Democracy and the Party Spirit

...But this is another case in which experience refutes theories...

...This charge seemed the more plausible because the climate of opinion in those two decades made it quite impossible to foresee the present demonic realities of Soviet politics...

...The other has been involved in social instability since the French Revolution...

...Thus, modern democracies have evolved the organization of an alternative government which constantly challenges the party in power while it is in office, and tries to replace it in office at the end of the term...

...But he would certainly have been surprised by the consistency of the national organization of each political group...

...and by the leftist extremists, who tried to prove that every kind of conservatism was tantamount to fascism and that Communism was justified as a weapon against the fascist danger...

...Thus Britain has survived both the assumption of power by a Socialist party and its defeat by the Conservatives without an appreciable rent in the national unity...

...There was an incident in the election after the war which brought Labor to power which shows that even a wise and magnanimous leader such as Mr...

...The difference between an ostensible socialist party and an ostensible conservative party is significantly less than the difference between the two American parties which have elaborated two facets of the old liberalism...

...The Marxist dogma of the class struggle oversimplified the complex class structure of technical civilization and obscured the mutualities of interest transcending the conflict of economic interests, which Madison recognized as the root of political controversy long before Marx...

...Whether or not the President's advice is heeded may be more fateful for the health of our nation than the victory of either party, or of the policies which they may follow...

...Churchill, in a memorable speech, attributed the two-party system to the indirect influence of the rectangular, rather than circular, architecture of the House of Commons...

...but one of the most important surely is the limited character of the party conflict...

...The charge of connivance with treason is particularly significant, for it is always the final weapon of the demagogue to accuse the political opponent of being in secret or open connivance with the enemy of the nation...

...Fortunately, the two-party system proved powerful enough to transcend its architectural cradle...

...He prophesied that a Labor victory would usher in a "police state...

...But the necessity of party government makes it all the more important to curb the excesses of the party spirit which our fathers feared so much...

...By contrast the French instability obviously derives from the heat of the party conflict...

...Approaches to it by right and left cannot be "objective," for they are prompted by the respective interests on the one hand of those classes which are powerful enough to have security and want liberty for the exercise of their power, and on the other hand of the less privileged classes, which prefer security to liberty, since they have no skill or power of their own to gain security amid the hazards of a technological society...

...We know the baleful consequences of a consistent application of the Marxist doctrine in modern Communism...

...An equally small number among the parties of the Left were sympathetic to, or tolerant of, Communism...

...The sources of British stability are many...

...In Europe, it could be taken for granted that a small number among the parties of the Right were either fascist-minded or tolerant of fascist ideas...

...This is the more true since the political debate in every modern technological nation centers on the question of how much or how little the Government shall interfere in the free play of economic forces...

...They believed that the economic process must always be subordinated to political power and moral principle...

...Madison was as fearful of the baneful effects of "faction" as was Washington...

...Churchill may be tempted to overstep the bounds of "limited war" in the heat of an election campaign...

...If this works, the President will remain an unsullied symbol of moderation and wisdom, who will appeal to the dominant mood of the nation, while the "bully boys" will "rough up" the opposition without real hindrance and will appeal to that part of the electorate which speaks of a "Republican revolution" and desires to set the clock back on both domestic and foreign policy...

...Eisenhower obviously is a man of the middle ground in terms of his temper...

...The indignities to French honor during the Vichy period are well known...

...The unity of the national community must not be endangered by party strife...

...The health of modern societies requires that this debate remain inconclusive...

...What remains memorable is the acrimony between the parties, no matter what their policies...

...The one enjoys a stability beyond that of any other nation...

...Low merely pictured Clement Attlee trying to look like Stalin...

...Unlike Continental parties, it therefore gained the suffrage of the whole national community...

...President Eisenhower's warning against party extremism is thus extremely relevant, for the parties not only must not be too far apart but must not be made to appear more contradictory in their objectives than they really are...

...This was the most indisputable proof of the thesis that democracy depends not so much upon particular policies as upon the fairness and justice with which the conflicts of interest are composed and basic rights preserved...

...We are told that Latin American observers are "shocked" by our custom requiring the loser to congratulate the victor and assure him of support...

