Patronage, Principles, and Political Parties

by Paul A. Rahe

When they teach American government and the history of the early American republic, political scientists and historians have a puzzle to explain. There is, within the American constitution, no mention of political parties. And yet it is impossible to make sense of American politics in and after the early republic without reference to parties. Moreover, the parties that did emerge in the United States bear only a faint resemblance to the parties that existed in England and on the European continent prior to the American civil war and even less to the parties that exist on the other side of the Atlantic today.

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The two puzzles are related. It is true that the Framers of the Constitution had no liking and made no provision for organized political parties, and it is also true that all of the early Presidents made at least a half-hearted attempt to transcend partisanship. It was not until Andrew Jackson that we got our first unequivocally partisan President. It is also true that the partisan divide that emerged in the 1790s was viewed by both sides as something temporary and regrettable. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison formed a party, which in time they called the Republican Party, to counter what they considered a conspiracy on the part of George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and in response he formed a party to counter what he considered a conspiracy on their part. Absent the conspiracy, or in the eventuality of its defeat and disappearance, the American republic’s first partisans expected the parties to wither away.

In this presumption, as Martin van Buren came to realize, they were wrong. Given the separation of powers, it was virtually impossible to govern in the absence of partisan alliances. But the very structure of American government – in which Congressmen are elected by particular constituencies located in particular places and look to that locality for re-election, and in which Senators represent particular states and are no less sensitive to local concerns – subverts partisanship and promotes a species of moderation as well. Only the President sees the Union from the perspective of the whole. When Tip O’Neill remarked that all politics is local, he spoke in a fashion perfectly appropriate to his situation as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We must, then, view political parties from a double perspective.

They are alliances based on principle (this is how they all originated), and they are alliances of convenience designed to enable Congressmen to extract goodies for their constituents back home. In other words, they arise from and nourish deliberation concerning the common good, and they provide occasion for negotiation with an eye to particular goods to be allotted to particular individuals or groups. In consequence, our parties oscillate between two extremes. In some circumstances, they operate as parties of principle; in others, as parties of patronage. Most of the time, they occupy, in an uncomfortable and awkward fashion, the middle ground.

When a party comes to power at a moment of realignment, it tends towards the former extreme and for a time it short-circuits the separation of powers by uniting the legislative, the executive, and, by hook or by crook, even the judicial power in the hands of a single group intent on governing with an eye to specific principles. But once the members of that party have set things right according to their lights, it runs out of gas, and the underlying structure – the separation of powers – reasserts itself; and though a single party may control both houses of the legislature and the presidency, its members are, at least some of the time, at one another’s throats. They cannot afford to ignore their constituents back home, and each is apt to defend the prerogatives accorded the office he holds. When someone referred to the Republicans as the enemy, Tip O’Neill snorted and replied, “No, the Senate is the enemy! The Republicans are the Opposition.”

Party members are reminded that they are men of principle when they think that they are faced with a conspiracy. This is where Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the stalwarts of the first Republican Party stood when they charged Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist with plotting the establishment in the United States of a monarchy. This is where Andrew Jackson and his fellow Democrats stood when they denounced Nicholas Biddle and the Second National Bank. That is where Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in and after 1860 stood when they railed against the slave-power conspiracy. This is where Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats stood in 1936 when the former charged that “a small group” of his fellow Americans was intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” And this is where we stand today.

Look at what Barack Obama and the Democrats have done – with the so-called “stimulus” bill, with what they call “healthcare reform,” and with their reform of financial regulation. Each initiative involved the passage of a bill more than a thousand pages in length – which virtually no one voting on it could have read, and no one but those who framed it could have understood. Each involved a massive expansion of the federal government and massive pay-offs to favored constituencies. Each is part of a much larger project openly pursued by Progressives in the course of the last century and aimed at concentrating in the hands of “a small group” of putative experts “an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” And we can now say, as FDR said in 1936, that “for too many of us life” is “no longer free” and “liberty no longer real” for we are being deprived by the government of the means by which to “follow the pursuit of happiness.” The only difference is that FDR’s assertions were lies, and when we make the same claim, we are, alas, telling the truth.

