(Thanks for this dose of history and context. Toward knowledge, wisdom, and understanding!   – promoted by eli_beckerman)

As a student of politics I have given some attention and study to significance of “partisan-ness” and the role and function of political parties.  

I’ve written some specific musings here touching on the subject of political parties and social movements, but with the aftermath of 2010 elections and the GRP convention I have new impetus to elaborate on the concept of political parties in general and their history.  

In this post I want to explore some of the history of political parties in modern democracies, their function, purpose, means of existence, and how they relate to social and political change. My task is more descriptive than prescriptive, and I want to cover this topic broadly while maintaining relative brevity. Of course my biases and prejudices will show.  And I’ll miss the caveats, details, key examples, and the satisfactions of an analysis with multiple perspectives. If I had to boil the focus down to anything its the unique nature of political parties in the United States, and how this differs from other advanced democracies.  But where I overgeneralize or fail entirely please tell me.

Historical understanding is rare, and a grasp of political and social history rarer. I hope that this post will provide some insight into some of the background that informs my politics as well as open folks up to considering present political questions in the light of this history.

Properly speaking, factions and groupings of people organized to gain and keep political power have existed as long as humanity.  The political party as a modern institution can be traced to the maturation of the nation state and the beginnings of liberal democracy, first in the 1600s in England and later in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the US and France.

Birth of the Political Party

In the aftermath of the English Civil War of the 1640s, a new kind of polity began to coalesce, the constitutional monarchy.  Open conflict of classes and interests became partially institutionalized in an elective and representative body, the House of Commons.  

Those who did not want royal absolutism, those who represented the strengthening interests of commerce, formed a party called the Whigs.  Those who wanted to strengthen the old feudal order or maintain its privileges formed the Tories. Its a simplification of course but the outline is correct.  The franchise remained extremely limited and these parties remained alliances of elites rather than actual commoners.

The American colonies lacked a feudal order, its leaders and elites shared much more in common with the Whigs.  This coalition of merchants, entrepreneurs, landowners, and professionals who led the revolution and helped found the United States did not want political competition.  The Constitution was modeled more on constitutional monarchy than popular democracy, and Washington and Madison warned against factions and parties.

While some of this was to caution against intense competition among regional and economic elites, there also existed a genuine fear of the more participatory currents and groups that existed during and after the revolution, the organizations of poor farmers, the property-less, the non-English, women, youth, and of course hundreds of thousands of slaves.

So when parties did come into existence, Democratic-Republicans and Federalists, and then Democrats and Whigs (different sort), they remained combinations of elites with a pragmatic orientation toward the growing number of enfranchised white men.

What also scared many was the tumult in France.  Rather than reforming the old order it was abolished, and the reigning Third Estate found itself split into various factions and groups.  Directly democratic sections in Paris, proto-socialist insurgents, agrarian and peasant organizations, radical liberals and republicans, as well as constitutional monarchists, moderate republicans, and supporters of autocratic rule.  After years of revolution, coups, and war a somewhat stable constitutional monarchy contained parties representing liberal monarchists, bourgeois republicans, supporters of Napoleonic autocracy, and more radical republicans and liberals (including proto-socialists and even anarchists).

Path Diverges: Two Party System in the US and Birth of the Mass Party in Europe

The United States unlike other liberal democracies did expand the franchise to all white males fairly early on, and so political conflicts were not fought over this like in other countries, including England.  Rather tensions arose between regional elites and a divergence in economic systems, an industrializing North and an agricultural and slave economy South.  The frame of government and its political parties could not negotiate this, and the Southern elites could not tolerate a President representing a regional Northern party critical of slavery.

The Civil War brought these tensions and conflicts to a head and rearranged the political and partisan landscape.  While the war’s resolution nominally gave African American men the basic rights of citizenship and for a time the Republican Party operated in the South as a coalition of Northern transplants, poor farmers, and newly freed slaves the old elites soon regained power and disenfranchised their opponents leading to a hundred years of autocratic one party dominance in the South.

The popular aspects of the Republican Party soon subsided with the passing of the war and it became a party of Northern industrialist and financial interests, whilst the Democrats represented Southern elites and economic powers not best served by Republican policies.

Europe saw its own further revolutions and wars, and wide social/political shifts.  Amidst this a new kind of political party was created called the mass party around the 1860s, first in Germany and France.  Agree or disagree with him, Karl Marx had a definitive impact on this development.  The formation of labor, socialist, and social democratic parties throughout Europe ushered in this new age.  

