At a time when partisan warfare threatens democracy, stronger, not weaker, political parties might be our salvation.
At a moment when democracy itself hangs in the balance, when everything from election denialism to political violence has gone mainstream, discussing the mechanics of party politics might seem quaint, even naive. Yet if American democracy is to survive its current crisis, we must look unflinchingly at what’s broken in our political system — and what’s worth keeping and can still be fixed.
On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Princeton historian Julian Zelizer offers a provocative argument from his new book In Defense of Partisanship. At a time when nearly a third of Americans view both major parties with disgust and many blame partisan loyalty for our democratic decay, Zelizer says that strong, disciplined political parties — not feel-good Biden-style bipartisanship — have historically been crucial to America’s greatest achievements.
The problem isn’t that parties fight hard for their beliefs; it’s that we’ve lost the institutional guardrails that once transformed partisan combat into incremental but lasting progress.
Zelizer traces how the erosion of institutional norms since the 1990s, supercharged by toxic media and dark money, turned principled political competition into a destructive blood sport.
Drawing on historical examples, he explains in detail how the US can reinvigorate the public policy debates essential to wise governance without political partisans treating their adversaries as enemies of the state.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In a recent Pew Research poll, nearly 30% of Americans hold unfavorable views of both major political parties, the highest level in three decades. The conventional wisdom tells us that extreme partisanship is tearing America apart, destroying democratic institutions, and making governance impossible. From election denialism to congressional gridlock, many see partisan loyalty as the root cause of our democratic decay. But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong? What if strong partisan differences properly channeled are exactly what democracy needs?
Today, I’m joined by Julian Zelizer, the Malcolm Stephen Forbes professor of History at Public Affairs at Princeton University. In his provocative new book In Defense of Partisanship, he argues that responsible partisanship, not bipartisanship, may be the key to breaking our political gridlock. Through a sweeping historical analysis from FDR to the present day, he shows how strong parties once helped America tackle its biggest challenges, and how it might do so once again.
At a time when a quarter of Americans say they feel unrepresented by either party. When partisan divisions seem deeper than ever, and when many blame party loyalty for our democratic crisis, Zelizer offers a contrarian view. He suggests that the problem isn’t partisanship itself, but rather the breakdown of democratic guardrails that once helped channel partisan competition constructively. Julian Zelizer is a CNN political analyst, NPR contributor, and author of numerous books on American political history. It is my pleasure to welcome Julian Zelizer back to this program to talk about In Defense of Partisanship. Julian, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Julian Zelizer: Thanks so much for having me on the show.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. When we talk about partisanship, we have to go back almost to the beginning of the republic and the way the founders looked at political parties, particularly the way Madison saw parties as something to be seen as a problem, something to be avoided as the republic unfolded.
Julian: Right from the founding, there’s an anti-partyism in this country, a fear of party, a fear of faction, as they talked about it. Not all the founders felt this way, but Madison certainly did. In part, the Constitution was designed to make sure government didn’t get too big. In part, it was to make it difficult for parties to ever form or for one faction to gain a lot of strength. The thing is, very soon after the republic starts, almost immediately you see parties start to form and our two-party system takes hold.
Jeff: What was it in the founding? What was it in our structure that made parties so irresistible?
Julian: I think part of it is the idea of a polity without division is just not very realistic, and in a democracy, the whole point is people can express their differences in division. You set up a system which is not conducive toward non-divisiveness. Authoritarian government’s actually much better at that. Big divisions emerge early on. Some of the questions we debate today, including what the role of the federal government should be in American life, as well as debates over foreign policy, so doesn’t manifest themselves very quickly. And the second thing is we do create– the Constitution creates this very disjointed system with many levels of power and separation. And what became clear is there needed to be something to organize people in different parts of government who had similar views, and parties become the best vehicle for that.
Jeff: Talk about that a little bit more, because it really is in this disjointed nature of governance that parties become so essential in so many ways.
Julian: They do. There needs to be a connective tissue. Otherwise, it’s very hard to govern. The founders at some level did not imagine the kind of government we would have in this country and the needs that we would have for government. And very quickly that becomes apparent. And so the communication between people in the state and local government and people in different branches of the federal government, the party became the umbrella that held them all together, even when there were differences. And I think the structure of our government actually requires something like political parties to make some sense during the governing process, in addition to expressing the divisions that are very real.
Jeff: One of the points that you make in the book is that partisanship, sometimes not extreme, but nonetheless strong partisanship has often led to more progress, particularly legislative progress, more so even than bipartisanship has.
