The Decline of the Parties

By LANCE MORROW

The men who do the work of piety and chanty in our churches ... the men who own and till their own farms ...the men who went to war ... and saved the nation's honor ... by the natural law of their being find their place in the Republican Party. While the old slave owner and slave driver, the saloon keeper, the ballot box stuffer ...the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write, by the natural law of their being find their congenial place in the Democratic Party.

A Massachusetts Senator (Republican) named George F. Hoar arrived at that triumphantly self-satisfied formula toward the end of the 19th century. The delineation suggests what political parties used to be in the U.S. The labels were, for one thing, descriptive: a man who called himself a Democrat embraced impulses, assumptions, leaders and even a culture very different from those of the man who called himself a Republican. The political parties functioned in a sense like secular churches, with doctrines and powers of intercession, with saints, rites, duties, disciplines and rewards. From wards to White House, the parties were crucial to the way the country worked. The old Tammany boss Carmine DeSapio remembered hauling coal as a young party errand boy to keep families of voters from freezing in the winter. A millionaire political boss like Mark Hanna could install William McKinley as President.

Today the parties have virtually collapsed as a force in American politics. This fall's campaigns were emphatic confirmation of a trend that has been at work for a decade or more: the draining of energy and resources away from the parties and into a sort of fragmented political free-for-all. The extent of the political transformation can be seen in the extravagant use of television, which more than any other single factor has cut loose candidates from their parties and allowed them to inject themselves directly into the constituent consciousness: individual packaging instead of bulk. In this election, TV spending by candidates for Congress and state offices exceeded anything in the past.

Ask any American today to list five words with which he would describe himself. It is rare that Republican or Democrat will be on the list. In fact, a sizable number of candidates in this fall's campaign displayed an amazing reticence about letting the voters know what their party was; the affiliation was widely regarded as either an encumbrance or an irrelevance. In New Jersey, a voter reading one key piece of Senatorial Candidate Jeffrey Bell's literature could not have told whether he was running as a Republican or a Rosicrucian.

House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill surveyed the party's centrifugal forces last week and remarked: "If this were France, the Democratic Party would be five parties." The somewhat chaotic individualism of American politics these days can have its charm, but it is also dangerous. Congress now has all the discipline of a five-year-old's birthday party. Toby Moffett, 34, a Democratic Connecticut Congressman who was not even a member of the party until a couple of weeks before he filed in 1974, remarks with some chagrin: "We get to Washington and we're not prone to look for leadership the way they used to. We don't owe anybody anything." With several hundred different ideas caroming around the Capitol about how to handle energy or inflation, it is difficult to make policy. It is also much harder for the man in the White House to use party discipline to bring Congressmen into line behind his program. Jimmy Carter, who for the first two years of his term incautiously neglected relations with the national Democratic Party, found that he could not attack from the culprit's rear, by way of the party structure back home.

The decline of the parties is part of the atomizing process of American culture. "The individualistic instincts in this society," writes Washington Post Columnist David Broder, "have now become much more powerful in our politics than the majoritarian impulse. It is easier and more appealing for all of us leaders as well as followers--to separate ourselves from the mass than to seek out the alliances that can make us part of a majority." Voters seem to have lost the psychological need to feel themselves part of a large political cause; the Viet Nam War, Watergate and other scandals have left a deep residual cynicism that instructs Americans to beware of politicians.

Many other conditions have helped to reduce the parties' circumstances. The relentless attention of pollsters to the public mood means that candidates and officeholders receive their instructions directly from the people, rather than through the party apparatus. Impresarios of media--like White House Adviser Gerald Rafshoon--orchestrate campaigns without the party's help or intervention.

The very reforms that the parties instituted to purify the system (the proliferation of primaries, the funding of campaigns by political action groups instead of the old fat cats) have helped to destroy it. Says Joel Fleishman, director of Duke University's Institute for Policy Sciences: "With laudable motives, we've actually contributed to the degeneration of the political process."

The traditional party structures served to organize possibilities, to discipline people and ideas into workable forms. When practically every politician is a free agent, there is a tendency toward the anarchic, which may be a perfect political reflection of a narcissistic decade. In the absence of party loyalty, officeholders may find it easier to exercise their integrity, although of course they may also owe fealty to some private lobby. In either case, they tend to lose the talent for compromise and concerted effort. Single-issue zealotry, which is rewarded in the new enlarged primary system, can contaminate the entire political process.

Announcements of the death of the two-party system are issued regularly, of course, usually just before the two-party system reasserts itself with a certain amount of resilience. "Everything is cyclical," remarks Stanley Friedman, the Bronx County Democratic chairman in New York. "It used to be fashionable to beat the bosses. Now people are recognizing that you can get strong leadership from an organized political establishment." Still, it is clear that the powers and purposes of both parties are becoming thoroughly circumscribed. It would be lamentable if some day the nation's two great political parties were reduced to performing merely decorative and ceremonial duties, with candidates taking the party label in the same spirit that ships sail under Liberian registry--a flag of convenience, and no more. -- Lance Morrow

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