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Liberals, Labor, and Party Government

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Polity

Abstract

Republican party government during the presidency of George W. Bush prompted liberal academics and intellectuals to reconsider the theory of responsible party government (RPG). While liberal thinkers traditionally had viewed party government positively, the onset of robust conservative government led some to question its desirability. This article examines this momentary turn in liberal thought and argues that it misconstrues the arguments for RPG, overstates the extent to which contemporary conditions constitute a fulfillment of the model, and exaggerates the degree to which Bush-era Republicans were able to shift policy to the right. Most important, recent critics misunderstand the ways that stronger parties help organized labor and favor a left-liberal political agenda.

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Notes

  1. See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” Harvard Law Review 119 (June 2006): 1–73; and Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Very similar views, but from a more determinedly centrist perspective, can be found in Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).

  2. For the concept of a political order, see the discussion in David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  3. John Kenneth White and Jerome M. Mileur, “In the Spirit of Their Times: ‘Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System’ and Party Politics,” in Responsible Partisanship: The Evolution of American Political Parties Since 1950, ed. John C. Green and Paul S. Herrnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 14.

  4. See E. E. Schattschneider, “Party Government and Employment Policy,” American Political Science Review 39 (December 1945): 1147–57, and E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2004 [1942]).

  5. See the history of the Report by Paul David, “The APSA Committee on Political Parties: Some Reconsiderations of its Work and Significance,” Perspectives on Political Science 21 (Spring 1992): 70–79, http://www.apsanet.org/~pop/APSA1950/David1992.html, and comments by Ralph M. Goldman, http://www.apsanet.org/~pop/APSA1950/apsa2000goldman.pdf. According to Goldman, Bertram Gross was the principal author of the report, and personally told him that the common motivation of the authors was “to keep the New Deal legislation of the day in place and growing.” Gross later wrote a left-wing tract, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Boston: South End Press, 1980), in which he warned of a “a slow and powerful drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government partnership.”

  6. Report of the Committee on Political Parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” American Political Science Review 3 (1950): v and 1, available online: http://www.apsanet.org/~pop/APSA_Report.htm#REPORT.

  7. Ibid., 4–5.

  8. Ibid., 8, 61.

  9. Ibid., 9, emphasis added.

  10. Ibid., 74–75.

  11. Schattschneider, Party Government, 208-09. See also E.E. Schattschneider, The Struggle for Party Government (College Park: University of Maryland, 1948).

  12. Schattschneider, Party Government, 207.

  13. See Everett Carll Ladd, “Party Reform and the Public Interest,” Political Science Quarterly 102 (Fall 1987): 355–69; Everett Carl Ladd, “Political Parties, ‘Reform,’ and American Democracy,” in Challenges to Party Government, ed. John Kenneth White and Jerome M. Mileur (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1992); Evron M. Kirkpatrick, “Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System’: Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?” American Political Science Review 65 (December 1971): 965–90; James Piereson, “Party Government,” The Political Science Reviewer (Fall 1982): 2–53; and Sidney A. Pearson, Jr., “E.E. Schattschneider and the Quarrel Over Parties in American Democracy,” Introduction, Party Government; James Ceaser, “Political Change and Party Reform,” in Political Parties in the Eighties, ed. Robert A. Goldwin (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980).

  14. Kirkpatrick, “Toward A More Responsible Two-Party System,” 967.

  15. See A. James Reichley, “Party Politics in a Federal Polity,” 53.

  16. Ladd, “Political Parties, ‘Reform,’ and American Democracy,” 32. James MacGregor Burns offered probably the most candid academic statement of the relationship between party government and liberal aims in The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), in which he discussed his unsuccessful effort to be elected to Congress as a liberal Democrat running primarily on national issues (see 229–33). Confirming the logic underlying Burns's argument, David Mayhew later concluded that “major transfer innovations are unlikely to spring from individualistic assemblies,” and that such reforms would require “impetus from elsewhere”—typically executive or party leadership. See Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 137.

  17. Schattschneider, Party Government, 111, 118.

  18. Piereson, “Party Government,” 21, emphasis added. See also, Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1986), 32–37.

