Parties Without Partisanship
How can you have postpartisanship when there are two dominant political parties? The answer lies in a distinction. Yes, another one of those pesky intellectual distinctions. The distinction is between partisanship on the one hand, and party-affiliation on the other.
Party-affiliation is a function of what box you check on a form when registering to vote or what word you choose to utter in response to a question about your political orientation. Partisanship or what George Washington called the “spirit of party” runs much deeper. It is based on a choice, made by individuals, to permit their political party to be determinative of their positions and actions.
To be a partisan is to lose independence. Partisanship means being so inflexibly wedded either to an abstract ideological construction — or to opposing every idea of the other party, or to the notion that our country’s success depends upon destroying the other party, or all of the above — that forming an independent opinion becomes impossible. Partisans, to be sure, are in the business of division. They come in the form of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents and every other party you can think of. Partisans prioritize their parties over their constituents.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a registered Republican, but he is not partisan. President Obama is a registered Democrat, but he navigates a pragmatic and inclusive course that is anything but partisan.
Or take Rahm Emanuel. Many would argue that Emanuel is a hard partisan. To be sure, the man almost single-handedly took back the House of Representatives for the Dems in 2006 as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — an incredible 31 seat gain. But his strategy for doing so was not partisan. Quite the opposite. Emanuel tried to select moderate candidates in districts held by the GOP but tilting to the center, the battlegrounds. Yes, it’s true, you heard it here — Rahm Emanuel, in 2006, was strong-arming partisan Democrats out of the primaries. He was going Rahmbo on hard Democrats. Sometimes the more liberal candidates would continue on in the primary against Emanuel’s will. But in every instance, Emanuel’s candidate won. (As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, Howard Dean employed a more partisan approach in his 2006 organizing efforts, betting that Americans were ready for some good old fashioned liberalism again. Dean was quite successful too.)
Can you imagine a Republican leader doing the same thing Emanuel did? Republicans are, generally speaking,a more partisan breed than Democrats. Part of the reason is because the very foundation of the Republican party in Washington, first set out during the Republican “revolution” in 1994, is to stand against everything the Democrats try to do. For the better part of the last century, the GOP has been primarily an opposition party and, as such, its members are more loyal, but often to a fault. People tend to forget that the Republicans have since the New Deal almost always been the minority in Washington. They have therefore always been struggling to have a distinct, unique message so that they might stand out or, as Barry Goldwater famously put it, offer a “choice not an echo.”
Meanwhile, ever since Bill Clinton’s applied with some success his centrist model of “triangulation,” Democrats have been doing a great deal more moderating than Republicans. That trend is continuing with Barack Obama.
