Nancy L. Rosenblum's book is a unique and important contribution to contemporary democratic theory. A work of normative theorizing that is grounded in careful historical research and thoroughly conversant with contemporary empirical research on political parties and partisanship, it is an exemplar of political theory at its best.
On the Side of the Angels makes two core arguments, first for the “creativity of party politics,” and second for the “moral distinctiveness of partisanship” (p. 7). By “creativity,” Rosenblum means that political parties are entrepreneurial and agonistic institutions that are essential to representative democracy because they “create, not just reflect, political interests and opinions” (p. 7). She derives from this notion a sharp rebuke to theorists of deliberative democracy who simply take it for granted that political parties have no role to play in reasoned exchange precisely because they are partisan. Rosenblum asserts, to the contrary, that parties do for democratic deliberation the “work that philosophy cannot”: They hone conflict so that it is politically pertinent and cast it in an oppositional frame to focus citizen choice (p. 307). She praises partisans, in turn, for lending urgency to public debate. They “generate conflicting positions and advance opposing arguments within a framework designed for adversarial show” (p. 307). Although their explicit partiality is likely “aversive to some,” it nonetheless lends interest and urgency that deliberation can have “only when it is about choosing sides” (p. 310).
Rosenblum arrives at her first core argument, the “party creativity” thesis, in surprising ways. She finds initial inspiration for it in one of two “glorious traditions” of antipartyism, and then proceeds to elaborate it by an unusual but compelling synthesis of the ideas of J. S. Mill and E. E. Schattschneider (p. 25).
What can we learn from antipartyism? The first of Rosenblum's two glorious traditions, “holist” antipartyism, illuminates aspects of modern and contemporary politics that run counter to pluralist democracy (p. 26). Exemplified by Hobbes and Rousseau, this strand of argument takes “all social and political groups [to] threaten the unity and integrity of political order” (p. 25). Whereas holists regard all partial bodies as “morally unwholesome and politically fatal,” they reserve a special antipathy for political parties that they regard as the “most esthetically, morally, politically unabidable” because they have “partiality and opposition as their aim” (p. 25; Rosenblum's emphasis). Rosenblum sees vestiges of holism in arguments for “parties of virtue” and in “one-partyism,” and argues that majoritarianism manifests “shadow holism” wherever the fact of having commanded a majority goes along with the conviction that one has also earned a “morally compelling claim to speak for the great body of the people” (pp. 37, 55).
In contrast to this first tradition of antipartyism, the second tradition outlined by Rosenblum is compatible with pluralism because it accepts social divisions as “inevitable, even natural,” but opposes parties for being fatally divisive (p. 60). This charge of fatal divisiveness itself has two variations. The first is that parties are dangerous because they “deepen and enflame real social divisions” (p. 103; my emphasis). This claim sits uneasily with the second one, which is that they fail to “reflect recognized social parts or deep divisions of interest or opinion,” distorting conflict by trumping up issues that are “trivial or ephemeral” (p. 103). This second view differs from the first in actually conceding that there might be some utility to party conflict, provided that it properly reflects conflicts in society. Thus, the principal concern of these second critics is not that political parties might “deepen” conflict but that parties invent petty conflicts that distract from struggles that need and ought to be represented through the party system.
This second variation on the “fatal divisiveness” theme is especially important to Rosenblum's argument. As she emphasizes, it foreshadows, albeit “aversively,” her own core thesis regarding the creativity of party conflict: that “parties do not just reflect but also create lines of division” (pp. 103, 62). It also brings to the surface deep-seated presuppositions about democratic representation and its relationship to political parties that are antithetical to her argument and still operative today. The presuppositions are, first, that political parties exist primarily to represent conflict in society and the electorate, and, second, that representing means mirroring those conflicts, not shaping them.
Rosenblum's thesis regarding the creativity of party politics is exciting precisely because it resists this metaphysical conception of representation as mirroring. Like Bernard Manin, who has provocatively suggested that an “electoral campaign may be compared to a language” as a “system of differences” where the meaning of each term derives not from that to which it refers but from that from which it differs, Rosenblum understands parties to be “defined in relation to one another and [to] make sense only with regard to one another” (p. 139; Rosenblum's emphasis).Footnote 1 She elaborates that party conflicts do not follow from “social divisions”; they are, rather, “opportunistic responses to political possibilities” (p. 103). In short, “there is no natural party of the people. No majority exists spontaneously, ready to be contested for. It is identified in the course of drawing lines of division” (p. 58).
