How Patronage Ruined the Democratic Party
This article was an outstanding statement of the facts as I see them.
Unfortunately, the public faces of both parties often mask some decidedly anti-republican tendencies. Governed only by the ambitions of politicians and a slender set of rules, parties are not constrained to act only on behalf of all the people, and they regularly do not. While the rhetoric of both sides may speak to the public good, behind the scenes Democrats and Republicans are often eager to make deals with various factions within society—if that is what it takes to win.
We have called this practice clientelism—the exchange of votes for governmental favors between a faction and a party. The great oversight of our Constitution was the framers’ failure to anticipate the inevitability of political parties, and thus to provide for better mechanisms to control their behavior. For if a political party is behaving in an anti-republican manner, and it controls the government, then the government—even with all of its checks and balances—will likewise behave in an anti-republican manner.
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