Origin of the Species

Passions approached the fail-safe point. Then, for reasons not entirely clear, Hamilton decided that his intramural disputes with Adams outweighed his grand philosophical disputes with Jefferson. He turned on his fellow Federalist. The Hamiltonian party fractured, never to rise again. Jefferson's party prevailed in the 1800 free-for-all and would hold the White House for the next 40 years.

WHICH, COME TO THINK ABOUT IT, is something very good that we can say about our parties: They tend to fall apart.

From the very beginning, whenever one party has gotten strong enough to start passing horrible laws such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, it has crumbled soon thereafter. Empowered, the parties overreach. Or members let some element of the party push its dogmas to the extreme, thus driving away moderate supporters. Or they calcify and then find themselves unable to deal with emerging problems. Something happens, and the pendulum swings. This happened to the Federalists. Years later, outrage at the tyrannical airs of the populist strongman Andrew Jackson split Jefferson's party into two camps -- the Jackson Democrats vs. the Whigs of Henry Clay -- and left it unable to cope with the issue of slavery. Then the Republicans had a heyday after winning the Civil War, but they, too, soon got to infighting. More recently, the Democrats deflated like a leaking dirigible after Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In other words, there is something about our parties, some power-sensitive self-destruct button lodged deep in the machinery, that keeps them from getting too big. On the surface, that might not seem like much. It is so much a part of American history that we take it for granted. But think about it -- what did the 20th century teach us about parties that grow too strong? The fact that our parties, at their most powerful, just . . . fall apart . . . would have seemed like a priceless blessing to the Jews of Nazi Germany or to the gulag prisoners of the Soviet Union.

WHY, THEN, DON'T WE HAVE LOTS OF LITTLE PARTIES? When our two major parties engage in their periodic undoing, why don't they disperse their constituencies like dandelion seeds? Why aren't we more like Italy: Picture an America in which the Green Party is robust, and the Workers Party is muscular, where the Right to Life Party has seats in Congress alongside the Hollywood Liberal Party, the Gun-Toting Celebrity Party and the Portly Demagogue Party (where the aforementioned Limbaugh and Moore would finally make peace over a nice hot fudge sundae).

If I were a political scientist, I would explain this by delivering a dense and learned explanation of Rational Choice Theory and the Nash Equilibrium, complete with multi-variable mathematical equations. I would show how the electoral college and the institution of the Senate combine to reinforce the two-party system at the expense of proportional representation, etc., blah, blah and blah.

But since I don't really understand that stuff, I prefer to say: Because we are Americans. Charles de Gaulle once asked why anyone could think France would unite behind a single party when the country has 200 varieties of cheese. In the United States, things are simpler. We've given the world just two varieties of cheese: the kind with individually wrapped slices and the kind where the slices stick together. We're binary people: Coke vs. Pepsi, boxers vs. briefs, Ruben Studdard vs. Clay Aiken.

This either/or outlook has significantly shaped our politics. The most obvious example is North vs. South. We fought our bloodiest war over this one, and it is still with us, in important ways. But there are others: big government vs. small government, high taxes vs. low taxes, city vs. country, big business vs. populist. And one I call "prim vs. frisky," which for most of American history was an argument over banning alcohol, but in recent decades has moved mainly into disputes over sex.

There's even a recurring pro-French vs. anti-French argument, which often plays out as internationalist vs. isolationist. The Hamiltonians loved to insinuate that Jefferson was a French dupe. More than two centuries later, the Republican National Committee is circulating news releases noting that John Kerry has French relatives, and House Republican leader Tom DeLay sometimes starts his speeches by saying, "Good afternoon -- or, as John Kerry might say, Bonjour."

The two-party system has turned out to be a highly flexible tool for working these two-sided disputes. The parties try to build winning coalitions and agendas by taking sides in these various perennial debates -- creating Roosevelt's "jungle of incongruous elements" -- much as the captains of two playground kickball teams choose classmates one by one. The Federalists, for example, chose North, big government, high taxes, city, big business, prim and anti-French. Whereas the Jeffersonians lined up South, small, low, country, populist, frisky and pro.

And the game got started.

But here's where it gets tricky. Most people, and most factions, who support a party don't buy into every single element of the party line. Given the chance, they would probably choose some from Column A and some from Column B. But they prefer a particular party at a particular time because, for them, a particular agenda item matters more than all the others. As circumstances change, other items on the agenda rise in importance. Arguments that were submerged suddenly surface. What was minor becomes major -- and suddenly instead of party unity you get party disintegration. Here, in cartoonishly oversimplified form, is how it has worked.

AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE FEDERALISTS, the Jeffersonians seemed to have everything going for them. True, they didn't know what to call themselves. First they were the Republicans, then they were the Democratic-Republicans, and finally, with the fiery populist triumph of Jackson, they settled on plain, old Democrats.

Initially, the party's coalition produced success upon success. Jefferson's pro-French internationalism ensured that relations were sufficiently friendly that cash-strapped Napoleon turned to us when he wanted to sell the Louisiana Territory for a song. And a weak central government was in sync with the ravenous and anarchic settling of the West -- at least from the Caucasian perspective. A newborn nation loosely stitched together along the Atlantic Coast became, in half a century, a hemispheric power with plans to span the continent from sea to shining sea.