The Party Faithful

A choice, not an echo.  That was the slogan for the 1964 presidential campaign of GOP nominee Barry Goldwater, describing his vision of a Republican party distinct rather than compliant in its ideology.  And as we face the upcoming election, the question is whether the two major parties have provided acceptable choices for the voters in recent years.  And if they have not, will the voters turns elsewhere in numbers significant enough to ultimately change the paradigm of two party dominance?

This dominance has created two big and broad tents encompassing wide swaths of belief.  Jesse Jackson and Joe Manchin are both Democrats.  Michael Bloomberg and Ted Cruz are both Republicans.  The co-existence of such disparate viewpoints within these parties inevitably creates belief systems that are more echo and less choice – and makes the parties more indistinguishable from one another than in parliamentary systems, most of which have bookend dominant parties but also competitive alternative parties.

In America, third party candidates periodically rise just enough to be remembered only for causing a loss by one of the major party candidates, from Ralph Nader “costing” Al Gore the White House in 2000 to Libertarian Robert Sarvis supposedly siphoning the votes Ken Cuccinelli desperately needed to beat Terry McAuliffe for Governor last year.

Political parties themselves, and the permanent existence of only two major parties, have become so ingrained in the American political system that little thought is given to what the founders, in their profound understanding of human nature, believed about them.

In Federalist 10, James Madison made it clear that political parties were inherently antithetical to the constitutional principles proposed by the founders and ultimately ratified:

Complaints are everywhere heard…that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties…and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority…Human passions have…divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

With approval of congress – reflecting sentiment about both the GOP and Democrats since different parties control the two chambers of congress – averaging a pitiful 14%, could that not just as easily have been written today?  And yet, incumbent members of congress have been re-elected 93% of the time in this 21st century, because the same voters who hate the performance of Congress overall approve of their own representatives in unimpressive yet far greater numbers.  This is the political equivalent of NIMBY (I want something to happen or change, but not in my backyard).

The Constitution is strikingly silent on the issue of political parties, but the reason Madison dedicated attention to such parties was his understanding that, while they are not desirable, they would be inevitable.

And it did not take long for the inevitable to happen.  In fact, it was Madison himself who co-founded with Thomas Jefferson the Democratic-Republican (anti-federalist) Party in opposition to the other fledgling party, the Federalists, shortly after our very first presidential election.

Multiple parties emerged over the years, but the bifurcation of political parties turned out to be just as inevitable.  After a number of presidential elections in which multiple candidates of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were on the ballot, we have not in almost two centuries witnessed the rise of any significant third party for more than a single election cycle, and even those were driven by high-profile candidates rather than any durable organizing principles – Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968, Ross Perot in 1992.

Today, the three “major minor” parties, the Constitution Party, Greens and Libertarians total only around one million members combined – in a nation of over 300 million people.

So, given that history has demonstrated that the existence of only two significant parties seems inevitable/unavoidable, we can dispense with the many arguments made over the years about how this party or that would soon rise to challenge the big boys.  Such predictions always go the way of those claiming soccer is about to experience a huge surge in popularity.  It just never happens.

The Tea Party and Occupy movements at opposite ends of the political spectrum, and various like-minded and single-issue movements in between, can, and have, animated the arguments, but not by themselves come close to challenging the supremacy of Republicans and Democrats.

With the overwhelming majority of voters obviously believing – with cognitive dissonance – that both parties are unworthy of their approval, but that a vote for anyone other than a Republican or Democrat is a wasted vote, our attention turns to how many voters will actually show up this fall.

Presidential elections are all bright lights, giant, sexy, all-consuming spectacles in the media and popular culture.  Mid-term elections pale in comparison.  The popular way we refer to them alone – “mid-term” – gives us some idea of how secondary they seem.  They are described solely in their relationship to the election of the executive.  But the Constitution – and the men who wrote it – saw things differently.  The executive is discussed in Article II – secondary to the people’s legislature laid out in Article I.  As it should be.

In the Articles of Confederation first thought appropriate, but then insufficient, to govern even the 13 disparate states in our original union, the “president” only presided over the legislature.  This is now the only defined duty of the Vice-President, a job once described by one of FDR’s Vice Presidents, John Nance Garner, as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

This rejection of an executive authority was animated by the revulsion among early Americans at the idea of a powerful president who they instinctively believed would resemble a king, against whom they had successfully fought a revolution.

Excessive authority exercised by overactive presidents has punctuated American history.  It is hardly new, but has certainly risen afresh in the Obama presidency.  We have almost lost track of the number of constitutional breaches in this administration, but it is Congress that must actually use their constitutional authority to hold the executive branch accountable.  As the first and only branch of the federal government that has existed since the founding of the republic, they have the power, but have been timid in asserting it at the most critical times.

It is increasingly obvious that the two major parties are failing to an ever greater degree to represent the interests of the nation.  But the reverse perception – how Congress responds to the voters – is also critical.  If the electorate is perceived by its representatives as checked out, the congress is going to continue to be less responsive than they will be to an engaged electorate.  And engagement involves more than spouting opinions on social media.

Only by going to the polls in roughly the same numbers as we do in a presidential election year – no matter our current disdain for the legislative branch – can we demonstrate an understanding that the Congress is intended to most accurately and directly represent their interests in an increasingly distant, unaccountable and scorned capital of the nation.  And much like how the congress must assert its power to hold the executive branch accountable, the people must show up at the polls and assert their ultimate power to similarly hold its representatives accountable.