Partisanship in the U.S today is ideological, and perhaps no book of the moment can better help us understand the nature of ideological partisanship today than this one. Most grasp that over the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has become uniformly liberal, and the Republican Party conservative. What is less well understood, and what Hans Noel illuminates, is that the ideologies came first. Liberalism and conservatism as we presently know them were only codified in the 20th century—not by partisans but by writers and intellectuals—what Noel calls, in a non-pejorative manner, “ideologues” (p. 22). The soul of the Democratic Party is not to be found in Jefferson or Jackson, but in Herbert Croly, whose Promise of American Life (1909) marked the beginning of an effort to define what we now understand to be “liberalism.” And the soul of the Republican Party is located less in Abraham Lincoln than in William Buckley, whose National Review hammered out what contemporary conservatism means.
Noel’s argument corrects the common tendency to cast ideology as the slave of political ambition. In Anthony Downs’ model, for instance, “parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies” (An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957, p. 28). Concrete interests, not ideas, seem to matter most in politics, both for both politicians (who want the power, prestige, and income that come from holding office) and voters (who want policies that favor benefits like good jobs, good roads, good schools and such). Yet this no longer quite makes sense of American politics, Noel shows. Ideas matter in a more direct way because those who care about ideas most—the intellectuals or ideologues—have captured American parties.
Through a masterful study of the issue-stands taken by writers for major political publications between 1850 and 1990, Noel reveals how even in the late nineteenth century (when parties were strong and polarized) partisans were not very ideological (pp. 93–118, 82). Nor does ideology make sense of political opinion in the Progressive Era, in Noel’s analysis (pp. 84–88). And parties in the mid 20th century were ideological blends, as each tried “more or less successfully to spread over the whole political rainbow from on extreme to the other” (E.E. Schattschneider, Party Government, quoted at 13). The familiar ideologies of liberalism and conservatism only came together as systems of thought in the twentieth century, after which intellectuals and ideologues set about imposing them on the party system (p. 9, 78–82, 122–137, 142, 173).
This leads to the diagnostic question at the heart of the book’s conclusion: is ideological partisanship good? Noel challenges normative democratic theorists to speak to this question more powerfully than they generally have. Indeed, the question of ideology seems to fall into the empty space that separates empirical political science and normative political theory. As I just noted, the economistic strain of political science assumes ideology is not a genuine political force in the world. For office-seekers, it is a “means of getting votes”—a tool they use to assure voters they will not deviate from their promises; for voters, it is also a tool they use to economize in assessing rival candidates. But ideological policy convictions are not the real stuff of politics, in this view, since “rational men are not interested in policies per se, but in their own utility incomes” (Downs, An Economic Theory, p. 42). Meanwhile, what matters for many normative political theorists is not scoping out the proper place of ideological conflict in a vital democratic system, but settling the ideological question. The task of political theory, for many, is to get at the right or true ideology, to ascertain the most reasonable conception of justice that, if generally accepted, would reduce or eliminate ideological conflict. Yet, as Noel says, since ideological partisanship is not going away anytime soon, we ought to have theoretical resources that allowed us to assess its place in a well-functioning democracy.
For his part, Noel is understandably concerned about a democracy where “activists and politically sophisticated people get what they want” but everyday citizens are disconnected from political elites (Morris P. Fiorina with Samuel J. Abrams, Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, 2009). Ordinary citizens do not share the ideological convictions that animate activists, candidates, and officials. With an ideologue, we can predict his position on issues B, C, and D, by knowing his view on issue A. The views of ordinary citizens (even highly informed citizens), meanwhile, are seldom constrained this way (p. 40, 68–69). A situation where political elites impose ideological conflict on the polity, “is at odds with the story we like to tell about democracy.” The electoral connection is meant to empower citizens to transmit their views to political elites, not to transmit ideologies from elites to citizens (p. 181).
