George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the “New” American Party System

George Bush’s party leadership highlights a long-standing paradox growing out of the New Deal political realignment. On the one hand, Franklin D. Roosevelt and ardent New Dealers anticipated the critics of the party system of the 1940s and 1950s, who advocated a more “responsible” party system composed of national policy-oriented organizations capable of carrying out platforms or proposals presented to the people during the course of an election (APSA Committee on Political Parties 1950).²² They wanted to overcome the state and local orientation of the party system, which was suited to congressional primacy and poorly organized for progressive action on the part of the national government, and to establish a national, executive oriented party, which would be more suitably organized for the expression of national purposes. Unless such a development took place, Roosevelt argued in defending his efforts to diminish the influence of the conservative southerners who opposed the New Deal, the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely “Tweedledum and Tweedledee to each other.” The system of party responsibility, he argued, “required one of its parties be the liberal party and the other the conservative party” (Roosevelt 1938-1950: v. 7: xxviii-xxxii).

On the other hand, Roosevelt’s dominance of Democratic politics and the New Deal commitment to “enlightened administration” required presidents to stand apart from partisan conflicts. Roosevelt sought to build a more progressive form of government within a reconstituted executive office rather than through a vital connection between the president and Congress. This required extending the personal and nonpartisan presidency to the detriment of collective partisan responsibility. The New Deal emphasis on entitlements and liberal internationalism – the rhetorical and programmatic commitments to uphold “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” exalted national administrative power into a new creed, one that demanded the transcendence rather than the transformation of partisanship.

Presidents who have envisioned a departure from the New Deal, and its offspring the Great Society, have revitalized party politics by rallying conservatives to a Republican party that proclaims to be against administration. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, especially, have championed traditional values and rights seemingly marginalized by the emergence of the New Deal political order (Heclo 2003). Bush has surpassed Reagan, the former actor, divorcee, and causal churchgoer, in identifying himself and his party as the chief defenders of traditional social values, “both by what he upholds (religious faith, flag-waving patriotism, marriage between a man and a woman, restrictions on abortion, the right of gun owners) and what he opposes (gay marriage, sexual permissiveness, gun control)” (Nelson 2005: 14). But he has also softened Reagan’s harsh anti-government rhetoric, acknowledging the enduring place of the modern state in American life. Whether the reform of education policy and Medicare during Bush’s first term serve conservative objectives is a matter of some dispute; there is no question, however, that these initiatives involve a major expansion of national administrative power.

In the wake of his victory in the 2004 election, Bush proposed not to cut social security benefits, as Reagan had proposed, but, rather, to “privatize” them, that is, to allow workers under age 55 to divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts. This reform, the White House claimed, would yield a better rate of return on funds dedicated to Social Security benefits; equally important, the personal retirement accounts would recast the core New Deal entitlement as a vehicle by which individuals would assume greater responsibility to plan for their own retirement. The money in personal accounts, Bush promised, would belong to individuals, not the government. Nonetheless, the national government would still force people to save, control the investment choices they make, and regulate the rate of withdrawals (Mufson 2005).

Posing challenges to the Liberal order while embracing liberal methods of governance, Reagan, Bush, and the modern conservative movement have, in a sense, brought to completion the national party system that Roosevelt prescribed. Driven by party activists who are motivated by ideology rather than old style patronage, the Democratic and Republican parties may be as polarized as at any time since Reconstruction in the 1860s. Moreover, social and political changes – best represented by the partisan realignment in the South – might portend enduring polarization.

Republican no less than Democrats, we have argued, have become part of the “government tier” (McWilliams 1995:275), a party of administration. Both Reagan and Bush have presided over important expansions in the modern state, and, as the abortion dispute makes clear, have championed rights that require the extension of government power.

