“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction…”
“Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it in the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”
These are two quotations from George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address. Many will recall from high school history class that Washington in this address warns the nation about the danger of political parties; these are some of the words he uses to issue that warning. Less often discussed in high school history is that it is not parties as such that concern Washington, but the spirit of party. Over the course of this essay I hope to unpack and to meditate on that important distinction. As I show, Washington ultimately calls on us all to become political firefighters, committed first to doing no harm as we try to tame the flames of partisanship consuming the country we love.
Take the top quote first. It illustrates the danger of party rivalry going to the extreme and becoming a kind of quasi-warfare in which each faction cannot stand to be governed by the other, and seeks retribution on rival partisans whenever it has the chance to extract it. No one is happy in this situation of all-around punishment and revenge seeking. Washington points out that this creates the perfect conditions for a strong-man’s rise and rule. Erratic changes to law, policy, and government, particularly when they excite a high degree of public unease or anger, will stress the seams of trust in the social fabric, and predispose citizens to placing their faith in someone with the apparent strength and willingness to stitch together some kind of order out of the unhappy instability. Given that the new regime in this scenario is basically by definition the result of “accident and force,” it will almost certainly be less friendly to individual liberty and personal pursuits of happiness than one built upon careful “reflection and choice.”
The bottom quote is more quotidian. It’s the one we could benefit from dwelling on today. In this selection Washington acknowledges that a constitutionally destructive party-rivalry spiral is “an extremity,” and thus not a very likely scenario. But he still wants to point out that the spirit of party brings “common and continual mischiefs.” The presence of these day-to-day inconveniences leads him to the conclusion that a wise people would recognize that it is in their interest—and also is their duty—to keep contained the various enthusiasms that come along with partisanship.
A few lines later, after allowing that a minimal amount of party spirit will be inevitable in any free society, Washington (perhaps with the rhetorical assistance of Madison and/or Hamilton, both of whom edited versions of the address) delivers a memorable metaphor. “A fire not to be quenched, [the spirit of party] demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
Party fire
American democracy will always see the fire of party aflame in the hearth, and be “warmed” by its combustion. It is in modest measure good for sometimes sedated and insular twenty-first century capitalist-democratic souls to experience the edifying thrill of genuine political contest—skin-in-the-game competition over the management of real-world affairs. But today there is no concern about insufficient party affinity in the American system. Rather, we are confronted continuously with the opposite problem: that of excessive attachment to factional causes and interests. It would be hard to characterize our vigilance on this matter as “uniform.” The fire of party spirit burns freely, and while it hasn’t lit the forest just yet, one wonders if we’ve even entered the dry season.
Personally, I don’t think we have. As my good friend Thomas Koenig has recently written, in a post titled Things Will Get Worse Before They Get Better, “many Americans have proven that their political convictions are immune from reality… And when politics and reality diverge, nothing good ever comes of it. ” Moreover, negative partisanship remains one of the most powerful forces operative in our politics today, and shows few signs of weakening. Put another way, dislike of certain others steers the political ship for a lot of people. Democrats have well-rehearsed reasons to be distrustful, even spiteful of Republicans; it goes without saying that the reverse is true as well.
The purpose of this article is not to evaluate the balance of who is more right across all particular claims, but I will note that at present it is only the GOP that threatens to sever itself from American constitutional democracy by going along with Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, as well as those concerning the American electoral and legal system more generally. And then there is the Court of Mar-a-Lago: so many powerful, supposedly pious Republicans going along with so many of Trump’s unsavory, unprincipled, and often untruthful ad-hominem assaults—and institutional norm breaches—from what was for a time the most powerful bully pulpit on Earth. Should 2024 see additional Trumpian (or copycat) challenges to the election process, particularly after another Republican loss, it is the GOP base I am worried about throwing in the towel on the Union project. Decrying negative partisanship does not make me a covert Democratic operative or Trumpian apologist; I can condemn Trump’s lies and the MAGA movement’s ultimately anti-American perversion of “patriotism” while also still speaking truth about how condescending and bigoted Democratic attitudes—often stemming from biased and partial media coverage of red regions, as well as a lack of personal experience there—have played a part in sustaining the resentment of the populist right.
