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Books (Nonfiction):
Review of Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, by Lewis Gould (Random House, New York, 2004, 597 pages, $35) and Party of the People: A History of the Democrats, by Jules Witcover (Random House, New York, 2004, 826 pages, $35)

ELEPHANTS AND DONKEYS

Americans have long harbored ambivalence about political parties. The U.S. Constitution made no mention of them, and the architects of the first American party system, Jeffersonians and Federalists both, regarded them as “sores on the body politic”. Still, like it or not, the founders recognized disagreement and competition as unavoidable features of democracy—and over the first century of the nation’s history, Americans embraced the Republican and Democratic parties not only as political organizations, but as badges of honor, markers of identity and repositories of culture. Parties became such an essential component of American politics that efforts to export democracy overseas envisioned multiparty competition as a prerequisite for popular government.

In recent decades, however, the major political parties have lost much of their ancient appeal and influence. The rise of television, the advent of split-ticket voters and the triumph of candidate-centered campaigns have vastly diminished the pivotal role the elephant and the donkey played in American politics. Once the nominating conventions meant something; smoke-filled and booze-soaked delegates selected the national candidates amid fistfights, catcalls, balloons and brass bands. Now the parties beg cable networks to air their sterile, scripted displays. Last spring John Kerry considered delaying his acceptance of the Democratic nomination until after the convention. Commentator Kenneth Baer concluded, “It’s time to end the party convention as we know it. . . .”

But the demise of political parties, though widely asserted, has been greatly exaggerated. Americans routinely discuss the divisions between Red and Blue America, the starkly partisan map the networks showed us during the 2000 election. In Washington the ideological polarization of the parties has reached such intense levels that Congress proved incapable of compromise even in the terrible aftermath of 9⁄11. The situation reached the level of parody recently when Republicans called on the Capitol Police to evict a group of Democrats from a room in the House of Representatives.

There seems to be little room these days for anyone seeking middle ground. Republicans attack Democrats as the party of bloated bureaucracies, government handouts, cultural hedonism, high taxes and spineless pacifism. Democrats accuse Republicans of favoring tax cuts for the wealthy, privileging puritanical moralism and recklessly using military power without the benefit of international support.

With partisan tensions so high, this is an opportune time for a sober reassessment of the two parties that dominate our political landscape. How did Americans get here? What roles have big ideas and monumental political struggles played in party history? How have parties as organizations changed over time, and do they have a different role today than in previous years? Who are the individuals who made Democrats and Republicans what they are today? How can the history of the parties give us guidance in current political debates?

Lewis Gould’s Grand Old Party and Jules Witcover’s Party of the People tackle some of these important questions. Together these election-year books from Random House detail the long, strange evolution of the nation’s most important political organizations, recounting the parties’ ideological gymnastics over the better part of the past two centuries.

Each book focuses on the historical transformation of one of the major parties. Witcover traces what eventually came to be known as the Democratic Party back to the agrarian interests that supported Thomas Jefferson. Even as he argues that egalitarian concerns motivated the party’s founders, Witcover uncovers the paradox that defined the party from the era of Andrew Jackson until the civil rights movement of the 1960s: The very same white southern Democrats who pushed the party to embrace an ethos of economic populism simultaneously defended virulent racism. The party gathered together an unstable coalition of northern city dwellers and rural southerners, tenuously united in their opposition to government meddling with their (very different) ways of life.

For most of U.S. history, from Jefferson to Jackson to Woodrow Wilson, southerners essentially defined the Democratic Party. The states’ rights and limited-government outlook that Democrats favored were rooted in the South’s desire to protect slavery up through the Civil War and to preserve white supremacy thereafter. As the Democratic coalition broadened to include more constituencies (northern immigrants, liberal intellectuals, blue-collar workers) who demanded a stronger role for government, its relationship with the South became more problematic.

Franklin Roosevelt was able to craft delicate compromises to keep this coalition intact; Lyndon Johnson was not. The struggle over civil rights that climaxed in the 1960s, as well as the powerful force of southern suburbanization, broke the Democratic hold on the South and pushed the region into Republican hands.

That painful divorce still haunts the Democrats. Since John Kennedy’s election in 1960, the party has mounted successful national campaigns only when it nominated southerners who could, at least partially, reassemble the old Democratic coalition—Johnson of Texas, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Bill Clinton of Arkansas. Today Democrats continue the agonizing search for their soul that has afflicted them since the 1960s. Some leaders, such as Clinton, have tried to push Democrats toward the center, appealing to southern and midwestern voters, whereas others have played to the party’s liberal base on the two coasts.

