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On the Side of the Angels An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship
By Nancy L. Rosenblum Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-13534-2
Introduction An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship
Antipartyism and its partner in negativity, antipartisanship, have a distinguished, even brilliant pedigree. On the Side of the Angels is my assessment of antipartyism, designed to map the field, to facilitate comparison among enduring aversions to political parties, to see whether contemporary antiparty thinkers echo orthodox arguments or are creative in their loathing. The materials I draw on to represent antipartyism are scholarly and literary, with added dollops of political commentary. From the furious railings of what I call the "glorious traditions of antipartyism" before democracy to the "postparty depression" that stretches to the present and shows few signs of lifting, antipartyism is one subject where the usual chasm between philosophy and common understanding is shrunk, closed really. I expect that my readers share the aversions I record, are frustrated with parties in practice, are quick to express antipathy, or are confirmed in their indifference. It is likely that any acceptance of parties is pragmatic, unexuberant, unphilosophical, grudging. I expect readers to be skeptical of a sympathetic theory of parties.
Yet that is my challenge: to rehabilitate parties and partisanship in readers' minds.From the long history of antipartyism, I retrieve rare moments of appreciation. I also propose my own. Parties are truly "the orphans of political philosophy," and I show why democratic theorists should adopt them and take them in. Rehabilitation of parties in practice is another matter, deserving of whatever scrap of utopianism is in us.
Disregard: The Bad Attitude of Contemporary Political Theory
Parties and partisanship are indisputably orphans of political philosophy. The list of advocates of parties and partisanship in contemporary political theory is spare. The classic work on the concept of representation, for example, pays them scant attention. When they address the subject at all, political theorists reproduce the antiparty temper that dominates the history of political thought. In democratic theory today, parties either are the object of reflexive antipathy or suffer utter disregard.
It is hardly surprising that philosophers derogate partisanship. Whether their aspirational perspective is subversive Socratic questioning or Humean impartiality, a transcendent "view from nowhere" or stringent "public reason," it is the antithesis of a partisan perspective. That is expected. More remarkable is that contemporary democratic theorists who describe their work as "nonideal theory" have little to say. Democratic theorists refer to parties rarely or accusingly in passing. The problem is not that democratic theorists are inattentive to institutions generally. On the contrary, their interests extend to just about every institution for participation, representation, decision making, and political education except parties. Here is a brief rundown of the true objects of political theorists' affections: advocacy groups (selfstyled public interest groups chief among them) and social movements; direct democratic institutions such as referenda, and experiments such as "citizen juries" and "deliberative polls." Theorists of multiculturalism and the "politics of difference" value self-organized identity groups and arrangements for guaranteed representation. Democratic theorists of almost every stripe look to the associations of civil society to cultivate civic virtue and political engagement, and affirm that hope for democracy rests on "exploring the unrealized possibilities in ... institutions such as schools, workplaces, churches and synagogues, trade unions and social movements." The exclusion of parties from exhaustive catalogues of the associations of civil society is particularly curious, given the foundational concern with mediating institutions that bridge society and government. Finally, for stern proponents of deliberative democracy for whom overcoming disagreement is a regulative ideal, partisanship is anathema. Even those who do not aim at consensus would assign disciplined deliberation a place of its own, removed from conventional political arenas, elections, and parties, such as specially created "mini-publics" with participants chosen to represent "lay citizens and nonpartisans." It would be too harsh to cast these dominant strains of democratic theory as antipolitical, but contemporary theorists write-sometimes expressly-as if democracy could and should do without parties and partisanship.
If parties are the orphans of political philosophy, they are the darlings of political science. They are built into the standard definition of democratic government as "one chosen periodically by means of popular elections in which two or more parties compete for the votes of all adults." The touchstone of governments that call themselves democratic is frequent and fair elections, made meaningful by party competition. Political science puts parties at the core of its signature preoccupation with voting and elections. Democracy is "unthinkable save in terms of parties," and "democratic deficit" typically cites their absence.
