Vote Blue No Matter Who: Party Politics as Political Agency

In America today we have a party of ordinary governance and a personality cult party. Those are the two options we are now offered every general election, and it really is that simple.

That does not mean the party of ordinary governance is always admirable, or its average member all that appealing. Ordinary governing parties are, at the end of the day, responsible for controlling states, and states are prone to all manner of injustice and violence. But the choice between ordinary governance and a personality cult—especially this cult, of this personality—is not a hard one.

Every so often someone expresses their understandable frustration with the party of governance by threatening to withhold their vote in the general election. In these situations, they often insist this is an act of political strategy. But this is foolish at best, and it rests on a misunderstanding of what it even means to act as a party in politics.

Max Weber defined politics as “striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power,” but he had in mind a vocational politics in a consolidated state. There have been moments where a different kind of politics comes into play, the politics of drastically altering the power relations of a society through institution building. The founding of the federal government was one such moment. The establishment of the USSR was another. The establishment of post-Soviet countries was yet another.

It is only once a political order of this kind is entrenched that we can speak of a vocational politics, of maneuvering to gain established offices in existing institutions. When such maneuvering is done jointly rather than individually, we can speak of factions—or parties, which Schattschneider defined in minimal terms as any “organized attempt to get control of the government.”

Both the institutions of the state and political parties are universal. The quest to eliminate either is a fool’s errand.

Statelessness is not an option. Give human beings instant communication and rapid transportation over vast distances, along with production processes with high capital costs—including the production of weapons and military materiel—and you will inevitably get people organizing the use of force on a large scale. This is not to say that states are inherently benevolent. Throughout history, they have been gratuitously violent and display a pronounced tendency to treat people like a line in a spreadsheet or cattle to be herded.

But states are a fact of the world that we must face. We must take seriously the challenge of mitigating their worst excesses and channeling their strengths productively. We cannot eliminate them. The only thing worse than a tyrannical state is a failed state, with high levels of political violence and frequent outbreaks of civil war.

Eliminating parties is likewise, not an option. If you have states, you will have organized attempts to take control of them. This can mean formal organizations, or it can be looser and more informal ones. In America, we have done more to try to eliminate parties than any other country, and the result is a very loose and informal party system, where discipline is maintained more through a fear of the party’s influential members and primary voters than any formal mechanism. By contrast, in many countries a party organization can expel members and otherwise sanction them in order to enforce discipline. America’s many attempts to eliminate the party have radically altered its form but not its basic nature, as a collective enterprise aimed at controlling the state.

There is never a question of whether or not we will have parties. There is a question of what form they will take. And just as importantly, whether or not we will have a competitive party system.

For parties are indeed universal—they rule a modern state whether it is a democracy or not. Indeed, given the inherent ambiguity around whether a country is a democracy or simply play-acting one, Adam Przeworski has suggested that democracies are systems in which “parties lose” (presumably incumbent ones specifically). In this sense America’s federal government is still a democracy, as both parties have lost regularly nearly every two years for most of the 21st century so far. Many state and local governments are more questionable through this lens, however; our subnational units are best described as a two-at-most party system, with only intraparty factions offering anything like a competitive system, and some places (following Wisconsin’s example) quite brazenly enacting competitive authoritarianism. 

Much of people’s understandable frustration stems from this, the basic uncompetitiveness of our party system for a great deal of the country. But fixing this is not something that can be done by refusing to vote for either of the parties that actually has a chance of winning in an election. It in fact requires engaging in intraparty politics within one of the parties, to push them towards a reform agenda that addresses the structural causes that keep us from having a competitive multiparty democracy at all levels of government.

Intraparty politics is therefore the next level of politics which we will examine.

Parties seek to control states, but must decide what to do when they succeed—and who, exactly, will be the ones to do it. If we think of parties as factions within a larger society, they themselves are divided into further factions, subject to intraparty politics in Weber’s sense of seeking a measure of power or influencing the distribution of power—in this case specifically the distribution of the party’s power.

Some of this is driven by substantive goals, such as a specific policy or reform or diplomatic stance. The party may be divided on the particulars of such goals, or even on whether they are desirable at all. 

Much of it—more than we partisans may like to think—is driven by personal ambition and interpersonal support networks, as well as political parasociality (the very thing that always risks degrading into a personality cult). Membership in a party is wide, mass partisanship much wider still, but most power and influence are wielded by a small minority of leaders and key figures. There will always be an army of internal challengers who seek to knock someone out of their position of power to take it for themselves. This is what much of the mechanics of politics amounts to, ultimately.

Many disputes characterized as being about substantive goals are in fact driven by interpersonal competition of this kind, among people who may hold very similar substantive goals or indeed would be willing to hold a great many substantive goals if it offered them a path to power.

Now—let us turn from hypotheticals and concepts to the party politics that America faces today.

The range of options within the party of ordinary governing is very wide, from good to mediocre to ill advised to odious. But compared to the personality cult, they are better by far—especially because the lion’s share of them operate as a party on the lion’s share of issues. Even in our extremely candidate-driven system, they act together rather than merely as individuals making individual judgements. 

To put it simply, the Democratic Party, as a party, is incomparably better than the Republican Party.

The problem is that better is not good enough. We need a Democratic Party that will aggressively prosecute the criminals of the Trump administration, expand the Court, and in general pursue the reconstruction of America’s institutions. That is a difficult request to make of the full and uninspired caretakers of our now-dead status quo.

How we turn the humdrum governance party into the reconstruction party is the key question of our moment, more important even than determining what they must do once they are willing to do it. Primaries are one tool, both as voters but also as a potential candidate yourself. Liberal Currents is of course engaged on another front—persuasion, aimed both at fellow voters, more influential figures, as well as current and future elected Democrats.

One thing we must not do to influence intraparty politics is withdraw our vote from the general election (never mind cast it for the personality cult, or a minor party rendered worthless by our system). Even the worst Democrat is better than the best personality cultist. If you care about democracy and human rights, you must, in fact, vote blue no matter who. 

If you publicly threaten not to vote Democratic in the general, at best you are engaging in a bit of showboating to serve your own personal ambition within the party, at the expense of more important goals. At worst, you lack true commitment to defeating the personality cult at all, an effort that requires us to act as a party rather than as eccentric individual voices. These are not mutually incompatible possibilities.

“Vote blue, no matter who” is not an abdication of political agency. It is an acknowledgement of the form political agency takes in current American politics—of balancing, on the one hand, very real intraparty debate and competition, with, on the other, acting as a party against an out-of-control reactionary faction that regularly wins a plurality of votes. 

Featured image is Delegates on the floor at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, by Warren K. Leffler or Thomas J. O'Halloran