The amazingly weak American political parties
More than the parliamentary system, more than the office of the prime minister, what truly differentiates the Canadian political system from the US model is our country’s vastly different method of structuring political parties.
The biggest news to come out of Canada this week was Jack Layton’s emotional revelation that he has been diagnosed with prostate Cancer. Aside from being a personal tragedy, this was an announcement with potentially serious political consequences. Layton is, after all, the leader of Canada’s fourth-largest political party, a position he has held uncontested for the last seven years. Any successes or failures the New Democratic Party has achieved during that period — and there have been plenty of both — are largely the result of Layton’s leadership, and his health-related resignation, if it were to occur, would undoubtedly instigate an intense period of concerned speculation regarding the future of his party.
These sorts of dramatic leadership resignations and subsequent partisan soul-searchings are an event of fairly routine occurrence in Canadian political theater, yet they’re also an act of drama almost entirely lacking a comparable American equivalent. The first great principle of Canadian political parties — that they be incredibly structured, formal, hierarchical organizations — simply does not exist in the United States, and is in fact actively resisted whenever proposed. It’s a divergence Canadians often have a hard time fully comprehending. Our natural, parochial tendency is to assume all political parties the world over are more or less structured like ours, which is to say they have fee-paying members, a single leader, and a firmly enforced partisan philosophy. But reality tells a different story, and we do ourselves a tremendous disservice in believing otherwise.
To be a “Republican” or a “Democrat” in the United States entails little more than declaring yourself to be one. A citizen simply self-identifies as one or the other (or none of the above) when he fills in his voter registration card. It’s an incredibly unglamorous gesture on par with stating your date of birth, yet it qualifies you to vote in primaries, attend conventions, exploit party resources, and all the other perks and benefits associated with your label of choice — and all largely free of charge. Indeed, it’s this ease of “joining” a party in US that directly justifies the free-wheeling American primary process, a public system of choosing party candidates that often leaves Canadians scratching their heads, so vastly different is it from our nation’s boring, closed-door “nomination meetings” of party insiders. When Paul Martin was appointed Prime Minister of Canada in 2003, the National Post cynically observed that the some 133,000 card-carrying Liberals who made the decision contrasted rather unfavorably with the over 3 million who had picked the winner to the previous night’s Canadian Idol. Likewise, while I can almost guarantee that you do not know a single person who helped install Martin as leader, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American Democrat who did not cast a vote in the Hillary-Obama matchup (or at least possess several friends who did).
Even then, the analogy is still not perfect. Barack Obama is not to Paul Martin as Jack Layton is to Stephen Harper. Despite being president, Obama holds no titular office in the organized wing of the federal Democratic Party (as much as such a wing even exists). It’s Tim Kaine, a former one-term governor of Virginia, who holds the purposely convoluted title of “Chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” a position previously held by such household name heavyweights as Roy Romer and Joe Andrew. What exactly these people do, aside from write the occasional mass email or host the odd fundraising dinner, is hardly clear to even the most civic-minded American, but suspending disobedient caucus members, whipping votes in the legislature, decreeing platform positions, and all the other mundanely authoritarian responsibilities one associates with a Canadian party leader are certainly not among them. Indeed, when compared to the cavalcade of vainglorious ambition that characterizes the typical Canadian leadership race, it’s remarkable to consider that George H.W. Bush’s brief 1973-1974 tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee is widely considered to be one of the lowest points of his political career.
Lacking a hierarchical structure, a strong distaste for bureaucratically-imposed discipline within the American political parties has become one of their most defining traits. The purpose of American party committees, both federally and locally, is largely the unremarkable business of redistributing funds. Money is raised through various channels, then, when the voters decide the two nominees, be it for president, governor, or school board trustee, the committees open their spigots. Even though there has been much controversy within some Republican circles as of late regarding whether this or that politician is “conservative enough” to deserve the GOP label, the leadership of the Republican National Committee voted unanimously last week to strike down a proposed “purity test” that would have given themselves the ability to deny funding to candidates who held “incorrect” views on abortion, or whatever.
All together, the weak partisan structures of the United States ensue that one can be virtually any sort of Republican or Democrat one chooses, and skill eke out a reasonably successful political career. The style of Republicanism practiced by a Senator from Mississippi will be vastly different than one from Maine, yet neither will face any consequences for heresy. The challenges President Obama has recently faced in wrangling his own party to support his controversial healthcare bill is similar evidence of the limited powers that even the Leader of the Free World can exert over his own caucus.
Canadians sometimes speak pityingly of the United States and the fact that it “only has two parties,” provincially assuming, based on years of suffering under their own party bosses, what an oppressive tragedy this must be. But in practice, the American system proves largely the opposite of the standard Canadian conventional wisdom— that it’s not the number of parties that matter, but the amount of freedom afforded to those within them.