Julian: I think that’s right. If you think of some of our most important moments, certainly in contemporary history, a strong party was essential. You don’t get FDR in the New Deal without a very strong democratic party that forced the hand of Republicans. You don’t get LBJ in the Great Society, which gives us Medicare and Medicaid and so much more without a Democratic party that was pretty robust and was pressuring Republicans, essentially, into working with them or being isolated.
You don’t get Ronald Reagan in the 1980s without a Republican party that had been revitalized by the conservative movement and was willing to have a strong leader push debate in a new direction. Parties have been very important. Just in policy making on Capitol Hill, strong parties either push things through on their own, big programs like the Affordable Care Act, or strong parties are the ones best able to negotiate with each other rather than fragmented and weak parties in reaching deals that last.
Jeff: Talk about the danger that Bipartisanship has had, and perhaps no better example than the civil rights era.
Julian: I started my career writing about that era and a Southern Democrat named Wilbur Mills, who was the quintessential conservative southern Democrat. In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, bipartisanship really meant a Southern Democrats who tended to be the committee chairs on Capitol Hill working with Republicans in a conservative alliance that was devoted to gridlock. They wouldn’t let civil rights legislation get through. They wouldn’t let healthcare legislation get through. They were the barrier to liberalism.
You could see very clearly how closed smoke filled rooms with members of both parties agreeing that they were in control wasn’t always a good thing. And many liberal reformers and some conservatives, frankly, thought that watered down approach to political parties was actually dangerous because it didn’t allow us to solve the problems that people were calling on to be solved.
Jeff: And as you talk about in the progressive era, much of the progressive pushback to parties really didn’t have the intended consequence.
Julian: Yes. You have two different era of reform. One is the early 20th century, where progressive reformers put into place lots of changes that try to weaken political parties. They don’t end up getting rid of them. They basically layer regulatory bodies and new measures that diminish the power parties into a party system. In the ’70s, you have a huge push to create centralized, strong parties in Congress that won’t be the bipartisan gray that had frustrated so many people. And it’s pretty successful. I argue for a couple of decades, you really have what a lot of reformers from Woodrow Wilson to reformer political scientists in the ’50s were calling for pretty centralized, strong parties where everyone was operating within the parameters of what the party wanted, and fighting it out, and representing different views that exist in the electorate.
Jeff: And you look at this as what you call a period of responsible partisanship that happened in the ’50s through the ’80s, essentially?
Julian: Yes, I mean it’s ironic. We had a period of responsible parties, but divided parties. Ultimately, what we end up with are united parties that aren’t very responsible. And my argument is it’s pretty straightforward. It’s that strong partisanship is important for all the things we’ve discussed; generating ideas, creating bold leadership and bold vision, organizing governing decisions and pushing through legislation and more, but there need to be guardrails that people abide to.
And you really had that until the 1990s where most leaders understood there were limits to how far you could go, that you couldn’t weaponize every procedure, that you couldn’t say whatever came to your mind, that you couldn’t simply perennially lie. There were guardrails. That’s why Senator Joe McCarthy and the Republican Party in the ’50s, the famous pretty vicious anti-communist, doesn’t become a leader of the Republican Party. We are in a different era. Today, we have no guardrails. I argue that’s really what people are responding to, because then the partisanship can be totally destructive.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how that emerged in the ’90s, particularly with Gingrich.
Julian: Two things happened since the ’90s that were pretty, pretty important of what partisanship will look like. One is you have a long-term change in the Republican party. Gingrich is a key player in the ’80s and ’90s. He argues very explicitly in private memos and in public that Republicans
have to take the gloves off and they have to stop worrying about how to best govern. They had to stop worrying about bipartisan civility, and they had to go all out. Anything was fair game. They could say whatever they want. He literally sends a memo out saying this.
And they also can take any process, the most routine process, he’s passing a budget, and use it as a partisan weapon. And he influences a whole young generation that comes into office. And then the next generation’s more radical than him, the Tea Party in the 2010s, and it culminates with Trump. So you have this long-term change within the GOP where the partisanship that people see today supplants a much more responsible approach to partisanship, which could be hardball and tough but operated within boundaries that allowed governing to happen.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the external changes that happened at the same time, perhaps changes that even Gingrich might not have anticipated at the time with respect to things like 24-hour news and social media and the way in which the political environment changed simultaneously.