That is why I am adamant that de-escalating intense partisanship must be a joint partisan project. Unjustifiable cross-party animosities do run at some level in both directions, even if one party objectively is doing more that threatens the national constitution. If we want to arrest this spiral we have to understand what set it in motion. But we must be humble as we try to do this, as macro-political cause and effect are complicated. Trump perhaps would have enjoyed less support early on had certain Americans perceived less disdain for their values and ways of life from other, often more successful and better educated Americans. It is unfortunate that, to some intelligent minds, others’ support for Trump has always and only meant direct support for racism, sexism, xenophobia and related nastiness. Many a lived reality—were it ever discovered and known through firsthand encounter—would suggest that a better explanation for at least some Trump support is needed. But the persistence of the only-isms theory itself suggests that some “theorists of Trump” actually know very little about the lives and minds of actual Trump supporters, and thus, the dynamics of Trump support.
A few words from Washington speak to this point:
“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”
It can be comforting to believe from Brooklyn, D.C., or San Francisco that only bad people and racist people could support the political personalities you oppose. Or to believe from central Oklahoma that only liberty-hating would-be tyrants could vote Democrat. And if you are any sort of influencer, it can be expedient to promote such beliefs to those around you—“to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.” Repeating to people in ways subtle and gross that they are right and good, while those people are bad and intent to end your way of life, tends to make the intended audience want to listen to you more. But along the way, the curiosity-fueled pursuit of truth is lost. The desire to understand reality in all its richness gives way to a desire to promote a particular view of reality, which then no longer corresponds to actual reality. From the warped mind follows warped action. Thus do our misrepresentative, but also sadly self-fulfilling partisan narratives promote “jealousies and heartburnings,” which have indeed rendered us alien to one another.
And so we wonder what might break the spiral. We’ve seen that cross-party animosities have grown only more intense during a shared public health crisis, which many initially thought might help place partisan politics-as-usual on the back-burner. That we collectively proved such predictions false does not instill much hope or confidence that things will only get better from here. There’s still a bottom down there, somewhere, that we’ve yet to touch. A Trump 2024 run—if it is replete with election lies and his usual divisive rhetoric, as we should expect it would be—might help us find it. Particularly if that contest takes place against the backdrop of an international crisis or anxiety-inducing inflation, which even some mainstream liberal economists now publicly fear.
(Note that the presence of the prefix “hyper-” before “inflation” is not necessary for the phenomenon to induce anxiety around working-and-middle-class kitchen tables. Even a “moderate” 5-7% annual rate of increase in the Consumer Price Index for the next three years could make things very difficult for a Democratic incumbent, and indeed, for American society. Remember Carter!)
Given this sobering assessment, we’d be wise to reflect on Washington’s analysis. “[The sprit of party] serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” Any of this sound familiar?
Distracted, enfeebled
None could deny that "public councils” and “the public administration” have become “distracted” and “enfeebled” by partisanship in recent years. Otherwise our governing institutions would not be mired in many of the same fruitless national showdowns on so many of the same controversial issues dating back at least to the days of The West Wing: energy, policing, guns, abortion, immigration, education, economic redistribution, and healthcare, just to name a few of the big and still-mostly-unresolved ones. (The natural solution for several of these issues is greater localism, or more federalism; that we have not gone down that road of live-and-let-live [or, live-and-let-die] is itself proof that strong partisanship—the nationalized quest for total victory—has fogged our vision and condemned us to political insanity: doing the same things over and over again while expecting different results.) Scoring partisan points and securing media soundbites (you know, the ones that will be popular on Twitter, cable, or “back home”) have replaced governing well as the organizing priority for too many American officials.
Enfeebling distraction has reached even the highest office in the land, from which Washington once spoke. The reading public will recall that former president Trump practiced timely distraction as a self-serving art, to the great detriment of the body politic. But Washington’s words cut more than one way. The unscrupulous silence (in the face of ridiculous ideas like “defund the police”) and doublespeaking duplicity (behind declarations of “mostly peaceful” protest in front of burning buildings) of many progressive and Democratic leaders in the face of nightly riots that went far beyond—and in the eyes of many, delegitimized—peaceful daytime protests after the murder of George Floyd showed that the spirit of party could swallow, in addition to honesty, both pandemic public health guidance and fidelity to neutral conceptions of law. What some partisans were intent to christen a “summer of love” turned out, in reality, to be a summer of significantly increased carnage (with lasting effects). Whether out of guilt, pity, genuine ideological commitment, or fear of partisan pushback, few aligned with the side most enthusiastically supporting the protest movement could find any public words to address the riots. Some began to do so in July and August, after the worst had passed and the costs of ignoring the violence grew, but very few did so initially. I remember, because I was listening.
