Today’s hyper-partisan tribalism was our first president’s worst nightmare

Washington’s partisan dysfunction is accelerating rapidly, putting the nation’s democratic institutions and norms under tremendous strain and endangering America’s global leadership. 

Just in the past few weeks, the U.S. Senate killed a bipartisan deal to address a crisis at the southern border and render aid to embattled allies overseas to maintain an election issue for the presidential race. A separate, stand-alone Senate foreign aid bill passed but was essentially declared dead on arrival by House leaders.  

This month, the Supreme Court took on not one, but two cases tied to the former president and likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and block the peaceful transfer of power. Although bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress voted to affirm that Trump engaged in insurrection during his second impeachment, our democratic institutions seem paralyzed to do anything about it. 

By the slimmest of partisan margins (214-213), and with scant evidence of “high crimes or misdemeanors,” the U.S. House did vote to impeach a Cabinet secretary, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, for the first time in 150 years.

All in a single week.  

This presidential election year already shows signs of pushing our democracy to the brink, and it is raising existential questions about the nature of our politics and governance.

How is it that a president who has shown contempt for the Constitution and the governing institutions that breathe life into its strictures remains a frontrunner to win another term? 

What is the origin of cynicism so deep that it becomes acceptable to many of our fellow citizens that a president attempted to overturn a legitimate election outcome with threats and violence? 

Are we so steeped in tribal hatred and mistrust, and so disillusioned with our governing institutions, that we are willing to reward authoritarian leadership that threatens the checks and balances our founders crafted to keep our experiment in democracy alive and durable? 

Our greatest leaders foresaw the dangers that now gather all around. Indeed, in his farewell address, Founding Father George Washington presciently warned that partisan tribalism could be the nation’s undoing. 

Washington cautioned “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally,” calling it “inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.” 

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge … is itself a frightful despotism,” he continued.  

Washington well understood that the tendency toward political tribalism was in our nature and that great care had to be taken to prevent democracy from being consumed by its destructive forces. He foresaw that extreme partisanship and division could paralyze our government and render it dysfunctional, intensifying a downward spiral of public cynicism and disgust that ultimately undermines the system of republican democracy our founders worked so hard to design. 

“This leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism,” Washington said, noting that “the disorders and miseries which result” could “incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.” 

He said: “Sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purpose of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Each week in Washington, D.C., provides more evidence that we are in a race against time to forestall that decline into irreversible tribalism, a trend that extends beyond any particular political figure. Progress has been made, however, in reforming the election system that has fueled such cynicism and dysfunction by rewarding hyper-partisanship. 

Several states have begun implementing new election systems that deemphasize or eliminate partisan primaries which allow the most extreme factions in our politics to have outsized influence over election outcomes. Other states have changed the general election rules to require successful candidates to earn support from a majority of voters, rather than relying on a simple, ideologically zealous plurality. Still, others have focused on anti-gerrymandering reforms to create nonpartisan voting districts that do not unfairly favor one party over the other.  

Yet those invested in the status quo or enabled by partisan dysfunction and voter cynicism continue to place barriers in the path of reform. They are betting that if the reform process can be slowed, they can maintain their personal or partisan advantages. Sadly, that also means it will not bring benefits fast enough to win back public faith and put our democracy on a more sustainable path in the near term. 

In the interim, we must refuse to yield to the dark forces of human nature that our first president George Washington warned us about, even if that requires putting aside short-term tribal interests. We must rededicate ourselves as citizens to the hard work of reforming and strengthening our political system, and thus keep faith with the venerable tradition of preserving and passing along the world’s oldest democracy to the next generation of Americans. 

Glenn Nye III is a former member of Congress and president and CEO of the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress.