Inspired by this thread: “Proportional Representation in the U.S.” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=332307
Any proposed reform (proportional representation, instant-runoff voting, ballot fusion) intended to open our political system to more political parties is based on the assumption that political parties have a legitimate role in politics. That is the prevailing view, generally, but there has always been an undercurrent of thought in the U.S. that a political party, any political party, is nothing but a racket devised by and for the benefit of politicians. The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of, or particular provisions for, political parties. The Federalist (written by three of the founders of the Federalist Party) nowhere mentions parties or “factions” except as a threat to be avoided, or at least neutralized. “If I could not go to Heaven but with a political party, I would not go there at all,” said Thomas Jefferson (founder of the Democratic-Republican Party). But, as Edmund Burke put it, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Do we need political parties in a republic? Would it be possible or advisable for all elections to be “nonpartisan,” like some municipal elections in the U.S.? (BTW, I’ve never encountered a scrap of evidence – maybe some of you can provide some – that nonpartisan elections produce any better or worse municipal government than partisan elections.)
I think parties, even ideological parties, are a Good Thing. They have the ability to think out and propose clear policy alternatives. And party labels have a practical value to the individual voter. True, they are not as useful as they might be under our present system, where each party is perforce a “big tent” and the Democrat in a given race might be more conservative on most issues than the Republican. But they are still very useful in allowing voters to have at least a fingernail grip on what their choices are, without researching the personal history of each individual candidate.
In any case, it is definitively impossible for a civic-minded citizen to practice politics without “ideology.” Any approach to public policy is based on some kind of ideology, i.e., a certain world-view and an assumed set of value judgments, even if that ideology is not clearly or consciously articulated. Consider the early-20th-Century Progressive movement. The first Progressive Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Progressive_Party#The_first_Progressive_Party) was a mainly middle-class and upper-class political movement, devoted to honest, transparent, vigorous and effective government, but also to fiscal responsibility with no deficit spending. The Progressives had a technocratic, professional vision of government that purported to transcend ideology, class interests and partisanship – an old Progressive slogan was, “There is no Democratic or Republican way to pave a street.” But that way of thinking was fundamentally mistaken. How to pave a street might be a purely technical problem; but deciding which neighborhoods get paved, what property should be condemned to make way, and who should pay how much for it are all political questions, in which different social classes, ethnic groups, etc., might have different and conflicting interests, and in which differing ideological notions of justice and fairness would inevitably, and properly, come into play. Certainly it is better to have as many public decisions as possible made by professionals and experts than to have them made by party hacks, in the tradition of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populism and urban machine politics. But the idea that Progressivism itself is not an “ideology” is pure illusion. The Progressives, no less than any Marxist, believed they had an inside track on what amounts to a purportedly scientifically proveable vision of the “truth” and the “good,” and what could be more ideological than that?
The Progressives had a Puritan revulsion for the “logjams” and “logrolling” of the conventional legislative process – if you know what’s best for society, why compromise? The Progressive movement is what got us nonpartisan municipal elections, as well as a lot of “direct democracy” reforms designed to enable to people to do an end-run around the politicians – ballot initiatives and referenda, recall elections, etc. (Also women’s suffrage, and Prohibition.) But for all of that, the Progressives were anti-democratic in a lot of ways. They were essentially elitists, in the mold of Alexander Hamilton. They supported voting qualifications that would discourage the poor and immigrants from voting at all; they opposed the urban political machines that, for all their faults, were at the time the principal means for such people to relate to and participate in government.
The Progressive tradition is still alive in American politics. Its most recent manifestation was in the Reform Party – which ultimately broke up because, among other things, it was always an ideologically incoherent alliance of Progressives and Populists. See this article by Michael Lind from 1999: http://www.slate.com/id/36428/
Since the Reform Party broke up, some Progressives have found a home in John Anderson’s Independence Party – http://www.mnip.org/ – which has had little political success outside Minnesota. Buchanan’s Populist-paleoconservative wing went on to form the America First Party – http://americafirstparty.org/index2.shtml.
Now, another successful Progressive reform was the 17th Amendment to the Constitution (1913), which provided for direct popular election of United States senators. That serves to illustrate the fundamental differences between the Progressive and Populist world-views. I have spoken to America Firsters who want to repeal the 17th Amendment* and go back to letting the state legislatures choose U.S. senators. From a Progressive point of view, the 17th Amendment was about empowering the voters to do an end-run around those corrupt careerists in the state capitols; from a Populist POV, repealing the 17th Amendment is about restoring states’ rights and giving the state legislatures, as such, a voice to resist the incessant encroachments of the power-mad federal biggummint. They’re clashing over the same issue for completely unrelated reasons.
And they both have some good, arguable points! In my view, that illustrates a core reason why we need a multi-party system. In politics as in any other highly complicated and mysterious field of human endeavor, the process of seeking the “truth” is a lot like the six blind men trying to determine the true shape of the elephant. If they could only quit squabbling and sit down and compare notes, they might come up with a consensus picture that is something close to the whole picture. Our present system, OTOH, produces a political arena where the “an elephant is like a fan” school is locked in a constant death-struggle with the “an elephant is like a snake” school, and the “sword,” “wall,” “rope,” and “tree” viewpoints can never get a word in edgewise.
But what if, instead of six blind men, we had 300 million? What consensus image of truth could emerge from debate among a mass of individual citizens organized into no parties at all? That might work well enough at a New England town meeting where everybody can discuss things face-to-face – but how could it work at the state or national level? We need parties just to impose some kind of coherence on the whole process.
*An idea which has been debated in this forum before – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=178451.