Membership of an association, be it a state, family or ethnic group, is often said to bring with it a distinct set of obligations. In the case of a political party, as typically a voluntary organization, it may seem self-evident that there should be such obligations. To commit to a cause is to make collective projects one’s own, something that necessarily involves a measure of self-restraint and sacrifice. Yet the extent of such obligations – to whom or what they are owed, and how constraining their demands should be – is less clear. For some, the obligations specific to the partisan may be quite limited, along the lines of a duty of loyalty to those immediate colleagues whose political fortunes they share. For others they will be rather more extensive, entailing a commitment to some larger community of the like-minded, extended in space and time. The obligations incumbent on partisans, independent of those they may incur as citizens or in other social roles, can be sketched in contrasting ways.
Existing treatments of partisan obligation generally approach it as a special case of political obligation.Footnote 1 A core concern is how partisan conflict can be made compatible with a liberal order: questions of tolerance, free speech and the scope for civil disobedience are at the fore, with an emphasis on what partisans owe to those beyond their own circle (that is, to their political opponents and the wider political community). Rarer is a focus on what partisans, as members of a collective, owe their fellow party members. Some of the essential elements that such an ethics of partisanship might cover have been highlighted in the occasional work on intraparty deliberation, participation and respect for dissenting opinion.Footnote 2 I want to introduce a different dimension: what partisans owe their fellows in respect of their party’s past and future. This is a distinct area of partisan ethics, centred on the party’s evolution in time. Guided by an idea of partisanship as directed towards advancing a long-term political project, I explore the nature of partisan ties by approaching them as a question of intergenerational obligation.
Thinking about partisanship in this time-sensitive fashion is important if we are to fully understand, critically appraise, perhaps even respond to, some of the key political trends of contemporary Western democracy. For many parties, recent years have seen declining rates of membership and increasingly uncertain voter support. Where once labour parties might have hoped to count on the stable allegiance of a working class, and conservative parties on that of the moneyed and propertied, today things seem more unsettled. What political scientists call processes of ‘de-alignment’Footnote 3 have left parties needing to adapt in order to survive. One of the ways they have done so is by making fundamental revisions to party doctrine, in some cases changing their constitution to do so. This was the route the ‘Third Way’ parties of the 1990s chose, severing themselves from much of their socialist traditions in the name of modernization.Footnote 4 Conservative and centrist parties have seen parallel shifts, described with such terms as ‘neo-conservatism’ and ‘neo-liberalism’.
Such parties are heavily criticized from within for disowning the commitments they once stood for. Efforts to shore up party support have been widely viewed as an exercise in ‘selling out’. Yet the same critical attitude has appeared to others as a form of dogmatism. Mature politics, it is suggested, involves revising one’s commitments as the electorate evolves. Parties must keep up with the times. At stake in these disputes are the parameters within which any process of partisan re-definition may legitimately unfold. I suggest that this, in turn, reflects how one draws the contours of partisan obligation. Decisions to reorient a party inevitably put the actions of predecessors and successors in a new light; the question is how much this matters. The pressing strategic decisions facing many parties today have thus brought a particular dimension of partisan ethics to the fore.
In the ethics of political community more broadly, questions of cross-temporal obligation have been usefully approached by distinguishing backward- and forward-looking perspectives.Footnote 5 This distinction can be applied to the present enquiry. In the first category, one might ask to what extent partisans are obliged to remain faithful to the convictions of preceding partisans. Does membership of an organization extended in time, with an established history and an unbounded future, introduce constraints on the scope for legitimate political reinvention? Or should one emphasize the autonomy of today’s members – the ‘sovereignty of the living generation’? In the second category – the forward-looking perspective – one may ask whether the partisans of the present have obligations concerning their party’s future. For example, do they have a duty to balance short-term gains such as electoral success against the party’s long-term organizational and programmatic sustainability? How far, in short, should one conceive partisan obligations as extending cross-temporally?
I begin by examining what might be called the ‘presentist’ view of the party, in which obligations connected to the party’s past and future are absent. In such a perspective, a party is correctly understood as an association of individuals whose mutual obligations, such as they are, are independent of the party’s history and long-term trajectory. I argue this view is problematic, partly because it downplays one of the sources of a party’s public credibility – its constancy of programme – but more crucially because it is in tension with one of the good reasons individuals may have to associate with a party: its commitment to a political project whose full realization necessarily lies in the long term, perhaps beyond their lifespan. Partisanship finds one of its strongest rationales in the idea of the party as a cross-temporal collective whose members’ efforts cumulate over time. Insofar as partisans ought to respect the good reasons why their fellow partisans may associate with the party, they should not be indifferent to its coherence over time. The article goes on to explore the merits of an alternative account in which partisans do have cross-temporal obligations, both ‘ascending’ ones to the past and ‘descending’ ones to the future. I sketch how the attendant obligations might look, outlining two norms of fidelity and sustainability. Such obligations need not always trump countervailing concerns: they apply in a context in which other citizen obligations continue to hold, and sometimes the demands of the latter will be judged superior. But these obligations should be recognized, I argue, as one element in the moral calculus of partisanship.Footnote 6
Thinking about group obligation is one way to explore the nature of the group. The article’s primary goal is to refine our concept of what a party is, offering a corrective to accounts that cast it as but a network of office-seeking individuals. A richer conception is needed if one is to grasp the stakes of contemporary partisan crisis and transformation, and make a critical evaluation of the strategies adopted by contemporary political elites. More widely, the article seeks to develop one branch of an ethics of activism. The political party, broadly understood, has been one of the paradigmatic forms of political involvement in the modern age, and arguably still represents an important source of desirable change. If its progressive potential is to be realized, reflecting on the moral basis of the demands it makes seems important. In particular, in a period when real-world social and political movements often display an ephemeral quality, emerging and receding at some speed, it seems important to reflect on the activist’s position in time.
