There are many reasons for the dramatic rise in partisanship at the end of the 1820s, mainly related to economic diversification and rapid democratization. The number of voters had more than doubled between the elections of 1800 and 1820, and while an electorate exclusively of white men seems terribly uniform by today’s standards, its diversity was unthinkable compared to what had come before it. Farmers, merchants, workers, and industrialists from Maine to Missouri were participating in the democratic process, and partisan politics was how such a wild and unruly people could impose accountability on their government.
That said, the triumph of partisan politics in the United States does not diminish the lessons we can learn from the Republican leadership’s fusionist approach. As the popularity of the term “negative partisanship” indicates, there is a growing conviction that many partisans on both sides of the aisle are motivated in part by hatred of the opposition. Even if we accept Machiavelli and Van Buren’s view that factionalism can be a source of civic strength, we can also acknowledge that Harrington and Madison were correct about its ability to do “violence” to the political community. Indeed, some are castigating the Constitution today as a threat to democracy because it forces the two sides to compromise, and a growing number of Americans believe that political violence is sometimes acceptable.
So, as we accept the institutionalization of factional conflict through the party system, we should be mindful that “not all differences of opinion are differences of principle” and look for opportunities to work together. An idea like cooperation might seem awfully quaint in this 250th year of American independence, but the author of the nation’s Declaration of Independence and the father of its Constitution took it seriously enough to build their administrations around it.