When this occurs, the legislative agenda will become more chaotic, and the opportunity for legislative entrepreneurship will expand. Habits of cross-party coalition-building that have faded in recent years will be rediscovered, and the utility of constructing coalitions of strange bedfellows will become more prevalent.
It is important to recognize that moderate factions do not need to be dominant to force such changes. In fact, a relatively small but pivotal number of disciplined moderate dissenters in each party would be enough to provide the political leverage to demand rules changes conducive to greater cross-party agenda-setting.
Notably, a more factionalized party system would not only permit more opportunities for political moderates of various stripes, it would also facilitate a legislative system closer to the framers' design than the polarized, leader-dominated one we have seen for the last several decades. It would, for instance, re-invigorate the job of being an elected legislator.
A Congress without factions has no mechanism to force leadership to share power with members, who, as a consequence, have little creative or productive to do with their time.
As Yuval Levin has argued, members today are incentivized to simply vote however leadership tells them to while devoting their entrepreneurial energies to building their own personal brands through cable-television appearances and other individualistic activities.
This inevitably stokes negative partisanship. In a more factionalized environment that created organizational structures for more activism, members could potentially have meaningful roles beyond just being roll-call cannon fodder. Their factional membership would give them leverage to influence the agenda of Congress and work with shifting, issue-by-issue coalitions of members to alter bills on the floor. A more factional Congress would also be one less likely to bend the knee to the president, since factions would give dissenting members of the president's party in Congress a means to work together rather than being picked off one by one, which has been the fate of Republicans who criticize Donald Trump.
A Congress that worked like this would be attractive to the kinds of quirky, independent politicians who have either retired in frustration or avoided running altogether as of late. A Congress populated by factions may find it harder to actually pass legislation due to weaker leadership control of the agenda and the greater power of members to act collectively against their own party.
But it would also be a Congress that is more creative and more open to a wider range of potential policy solutions than those that simply sustain single-party majorities. A more factional party system would also change the way presidential nominating processes play out. The "invisible primary" that takes place before any votes are tallied will increasingly be conducted by factions as they choose who will carry their torch into battle for the nomination. With factions playing a regular, structured role in the nomination process, we may see more inconclusive primaries, leading to formal brokering between ideological groups.
This could yield something closer to the balanced tickets and cabinets that characterized the pre-polarization era. While the stage is set for factionalization in both parties, exploiting that opportunity will require creating durable institutions within each party designed to fight the battle for intra-party supremacy.
But again, they do not need to attain primacy in the party to achieve many of their goals; they just need to pick, and win, the right battles. Crucially, while the opportunity to gain sufficient power to change the way legislative institutions operate is emerging, that power will not simply drop into moderates' laps.
If funders and activists devote their time to pointless democracy-reform do-goodism or quixotic third-partyism instead of building up a base of power within the two parties, moderates will miss their chance. Therefore all moderates, especially those with resources to devote to politics, should redirect their efforts to where they can actually do some good.
Ultimately, there is no non-partisan route to the kind of looser, more deliberative democracy that many moderate reformers desire. In the American political system, the only path to this end is through the political parties.
Acknowledging this may be uncomfortable for moderate donors in particular, who often find partisan politics and the long, slow slog of political mobilization distasteful, preferring instead "practical problem solving" and government by experts. But ultimately, improved democratic governance requires actually seizing power. If moderate votes, money, ideas, and organizational activism are not mobilized in the right places and over the long term, we will likely remain mired in hyperpolarized gridlock.
The return to factional political parties with the potential to re-invigorate moderates in the American political system is a scenario, not a certainty.
It will not unfold purely on the basis of mechanical, structural forces; rather, its advent is contingent on creative, intelligent agency on the part of both organizations and individuals. A faction, after all, is composed of a network of organizations, and organizations do not emerge spontaneously. What's more, there is no guarantee these institutions will be well-designed, well-led, sufficiently cunning, or endowed with enough resources flowing toward the right incentives.
Yet some raw materials for developing moderate factions within both parties already exist. Billionaire donors like Kathryn Murdoch and Seth Klarman have expressed interest in supporting moderates in both parties, although their strategy for doing so appears fairly rudimentary thus far.