SOVEREIGNTY OF THE LIVING GENERATION? PRESENTIST CONCEPTIONS OF THE PARTY
I define the presentist conception of the party as the view that partisans, as partisans, have no meaningful cross-temporal obligations. By ‘partisans’ I understand those who claim unity in the name of a shared conception of the public good and how best to realize it (a normative programme, as I call it), and who participate in co-ordinated activities designed to bring this interpretation to bear on authoritative political decision making.Footnote 7 Provisionally, for simplicity, I shall refer only to those who are party members in the formal sense, though later I shall touch on the more ambiguous case of those who are consistent supporters but not formal members (‘partisans beyond the party’, as one might call them).Footnote 8
In this presentist view, partisans have no reason to feel constrained in their decisions by concerns arising from how these decisions relate to the party’s past. Nor need they make special allowance for the party’s future, insofar as this is separable from their own immediate fortunes and the fortunes of the wider public on whose behalf they act. They have full discretion to discard or retain the existing normative programme as they see fit, and full discretion to discount the party’s long-term prospects in favour of its short-term success, for example construed as electoral popularity or policy impact. They are unencumbered by cross-temporal partisan obligations. Borrowing a term used in eighteenth-century debates on the desirability of binding state constitutions, we might summarize this view as endorsing ‘the sovereignty of the living generation’.Footnote 9
Such a position can be found in what is sometimes called the economic view of the party, which conceives it as a network of elites seeking to maximize their personal advantage. The view has been popular in the study of parties, both within and beyond the rational-choice tradition. In this perspective, the party is conceived compatibly with the definition above, but with the additional proposition that the guiding motive of action is individual utility maximization.Footnote 10 Partisans are conceived as office seekers, their decisions led principally by a concern for what will be electorally popular amongst a population of voters in the moving present. Although an argument against intergenerational obligation is rarely made explicit by adherents to this view, the focus on electoral measures of partisan success, which entail a numerically determinate population of voters comprised of those living at a given moment, implies a model of partisan rationality in which cross-temporal concerns are largely absent.
That partisans oriented only towards immediate success will lose public credibility over time is a point supporters of this view may freely concede.Footnote 11 If the world to which normative programmes are addressed is at all stable, what partisans advocate today and tomorrow ought to bear some resemblance, or else their actions will become too unpredictable to be meaningfully endorsed. Constancy of message is important, such authors will accept, even if partisanship is ultimately about nothing more than efficiency at winning power. This might be seen as a concession to the importance of cross-temporal demands – to the need for the ideal partisan to bring tomorrow’s voters into their calculus alongside today’s. But the argument turns on strategy rather than ethics. In this line of reasoning, in which voter behaviour is the ultimate measure of good (that is, effective) partisanship, cross-temporal thinking only becomes important to the extent that it helps to win votes. The implication is that if voters are willing to endorse radical ruptures in a party’s programme, constancy of message does not matter. In other words, this concern with political credibility reflects merely an expectation of what kind of partisan strategy is likely to be successful. It is not derived from an assessment of what configuration of obligations is constitutive of partisanship. No intrinsic value is attached to the effort to harmonize present-day partisan actions with those of the past and future.
I foreground the economic view because it is a familiar one in the study of partisanship, but presentist conceptions need not take this form. A less utility-oriented account is possible, whereby partisans have other-regarding goals, yet full discretion to pursue them as they see fit, unburdened by backward- and forward-looking partisan considerations. In the Jeffersonian reasoning against perpetual state constitutions, the sovereignty of the living generation is of course necessary not so as to liberate decision makers to pursue selfish interests, but so as to prevent their being constrained by commitments not of their own making.Footnote 12 Similar arguments might be developed for the party, such that present-day partisans are said to be able to pursue their normative programme adequately only if their hands are not tied by the commitments and prospects of those of another time. It is their judgement that is thus privileged, not their interests narrowly understood. Such a view amounts to an enlightened presentism, for it is compatible with the intention to pursue the interests of a wider constituency. It is, however, in one important respect similar to the outlook previously described: no intrinsic value is placed on seeking to align present-day partisan actions with those of yesterday and tomorrow.
I want to contest this position without simply referring to the questionable credibility amongst voters that presentism may or may not entail. The major limitation of a presentist perspective lies, I suggest, in its discordance with the good reasons for which an individual might choose to associate with a party in the first place.
