It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  Drafting the Constitution, the founders had been intent on preventing the formation of a powerful central government in the United States like the one that ruled Britain. So they had fragmented power, dividing the government of the new republic into three branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, and encumbering each branch with onerous checks and balances. Then, after the Constitution was ratified and the members of the new government assembled in New York City, the nation’s first capital, the founders discovered a problem. It proved difficult to get anything done. To enact a program, the president had to win support for his measures in Congress. To pass a law, Congress had to persuade the president to sign it. To stay on the good side of the Supreme Court, the president and Congress had to coordinate their activities, avoiding measures the Supreme Court might deem unconstitutional.

  Imagine for example that you’re Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, President Washington’s secretary of the treasury, was determined to build a strong, activist federal government—not as powerful as the government in Britain, but powerful enough to dominate the state governments while directing the national economy. As Hamilton, you suppose yourself to be sitting pretty. This is understandable. You, more than anyone, have the ear of President Washington, and President Washington, more than anyone, holds power. Then you make an ugly finding. Hobbled by the checks and balances the Constitution has placed on his office, even President Washington can accomplish almost nothing on his own. You realize that you need allies—not just a collection of cronies but a formal organization of like-minded men, capable of raising money, recruiting candidates for office, and swaying public opinion. So you get together with Vice President John Adams, and a couple of dozen members of the House and Senate, to form a party, the Federalist Party. Then you obtain backing from your rich friends, bankers in New York and merchants in Boston, and go national, setting up party organizations in all thirteen states. Now you’ve got something. Now you stand a chance of getting at least some of your program enacted.

  Next imagine that you’re Alexander Hamilton’s foe, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, President Washington’s secretary of the treasury, wanted to bolster the power of the state governments, not the federal government, and he championed small landholders, distrusting bankers and merchants. When you see the Federalists start to organize, you realize that you have no choice but to organize a party of your own. So you get together with James Madison, a leading figure in the House of Representatives, to found the Democratic-Republican Party. Then you get backing from your own friends, southern planters, and set up your own party organizations in all thirteen states.

  Thus the provenance of American political parties. The founders invented them to get out of a jam.

  Which brings us to the next question. What’s so special about the number two? If Hamilton and Jefferson gave us two parties, why didn’t Monroe give us a third? And Madison a fourth? For that matter, why didn’t each of the founders establish a party of his own, giving us a couple of dozen? We return, once again, to our fundamental institutions of government. A couple of institutions in particular endow the number two with special properties. The first is plurality elections.

  In discussing electoral systems, there is always a danger of getting lost in the jargon of political science—when I was reading about the subject I got lost in the jargon myself. But the point to grasp about plurality elections is simple. Probably the easiest way to see it is to compare plurality elections with majority elections. In majority elections, the winning candidates must capture more than 50 percent—that is, a majority—of the vote. If, in any given contest, many candidates compete, splitting the vote so many ways that none receives a majority, runoff elections are held, pitting fewer and fewer candidates against each other until one finally succeeds. In plurality elections, all that the winning candidates have to do is capture more votes than any of their opponents—that is, a plurality. Runoff elections never occur. Now here is the point. Under a majority system, the candidates who are defeated in each round can throw their support to other candidates in successive rounds, helping the candidates whose views are closest to their own. But under a plurality system, all that minor or doubtful candidates can do is hurt their own causes, drawing votes away from other candidates. Consider, for example, a race in which several liberal candidates compete against just a single conservative. While the conservative keeps the conservative vote to himself, the liberals will split the liberal vote, handing the conservative an easy victory. (As long as I was presenting a hypothetical example, I thought I might as well make it to my liking.) The liberals would do a lot better to get together beforehand, uniting behind a single liberal candidate. Thus in a plurality system it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race. And since it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race, it makes sense to have only two parties.

  Third parties do indeed appear. But most remain tiny, like the Libertarian or Green parties. The few that do grow large seldom last. Whenever a third party begins to attract a sizable following, it also attracts the attention of the two major parties, who suddenly find themselves scrambling to discern the source of the third party’s appeal. Once they do so, they adjust their own positions accordingly, putting the third party out of business. Just look at the Reform Party. Ross Perot’s major issue when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket in 1992 was the federal deficit. Then the Republican and Democratic parties picked up the issue, claiming to be as dedicated to reducing the deficit as was the Reform Party itself. When Perot ran for president on the Reform Party ticket a second time in 1996, his vote fell from the 19 percent that he had garnered four years earlier to just 6 percent. Now that the federal deficit has been replaced with a federal surplus, the Reform Party must identify an entirely new issue—at this writing Pat Buchanan, seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be running on protectionism, an issue with little national appeal, while Donald Trump, also seeking the Reform Party’s nomination, appears to be offering the country only his ego—or remain marginal. In the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, “Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die.”