This is where we stand today. And there is more. As I have argued repeatedly in the last twelve months – here, here, and here – Barack Obama represents the last gasp of the Progressive impulse, and his ruthlessness and that of his party in both the House and the Senate reflect a species of desperation on their part. The welfare state is no longer sustainable. Thanks to modern medicine, we live longer lives than did our predecessors; and thanks to Social Security, we have fewer children. In consequence, the demographic balance between those expected to pay into the system and those on the receiving end has shifted gradually and unobtrusively but nonetheless dramatically in favor of the latter, and soon the former will no longer have the wherewithal to pay the dues they owe.

This needs to be underlined. The massive increase in taxation required to pay for the as-yet unfunded pensions of civil servants nearing retirement and the increase required to sustain Social Security and Medicare would so radically change the incentives and alter the conduct of those who earn and invest that the tax intake would be far more likely to decline than increase. This may seem counter-intuitive but it is a fact. The trouble with socialism was accurately described by Margaret Thatcher: sooner or later you really do run out of other people’s money, and here is how it happens.

Just as a tax reduction can stimulate economic activity and eventuate in an increase in revenues, so can a tax increase reduce economic activity and eventuate in a decrease in revenues. The more dramatic the change in the tax code, the more dramatic the effect. When human beings know that they can keep the bulk of what they make, they are apt to work like the devil and invest in new technology. When they know that most of what they make will be taken from them and redistributed to others, they are far more apt to take the day off and relegate their savings to treasury bills and municipal bonds.

Everything that Barack Obama has attempted to accomplish in the last eighteen months flies in the face of economic reality, and the American people are not as economically illiterate today as they were in 1932 and 1936. They look at the deficits run up in the last two years; they contemplate his healthcare reform; and they know that they will be called upon to pay and pay and pay. They are rightly afraid of the consequences, and a great many of them are also furious. What was sold as hope and change is likely to leave them hopeless and in possession of little but small change – and, as the polling data confirms, to an ever-increasing degree, they recognize this fact.

We as a people have come to a crossroads. We can acquiesce in what the Democrats have forced down our throats; we can meekly accept Obamacare, the confiscatory taxes that will come with it, and the rationing of medical care that Obama and his minions intend to impose on us. Or we can fight – but this can only be done through a political party, and the party we have to work with – the Republican Party – is at the moment a party of patronage frustrated at being driven from the heights of power and more apt to mouth slogans designed to mollify our zeal than to act in concert as a party of principle intent on setting things right.

To get a sense of the obstacles we face, I suggest that those who have gotten this far in perusing this post take a close look at the last four chapters of my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, where I chart and attempt to explain the growth of the administrative state both in the United States and abroad; sample the blogposts linked here and found here, where I discuss more recent developments; and then read and re-read the brilliant and disturbing analysis of our present discontents that Angelo M. Codevilla has published in the current issue of The American Spectator (which is available online here).

As Codevilla and I have argued in different but complementary ways, what is required is a return to first principles carried out at the ballot box and enforced on the hapless hacks in the Republican Party by a public sentiment fierce, fully aroused, and no longer willing to tolerate half measures. What is needed is a peaceful revolution that restores civil equality, that does away with “affirmative action” and protected legal categories, that eliminates the redistributionist apparatus imposed upon us gradually over the last century, that eventuates in a principled rejection of government subsidies of every kind, and that restores to the states and the localities the prerogatives that are rightly theirs. Anything short of this will merely slow down our gradual descent into servitude.


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Posted Jul 24th 2010 at 6:00 am in Congress, Economics, Featured Story, Federal Spending, Financial Services, Healthcare, History, Obama, Politics, Regulation, Tea Party, taxes | 89 Comments