Whatever their political orientation, one of the important rationales available to individuals to motivate their involvement in partisan activity is, I suggest, the idea of helping to advance the kinds of normative ideal that require co-ordinated effort over time. While small victories that favour ideals such as justice, equality, fairness, freedom, democracy, national development and conservation can be aimed at in the short to medium term, they resist immediate satisfaction in anything close to their entirety. Those who commit themselves to a party defined by such goals, though they may also set themselves more achievable, less high-minded goals, ultimately commit themselves to goals that cannot be fully realized within a single electoral cycle, a single period of office, a single political career or indeed an individual’s lifespan.Footnote 13 They commit themselves to projects that require time to implement, and that cannot be tackled during the relatively short timescale of a political mandate. The value of the party lies in the way its extended lifespan makes the pursuit of these long-term projects possible. Borrowing terminology from existing discussions of intergenerational justice, we might say that the party represents a distinctive means by which to address ‘lifetime-transcending interests’.Footnote 14 It provides an opportunity for those associated with it both to contribute to an ongoing, cumulative project and, less instrumentally and more expressively, to align themselves publicly with the ideas that inspire it.Footnote 15
To be sure, for some individuals, personal power and prestige may be sufficient reasons to associate with a party, as the economic conception suggests. But while this may be an adequate motivation for some – particularly for those with realistic prospects of achieving a position of leadership within the party – for others it will be quite implausible.Footnote 16 Many partisans – especially those affiliated with large parties – may not be in a position to justify their involvement in terms of interest maximization, since they may gain little in strictly material terms. Economic theories of the party generally have little to say about what brings the ordinary partisan on board, yet without them there is no party.Footnote 17 Nor can an enlightened presentism adequately be the source of their allegiance. Those who take other-regarding commitments seriously and wish to shape institutions to reflect them must reckon with the fact that realizing goals through the political process demands patient efforts extended over time. Even in its more modest forms, partisanship is a protracted business, not least because political institutions themselves – the procedures of election, legislation, execution and so on – have their own distinctive tempo to follow. Moreover, ongoing partisan dedication is required to maintain political achievements, once attained. Those who join a party expecting immediate and lasting results will typically be soon disappointed. If their involvement is to be meaningful, objectively and subjectively, an alternative rationale for association is needed; the idea of commitment to an ongoing collective project provides this.
Here one gets the first glimpse of a possible theory of partisan cross-temporal obligation, though it is not my aim to develop it in detail yet. If the idea of the party as advancing a cumulative, cross-temporal project provides a strong rationale for engaging in partisanship, then arguably this motivation deserves some form of respect, for it is the quid pro quo of the sacrifice and self-restraint that partisanship demands. As partisans seek to influence the course of their party, they should not be indifferent to the commitments of predecessors, whose efforts were crucial to the party’s development and whose contributions find their meaning in the belief they will be continued. Partisans failing to show due respect for this motivation would be abusing the efforts of their fellow members, reaping the benefits of these efforts without acknowledging that which gives them their sense and coherence.
Cross-temporal concerns of this kind, it should be added, seem to form part of the self-understanding of partisans themselves. Moments of crisis in particular are a revealing site for the study of normative expectations. In the case of parties, notions of the intrinsic importance of constancy of normative programme are disclosed in those moments when a sub-group of the party sharply deviates from past practice. As noted, many are the party leaders in modern democracy who have been accused by large sections of their membership of having ‘betrayed’ their party’s origins, ‘sacrificed’ its traditions or ‘sold its soul’.Footnote 18 Such denunciations of broken commitments evoke the party as something larger than its living individuals – as part of an ongoing political project – and suggest the intrinsic worth of remaining faithful, one way or another, to the party’s earlier incarnations.Footnote 19 Nor are such ideas the preserve of a particular species of party. While the notion of commitment to a long-term normative project might seem to fit parties of the Left in particular, as those historically oriented to social progress and ongoing struggle, parties of the Centre and Right have by no means been immune to such concerns. Empirical observation reveals plenty of denunciations of betrayal here too.Footnote 20 Even parties that are considered ‘conservative’ generally set themselves some kind of ongoing project – for example, the restoration of a good society deemed to have decayed – and rarely cast themselves purely in the role of a rearguard action to defend the status quo.
In sum, if the unity of a party is grounded, as I have suggested, in shared political commitments, affiliation to it should be possible in terms of the goals it professes. Given that these goals are generally of a long-term character, this possibility relies on the ongoing co-operation of other partisans, acting in such a way as to make cumulative moves towards those objectives possible. Further, the wider contribution of partisanship to democracy arguably rests in part on partisans having exactly such long-term goals, thereby establishing a systematic connection between political ideals and institutional decision making.Footnote 21 It is because the notion of partisanship as about a cross-temporal project is one of the most plausible rationales for partisan practice, as well as one apparently evident in the intuitions of partisans themselves, that it should form the basis of a more detailed exploration of partisan cross-temporal obligation.