Rosenblum begins to elaborate this insight from the antiparty tradition by building on the “moment of appreciation” for political parties that she finds in the work of John Stuart Mill. Admittedly, Mill was ultimately no friend of political parties. Nonetheless, he opens the way for them to play a constructive role in democratic politics through his “account of ‘the social function of antagonism,’” his signature affirmation of public argumentation as the means for correcting error, promoting understanding of rival perspectives, and strengthening the cognitive foundation of belief (p. 148). Rosenblum takes pains to distinguish between Mill's position and that of contemporary deliberative democratic theorists. In fact, she finds Mill especially valuable for countering deliberative democrats' radical separation of deliberation “from political rivalry,” and their abstract notion of a “public sphere” that exists “everywhere and nowhere” (pp. 147–48). Contrast this to Mill, who located the “contest of ideas in government,” and insisted that the “process requires actual advocates,” as “objections have force when they come ‘from persons who actually believe them, who defend them in earnest, and do their utmost for them’” (p. 148). It is this belief, that the “framework for political deliberation requires the rough process of a struggle among combatants fighting under hostile banners,” that positions Mill against deliberative democrats and (potentially) on the side of parties and partisans (p. 307).
It appears to be E. E. Schattschneider who inspires Rosenblum to turn Mill's account of antagonism into a “proto-Millian” moment of appreciation for parties (p. 149). For it was Schattschneider, Rosenblum notes, who gave us the “strongest” response to “antiparty pluralists” that we have. That response “rests on the theoretically important insight that a ‘conflict system’ shapes political conflict and that when parties ‘stage the battle,’ the scope of conflict is more open and democratic than a system based primarily on interest groups” (p. 272; Rosenblum's emphasis). What would you get if you crossed J. S. Mill with E. E. Schattschneider? The central insight of her argument for party creativity: party antagonism is the “engine of ‘trial by discussion’” (p. 307). It follows that the first task of political parties is not to reflect or respond to conflict but to “construct” it (p. 307). Parties “draw politically relevant lines of division, reject elements of the others' account of projects and promises, and articulate positions” (p. 307). This is precisely what “theories of democratic deliberation [that] prize a ‘variety of perspectives,’” cannot understand (p. 307). To quote Schattschneider, “it is conflict that involves the people in politics,” and it is political parties that organize conflict to appeal to majorities.Footnote 2 Without parties' “distillation” of political issues, democratic deliberation would lack all urgency.
Given the exuberantly agonistic view of political parties that Rosenblum puts forth in defending the party creativity thesis, her second core argument, that for the “moral distinctiveness of party ID,” comes as something of a surprise. She contends forcefully and without qualification that partisanship is “congruent with standard democratic virtues” (p. 362). Such a claim must be jarring to anyone who has followed the revelations about partisanship in the George W. Bush administration. The litany of partisan hiring in the Justice Department, executive branch tampering with Environmental Protection Agency memos to support a partisan viewpoint on climate change, and partisan legal briefs justifying expansive surveillance of U.S. citizens and defending torture in the name of “aggressive” interrogation techniques—none of this seems particularly congruent with democratic “virtues.” How would she defend her position?
Rosenblum would argue that these excesses were not instances of partisanship at all. They were renegade actions that violate the basic “phenomenology of partisanship,” which is a consciousness of oneself as being with and acting with others, and a commitment to building the party that transcends one's own moral convictions or self-interests (p. 341). If we grant the author that partisanship is first and foremost an “identification with others” that aims at majority status, then we will see precisely how her account of partisanship is on the mark. It spells out criteria that allow true partisans to make the case that George W. Bush and his administration had compromised the goals of the Republican Party and the ideals of conservatism more generally (p. 342).Footnote 3
To provide a normative ideal “for the best possible partisanship” and spell out “grounds for criticism of actual partisanship,” Rosenblum articulates three “articles” that characterize the disposition of what she calls “ordinary, civilian partisans” (pp. 362, 367). The first of these is “inclusiveness” (p. 357). Unlike organizations based on membership, partisanship unites diverse “segments of the population as measured by socioeconomic status or religion,” and spans a wide ideological range (pp. 356–57). Partisans are inclusive because they have to be; their aim is for their party to “be in the majority” (p. 357). Consistent with this aim, partisans have a responsibility to put forward a comprehensive vision of what needs to be done, “in general terms that appeal to citizens in general” (p. 360). This is the second “article.” Third, partisans display a special kind of discipline, a “disposition to compromise with fellow partisans” (p. 361). This above all differentiates partisan identification from membership; partisans remain committed to sustaining the party even when their particular goals are not satisfied.