  The second institution that endows the number two with special magic is the presidency. The founders gave us a system of government in which a single prize, the office of chief executive, dwarfs the rest.

  In theory at least, many local two-party systems instead of one national two-party system might have emerged during the early days of the republic. Virginia might have had two parties, Massachusetts two completely different parties, Rhode Island two parties of its own, and so on. A few local parties did originally exist. Yet voting patterns converged on the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties so quickly that by 1796, when the Federalist John Adams defeated the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson for president, the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans had already become the dominant parties throughout the country. Why?

  Lying outside the national two-party system, local parties faced a choice. Either they signed on with one of the two major parties and got the chance to participate in presidential politics, which was the big game even then, or they remained independent and had to observe presidential politics as outsiders. They signed on.

  * * *

  Fragmented power, plurality elections, and presidential politics. Look in the history books, and those are the explanations for the two-party system that you’ll find. Yet as I worked in the library, another explanation kept coming to me: human nature itself. I found my mind occupied by the Blues and the Greens.

  The Blues and the Greens were political parties in ancient Constantinople. As far as historians can tell they first took shape as groups of sports fans—two of the colors under which chariot teams raced at the Hippodrome were blue and green. The Blues and the Greens each marched through the city, staging demonstrations. They rioted in each other’s neighborhoods. They defended their own sections of the city walls when Constantinople fell under attack. From time to time
one party or the other even proclaimed an emperor.

  What did the two parties stand for? Did the Blues want lower taxes? Did the Greens support more social spending? Did one accuse the other of being soft on the Turks? Who knows? All we can see as we peer back across the centuries is the two parties themselves. And the Blues and the Greens represent just one of dozens of instances throughout history in which people have grouped themselves into two opposing parties. The Blues and the Greens in ancient Constantinople. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines in medieval Italy. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers in seventeenth-century England. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans in eighteenth-century America.

  Partisanship. The very word suggests shallow-mindedness. Yet partisanship runs deep.

  VERSIONS ONE AND TWO

  Journal entry:

  Reading about the founding of the Republican Party today, I thought back to the plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln that my father kept out in the garage. The bust was too ugly to go inside the house, but my father was too much of a Republican to throw it out.

  The GOP, the party of Lincoln. And then again, I’ve learned, it isn’t.

  Ignorant as I was, I was prepared to learn a lot when I looked into the GOP’s origins. I was unprepared to learn that there are two completely different versions of the way the GOP came into existence.

  Version One: In 1854 the Republican Party emerged ex nihilo, out of nothing, a popular movement of ordinary Americans in the upper Midwest, far from the centers of wealth, power, or sophistication. The GOP amounted to a spontaneous moral crusade with a single, noble purpose: cleansing the nation of slavery.

  Version Two: When it appeared in 1854, the Republican Party drew much of its support from the same regions, economic classes, and ethnic and religious groupings as had two parties that preceded it, the Federalists and the Whigs. The name of the party may have been new. The party itself was old.

  Strange though it seems both versions are true. Both inform the Republican Party to this day.

  Version One took place against a background of seventy years of compromises between the North and the South over slavery. The first compromise was the Constitution itself, ratified in 1788. To placate the South, the Constitution stipulated that in determining the population of each state—an important exercise, since it was on the basis of its population that a state would be allotted members in the House of Representatives—slaves would be counted right along with white people. (Each slave would count for only three-fifths of a white person. But to the South three-fifths was better than nothing.) To placate the North, the Constitution stipulated that while the import of slaves would remain legal until the end of 1807, as of that date Congress would have the right to bring the slave trade from Africa to an end. (Congress did just that as soon as the stated interval had elapsed.) The next compromise, the Missouri Compromise, took place in 1820. It brought Missouri into the Union as a slave state. But it also brought in Maine, which until then had been part of Massachusetts, as a state in its own right, preserving a balance between the North and South at twelve states apiece. Thirty years later came the Compromise of 1850. It permitted California into the Union as a free state. But it made a number of concessions to the South, including rigorous provisions for the return of runaway slaves and the settlement of a border dispute between New Mexico, a free state, and Texas, a slave state, under which Texas received $10 million in compensation from the federal government.

  While these compromises were taking place, the North was prospering, its economy expanding, its men of affairs growing rich on manufacturing, banking, and shipping. About the same as that of the South when the Constitution was ratified, the population of the North grew so much more quickly that by 1820 it was almost 20 percent larger than that of the South, by 1850 almost 60 percent larger. The very prosperity of the North seemed a condemnation of slavery—look, the North said in effect, at all that we have achieved without it. Why should we go on making one compromise with the South after another?

  The final compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, took place in 1854.

