Time Essay: The Decline of the Parties

The men who do the work of piety and chanty in our churches ... the men who own and till their own farms ...the men who went to war ... and saved the nation's honor ... by the natural law of their being find their place in the Republican Party. While the old slave owner and slave driver, the saloon keeper, the ballot box stuffer ...the criminal class of the great cities, the men who cannot read or write, by the natural law of their being find their congenial place in the Democratic Party.

A Massachusetts Senator (Republican) named George F. Hoar arrived at that triumphantly self-satisfied formula toward the end of the 19th century. The delineation suggests what political parties used to be in the U.S. The labels were, for one thing, descriptive: a man who called himself a Democrat embraced impulses, assumptions, leaders and even a culture very different from those of the man who called himself a Republican. The political parties functioned in a sense like secular churches, with doctrines and powers of intercession, with saints, rites, duties, disciplines and rewards. From wards to White House, the parties were crucial to the way the country worked. The old Tammany boss Carmine DeSapio remembered hauling coal as a young party errand boy to keep families of voters from freezing in the winter. A millionaire political boss like Mark Hanna could install William McKinley as President.

Today the parties have virtually collapsed as a force in American politics. This fall's campaigns were emphatic confirmation of a trend that has been at work for a decade or more: the draining of energy and resources away from the parties and into a sort of fragmented political free-for-all. The extent of the political transformation can be seen in the extravagant use of television, which more than any other single factor has cut loose candidates from their parties and allowed them to inject themselves directly into the constituent consciousness: individual packaging instead of bulk. In this election, TV spending by candidates for Congress and state offices exceeded anything in the past.

Ask any American today to list five words with which he would describe himself. It is rare that Republican or Democrat will be on the list. In fact, a sizable number of candidates in this fall's campaign displayed an amazing reticence about letting the voters know what their party was; the affiliation was widely regarded as either an encumbrance or an irrelevance. In New Jersey, a voter reading one key piece of Senatorial Candidate Jeffrey Bell's literature could not have told whether he was running as a Republican or a Rosicrucian.