...It is significant that those members of the present Administration who shared the responsibility of government in the Roosevelt era were as touched with illusions in regard to Russian realities and intentions as members of the Democratic party...

...The danger that democratic freedom may destroy the unity of the nation is in fact so great that our Founding Fathers never envisioned the organization of national parties as we know them...

...In the temper of our political life, we are probably equidistant from the standards of Britain on the one hand, and France on the other...

...Theoretically, the "rulers" should be subject to the constant scrutiny of the "people" and hold their office only by their suffrage...

...Theoretically, two parties might be expected to divide the nation more consistently than a profusion of parties...

...In our nation, the temptation has been particularly great because the party in power during the period when the hated foe of today was an ally in the struggle against Nazism, was of the Left...

...The Socialist party was significantly not orthodox Marxist and refrained from challenging the whole national tradition...

...The fear of the Founding Fathers of national disruption through the organization of "factions," and the complete silence of the Constitution on political instrumentalities which are now the very stuff of the political process, put party government in the same category as constitutional monarchy in, say, Britain...

...The common sense of the whole national community enforces these limits...

...There was, therefore, a certain plausibility to the absurd charge that the New Deal was involved in "twenty years of treason...

...They are both unintended instruments of democracy which contain more wisdom than anyone could have consciously intended...

...For the French Right, including military leaders such as General Weygand, were so obsessed with the domestic peril from the Left that they were ineffective against a foreign foe, and in some cases overtly preferred capitulation to a victory which would have given the domestic competitor prestige...

...The "vital center" of democracy was held by neither Right nor Left but by both conservatives and liberals, who put the standards of justice above party advantage...

...The Conservatives, on the other hand, did not lend themselves to the illusion that they could or should undo everything that Labor had done...

...Its success depends upon the constant willingness of the defeated minority to trust both itself and the nation to the victorious majority...

...In addition to temper, the President is deeply committed by conviction and previous experience to the foreign policy course which the previous Administration elaborated...

...Our political health is correspondingly less robust than that of Britain but more robust than France...

...Democracy and the Party Spirit By Reinhold Niebuhr A few days before Lincoln's Birthday, President Eisenhower pleaded with both parties to avoid extremism in party conflict in view of the seriousness of the times...

...There are obvious historical reasons for this development, not related to the fortuitous presence of gifted and unscrupulous demagogues on the Right...

...There was an ironic quality in history's refutation of these theories...

...But the satire of the potent cartoonist, David Low, refuted this extremism better than the opposition could have done...

...For such political acrimony endangers the nation's health more than any specific political policies...

...Who remembers the creeds of the various French parties...

...There can be no final solution of this problem...

...They were schooled in an older and wiser tradition than our conservativism...

...Practically, the "people" can make their decisions only when they are confronted with specific alternatives...

...The party programs must not be too contradictory and a large segment of the population must not be irrevocably committed to either party...

...Both theories proved wrong...

...If these considerations do not convince the thoughtful observer that the contest between the President and the extremists of his party is more fateful for the health of our nation than the contest between the parties, a comparison between two contemporary democracies, Britain and France, may be convincing...

...But, when the count is in, the defeated minority submits with what grace it is able to summon, and the party truce goes into effect for the general public—though the professional politicians are expected to carry on a guerrilla warfare...

...Incidentally, the fact that this party conflict takes place in a multiple-party system, as contrasted with the two-party system which distinguishes Anglo-Saxon democracies, is instructive...

...The first threat to unity above and below party conflict came from the Left...

...Parliamentary government is, in the phrase of the English historian Herbert Butterfield, a form of "limited war...

...This vital center was constantly threatened by the extremists of the Right, who tried to prove that the whole Left was involved with the Communist conspiracy and that, in any case, fascism was justified as a weapon against Communism...

...But an old pattern repeated itself and an equivocal action followed an unequivocal one...

...Everybody laughed the analogy out of court...

...When President Eisenhower stood resolutely against the Bricker Amendment and the isolationist nationalism which it expressed and symbolized, it seemed for a time that the issue had been finally joined and we would soon know whether the one or other type of Republicanism would be victorious...

