During Tuesday’s WEEKLY STANDARD podcast, I made a point that requires some amplification. The polls consistently show that the vast majority of voters—about 130 million in total—do not like either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, who were selected by just over 30 million people. There must be something wrong with our system of government when the people have two candidates foisted upon them by less than 25 percent of the whole.
At first blush, the answer is simple: That’s democracy, so what? But upon closer inspection, things are substantially more complicated. “Democracy” is not simply a matter of letting the people decide. There is also a process to determine how the votes are counted, as well as who will be deemed a serious candidate, and who will not. Yes, voters have the power to choose in a democracy, but before they have exercised that power, a whole host of other actors have exercised their own authority, determining how the choice itself will be structured.
In our system of government, this “pre-democratic” power has long belonged to the parties. Indeed, it still does, more or less. And if voters are really dissatisfied with the choices they’ve been handed, they should blame the parties—and start demanding party reform.
It may seem peculiar to even discuss the idea of party reform. The parties, after all, are different than tax policy or Medicare. They don’t “belong” to the government. They are private organizations, so why should we consider reforming them? While the parties are private entities—and thus outside direct government oversight—they still perform vital civic functions. So while we can’t use the state to fix the parties, we should still try to fix them, by ourselves.
Indeed, the parties are the hinge of our system of government. Consider: Why is it that Americans use a representative system of government rather than a direct democracy? Part of the answer has to do with practicalities—it is simply too hard to corral everybody in one place to make a decision—but the Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the principle of vox populi, vox dei. They doubted the capacity of the people to rule themselves without adulteration. They were not “populists.”
Instead, they advocated a representative system that, per James Madison, is supposed “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”
Alas, the Constitution does not elaborate a process to select the candidates for the people to choose. Arguably, it is the gravest weakness of the Constitution, one that the first generation of leaders had to deal with. Their solution was the party system.
Spearheaded by Jefferson and Madison, one of the functions the “Republican party” served in the 1790s was to offer a party-approved slate, based upon each candidate’s fitness for office and adherence to party principles. That way, the voters could know in advance who would genuinely serve their interests and who was a two-bit huckster.
The Founding Fathers inherited a dislike of party politics from their British forebears, who thought partisanship was an incipient form of insurrection. Though Jefferson and Madison more or less created the Republican party, they were never true partisans—and they allowed their party to atrophy after they defeated the Federalists.
It was up to the second generation of Americans to discover the civic virtues of partisanship—and nobody offered a better apology for it than Martin Van Buren. This passage, taken from his Autobiography, still rings true today:
Van Buren hits the nail on the head. A well-maintained and vigilant political party is necessary to thwart the “disposition to abuse power” and thus preserve our republican system of government. Yet Americans today—just like in Van Buren’s day—have little interest in a sincere discussion of party politics. Partisanship is still seen as illegitimate. Even people who consider themselves partisans struggle with the idea that the parties are necessary for the maintenance of good government.
As such, our parties have always been prone to atrophy. We just do not spend much time thinking about them—the functions they serve, and how they could work better. The current drought is quite long, even by historical standards—there has not been a major push for party reform in nearly fifty years. Little wonder that the party system is badly malfunctioning, even in this most basic task of selecting estimable candidates for office.
Conservative reformers should take note—for this election demonstrates that it is nearly impossible to produce good policy from a bad process. For years now, a clique of thoughtful conservatives have been cranking out innovative and interesting policy proposals—but to what ultimate purpose? If the Republican party cannot win, those ideas are useless. If it wins with a narcissistic, big-government strongman with no interest in reform, those ideas are useless. In other words, conservatives need a well-functioning Republican party to achieve their policy goals. They do not have that right now.
The Founding Fathers understood: institutions have to come before public policy. And so it is today. Unless the party system is reformed, there is little hope for conservatives to enact all the grand ideas they have dedicated their time to developing.