Following the articles, Rosenblum specifies what she calls the “categorical moral distinctiveness of party ID”: Partisans “do not imagine that their party could speak for the whole” (p. 364). Partisans aspire to be in the majority, aim to appeal to citizens in general, and want their organization to endure—they are identified with their party and its fate. Nonetheless, they are also resolutely committed to what the author calls “pluralism without foundations” (p. 365). The counterpart to party creativity, pluralism without foundations is the recognition by partisans of the fluidity of political opposition. As “parties are not reflections of cleavages ‘there’ in society,” majority status is always temporary and minority status is never “irreversible” (pp. 365–66, 363). Creative partisans are always looking for a way to put their party back on top by proposing a new line of division, “bringing it to public awareness, and with that introducing a ‘power into the political world’” (p. 366).
By Rosenblum's account, the record of travesties by the Bush Administration can be denounced as bad partisanship. Governing unilaterally both at home and abroad, within its own party and between the parties, the Bush administration defended its power with a foundationalist rhetoric of good and evil that brooked no compromise, even for the sake of the mundane and pragmatic goals of sustaining its electoral majority. But if Rosenblum's defense of partisanship can illuminate the failures of that administration, I think it fares less well against the example of its opposite: the “southern strategy” by which the contemporary Republican Party built its electoral majority. The brainchild of Kevin Phillips, inspired by the segregationist third-party candidacy of George Wallace, initiated by Richard Nixon, and brought to fruition by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the strategy used white resentment to draw a new line of division, one that would split Southern Democrats off from the New Deal coalition and capture the newly growing Sun Belt population for the Right.
Was this not extremism? In Rosenblum's own terms, it was a distinctively partisan strategy. Not an overt or narrow bid for white privilege, the southern strategy involved putting forward a comprehensive vision of lower taxes and smaller government. It was an appeal to hard-working Americans who could be persuaded that a left-liberal elite had hijacked their paychecks to finance a set of social programs that fostered illegitimacy, drug use, and permanent dependence.Footnote 4 Although it was not overtly racist, the southern strategy did create a set of stand-ins for race—for example, crime, welfare, busing—thereby creating the impression that black Americans were to blame for the economic squeeze that de-industrialization, union busting, and other structural shifts were placing on the U.S. working and middle classes. This was, to borrow a term from Schattschneider that does not figure in Rosenblum's account, a “displacement” of economic conflict into social and cultural terms.Footnote 5
In short, though a clear exemplar of partisanship, the southern strategy is anything but a model of democratic virtues. It was misleading, polarizing, and, above all, galvanizing for four decades of tax and social policy that has both transferred wealth upward and intensified the political influence of wealth as well.Footnote 6 My point is not that Rosenblum would ever celebrate the southern strategy. It is that her account does not necessarily furnish us with the intellectual resources from an understanding of how it was wrong precisely by virtue of its partisanship. Her benign account of partisanship creates cognitive dissonance in light of her astute picture of political parties as institutions that have to be entrepreneurial and agonistic in order to mobilize citizens.
It is not that her account is wrong but that it is incomplete, in two distinct ways. First, Rosenblum fails to consider how partisanship works to produce identification with members of one's own party by means of asserting a difference from the party one is fighting against. The consequence is a one-sided portrait that credits partisans with tolerating heterogeneity and exercising a discipline of compromise among themselves, while glossing over another face that is part of partisanship by virtue of the dynamics of agonistic struggle: the consolidation of the “us” by the constitution of an “other.” This is an aspect of party creativity that sometimes works with democratic and liberal values and sometimes against them. Telling the difference between these instances is not just a normative question but also an empirical one. This is the second way in which her account is incomplete, for her defense of partisanship is entirely abstract. Yet this is not so much a defect of her study as it is an invitation to democratic theorists to follow her lead by taking up the study of political parties with insight and creativity. In taking the lead, Rosenblum has done a service to political theory and empirical political science, and to the reinvigoration of a political science discipline that is at once rigorously empirical and normatively serious.