The disjuncture between political science and political theory is striking. Political theorists have abandoned the field, and the study of parties and partisanship is carried on in political science terms (or in terms set by constitutional and election law). I have gone on a scouting expedition into the territory of political science, off the usual paths of political theory. My discussion of contemporary antipartyism moves back and forth between political science and political theory, imagining a conversation, and using resources from both to assess the achievement parties represent and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship.
The Sounds of Silence
The plain disproportion between a record of relentless, ferocious opposition to parties and moral disdain for partisans, on the one hand, and reticence bordering on silence when it comes to defending parties, on the other, brings to mind classical writings on democracy. With the partial exception of Aristotle's Politics, the great Greek texts reveal their authors' hostility to democracy. They broadcast its failings. Philosophic arguments undermined democratic premises; Socrates' subversion of popular opinion is the most powerful instance. Why was there no corresponding philosophical defense of democracy? One thought is that Athenian democracy in the fourth and fifth centuries was so deeply entrenched as popular ideology and practice that it stimulated no theoretical justification. No wonder "it was much easier for John Adams to find a thousand quotations and historical examples from the ancients in support of mixed government than for any Anti-federalist to find even one endorsing simple democracy."
Something similar may hold for political parties, at least after the consolidation of electoral democracy when parties competing in regular elections became a familiar feature of the political landscape. Today, parties are acknowledged as "convenient vehicles for conducting" elections, mechanisms for "reducing the transaction costs" of democracy. Further justification seems superfluous. The energy of thought is committed instead to identifying the pathologies of "the system" and devising correctives.
We might assume that partisanship itself is a defense of parties. Not so: when partisans had to justify organizing, they typically argued for the necessity of combining in their own particular case, not for the respectability of parties per se. ("When bad men conspire, the good must associate.") Whether partisans adopt the standard historical defense that theirs is "a party to end parties" or simply affirm that theirs is on the side of the angels, they give little thought to the value of parties in general or to partisanship as a political identity.
Established party systems have not stopped antiparty political theorists from aspiring to democracy without parties and proposing designs to contain or circumvent or eliminate them. But entrenched parties do appear to inhibit theorists from challenging utopias in which all citizens are Independents, and from acknowledging the value of parties and partisanship. I take Bernard Crick's warning to heart; "boredom with established truths is the great enemy of free men."
Speculating about silence is hazardous, of course. I will simply note that the absence of appreciation is not the result of disillusion. There was no initial enthusiasm for parties' promise followed by inevitable dashing of hopes. Disgust with parties as "unscrupulous power groups" and moral disdain for partisans as "little more than a Conspiracy of Self-Seekers" dominate the history of political thought, and contemporary thinkers have not dissented from that view. Canonical political theory from antiquity is studded with precursors and echoes of the philosopher Hume, who famously wrote: "As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honored and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated." And Jefferson, co-founder of the first popular political party, nonetheless contended, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." There are few corresponding champions of political parties. Parties' positive contributions to regulating political conflict, governing, exciting political participation, and deliberating go mostly unacknowledged. Parties do have one classic defender, Edmund Burke, of whom William Goldsmith wrote in 1774, "Here lies our good Edmund. Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind. And to party gave up what was meant for mankind."
Political theory harbored no great political expectations parties could disappoint, then. Burke's positive definition-"a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed"-was rejected by dour detractors from the start. One writer juxtaposed a definition of party as a group held together by the "cohesive power of public plunder." In any case, the charge that parties and partisans have not lived up to Burke's principled concern for the national interest is only one thread of antipartyism, hardly the sole cause of universal antipathy. Simply, no aspiration for what parties could be or might do, and no account of the virtues of partisanship existed, or was sufficiently believed, to give rise to disillusion. Parties' failings were reported, and the reports mounted once parties took shape as permanent institutions for organizing elections and governing. But antipathy is not disappointment. As for partisans, they have always been mistrusted as blind loyalists or hacks, manipulated or bought. "Sounds of silence" refers to appreciation, not aversion.
