Why did political parties form in the United States?

Question

In George Washington's "Farewell Address", the first President specifically warns about the dangers of political parties. He admits that people tend to naturally align in groups, but also warns that political parties and bias can weaken the government and the unity of the Republic (look where we are today in our national unity: not so great).

He warns that parties can lead to alternating domination over each other and to efforts to exact revenge upon one another, causing each side to commit atrocities against the other. He believed that ultimately political parties tend to push the people to seek security in an individual rather than the collective whole of the Republic (Candidate X being the "answer" rather than "the people as a whole"). This in turn can lead to despotism.

Even today, if you look around you can see each party trying to dominate over the other, and making major moves to keep that domination (gerrymandering district lines to keep power, calling for multiple recounts when they don't win in contested states/districts, skewing polls to discourage voters, using the free press as a propaganda tool, using external organizations (PACs) to out-raise each other financially as a legal loophole to campaign finance laws, need I go on).

So the question is: why wasn't a safeguard put into place to ensure parties could NOT exist in the federal government of the USA? To keep ALL government elected officials independent and only accountable to their local constituents for representation rather than their party?

Answer 1

A safeguard WAS put into place. We call it the Electoral College (although it is not named as such in the Constitution). It failed miserably at that goal.

The original vision when the Electoral College system was devised had three aims:

1. To prevent political parties from dominating politics.
2. To prevent a populist from getting elected to office.
3. To "handicap" larger states so smaller states could still have a voice.

To prevent political parties, the original text of the Constitution required each member of the Electoral College to cast two votes for President (one of which could not be for someone from that elector's home state (to prevent the "favorite son" problem). The top vote-getter would be the President, and the 2nd-place vote-getter would be the Vice President.

The idea here is that the President and Vice President would likely be from different parties, since nobody runs for 2nd place. Constitutionally, the Vice President is the head of the Senate, so the thinking was that the differing political ideologies between them would force them to work together to achieve some compromise or consensus to get things done. This plan went sour very, very quickly with the elections of 1796 and 1800 respectively.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were bitter political enemies. In 1796 with Adams as President, Jefferson leveraged his position as Vice President to attack Adams' policies, and the Adams administration turned out to be a very dysfunctional government.

The election of 1800 was even worse. Both parties attempted to gerrymander their electoral districts to sway the vote, and the shenanigans resulted in a tie. If nobody gets a majority in the Electoral College, the Constitution says that the House of Representatives then votes to appoint the President. Both parties tried to collude with other factions within the House with endless ties as the end result. It took 36 ballots to finally break the tie, with Jefferson and Adams swapping their President and Vice President seats.

Because the two back-to-back election cycles were such a colossal disaster, the 12th Amendment was passed, subtly but fundamentally changing how the Electoral voting system worked. Under the 12th Amendment, electors still cast two ballots, but they are marked specifically one for President and one for Vice President. This change basically abandoned the idea that the runner-up would be from the opposing party, and the President and Vice President have run together strategically on the same party ticket ever since.

The idea that we could have a truly bipartisan government is a great idea in theory, but history has shown us that it was completely unworkable in practice (at least, with the system they tried anyway).

In my personal opinion, politics always devolves into the worst form of tribalism no matter how great or small the stakes. In a naive, idealized form of democracy, elected representatives carry forward the values of their constituents in national policymaking. In reality, however, most elections are not about voting for your own values; they're about voting against the other guy's values, because those values will destroy the country. Political parties are the inevitable result of people banding together to prevent the other side from "winning", rather than a mechanism for carrying forward one's own ideals. This was as true in the 18th century as it is today.

This isn't just an American thing; you see this in every democratic country in the world. Politics being what it is, political parties -- no matter how much we might wish it weren't so -- are an inseparable property of a representative government.

Answer 2

The first two parties of the United States were the Federalists and their aptly named opposition, the Anti-Federalists. The former believed in a strong centralized federal government over the state governments and businesses and banks, with some wanting to increase friendly relations following the Revolutionary War. The Anti-Federalists obviously disagreed and believed that the Constitution was not restrictive enough (they were the reason for the Bill of Rights amendments) and favored limited central government and more power for the states and the people. They feared the Presidency might devolve into a Monarch, and were generally opposed to the business and banking interests.

The Federalist Party quickly lost favor and became the Whig Party, with moderates moving over to the Anti-Federalists which devolved into the the Democrat-Republican party, which further divided into the Modern Democratic party, and eventually the Modern Republicans (the core opposition to the Democratic Party were those that were opposed to slavery that was supported by the agriculture base of the early Democrats, in the form of several parties that were issue-specific. The Republicans generally picked up support over time as these various parties rose and fell apart). Interestingly enough, both modern Parties see Thomas Jefferson as their spiritual ancestor... the Democrats also add Andrew Jackson, who was a big proponent of opening more positions in government (notably judges) to voting and brought more suffrage to Americans... though that would be white male Americans without land that benefited.

While the arguments have changed over time, and issues are supported over different times by different parties, the evolution of parties in the United States was largely a result of the ongoing debate on where the limits of the central federal powers should be vs. the States and individuals and what does the Federal Government have a right to do vs. what does it have no right to do.

Answer 3

Because there's no real way to prevent a party from forming. Parties are independent organizations that seek to maximize their members' political power by voting as a bloc. They arise naturally and organically in any representative democratic organization, first as informal organizations and later as more formalized organizations. The only ways to reduce them is to have no democracy or full democracy (where eligible voter votes on everything).

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/origins-and-functions-political-parties/