Preserving Democracy: Pursuing a More Perfect Union

Political parties are the gatekeepers. And in many ways, I think Americans actually invented political parties. But what the irony is that our constitution was written before political parties existed. So we have not as many kind of formal procedures in place to assure their centrality and to assure that they can serve this gatekeeping role. Very early on the north and the south were clearly at odds in their interests. As a result, political parties began to spring up throughout the country, but two in particular, Democratic Republicans and the Federalists. Federalists were the party of Hamilton, Democratic Republicans, the party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. George Washington is the only president to have never declared allegiance to a political party while he was in office. His biggest issue was that the factionalism in America was clearly driven by self-interest, and that people and the head of political parties and constituents were invested in their own interests at the expense of others. This was a problem because power would then become the priority instead of the betterment of the nation, instead of improving the democracy, working towards stability, all of that would fall to the wayside as long as a party could maintain power. And if it was all about power, then corruption and decay were close behind. George Washington in his 1796 farewell address specifically said, "Don't build political parties." He said, "Once we build parties that are against each other, Americans will start fighting each other and they will stop paying attention to the threats from other countries. And that will open us up to not only threats from other countries, but also will allow other countries to take advantage of these internal rifts that we have and manipulate us and distract us from the project of perfecting American democracy." And that was his warning. And then in the election of 1800, we had parties. We made 'em pretty much right away. At every stage, the major political parties in the United States had made claims about democracy that were predicated on what the leadership believed the nation needed. And at each one of those moments, whether it was in the 1800s or yesterday, there was some flaw in that calculation. No party can say that they have had a seamless or perfect history of conceptualizing democracy. And each party has a responsibility to reckon with those failures in the past and provide people with something better for the future. And I don't think any of the political parties have done that in a way that is convincing. We need to see the reforms of our political parties, because right now, the way that our political parties is structured is that they're also focusing on the extremes and we're basically having people fighting things out rather than looking at consensus. All of our politics is described in terms of win or lose, victory or defeat, not about how we create coalitions, both within parties and across parties to get things done for the American people. It's all about, how do I win? Politics has become like mortal combats and politicians are like avatars in a video game where you just have to blow people away to win. That's not how politic should be working and it's not how politics in the United States was envisioned. It's just how it has become over time. I think there is a real danger that losing candidates from either party are going to stop treating their defeats as legitimate. We have seen some of this in both parties, we saw it spectacularly with President Trump and the 2020 election, and we have to rebuild a political norm against this kind of sore loser political behavior. It has to start with each party showing less tolerance for its own members when they indulge in this kind of irresponsible rhetoric. We saw Democrats question the 2000 and 2004 elections and launch objections to it on the floor of Congress and they seemed harmless to a lot of Democrats at the time. I would like to think that some of them have reconsidered that after seeing what those kinds of objections helped encourage after the 2020 election. We should not assume that democracy just means two parties. In fact, two parties often means a lack of imagination and maybe lack of new ideas really. In the late 19th century, a period of great economic transformation and also the economic depression of the 1870s, the 1890s, you had parties pretty much forgotten today, like the Greenback Party, the Populist Party, other local labor parties in various cities, which tried to really crack the hold of the two party system on our political alignments. It seems like we are stuck with these two parties right now even though a lot of people find neither of them all that appealing. I wonder what would be the result for American democracy if we really had a more multiple party system as many countries do. Some places works very well, some places it doesn't work all that well. But it helps to get new ideas into circulation.