These parties were based on economic class and station, were ideological in perspective and strategy, and organized popularly with affiliated mass organizations. In the economic sphere these were allied cooperatives and trades unions, in the social sphere they were self-help, recreational, and neighborhood societies and groups of every hobby and past-time.  They had their own media in the form of newspapers and journals and built up educational institutes and resources to politicize and empower their memberships.  The parties were usually both centralized and democratic.  This gave them the capacity to impose discipline and be efficient in their fights for power while still being accountable and open to their memberships.

Mass left parties worked for immediate reforms but also had expansive ideas about society and its possible future.  They used their growing practical power in mass organizations to win the basic reforms that people wanted and needed but also inspired their members further and challenged the dominant ideas of elites in society.  By having power in more than one area they could survive electoral or economic or social defeats and continue to rely on their bases in other kinds of organizing to maintain themselves.

This model proved so powerful, effective, and threatening even in repressive countries without democracy or the rule of law that soon other social interests, from the Catholic church to farmers and peasants to ethnic minorities and nationalists to middle class merchants and businessmen to industrial and political elites had formed their own versions of the mass party to compete politically with the socialists.  While ideologies changed and new classes and constituencies were formed, the competition of mass parties remained the norm into the second half of the 20th century in Europe.

Populists, Socialists, and Progressives in the United States

Now the post Civil War Democrats and Republicans did have their own newspapers, large memberships, and affiliated organizations (more recreational than economic).  They were not however organized by class or united by ideology.  Both parties remained pragmatic vehicles to hold and compete for political office, to empower elites, and co-opt the greater mass of people without power.

Their hegemony did not go unchallenged.  Farmers and workers found with the continued course of industrialization and economic centralization that their interests and needs were not met, and their freedoms often trampled on.  Starting in the Midwest and reaching all over the US, the Populists of the 1880s organized farmers and common people to take back their government from the control of banks and industrial interests.  Their organizing resembled more closely the mass parties of Europe, though with a more diffuse ideological perspective.  They won control over many states and threatened Democratic and Republican control of Congress.

But the two parties worked to weaken them and played on their divisions, adopting portions of their platform and placating portions of their electorate, while fighting to make it harder for the Populists to remain electorally viable. By the 1890s their time had past.

The later 1890s and early 1900s saw the Socialists take up some of same causes as the Populists.  A major difference here was specific ideological commitments (though still much more diffuse and wide than their counterparts in Europe) and their strength in cities among new immigrants.  They also took up more prominently the cause of women’s suffrage and African American civil rights.  While not as electorally successful the Socialists kept the Populist vision alive and made more pointed its critique and advocacy.  

By the early 1900s the inadequacy of American political arrangements and the varied social ills and troubles brought on by a maturing capitalism was obvious.  The threat of Populists and Socialists, and their inroads politically as well as into the two major parties became a wake-up call.

The Progressive movement was a middle class led reform movement attempting to blunt the critique of more radical working class people and parties.  Their reforms of municipal and state governments, their push for the creation of basic sanitation, health, and labor laws, and reforms of the political process itself were in reaction to this more radical organizing and political action.

While fighting corruption and waste gave greater efficiency to government, the Progressives also set out their reforms in such a way as to actually limit working people’s power and institutionalize the two party system.  The greater role of government in regulation and in providing services also relieved corporations of burdens and obstacles in their path to greater growth.  Their work and the threat of Socialists and other third parties came to end with the repression of the First World War and the Red Scare soon after.

The Great Depression and the Last Hurrah for American third parties

The reforms of the Progressive era did not go as far as what was advocated by the Socialists and Populists.  And the Democrats and Republicans remained driven by pragmatic elites.  Some progressives organized outside the two parties in the 1920s like LaFollette in Wisconsin (he has a quote up on the website) who were outraged the conservatism of the major parties. Then came the Great Depression.

This event, its deep impact in American life, and vast changes people underwent for more than a decade changed the party system. After the election of 1932 the Republicans were nearly wiped off the map and the Democratic Party faced the full brunt of popular organizing and agitation as well as third party challenges.  Nationally Socialists, Communists, and the Union Party (a coalition of left and right demagogues contesting the 1936 elections) sought to gain a foothold. Regionally third parties had tremendous success, the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota and in other mountain states, and the American Labor Party in New York State.  These states became experimental grounds for the policies and projects of the New Deal.  These parties (save the Communists) remained ideological but open, and reliant on affiliated mass organizations or campaigns in economic or social issues for their power and success.  

