Americans often dream of freeing themselves from the two-party system. Some find delight in the idea of a third party free of the dogmas of Republicans and Democrats, ideally one perfectly reflecting their own beliefs. Others imagine their preferred party vanquishing its rival for a generation, ushering in an era of unfettered one-party rule through a “permanent majority.” Such dreams are utopian. America has always had two major political coalitions, each winning about half the vote. It will always have two major political coalitions, each winning about half the vote. America will never have a long-lasting third party of any significance. No party will ever win a permanent majority. That's because the American two-party system is more than an accident or tradition. It's part of the basic foundation of the American constitutional republic.
The story of America's First Party System, in which Alexander Hamilton's Federalists battled against Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans, is the story of how America's Founding generation discovered to their dismay the way American party systems work. You can forgive yourself if you despise two-party politics, since America's Founders didn't much care for political parties either. They never even mentioned parties in their Constitution because they never intended for them to exist. Yet almost as soon as their new republic opened its doors, two political parties formed and went on to dominate American government for decades. As America's Founders discovered to their dismay, political parties are an essential component of American democracy. We may not always like the two-party system, and for good reason, but party systems and the realignments that create and destroy them are fundamental components of the American republic and will always be.
THE FEDERALISTS AND DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICANS ARISE
It was a generally accepted fact in both America and Britain during the eighteenth century that political parties were evils. The only question was whether they were necessary evils or ones that could be successfully suppressed and eradicated.1 America's Founders agreed that political parties were dangers a rational republic would do well to avoid. As James Madison, the person most responsible for designing the America Constitution, wrote about them, parties are a “violence” that only inject “instability, injustice, and confusion…into the public councils.” They cause “the public good [to be] disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties” and public decision to be made “not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority,” making them “mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”2 When America's Founders set out to create their new republic, not only did they never intend it to include political parties, or “factions” as they usually called them. They specifically crafted their Constitution to ensure political parties never arose.3
America's Founders wanted to create a republic of reason. They intended for citizens to elect the nation's wisest and most enlightened minds to reach decisions for the common good through rational argument and debate. They therefore designed a complex republic with three separate and independent branches of government, each with the power to check and balance the power of the others, further dividing authority between a national government and individual state governments—“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”4 Their Constitution gave the most power to a Congress in which elected representatives created the nation's laws through reasoned debate, and it further separated that Congress into two chambers, requiring mutual agreement to act. In light of this careful constitutional design, political parties look like corruption. Parties are private associations located entirely outside government seeking to coordinate action across every institution. They seek not to independently debate the common good issue by issue but to advance the party's already-decided agenda. They seek to overpower the independent thought of legislators in the name of party loyalty. They seek to overpower the independent thought of voters through partisanship and campaigning. Political parties are essentially conspiracies to overpower the Constitution's carefully designed mechanisms against any person or group ever gaining enough power to act alone. Their entire purpose is to circumvent the protections the Founders believed critical to rational government. Yet as soon as the Founders formed their first government, they quickly divided into two energetic political parties to their own bafflement and disgust.
We sometimes forget that when Washington and his administration set about charting a course for their young country, they had no idea what a democratic republic was supposed to look like, much less how one might actually work. We all carry a model about in our heads of how democratic politics functions because we've always lived in a world full of democratic republics. America's Founders, without our centuries of experience to draw upon, were inventing this form of government we take for granted from scratch. Most people at the time—living in an era in which everyone accepted the legitimate rule of kings—had grave doubts whether it was even possible to sustain a democratic republic at all without it tumbling into tyranny, turning itself over to the false promises of a cunning demagogue, or falling prey to the angry passions of the mob. America's Founders could look for guidance to ancient societies like Greece and Rome, republics built for a very different world over a thousand years in the past, which often functioned more like oligarchies and ultimately collapsed into tyranny or despotism. They could look to the British parliament, still awkwardly sharing power under an unwritten constitution with an honest-to-goodness king. They could look to the corrupt oligarchies of the Italian city states. Ultimately, however, they had to rely on their own intuitions and imaginations about what pitfalls might lie ahead for the democratic republic they would create.5
When George Washington assembled America's first presidential administration, its officials appeared to be likeminded and united. They all agreed with the American Revolution's ideals, supported the Constitution, and dared not challenge Washington. The chief political dispute at the time was between the Federalists, advocates of replacing the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, America's first organizing document, with the Constitution, and the Anti-Federalists, who opposed the Constitution.6 Washington's important officers were all Federalists, with the possible exception of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who had flirted with Anti-Federalism before joining the Federalist cause.7 As Washington's new government set to work, the Founding generation still considered the idea of an organized opposition to the government inherently disruptive, useless, and illegitimate.8 Based on Britain's experience with factionalism in its own government, formal party opposition—as opposed to mere individuals independently opposing government—still had a somewhat unsavory reputation, tainted with a whiff of disloyalty and treason.9 The members of Washington's cabinet, however, held very different ideas about how to safeguard the new republic.