Excoriation of politicians as power-hungry and treacherous, deformed by hypocrisy, tainted by personal and institutional corruption is as old as ruling and being ruled. It preceded party politics and will doubtless carry on after. I will show that distinctive moral and political pathologies are said to taint partisanship and parties: the very existence of parties signals a falling off from wholeness or original unity, for one, and the fatal divisiveness of party strife for another. If nothing else, parties make vivid the politics-the ceaseless strategies, collective efforts to exercise power and to deny its exercise to others, the arrant partiality of legislating and governing (and shaping public opinion). And there is the sheer indignity of partisanship.
One explanation for the loud and nearly ubiquitous sounds of antipartyism is that antipartyism is everywhere because parties are everywhere. In the words of one scholar, "parties are potential in every regime where they are not actual; and where they are actual, there are also potential parties lurking beneath every opinion taken for granted by the actual parties." And why are parties everywhere? One answer is, because politics is partisan. In saying politics is partisan, I am saying the obvious: politics is about disagreement that brings conflict. Politics exists only when the fact of pluralism is accepted and there is latitude for open agitation of groups with rival interests and opinions. In this respect, parties might be expected everywhere that they are not brutally repressed. The problem with this logic is that both historically and today, parties are not everywhere. They are not the only way to organize political conflict, and are seldom the favored way. Of course politics is partisan, but parties are not the only carriers of partisanship. (Partisans of a cause form caucuses, alliances, associations, and movements, to say nothing of subversive groups bent on revolutions, coups, and civil wars.) If political parties were inevitable, irrepressible, and ubiquitous, they would not be achievements.
Appreciation
Between carping and disapproval of parties and partisanship, on the one hand, and taking their uses for granted or utter disregard, on the other, we lose sight of the achievement of parties and partisanship. We miss the historical innovation of regular party rivalry, and the conceptual breakthroughs required to imagine and accept the political work parties do. Above all, we miss the creativity of party politics and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. Parties create, not just reflect, political interests and opinions. They formulate "issues" and give them political relevance. Party antagonism "stages the battle"; parties create a system of conflict and draw the lines of division. Moving back and forth between metaphors of natural and artistic creation, Maurice Duverger tried to capture this shaping power: parties crystallize, coagulate, synthesize, smooth down, and mold. Creativity in politics is almost always identified with founding moments, constitutional design, transformative social movements, or revolution, not with "normal politics." Modern party politics is the ordinary, not (ordinarily) extraordinary locus of political creativity.
Partisanship warrants appreciation, too. We do not need to admit the virtues of partisanship or admire partisans even an iota to see that representative democracy benefits from them. Ardent partisans may not be deliberative personally and individually, but at the level of the polity partisanship fuels collective discussion of men and measures; partisans are the agents of "trial by discussion." Important as that is, I think partisanship deserves recognition on its own terms. I advocate for the moral distinctiveness of partisanship and propose reasons to elevate partisanship over its nemesis, the much vaunted pose of "Independence." Partisanship is the only political identity that does not see pluralism and political conflict as a bow to necessity, a pragmatic recognition of the inevitability of disagreement. It demands severe self-discipline to acknowledge that my party's status is just one part in a permanently pluralist politics, and hence the provisional nature of being the governing party and the charade of pretending to represent the whole. Partisanship, I argue, is the political identity of representative democracy. It may seem like an unsettling reversal of the common-sense view that partisans supports parties to argue, as I do, that one value of political parties is to serve as "carriers" of partisanship. Political theorists today do not connect the practice of democratic citizenship with partisanship, or the virtues of citizenship with the qualities of partisanship. I intend to repair this lapse.
Partisanship is separable from parties, and in the sense of advocacy for an interest or cause is always with us. Partiality and disagreement are universal and irrepressible too, as are political groups organized in opposition to one another. But once again political parties in representative democracy are not, and neither is partisanship tied to parties, "party ID." I will show why we should recognize them as achievements.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Side of the Angels by Nancy L. Rosenblum
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