Julian: Yes. So as the Republican Party is changing in the ‘90s, in 2000s, and becoming much more a smash-mouth vision of partisanship where there are no rules that have to be followed, a second thing that happens is, and this is an internal story, after 1994, both parties will be very competitive. You’ll enter an era where majorities are no longer stable. Political scientist Francis Lee wrote about this. And so control of The House and Senate can change any year, and majorities are very narrow. And so this intensifies partisanship because the stakes of not being loyal to party are magnified. It could cost you control.
And then you have changes outside of Congress, outside really of the elected official world, like the media. And, first, you have the fragmentation of the media, which makes it much harder to control the information that gets out there, much easier for parties to spread pure disinformation and really toxic rhetoric. You also have a instantaneous media cycle that starts with cable in the 1980s and culminates with social media where it’s hard to stop information. So it’s not simply you can get anything out there, there’s no response time anymore. So this all compliments and accelerates and aggravates the much more partisan politics that we’ve had since the 1980s and influences the electorate. And that increasingly the worldview of a lot of voters matches up perfectly with the party they support.
Jeff: And the other thing that changed is the rise of celebrity politics, individuals that became more important than the party, the transcended party.
Julian: Yes, that’s important. And, ultimately, some would argue the healthiest partisanship is when people, politicians, and voters are loyal to the party. But we’ve had another phenomenon. I think it’s certainly accelerated with President Trump, and that is the individual is the party or the individual is the face of the party, and the loyalty starts to be to the person, and it sometimes can work, but the danger is if that goes too far, it only increases the risk for really dangerous behavior. And if the individual does it and everyone follows the individual, there’s not going to be much pushback.
Jeff: Talk about where you think that leaves the party system today. Have we gotten so far afield from it as a result of all of these other things that even with guardrails, it would be arguably impossible to get back to the partisan system that we had, strong or weak?
Julian: It will be hard to go back, and that’s the case with almost anything, but I think it can be much healthier. I do think we are a divided country. I do believe that, and I think different parts of the country see politics and political questions in a really different way. So we need more urgently today in some ways in the past, strong parties that reflect those views, because you want those views to work within the political system, and you want voters to feel they have a place to fight this out through legitimate politics. And I do think, and I try to talk in the book, there can be reforms that certainly won’t make things perfect. It’s a practical vision of politics, but can restrain the parties and can rein them in. So some of the excesses that have become normative are taken away or diminished.
Jeff: What about divisions within the parties? Talk about that in the historical context, but particularly as it relates today, the need to fall in line in these parties.
Julian: We hear about divisions, for example, some that play out in the GLP over leadership battles and they’re there, or progressive versus mainstream Democrats, but they’re not anything like what we’ve had in the past. I mean if you look at the ’40s and ’50s, you had parties like the Democrats that were fundamentally divided on the core questions. Today, some of it is about power and leverage, some of it’s about issues, but I actually don’t think they’re insurmountable, nor do they play out in voting, roll call voting, electoral call voting. So I think the parties are actually, even with those divisions, pretty strong today.
Jeff: In many ways, so much of the party division played out in a legislative framework. Talk a little bit about how you see it playing out in an era that we’re in now where presidential power and executive power seems to be so predominant.
Julian: Yes. We see this a lot and we’re going to see it in the next few years, but I’ve argued that even though we have a much stronger executive and now incredibly aggressive executive with President Trump, he still depends on the party. It’s really interesting to watch. If he didn’t have a very united strong Republican party in his first term, he wouldn’t have survived necessarily. He might have been removed from office. It was the Republican Party that saved him.
Similarly, with the way he recovered politically in the last few years, it depended on a very loyal, strong Republican party that saw him as a path to power. And so I think even in the executive, focused age where muscle is being flexed, the power of party and the importance matters very much as it does for Democrats. The only way Democrats fight back against the Trump presidency is if they can maintain unity and act as an effective party. Otherwise, the playing field will be wide open for the new administration.
Jeff: One of the things that’s changed as well, which we haven’t talked about, is the importance of primaries and of money within those primaries.
Julian: Yes. I mean both are two related but different issues, and they complement some of the changes in the media that have fueled partisanship. With money, we’ve seen the erosion of the Watergate era reforms from the ‘70s, and we have a system for many reasons, Supreme Court decisions and more, where private money floods the system. And a lot of the big money comes from single-issue groups that have one issue that they push and that often aligns with one party or the other because of how issues have been separated. And so that money becomes a constraint on someone changing their position at all because they will lose some of that finance, and that money is important to primaries, which in house politics are important. And in a very red-blue map, what members are worried about is that they will be primaried by someone more to the extreme. And so they always stick to the most extreme version of what their party wants, and the money and the party primary system both work together to make that happen.
Jeff: Does the primary system feed into hyper-partisanship or can it be some kind of bulwark against it?
