My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance—just pure partisan competition. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and arbitrary, I engaged in the competition with the utmost seriousness—in relay races, basketball games, and whatever else was on the packed schedule.
At day’s close, two climactic showdowns involved the whole camp, each team gathered on opposite sides of a ball field. The first competition required us to shout self-congratulatory cheers; the victory was awarded to the team that impressed the judges as louder and, thus, more spirited. I would scream myself hoarse. The finale, a tug-of-war, relied less on an umpire’s subjective assessment. We lined up alongside a massive rope stretched across the field and pulled with all our collective might. I can still picture the anchor of my team during one of those summers, a stout boy with a low center of gravity from the oldest age group, wrapping himself with the far end of our rope, his face red from the strain. I also remember the magical feeling, after what seemed like an endless and titanic effort, when the rope began to edge slowly but decisively in our direction.
In both of those contests, my excitement and my motivation to compete rose in proportion to the size of the team I was on, despite the fact that team size was precisely what made my own contribution so much less likely to matter. This is one of the paradoxes of team competition.
Often, I recall the image of the tug-of-war, and the attendant illusion that my cheers or my exertions on the rope were making a meaningful contribution to victory, when I face an impending election season. The parallel is striking: In mass democracies, voters deliberate and agonize over their actions, exert themselves, and trumpet their allegiances, even though they understand rationally that their individual support is wildly unlikely to determine the outcome. The larger the electorate, the less our votes count. And yet we turn out most consistently when the electorate is largest, and we recall most vividly those Election Days when our votes made the least practical difference.
In modern political life, the act of individual voting, conducted in privacy and unfettered by external constraints and pressures, is the hallmark of a democratic society. It’s most of what we mean by democracy. This one occasional exercise bears the heavy burden of representing (or even exhausting) the capacity of ordinary individuals to determine their political circumstances and participate in self-government. But it is also an exercise in which individual choices and actions hardly appear to count at all. The more ostensibly democratic a society—the more widely suffrage is extended or the more robust the turnout on Election Day—the more we as voters ought to feel effectively disenfranchised.
From the perspective of moral and political philosophy, the predicament of the individual voter in a mass election is a type of collective-action problem. Voters might be adhering to some categorical imperative to act as they wish others to do—much as they feel obligated to boycott unsavory business practices, forgo benefit from animal cruelty, or sort their recycling—even when they don’t expect their individual act to have any practical impact, and even when they could simply become free riders on the boycotts or recycling efforts of others.
I imagine that there are voters out there for whom such philosophical considerations come into play, reassuring them or even animating them. Likely for others, the mere possibility (reinforced by the occasional example from a local election) that an outcome could be determined by the action of one voter provides enough motivation. But more commonly, voters adopt other strategies to augment the puny power of our individual ballot. They may try to persuade others to vote, or to vote a certain way, and donate money to organizations that will try to mobilize or influence multiple voters. (For many Americans, and not just the wealthy and incorporated, individual donations have supplanted individual votes as expressions of voter preference and mechanisms for participating in electoral politics.) Others try to maximize the effects of their votes by registering, if they can legally do so, in competitive districts or smaller states where the odds of casting a single decisive straw might be marginally higher. I myself have done all of these things.
These efforts resemble shouting louder or pulling harder at the end of color war; they are desperate attempts to be more than just a solitary voice or a lone body in the massive crowd. But what I recall from those childhood experiences is less some concern about the size of my contribution than the attraction and excitement of belonging to such a large, competitive undertaking. Similarly, for many voters, the sense of participating in a huge partisan battle, more than anything else, may make them feel (typically with the help of some magical thinking) that their votes count.
U.S. party politics offers voters this kind of opportunity. Though partisan remains a slur in our political discourse, partisan feelings are as powerful and pervasive in this country today as at any point in the past century. Despite the current disrepute and relative weakness of the major party organizations, party-line voting is on the rise. Large aggregate shifts in partisan vote from one election to another within communities and regions have become so uncommon that we speak with confidence of red and blue states or counties. Notwithstanding misgivings about the two parties, most U.S. voters gravitate to one of two teams, even if they register as independent. And the competition between those teams fully structures and conditions U.S. politics.
The history of this development is deep and complex. Not all democracies have two-party systems, and nothing in the U.S. Constitution mandates parties at all—most of the Founders abhorred factionalism and expected the new republic to avoid party formation. As ideological differences within George Washington’s cabinet crystallized, though, parties quickly formed, and we’ve had some version of them ever since. But the modern two-party system, with national competition, grassroots organization, and intense loyalty, emerged in the early 1830s. It was initiated by Martin Van Buren when he built the Democratic Party around the presidency of Andrew Jackson—while Jackson’s opponents followed suit and created their own rival organization, the Whigs. Over the next decade, party labels became what they have been ever since: core forms of identity, usually passed down from generation to generation, connecting masses of strangers to one another well beyond a single election season. By 1847, a Whig editor could describe partisanship as the animating emotional force in American electoral politics. With party divisions, he wrote, “pride, emulation, the desire of distinction, the contagious sympathy with numbers, and that disguised form of self-love, the esprit de corps, all concur to swell the tide of feeling, until the desire of party success becomes the master passion of the human breast.” Not patriotism, honor, or sense of justice, but rather partisan desire.