Rather than curtail the administrative state, therefore, Republicans have engaged the Democrats in a battle for its services. This struggle, as we have noted, has been based on the proposition that the modern presidency, ideologically, is a two-edged sword that can cut in a conservative as well as a liberal direction. The continual expansion of the administrative presidency during Republican presidencies, even during the tenure of ardent partisans such as Reagan and Bush, has diminished the collective nature of the new party system. Like their Democratic predecessors who created the modern presidency, Reagan and Bush have concentrated political and policy power in the White House, preempting congressional and state party leaders in many of their limited but significant duties. It is telling that both the Bush and Kerry campaigns organized their grass roots field operations outside of the regular state and local parties. For all their differences, the Bush campaign strategists and the leaders of ACT, which assumed responsibility for the Kerry “ground war,” agreed that the state parties lacked the energy and talent to carry out a sophisticated mobilization of grass roots supporters.²³

Given the domestic and international challenges posed by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the development of the modern presidency as the principal agent of American democracy might very well be justified. A new sense of executive responsibility was needed, one that the contemporary presidency fulfills rather admirably. As we have noted, even as many Democrats disagree with President Bush about the Iraqi War, not many of them have defended institutions or laws that would handcuff Presidents in meeting the challenges of fighting a war against the invisible, but relentless enemy of terrorism. Still, the more powerful executive office – the executive establishment – that has been built to meet the domestic and international challenges of the 20^th and 21^st centuries has not come without a price. The danger has been, and still is, that presidents will abuse their privilege as the embodiment of the national will (Lowi 1985, 178).

Champions of party politics have called for a new kind of party system to constrain presidential power and revitalize the connection between government and the people. Walter Dean Burnham argued in his seminal 1970 volume, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics, that the task confronting the United States was no less than the “construction of instrumentalities of domestic sovereignty to limit individual freedom in the name of collective necessity.” This would require “an entirely new structure of parties and of mass behavior, one in which political parties would be instrumentalities of democratic collective purpose” (Burnham 1970, 188-189).

Perhaps the party polarization, rapt public attention, and increased turnout of the 2004 election suggest that the national parties have the potential to bridge the traditions of republican government in the United States and the exigencies of national administrative power. The 2002 and 2004 elections gave dramatic testimony of how the relationship between the modern president and the party can be mutually beneficial. Just as Bush played a critical part in drawing campaign funds and loyalists to his party, so did he benefit from the steadfast backing of his party members in Congress and party loyalists in the electorate. Although Bush’s popularity has declined considerably in his second term, the unfailing support of congressional Republicans and conservative activists has enabled the White House to push important legislation through Congress, make appointments to the federal judiciary that have strengthened conservative control over court rulings, and “stay the course” in Iraq in the face of growing criticism of the war (Vanderhei 2005; Vanderhei and Babington 2005).

Bush’s presidency, especially, shows how an unstinting partisan in the modern executive office makes possible a blending of partisanship and administration, one in which administration has become a vehicle for partisan objectives (Vanderhei 2005). At this point, however, the prospects for “a new party system” that ties the executive to collective purposes are very uncertain. The establishment of the president as the “steward of the public welfare” has put a premium on candidate-centered campaigns and organization. More important, given the nature of the modern executive office, it summons individuals whose ambition is best served by acting outside of party politics. Presidents can be strong, indeed, best display their personal qualities, “above party,” McWilliams has written (McWilliams 1989, 35). The rise of the modern presidency thus encourages each occupant of the White House to exploit the full splendor of the executive office at the expense of public debate and resolution that best take place in Congress and the state legislatures. The War on Terrorism, the defining issue in the 2004 campaign, seems less an episode of collective responsibility than new confirmation of Madison’s warning that “War is the true nurse of executive aggrandizement” (Hunt 1906, vol. 4, 174).

The relationship between the president and “new” party system invites us to consider a dilemma as old as the Republic. How can a state that is expansive and powerful enough to protect our rights provide for an active and competent citizenry? In the nineteenth century, Americans sought answers to this dilemma in a natural rights version of liberalism that celebrated localism. Traditional party organizations and newspapers rectified the Constitution’s insufficient attention to civic matters. By the same token, the modern executive establishment, born of New Deal “programmatic liberalism” and embellished by its enemies, has fostered a more active and better equipped state, but one without adequate means of common deliberation and public judgment, without the means to sustain the vitality of its civic culture. This is the modern dilemma of America’s “extended republic” – this is the central challenge for American democracy at the dawn of a new century.