PARTISAN ASCENDING OBLIGATIONS: ON A NORM OF FIDELITY
Reflections on intergenerational justice sometimes distinguish between ascending and descending obligations, that is, between obligations to predecessors and successors.Footnote 22 The distinction can usefully be applied when thinking about the ethics of partisanship, and is adopted in this section and the next to offer an account of how cross-temporal partisan obligations might look. My goal is to identify a core set of obligations that help illuminate some of the essentials of partisan ethics. The discussion is necessarily selective: additional obligations could very possibly be included, not least because the details of a party’s ideological profile may generate obligations specific to partisans of that persuasion.Footnote 23
Before we begin, notice that to speak of obligations to predecessors and successors is to formulate matters in interpersonal terms – as ties to people rather than to institutions, traditions or values. One of the merits of this formulation is that it accords with the ‘person-affecting intuition’, whereby we assume that right or wrong acts, and the obligations that correspond to them, are such according to the positive or negative effects they have on persons.Footnote 24 If decisions affecting the course of a party are to be measured against some kind of normative standard, one would expect it to have something to do with how these decisions affect people (in the case in question, fellow partisans). By contrast, depersonalized obligation has a fundamentalist ring, suggesting an unbounded enthusiasm for ‘the idea’.Footnote 25 To detach commitments from the persons they are shared and advanced with is to risk becoming deaf to the human costs that arise in their pursuit.
But to speak of obligations to predecessors and successors, rather than disembodied traditions, raises the challenging prospect of obligations to the dead and the unborn.Footnote 26 Especially the possibility of the former may seem dubious.Footnote 27 If someone no longer exists, what benefit or harm can be done them? Does their unawareness of later events not make them inviolable, and does this not place them beyond the scope of a theory of obligation?Footnote 28 That the dead might be harmed by the living is implied, of course, by some common intuitions, notably that an injury is done when a person is posthumously slandered. That they are ignorant of the deed seems weak grounds on which to discount it. Of direct relevance to the argument that follows is the more general proposition, maintained in a substantial strand of moral philosophy, that the dead can be harmed or benefitted according to how far their deeply held concerns are promoted after their death.Footnote 29 In this perspective, the fortunes of the dead, properly considered, are inseparable from the later trajectory of things dear to them – their children for instance, or the activities to which they dedicated themselves in life.Footnote 30 Their stake in these matters is ongoing, and how such concerns unfold after their deaths is germane to the degree of fulfilment that can be attributed to their lives. This fulfilment, argues Pitcher, is not reducible to a conscious state of happiness or satisfaction: a life can be compromised by developments of which the individual is unaware, and by extension it can be compromised by events that take place after its conclusion.Footnote 31 In the case of partisans, one may suppose that the fate of the political project they choose to commit to is one such deeply held concern of the sort that bears on such fulfilment. Whether the party prospers in a recognizable form is an important aspect of their self-realization. This is the sense in which their welfare depends on the party’s subsequent trajectory, and how they fall within the purview of a theory of obligation.
Let us look more closely then at the first set of obligations to be considered: those of the backward-looking, ‘ascending’ kind. I have argued that a long-standing and coherent reason to be a partisan has been to contribute to the advance of ‘lifetime-transcending interests’. Included in this rationale for partisanship is, I suggest, an expectation that tomorrow’s partisans will seek to act in a way broadly consistent with the efforts of today’s. Given that the fruits of these efforts will be deferred, and dependent for their realization (partial or complete) on the labours of those to come, these activities are likely to derive much of their value for those engaged from the belief they will be continued, and certainly not discontinued or flouted arbitrarily. Partisanship may be classed as a ‘future-oriented’ practice in this sense.Footnote 32 As such, it may be said to generate obligations amongst present-day partisans to respect the actions of their predecessors, and to give sense to the future-oriented spirit in which these were conducted.Footnote 33 This is what is intended by the above-mentioned norm of fidelity.
In the most obvious sense, fidelity might be taken to imply an obligation to act in strict accordance with the traditions of the party as established by its founding partisans. It can be read as an effort to adhere as far as possible to the inherited normative programme. In many parties the fundaments of this programme are laid out in a constitutional text,Footnote 34 which can be understood as the founders’ effort to embed certain long-term commitments at the party’s core. It is this text, one might argue, that authoritatively reveals their future-oriented projects and those of all partisans who choose to associate with the party over the course of its subsequent development. Fidelity to predecessors in this view means fidelity to the constitutional text.
Yet while strict conformity with a founding document is clearly a form of fidelity, such an interpretation is not without problems. First, it is liable to produce a rather static conception of the party in which partisans are condemned to ‘live in the past’. It reserves partisanship for the dogmatic, understood as those unwilling to revise commitments in response to changing empirical circumstances. Secondly, one intuitively senses that it overstates the claim of past activists to set the course followed by their successors. The future-oriented actions of the dead or retired seem to achieve an unjustified dominance over the future-oriented actions of the presently engaged. While a presumption of constancy in commitment seems plausible, strict conformity itself is too demanding. If this signifies a reductive understanding of fidelity, what could be meant by it instead?