  19. Students for a Democratic Society, “Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society” (1962), http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html.

  20. Report of the Committee on Political Parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” 86, 20, 34. The contemporary alignment of interest groups behind each of the parties, which is exactly as the report predicts, is discussed in Barbara Sinclair, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), ch. 9.

  21. T. William Goodman, “How Much Political Party Centralization Do We Want?” Journal of Politics 13 (November 1951): 536–61, emphasis added.

  22. J. Roland Pennock, “Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Majority Rule,” American Political Science Review 46 (September 1952): 790–807, emphasis added.

  23. Julius Turner, “Responsible Parties: A Dissent from the Floor,” American Political Science Review 45 (March 1951): 143–52.

  24. Austin Ranney and Wilmoore Kendall, Democracy and the American Party System (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 531. For similar views, see Pendleton Herring, Presidential Leadership (New York: Rinehart, 1940); Pendleton Herring, The Politics of Democracy: American Democracy in Action (New York: W.W. Norton, 1940); and Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Writing in the 1890s, A. Lawrence Lowell anticipated later anxieties when he wrote: “…if the party lines become really horizontal, democracy is on the high road to class tyranny, which leads, as history proves, to a dictatorship.” Lowell is quoted in Austin Ranney, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government; Its Origins and. Present State (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 58.

  25. Julian E. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences, 1948–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5–7, 33–42, and Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 93–98.

  26. Quoted in B.J. Widick, Labor Today: The Triumphs and Failures of Unionism in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 116. For more on labor's strategy and visions of realignment, see Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Ch. 14.

  27. Piereson, “Party Government,” 26, emphasis added.

  28. See the archives of The Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com), Firedoglake (http://firedoglake.com/), and The Huffington Post (http://firedoglake.com).

  29. Al Gore, “Transcript: Former Vice President Gore's Speech on Constitutional Issues,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011600779.html, emphasis added.

  30. Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? 176.

  31. Levinson and Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” Harvard Law Review. Pildes has written for such broadly liberal journals as The American Prospect, Boston Review, and The New Republic, while Levinson is widely known as a “left of center” law professor (see Anna Schneider-Mayerson, “Harvard Law On A Heterodox Spree, Listing To Right,” New York Observer, December 4, 2005, http://www.observer.com/node/38034).

  32. Levinson and Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” 26, 27.

  33. Levinson and Pildes, “Separation of Parties, Not Powers,” 35, 66, 71, 36.

  34. Hacker and Pierson, Off Center. Hacker and Pierson were quite clear that their book was intended as a contribution to current political debate, not just an exercise in academic political science. As they hoped, the book was reviewed widely in the popular press, and given close attention on liberal blogs, at least one of which even hosted a guest discussion featuring the authors (see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_10/007296.php).

  35. Hacker and Pierson, Off Center, 185, 186, 12, 187, and 1.

  36. Ibid., 173.

  37. For other strong claims about how polarization limits legislative productivity, see Nolan McCarty, “The Policy Effects of Polarization,” in The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism, ed. Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 223–55; and Sarah Binder, “Elections, Parties, and Governance,” in The Legislative Branch, ed. Paul J. Quirk and Sarah A. Binder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148–70.

  38. Hacker and Pierson, Off Center, 186 and 223.

  39. For the negative effects of fragmented institutions on the development of liberal social policies, see John Kingdon, America the Unusual (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and Sven Steinmo, “American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Culture or Institutions,” in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994).

  40. Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? 181.

  41. Hacker and Pierson, Off Center, 191, 221.

  42. Ibid., 194, 198, 200.

  43. In their most recent book on economic inequality, Hacker and Pierson also avoid any discussion of strengthening parties, focusing instead on the need for union revival and an amorphous (and antiseptic) notion of “mass engagement.” The comparison with the similarly engaged work of James MacGregor Burns two generations earlier is striking—while Burns extols parties on nearly every page, Hacker and Pierson seem to be at pains to mention every source of change except the instrumentality of plain old partisanship. See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); and Burns, Deadlock of Democracy.

  44. E. E. Schattschneider, “Party Government and Employment Policy,” American Political Science Review 39 (December 1945): 1147–57.

