This is the 8th video in a series I am recording in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the release of my most recent book, American Democracy in Crisis. If you have not had a chance to listen to the previous videos, I invite you to do that.
As usual I am going to begin with a quote, then say a few words about it.
The quote today is from a political scientist, V.O. Key, who said:
For [American] government to function the obstructions of the
constitutional mechanism must be overcome,
and it is the party that casts a web... over the dispersed organs
of government and gives them as semblance of unity.
This quote helps explain why, even though the Framers described parties as evil and believed they were a threat to liberty, they turned to them as the only institution capable of bridging the divisions they themselves built into the system.
Why did they divide the system in the first place?
The Framers were so concerned about majority factions taking control of the state and tyrannizing the minority, they constructed a system to frustrate, stop, and impede them. This includes adopting separation of powers, checks balances, etc.
The problem is that in doing this, they failed to distinguish between factions that are tyrannical and those that are not. As a result, all majorities, regardless of intention, are frustrated and checked in our system.
This has been a problem since the Founding – how to get things done, things that most Americans agree with, in a divided system?
Alexander Hamilton was the first of many leaders to recognize this problem and to find a solution to it – or as I call it a semi- or partial- solution – political parties.
As he struggled to get his fiscal plan passed, Hamilton became what Ron Chernow called, the unlikely “flash point for the formation of the first parties.”
He unified his backers and supporters, creating a loose coalition that would later become known as the Federalists, in the process he gave his opponents reason, motive, and cause to unite against him.
The opposition started in Congress, led by another unlikely source - Hamilton’s former co-author and friend, James Madison. While Madison had spoken out forcefully about the dangers of majority factions in “Federalist #10” and elsewhere, he nevertheless spent much of his early years in Congress organizing the “anti-Federalists” into what some would eventually refer to as “Madison’s” party and what would later become known as the Democratic-Republicans.
Hamilton was largely successful in pushing, persuading, and bargaining with members of Congress to get his fiscal plans passed; the result was to further unite the opposition against him and the administration.
So united was the opposition that by the end of Washington’s first term – roughly 1793 – the first parties in the U.S. had begun to emerge. While these fledgling groups were not fully formed political parties of the type we are familiar with today, this did not stop them from engaging in several vicious and very public clashes.
As critical as the development of the party apparatus was in the early years of the republic, it has proven at best to be just a semi-solution to the problem of anti-majoritarianism for many reasons.
I’ll just give you three.
First, parties help mitigate division in periods of unified government – when the same party controls the First and Second branches, as they did during Jefferson’s time. There is, however, no guarantee that the president’s party will control one or both houses of Congress. And while periods of divided government were once a rarity, they have become increasingly common.
Between 1954 and 2022, nine presidential and fourteen midterm elections have resulted in divided government. Compared with the previous fifty years when no presidential elections resulted in divided government and only four midterm elections did.
Second, even when the president’s party is in control of Congress, there is no guarantee the president will be able to move his agenda through congress. Since Congressmen and women are elected independent of the president and serve different constituencies they are not incentivized to act in accordance with the president and, much to the dismay of many Executives, they often don’t.
In June 1979, after many years of careful deliberation, President Jimmy Carter finally signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union. He was able to negotiate an agreement with the nation’s bitterest rival, but he was unable to get his own Democratic Senate to support it. Carter is not alone, several of his successors – including Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden all enjoyed periods of unified government early in their tenures. Despite this, each was frustrated by stalemate that left them unable to address key challenges of the day.
In 2017, even though President Trump came into office with a Republican led Congress he was unable to fulfill many of his campaign promises, including repealing and replacing ‘Obamacare’ (The Affordable Care Act), building the southern border wall, and reforming the nation’s immigration system.
Finally, even during periods of unified government there are other structural divisions in the system which parties cannot always surmount. One example is bicameralism. The Framers were not just content to divide the First and Second branches, they also divided the First branch into two distinct and separate chambers creating a strong bicameral legislature. While many European nations have a bicameral system, most have what can best be described as a weak bicameral system; weak to the extent that the two houses are not equal in power. Great Britain, for instance, has a bicameral parliament, but the House of Lords has not wielded nearly as much power as the House of Commons since the early 1900s.
By contrast in the U.S., the two chambers are equal in power and yet, different in terms of their makeup, constituency, etc. The fact they are both equal in power and yet distinct in composition often makes it difficult to come to agreement and pass legislation, even when the 2 houses are controlled by the same party.
While the early Founders turned Framers found a semi-solution to the problem of divided government, it was only a partial solution. The problem of how to respond to the needs of the majority and how to address the critical problems facing the masses continues today; not only making governing difficult, but frustrating citizens and public officials alike.
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Notes
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
V.O. Key, Politics, Parties, & Pressure Groups
James Madison/Publius, Federalist #10
Jeanne Sheehan, American Democracy in Crisis