As president, Washington relied greatly on his younger protégé and treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, a New York lawyer who had served alongside Washington as his aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War.10 Hamilton had a vision of America, the small colony at the world's edge, growing into a great commercial republic standing equal to the greatest powers of Europe.11 As Washington's most trusted official, Hamilton quickly set about implementing policies and reforms to strengthen the national government, provide infrastructure to sustain a commercial economy, and remedy the failures of the Articles of Confederation. Hamilton wrote three reports detailing his plans, one proposing the national government assume state debts accumulated during the war, along with mechanisms to secure credit to pay those debts; a second creating a national bank like a Federal Reserve; and a third proposing tariffs and subsidies to encourage manufacturing and fund infrastructure like roads and canals.12 Hamilton's plans—which incidentally benefitted the commercial economies of the Northern states that had failed to pay off their war debts while imposing costs on the Southern states that had already mostly repaid them—were meant to advance a vision of America as a growing nation of merchants and bankers, with taxes and officials and standing armies to compete in the squabbles of nations.13 Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and his protégé, James Madison, had a more romantic vision of what this republic was supposed to be. They believed those who worked in manufacturing or commerce, without the economic freedom afforded by owning their own land, were rendered by their dependency unfit citizens for a republic.14 They yearned for a republic of independent yeoman farmers free of what they believed were the corrupting influences of state power and commerce, which they associated with aristocracy.15 Of course, in practice this also served the interests of rich plantation aristocrats like Jefferson, whose wealth rested on the exploited labor of slavery and whose manners and lifestyle were far more elitist and privileged than a self-made lawyer like Hamilton, whom they accused of aristocratic pretensions.
As Hamilton marched forth with his bold ideas of reform to the cheers of New York and Boston, opposition gathered. What Hamilton and his administration faction saw as strengthening the young nation, Jefferson and his followers feared was a path toward corruption and aristocracy that would destroy their republican experiment. Jefferson's anti-administration faction waged a pitched battle to stop Hamilton's policies as violations of the American Revolution's ideals. Hamilton won most of the important battles, winning the implementation of his plan's critical cornerstones, but the powerful anti-administration resistance levied a toll. Hamilton and his supporters won the debt plan, in exchange for relocating the nation's capital to the Potomac River, and the national bank, but Jefferson and his faction thwarted the industrial proposals.16 Both groups then worked to convince a reluctant Washington to stay on for a second term to keep the nation united, where they soon discovered new differences.17
When the French Revolution led France into war against monarchical Europe, Jefferson's followers, now calling themselves republicans, demanded America support France as its ally and revolutionary brother. Jefferson's republicans saw the French Revolution as a struggle against the same aristocracy and corruption toward which they feared Hamilton was leading America.18 Washington, Hamilton, and the administration faction, still called Federalists, weren't interested in gambling the security of their new nation in a dangerous foreign war, much less one they feared might rip apart American society if the utopianism radicalism behind it ever spread at home.19 Opponents of the administration began organizing into Democratic-Republican Societies, but their association with Jacobin radicalism and the Whiskey Rebellion tax revolt tarred them as dangerous and disloyal.20 Washington denounced these “self-created societies” as inherently dangerous provocateurs of insurrection—seeming to claim any organized opposition to his government was tantamount to treason—helping to stomp them out.21 As long as Washington remained president, however, this factionalism mostly roiled beneath a formally united government. Few dared to attack the hero of the American Revolution openly, instead criticizing ministers like Hamilton for misleading and deceiving him. Then, in 1796, Washington retired.
Alarmed at the warfare inside his government, Washington dedicated a Farewell Address to convey a grave warning to his successors—they were on course to rip apart the republic they had just laboriously created. His theme was more than just concern over the controversies pitting his administration's federalism against Jefferson's republicanism. It denounced in clear terms the idea of the political parties he saw forming in America:
The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.22
Everyone ignored Washington's warnings.
