In this creative volume, Jeffrey Selinger criticizes a great deal of received wisdom about the history of party systems in the United States, claiming that party scholars have been reading later perspectives back into earlier eras. In particular, Selinger argues that those studies that “equate party development with democratic progress have tended to downplay the risks that party rivalries posed to civil order and the integrity of the Union” (p. 24). Embracing Dissent concentrates chiefly on the long nineteenth century, drawing richly on writings and speeches by a number of political elites in each period, and making use of work by historians and political scientists. The book appears strongest and most original when dealing with the Founding Era through the Civil War.
How did the United States transition from the early national period, where party opposition was seen as “one of the leading threats to the integrity and continuity of the republic” to the post-World War II era where major party opposition “had become essential to the democratic legitimacy of the governing regime” (pp. 170–171)? The story is one of patterned institutional change and American political development. The status of party opposition was transformed alongside development of the capacities of the national state and shifts in the position of the nation in the international arena. Liberal and republican thought shifted only in conjunction with these other transformations. Accepting the proposition that the American state should be deemed weak prior to the Civil War, Selinger links state capacity to its acquisition of a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence and ability to secure the means of extracting revenue from the population.
American politics and political parties as institutions were built upon political and economic disputes that, in the early years of the republic, were particularly violent and potentially destructive. Geographically concentrated opposition posed a special threat when the national government lacked the power to coerce a block of states; in the aftermath of the Civil War, the threat of exit receded, permitting new ways to envision party politics (p. 146). Although reconstruction era politics was highly polarized by region, Selinger argues that parties no longer had the “capacity to compromise the structural integrity of the republic” (p. 177).
It has been asserted elsewhere that constitutions are made between people who have fundamental disagreements on values (Mark Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil, 2006). On this view, constitutional bargains are designed keep certain divisive issues off the table. For Selinger, the Electoral College, bicameralism, and the separation of powers from the Founding era were an important beginning, and the Constitution made interstate, national parties possible. The founders, rattled by the outbreak of violent conflicts between debtors and creditors in the 1780s, were anxious to design institutions to minimize the likelihood of violence “from below” (p. 34). In this sense, Selinger’s narrative seems implicitly to follow progressive historian Merrill Jensen (e.g., The Articles of Confederation, 1940), with the Constitution a more conservative document than the Declaration of Independence, and elites determined to rein in excesses of democracy on exhibit in the states since 1776. Selinger reads Madison—and Federalist No. 10 in particular—through this lens, which also affords an interesting gloss on the Republican guarantee clause (Art. IV §4).
In Selinger’s narrative, the adoption of presidential nominating conventions during the second party system and the secret ballot and proliferating ballot-access laws (including antifusion laws) instituted in the early years of twentieth-century party competition helped defuse potentially divisive conflicts, relegated third parties to harmless players, and made it possible to embrace the notion of legitimate opposition. Similarly, political institutions and political practices are treated as the result of historic, self-conscious compromises that political leaders forged in particular policy arenas as they attempted to defuse constitutional crises, aiming “not merely to maximize their electoral advantage, but also to silence questions that might trigger political violence or separatist movements” (p. 112). Major party leaders sorted themselves on matters that could be securely debated. Managing tensions between French and English sympathizers when these nations went to war, attempting to submerge the slavery issue so that it would not dominate national debate, and later, diffusing class tensions shaped the first, second, and third party systems.
While Embracing Dissent is not a consensus history, Selinger argues that “too often, public figures exaggerate the significance of partisan differences and minimize the breadth of political consensus that permeates the politics of postbellum America” (p. 27). Yet since Selinger documents fears of political violence by drawing upon elite political opinion in specific historical eras, it seems warranted to take more seriously the scholars and political elites who do find danger and violence in the current political moment. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, why would the concerns of Americans about the consequences of racial animus, hate groups, polarization, rising income inequality, and various standoffs against the federal government not be likely to reshape party responses and notions of legitimate opposition? Elected leaders who eschew compromise and a major party candidate for the presidency who rallied audiences with calls to lock up his opponent hardly seem to embrace legitimate opposition.
Selinger wants to make comparative points: the American regime today does not face the dangers from polarized party opposition that it once did, and relative to a number of other advanced democracies, party politics “appears rather tame,” with less polarization, virulent racism, anti-Semitism, and less incivility in partisan discourse (174, 177). Scoffing at recent hand-wringing about party polarization, Selinger’s position is effectively: if you think politics in recent years is violent, polarized, and dangerous, you should recognize what illiberal dangers looked like from the 1780s to the 1860s! He contends that the worst that can be said today is that recent party competition has tended to prevent meaningful change in policy. Embracing Dissent was completed before the presidency of Donald Trump, but the author would surely make the same comparative points.
However, we can find evidence of increasingly bitter partisan divisiveness and suspicion of the other major party. The Pew Research Center survey, “Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016” (American Trends Panel) finds that “fully 70% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans say they are afraid of the other party.” The level of hostility and suspicion of members of the other major party stands out, along with belief that if a president were elected from the other party, it would be dangerous to the nation. Other evidence suggests that Americans may be less likely to talk to or interact with supporters of the other party than before. If one accomplishment of the second party system was the acceptance of the principle of rotation in office, “an implicit admission that no great harm would come to the country as a result of a change in the parties’ electoral fortunes” (p. 94), then there appears to be considerable sentiment today that rotation in office does pose dangers to the republic. While, as Selinger points out, there were no surveys in the nineteenth century with which to gauge such distrust and hostility, these recent indicators suggest deepening cleavages and suspicion.
An interesting theme in Embracing Dissent is that the tolerance accompanying eventual acceptance of legitimate party opposition comes at a price: the standard of toleration is not very wide. Parties became conservative, instrumental, and establishmentarian. Post-World War II parties serve as an important national adhesive only by offering choice, but not a wide range of options. Party development yielded institutions that have become effective in policing the boundaries of debate. Parties are not clearly aiming to offer solutions to the most important felt political issues, which may contribute to popular dissatisfaction with politics as usual. What would predict a dissolution of the current party system? Selinger’s provocative book clearly invites this important question.