Jealous, alarmed
“Ill-founded jealousies and false alarms” fill our op-ed pages, “news” channels, and social media feeds, kindling “the animosities of one part” of the American political community “against another.” It doesn’t matter that many of the commentators and personalities most given to alarmism about “the other side” are often wrong about particular cases; throw enough worried expression out there and some of your stated fears will inevitably “come true.” Do this enough times and you have a “proven track record,” and are on your way to becoming a “serious commentator.” Thus we elevate voices that prioritize the maintenance of a certain kind of narrative (they’re coming for your AR-15; they want to take away your access to contraceptives), over and above those calling for the truthful examination of the particular details in each particular case, with an eye toward compromise and peacemaking. Many events and controversies—those that appear unfavorable to the team with which you sympathize most—you will as a 2020s pundit ignore altogether, knowing that events will inevitably (and quickly) serve you up something less uncomfortable to discuss with your audience. Something that implicates them instead of me or us. Thus churn the factories of other-oriented alarm and jealousy circa 2021.
Riotous, given to insurrection
Lastly comes Washington on riots and insurrection. He’s spot on once again. Acts of lawlessness follow the belief that my group’s grievances are unquestionably legitimate and supreme. In this situation ideas of popular sovereignty—beliefs that the people should ultimately rule or decide—overwhelm adherence to formal governing structures. The will to advance the group, or to oppose another faction, including sometimes the State, comes to replace the desire to follow the law. That’s what happened to many a masked, Molotov-throwing rioter in the summer of 2020, and that’s exactly what happened to the Capitol-breaching Trump true-believers on January 6th, 2021.
Here again I will supplement my own exegesis of the Farewell Address of the first president with one of Tom’s Takes (actually published in The Dispatch) on the sixteenth:
“Lincoln long ago figured out the relationship between the looting and lawlessness of last summer and the insurrectionary violence of January 6. The greater threat to the republic took place at the Capitol, but we would be remiss to not understand, as Lincoln did, that these “lawless in spirit” are liberated and spurred to action as the majesty of the law withered in the face of the mob violence of the summer. In Lincoln’s eyes, the upshot is worrisome: ‘by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the People.’”
Fantastic notions of pervasive racism and white supremacy and pervasive election fraud similarly animated both “mobocratic” groups of 2020-2021, and similarly worked to corrode their attachments to law and the national government. Those groups’ fantastic notions—actually complex assortments of memes, beliefs, and world-images suspended in the imagination and psyche, their expression influenced by personal disposition and environment—can trace their roots though the twisting vines of media precisely to the spirit of party—parent of the mobocratic spirit—which plants in us the will to create (with a common vocabulary and purpose), to remain within (for security and meaning, at threat of expulsion or “cancellation”), and to please (with proper speech and action) the comprehendible group. (An aside for my fellow armchair Andersonians: The “imagined nation” suffers when many participants lack the experiences required to imagine humanely different others within that same nation. Hence the tribe, a more coherent sub-group with more readily-apparent similarities, that is more easily “imagined.”) It took a complex chain of events (including a novel respiratory pandemic and government-mandated, psychologically-trying lockdowns) to produce both the summer 2020 riots and the January 2021 insurrection, but reading Washington alongside Lincoln highlights that the mobocratic mode of the spirit of party, in its destructive, single-minded excess, is what ultimately fueled each of these unfortunate episodes.
Uncertain of what lies ahead
One can look at the American political landscape today and feel many things. Many, if not most have decided that one or another “team” (in reality there are many more than two if you consider factions within each) is better, and thus deserving of their support. A smaller number of individuals look at the two-party ecosystem as currently configured and see a serious systems-level problem for the republic. First and foremost I am a member of the latter camp.
Returning to Washington clarifies the problems and the challenges that we face. It’s not parties per se that are the problem.
It’s the spirit of party, the all-too-human manner in which we over-engage in fierce, community-dividing political acts under the banner—and with the monetary and institutional support—of party structures. Applying Washington’s ideas to the present, it’s clear that we’re playing with fire through new and unprecedentedly powerful means of spreading it. Indeed, we must keep in mind that the last forty years have seen a succession of profound global revolutions: the rise of computers and the Internet, the adoption of pagers, PDAs, and cellphones, the scaling up and branching out of wireless data, social media, and other digital networking technologies. Our “public” interactions with one another have flattened and accelerated and are changing still—particularly after the experience of the pandemic. It’s becoming possible to fear that automation and technology will displace or render less important human workers on the one hand while networking human grievance on the other. “Reflection and choice” may indeed become imperiled in a world of technological “accident and force.” Many people are having a hard time keeping up with it all, if the suicide statistics tell us anything.