In the election of 1796, all this factionalism broke loose. It was increasingly clear these two factions, federalists and republicans, weren't just two ad hoc groups sparring over an economic plan. Nor were they just the partisans of two ambitious personalities, Hamilton and Jefferson, scrapping over power. They were the start of two enduring political parties engaged in a philosophical debate about how a republic was supposed to work—not merely federalists and republicans but a Federalist Party and a Democratic-Republican Party.23 Federalists, who mainly drew from New England and Northern elites, favored growth and commerce, a strong national government, national economic policies, preferred Britain over France in foreign affairs, and feared that the naive, utopian, and radical ideas of the Democratic-Republicans would bring bloody violence, destruction, and murder just as it had revolutionary France. Democratic-Republicans, who drew from the South and the growing middle class of merchants and artisans in the North, favored a decentralized nation of independent farmers, a weak federal government with states' rights, favored France over Britain, and believed Federalists were closet aristocrats, too friendly with England and supporting a corrupting economic and political program meant to choke off liberty in order to install a monarchy in America.24 Their disagreements over policies and issues, they learned, actually represented rival visions of what the American republic was supposed to be. Could America really grow into a rich and powerful nation of commerce, standing armies, and national authority and retain its republican character? Did America need national institutions and taxes to grow and thrive, or were such things a path to aristocracy? Did a republic require the radical ideals of revolutionary France, or was that a path toward instability, bloodshed, and ruin? Each party had conflicting ideas about what a republic required, and each feared its rival's ideas were betrayals of the American Revolution that would inescapably lead to the destruction of the republic of liberty they won a war to create. These clashing ideas would echo across American politics for a generation.
In 1796, the Federalists rallied around Vice President John Adams as Washington's natural successor. The Democratic-Republicans promoted their leader, Jefferson.25 Although the presidential electors were still supposed to be independent, both parties expected electors from the state legislatures they controlled to vote for their faction's candidate—subverting the original intent of the electoral college. Adams won the most electoral votes and the presidency. Some Federalist electors, however, cast their second vote for local favorites instead of the intended Federalist vice-presidential candidate, so Jefferson won the second-highest number of votes and, under the constitutional rules that existed at that time, the vice-presidency.26 Adams personally loathed political parties, continuing to rail against them throughout his life, so he naturally hoped to govern above parties as Washington had sought to do.27 He saw himself as bound to no party, attempted to move past the partisan battles of the Washington years, and even sidelined Hamilton out of a mixture of disagreement and jealously.28 Jefferson and his faction, however, remained determined to fight Adams and his perceived Federalism.
After a series of political conflicts and diplomatic blunders between America and revolutionary France spread war fever and fear of French invasion across America, the clash between Adams and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans really came to a head.29 Fearing disloyalty from immigrants friendly to France, as well as angry political polarization from French partisans in America, Adams and his administration advanced a package of controversial laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws empowered the president to detain or expel foreign immigrants and to criminally prosecute anyone who opposed any “measures of the United States” or who spoke, wrote, or printed any statement bringing the president into “contempt or disrepute.”30 The Federalists—and Adams in particular—had long suffered great abuse by a more sophisticated and extensive Democratic-Republican press.31 Not accepting or understanding the idea of legitimate party opposition, Adams viewed these Democratic-Republican attacks as corrosive assaults on the American government that threatened national stability and order. Neither party yet saw its rival as a legitimate opposition; both still believed the other an illegitimate band perverting the republic, a danger the nation needed to violently stamp out.32 Believing he was fighting a disease eating away at the republic, Adams eagerly employed the Acts to prosecute Democratic-Republican newspaper editors, journalists, and political activists for speaking against the administration—enraging Democratic-Republicans who saw these prosecutions as unconstitutional partisan tyranny.33 Backlash put the final coffin nail into the nonpartisan ideal.
The election of 1800, pitting Jefferson against Adams for a second time, was among America's ugliest. Both parties now waged nearly hysterical campaigns of mudslinging and hyperbole, claiming their opponent would destroy the republic if elected.34 Democratic-Republicans denounced Adams as a fool, imbecile, tyrant, and closet monarchist plotting to overthrow the republic with a new aristocracy. Federalists accused the Democratic-Republicans of Jacobin radicalism that would plunge America into foreign wars, tear apart its society, and ultimately sink the nation into anarchy. Journalist James Callender, Jefferson's chief literary assassin, wrote on Jefferson's payroll that Adams prattled with “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”35 A Federalist newspaper, the Connecticut Currant, wrote that if Jefferson were ever elected president, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will all be openly taught, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”36 Both parties worked diligently to elect partisan presidential electors, finalizing the transition of the electoral college from independent decision-makers to the party functionaries they remain today. Jefferson won the election in large part due to the outrage over the Alien and Sedition Acts, but since Democratic-Republican electors cast their two votes by party line, his vice-presidential pick, Aaron Burr, won the same number of electoral votes. (The Federalists arranged for one elector to throw his second vote to avoid this situation.) That tossed the election into the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives, which almost picked Burr until Hamilton convinced them Jefferson was the less-dangerous choice.37 In response to the debacle, America scrapped the original system of independent elections for president and vice president in favor of party tickets—now tacitly recognizing political parties in the republic's election rules.
