On the Abolition of All Political Parties
In 1943, the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil was living in London. She was close to death – she had contracted tuberculosis, and her condition was made even worse because she insisted that she would eat only what her French colleagues were allowed to eat in their occupied country. She died in hospital that year when her heart failed, but the coroner’s report was stark: She “slayed” herself by refusing to eat.
As Weil was dying, she wrote a brief book called, in translation, On the Abolition of All Political Parties. This has been on my mind recently as the Republican Party in the United States daily faces the question whether they will support Trump’s MAGA policies when they are in clear conflict with established law and even with the Constitution. (I hasten to add here that I understand that some of the theorists who developed these policies are fully aware that they violate established law, but hope that the judicial process will eventually bring them to the Supreme Court, which they hope will change established law.)
Consider Weil’s list of the three essential characteristics of political parties:
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“A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.”
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“A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.”
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“The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.”
In short, she goes on, a political party is focused on realizing its own power. When members are forced to choose between the needs and interests of the country, on one hand, and those of the party, on the other, the costs of a choice for the country are much higher than the benefits of a choice for the party. So, she concludes, the party becomes its own end.
I’m still considering the question whether she’s right as a general rule, but I’m absolutely convinced that current powerful figures in the contemporary Republican Party are explicitly focused on maintaining their control of the nation, even at the expense of the interests of the nation. Perhaps she’s right to see this as a characteristic of political parties in general, but we can point to a time in the United States when members of the Republican Party set aside party interests in defense of the Constitution. Compare the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, after refusing President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, to the acquiescence of current officials to Trump’s illegal firing of multiple independent inspectors general.
These firings and other executive actions will surely end up before the Supreme Court. But getting there will take time, and we will be living with the turmoil before then. And we can’t be confident that the resolution offered by the current Supreme Court will leave us with anything like the balance of power that we’ve had, imperfect as it is, in the country before these actions. To paraphrase Franklin, we have “a republic, if we can keep it.” I’m not at all confident that we can.