Rather than an obligation to avoid innovation at all costs, I interpret fidelity to mean an obligation to justify innovation and to pursue it incrementally. It amounts to a requirement to show, in convincing fashion, how new initiatives connect in some minimally coherent way to the traditions from which they depart, and to explain why their novel elements are needed. To better understand what this norm might entail, I first set out the general criteria that might guide such a process of justification, before looking at an empirical case that clarifies their application in practice.
On this account of fidelity, deviations from past practice ought (1) to be the subject of partisan debate. They should be overt initiatives, openly weighed by fellow partisans, rather than privately promoted by a faction. It is a minimum condition of respecting party predecessors that their commitments are challenged openly rather than covertly, else their claim on the party’s course is ignored. Beyond this basic requirement, we may hold that where departures from past practice are sought, these should (2) be credibly presented as building upon existing elements of the partisan tradition, rather than marking a wholesale rupture. Links to predecessors’ commitments ought to be visible, with innovations presented as reinterpretations of values shared by past and present partisans alike, or as extensions of older commitments into new domains. That innovations do not undermine broad swathes of existing commitments, even if they necessarily marginalize some, ought to be demonstrated. When it is proposed that Commitment X replace Commitment Y, it should be shown this is compatible with the continued pursuit of Commitments A, B and C. This applies, in addition to commitments traceable to the party’s founding text, to those more recently affirmed in major documents such as manifestos.Footnote 35
A further criterion is (3) that the necessity of such innovations should be properly accounted for. Short-term electoral popularity, or some general notion of change for change’s sake, are weak grounds on which to compromise a party’s constancy of programme. Where shifts in the party’s direction are sought, these should be grounded in an analysis of how far-reaching changes in the wider society render certain commitments outmoded. To the extent that adaptations of programme can be convincingly related to societal change, the break with tradition leaves intact the rationality of partisan predecessors as they pursued their projects in a different social context, and indicates why the party must proceed in ways they could not have foreseen.Footnote 36
To illustrate how such considerations might play out in practice, it is useful to observe a concrete case at some critical moments. Perhaps no party history better illuminates the claims of fidelity than that of British Labour, a party of long traditions that has been subjected more than once to pressures to redefine its programme. In the two most prominent instances, the central question has concerned the party’s commitment to public ownership in the economy. Clause IV of its 1918 constitution committed the party to seeking ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. First under the leadership of Gaitskell in 1959–60, then under Blair in 1994–95, and both times in the context of electoral defeat, there were moves to revise this commitment. Each was a genuinely revisionist effort, designed to detach the party from a significant strand of its orthodox views.Footnote 37
How do these initiatives match up against the fidelity criteria described above? Was the norm adhered to in practice? To their credit, both Gaitskell and Blair were quite open about their proposed acts of redefinition. In line with Criterion 1, their initiatives were overt, publicly announced at a party conference and much debated before a decision was made.Footnote 38 Furthermore, broadly consistent with Criterion 2, both involved efforts by the advocates of change to show how the proposed innovations were continuous with the party’s traditions. A distinction was made between the means and the ends to which the party was committed: public ownership, argued the revisionists, was but the contextually appropriate means to advance the underlying goals of equality and social welfare, which now needed to be pursued by other means.Footnote 39 To be sure, in Blair’s case, the continuity was thinner – partisans in 1995 were being asked to embrace the principle of private ownership and competition, whereas in 1960 they were being asked simply to consider exceptions to the rule of public ownership.Footnote 40 Arguably the later shift risked emptying the Labour tradition of its coherence; it was also combined with open disparaging of large chunks of the party’s past. Yet there was some effort to show continuity with the past.Footnote 41
Where the experiences significantly diverged was in regard to criterion (3), concerning the depth of analysis deployed to justify change. Gaitskell’s initiative was underpinned by a comprehensive account of societal transformation, developed by intellectuals such as Crosland and widely disseminated in party literature, that sought to explain why public ownership no longer deserved the emphasis it had been granted in 1918.Footnote 42 The initiative was also accompanied by clear arguments for where the party should be going. Blair’s proposal, by contrast, lacked any such intellectual support. The main texts, such as they were, emerged in the following years. Also vaguer was the alternative that Labour partisans were to consider. The burden of persuasion fell largely on data from polling and focus groups, and the prospect of further electoral defeats, rather than on a principled case for change.Footnote 43 These failings of justification were all the more problematic given that the break with party tradition was more far-reaching in this case.
The norm of fidelity thus looks to have been fairly well served in the earlier phase of Labour revisionism, and less so in the later one. In the former case an arguably modest break with the party’s past was advocated with precision, in a way that upheld the rationality of what partisan predecessors had been seeking to achieve in an earlier societal context. In the latter case, a more radical break with the party’s tradition was argued for loosely, and often with the explicit denigration of ‘Old Labour’ partisans. While both initiatives were revisionist, one displayed noticeably more appreciation than the other for the projects of partisans past.