America's Founders, however, still hadn't accepted parties. Jefferson triumphantly proclaimed in his first inaugural address, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists.”38 That didn't mean he intended to respect his Federalist opposition. Jefferson believed his victory meant federalism, now defeated and discredited through his electoral triumph, would properly fade away as the entire nation, finally freed of the corrupting influence of the dastardly Federalist cabal, united as Democratic-Republicans.39 To carry out his goal, Jefferson eagerly set out to undo all the horrors of Federalist policy he had spent the last decade denouncing. He pardoned those prosecuted under the Sedition Act.40 He repealed Federalist taxes and cut national spending to rid America of the debt Hamilton had grown to create American credit.41 He shrunk the national army dramatically.42 As the Democratic-Republicans transitioned from an opposition railing against the decisions of others to leaders responsible for the republic's welfare, however, something interesting happened.
After investigating the Hamiltonian economic system, Jefferson declined to alter it at all. As his close adviser and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin counseled, after tearing into the details of Hamilton's economic policies to expose the corruptions and errors he presumed he would discover, “I have found the most perfect system ever formed. Any change that should be made in it would injure it. Hamilton made no blunders, committed no frauds. He did nothing wrong.”43 Presented with the opportunity to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France, Jefferson seized it to great applause—despite his party's strict view of constitutional powers that suggested the president lacked the authority to do any such thing and the debt the purchase required, which his party ideologically opposed.44 Jefferson eventually bolstered the military he had previously cut so he could wage a foreign war against North African pirates and stave off possible European incursions.45 Jefferson even proposed a Hamiltonian-sounding national infrastructure plan to strengthen the economy.46 The Democratic-Republicans more than simply made peace with Hamilton's Federalist policies. They effectively adopted them.47
In public, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans continued waging the same wars over the same debates, denouncing each other as malevolent threats to the republic. In practice, however, there wasn't much left to dispute. After two decades, America had gone through three presidents from two rival parties. It established new institutions. It navigated foreign crises. It built banks, financial systems, and standing armies and found them not only useful but essential. The nation hadn't slid into tyranny. An Old World aristocracy hadn't risen to restore the monarchy. Jacobins hadn't plunged the nation into anarchy. The rational fears of the Founding generation in 1789—before anyone knew how their new system would work, or if it even would work at all—were no longer reasonable in 1808. After two decades of experience, the American people had tacitly reached a conclusion. The nation could have all of Hamilton's institutions without trampling on republicanism or courting aristocracy as Jefferson had feared. When Jefferson adopted Hamiltonianism under the name of Democratic-Republicanism, the First Party System debate was effectively over. All that really remained to hold these parties together was political tribalism, campaign ballyhoo, ambition, habit, and inertia.
THE INEVITABILITY OF AMERICAN PARTY SYSTEMS
As the Founding generation learned to their despair, the American system of government is designed to produce two major parties, each receiving about half the national vote. Powerful third-party movements will erupt from time to time. They may even temporarily capture the nation's attention before the existing parties coopt them or they simply fade away. Parties may briefly capture sweeping national majorities, like Roosevelt's New Deal Democrats, until America drifts back toward two-party parity. Yet unless and until we overhaul human nature, America's constitutional system, and the present election rules, America will always trend back toward two national coalitions just within striking distance of a national majority and no larger. America's Founders might not have intentionally designed a republic for two-party politics, but party systems with two fairly balanced parties is nonetheless implicit in their design.
The reason is obvious when you think about it. Under the current rules, you have to control over half the votes cast to influence the American government. If you control any less than half, you get nothing. In a society with three major factions, or four, or five, or more, none can win alone. If they instead share power in an alliance, they can collectively control enough votes to at least enact parts of everyone's agenda. A political coalition that controls any less than half the national vote will thus naturally add factions until it can reach a majority. What people often miss is that this same process also works in reverse. Every faction that supports a coalition expects to get some of its priorities enacted in exchange for its support. Each additional faction means satisfying more people, sharing more power, and everybody getting fewer of their priorities enacted. An alliance winning significantly more than half the vote can safely ignore or cast out the parts of its coalition that other members like the least so every remaining faction can get more of what it wants. An alliance has everything to gain by adding supporters up to fifty percent of the vote and everything to lose by adding supporters once it reaches the threshold. Given America's federal structure with overlapping institutions and multiple sovereigns that divide and separate power across institutions, jurisdictions, and levels of government, a party must do this nationally—coordinating the actions of senates, presidents, state legislatures, agencies, mayor's offices, state supreme courts, and more. While inevitably producing pockets in which one party dominates, the system overall produces two national parties capturing about half of the national vote.