For their resources to have an impact, more donors in both parties will need to shift their political activity to consciously seeding the wide range of electoral, policy, and intellectual organizations that will allow moderates to gain leverage within institutions largely dominated by extremists.
New magazines and think tanks catering to Democratic market-liberals and the liberal-conservative faction of the Republican Party will need to emerge, providing an outlet for academics, writers, and policy experts affiliated with moderate elements to develop and share their ideas. Meanwhile activists, donors, and intellectuals alienated by the polarized direction of their respective parties will need to redirect their activity toward finding a base of support to mobilize and creating organizations to facilitate their pursuit of power.
In places where their respective national parties are weak, these moderate factions will have an opportunity to establish a power base for intra-party conflict. Where they are successful, they will, at least on occasion, need to translate their custody of state government into the election of factional supporters to Congress and use their new institutions to coordinate their legislative efforts. The dominant populist faction of the Republican Party may not even resist the growth of a minority faction, since such a faction will operate in places where the party is nearly extinct; success in those places may be necessary for Republicans to control Congress in the future.
But this doesn't necessarily mean the effort to build a power structure for moderate Republicans in enough states to gain influence is hopeless. Republican governors in blue states have especially powerful sway over their state parties, which they can use to build a strong factional as opposed to merely personal base. In Virginia, for instance, the Trump brand has almost single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party's power, making it uncompetitive in the middle-class suburbs that pave the way to control of Richmond.
This suggests there could be demand from office-seekers for a rebranded party capable of differentiating itself from the increasingly toxic national brand by associating itself with a moderate faction. In Kansas, moderate Republicans have openly defected from their more extreme conservative counterparts to reverse the sweeping tax cuts that wrecked the state's finances.
More could and should be done to build that group into a durable faction within the state legislature. This will involve more than a year or two of work, but it is the kind of long-term effort that eventually gave conservatives the whip hand in the party. This scenario is certainly not the only possibility. But it does suggest that, by cultivating factions within each party, moderates have at least some prospect of re-emerging as a power center in American politics.
While they may seem like unicorns in our current polarized moment, intra-party factions used to be the norm in American politics, and the time is ripe for their renewal. For such factions to develop, moderates will have to summon the motivation and the discipline to engage in the kind of intra-party trench warfare they've too often considered unsavory and demeaning, but that their competitors have mastered and put to effective use.
Chasing non-partisan or anti-partisan fantasies may provide psychological comfort, but it won't generate much in the way of tangible results. The best investment of time, energy, and money for those who want a more deliberative, entrepreneurial, and productive political system is to dedicate themselves to the gritty work of building moderate factions within the two major parties.
Steven M. Teles is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. Robert P. Saldin is a professor of political science and a Mansfield Center fellow at the University of Montana. Forgot password?
The Future Is Faction. Previous Article. Insight from the Archives. A weekly newsletter with free essays from past issues of National Affairs and The Public Interest that shed light on the week's pressing issues. The opening will come from deep forces at work in American society and politics that are going to cause the two parties to become less and less cohesive in the coming years. Among Democrats, the temptation for overreach that accompanies the increasing power of the left in a number of coastal states will open up opportunities for Republicans who can split off suburban, relatively moderate Democrats with the promise of political adult supervision for left-wing legislative majorities.
These forces have already created significant fissures within both parties that show no signs of abating. As these fissures widen, they will create an opportunity for organized and mobilized factions with different social and geographic bases to reemerge as a major force in American politics.
Under a scenario in which factions return, the control of Congress by party leadership will break down, as members will no longer consent to restrictive rules. When this occurs, the legislative agenda will become more chaotic and the opportunity for legislative entrepreneurship will expand. Habits of cross-party coalition-building that have faded in recent years will be rediscovered and the utility of constructing coalitions of strange bedfellows will increase. Indeed, a relatively small — but pivotal — amount of disciplined moderate dissent in each party would be enough to provide the political leverage to demand rules changes conducive to greater cross-party agenda-setting.
If that happened — and if supportive institutions, like think tanks, started supplying policy ideas with appeal across party lines — it would produce a Congress that has more in common with the early s than the last quarter century.
If we are right, moderates — especially those with resources to devote to politics — should redirect their efforts. While the stage is set for factionalization in both parties, exploiting that opportunity will require the creation of durable institutions within each party designed to fight the battle for intraparty supremacy. Especially in the GOP, that is a battle that moderates cannot win in the sense of attaining dominance at least in the foreseeable future.
