In his NYT column today, David Brooks discusses political discrimination (“partyism”), a social phenomenon characterized by an increasing willingness to make moral judgments about others based purely on political labels. To Brooks, it’s a perspective that turns politics into “a Manichean struggle of light and darkness,” profoundly debases human interaction, and erroneously conflates the personal and the political. Political scientist Russell Muirhead, though, sees the potential benefit of partisanship even from the vantage of our age’s inflammatory political divide. With Brooks’s partyism in mind, and a hotly-contested midterm election just a week away, we offer here the Preface to Muirhead’s The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age.
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As a partisan myself, I know a bit of what party spirit feels like. I have been moved—by anger, by conviction, by hope, by affection, and sometimes by hate—to hold signs, to sit through caucuses, to make calls, to write checks, and to vote. On those election nights when my party was defeated, I have crawled early into bed full of woe. And I will never forget the nights when my party has won, celebrating with friends into the sunless hours of morning.
Perhaps this experience gives me a sympathy for those who find it in them to take a stand and carry this stand to the political world. From a combination of habit, affection, and conviction, such people stand with a party. These may be “passive partisans” who think about politics only now and then. Or they may think about it a lot and try to talk their friends into voting this way or that. They are also the ones who make elections happen—they vote, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, drive people to the polls, make phone calls, contribute money, design strategy, and run for office. They are the ones who cheer in joy and who mourn in sorrow on election night—and either way, steel themselves for another fight. If they are prejudiced, narrow, and blind in some respects (and they can be), they are also idealistic, inspired, and knowing. Partisanship does not entirely deserve its bad name.
It is hard to imagine life without political friends—those with whom I can take a certain measure of agreement for granted. But it is also stimulating and provocative to be with political opponents. They remind me of the mystery of political disagreement: Why would someone so decent and so thoughtful disagree with what seems, to me, so obvious, so true? Are they blinded by selfish interests? Are they heartless? Or… am I… not entirely right after all? What is it about the political world that can give rise to such disagreement? Party spirit is the starting point for a basic curiosity about political things.
But party spirit is less an intellectual than an active thing: partisans take a stand. They stand with others and stand for something. As a partisan, I have sometimes allied with groups I otherwise disagree with, for the sake of standing for the larger goals of the party. This is never solely a matter of sober calculation, as if any algorithm could be up to the job. It is always, in part, a matter of the heart. That is why I prefer the eighteenth-century phrase “party spirit” to the social-scientific “partisanship.” Partisanship is not a dispassionate “identification,” nor is it simply what happens to you while you are not looking (as a child); it is spirited, or prideful. It originates in the desire for recognition, is sustained by the way being disagreed with is experienced as an insult, and is not without a noble willingness to fight (in a sense) for the sake of the common good. Reason can—and should—inform, guide, and chasten party spirit, but it is rarely only the consequence of a conclusion based in reason, the way we might conclude that the square root of two is irrational when we study geometry.
In principle, the common good should be a matter of agreement—it is, after all, common. Since Plato, political philosophy has been devoted largely to articulating a rational basis for agreement about the common good. In this sense, the purpose of political philosophy is to eradicate partisanship: in principle, the idea of justice itself may require believing that reason can displace contestation. The aspiration to base politics on reason informs the social-scientific ideal of a politics of problem solving by informed experts who do not let disagreements on small questions of technique get in the way of mutually advantageous accommodations. It is also aligned with the common understanding that partisanship is an affliction of political elites, a self-serving game that distracts us from the common good.
But the hope that we could take the politics out of politics blinds us to the way every effort to denude politics of disagreement must silence some interests, some understandings, some groups, some persons. What makes politics magnetic is that the common good is ever a matter of dispute. To serve the common good implicates us in a contest. What that contest is for, how it should be fought, and how it might be the basis of a political community are urgent questions of politics and political philosophy.
Yet amid the resurgence of partisan passions in the 2000s—following the impeachment of President William Clinton in 1998 and President George W. Bush’s contested victory in 2000—it struck me that we lacked a vocabulary by which to understand and value partisanship. Other than the language that justifies one’s own partisan commitments and the language that piously condemns all partisanship, we lacked a way to locate the important place of party spirit in our politics.
To make sense of partisanship, political theory needs to give an account of what can be said in its favor—one that goes beyond the partisan’s own, one-sided account. In my first efforts to do this, a 2006 essay in Perspectives on Politics, I focused on defending the place of partisanship in democratic politics. Since then I have come to see that while partisanship needs a defense, it also invites profound pathologies that can corrupt democratic politics.
Part of this corruption comes in the form of money, of course: parties funded by the few are unlikely to connect citizens’ trust and affection with the institutions of government. But the more severe threat comes from the spirit of party itself. In particular, the danger arises when party spirit pervades life and extends to all of government, the press, scholarship, and friendship.
Working out the limits of party spirit requires more than a defense of partisanship on one hand, and more than a general condemnation of party on the other. It requires a more nuanced consideration of public institutions, one that makes room for partisanship in some places while containing it in others. That is what I have tried to do in this book.
Partisanship is appropriate for citizens and legislators, for instance—but is a far more potent threat in other institutions that house the executive or judicial functions of government. Partisanship is not the sort of force that can easily be contained. Rather than expect that partisanship can be overcome, or transcended, or simply turned off in those places where its presence would be corrupting, it is better—more true to the real possibilities for democratic politics—to differentiate between more elevated and more base expressions of party spirit.
High partisanship is oriented to convictions, principles, and conceptions of the common interest. Low partisanship is about strategy, power, and ultimately, victory. The two are intimately connected, but they have different roles. Low partisanship has its place in campaigns, elections, and legislatures. But even there it can corrode cooperation and trust. High partisanship by contrast does not necessarily corrupt. The task for institutions like the executive or the judiciary is not to insulate them from all partisanship, as if political decisions could be made according to a handy nonpartisan algorithm. On the contrary, high partisanship is the link that connects these institutions with public purposes that people might endorse.
Put differently, what politics needs is not less partisanship, but better partisanship.
