Can Political Parties Save Democracy?

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Poisonous partisanship is ruining our country. What if political parties are a big part of the answer?

I know, I know. You have mixed feelings about parties. So did James Madison. In Federalist 10, published under a pseudonym in 1787, he said that the whole point of the Constitution was to avoid “faction,” which is what the founding generation called parties. But just five years after he denounced factions, he changed his mind and organized a political party. This time under his own name, he started writing “candid” essays about how factions are great. Parties, he said, are “natural to most political societies.”

Parties aren’t bad; they’re necessary and inevitable. Call it hypocrisy, or call it Madisonian pragmatism.

He was right to be ambivalent. At their best, strong parties can make the country work. At their worst, parties can devolve into instruments of raw power and corrupt domination. The trick is to harness their muscle for the good of the country while avoiding their excesses.

That was the theme of a book, In Defense of Partisanship, by Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. We spoke on the Brennan Center’s podcast last week about how to make sense of the attack on Black representation being pressed by Republicans across the South. I encourage you to take a listen.

“Parties have done good things,” Zelizer noted. “There have been moments in American history where strong parties actually were part of what moved America in different directions. Democrats will certainly point to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, when you had a robust Democratic Party. . . . Conservatives will talk about Reagan in the 1980s and the reemergence of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Watergate that pushed politics in a rightward direction.”

But Zelizer isn’t blind to the darker sides of party power: “You can’t have partisanship with no guardrails.”

No guardrails. We are seeing that in the brutal grab for advantage set off by the Republican gerrymander in Texas last year. Democrats responded and came close to matching the Republicans.

Then the Supreme Court entered the political fray unnecessarily, pulling down the guardrails at the worst possible moment. The justices essentially overturned the Voting Rights Act, handing Republicans a new weapon to escalate the gerrymandering battle. What followed, predictably, was a shockingly rapid bid to eliminate seats held by Black elected officials all across the Old South.

Never has the Supreme Court intervened so dramatically, so close to an election, with such predictable partisan consequences. The only other possible example was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which tried to outlaw the position of the Republican Party against the expansion of slavery. That backfired spectacularly: The brand-new GOP won the presidency, fought the Civil War, and ended slavery. It remains to be seen whether the Roberts Court’s gift to Republicans will boomerang in the same way.

To be clear, this is not an essay against bipartisanship. We who work for democracy should try hard to gain bipartisan support wherever possible. On issues ranging from criminal justice to surveillance to presidential power, there are surprising pockets of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans, such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) working with progressive and conservative reformers. 

And some issues should be entirely nonpartisan. Americans of all parties should stand up for state and local election officials, who are trying to do their job under withering pressure.

But as Madison might have put it, we again need to take a candid look at the parties. There are certain problems facing the country, like systemic corruption, that require a coordinated response, organized by parties.

Indeed, the corruption issue offers the best chance to upend today’s rigid polarization. Republicans should be grasping at any chance they can to vote against the White House ballroom or the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund. Democrats, who are seen as little better than their opponents in regard to corruption, will want to show they are for real — and that they can get something done. Sooner or later, regardless of who acts first, it will take the concentrated political oomph that comes from a party backing politicians in the halls of power to break the concentrated forces of the status quo.

Something similar needs to happen to respond to the gerrymandering frenzy. Both parties are now grappling across the country. But Congress could act immediately to ban partisan gerrymandering and bar mid-decade map drawing. That proposal was part of the Freedom to Vote Act, which passed the House and nearly passed the Senate in 2022, notably on a party-line vote. Now would be a good time for both parties to unite in this kind of political arms control.

Let’s not be naive about this: There have been times, such as the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, when Republicans and Democrats competed for the mantle of reform. More typically, though, one party or another takes the lead, and often enough, lawmakers from across the aisle join in to add a note of bipartisanship. And there have been times when vital reforms actually passed on only a party-line vote. That’s how the 15th Amendment to ban racial discrimination in voting became part of the Constitution.

Bipartisanship doesn’t guarantee peace and calm. The last time the Voting Rights Act was considered by Congress, it passed the Senate 98–0 and was proudly signed into law by President George W. Bush. Within a few years, the same Republicans who voted for the law turned against it and made election denial more generally a party cause.

But one way or another, this period of abuse and corruption must yield to a time of reform.

It’s not too soon to start thinking about the post-Trump era. Yes, he’s got more than two years in office to go. But there is an unmistakable sense that Trumpism, which a decade ago was the rude, disruptive new force, has become an uneasy and increasingly unpopular status quo. What comes next? That’s for all of us to decide. And the grubby, compromised political parties that make the system work or fail.