How I Turned Anti-Partisan

A pre-memoir

There is an uncommon chutzpah, bordering on self-delusion, in trying to chronicle the birth of a movement that doesn’t exist.

There’s no movement. There’s a guy who’s trying to start one, but there’s no movement.

There is a website. It’s purple, representing the merging of red and blue. It’s symbolic. There’s an avatar with a purple map to reinforce the point, in case you missed it. And the launch post also features an image of a tattered flag being mended, in case the message is still too subtle.

There’s also a book, coming soon. And a podcast, coming very soon. So, I guess there could be a movement, eventually. There are grounds to grow it.

These projects are the product of six years or so of work, more than five of which were spent on the book. I started in 2018. But, the idea the book presents—anti-partisanism—was conceived in raw form eight years before, when it just sort of came to me….

Ok, that’s not the whole tale of the epiphany. It was a chilly afternoon in mid-November 2010, and, I had just gotten home from work and turned on a cable news channel. A hosted news program was on, and the host was reading viewer emails about the just-concluded midterm elections that saw the House of Representatives swing from Democratic to Republican control. This put the GOP in prime position to stymie the agenda of President Obama.

The host wrapped up the segment with an email from a man who observed that the power shift simply represented a role reversal: it was now Republicans’ turn to run the chamber, while it was Democrats’ turn to obstruct them, or “block progress,” as the commenter put it.

“What a system,” he finished. 

Eureka.

In that instant, I understood that the problem with political parties isn’t rooted in the way they conduct politics, no matter how hyper-partisan their words and actions are. Because parties are hyper-partisan by design.

That’s why the dysfunctional, cyclical rotation of power that the email writer called out happens. Parties behave exactly as they’re supposed to, whatever their place in the hierarchy of the moment. If they hold power, they steam full speed ahead with an uncompromising, partisan agenda, no matter who they run over in the process. If they’re out of power, they devote all their energies to derailing their opponents.

The problem wasn’t the way the parties were conducting their business. It was the fact that they existed at all.

In that moment, anti-partisanism was born. (My apologies if you were expecting a tale of how I uncovered some grand case of bipartisan malfeasance, or some other, more interesting origin story).

I suddenly flashed back to a definition of political parties that I had learned in one of my college political science classes. It consisted of a basic rundown of party roles and functions, none of which I could remember by that point, except the last one. The ultimate function of parties cited in the definition was explained in three words that were burned into my brain: “and to win.”

(The definition was essentially a fancier version of standard definitions for parties, like this one from the The Ace Electoral Knowledge Network: “an organized group of people with at least roughly similar political aims and opinions that seeks to influence public policy by getting its candidates elected to public office.”)

And to win. To win. That was the only part that really mattered, I realized.

Because parties need to win, their partisans will say or do whatever it takes to achieve that objective, no matter the cost to the nation. Macroscopic consequences mean nothing when macroscopic power is at stake.

But, my earliest conception of anti-partisanism was too narrow. I concentrated wholly on the competitive aspect of parties’ victory imperative, as if parties were only trying to win for the sake of winning, because it’s their reason for being.

That’s still a big part of it. There’s something primal in partisan conflict that turns the act of beating the other side into its own reward.

However, I was focusing exclusively on the electoral element of victory, as if the entire game could be reduced to a contest to control executive and legislative offices. But, that’s only one part of the competition.

Because parties don’t just get their candidates elected. They also try to pass policies that will shape society to their liking, policies that will make the other side strongly dislike the new shape of things.

And, so, I came to understand that parties weren’t just consumed with winning elections. They were consumed with winning policy wars. They were consumed with winning America. They were consumed with winning the future. They were consumed with winning the power to design life.

Because I believe in a partially deterministic universe, I believe that I was meant to see the aforementioned viewer comments clip and hear the text of that email. And that was meant to inspire me to create anti-partisanism, and that was meant to… (to be continued).

But, thousands of other people watched that segment. And, to my knowledge, there have been no reports of a random comment about partisan gridlock that was shared on a late-afternoon news show in late-2010 leading people to devise revolutionary, new political philosophies.

Most likely, it was just me. Everyone else just turned to Judge Judy or something when the show went to commercials.

What was it about me that caused the wording of a tame rant about party politics on an innocuous news program to spark a profound revelation about party politics? I have asked myself this question a lot.

An obvious answer is that I was already disaffected with politics. But, I was hardly alone in this sentiment. This was two years after the financial crash, when the unemployment rate was still close to double digits. Many people were feeling alienated.

And I wasn’t always so disenchanted with politics. I grew up believing it was a righteous cause, a mission, a holy war.

Yes, if you haven’t pegged me yet, I was raised deeply conservative in both the political and religious sense. So, I understood politics—Republican politics—to be the weapon that people from my faith used to defend our beliefs.

I’ve also asked myself how much this background influenced the development of anti-partisanism. Certainly, anti-partisanism’s call for absolute neutrality in mainstream societal institutions comes from a belief that those institutions are, for the most part, absolutely biased, and usually, toward the left. And that is an idea that is drilled into you early in the world that I come from.

Yet, I would diverge from most in that world who would have no problem if the bias in those institutions was inverted. If news outlets, schools and the worlds of entertainment and culture started to promote socially conservative views, they would see it as the triumph of traditional values. They would look at it this way because, like their counterparts on the other side, they seek to impose their ideals on society. Like their adversaries, they would gleefully embrace an America that only appeals to their side’s stakeholders.

Also, people in this world see these temporal fights within the context of an eternal, spiritual conflict. That conflict, however, has an earthly dimension, and waging political war against the human beings on the other side is embraced as part of the larger struggle.

