John Hood's Daily Journal
The Use and Abuse of Partisanship

By John Hood

December 05, 2003

RALEIGH – The institutions of free, representative government and those of political partisanship have been intertwined – and at odds – since the founding of the American Republic. As with so many other disputes in the public sphere, the primary problem lies in failing to draw bright lines and to keep each category of political activity within its proper confines.

The Founders were deeply concerned about the development and influence of what they called political “factions.” James Madison wrote about the issue in The Federalist Papers, hoping that the various aspects of the new constitutional government such as separation of powers and checks and balances would serve to frustrate factional attempts to monopolize power or subvert it to private ends.

Each of the country’s first three presidents also offer strong condemnations of partisanship. In his farewell address, George Washington warned “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” At his inauguration, John Adams urged Americans never to “lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” And just after his own inauguration, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.”

Update the language and the particulars and you would have the substance of much of the political rhetoric we hear today in national politics and in North Carolina, where partisan warfare in the state House during the 1990s appeared to repel many observers and even many of the practitioners.

Of course, this rhetoric can’t be taken at face value. Adams and Jefferson, for example, were incessant partisans whose pervasive political warfare and outrageous 1800 presidential election would probably be soundly condemned by politicians and voters today. While Washington truly was aloof from much, but not all, partisan intrigue, most other major figures in our political history had episodes, if not entire careers, filled with bald partisanship, manipulation, and vitriol directed at political rivals.

The simple truth of the matter is that if you have electoral politics, you will have political parties. In the American system of winner-take-all elections, furthermore, you will probably have only two competitive parties at a time. Good government will not come either from attempts to quell partisan rivalry or to let it run rampant. Instead, parties must be allowed to contest ideas and elections boldly and energetically – but only within parameters that the party in power cannot easily evade or change.

Basically, the political game will attract public attention and involvement only if there are (at least) two distinct and competitive teams, but it will not command the public trust and confidence without distinct and inviolable rules and nonpartisan referees and commentators.

In journalism and in the public policy business, for example, it’s okay to have strong opinions about issues and to advocate them (though not in a way that warps the news coverage of politics). But it’s not okay for partisanship to intrude in the discussion. Right now, if you’ll pardon the oversimplification, left-of-center folks tend to vote Democratic and right-of-center folks tend to vote Republican. But left-of-center journalists and political activists should be willing to criticize Democrats when they enact bad policies or engage in unethical conduct. Similarly, right-of-center commentators should be willing to criticize Republicans on principle or policy, whatever the short-term impact on public opinion or elections.

Regarding elections, partisanship shouldn’t be squelched. I think “nonpartisan” elections for local or judicial offices is worse than pointless, because it robs voters of useful information and allows the outcome to be disproportionately influenced by simple name-recognition or the power of special-interest groups. On the other hand, partisanship shouldn’t be allowed to rob voters of free, fair, and competitive elections through gerrymandering or manipulation of the election laws.

A polity without effective partisan competition devolves into sloth and corruption, as we have seen in the past in both wholly Democratic and wholly Republican states and localities. And a polity with over-the-top and abusive partisan competition devolves into, well, sloth and corruption, too, because each team’s attention drifts to fights over the rules of the political game rather than cultivating talent and formulating effective plays to move the ball in the direction the team wants to go.

When politicians tell you how sorry they are about “partisanship” and how much they’d like to transcend it, they are playing a very old political game. I’m not vilifying them for it; after all, I remain a devotee of Washington, Adams (sort of), and Jefferson. But I’d take them more seriously if they would promise to be enthusiastically and unabashedly factional – but only about ideas, not about personalities or power.

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Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, publisher of Carolina Journal.com, and host of the statewide program “Carolina Journal Radio.”