Time Essay: The Decline of the Parties

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House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill surveyed the party's centrifugal forces last week and remarked: "If this were France, the Democratic Party would be five parties." The somewhat chaotic individualism of American politics these days can have its charm, but it is also dangerous. Congress now has all the discipline of a five-year-old's birthday party. Toby Moffett, 34, a Democratic Connecticut Congressman who was not even a member of the party until a couple of weeks before he filed in 1974, remarks with some chagrin: "We get to Washington and we're not prone to look for leadership the way they used to. We don't owe anybody anything." With several hundred different ideas caroming around the Capitol about how to handle energy or inflation, it is difficult to make policy. It is also much harder for the man in the White House to use party discipline to bring Congressmen into line behind his program. Jimmy Carter, who for the first two years of his term incautiously neglected relations with the national Democratic Party, found that he could not attack from the culprit's rear, by way of the party structure back home.

The decline of the parties is part of the atomizing process of American culture. "The individualistic instincts in this society," writes Washington Post Columnist David Broder, "have now become much more powerful in our politics than the majoritarian impulse. It is easier and more appealing for all of us leaders as well as followers—to separate ourselves from the mass than to seek out the alliances that can make us part of a majority." Voters seem to have lost the psychological need to feel themselves part of a large political cause; the Viet Nam War, Watergate and other scandals have left a deep residual cynicism that instructs Americans to beware of politicians.

Many other conditions have helped to reduce the parties' circumstances. The relentless attention of pollsters to the public mood means that candidates and officeholders receive their instructions directly from the people, rather than through the party apparatus. Impresarios of media—like White House Adviser Gerald Rafshoon—orchestrate campaigns without the party's help or intervention.

The very reforms that the parties instituted to purify the system (the proliferation of primaries, the funding of campaigns by political action groups instead of the old fat cats) have helped to destroy it. Says Joel Fleishman, director of Duke University's Institute for Policy Sciences: "With laudable motives, we've actually contributed to the degeneration of the political process."

The traditional party structures served to organize possibilities, to discipline people and ideas into workable forms. When practically every politician is a free agent, there is a tendency toward the anarchic, which may be a perfect political reflection of a narcissistic decade. In the absence of party loyalty, officeholders may find it easier to exercise their integrity, although of course they may also owe fealty to some private lobby. In either case, they tend to lose the talent for compromise and concerted effort. Single-issue zealotry, which is rewarded in the new enlarged primary system, can contaminate the entire political process.