How Federalists and Anti-Federalists Invented the Two-Party System While Simultaneously Insisting Parties Were Terrible Ideas
How Federalists and Anti-Federalists Invented the Two-Party System While Simultaneously Insisting Parties Were Terrible Ideas
The Invention They Didn’t Want and Couldn’t Avoid
George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 contains one of the most prophetic and thoroughly ignored warnings in American political history. Washington devoted substantial paragraphs to the dangers of political parties – “”factions,”” he called them – arguing that they would produce “”potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”” He urged Americans to resist the “”baneful effects of the spirit of party.”” He was the most respected man in America. He had led the Revolution. He had presided over the Constitutional Convention. He had been unanimously elected president twice. Nobody listened to him.
Washington gave his Farewell Address in September 1796. By the time he finished writing it, two political parties were already functionally organized and competing for power. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were building what would become the Democratic-Republican Party. Alexander Hamilton was organizing the Federalists. Washington himself had governed through Hamilton’s influence in ways that effectively identified his administration with Federalist priorities. He had watched parties form around him and within his Cabinet and had been unable or unwilling to prevent it. His warning against parties was issued by a man who had been, for most of his second term, the de facto leader of one. This is the founding irony of American political parties: they were invented by people who believed parties were dangerous, used by people who claimed they were merely temporary coalitions, and entrenched by people who had no intention of ever giving them up.
Federalists vs Anti-Federalists: The Original Partisan Divide
The first American political division was over the Constitution itself. Federalists – Hamilton, Madison (initially), Jay – supported ratification of the Constitution and a strong national government. Anti-Federalists – Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee – opposed it, fearing that a powerful central government would reproduce the tyranny they had just fought to escape. The Federalists won the ratification debate. The Anti-Federalists won the argument about needing a Bill of Rights, which was added as the price of ratification in several key states.
These early divisions mapped almost perfectly onto divisions that persist today: federal power versus state power, strong executive versus legislative supremacy, commercial and financial interests versus agrarian and rural ones. The parties have changed names, swapped positions on some issues, migrated geographically, and accumulated cultural identities their founders would find baffling. The underlying tension – how much government, for whose benefit, controlled by whom – has not changed. The argument is 235 years old. Both sides believe they are winning. Neither has definitively won. This is either a tribute to the genuine complexity of the questions or evidence that the argument will continue forever and perhaps should be made into a subscription service, since Americans seem unwilling to stop paying for it regardless of what they receive in return.
The Evolution Into the Modern Party System
The Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and Madison split in the 1820s. One faction became the Democrats under Andrew Jackson. Another became the Whigs. The Whigs collapsed in the 1850s over slavery. The Republican Party formed in 1854 on an anti-slavery platform, elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and watched the Southern states secede rather than accept the result, which is the most dramatic negative response to an election result in American history, though it now has competition.
By 1864 – in the middle of a civil war – the basic two-party structure of Democrats and Republicans was in place, and it has remained in place for 162 years, which makes it one of the most durable institutional arrangements in modern democratic history. Third parties have appeared, competed, occasionally won electoral votes, and then disappeared or been absorbed. Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote in 1992 and zero electoral votes. Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive Party in 1912, won 88 electoral votes and finished second – the best third-party presidential performance in the 20th century – and still lost. The system is structured, legally and electorally, to produce two parties, and it produces two parties with the reliability of a law of physics. Washington warned against this. Washington would have found the subsequent 230 years deeply validating and also very depressing.
What Parties Actually Do: Beyond the Theory
Political parties perform several essential democratic functions that the Constitution does not mention because the founders refused to acknowledge parties would exist. They recruit and nominate candidates. They coordinate legislative activity. They provide voters with information shortcuts – a party label that conveys a rough ideological position, allowing voters to make reasonable choices without researching every candidate individually. They mobilize voters, raise money, and provide organizational infrastructure that individual candidates could not replicate alone. They are, in sum, the operating system of democratic competition, despite being neither constitutionally established nor officially acknowledged in any founding document.
They also do things that are less flattering. They sort people into opposing teams where loyalty is rewarded and heterodoxy is punished. They create incentive structures that favor ideological consistency over governing effectiveness. They amplify conflict because conflict raises money and activates voters more reliably than consensus does. They have developed, over time, into identities as much as organizations – affiliations that predict not just voting behavior but media consumption, social relationships, geographic location, and consumer preferences. Americans increasingly live near people who vote like they do, watch media that confirms what they already believe, and regard members of the opposing party not as political opponents but as threats. Washington would not have been surprised. He specifically warned about this. Nobody listened then either.
SOURCE: The London Prat