The problem in 1950 was that the nation’s two major political parties weren’t honoring the intentions of their voters. A Minnesota Democrat pulling the lever for Hubert Humphrey, her party’s liberal Senate candidate in 1954, was also voting for a Senate majority that would include Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who was among the chamber’s most conservative members. Rather than offering a choice, the parties were offering a mush.III
This was the problem as the members of APSA saw it. The state parties were organizing politics around lines the national parties were erasing. “The national and state party organizations are largely independent of one another, each operating within its own sphere, without appreciable common approach to problems of party policy and strategy,” complained the authors. The US Congress included Democrats more conservative than many Republicans and Republicans as liberal as the most left-leaning Democrats. They were robbing voters of their most valuable opportunity to influence the course of public affairs.
Senator William Borah, an Idaho Republican, put it piquantly in 1923. “Any man who can carry a Republican primary is a Republican,” he said. “He might believe in free trade, in unconditional membership in the League of Nations, in states’ rights, and in every policy that the Democratic Party ever advocated; yet, if he carried his Republican primary, he would be a Republican.”3 Being a Republican did not mean being a conservative. It meant being a Republican. Party affiliation was a tautology for itself, not a rich signifier of principles and perspective.
In 1950, Thomas Dewey, the former governor of New York and the GOP’s 1944 nominee for president, freely admitted that if the measure of a “real” political party was “a unified organization with a national viewpoint on major issues,” neither the Republican nor Democratic Party qualified. Dewey thought this a great strength, since “no single religion or color or race or economic interest is confined to one or the other of our parties. Each party is to some extent a reflection of the other.… This is perhaps part of the secret of our enormous power, that a change from one party to the other has usually involved a continuity of action and policy of the nation as a whole on most fundamentals.” He allowed that there were those who “rail at both parties, saying they represent nothing but a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.” If the critics had their way, he said, “they then would have everything very neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic Party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party.”4 (Narrator: They would have their way.)
In 1959, then vice president Richard Nixon—who would go on, as president, to create the Environmental Protection Agency, consider a basic minimum income, and propose a national health-care plan more ambitious than Obamacare—spoke with derision of those who sought to cleave the parties by their beliefs. “It would be a great tragedy if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line,” he said. The strength of the American political system is “we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”5
In this, if in little else, Nixon was joined by Robert F. Kennedy. The journalist Godfrey Hodgson recounts a conversation where Kennedy warned that “the country was already split vertically, between sections, races, and ethnic groups,” so it would be “dangerous to split it horizontally, too, between liberals and conservatives.”6 Politics, in this telling, was meant to calm our divisions, not represent them.
In 1959, the Republican National Committee held an internal debate over whether the party should be driven by a distinct set of ideological values. At the inaugural meeting of the Committee on Program and Progress, which was tasked with designing the GOP agenda, the group invited the political scientist Robert Goldwin to make the case that “it is neither possible nor desirable for a major political party to be guided by principles.” Our modern cleavages give Goldwin’s concerns a force that they would not have carried in 1959. “With both parties including liberals and conservatives within their ranks,” he said, “those differences which would otherwise be the main campaign issues are settled by compromise within each party.” He warned that “our national unity would be weakened if the theoretical differences were sharpened.”7
This is a profound enough point worth dwelling on for a moment. When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate. An example here is health care: Democrats and Republicans spend billions of dollars in election ads emphasizing their disagreements on health care, because the debate motivates their supporters and, they hope, turns the public against their opponents. The upside of this is that important issues get aired and sometimes even resolved. The downside is that the divisions around them become deeper and angrier.
This debate exploded into the open during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential announcement speech. The address is now remembered for Goldwater’s promise to offer “a choice, not an echo.” Less well-known, but perhaps more telling, is the rationale for his candidacy that comes a few paragraphs earlier. Goldwater says, with some disgust, “I have not heard from any announced Republican candidate a declaration of conscience or of political position that could possibly offer to the American people a clear choice in the next presidential election.” This was Goldwater’s promise: if Republicans nominated him, the election would “not be an engagement of personalities. It will be an engagement of principles.” Goldwater, of course, won the nomination and got destroyed by Lyndon Johnson.
Goldwater’s convention was a harshly factional affair, with conservative Republicans doing their damnedest to expel the moderate wing of the party. In its aftermath, George Romney, then the governor of Michigan and a leading light of moderate Republicanism, wrote a twelve-page letter outlining his disagreements with Goldwater. “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress,” he wrote, rather prophetically.8 (Decades later, his son, who had carried on his father’s legacy as the popular moderate governor of Massachusetts, would win the Republican nomination for the presidency by recasting himself as “severely conservative.”)
Goldwater’s electoral destruction entrenched the conventional wisdom of the age: ideologues lost elections. In his 1960 book Parties and Politics in America, Clinton Rossiter wrote, “There is and can be no real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, because the unwritten laws of American politics demand that the parties overlap substantially in principle, policy, character, appeal, and purpose—or cease to be parties with any hope of winning a national election.”9 Better to be an echo than an also-ran.
The muddling of the parties carried well into the modern era. Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina notes that when Gerald Ford ran against Jimmy Carter, only 54 percent of the electorate believed the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party. Almost 30 percent said there was no ideological difference at all between the two parties.10 Imagine, in a world where the ideological difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties was slim enough to confuse half the population, how much less force party identity must have carried.