  45. Two excellent accounts of the process of partisan polarization, albeit with contrasting normative conclusions, are Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and Morris Fiorina, Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). Both authors agree that American politics in the twenty-first century is much closer to a model of party government than it was a half-century ago. See also Brownstein, Second Civil War, for further discussion of how well contemporary politics fits the RPG model of the 1950s.

  46. A useful critique of the off-center hypothesis from the perspective of the democratic left can be found in David Plotke, “Moving Right? Bush's Decline and American Conservatism,” Dissent (Summer 2006): 29–36. Plotke concludes: “There is little evidence that Bush has caused a major new shift to the right on most fronts in the last five years.” For discussions of the limitations on Bush administration initiatives, see Brownstein, Second Civil War, 297–323; Barbara Sinclair, “Living (and Dying?) by the Sword: George W. Bush as Legislative Leader” and Christopher H. Foreman, Jr., “The Braking of the President: Shifting Context and Bush Domestic Agenda,” both in The George W. Bush Legacy, ed. Colin Campbell, Bert A. Rockman, and Andrew Rudalevige (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 2008), 153–87 and 265–87, respectively.

  47. See the discussion of a variety of Obama-era regulatory changes in Theda Skocpol and Lawrence R. Jacobs, eds. Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama's First Two Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011).

  48. See Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).

  49. See Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1987), 152–56.

  50. The terminology here is that of Keith Krehbiel as developed in Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998) and applied to the case of the Bush administration in Keith Krehbiel, “Comment,” in Red and Blue Nation?: Consequences and Correction of America′s Polarized Politics ed. Pietro S. Nivola and David W. Brady (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008), 93–103.

  51. Dorian Warren discusses the battle over EFCA in “The Unsurprising Failure of Labor Law Reform and the Turn to Administrative Action,” in Reaching for a New Deal, ed. Theda Skocpol and Lawrence L. Jacobs (available online at: http://www.russellsage.org/research/working-group-obamas-policy-agenda).

  52. Everett Carll Ladd, “Liberalism Upside Down: The Inversion of the New Deal Order,” in The Party Symbol: Readings on Political Parties, ed. William J. Crotty (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980). See also Walter Dean Burnham, “American Politics in the 1970s,” in Parties and Elections in an Anti-Party Age, ed. Jeff Fishel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

  53. Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3 and 96, emphasis added. See also Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), esp. 172–73.

  54. Jeffrey M. Stonecash and Mark D. Brewer, Split: Class and Cultural Divides in American Politics (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006), 186.

  55. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 106.

  56. Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper-Middle Class,” Political Science Quarterly 124 (2009): 391–422.

  57. Abramowitz and Teixeira, “Decline of the White Working Class.”

  58. See Norman Ornstein, “A Very Productive Congress, Despite What the Approval Ratings Say,” The Washington Post, January 31, 2010.

  59. Ironically, Hacker himself has recognized that “Democratic coalescence” due to the party's increased ideological homogeneity and unity was crucial in the passage of the health-care bill; see Jacob Hacker, “The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened,” Perspectives on Politics 8 (September 2010): 861–76. The importance of partisan leadership and reputation is also emphasized in Lawrence R. Jacobs, “What Health Reform Teaches Us about American Politics,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43 (October 2010): 619–23.

  60. See Ronald Brownstein, “One for the Books,” National Journal, December 23, 2010, http://nationaljournal.com/columns/political-connections/one-for-the-books-20101223.

  61. Quoted in Lisa Lerer and Laura Litvan, “No Congress Since ‘60s Makes as Much Law as 111th Affecting Most Americans,” Bloomberg, December 22, 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-22/no-congress-since-1960s-makes-most-laws-for-americans-as-111th.html.

  62. Ironically, Pierson made this point in his first book. Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  63. Peter Starke, “The Politics of Welfare State Retrenchment: A Literature Review,” Social Policy and Administration (February 2006): 104–20.

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  1. California State University, Los Angeles

    Taylor E Dark III

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Dark, T. Liberals, Labor, and Party Government. Polity 43, 358–387 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2011.2

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