Many Americans incorrectly blame this two-party tendency on America's “first past the post” or “winner take all” voting schemes of single-member voting districts, in which only the top vote-getter wins office. Such systems inevitably create two parties, a tendency political scientists call Duverger's Law.48 To break the two-party monopoly, reformers often pine for proportional representative schemes in which parties receive legislative seats in proportion to the percentage of the vote won during the election, a system popular in many European-style parliamentary democracies. Since a party that wins 15 percent of the national vote still wins about 15 percent of the legislative seats under proportional representation, multiparty parliaments usually contain many smaller fluid parties, each of which exercise some power. American observers too often fail to appreciate, however, that once these smaller parties get to parliament, they still inevitably combine until a coalition controlling just about half the elected members form a government. Factions still have to share power in a majority coalition because the parliament still operates through majority rule, and the parties in opposition still have to cooperate to hold the ruling coalition accountable. Proportional representation still essentially breaks society into two broad political coalitions each receiving about half the vote, just pushing the process forward from the voting booth to parliament. Advantages and disadvantages exist in both systems, ones that strengthen or weaken certain sorts of factions, but under either system society ends up with two broad coalitions hovering around a majority. The only difference is at which stage the coalitions form and how stable they remain. The problem isn't single-member voting districts. The problem is the principle of majority rule on which the modern republic is based.
America's political system, moreover, isn't just designed to produce two roughly equal national parties but parties of a particular kind—deeply ideological ones. Political science has developed many methods to analyze parties and their coalitions. It was once common to view American parties as nonideological alliances driven by interest groups, issue activists, and discrete groups in society. Others chiefly focus on the measurable factions within each party, whether demographic identity groups such as “Catholics” or “soccer moms” or “Hispanics,” issue advocates like “economic conservatives” or “feminists” or “labor voters,” or self-identified factions like “religious conservatives.” Others look at parties through their overarching ideologies like “liberalism” and “conservativism.” Each method is valuable in context, with frameworks based around discrete and measurable identities particularly useful for people whose interest is in predicting and influencing individual elections in the middle of a working party system. It's obviously far easier to poll, measure, and study which candidates groups of people are likely to support in a specific campaign given a stable system of two well-defined parties than to delve into why people care about the things they do—something many people don't even understand about themselves. Party systems and realignments, however, are most powerfully driven by changes in ideology.
To explore whether American parties were mere coalitions of interest or something more, the political scientist John Gerring systematically analyzed the platforms and rhetoric of America's major parties across American history. He surveyed campaign stump speeches, party platforms, and campaign pronouncements to see what ideological principles parties invoked over time.49 He found that American political parties promoted consistent ideological themes over eras roughly corresponding to America's five historical party systems.50 In each era, America's major parties consistently relied upon the same collection of ideological principles and ideas. These same principles consistently echoed in the speeches, platforms, and policy agendas of the parties across the entire era. Out of these principles flowed the party's constantly changing agenda of specific policies and ideas. After each era, the principles each party relied upon changed. Gerring wasn't sure himself what accounted for the development of a party's ideology or what made ideologies suddenly change after long eras of stability, but he established the fact that American parties remain not just ideologically consistent but ideologically driven throughout each party system era.51 The idea that American parties are nonideological coalitions bound by interest and not principles and ideas simply doesn't conform to either experience or evidence.52
That parties are inherently ideological and built out of powerful principles is obvious to most ordinary voters. Choosing a political party isn't a cold rational decision like choosing the right car insurance company. It's a powerful statement of personal identity and one of the most deeply emotional decisions people make. A party identity is a primal attachment that connects you to assumptions about the most fundamental aspects of your character. Your choice of party says more about you in the eyes of your neighbors than your profession, where you grew up, or the car you drive. It affects who you date, who you marry, what your employer thinks of you, and how family members treat you when you come home for Thanksgiving.53 For many people it's an attachment that lasts for life.54 People don't form lifetime attachments to something as deeply important as their party identity based on transient campaign issues that change radically from year to year—over recent decades, national campaigns have centered around everything from “Whipping Inflation Now,” anti-missile treaties, a “nuclear freeze,” crime control, tax reform packages, welfare reform, a “star wars” nuclear umbrella, term limits for members of Congress, a social security “lock box,” adding a Medicare drug benefit, and eliminating corruption in Washington. People affiliate with a party not because of issue white papers or policy plans but because the principles in which the party believes resonate with their own. People attach themselves to a party because it confirms their identity and deepest values.