Van Buren defended his two-party system (which he claimed was simply a revival of an ideological division that had always existed) on broader grounds, but a crucial consideration was his desire to forestall sectional division and protect the institution of slavery. His system took shape against the backdrop of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, Britain’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies, the beginnings of radical abolitionism in the U.S. North, and other warning signs in the early 1830s of a political threat to the practice of slaveholding. Without competition between two national parties, Van Buren wrote, “geographical divisions founded on local interests or, what is worse prejudices between free & slaveholding states will inevitably take their place.” Around the figure of Jackson, a slaveholding southerner who appealed to northern and western voters on other grounds, Van Buren built a Democratic Party dominated by defenders of slavery while effectively forcing Jackson’s opponents to organize against him on a nationwide basis, giving them incentives to avoid slavery politics altogether.
Van Buren’s system achieved its objectives for a couple of decades, until it collapsed into civil war. But the culture of partisan competition that Van Buren had championed outlived both the political crisis that it was designed to avert and the institution it was intended to protect. Despite realignments leading up to the war and a massive influx of new voters in its aftermath, intense two-party competition soon settled back into familiar antebellum patterns and continued to structure American politics. Democrats and Republicans nominated candidates, framed policy debates, motivated and disciplined voters, and furnished the very ballots with which the right of suffrage was exercised. Voters saw elections (on most occasions) as a choice between two parties and experienced Election Day as a contest between two powerful teams. Van Buren’s hopes that national parties would produce sectional harmony had been dashed, but his vision of those parties animating and mobilizing masses of ordinary men as they went to the polls endured.
In the early 20th century, however, the major political parties suffered a heavy blow. Progressive reformers, with the support of big-business interests, introduced neutral ballots, private voting, direct election of senators, ballot initiatives, the professionalized civil service, and other core features of modern U.S. politics. These reforms, along with more high-profile crusades for immigration restriction, the banning of alcohol, and women’s suffrage, all had the intended effect of diminishing the power of political parties over electoral outcomes and limiting their control over public policy. The adjective partisan acquired ever more negative connotations, and parties became institutions from which the democratic process needed to be protected.
And yet the two-party system persisted. Despite additional realignments over the past century, nationwide competition between Republicans and Democrats still structures and constrains both elections and government policy to a degree that sets the United States apart from many other nations. Control of the presidency, Congress, and every state legislature in the country is determined by an electoral contest between the two major parties. Third parties and independent candidacies remain at least as marginal today as they were before the Progressive reforms.
Just as significant, the passions of partisan identification that first appeared in the decades before the Civil War are alive and well in our political culture. Modern parties may have been designed in large part around the abortive and discredited goal of avoiding a reckoning over slavery, and they flourished in an era when electoral politics was a male privilege and voting a display of masculinity, but almost two centuries and many constitutional amendments later, partisan competition continues to fulfill one of its other original purposes: It enables a mass electorate to feel emotionally connected to and invested in democratic government.
Ordinary American voters today proclaim their passionate investments from their virtual rooftops, and generally behave more like sports fans than like jurors: They boldly predict results, wager money, emblazon other people’s names on their chest and property, bask in the reflected glory of their candidates’ victories, and occasionally cut off reflected failure by disowning the losing side or blaming someone on the team for the loss. The sports fans they resemble are neither the hobbyists who follow athletic spectacles for entertainment’s sake or to acquire and display expertise, nor the hooligans who take the action on the field as license to enact other kinds of violent antagonism, but rather the partisan fans who root deeply for one team and imagine their support as somehow part of the competition.
This sense of belonging to a political team, a fundamentally abstract but variously embodied entity whose successes and failures reflect the efforts of individual voters and supporters, does lots of emotional work around elections. Some observers might see it as evidence of the trivialization of politics as spectator sport. Others might lament a distressing tribalization in American life. I’m more sympathetic. A democratic process with hundreds of millions of participants is daunting and potentially disempowering. Recognizing our individual efforts in a mass election as part of a team project, as so many American voters have done in the past, is not purely spectatorial and is not purposelessly tribal. It is a reasonable means (perhaps even a necessary means) of motivating the forms of participation that mass elections, by definition, both require and discourage. We are all more likely to vote, donate, and otherwise contribute to the outcomes of elections when we feel like part of a team. Imagining ourselves tugging on the massive rope that extends across the country in November requires a bit of magical thinking, but that might be what our political system demands and rewards. And in the 21st century, with the differences between the two parties so stark and significant and the stakes of these partisan contests so grave, we desperately need that kind of thinking.