Friday, June 29, 2007
Opinion

Two Cheers for Partisanship

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced his departure...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg looks on during a press conference June 20 after announcing his departure from the Republican Party, furthering speculation that he may announce a 2008 independent presidential bid. CREDIT: Mario Tama/Getty Images

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced his departure from the Republican Party to become an Independent, perhaps in anticipation of a run for the presidency. We might have predicted it: He left the Democratic Party for the Republicans in order to become mayor, and it’s not as if his political inclinations mesh especially well with those of the contemporary Republican party. Perhaps, unlike the old Tareyton cigarette smokers, he’d rather switch than fight.

More likely, though, he’d rather switch to fight. His decision to leave the Republican Party was generated, in part, by an attempt to clear some space for himself as someone who doesn’t believe in partisanship. It might work—at least, to the degree that any independent candidacy works. Polls show that Americans are frustrated with partisan fighting in Washington—so much so that Congressional approval ratings are actually lower than those of President Bush. Whether this frustration is borne of Congress’ seeming failure to get much done (which isn’t exactly true, anyway), a “why can’t we all just get along?” idealism, a suspicion of political processes more generally or something else, I don’t know. But I want to give two cheers for partisanship.

The first cheer: Partisanship is evidence of political memory. None of us—including our elected leaders—can handle the massive amounts of data associated with all the political issues of the day. Instead, we rely on those around us who have wisdom in particular areas to inform us. And those around us, in turn, rely on experts who have done such work before them, drawing on the wisdom of the past to fit it to our current context. And this, in a nutshell, is what political parties are: repositories of political memory.

Since none of the most important issues we face can be simply resolved in ways that will satisfy everyone (after all, if they could be resolved like this, they already would have been), we should expect that wisdom on such matters is not uniform and does not speak in a single voice. So there is more than one party, more than one approach, more than one vision, and more than one memory. Partisanship is the result of contending memories and contending memories, while frustrating, are better than no memory at all.

The second cheer: Partisanship is a product of passion. Who would you rather have represent you in office: someone who is just killing time or someone who really gives a damn about what’s going on and wants to effect change? Where apathy is among the greatest of threats to functioning Constitutional democracy, a little passion is certainly a good thing. Think of it this way: Partisanship at least gives our elected officials something to do—and keeping them busy keeps them in the public eye, where we can keep an eye on them—which, in turn, keeps them at least somewhat out of trouble. Would that more people were partisan! It would at least be a signal that they cared about what happened around them.

But the failings of partisanship—like the failings of most good things—are the dark sides of its virtues. Partisanship may be evidence of political memory, but when it outgrows its purpose, its antagonistic system can induce its own kind of political amnesia, in which political parties focus only on maintaining their values rather than getting their values in order. And in the process, partisanship replaces a passion for addressing real issues with a passion for defeating the opposition. The simplistic attitude of “we’re against whatever they’re for and we’re for whatever they’re against” helps nobody. And in contemporary U.S. politics, these dark sides are all too prevalent.
But isn’t our frustration with partisanship itself an expression of a “we’re against whatever they’re for” attitude? And isn’t it indicative of our own historical amnesia—a kind of insistence that we could do it better on our own?

I wish Bloomberg and the people of New York City luck. But more than luck, they—and all of us, really—need wisdom and passion. And for those resources, we’d better be willing to accept a bit of partisanship in our politics. Now, if we can just use wisdom and passion to help us do a better job of being partisan. SP

Mark Douglas is a professor of Christian ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary.