“It is not just a battle between two parties. It is a fight for the very soul of the American government,” the president warned in Chicago. “Powerful reactionary forces . . . are silently undermining our democratic institutions.” Republicans in Congress, he said, had “opened the gate to the forces that would destroy our democracy.”
This wasn’t Joe Biden in 2024, but Harry Truman in 1948. Apocalyptic invocations of disaster if the enemy wins are hardly new in American politics, and this year is no exception. Depending on who’s speaking, the U.S. is purportedly headed toward either dictatorship or woke tyranny if the other side wins. Either the country will capsize into chaos, or the righteous will seize the tiller and steer the republic into a grand future. This kind of rhetoric exists on both sides of the political spectrum—but each cycle, one side must lose. An essential part of democracy is learning to live after the apocalypse.
Our founding generation was conflicted about party politics. Many hoped to avoid it. George Washington tried to conduct a nonpartisan presidency and denounced the “fury of party spirit” in his Farewell Address. Yet early American statesmen also pioneered the habit of warning that the American experiment could be extinguished if their political rivals won. Alexander Hamilton helped author Washington’s famous address, but he was also one of the most vicious political knife-fighters in the early republic.
Deploring party politics has been a longstanding American tradition, but political parties and the controversies they engender are a natural outgrowth of democratic life. One of the great benefits of democratic systems is that elections provide a way of channeling social conflict, providing a framework through which various interests and worldviews can compete for influence. The very process of channeling that conflict necessarily leads to political disputation. A democratic politics that did not allow for such clashes would soon cease to be democratic.
Still, winner-take-all political conflict can become destructive when it fuels an escalating cycle of retaliation and alienation. That’s why it’s important for political leaders to exhibit public charity and partisan restraint. Washington’s invocation of a common American fate did not, of course, end the squabbles between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, nor should it have. But it was a prudent counterbalance to the factional passions of his time. With its checks on congressional majorities and deliberately clunky federal government, the American system itself has a way of diffusing, and thus disciplining, factional conflict. The heterogeneity of the constitutional order has continually helped American politicians find common ground despite major disagreements—which is why political prudence suggests that we should protect that heterogeneity rather than adopt a parliamentary approach, in which a narrow factional majority rules absolutely. The responsibility of forging a post-apocalyptic politics also rests on ordinary citizens: we must nurture the spirit of charity in our daily lives.
Patriotism is both a cause of and remedy for the temptations of faction. Caring for the public square as a whole adds urgency to democratic battles. It’s easy to affect equanimity when speculating on the politics of a far-off country. But thinking about your own home adds the sharpest point to the political questions of who holds power and what should be done with that power.
Love of country and countrymen can help us see political controversies in a fuller context. We are not just members of a faction but also participants in a larger civic order. Even if it is vaguely defined, that sense of common bond plays an important role in keeping the hot star of factional feeling from collapsing into an all-consuming black hole of hostility.
What Americanness means has been contested over the centuries and is not likely to be resolved soon. Reducing it to the profession of some ideological doctrine seems at best to convert national belonging into dogma and at worst to be a vehicle for a roving civil inquisition. The churn of history means that American identity cannot be defined as some exclusive ethnic lineage. Maybe there is something more to seeing ourselves as the inheritors of a particular mixture of blessings and struggles—this weird, wild continental republic of saints, sinners, and eccentrics. And yet, whatever our differences, we are also neighbors. Contrary to the vanity of ideologues, those differences can enrich the public square.
I suppose these observations might come across as naïve, middlebrow, or even “cringe.” There is, after all, a unique frisson in lifting the banner of the counterrevolutionary warrior or adopting the noble pose of the “truth-teller” who claims that politics really is just enmity all the way down. But a narrowly factional worldview makes for a diminished political vision. Statecraft in the grand sense means finding a stabilizing framework within which real political differences can be worked out. A politics that consists only of the friend/enemy distinction seems more a species of legalism than politics rightly understood, which demands care for the common good.
In one of the more illustrative coincidences of American politics, our general elections always happen right after Halloween. In our era, partisans put on their costumes of “red team” and “blue team” and play the usual political tricks, while the lucky few get the treat of victory. But Halloween ends. The time comes to take off the costume and reveal what we are underneath: Americans.
Photos: Valerie Plesch/picture alliance via Getty Images (left) / Brandon Bell/Getty Images (right)