I offered this Osher class for the first time in 2018. I distributed party hats and noisemakers to the class members so we could have some fun with a sometimes dry topic.
I taught this class again in 2019, and have presented some variations of the class to local community groups. I am presenting it again in August of this year, so I need to make some revisions to reflect the ways the political environment has changed since I first taught the class. Writing this essay has helped me make the needed revisions.
During the first class, I focus on why political parties exist – and why Americans don’t particularly like our party system.
First, I talk about the traditional functions of political parties:
I make the argument that the problem with the American political party system is not that the two parties are too strong (which is what we often hear people say), but that they are too weak. Let’s look at this briefly:
Recruit candidates for public office
The rise in social media and other unregulated sources of information has weakened the power of the parties to control who runs for office under their banner. Primaries have (in large part) replaced party caucuses, with the result that the parties have to just sit back and wait to see who their candidates will be. Look at 2016 – Donald Trump hijacked the Republican Party (there is no evidence that he was a Republican – he just hated Obama and Obama was a Democrat so Trump hated Democrats) and Independent Bernie Sanders attempted to hijack the Democratic Party (and almost succeeded). The respective party organizations had no choice but to accommodate these outliers.
Organize and run elections
This is currently the major function of our parties – although the decentralized nature of our party system (meaning that each state does its own thing) makes it difficult for the national party to create common themes or generate candidate momentum. You just have to look at the disastrous McAuliffe 2021 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia to see how badly the Virginia Dems flubbed the opportunity that the 2020 Biden/Harris victory in Virginia had provided.
Present policies to voters
Both parties say that they do this, but you only have to look at (look for?) the 2020 GOP platform to recognize that policy didn’t matter to voters; the only issue on the ballot was Trump. (In case you’ve decided to look for the 2020 GOP platform, don’t waste your time. They didn’t issue one – or more precisely, they just xeroxed the 2016 platform — including its references to the bad policies of the “current” administration — which meant Obama in 2016 but not in 2020.
Because we so often have divided government – where various branches of the government are controlled by opposing political parties – even when a party does have a clear message, it’s hard for it to turn the message into legislation. The hyper-partisanship that has characterized American politics since the 1990s has obliterated the idea of compromise and cooperation across the aisle.
When the majority leader of the United States Senate can say, as Mitch McConnell did in a 2010 interview, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” you know that it’s all about power and not about the good of the country. McConnell made the same point a few years later, when in 2021 he said that “one-hundred percent of our [GOP] focus is on stopping this new [Biden] administration.”
Accept responsibility for operating the government
In parliamentary systems, the prime minister (head of the majority party or majority party coalition in Parliament) expects Parliament to pass legislation he proposes. If he loses the support of his majority in Parliament, he can be removed from office or he can call new elections. This is called a “responsible parties model.”
In recent days, we have seen Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK (and Trump wanna-be) booted out of office because his party lost confidence in him. Our parties don’t have this kind of connection to policy.
American Presidents do not have this kind of relationship with Congress. Now couple this with the current misunderstanding (among much of the public) or intentional deception (from the politicians who know better) of archaic rules such as the filibuster that make it impossible for even a President like Biden, whose party has numerical control of both parties in Congress, to get bills passed.
Stronger political parties would perform all of these tasks more effectively.
These observations reveal a lot about why American don’t like their political parties, as this 2018 political cartoon points out.
When I teach this class, I argue mightily (and usually unsuccessfully) against the “I vote for the person and not the party” mentality, and here’s why: parties are the way majorities form in a representative democracy, and it should be the goal of every voter to vote for the candidate of the party that best reflects what they think government should do. In order for voters to do this, the political parties have to identify clearly and unequivocally the principles they stand for. I don’t think our parties are doing that very well these days, and this is reflected in the lack of support for our parties among the electorate.
I used to say (with a knowing chuckle) that voters should support any candidate their party puts forward – unless, of course, the candidate was a criminal, a fraud, a con artist, a rapist, or pedophile. I was joking when I made these comments any time before 2015. I can’t make that joke today because Republicans in my classes think I’m taking a swing at Trump. If the shoe fits . . . .
During the third class, I spend a lot of time talking about the history of political parties in America. First of all, I explain why America always settles into a two-party system while many other countries in the world have party systems featuring three or more political parties. It is common to hear Americans lament the state of our political parties and propose that we create a “new” party. That’s all well and good, but a country’s party system is a function of its underlying political system, and elements of the American political system virtually guarantee the survival of only two political parties at a time. The next several maps illustrate how different the American political system is from other systems around the world.
When you put all of these factors together, the United States is an outlier – the only country in the world featuring a two-party, federal, presidential system with single-member-district elections. Most Americans don’t understand the degree to which the American political system is an outlier, and thus they don’t understand that we can’t have a party system like we see in other parts of the world unless we choose to change these underlying factors. Them’s the facts.
Then I look at the history of American political parties.
The party names stay the same, but the party coalitions change frequently. In the class, I examine in detail the six party systems and “realigning elections” that signal the movement from one party system to the next. For this essay, I’m going to simplify this a little, comparing the two major parties or the 3rd and 6th party system, approximately 100 years apart.
There’s a lot to say about this comparison (and I say a lot about it in the class.) Although there are some threads that persist across party eras, it is clear that the two parties in post-Civil War America stood for very different policies and appealed to very different coalitions of voters than the current parties bearing their names.
Sometimes people use this fact as a “gotcha.” You’ve heard them: “The GOP is the party of Lincoln and Lincoln freed the slaves and the Democrats opposed the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, therefore the Republican party is the only party that cares about black voters.” The historical facts about the political parties are accurate, but the conclusion is hogwash. The party coalitions changed.
Someone once explained this to me this way: to insist that the modern parties are identical to their earlier iterations is like saying that the New York Jets are still the best team in football because they won Super Bowl III in 1969. Today’s team has different players and coaches, different strategies and skills, and the only connection to the 1969 team are a few trophies, some memories, and TV ads featuring Joe Namath as a shill for Medicare Advantage Programs.
That’s the case with our political parties as well. Except for the Joe Namath part.
Excellent! Simply excellent!! Thank you, Karen.