  The act arose from the ambitions of Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, who wanted to be president. Douglas believed that by opening the territory west of the Missouri to settlement he could ingratiate himself with western farmers, who would move into the territory, and with moneyed interests in the East, who would build railroads across it. Yet Douglas faced a dilemma. If he brought Kansas and Nebraska into the union as free states he would infuriate the South. Yet if he brought them in as slave states he would anger the very farmers and bankers whose support he wanted to win. Douglas’s solution? To sidestep the issue. The new legislatures of Kansas and Nebraska, he proposed, would decide the question of slavery for themselves. Even before Douglas’s fellow Democrat, President Franklin Pierce, signed the act into law on May 30, 1854, northerners and southerners, both eager to claim the two new states for their own sides, began pouring into Kansas and Nebraska. Almost immediately, fighting between the northerners and southerners broke out.

  The nation erupted. In the North, the region that concerns us here, patience with the seven decades of compromises over slavery finally snapped. Preachers denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in every pulpit from Maine to Illinois. Torchlight parades were held. Newspapers coupled lurid accounts of the fighting in Kansas and Nebraska with diatribes against the South.

  In May 1854 a mass outdoors meeting took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, to found a new, anti-slavery party. Two months later, in July, the new party held a convention in Jackson, Michigan, at which it formally adopted a name, calling itself “Republican.” The new party grew at an astonishing rate. Within months it had replaced the Whig Party as one of the two major parties in the country. Within two years it had elected a speaker of the house. Within six years it had placed Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

  There is only one way to make sense of the speed with which the Republican Party rose to power. You have to see the GOP as a crusade. At the very moment when millions of northerners were suddenly looking for a way to express their outrage, the GOP represented a vehicle for moral protest. Indeed, until the civil rights protests of more than a century later, the Republican Party remained the biggest protest movement the United States had ever seen.

  Version Two is nearly the opposite of Version One. While Version One stresses the suddenness with which the GOP emerged, Version Two argues that by the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act the GOP had already been around for decades.

  To grasp Version Two, you have to ask yourself just what kinds of people would have joined a moral movement like the movement in Version One. It certainly wouldn’t have been southerners. They saw the Republican movement as an assault on their very way of life. But it wouldn’t have been every northerner, either. Laborers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other northern cities had no desire to free the slaves. The very idea unnerved them. When they pictured freed slaves, they pictured a horde streaming north to take away their jobs.

  When you sit back and consider it, you can see that the people drawn to the GOP would have been northerners of just two kinds. The first would have been the rich. Bankers and merchants had nothing to fear from freeing the slaves. They knew they would retain their privileged position in any event. They were at liberty, so to speak, to act upon their indignation. The second would have been rural folk, the eighty percent or more of the northern population that lived on farms and in small towns. They were self-sufficient. They had no more fear of freeing the slaves than did the bankers and merchants. And it was just these two groups, the rich and the rural, that did indeed rally to the Republican Party.

  Now, here is the odd part. The same two groups of northerners that provided much of the support for the Republican Party, the rich and the rural, also provided much of the support for the party that preceded the GOP, the Whig Party, and for the party that preceded the Whig Party, the Federalist Party. Yet when you compare their stands, you’ll see that the Federa
lists, the Whigs, and the Republicans had virtually nothing in common.

  The Federalists stood for a strong central government. Their party became defunct after the War of 1812. Then in the early 1830s the Whig Party emerged. Never managing to put together a coherent agenda of their own, the Whigs seldom stood for much of anything except animosity toward Andrew Jackson and the Democrats. The Whigs remained the second major party, in opposition to the Democrats (the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans) for just over two decades. Then with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the anti-slavery Whigs of the North, who dominated the party, found it impossible to cooperate with the pro-slavery Whigs of the South. The Whig Party collapsed. The GOP emerged, standing for abolition.

  Three different parties: Federalists, Whigs, Republicans. Three different stands: in favor of a strong central government, against Andrew Jackson, in favor of abolition. Yet support from the same two groups of northerners sustained all three parties alike.

  Both Versions One and Two inform the GOP to this day, as I’ve said. Version One, the version in which the Republican Party arose as a spontaneous moral protest, gives Republicans a certain pride. Once you recognize that the GOP was right on slavery, the greatest issue the nation ever faced, you can almost understand how Republicans manage to hold their heads high, even during a debacle such as the presidential campaign of Bob Dole.

  Version Two establishes the existence of the Republican tribe. Before it was the Republican tribe, of course, it was the Whig tribe, and before it was the Whig tribe, it was the Federalist tribe. Yet the tribe itself dates from the earliest years of the republic. Although the tribe has spread out, migrating from its original base in the North to other regions of the country, it exists to this day. Most Republicans are born into it—indeed, I learned, most Republicans are Republicans because they’re born into it. This was not an idea that sat easily with me.