Me, on the other hand—I’m just trying to bring people together by getting them to desert the political armies that keep them divided and in a perpetual state of conflict with each other. There isn’t much of a Christian analog for that. Maybe “blessed are the peacemakers.”

Here’s what I can tell you—again, I believe I was meant to invent anti-partisanism. For what purpose, I do not yet know. Maybe it’s not supposed to become well-publicized in my time. Maybe someone will stumble across something I wrote after I’m gone, and that person will be the one who breaks the idea through to public consciousness.

So, yes, my political and religious background partially influenced the creation of anti-partisanism. But, that’s hardly its only source of influence. I would pinpoint three modern, historical events as having cultivated the political disaffection from which it grew.

The Clinton Impeachment

I’ve cast one vote in my life, for George H.W. Bush in 1992. It was the first election I could vote in, and it was the thing to do at the Christian college I attended. Aside from my presidential choice, I think I just went straight-ticket Republican. Where I was, that was also the thing to do.

Like most of my fellow campus members, I was distressed for a bit after the ‘92 race. Republicans, who we had been socialized to see as our political arm, had held the Oval Office since Reagan’s election in 1980, my first political memory. Although we wouldn’t have acknowledged it at the time, we saw the White House as our entitlement.

Yet, by the ‘96 cycle, I was remarkably detached and apathetic. I was still nominally Republican, although I had metamorphosed a lot during my four years of school. But, maybe it was just a concession to reality—even the most committed GOPers knew Bob Dole had no chance.

But, it was during Clinton’s second-term impeachment that I first saw the real face of parties through unindoctrinated eyes. There was no clean dichotomy between who was right and who was wrong, as I had been conditioned to believe, no simple binary of good vs. evil.

In fact, there was no goodness to be found anywhere in the sordid episode, only the pure lust for power. Republicans were hellbent on getting Clinton—for anything they could, anything at all—and achieving through legislative procedure what they couldn’t do at the ballot box. Meanwhile, Democrats were willing to defend some things that seemed indefensible in their craven effort to cling to political control.

Many observers at the time thought that Clinton’s impeachment represented the zenith of American partisanship. And, taking place in the cable news and Internet age, it did seem that the scandals and investigations tapped into new levels of partisan fury and politicized life as never before. It was hardly the first scorched earth battle between American parties, but it was the first that happened in an era where outrage could be consumed on a 24-hour loop.

The 2000 Presidential Election

However, the event from that time period that most vividly exposed the naked partisan interest that drives parties—the moment I had my first nascent perception that party politics are about winning and nothing else—was the aftermath of the disputed 2000 presidential election been George W. Bush and Al Gore. Occupancy of the White House rested on a contested vote count in Florida, and both parties concocted narratives asserting that the other party was trying to steal the election.

And, if you include in the definition of theft the act of trying to seize something without regards to whether it rightfully belongs to you, then both parties were, in fact, trying to steal that election. The Bush campaign went to court to stop the recounts because Bush was ahead. The Gore campaign went to court to ask for recounts in counties where it believed it would benefit Gore. Neither had any interest in finding out who more Floridians actually voted for, only in arriving at a count that put their guy in front.

While it would still be a decade until I would conceive anti-partisanism, this was the moment when the above-referenced political disaffection, the seeds of which were sown during the Clinton Experience, fully took root. I had already lost my political religion. By 2000, I was forcefully identifying as an independent. The Bush-Gore debacle only reinforced my commitment to non-affiliation.

There’s no question that politics got nastier after 2000. Maybe it was just the evolution of the Internet in that era and the new spaces it opened for people to establish communities. But, that was the first era when I remember there being a discernible, mutual hatred between partisans online. This grass roots animus percolated through cyberspace before it inevitably filtered upward into local, state and national politics.

The Death of Trayvon Martin

However, the final event that informed the development of anti-partisanism wouldn’t happen for more than a decade, the 2012 shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. What some people took from the incident was that people of color are at high risk of racially inspired violence. For others, it was that a community security patrolman was able to defend himself against an assailant, thanks to the Second Amendment.

My takeaway, however, was distinct. What struck me most was the fact that, even though not one eyewitness had a clear view of the event, seemingly everyone on the planet was certain they knew precisely what occurred. Tens of millions of people immediately decided Zimmerman was guilty, based on no evidence. Tens of millions of others immediately decided he was innocent, also based on no evidence.

What I realized was that the reason these premature judgments were being made was because people on both sides wanted their judgments to be true. Democrats and the left wanted Zimmerman to be guilty because that outcome would reinforce their preexisting beliefs and preexisting narratives. Republicans and the right wanted him to be innocent for the same reason, for the sake of their own side’s narratives and beliefs.

The politicization of criminal justice in the Martin case crystallized my comprehension that the partisan theater of war encompasses more than elections and policymaking. Ultimately, partisans are battling over our national narrative. They are fighting over how the terms of life will be defined.

That was the point at which I knew I had to write The Anti-Partisan Manifesto, the principles of which were beginning to congeal in my brain. Even though I wouldn’t actually start working on it for another six years, that was the moment at which I knew I had to put it out there at some point. If there was that a chance that it could help prevent partisans from being the sole authors of history, I had to try.

And that brings me back to my belief in partial, theistic determinism. I honestly believe that the idea of anti-partisanism was imparted to me. It’s my calling to share it. Whatever happens, I will have fulfilled my mission. And whatever happens after that is… (to be continued).

* Portions of this post have been adapted from my upcoming book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down (2024).

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