...The respective parties are bound to contest elections as if the future of the nation depended upon their victory...

...It is worth noting that stable democracies have developed a technique for limiting party conflict which might strike the visitor from Mars as very illogical...

...If this policy should succeed it would make confusion worse confounded in our nation and make our future ominous...

...The President did not act until it was too late to rescue an inept Secretary of the Army from at least the appearance of capitulation to Senator McCarthy and thus increased the status of this demagogue at home and his caricature of American life abroad...

...The mutual trust between parties, which makes the limitation of party conflict possible, rests upon certain conditions...

...If they had been right, no democracy could have survived...

...Madison argued, in fact, that one virtue of a federal community would be that it would prevent the organization of "factions...

...That circumstance makes the tension between the President and his party so fateful for our future...

...The French party struggle certainly contributed to the French defeat by Hitler...

...He is also surprisingly loyal to the domestic policy of controlling economic life at least to the extent of avoiding undue fluctuations of "boom or bust...

...The contest between the President and the extremists in his party is, therefore, a contest between those who would narrow, and those who would widen, the distance between the parties...

...He was right in the sense that our political parties are loosely organized federations of local and regional political groups, which lack the ideological consistency of European political parties...

...This remains true despite his unfortunate definition of his campaign as a "crusade," for the word connotes unlimited, rather than limited, conflict...

...In Latin America, that gesture smacks of "insincerity...

...For we inherited it from the British, though we built our Congressional chambers after the pattern of the Continent...

...This incident, together with his failure to enforce anything more than an outward compliance to his rule of moderation even upon members of his own staff, raises the question whether the party in power may not have elaborated, either by design or inadvertence, a method of working both sides of the street...

...When it became apparent that the cherished policy of collectivization could not overcome the poverty of a war-impoverished nation and that the hiatus between dream and reality could not be overcome by more rigorous collectivization, the prestige of Labor declined and Churchill returned to power...

...This did not prevent his own party followers from celebrating Lincoln's Birthday all over America by accusing the opposition of having been involved in "twenty years of treason...

...The fact that the Left was influenced by viewpoints and accepted credos which in their most consistent form resulted in the hated Communist conspiracy offered a great temptation to the Right to pretend to see the whole political spectrum left of center as involved in the conspiracy...

...The technique requires that the election contest be fought with few restraints, generating emotions which sometimes divide families and friends...

...The fact is that democracy requires not only the organization of political parties but also a certain degree of mutual respect or at least tolerance...

...Our Electoral College, a vestigial remnant of the written Constitution made otiose by our unwritten constitution with its development of parties, is a reminder of the unintended place of parties in our system...

...In modern democratic societies, particularly in our own, the danger of party extremism now comes from the Right rather than the Left...

...If this should be true, architecture would have had a most grateful influence upon the health of nations...

...Actually, it is a ritualistic observance defining the difference between stable nations, in which the political struggle has limits, and those nations in which the struggle may be as bitter as it is "sincere" and where the minority is not reconciled to defeat...

...In the present instance, Communism actually has a power on the French Left which it does not enjoy in any other modern nation...

...Democratic socialism has only slowly extricated itself from the power of the dogma, though it is only fair to say that its practices have been, for a long time, more consistent with democratic mutuality than with the theory to which it payed lipservice...

...Above all, there must be a reserve of loyalty to the nation—and, what may be more important, to principles of justice and freedom—which transcends the party conflict...

...This is surprising in view of the temper of his campaign...

...But they must nevertheless have a reserve conviction that this is not true, that the nation will be safe in the keeping of either party...

...For the two forms of extremism, each of which tried to justify itself as the most effective weapon against the other, were revealed to have identical consequences of tyranny and cruelty...

...Whenever the followers of one political party persuade themselves that the future of the nation is not safe with the opposition in power, it becomes fairly certain that the nation's future is not safe, no matter which party rules...

...Our experience in this matter is partly conditioned by European history...

...Whenever these common loyalties and standards of justice are subordinated to party advantage, the community is imperiled by threats of schism...

...But even when the Left is rigorously anti-Communist, it imperils the security of the nation by neutralist illusions which have their source in the acrimony of the domestic political situation...