Many of those in both of our major parties have a poor understanding of how politics works.
When Republicans talk about the future of their party these days, they tend to talk in terms of what will happen more than what they will do. That’s even true of many Republicans elected officials. Everyone is inclined to think like an observer, more than an agent of action.
That has a lot to do with Donald Trump, of course. Republican politicos have had to constantly respond to Trump since 2015, and have seen their voters captivated by him to a degree many of them still can’t quite explain, but few have really felt like part of his team. That has habituated them to assuming their fate is out of their hands, and that all they can do is wait and see what happens.
Trump remains a major force shaping the GOP’s future. The prospect of his running for president again hangs over every discussion of 2024, and he also seems intent on playing the kingmaker in some 2022 congressional races — backing candidates who have said nice things about him and turning challengers loose on his critics. But this spring has already brought some evidence of the limits of his reach now that he lacks even a Twitter platform, let alone the power of the presidency to move events and make him the subject of every political conversation. As one Republican officeholder put it to me last week, Trump’s schtick has always been all about himself, but when it’s so detached from the flow of politics it can easily become drearily dull — and boredom is deadly to performance art.
You can see early signs of this sort of effect in the way some potential 2024 presidential aspirants have started to frame their appeals to Republicans in post-Trumpist terms. More remarkably, some RNC members have started pressing the formal party apparatus to get some distance from Trump. And even some Trump fans have described the public remarks he’s made this spring as just more of the familiar greatest hits.
If Trump perceives this kind of fading of his influence, he will surely act to mitigate it. We might expect to see him holding public rallies again this summer, or working harder to get into the news cycle. He could well succeed, and he does have huge numbers of loyal Republican supporters. But straining to recapture lost charisma can easily have the opposite effect too.
For other Republicans, however, the challenge of overcoming passivity will increasingly be about more than Donald Trump. There are deeper structural challenges confronting anyone looking to shape the party’s future. There aren’t straightforward ways to propose new directions at this point, or to start a substantive internal debate. And short of a presidential aspirant with a clear agenda for the party to accept or reject, it isn’t obvious how anyone could try to rally Republicans around anything other than opposing what the Democrats happen to be doing. That’s why serious people on the right looking to chart a different path tend to talk in terms of which potential 2024 candidates could personify it.
But embodying a new approach to governing from scratch is surely too much to ask of a politician running for president. A great deal of work would have to be done in advance of that. And if competing candidates are to embody competing visions, there would have to be some forum, some framework, some set of practices in place for those to be hashed out.
To see this is to grasp one of the most peculiar features of this moment in our politics: We confront a strange dearth of intra-party factions.
That is not to say the parties aren’t internally divided. They are, and in some increasingly interesting and unfamiliar ways. But within both parties, every competing group feels compelled to claim the mantle of its entire party, and to try to own the conflict with the other party, rather than to see its own party as the scene of a negotiation among the members of a coalition.
The Democrats have a little more of the appearance of internal factions, as they have an assertive progressive-activist base that is clearly driving the party’s agenda at this point. But the other side of the party is strangely undefined, even though it (sort of) holds the presidency and is plainly essential to the party’s capacity to form congressional majorities too. So the progressive activists behave as though they simply are the Democrats, and aside from a short-lived post-election blowup, they have met little serious resistance from more centrist Democrats at this point. This has contributed to the bizarre atmosphere of these early months of the Biden era, in which progressive activists talk as though the narrowest congressional majority in modern times will be (indeed, already is!) the vehicle for a radical social transformation and channel their frustration regarding any setbacks at Joe Manchin — when in fact the party obviously needs more Joe Manchins rather than fewer.
They have so far achieved this feat of self-persuasion mostly through exaggeration. Some Democrats have talked themselves into the view that President Biden is already a transformational figure. They argue, for instance, that the COVID-relief bill enacted last month was not the second-largest of six such bills enacted over the previous year, basically doing more of what the prior ones had done, but rather the first massive step in the next iteration of the Great Society. They also seem to have decided to be pre-excited about a great infrastructure bill. There are advantages to this kind of boosterism: For now, the progressive wing of the Democrats really does seem to control the agenda, and the Biden administration bears the activists’ mark more than the president’s. But the absence of formal factional institutions and venues means real negotiation is largely nonexistent, both within the party and with Republicans. The Democrats may grow to lament its absence when they notice they aren’t really accomplishing nearly as much as they say, let alone when they recognize how constrained they are by the self-definition of the activists when they have to face voters next year in districts and states where Democrats need to be much more circumspect.
But as usual, the GOP’s problem is bigger. In recent years, Republicans persuaded themselves that any deviation from a party position of the moment was heretical and unmanly just as they shamelessly submitted themselves to the whims of a narcissist with a negative attention span and no set policy views. Abiding by the resulting combination of dogmatism and inconsistency has been exhausting for Republican politicians, but it has left most wanting a more stable party-wide orthodoxy rather than more flexibility for internal policy negotiation.
There are now some serious policy differences among some Republican politicians, especially in the Senate. Some involve very basic disagreements about the role of government in the economy. But they treat these differences as reasons to be publicly disappointed with each other more than as starting points for negotiation. Much the same occurs among the wonks and activists who back the different sides to these disputes. They don’t seem to see that their differences could actually serve as a foundation for a broader party coalition, and instead imagine that only confident tenacity in the service of precisely the right platform could bring victory on Election Day.