Or at any rate, this is how it appears from the outside. The plausibility of revisionist claims is of course ultimately for partisans themselves to assess. Partly a matter of individual judgement, it is also something for which, in any given party, institutional mechanisms are foreseeable as a means to guide evaluation and give voice to partisans past. While the party constitution is an obvious reference point for establishing the party’s core commitments, along with past manifestos and salient policy statements, such texts require interpretation. A deeper institutionalization of the norm of fidelity might involve a party establishing a council of partisans, separate from the leadership, to act as an authoritative interpreter of the tradition. Its role would be to engage in judicial-style reasoning concerning the meaning of the constitution, subsequent interpretations of it and the kinds of precedent established by departures from it.Footnote 44
To conclude, the trajectory of any party will legitimately include elements of rupture as well as continuity. There will always be ways in which real-world conditions have changed unforeseeably such that significant departures in programme are necessary. Sometimes the goals of yesteryear will genuinely need to be pursued by different means. Sometimes individual ends themselves, or their relative significance, may need to be reassessed. An obligation of fidelity nonetheless implies real constraints on how the partisans of the present may define and promote their normative programmes. It hitches a burden of justification to revisionist initiatives, and renders suspect the kind of opportunist strategy that seeks immediate popularity without regard for the party’s longer-term past.Footnote 45
PARTISAN DESCENDING OBLIGATIONS: ON A NORM OF SUSTAINABILITY
If partisans have ascending obligations, can one identify a corresponding set of descending obligations? Partisans, it may be said, have a duty to preserve the conditions in which the just-described process can continue into the future. For if G2 has obligations to G1 and its predecessors, G1 in turn has an obligation to bequeath to G2 the circumstances in which it can feasibly discharge its obligations to G1 and its predecessors, insofar as G1 has the power to do this.Footnote 46 This is an ethical – as opposed to merely prudential – demand, for it is a condition of partisan successors being in a position to continue to pursue the projects of their predecessors. Specifically, partisans can be said to have a duty to preserve the conditions in which future partisans can draw on a tradition and credibly present themselves as connected to it. I examine this obligation under the heading of a norm of sustainability.
How might this be interpreted? Clearly the transfer of material resources is likely to be one component. Without the basic foundation of sound party finances and a reasonable membership base, the ongoing viability of the party is in question. Just as important, however, is the party’s endurance in an ideational rather than an organizational sense, which depends on the transfer of symbolic and intellectual resources. Future partisans will require a meaningful set of concepts and a related vocabulary with which to articulate and continue a normative programme, and the visible public profile and good reputation needed to promote it.
This can be approached as a problem of conservation and depletion. One might speak, for instance, of a partisan obligation to avoid using the core concepts of the party’s ideological tradition in contradictory ways such that their meaning is hollowed. Such a stipulation would exclude what political observers call ‘cross-dressing’, whereby party elites seek the short-term approval of a certain group of voters (or to demobilize those who might support competing parties) by making themselves ideologically indistinguishable from their opponents.Footnote 47 Such moves make it more difficult for their partisan successors to stake out a distinctive position and convincingly present themselves as part of an enduring political tradition. Rather than as members of a cross-temporal political project, they risk appearing as nothing but a collection of self-interested individuals that uses political language for instrumental purposes rather than to express sincerely held commitments.
A related obligation concerns the influence that present partisans may have on the wider political culture beyond their party. The sustainability of their partisanship depends on a culture that readily accepts the idea of principled disagreement between competing political views. In the absence of such a culture, future partisans are likely to struggle to promote their political projects to the general public: their ideals will fall on deaf ears. An obligation to uphold such a culture might entail, for instance, a responsibility not to deny the reality of political disagreement with adversaries, or to cast it in merely technical terms when it concerns ends as well as means – temptations to which Third Way parties were famously prone.Footnote 48 Disavowing principled differences in the present is liable to make critical perspectives harder for future participants in the democratic process to articulate. Succeeding partisans become more likely to struggle ineffectually.
Questions of organization and leadership are also central to a party’s sustainability. Partisans who allow their party to be dominated by a single individual, though they may boost its fortunes in the short term by drawing on personal charisma, put its longer-term prospects in doubt. Not only does individual domination risk displacing programmatic commitments with the politics of personality; it also ties the party closely to the individual’s reputation – and is easily tarnished by it.Footnote 49 Problems of leadership succession are also accentuated in such cases. (The British Conservatives under Thatcher would be one case in point.) It is for such reasons that historically some of the party leaderships to have left the strongest legacy for their successors have been relatively collegial in structure.Footnote 50 Absolute command has not been sought, or it has been restrained by the efforts of partisan peers. In an increasingly mediatized environment, and especially in presidential systems, elements of personalization are inescapable.Footnote 51 But they can be amplified or contained. Rarely are they indispensable to a party’s success.Footnote 52 For partisan successors, the legacy of dispersed authority is likely to be more solid than that of one-person rule.
