A Turn Toward Great Party Politics?

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes two kinds of political parties: great ones and small ones. The former are those “attached more to principles…to generalities and not to particular[s],” to statesmen and not to politicians. They are the parties of founders. The latter are just the opposite: “generally without political faith,” these are the parties of disinterested politics, of policy more than of direction.

“America has had great parties,” he writes, though “today they no longer exist.” But much has changed since the early 1830s, when Tocqueville visited the United States. He did not live to see the Civil War, a conflict so well-suited to his description of great parties that the war itself reads like his definition made literal. Neither did he live to see the small parties that followed in its wake.

From the North’s victory over the South, which vindicated the founding’s anti-slavery political principles, to the reorientation of American politics with the New Deal coalition under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the rise of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement, America has seen its share of great parties. They shared a common thread: each won a decisive victory that set the terms of political debate for a generation.

Small parties have then emerged in their wake. When Tocqueville tells us of those times “when societies rest and when the human race seems to catch its breath,” he is referring to the calm that follows the storm. As much as he admits to hating the lowness, blatant corruption, and political opportunism of small parties, Tocqueville contends that America “gained much in happiness” with their emergence. The patriots of 1776 paid in blood to establish a new status quo along republican lines, to create the conditions in which the small parties Tocqueville describes could ask small questions because the big ones had already been answered.