We all know this instinctively. Government policy touches on so many complicated topics—the energy industry, the history and policies of every foreign government, cutting-edge medicine, environmental science, the sociology of policing, the socioeconomic impact of immigration, the efficacy of various weapon systems for national defense, to name just a few—that it's unreasonable to expect ordinary voters who barely have time to keep their heads above water at work and at home to invest the time and attention necessary to understand it all. Ordinary voters have no way to judge whether the policy ideas political candidates propose are reasonable or likely to work, so most people have no choice but to use a proxy. The proxy is whether they think a candidate sees the world the same way they do. Does this candidate value the same things I care about? Is he or she someone I can trust to pursue the policies I would pursue if I understood the issues myself? Or is this someone who sees the world so differently they might seek to push America in a direction I won't like? Put simply, most people can only look at the principles a candidate and party represent through their ideology and compare them to their own principles. When we identify the factions of a party by issues or demographic groups—as pro-business voters, environmentalists, organized labor, working-class men, Catholics, women, African Americans, soccer moms, the South, rural voters, or suburban ones—we're talking about tips of icebergs poking out of the water, effects instead of causes. For most things, a party chooses to support an issue because it arises from one of the principles in which it believes, not the other way around. While parties tend to attract disproportionate support from certain demographic groups during an era, it's mainly because the life experiences of those groups at that moment in history disproportionately cause them to value similar things that align them with the party's ideology.
It could hardly work any other way. A party has to tell a story that taps into what people value, demonstrating they can trust the party to address problems as they might if they understood the details—a story that touches their values, their dreams, their nightmares, and their loves. The only way a party can conceivably do this, uniting half the voting population for decades at a time, is by identifying and answering a grand question that hovers over the age, a problem so large and meaningful that everyone in America frets about it for decades. Its answer to that question, which we usually call a party ideology, naturally combines several unrelated principles each appealing to different factions of people, to create a temporary political alliance. We all know this from experience because we all know that not everyone who identifies with a party and its ideology does so for the same reasons. We all know a professional business-minded “conservative” isn't coming from the same place as a rural religious “conservative,” any more than a blue-collar labor union “liberal” is motivated by the same things as an urban progressive activist “liberal.” What on the surface appears to be two great teams at war is in reality two big, messy coalitions binding millions of very different people around a collection of principles combined into two distinct party ideologies waging a national debate over the greatest issue of an age.
America's Founders during the early years of the republic unwittingly discovered this lesson about how and why their new government's design inevitably led to two broad and ideological parties. Then, upon Jefferson's retirement, James Madison assumed the presidency, and he and his party launched the disastrous War of 1812. America's Founders were about to learn a second lesson about American parties and party systems—one about how and why they also inevitably collapse.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE FIRST PARTY SYSTEM
Following the precedent George Washington set, Thomas Jefferson retired from the White House after two terms. He handed his office to his closest adviser and protégé, James Madison, who saw his duty as carrying forth Jefferson's Democratic-Republican vision. By now, the Federalist Party was floundering while Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans dominated politically.55 What's more, after Madison allowed Hamilton's national bank to quietly expire, all that really remained to separate Federalists from Democratic-Republicans was lingering tribalism and a preference for Britain over France.56 Then a war-hawk faction of the Democratic-Republicans under the leadership of House Speaker Henry Clay began agitating in Congress for what they believed would be a quick and easy war against Great Britain. America, they thought, could quickly seize British Canada, end British efforts to limit American expansion, aid France, and finally avenge America's honor in a second war for independence.57 In 1812, these war hawks drove Congress to issue a declaration of war and Madison happily signed it. Their war was a disaster, one that brought the First Party System crashing down.