We are out of the habit of formal party factions just now, and we’ve forgotten how pervasive that habit has been in our resolutely two-party politics. To rectify our forgetfulness, a great source to consult is Daniel DiSalvo’s important 2012 book Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics, 1868-2010. DiSalvo offers a powerful corrective to a lot of the political science regarding the strengths and weaknesses of parties by focusing on factions.
Factions have a bad reputation, of course, in part because James Madison famously used the term to mean “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” DiSalvo’s definition (and mine here) looks more like Edmund Burke’s description of a party, only within a broader party: “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” DiSalvo offers this more expansive meaning:
A faction, as defined here, is a party subunit that has (1) the ideological consistency, (2) the organizational capacity, and (3) the temporal durability to (4) undertake significant actions to shift a party’s agenda, priorities, and reputation along the Left-Right spectrum. Factions exist when some party members share a common identity, are conscious of differences that separate them from other party members, and cooperate on a range of issues.
DiSalvo focuses on a few particular examples but it’s easy to think of many across our country’s history, including its relatively recent history. What stands out about them, in his description, is their capacity to act:
If parties occasionally lack purpose, factions often provide one. They are instruments that coordinate party activists, elected officials, interest groups, and intellectuals in efforts to rationalize the public agenda and the policy process. They put new ideas on the table and take concerted action to promote their adoption.
This is what is really missing now within the parties. There are still discernible blocs of voters and of politicians, and occasionally they are reasonably self-aware. But in recent years, they have tended not to be organized in ways that enable them to act within the parties. DiSalvo could see this problem coming a decade ago. “Contemporary interparty polarization forms a hostile climate for factions,” he wrote. But the degree of incapacity this has created was not yet fully evident then.
Two other great political scientists — Steven Teles and Robert Saldin — have taken up the question of factions more recently, with a profound awareness of how bad that incapacity has gotten. In an important essay last year in National Affairs (the journal I edit), they offered some hope about the potential for the emergence of meaningfully organized factions in the coming years, but they were clear-eyed about the obstacles too.
They considered the question through the lens of the desire to empower “moderates” in both parties. I don’t think that’s quite the right goal to have in mind, or maybe I just don’t think it’s easy to say what “moderates” are as a matter of policy views right now. But their insights about the potential of factions are profound regardless of whether that’s your goal or not. They write:
Polarization is commonly understood as a dynamic in which the two parties move further apart. However, another important feature of polarization is increasing homogeneity within each party’s cohort of elected officials. This pattern stifles demand for the kind of intra-party factions that used to provide necessary outlets for the much more varied preferences of elected politicians. Understanding the last two decades through this lens helps explain why there has been such a decline in cross-party lawmaking.
They note that more explicit factionalization of the two major parties could help Congress recover some of its energy. “In a more factionalized environment that created organizational structures for more activism, members could potentially have meaningful roles beyond just being roll-call cannon fodder.” And they argue that such factions could reshape presidential elections for the better too: “With factions playing a regular, structured role in the nomination process, we may see more inconclusive primaries, leading to formal brokering between ideological groups. This could yield something closer to the balanced tickets and cabinets that characterized the pre-polarization era.”
I would add that some work toward building meaningful factions could also help the parties clarify the character of their electoral coalitions. Factions today would unite around substantive policy priorities, not regional identities as at times in the past, but they would probably also end up creating voting blocs with at least a discernible pattern of residential geography — rural, suburban, and urban — and attendant familial, religious, economic, and cultural demography. In the absence of organized factions, the parties are now strangely unfamiliar with (or willfully blind to) the emerging demographics of their own electoral coalitions.
But crucially, Teles and Saldin point out that a politics of meaningful factions “will not unfold purely on the basis of mechanical, structural forces; rather, its advent is contingent on creative, intelligent agency on the part of both organizations and individuals.” In other words, it will require action. “The opportunity to build factional parties depends on a core group of activists and donors emerging — one that will provide the leadership and resources to build the structures through which a mobilized faction can surface.”
In separate essays, the two of them have since dug deeper into the benefits that this way of approaching politics could offer. Teles has shown how more explicit faction-building at the national level could help Republicans gain ground at the state and local level, and especially in the cities. And Saldin (with B. Kal Munis) has made an analogous argument regarding the Democrats in rural America.
There are structural reforms that could help our politics enable more constructive faction-building within the parties. Election systems that sought more fine-grained representation of differences (like ranked-choice voting, which could offer Republicans in particular more advantages than they now imagine), and congressional reforms that worked to decentralize authority in both houses (by empowering committees, breaking the barrier between authorization and appropriation, or otherwise rethinking the budget process) could clear some obstacles.
But the biggest obstacle is conceptual. The frustrations that stand in the way of more effective bargaining and policy-making in Washington now add up to an argument for more explicit intra-party groupings that would negotiate with one another and with factions in the other party. But too few of the frustrated activists and politicians in both parties seem to see that, and so too few are engaged in building durable institutional structures for constructive factional engagement — at least beyond the level of rhetoric and communication strategy.
This is in part because we are too little inclined to consider this moment as continuous with our political history. We tend to think now that the most apocalyptic arguments are the most realistic and hard-headed, but they are actually the ones most likely to be blind to the continuities that make human societies knowable. The insistence that we are in a moment of unique and imminent danger is a way of demanding that we ignore what we know. And so those within our parties who want to see some change are inclined to think that achieving that demands a dramatic break with the past — a revolution to prophesy rather than a meeting, an agenda, or a membership drive to actually go and organize.
We should consider the possibility that what this moment requires is politics, and that we all have something to learn about how to engage in politics more effectively.