These are some of the important ways in which partisans may be said to have obligations to seek the sustainability of their practices. It may be wondered whether there is still something problematic about the notion that future partisans can be harmed by the actions of their predecessors. If later generations encounter the party in a sufficiently adequate state that they wish to associate with it, this is reasonable evidence, it might be said, that their predecessors did not behave irresponsibly. Their enduring willingness to affiliate is evidence that no harm was done. Alternatively, where earlier generations do behave irresponsibly and the party loses its appeal to would-be partisans, again it may be said that no harm was done, for the successors who might raise a complaint do not exist. Plausible as it may sound, this challenge is too dichotomous. It must be expected that a party will continue to attract partisans even in a compromised state, due to its still representing the best option available for those of a certain political persuasion. (Alternative parties may be wholly unpalatable, and the costs of establishing a new party high.) For these partisans still drawn to the party, the task they face is made more arduous by their party’s diminished condition. As a class then, even if not as determinate individuals, future partisans can be left with stronger or weaker prospects, according to the condition in which the party is transferred.Footnote 53 Decisions made in the present will predictably affect the challenges that succeeding partisans must face.
Furthermore, the obligations associated with a norm of sustainability, though directed towards future partisans, also connect to partisans of the past and present. Sustainability is the condition of respect being accorded by present-day partisans to the future-oriented actions of their predecessors and peers, since these actions gain their meaning from the reasonable expectation they will be advanced not just by one particular generation (the present one) but also by others continuing into a more distant future. Consequently, while such a norm is geared towards the welfare of partisans-to-be in its concern that the point of departure for their projects be favourable, it also aims to protect the future-oriented projects of those who came before.Footnote 54
It remains the case that sometimes considerations of fidelity and sustainability may clash, or (purely on the descending side) that there may be a tension between preserving the party as a coherent normative unity and ensuring its material survival. It is not difficult to imagine occasions when there is a tension between consistency of programme and the party’s material prosperity as an organization, even its survival.Footnote 55 But to acknowledge such clashes is already to grant the reality of cross-temporal considerations. How they are then to be weighed is a matter for situated judgement.
OBJECTIONS
In these final paragraphs, let me examine a cluster of objections to the article’s argument. First, it may be asked whether the obligations I have described, to the extent that they are embraced by the partisan, are not liable to divert from the fulfilment of competing obligations, for example to the political community as a whole. If, for example, a party of government can save lives by shifting policy in a way that breaches fidelity, should its partisans not override their cross-temporal obligations without hesitation? One can imagine various states of emergency in which this might apply (leaving aside the fact that in such scenarios a norm of fidelity may equally be a useful source of orientation). Likewise, what about the party that consistently pursues immoral ends? Are the members of a party with racist traditions not morally obliged to seek as clean a rupture with the party’s past as possible, if not its dissolution? In such cases, a norm of fidelity would seem simply an impediment to civic virtue.Footnote 56
Clearly there is a difference between sketching these obligations at a general level and identifying their force in the particular instance. It has not been the article’s argument that partisan cross-temporal obligations necessarily trump countervailing concerns, but rather that they should be recognized as one element in the moral calculus. Ceteris paribus they hold force, but there will be occasions when they are outweighed by competing concerns.Footnote 57 Discharging an obligation will not always be the right thing to do, but it is a consideration to take seriously as part of the deliberative process that seeks to establish what the right thing to do may be.Footnote 58
In the case of a persistent tension between norms – as in the case of the racist party – one might prefer to see cross-temporal obligations as not merely outweighed but dissolved. F.W. de Klerk was, one might argue, under no obligation whatsoever to be faithful to the traditions of the South African National Party, or to seek to advance the sustainability of his party. No trace of blame – as a breach of obligation might imply – should be attached to the rupture in policy he heralded. Although it is tempting in this way to limit the idea of cross-temporal obligation to what one might call ‘respectable’ parties, I prefer to see these obligations as existent but persistently outweighed in such parties.Footnote 59 Without contextual knowledge, one should note, it is unclear that the good of the polity is necessarily better served by the breach of cross-temporal partisan obligations than by their observance, and thus the persistence of the party in a form that makes it (and its ideas) a visible target of condemnation.
A second, related challenge to the argument resembles the first in inverted form. Cross-temporal obligations are generally trivial, it may be said, destined not so much to distract from competing obligations as to pale beside them (not to mention the temptations of power and prestige). The claims of predecessors and successors will never be sufficiently strong to deflect partisans from what other kinds of obligations require them to do. Here one is being asked to consider whether partisan cross-temporal obligations are really consequential enough to be weighed at all.
It is by no means clear that such obligations will always be trivial. There may be occasions when competing obligations balance each other, or when it is uncertain what actions they prescribe. In such cases, considerations to do with fidelity and sustainability may tip the balance in favour of one course of action over another.Footnote 60 They may be decisive, in other words, even when they are not the most crucial considerations in play.
