead published his book.
This intelligently-argued if often confused book contributes to the discussion of the party spirit in America, a discussion that itself has become partisan.
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