Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance

“Importing these ideas into your sense of self—to think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative—is irrational and corrosive. It is a recipe for error.”

Thinking of political action along a conservative-liberal axis is nothing new. Institutions and individuals have been lumped along these lines for centuries. 250 years ago, the architects of American democracy were, by the lights of their times, liberal theorists. Across the pond, contemporaneous statesmen and philosophers like Edmund Burke were champions of conservatism. Just about every permutation of participatory governance has been carved along some version of that centuries-old partisan axis.

As abstractions, these terms have relatively clear meanings. Conservatism celebrates tradition and institutionalized moral systems. It greets change and difference with glowering circumspection. Liberalism places its core emphasis on individual liberty and recognizes change as both an inevitable outworking of personal freedom and a likely route to progress.

But cast back onto the shifting, idiosyncratic world of day-to-day human life, these concepts lose a lot of explanatory traction. Instead of clarifying ideas and relationships, they tend to obscure nuance and individual variation. Burke, for instance, was a fairly archetypal conservative—a stuffy religious moralist, through and through. He also happened to support America’s largely secular and distinctly liberal revolution. John Stuart Mill, meanwhile, was a champion of personal liberty. This is liberalism in the classical sense. Yet perplexing, the modern political stage—at least in the United States—casts liberals as stewards of government excess and the ensuing restraints on the scope of individual action that excess entails.

Despite its messiness, the conservative-liberal binary has cemented itself in the popular consciousness. In the United States, the majority of regular, active voters have latched onto one or the other pole and bricked it into their individual identity. The political stage, then, is an either-or contest between Democrats and Republicans. Functionally speaking, the two parties have managed to make themselves the sole avatars of liberalism and conservatism, however loosely and inconsistently defined.