The War of 1812 was yet another outgrowth of the wars against Napoleon. Since the early days of the French Revolution, Great Britain and revolutionary France had been in a perpetual on-again, off-again state of war, leaving America—with its economy reliant on European trade—caught in the middle. France controlled the European continent by land with its powerful army, and Britain dominated the sea with the wooden wall of its grand navy, so for years these two powers—each unable to conquer the other—fought through the control of trade. The navies of both powers harassed American ships, although the British particularly seemed to relish humbling their former rebellious colony.58 Britain even claimed the right to forcefully board American ships to impress into royal service sailors it suspected had been born subjects to its king. Off the coast of Virginia in 1807, the British fired upon and boarded an American warship, the USS Chesapeake, killing several American sailors and hauling off four more into British service, leading the Jefferson administration to retaliate with trade restrictions that mostly hurt America.59 Britain had also embraced a policy of arming Native American tribes in the Midwest, in part to hinder American expansion toward what remained of its North American territory. With Britain distracted by Napoleon, the war hawks thought it was the perfect time to push back against British aggression with a quick American strike. A mixture of poor leadership, strategic miscalculation, bad planning, and the unanticipated strength of the British response, turned Madison's triumph into an embarrassing quagmire.
The War of 1812 didn't go as the war hawks planned. The British repulsed an ill-advised American invasion of British Canada, landed troops in Washington, DC, chased the president out of town, burnt the White House, and blockaded American ports to shut down trade.60 After the initial patriotic enthusiasm wore off, the war became unpopular everywhere, but Federalists especially loathed it.61 Madison's government expected New England's militias to bear the brunt of the fighting on the Canadian front, while the powerful British Navy wrecked New England's trade-based economy, all while partisan Democratic-Republicans fiercely denounced as traitors everyone who questioned their ill-conceived war of choice. The Federalist-controlled states of New England naturally dragged their feet on providing resources and troops.62 Before long, discontent over the war was so strong Federalist newspapers began trumpeting that the states of New England were considering outright secession from the Union. In 1814, five Federalist-controlled New England states sent delegates to a convention in Hartford, Connecticut, to lodge demands. Madison's administration feared this challenge to national authority, even making military preparations to quickly respond to a rebellion if the delegates dared to leave the Union.63
With the threat of secession lingering in the air, the Hartford delegates drafted a strong report demanding policies and constitutional amendments to protect New England from further Democratic-Republican folly. The delegates demanded fundamental constitutional changes such as requiring a two-thirds congressional majority to declare war and changes meant to weaken the lock the Democratic-Republican South seemed to have on the presidency. Federalist delegates marched their petition to Washington, expecting to make political hay of it in the middle of a disaster of a war, but, unfortunately for them, their timing was horrible.64 The petition arrived just after General Andrew Jackson vanquished the British at the Battle of New Orleans, a victory that took place just as a ship with a signed peace treaty restoring the status quo was already on its way from Europe. In the popular mind, Jackson's great victory transformed the War of 1812 from a painful humiliation to a triumph—America had once more stood up to a bullying superpower and held its own! Caught in the unfortunate crosswinds of a sudden patriotic fervor, the Federalist brand turned toxic and party support collapsed.65 The Federalist Party now looked like a party of traitors and secessionists. The label “Federalist” would become the filthiest of political insults for decades to come.
Secretary of State James Monroe, Jefferson's other great protégé, swept to an easy victory in 1816. Although the now nationally despised Federalist Party nominated a candidate, it hardly even contested the election. The new president, who loathed the Federalist Party and genuinely held the paranoid belief that it was intent on installing an American monarch, saw an opportunity to stamp out partisanship and the Federalist Party for good.66 Monroe declared a policy of “de-Federalization” that welcomed fleeing Federalists into his government but refused to recognize the Federalist Party or anyone still associated with it.67 As Monroe explained in a letter to Andrew Jackson:
My impressions is that the Administration should rest strongly on the republican party, indulging toward the other a spirit of moderation, and evincing a desire to discriminate between its members, and to bring the whole into the republican fold as quickly as possible. Many men very distinguished for their talents are of the opinion that the existence of the federal party is necessary to keep union and order in the republican ranks, that is that free government cannot exist without parties. This is not my opinion. That the ancient republics were always divided into parties; that the English government is maintained by an opposition, that is by the existence of a party in opposition to the Ministry, I well know. But I think that the cause of these divisions to be found in certain defects of those governments, rather than in human nature; and that we have happily avoided those defects in our system.68
Monroe even launched a good-will tour across America to rebuild the lost spirit of national unity, creating what one newspaper famously called an “Era of Good Feelings.”69 His policy was a smashing success. Eager to disassociate themselves from a now-fatal brand, most Federalists showily embraced the appeal to national unity. No real issues still remained to hold Federalists to their party outside old party loyalty and inertia, and with the party brand so damaged that was no longer enough. Although the Federalists formally lingered on in a few pockets for another decade, the Federalist Party was effectively dead within the year.70 With no opponent left to fight, the Democratic-Republican Party lost purpose and soon withered away as well. America's First Party System effectively collapsed.