The New Deal finished the reforms of the Progressive Era to create a new accord with the American people and its various interests and constituencies.  The active agitation and action of people’s organizations made this settlement palatable to most Americans.  But rather than winning power for third parties this settlement endeared Americans to the Democratic Party and the institutions built out of the struggle amidst Depression and war.

Progressive and left parties of the era by the 1940s soon either merged with the Democratic Party, dissolved, or became persecuted and marginalized by the Second Red Scare.  Mass organizations depoliticized and became pragmatically tied to the Democratic Party (as opposed to being ideologically constituted and organized like their European counterparts).  Tenants and Worker’s councils led by Communists and Socialists gave way to neighborhood coalitions of the Alinsky school aimed at winning reforms but not offering expansive political visions.

This is the heritage of the era, with ideology in the major parties (if you can still call it ideology) being based on the opinion of the New Deal settlement (extend it or roll it back, use different tools to achieve the same ends, etc) and most laws and policy debates focusing on administrative and procedural changes in the Federal bureaucracy.

The End of the Mass Party in Europe

Communists and Fascists used the mass party model with great success in countries without stable polities.  But mass parties also became stalwarts in stable democracies with both proportional representation and single seat constituencies (Sweden for example in the former, the UK in the later) winning reforms and pushing the frontiers of democracy.  But the era of the mass party as a politically creative and generative agent ended soon after World War 2.

Postwar Western Europe relied on the active involvement of all social institutions to guarantee economic security and the rule of law, leading to a level of stability and comfort that began to erode the solidarities and idealism once inherent in mass parties.  They no longer had to fight for basic rights, but had to figure out how to govern and manage the welfare state.

The Cold War ended the radicalism of social democratic parties and the fear of fascism moderated the center-right.  Mass parties soon acclimated themselves to the settlement of the welfare state, universal suffrage, and civil rights.  Their size and discipline became a force for uniformity and control rather than popular power as in the past.  Communist and nationalist parties of Western Europe similarly deradicalized to fill a function in the new settlement (supporting the Soviet line in the former, and giving voice to minorities in nation parliaments for the latter).

The political and economic conflict of earlier times had subsided in all the major advanced democracies.  Political parties filled out their role in the global order, becoming passive administrative agents as opposed to offering differing visions of society and human relations.

Green Parties

The 1960s youth revolt globally and the struggle for civil rights in the United States while challenging the postwar consensus did not create many immediate alterations in the nature of political parties.  In the subsequent decades changes were in store.

In the US the Democrats and Republicans welcomed new constituencies and issues from the 60s political shift, but did not themselves shift from the historic model of political parties in the United States being pragmatic and elite driven.  New interest groups in the women’s, anti-war, environmental, and civil rights’ movements modeled themselves on the non-partisan and non-ideological organizations that had success after World War 2.  Most groups that organized ideologically or outside the two parties were unable to find a foothold in civil society, and either broke apart or shrank to the point of irrelevancy.

In Europe these same constituencies were not easily incorporated into existing mass parties whose institutional and bureaucratic ties to the state and particular interests and classes made them inflexible.  Ecology, peace, and feminism took on a popular ideological character not seen in the United States.  They generated decentralized mass movements with political aspirations, critical of the institutionalization of former radical parties and looking to create new political formations.  

It was the mid 70s into the early 80s that Green parties, left socialist, and other political parties inspired by the New Left became organized and began to win elections in countries with proportional representation.  

And here we finally get to something of the present.   So below is the Green Party as an ideal type.  That is Weber’s term to describe a social institution in its essence.  An ideal type distinguishes something from the rest in its simplicity.  Its not a description of what Green Parties are or should be.  Nor does this imply if such a political formation is effective, good, bad, or indifferent.

Greens consciously attempt to avoid the internal centralization, lack of democracy (both participatory and deliberative), and the sexism and racism that inhered in old social democratic and communist parties. They share with these mass parties an ideological and visionary outlook, but are open and respectful of dissent and differing views.  They seek consensus but encourage and support individual, local, and group autonomy.

They articulate the need for political, social, economic, natural, personal, and spiritual change, reflection, and organizing.  They attempt to cure the rift among human beings and between the natural world.  Its a politics of inclusion and holism.