The Republican Party experienced a very different metamorphosis. Whereas the Democrats lost their foundation in the South when they embraced the cause of civil rights, the GOP retained its core support from big business, all the while making deep inroads into traditional Democratic constituencies.

The party was formed during the 1850s around the principles of ending African-American slavery and a strong federal government. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Republicans abandoned their commitment to African-Americans and segmented into two factions. One cultivated close ties with the national corporations that were shaping the new economy, and the other, “progressive” faction championed social and economic reform to tame the power of those very corporations. Republicans also promoted an expanded international role for the United States. The two strands were briefly intertwined in the career of Theodore Roosevelt—a seminal president who articulated the ideas of both factions and united them under the banner of the Grand Old Party.

Gradually, the progressive wing lost its clout. Once the opposition Democrats embraced federal government during the New Deal, Republicans focused their energy on limiting government and preserving states’ rights. Two notable exceptions to this focus included Republican support for using the government to enforce moralistic ideals and advocacy of a strong military (with the exception of a few periods when the GOP veered toward isolationism). In an ironic turnaround, the party of Lincoln became a haven for white critics of racial change. Republican candidates from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush reached out to white voters disaffected by desegregation, multiculturalism and affirmative action.

At a time when many Americans dismiss “partisanship” as a problem to be overcome, these books tell refreshing stories. They reveal the parties as durable vehicles through which Americans have articulated the passions of democracy for over 150 years and explain how healthy competition between Republicans and Democrats has fostered constructive political, constitutional and social reform. Both books will keep politics buffs enthralled.

But the history of the parties has been more than a succession of presidents and national campaigns. Those are the trees; when we step back to look at the forest, other issues come into focus that neither Gould nor Witcover quite manages to address. For example, overall political participation has been in decline since the 1890s, when 70 to 80 percent of the electorate regularly turned out for presidential elections; by 2000 it had dropped to slightly over 50 percent. The long-term atrophy of the parties within the electorate suggests that their survival is not inevitable, particularly when the worst vices of partisanship are predominant, as appears to be the case today. Gould and Witcover pay scant attention to these issues and, as a result, miss the big picture: How did we reach the point where Americans are so divided ideologically and, at the same time, so removed from the political process?

Indeed, 21st-century partisanship barely resembles the raucous, participatory party politics of the 19th century. During the 1800s, parties truly connected enfranchised citizens to their government. The parties remained central to social life as well as politics; partisan affiliation crucially defined the identities of American citizens. Party organizations maintained close ties to those Americans who had the right to vote, seducing them during campaigns with parades, picnics and other events that made politics a form of public entertainment. Parties also used heavy-handed tactics, supplying voters with liquor, intimidating them and even offering outright bribes.

The hurly-burly of 19th-century democracy led to high voter turnout (among those eligible to vote) and strong party loyalties. Americans identified with the party to which their families belonged and maintained a strong sense of allegiance to these groups. In a nation of joiners, partisan ties overlapped with memberships in other associations—churches, fraternal organizations, veterans’ groups, social clubs, ethnic networks, labor unions and reform societies.

By the end of the 20th century, however, those political affiliations had thinned. Campaigns centered on individual candidates; parties often functioned as fund-raising mechanisms rather than vehicles for political mobilization. Low voter turnout signaled just how many Americans remained alienated from their government and the political process. Party affiliation mattered only on Election Day, if even then. Like membership in an automobile club or the American Association of Retired Persons, being a Democrat or a Republican meant little. You received mailings, maybe even donated money, but the attachment was passive: no parades or barbecues, no regular meetings, no visits from precinct captains or local organizers. An estimated 51.1 million people watched the final episode of Friends, far more than the number who tuned in to see the party conventions this summer.

Today parties influence politicians and organized interest groups, but they no longer involve average citizens in their government. The result is a rancorous political system where constructive negotiation is rare and compromise almost impossible to forge. We now face the worst of both worlds: intense partisan polarization without durable grass-roots connections to political parties. Politicians are casually spoken of as a separate class in American society today, one whose members average Americans feel little identification with, much less trust.

With reports of an electorate evenly—and intensely—divided by partisanship a staple of this year’s campaign coverage, it’s easy to overlook the tens of millions of eligible voters who are unconcerned about politics and in all likelihood won’t vote this November 2nd. Will the historical decline in voter participation be checked by the more recent rise in passionate partisanship? Or will today’s divisiveness turn off even more voters? Will the American political system defined by parties survive either (or both) of these trends?

These questions are not academic but, rather, are essential as we approach the upcoming election. Healing the disconnect between citizens and government, a problem that seems especially acute when Americans are dying in Iraq, is the challenge we must confront—and soon—to revitalize our politics.

Fall 2004
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