The next eight years of Monroe's Era of Good Feelings was perhaps the strangest period of American political history. Monroe hoped that America could once again function as the Founders intended, without parties or partisanship, and he modeled his presidency on Washington's. As long as Monroe remained in office, his plan even seemed to work. Under Monroe's leadership, the American government seemed to function as a rational republic with independent-minded leaders. In 1820, he even became the first president since Washington to run unopposed. Beneath this placid surface, however, the republic roiled with discontent. Without partisan pressure or common interest to bind them, Monroe's government was riven with factionalism, as ambitious rivals jockeyed for position.71 Monroe's appointees and allies in Congress became more interested in petty wars against rivals over slights or personal interests. Without the tools to unite or motivate them, Monroe often even lacked the leverage to drive his agenda with his own subordinates, much less with Congress.72 The Era of Good Feelings is rightly considered an era of national drift.73 Without parties to unite and guide them, and without a common enemy to fight, ego and ambition ruled and the national government couldn't function. The failure of Monroe's Era of Good Feelings was a final coffin nail in the Founder's original vision of a nonpartisan republic. Without political parties to channel ambition and guide the government, the American republic simply didn't work.
When Monroe retired in 1824 after two terms, the illusion of national unity imploded. Four ambitious and powerful men wanted to replace Monroe in the White House—Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, House Speaker Henry Clay, Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, and now senator Andrew Jackson. Since partisanship had been declared dead, the four candidates didn't compete over partisanship but through personality, regionalism, plus a little buried Federalist resentment against the son of John Adams. Splitting the votes four ways, no candidate won an outright majority. That meant the House of Representatives had to pick the president from among the top three vote-getters, making House Speaker Clay, who came in fourth, effectively kingmaker. Clay threw his support to Adams. Adams in return made Clay his secretary of state—an office people at the time saw as the presumptive president-in-waiting.74 Jackson, who won the most electoral votes and thought that earned him the presidency, exploded in anger, claiming Clay and Adams had cheated him in a “corrupt bargain.” America was once more dividing into two warring camps. Before long, America had two major parties fighting over government again. Jackson's supporters called themselves Democrats; the Adams-Clay faction, initially calling itself the National Republicans, took on the name Whigs. America hasn't looked away from party politics since.
WHY REALIGNMENTS?
The Founders' high-minded ideas about parties weren't wrong—party politics is often just as emotional, tribal, irrational, and corrupt as the Founders feared. The Era of Good Feelings, however, clarified their hidden but powerful virtues. Without parties to guide them, elected officials don't behave like beacons of Enlightenment reason. They squabble, indulge their ambition, elevate their own petty priorities, and fail to act. Parties serve as necessary vehicles to unite officials around common ideas and create the levers of reward and punishment leaders need to force self-interested associates to cooperate for the common good. Parties are distinctively worse than the ideal we imagined but far better than the reality of how real human beings behave without the direction they provide. Twice, America's Founding generation tried to fight against parties and partisanship. Twice, they failed. In a real world with real human flaws, the American republic would be a partisan republic.
America's Founding generation vigorously resisted the pull of political parties through Washington's final warnings, Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, and Monroe's Era of Good Feelings, but nothing worked. Whether they wanted them or not, the natural influence of human nature and the structure of the American republic combined to create a system of two major parties fighting to control government. Although they didn't realize it—and would have hated it if they had—America's Founders designed a republic destined to create two national parties, each within striking distance of power. These two parties inevitably create rival ideologies built from a collection of principles that unite fractious coalitions, ones that disagree on many things but roughly agree on how to handle the great debate of their era. These parties conduct that grand national debate over decades until it's eventually either resolved or the world moves on and it becomes irrelevant. At which point, now lacking compelling ideologies capable of uniting their vast and querulous coalitions, those parties turn brittle. New issues about which their members disagree start to tear them apart. When a sufficient shock strikes, these decaying parties—no longer capable of holding their coalitions together—collapse. Upon their collapse, the factions and interests of the republic must once again find ways to unite half a nation into a coalition capable of winning a majority. Two new national coalitions emerge to debate the grand issue of the next age, and the process starts again.
Just like America's Founders, we might not always like the two-party system, but party systems and realignments are a natural cycle of rebirth and destruction built into the structure of the American republic. Party systems are how we channel our most important national debates, while the scary disruptions of realignments are how we clear away the cobwebs of the old and build something new. America is a two-party republic. America will always have two major parties that divide us for decades into two great coalitions engaged in a great national debate. America will always have realignments when the old coalitions falter and the time has come to build anew.