Why parties?

Because we disagree

America’s first political parties grew out of a fundamental disagreement about the kind of national government Americans wanted. At the time—amid the debate over ratification of the Constitution—neither the Federalists nor the Antifederalists thought of themselves as a party. Nor even as a faction, the term they used to describe the political groupings they had seen in British politics and come to blame for the bad legislation that had driven America to bolt the empire and establish a new country based on republican principles.

They weren’t naive about political differences. During the Revolutionary War, America was deeply riven over the very question of independence. Patriots battled Loyalists—and the battles weren’t confined to the arena of politics. The nastiest actual battles of the war pitted Patriots against Loyalists, with no quarter given.

Yet this very divisiveness seduced the winners into imagining that their postwar differences would be modest. There is something in the human heart that longs for unity. We dream of a kumbaya time in the past when we lived and worked as one; we hope for a time in the future when differences will fade and the human family be reunited. At the end of the Revolutionary War, nearly all the obvious Loyalists sailed away with the defeated British, leaving the winning Patriots a clear field to create the republic they wanted.

They didn’t all want the same kind of republic, it turned out. The war imposed cooperativeness on the thirteen states; they had to hang together, as Benjamin Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, lest they be hanged separately. The end of the war eroded the cooperativeness, as each state looked to its own interests.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton projected the erosion forward and perceived a rubble of thirteen bickering countries where one country had been. They engineered a rewrite of the national government, accomplished at Philadelphia in 1787. The enterprise lacked legal authority, having been conducted under the false pretenses of merely amending the Articles of Confederation; redemption for the coup could come only from a general embrace of the replacement charter, the Constitution, by the people of the thirteen states.

Madison and Hamilton led the pro-ratification camp, called Federalists for their preference for a strong federal government with powers stolen from the states. The opponents defaulted to the label Antifederalists; they were less organized and coherent in part because they thought they didn’t have to win the argument but merely avoid losing, as the status quo under the Articles favored their state-centered point of view.

The debate was bitter, revealing for the first time in the United States a fundamental principle of competitive politics: that consensus lasts only so long as the external force compelling the consensus persists. Humans naturally hold different views. The holders of the views have personal ambitions. They might submerge their differences and their ambitions in the face of a common threat—the British army during the Revolutionary War, fascism during World War II, communism during the Cold War, terrorism right after 9/11—but as soon as the threat eases, the differences and ambitions reemerge.

No one in the debate over ratification of the Constitution wanted to reattach America to Britain; that fight had been won. But the debaters differed sharply over whether America’s independent government should be one or several. The Federalists wanted an energetic central government to control American political life; the Antifederalists favored the several states as the surest repository of the people’s liberties.

The Federalists won, and they proceeded to organize the new federal government, inaugurated in early 1789. They didn’t think of themselves as a party, merely a coalition that had formed in pursuit of the common goal of ratification. And indeed they began to splinter, with Hamilton as treasury secretary promoting economic policies that alarmed even Madison, now a leader in the new Congress. Thomas Jefferson had favored adoption of the Constitution, but as secretary of state he too thought Hamilton was creating too powerful a central government. 

Jefferson and Madison organized their friends in opposition to Hamilton, who did the same on his side against them. Congressional politics is a matter of numbers. With 51 percent of the members behind you, you win. Otherwise you lose. From organizing those already elected to facilitating the election of like-minded members of Congress was an obvious step.

Foreign affairs added a sharpness to the emerging division. France and Britain went to war, and in their conflict each seized American merchant ships and sometimes their crews. Hamilton, believing that America's future required constructive relations with Britain, deemed the depredations by France upon American interests the greater sin. Jefferson remained a fan of the idea of the French revolution, even as he lamented its excesses. He focused on Britain's injuries to American rights.

People who disagree on matters of domestic politics often think their opponents are a threat to the national interest. When foreign affairs enter the debate, the threat can be made to appear imminently dire. Hamilton's followers wrung their hands over possible French aid to Jefferson, while the Jeffersonians warned of British meddling on behalf of the Hamiltonians.

President George Washington held himself above the parties emerging beneath him, although his policies were more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian. But when Washington retired to Mount Vernon in early 1797, the brawling between parties broke into the open. Each party blamed the other for low partisanship while asserting that its own policies reflected high patriotism. Neither party consistently claimed a name for itself, but gradually the Hamiltonians came to be called Federalists and the Jeffersonians Republicans.

Moralism infused the debate, as it does most human activities. Each party decried the division the other was producing in the American body politic. Yet the moralism was hot air where it wasn’t delusion. What did these men expect? That they would always agree? That ambition would drive them less than it had driven politicians in Britain?

In his inaugural address in 1801, after a hard-fought campaign against John Adams, Jefferson held out an olive branch. “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists,” he said. He soon snatched it back, governing in a formidably partisan manner.

Yet as a gesture it betokened something of first importance in American politics. Competitive parties, far from signaling decline from some fancied Eden, manifest the rude good health of democracy. We Americans disagree on fundamental issues, and parties permit us to join with those who share our views, the better to put them into action. Competitive parties don’t exist in dictatorships.

Parties become a problem if the parties allow themselves to be captured by their extreme elements. This has happened in America during the last few decades. Parties too often put their party interests ahead of the national interest, but because the other party is doing the same thing, this tends to even out.

Parties aren’t pretty, but in a functioning democracy they’re inevitable. They allow a nation of 5 million people, at the time of Jefferson’s inauguration, or 340 million, today, to answer basic questions of public policy. We have two parties because our system frames those questions, ultimately, in binary terms—for or against—just as in the original debate over ratifying the Constitution.

They aren’t going away. So, party on!