The US has had moments where partisanship has seemed to die. Our leadership has often called for an end to partisanship. We've heard this from Obama recently. I don't trust it. Of course I know what he means, and he is right, but there is a legitimate role for partisanship. If we forget the legitimate role of partisanship we get much worse things. Partisanship can be set aside only by consensus. Democracy is one way we get consensus in any country, but the other way is through force and power. Force and power are never evenly distributed unless everyone can organize, including the otherwise powerless. When there is no partisanship, the only partisans are those who already have power. Outward economic forms are fungible, Communists can form Companies and start preaching Capitalism, but elites will never give up even a little power and influence absent either democracy or revolution. Partisanship is a way to mitigate conflict and prevent violence.
Partisanship is about self interest organized. "Factions" are nothing more than people seeking to find deputies and representatives to represent their interests. In business people organize companies to make money. In politics people organize parties to represent their interests. Absent democracy, the two types of organizations become the same bodies.
It would be fatal for workers to trust management to represent them to Congress on all issues because they have different issues, and sometimes they have issues with management.
The fact of the matter is that this organization is part of the process of forming Governments. A party has a Government, a business has a Government. The notion that Government is not involved confuses formal government with the essential functions of Government.
When workers have issues with management those are government issues. That is why both workers and business managers petition government to get labor laws passed. All organizations have governments, and only another governing body can regulate or set the boundaries for what that organization can do. Businessmen want less formal government so they can be the government in their own markets and affairs. That they are incompetent to govern this way was obvious a century ago. That they still advance so-called 'libertarian theory' and make it party planks in the Republican party shows that this is just self interest. In other words, this is partisanship.
In the USA the founder of the party system was Thomas Jefferson, who was forced into it by the partisanship of people who claimed to be against partisanship. The idea was nonsense, but the Adams administration used it as a justification for laws banning freedom of the Press and locking people up for criticizing the President. Somebody had to represent the interests of the common people, and Jefferson organized the Democratic Republican party, which in the form of the Democratic party has been representing those interests ever since. Under Madison "partisanship" dropped off for a while, and the result was that new parties had to form to represent different interests.
The Republicans eventually formed to represent the interests of abolitionists as well as of the Federalists and Whigs who had backed Adams senior. These parties carried the legitimate fight between factions who were pro-slavery and anti-slavery, pro-tariff and anti-tariff, and eventually partisanship was expressed in a war between the states when the interests of those groups proved irreconcilable.
Through all of this partisanship usually represented real issues. The principles were the arguments for justifying laws, policies and methods of living. The fight over those arguments had real implications for real people. Had they been able to hash out issues of slavery to consensus there never would have been a civil war, but on the other hand, had they not had factions to represent the ideas formally, the civil war would have happened much sooner and with more permanent consequences. Eventually new consensus was formed, and new issues took the place of old ones, but "partisanship" still represents the legitimate regional and ideological interests of people. If we see that we can take the propaganda with a lot more salt.
Some ideas are better than others. Sometimes calls to "end partisanship" are just a way to gloss over legitimate differences of opinion. Such calls aren't needed when people genuinely agree. Right now we need to reverse bad government, find a way to adjudicate the burning off of bad money that won't stick that burden on ordinary people and allow it to escape the well healed who used the creation of bad money to siphon off their own personal Fort Knox. Calls to "end partisanship" in this context simply means snookering the tax payers and laborers to accept the burden of "fiscal discipline" and poverty.
We working people need to get smarter. Part of that means being partisan for our own well being. We have to get involved, stay involved, and if we have rascals representing us, throw them out!
Chris
Posted by cholte at January 10, 2009 09:07 AM