The American Bipolarchy: Recommended Reading

Pursuing my inquiry into the consolidation of the modern two-party system back in time, I've found an informative and entertaining volume to recommend. Mark Wahlgren Summers's Party Games is one of a series the author has written about politics during the American "Gilded Age," which lasted roughly from the end of the Civil War into the 1880s. This book, written in 2004, details the strategies, tactics and dirty tricks the Democrats and Republicans employed to thwart one another and block the advent of third parties.

Summers makes it clear that the Democratic party clung to life after the Civil War mostly on the strength of terrorism. Successful efforts by any means necessary to prevent blacks and other Republican sympathizers from voting gave the Democracy a power base that made it an irrepressible national force. In response, Republicans across the country decided that all tactics short of violence were acceptable. Both sides cheated in a blatant fashion that makes modern-day schemers look like dilettantes. Bribery of voters, ballot stuffing and outright ballot theft were all taken for granted. Partisan legislative majorities constantly redrew maps of voting districts to maximize their own advantage and imprison opponents in as few districts as possible.

Complaints were common but nothing seemed to be done about the situation. In part, that was because the two parties had already mastered the art of co-opting or neutralizing dissidents. On one hand, you could already hear the familiar litany that voting for a third party was actually a vote for the intolerable first or second party. On the other, the parties had learned to be flexible and accommodating, giving in just enough on third-party issues to keep wavering voters loyal in the end. At the same time, at least in the era Summers writes about, the two parties maintained consistent and distinctive positions on issues that really mattered to voters, particularly regarding trade. Republicans were always protectionist, while Democrats stood for free trade.

Money had already become decisive for politics in the era Summers describes. It cost money to stage rallies with uniformed marchers, to print pamphlets and the party ballots that were necessary before the introduction of voting machines, and to bribe "floaters," the people who remained self-consciously undecided until Election Day. Most newspapers were party organs that depended on local government patronage and shut out news about third parties, except when it hurt the other major party.

The remarkable thing about Party Games is Summers's ability to tell an appalling story with style and wit. A reader might well wonder whether he just finds details funny, but it's clear that he has a serious point to make. For all the chicanery he describes, I also got the impression that both major parties still stood for their founding principles in this era. The American Bipolarchy as we know it won't have taken its present form until the parties had mastered the ability to adopt any position, even one polarly opposed to their original principles, and still survive.

I would have liked more detail on the inner workings of national party bureaucracies apart from dirty tricks, because that's where we'd probably see what the Republicans and Democrats had that the Whigs didn't. We also need to see what's going on at that level to determine whether the parties retained an institutional self-consciousness and survival instinct over time or if, as some apologists for the Bipolarchy might like to argue, they became empty vessels to be animated by whatever grass-roots mass movements got control of them. Summers doesn't see mass movements getting control of the two parties in his era of study, so we'll have to keep our eyes open when this seems to happen later, whether in 1896, 1932, 1972 or who knows when.

Overall, Party Games is a book you can recommend to any literate person who might appreciate the fact that, little more than a century ago, a lot went on that made the United States look a lot like the Third World countries whose practices we deplore today. Since Americans today tend to claim that adopting American-style democracy would eliminate these ills, Party Games should serve as a cautionary tale.