There’s a reason Hannah Arendt connects loneliness and isolation to the rise of tyranny within her classic Origins of Totalitarianism. As Damon Linker wrote recently at The Week, drawing explicitly from Arendt, “Loneliness can be intolerable—so much so that even the most toxic forms of political association begin to look like a godsend.” Like Washington and Lincoln, Arendt was concerned with the spirit of party, in her own way. It’s the same spirit that filled the ranks of the brownshirts and broke the glass on Kristallnacht and demanded the submission of German constitutionalism to Hitlerian Führerprinzip. Washington stresses that this spirit—particularly the zealous, hell-or-high-water aspect of it—is present and ineradicable within us all. I would argue that it is related to what St. Augustine called the “lust for domination” and Nietzsche the “will to power” and Hegel the “struggle for recognition.” It is humbling, and at times unnerving, to remember that these impulses will remain part of our political firmament—we cannot overwrite moral psychology and basic human nature. But we can try to contain its worst expressions by working to counter our fellow citizens’ illiberal wills, whatever direction they point.
Firefighting
We must become political firefighters. By now it should be clear that it won’t be easy to tame our partisan tire-fire into a more manageable campfire, which warms rather than consumes. Doing so depends in part on each of us self-moderating as we engage in our various actions around “the political.” It also depends on us having the courage to try to moderate the most willful partisans around us, especially those on our own side of the aisle. Sometimes the best you can do is not join or remain a part of their audience. Personally, I have been reflecting on a rule of thumb that I think is a good one: first, do no harm. It’s a rule that accepts from the start just how easy it is, even with good intentions, to do harm in a political environment that is built around metrics of attention and traffic. Truth often is not popular, and what is popular often is not true.
What I have in mind is something like this. Say you’ve just received a piece of news about something one of your political “others” has done that you don’t like. Say you’re considering making a public expression about it—a social media post, a video, an essay, whatever. And say you have a considerable amount of influence and reach. Before you spout off, I’d encourage you to examine with cold realism the likely effect of whatever you’re about to post.
If you think that you have a reasonable chance at adding something new and insightful to the conversation, changing someone’s mind, getting someone to understand an issue differently, or making another kind of positive, situation-enhancing impact, by all means go ahead and make your contribution.
But if you realize that what you intend to say does not promise to do much more than anger people who already agree with you—or confirm them in their belief that they remain on The Right Side of Things—then I seriously encourage you to (re)consider what you are doing. Think about Washington and the fire of party spirit. Realize that issue-and-interest-based passions and cross-party resentments are organic, inevitable, and durable. (Washington: “…there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it.”) Perhaps you might conclude that this time around, the world doesn’t need your pile-on expression of how bad they are, and how right we are.
I’m under no illusions about the likely efficacy of this approach. And I’m far from perfect at living up to this standard myself, although I do try. My basic and animating concern is that the fire conditions keep getting more extreme, and our partisan sparks more intense. Rather than play the standard hypocritical partisan’s game—denouncing those I don’t like when they’re wrong, shielding my team when it’s wrong, praising only us when we look good—I am interested in getting more of us to realize and to act on the reality that we’reall wrong sometimes, and that every major movement operative today has some insight—speaks to some injury or aspiration—that we must incorporate if our national politics is to have a workable future. We just need to be more open to hearing truth from outside our usual groups and thought-worlds and more sincere about our own team’s screwups. The greatest challenge here may be distancing ourselves from those parts of our self-identities that are wrapped up and defined by our participation in our political teams; it will require courage for partisan American souls to step beyond their group-given identities and to aspire to the nobler self-conception of the tribally-independent other-regarding truth-seeker. Some fidelity to these exercises would, by revitalizing basic commitments to honest analysis and truthful self-reflection, keep our partisan flames more in check. Maybe we could learn to trust one another a little bit better.
There are good reasons that all of us should want to do this. Our perspectives are partial. We need one another to inform each other of those things that we each cannot easily see. Of course we will have deep and passionate disagreements. But we must keep them productive. Whipping up suspicion, fear, and resentment will not sustain us, no matter what virtues or notions of justice are invoked in doing so. Tribalism is anti-American. It tends “to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” Following Washington, let’s try to avoid making America’s party situation any worse.
Thanks for reading. I hope you’ll consider sharing this post with friends, family, colleagues, and any other possibly-interested associates. I would be grateful.