Julian: I mean I think it tends to feed into it, but if you had a primary system where there was more competition even within the party, if it wasn’t financially so difficult to enter into the primary process, or if districts were redrawn as some have tried to do, to create more competitive races, and that’s not just within the party, but between parties, it will not end the intense partisanship we have. That doesn’t go away. And it’s why you have it in the Senate and presidential politics, but it would be a check. And that’s what we’re looking for, ways to check a very strong partisan system. It would force members of the house, for sure, to think more broadly about policy questions.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about what we saw during the Biden administration and almost a nostalgia for bipartisanship, which while partly successful in terms of its legislative outcome, certainly wasn’t very successful in terms of its popular outcome.
Julian: Yes, there were limits, I think. There were some certainly examples of where President Biden, who really prided himself on bringing back this form of government was successful. Certain issues, infrastructure, for example, and the Chip Act, he found bipartisan legislative support. But overall, it ends up looking quite nostalgic. Most of the legislation he obtains is not bipartisan. It’s with one party driving it, maybe a couple of votes from the GOP.
And, ultimately, the 2024 election speaks for itself. I mean, the victor was not someone who believes in bipartisanship, [laughs] it was just the opposite, it was someone who believes in the division, and governs it that way. And so that combined with just what we saw throughout his four years, the political system that we have remain very much intact. And in the electoral map, you see, even with some of the changes that the Trump campaign was able to enjoy, the map still remains the same, and we keep coming back to that. So I don’t think he was able to fulfill that hope at all.
Jeff: And where does that leave us in 2024 when you look out at where we are days into this administration?
Julian: We’re going to have an increasingly divisive period. I think all the divisions that have played out, certainly, will continue. The question is, does the Republican Party become dominant? Meaning, are Democrats essentially passive and lose their voice, in which you have not two parties fighting it out, as you really did in the first term, but one party just pushing through a very robust agenda. And you might have that. Even with narrow majorities, that’s totally possible if the Republicans remain united. So I just think we’re going to have more of the same.
And the question, I guess, I’m asking or thinking about is, do we ever hit a point in the near future where there’s a generational change of people thinking, “We have to do our partisanship a little differently,” not yearning for bipartisanship or nonpartisanship, but saying, “We can do this better, in a better way.” And we’ll see. It’s not going to happen in the next few years, though.
Jeff: I guess it’s also a question of fatigue, the way a political agenda tires out over time.
Julian: Yes. I think different things happen. There can be a fatigue in the way the politics works, and that can lead, then, to generational energy with younger people. We’ve seen this. I mean, in fact, the more partisan system we have now that came about in the ’70s and ’80s was generational. It was the Watergate babies. It was young people saying the bipartisanship has to go, it’s not good for the democracy. And so I think that can happen again.
And the second thing that can happen is actually about party. Meaning, if one of the parties, particularly the Republicans, would suffer a series of losses over the next decade, where they feel that the kind of partisanship they are practicing is hurting them in terms of obtaining power. That’s the second kind of avenue toward rethinking the way you do business.
Jeff: I guess the other thing that’s different that we haven’t talked about, and maybe there’s historical precedent for this, the way in which social cultural issues play into partisanship.
Julian: Yes. They have become, really, a key fault line. I mean, still economic issues matter. I think there’s some questions such as deregulation of the workplace and the environment or taxes. How do you cut taxes? That, really, you see differences in the party, that it’s not all Tweedledee and Tweedledum, there’s pretty big differences in how we approach those, but social and cultural issues have risen.
And I think certainly for Democrats, reproductive rights became really an important critical elections issue in the last few years. And in the last weeks of the Trump campaign, he talked about transgender issues in sports. And these and other cultural issues have really risen and are part of what separates the parties, and in some ways are sometimes more intense for voters because they’re more personal. So I think sometimes those can be the subject of the bitterest debates.
Jeff: I guess what makes them even more bitter in some ways is that they don’t naturally translate to any kind of legislative action. They become battles unto themselves that really don’t have a political framework.
Julian: No, that’s true. Nor is there a clear path forward always to a solution. They’re almost perpetual sources of discontent and division, and they’re very difficult in that respect. But, look, just to move in a different direction, obviously in the ’50s and ’60s, the issue that caused the most tension was a social issue, it was civil rights and race relations. And that’s just to say culture is always at the heart of what the parties are fighting about, and they just are doing it in different ways.
Jeff: Julian Zelizer, his new book is In Defense of Partisanship. Julian, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Julian: Thanks so much for having me.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
