Will ‘Bad’ Partisanship Drive Out the ‘Good’?

Hearing commentators and public officials crowing about the bipartisan agreement in the Senate during the early stages of the impeachment trial of President Clinton, you would be prompted to submit the names of the plan’s unlikely pair of authors, Sens. Phil Gramm and Ted Kennedy, to the Nobel Prize committee.

After weeks of sulfurous invective on the House Judiciary Committee, the more modulated tones emanating from the upper chamber were as soothing to the ear as the peal of an Aeolian harp. The train wreck that passed for Judiciary Committee hearings should not, however, discredit partisanship any more than Dr. Kevorkian’s activities should stigmatize the entire medical profession.

Americans, certainly, have always felt uneasy about partisanship. Parties were condemned by James Madison in the Federalist Papers as “factions” that inflame the public with “mutual animosities” and “kindle their unfriendly passions.” A substantial part of George Washington’s farewell address condemned “the baneful effects of the spirit of party” that “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” and Thomas Jefferson observed, famously, in 1789, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Jefferson, of course, went on to found the most successful and enduring political organization in American history, the Democratic Party.

Partisanship, by its very nature, implies conflict, and conflict makes people uncomfortable. Studies of children’s attitudes toward politics suggests that they feel reassured when prominent political figures express agreement and they disparage strife among their country’s leaders. Perhaps they draw an analogy from the public sphere to their desire for harmony in their own families. Even adults express the view that overt expressions of political conflict make them uncomfortable.

But if fear of disputation in political life is widespread, so is another widely expressed view: that in having only two major parties from which to choose, Americans are deprived of genuine political alternatives.

You obviously cannot have it both ways--politicians in sweet agreement and also clearly delineated choices based on crisp philosophical and policy differences. What you can have, however, is disagreement that is expressed in tones that are not harsh, do not question the motives of opponents and do not hint darkly at conspiratorial forces lurking on the other side.

There are both noble and degraded forms of partisanship. Lamentably, it was the latter that was on such conspicuous display on the House Judiciary Committee. The noblest expressions of partisanship are found in the role that parties play in fostering compromise and narrowing differences. Indeed, one thing that differentiates parties from special interest groups is the very breadth of choices they present to voters. An antiabortion group, by itself, need compromise on nothing, but to get its goals accepted by any political party that has the hope of winning office, it must share the agenda with other interests for whom abortion is not the paramount issue. The party will also try to soften the edges of zealous groups within its orbit in the hope of capturing the political center where most voters are located. This, at least, is the theory as it appears in the political science textbooks.

Today’s reality is that the most extreme elements have come to enjoy disproportionate power in both parties. These groups are typically referred to as the “base,” an ironic term that can also mean contemptible, ignoble and lacking in higher values. More likely to vote than citizens of more moderate views, the base elements of both parties have been the audience to which politicians have fed their rhetorical red meat.

It would be hopeful to imagine that a conciliatory speaker could dial down the harshness in that chamber or that senators could quarantine their differences from the pathogens of personal animus, but our public officials are, in large measure, authentic expressions of those they represent. It is beyond the ability of politicians to ignore, for very long, the passions of a polarized electorate.

Perhaps our politics has begun to emulate certain venerable laws of economics so that, in the manner of Sir Thomas Gresham’s law of monetary value, bad partisanship has driven good partisanship out of circulation.