THE END OF POLITICS?
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it in terms of loyalty to parties. People used to feel a great loyalty to
their political party, whether because the party was something they were
ideologically comfortable with, or because the party was a social organ–
ism in which their friends were involved, which did things for them, or
because the leadership of that party was something they felt sympathetic
to. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, they felt party loyalty. You voted
the straight party ticket; people running for office advertised their party.
Party identification was very strong. Party loyalty has, for reasons we
have been discussing, practically disappeared. Billboards, if you go
through the country today, very rarely name the party under which a
candidate is running. None of us feel loyal to the party any more; we
all
vote split tickets . The whole ethos of the party has radically changed.
The disappearance of party loyalty means that the party is no longer ef–
fective in organizing the political process.
Edith Kurzweil:
Aren't you also saying that the parties served as com–
munity?
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
Well, they served as a sort of community, not
in the sense that the Communist Party was a community; our parties
have been far more disorganized and heterogeneous. But they played a
role of meaning in people's lives; they no longer do. Only a bunch of
old-timers, who can remember the New Deal, for instance, have much
feeling for a party as such. Today, polls show, I believe, that more
young people identify themselves as independents than as Republicans;
and almost as many identify themselves as independents as do those
identifying themselves as Democrats. Independents are going to be very
soon the largest party in the United States, which is the key to the
decline of the parties.
Heather Macdonald:
Are you suggesting that there can't be politics
without parties, without that mediation?
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
Well, of course we started out in this country
without parties. The Founding Fathers, the people who drafted the
Constitution, did not like the idea of parties. In his farewell address,
George Washington warned against the baneful spirit of parties.
Madison, in his
Tenth Federalist Paper,
talked about factionalism as a great
danger to the Republic. But parties, although not mentioned in the
Constitution, forced themselves on the polity for a number of reasons,
partly because there are, as Madison conceded in the
Tenth Federalist,
a
variety of interests in the country, requiring representation.
It
was also