But there is a subtle ambivalence to Noel’s assessment, as if he might respect some of the work ideologues do. He suggests in places that it might be misleading to suppose that ideologues have high jacked American politics to their own ends. Ideological differences may reflect real differences of interest, psychological temperaments, and philosophies of government. “We are born,” Noel says, “to disagree” (p. 186).
This ambivalence reflects an ambiguity in ideological partisanship itself. Ideology, Noel says, is a “shared set of policy preferences” (p. 14). The ambiguity comes from the tension between something that is “shared,” and something that constitutes a “set.” To share something suggests a coalition that stands together. A “set” implies a number of discrete items that logically or philosophically belong together.
Ideology, as Noel sees it, involves both of these things. Ideologues, he observes, “are typically trying to reach what they think is a correct answer” (p. 51). As such, ideology is an effort to logically apply principles to “issues of the day,” and thus to construct a logically coherent bundle of issue-stands (p. 42). Yet the ideologies of liberalism and conservatism are not simply political philosophical systems. As Noel observes, intellectuals can exercise great creativity in constructing arguments that link different issues together, and it often seems there is no logical necessity linking issue A with issues B, C, and D. There is no necessity that compels one who opposed the Iraq War to favor of redistributive social welfare policies and the legal permissibility of abortion, for instance. Those positions are bundled together not by logic but by politics. In this respect, ideologies are coalitions, not coherent philosophies: they unite a group that is more likely to be effective when it stands together than would be the case if policy demanders on each separate issue stood alone (p. 7, 13, 19–23, 70).
As coalition-builders, ideologues create the reasons that persuade various conflicting or mutually indifferent policy demanders to stand together and to act together. In this way, they are not different in kind from partisans. Both seek to to build a coalition that is sufficiently large and enduring to rule legitimately, consistent with the rules of constitutional democracy. The difference is that the old partisans perhaps cared more exclusively about the spoils of office rather than policy, where for the new ideologue-partisan, policy matters a great deal. But both share the same ambition: they want to rule.
But both the old partisans, concerned mainly with material benefits, and the new ideological partisans, want to rule legitimately: they try to create a majority sufficient to command the House, the Senate, the presidency, and appointments to the Court. This is a daunting task, requiring a majority that is both geographically extensive and temporally enduring. Neither party and neither ideology has succeeded at the task for nearly 50 years. To suppose that today’s ideological partisans are simply betraying the public by imposing ideologies on a public that is centrist and pragmatic is to believe that there is a path to political success that both parties reject, captured as they have been by ideologues. To be sure, this is not a claim that Noel makes—but it is a commonplace view among those who wish to cleanse politics of ideological disagreement. And it raises a critical empirical question: is there such a majority out there in the country, waiting to be represented?
There may not be such a majority, betrayed by today’s ideological partisans. The coalitions that ideologues and partisans (they are, as Noel shows, now the same people) are trying to build are not simply coalitions of intellectuals and professional “policy-demanders.” They are also building coalitions of citizens. The difficulty of their task may be compounded by the way public opinion is infinitely fragmented across an array of issues, and includes individuals whose ‘centrism’ consists of a combination of extreme positions taken from both sides of the ideological spectrum. It includes others who combine issues in ways that are very challenging to sustain in practice (such as support for expanded entitlements combined with support for tax cuts). If this is right, then ideological partisans do not simply impose their views on the public; they rather attempt to refine and organize public views so as to create what is not in fact already there: a constitutional majority.
This is the creative work both office-seekers and ideologues, partisans all, undertake: they try to persuade people who care about different issues to stand together. The fragmentation that liberty nourishes—the variety of conflicting interests that arise under conditions of commercial freedom, the ways of life that flourish under conditions of intellectual and religious freedom—make the creative work of partisans exceedingly difficult. Neither party in American politics has succeeded in recent decades (the failure of one is more obvious than the other at the moment), and it may be that neither party will truly succeed for as far as the eye can see. If neither succeeds, political elites will need to re-learn the brute political skill of compromise in order for the government to govern. Insofar as our ideologies are not only internally coherent political philosophies, but are also, as Noel shows, compromise coalitions, this should be more possible than very recent political history would suggest.
