The Party Problem: Political Parties and Civil Order

Abstract

The Party Problem:Political Parties and Civil Order Roman J. Hoyos (bio) Jeffrey S. Selinger. Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 254 pp. Notes and index. $55.00. Sean Wilentz. The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016. xix + 364 pp. Notes and index. $28.95. Political parties have posed problems for American politics since at least the beginning of our national history. From George Washington's Farewell Address warning against the dangers of political parties, to Thomas Jefferson's first Inaugural Address, which sought to transcend politics, to the contemporary pejorative "partisan," Americans have struggled to embrace political parties, especially opposition parties. In the United States, a strong anti-party rhetoric has grown alongside the development of political parties and party systems. Jeffrey Selinger and Sean Wilentz continue this discussion about the connection between parties, political order, justice, and more broadly, democracy. For Wilentz, pragmatic party-politicians have always been the critical element in creating and maintaining political order. They have understood well, he tells us, that politics cannot be based upon the unrelenting pursuit of a particular principle, but must be translated into the realm of the possible. Selinger, by contrast, offers a more nuanced account of the relationship between political parties and political order. Emphasizing structure over agency, Selinger argues that prior to the Civil War political parties were perceived as a threat to the continued existence of the republic. Political parties, especially opposition parties, were able to survive only to the extent that they avoided addressing the major social, economic, and political issues of the day. The legitimacy of a political opposition was made possible only as the state (i.e., federal government) acquired a monopoly on legitimate violence following the Civil War. On one level, Wilentz and Selinger agree that parties and party politicians have pragmatically pursued order over justice. Where they disagree is over the [End Page 223] meaning of that history. For Wilentz that order has been in pursuit of justice, while for Selinger it has been at its expense. Wilentz is critical of what he calls the "antiparty current," which he argues somewhat circularly, "is by definition antidemocratic, as political parties have been the only reliable electoral vehicles for advancing the ideas and interests of ordinary voters" (Wilentz, p. 28). Parties are the solution, not the problem in Wilentz's analysis, as they have been singularly successful in translating claims for economic equality into legislative programs that ensure political and civil order. This dynamic between party leaders (i.e., "politicians") and leaders of movements challenging economic inequality (i.e., "egalitarians") are, according to Wilentz, the "two keys" that "unlock the whole of American political history." From emancipation through the Progressive Era and New Deal to the Great Society, the grand policy initiatives that politicians created in order to attempt to address economic inequality were also great party endeavors (Wilentz, p. xiv). Emancipation and Reconstruction, for example, were Republican efforts to create racial justice in the South, while the New Deal and the Great Society were Democratic programs for economic justice. The "moral achievement" of partisan-statesmen, then, has been the simultaneous pursuit of economic equality and political order. For example, as inequality deepened in the early national period, a number of dissenting movements appeared, including trade unions, abolitionists, and utopians, and then a new Democratic Party, whose main economic program sought to destroy the Second Bank of the United States. The struggle between Whigs and Democrats in the Second Party System based itself in part on competing understandings of the sources of economic inequality (privilege v. moral turpitude). Antislavery politics represented an expansion of the idea that all individuals were entitled to their labor. The rise of industrial capitalism transformed political economy into economics, and made inequality the natural consequence of the new corporate capitalism (p. 56). In each case, Wilentz tells us, it was the efforts of party politicians like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and other presidents, who enacted programs to address and mitigate these problems of economic inequality. In other words, order and justice have been inextricably...