Furthermore, even obligations that are rarely decisive may still be worthy of recognition. Those that the article has sought to describe retain significance even if they are weakly observed and rarely serve as a sufficient guide to action. They introduce an additional source of pressure on the partisan to justify his or her normative position, in particular to say how specific commitments square with one another and with others previously held, and to explain why a given party is the most appropriate means to pursue certain goals. These obligations also offer a resource by which fellow partisans and the wider citizenry can hold their leaders to account. A celebrated thesis in the study of partisanship holds that party elites have a tendency to separate themselves from the rest of the party membership, pursuing a distinct set of interests and thereby undermining the normative programme.Footnote 61 The idea of cross-temporal partisan obligations offers an important corrective mechanism, an ideal standard against which to assess decision making and with which to counter the tendencies of an elite to retreat into a self-referential world. It offers a basis on which to integrate the party around the commitments claimed as the basis of its unity. It further may cultivate reasonable scepticism – amongst the partisans of a given party and amongst unaligned citizens more generally – towards the celebration of novelty, or cognate processes such as ‘modernization’, as goods in themselves, without need of further justification.Footnote 62 Thus even in a merely negative fashion, in the form of the denunciation of breach, the obligations we have examined may be considered significant in various respects.
It might still be argued that the account I have presented is too constricting for partisans themselves. The concern is perhaps not that the standards of fidelity and sustainability force them into the role of the conservative: after all, the normative programmes advanced with greatest constancy over time may well be amongst the most politically radical. But what space does this account preserve for their independence of mind and critical capacity? Are they not condemned to an unthinking role, habitually seeking continuity with their party’s past? It needs emphasizing that where individuals wish to break decisively with existing commitments they retain the option to exit their party. They can renounce the larger part of their partisan obligations and revert at least temporarily to the status of non-partisan citizens, perhaps before founding a new party.Footnote 63 This is one way that radical novelty of thought and practice can find expression, notwithstanding the significant institutional barriers that may impede it.Footnote 64 That obligations may be repudiated in the exceptional moment does not nullify their force under normal conditions.
To be sure, under imperfect institutional conditions it is not easy to found a successful new party. If the electoral system makes it difficult for small parties to gain representation in the legislature (for example, because there are thresholds of minimum support), new parties will need to work hard to establish themselves. Institutions can be redesigned to strengthen proportionality, but only under certain conditions.Footnote 65 Launching a new party is likely to be an option of last resort, challenging to carry out and of uncertain outcome.Footnote 66 But it remains an important possibility. And even were it true that the chances for major innovation lay exclusively within the confines of existing parties, a norm of fidelity might still carry force, albeit in an attenuated form: as the obligation to publicize the extent of a party’s transformation, for example by surrendering the symbols that evoke its continuity, including its name and its imagery. Such an act of separation would ensure revisionist partisans do not unfairly benefit from a misleading association with the endeavours of their predecessors, and would insulate the actions of the latter from the doctrinal shifts that might distort their original meaning. It would further leave intact the identity of the older tradition for a later set of partisans to reconnect to.
CONCLUSION
The article has argued for a conception of the political party that includes cross-temporal partisan obligations. It has sought to show how these are implied by the good reasons for which ordinary partisans may join the party, and the nature of the goals parties define themselves by. Meaningful partisanship, it has been suggested, relies on the idea of the party as advancing an ongoing project. The obligations that ensue take both ascending and descending forms, corresponding to what I have called norms of fidelity and sustainability, respectively.
In the parties of contemporary Western democracies, elites are frequently denounced precisely for having reneged on such obligations. In the post-Cold War period especially, partisan traditions are said to have been neglected or systematically undermined by leaders at the helm of a wide range of parties, both Left and Right, often in tandem with the celebration of a politics of pragmatism that makes the reactivation of such traditions by future partisans ever harder. This is one way to understand the nature of those ‘cartel parties’ that scholars in comparative politics tell us are increasingly common.Footnote 67 The maintenance of meaningful divisions of opinion between parties would seem to depend in large part on the extent to which cross-temporal obligations of the kind described here are observed. Partisans that breach such obligations are liable to end up looking rather alike, tempted to collude rather than criticize. Perhaps one should not be surprised that these developments coincide with declining rates of party membership. While there is no mono-causal explanation, one may wonder whether this is at least in part because the good reasons to join a party are nullified by partisan elites who show little awareness of cross-temporal obligation. Parties with no discernible past and future convey little sense that they stand for something. Elites who act as though a presentist conception of the party is adequate contribute to the decline of existing parties: the model is an unstable one.
Perhaps in the same instant that they weaken existing organizations, these transgressions make a contribution, however modest, to the renewal of the partisan idea. To put it in Durkheimian terms, they offend the partisan conscience collective, and by provoking denunciation they give this ethos new visibility. Converting this into a productive source of pressure on decision making is likely to depend on the strengthening of intraparty institutions that can authoritatively interpret a party’s foundational commitments, and combining these with mechanisms for intraparty deliberation such that the kinds of norms we have examined can be compellingly invoked in party debate.
Those who celebrate spontaneous movements as an alternative to party commitment apparently believe a more episodic form of political engagement can adequately stand in for one founded on long-term projects – or at least that it is the next best thing. My remarks on the party in time indicate some of the questions to be asked of these competing modes of engagement. What kinds of rationale do they rely on, and how far can these be detached from notions of commitment to a cumulative project? Are social movements so different from parties in their ethical basis? Can there be genuine solidarity in the absence of cross-temporal obligation? A wider ethics of activism would need to engage with such questions.
