Nation: The Four Parties

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As professor of political science at Williams College, erstwhile Washington bureaucrat, sympathetic biographer of F.D.R. and J.F.K., and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress from Massachusetts, James MacGregor Burns has a lot of ideas about politics. Among other things, Liberal Burns is a strong believer in the notion that the President of the U.S. should firmly lead the Congress—and that is the central theme of his latest book, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four Party Politics in America.

Burns is pretty unhappy about present-day politics. Says he: "As a nation we have lost control of our politics." The U.S. has "a government by fits and starts, a statecraft that has not been able to supply the steady leadership and power necessary for the conduct of our affairs. We have reacted to change rather than dominated it." Why is this so? The Burns thesis: "The pattern of national politics is essentially a four-party pattern. The Democratic and Republican parties are each divided into congressional and presidential structures, with all the elements that comprise the American type of party."

More Than Wings. Burns devotes nearly two-thirds of his book to tracing the historical development of this four-party pattern. He writes, "The congressional Democrats began as the Madison party in Congress and the presidential [Democratic] party was founded and built by Jefferson. The symbolic founder of the Republican presidential party was Abraham Lincoln; the congressional [Republican] party had its origin in the opposition to Pierce and Buchanan on the Hill during the 1850s and with the congressional Republicans who went on to fight Lincoln during the Civil War and to dominate Reconstruction.

"Today these four parties are as intact as ever: the Roosevelt-Truman-Stevenson-Kennedy presidential Democrats; the Willkie-Dewey-Eisenhower-Rockefeller presidential Republicans; the John Garner-Howard Smith-Harry Byrd-John McClellan congressional Democrats; and the Allen Treadway*-Robert Taft-Charles Halleck congressional Republicans."

These are not mere party wings, claims Burns; their differences are institutional and ideological. The power fulcrum of the presidential parties is the national convention, where they dominate rank-and-file delegates. "The Robert Tafts and the Lyndon Johnsons usually do not win at Chicago or Philadelphia." The Electoral College compels the presidential parties to "cater to the urban masses and their liberal dogmas." For leadership, they draw from the ranks of big-city lawyers, Eastern financial executives, academicians (Republican examples: Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, John Foster Dulles, Douglas Dillon). These parties are generally internationalist, favor activist government, are concerned with broad "way-of-life" issues.