But, again, they do not need to attain primacy in the party in order to achieve many of their goals — they just need to pick, and win, the right battles. The opportunity to gain sufficient power to change the operation of legislative institutions is emerging. This opportunity can be missed if moderate reformers devote their time to pointless democracy-reform do-goodism or quixotic third-partyism that does not build up a base of power in the two parties.
Ultimately, there is no nonpartisan route to the kind of looser, more deliberative democracy that many moderate reformers want. In the American political system, the only pathway is through the political parties. But ultimately, the path to improved democratic governance requires seizing power.
If moderate votes, organizational activism, money, and ideas are not mobilized in the right places and over the long term, we will likely remain mired in hyperpolarized gridlock.
More typically, the two major parties have each been deeply divided. This is an outgrowth of how our party system is structured.
More specifically, two key ground rules in our electoral system overwhelmingly tilt the playing field toward a two-party system rather than a multiparty system. First, we have single-member districts in which each congressional and legislative district elects its own representative. Second, we have a winner-take-all system. For third parties to gain any power, they have to actually win elections. This high standard for entry means that the two parties have an effective duopoly.
Because our institutions push strongly in the direction of two parties, it is no surprise that there has been no durable third party in the United States since the Republicans dislodged the Whigs in the s. However, our enormous population, vast geography and demographic heterogeneity make it hard for those parties — especially in Congress — to be internally coherent. The consequence is that the ideological and coalitional diversity that other systems process through multiple parties has typically been institutionalized in the United States through durable factions within the two dominant political parties.
Despite that, for the last couple decades both parties have been remarkably lacking in factional divisions. The Republicans in particular have not had organized groups with significantly different ideas, institutions, funders, and geographic bases. There has been, of course, the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, but even there it disagreed with the leadership not on first principles but primarily on tactics.
This era of internal coherence may be coming to an end. The Democrats are already seeing the first signs of durable factional divisions emerging in their ranks, with some members openly calling themselves socialists and rallying behind a presidential candidate — Bernie Sanders — who has always resisted membership in the party itself. This leftist wing of the party now has an increasingly large membership organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, that funnels party participation through a factional structure.
They also have their own ways to raise money, focused on large groups of small-dollar donors. By contrast, the moderate wing of the party is somewhat less developed, although it has a significant base of large donors, a group of loosely affiliated members of Congress the New Democrat Coalition and a few think tanks like Third Way and the Progressive Policy Institute. But both of these factions are likely to only grow and deepen in the future, potentially squeezing politicians, activists, donors, campaign professionals, and intellectuals to join one faction or the other.
It remains to be seen which faction will be dominant. The energy is certainly with the Democratic left for now, but it could be countered by growth in the moderate faction driven by refugees from an increasingly populist Republican Party. Whichever faction gains the upper hand, the Democrats in the future will almost certainly be a more deeply divided party than they have been since the fall of the conservative Southern Democrats.
The Republicans are likely to also become more factionally divided. Going forward, the dominant faction of the GOP will almost certainly be populist and nationalist, yet they will not have the party all to themselves. The populists are going to be forced to share the GOP with what we will call a liberal-conservative faction in recognition of their grounding in classical liberal principles of free trade, pluralism, and constitutionalism.
But that dominant faction will be all but uncompetitive in the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, New England, and the Acela Corridor, even as far down as Virginia.
Notably, these are the same parts of the country where the left wing of the Democrats will be the strongest, possibly even dominant. Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.
If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful. From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy , by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.
A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
A republic , by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.
Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves , convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.
The question resulting is, whether small or extensive republics are more favorable to the election of proper guardians of the public weal; and it is clearly decided in favor of the latter by two obvious considerations.
In the first place, it is to be remarked that, however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. Hence, the number of representatives in the two cases not being in proportion to that of the two constituents, and being proportionally greater in the small republic, it follows that, if the proportion of fit characters be not less in the large than in the small republic, the former will present a greater option, and consequently a greater probability of a fit choice.
In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.
It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects.
The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures. The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter.
The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.
Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.
Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic, -- is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it.
Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest?
In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.
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