This morning someone asked me whether America’s Founders were truly opposed to political parties. It is a familiar question, and for good reason: the early republic was full of warnings about “factions,” the term they used before “party” became standard political vocabulary.
George Washington’s Farewell Address is the most famous
example. As he prepared to leave office, he cautioned that factions would
inflame jealousies, divide the nation into rival camps, and invite foreign
powers to manipulate American politics. Washington’s concern was civic and
national: parties, he believed, threatened the fragile unity of the new
republic.
Thomas Jefferson is often quoted—and often misquoted—on the
subject. A popular paraphrase has him saying, “If there are political parties
in heaven, I’d rather not go there.” Jefferson did not write that exact line,
but he did write something close. In a 1789 letter to Francis Hopkinson, a signer
of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote:
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Jefferson’s point was philosophical and personal. He
believed that republican virtue required independent judgment, and that parties
demanded a kind of moral surrender. To join a party was, in his view, to hand
over one’s conscience.
James Madison, ever the architect, approached the problem
differently. He agreed that factions were dangerous—especially when a majority
could use them to oppress a minority. But unlike Washington or Jefferson,
Madison believed that given human nature factions were inevitable and that they
could not be eliminated without unjustly limiting freedom. As he wrote in the Federalist
Papers, the task therefore was not to eliminate factions but to “break and
control the violence” they could unleash. His answer was structural: a large
republic, separation of powers, and institutional designs that force competing
interests to check one another.
So, while Jefferson, Washington, and Madison all distrusted parties, they distrusted them for different reasons: Jefferson feared the corruption of personal judgment, Washington feared the loss of national unity, and Madison feared the tyranny of an unchecked majority. And yet, despite their warnings, parties emerged almost immediately. Jefferson, Washington, and Madison warned us—and we still walked right into the trap.
