Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States by Jeffrey S. Selinger (review)

Jeffrey S. Selinger has written a timely book that describes the development of U.S. political parties from 1783 to the end of the First World War. He sketches out a history from a beginning point decidedly hostile to the existence of political parties to an endpoint where political leaders and scholars had made peace with them. Many of these scholars also had come to regret the unwieldy nature of an atavistic American constitutional design that made "responsible party" governance difficult, if not impossible.

In his first chapter, Selinger rehearses much of the argument he will advance in the rest of the work as he describes the risks avoided by nineteenth-century political elites as they sought to prevent violence and a break-up of the young nation while working "to normalize party politics" (24). He suggests that this was done by a political elite that "attempted (with varying degrees of success) to settle, subordinate, or avoid the most contentious questions of the day. … This they attempted to do using three broad strategies: institutional design, party coalition building, and repression" (22). Selinger achieves much that he sets out to do here while adding to our understanding more broadly of political party development in the early republic.

The second chapter draws needed attention to the volatile and contentious political landscape of the 1780s by focusing on the rise of populist agrarian groups that challenged state and national political elites. Insightfully, Selinger argues that the Constitution worked to prohibit "state legislatures from wielding the policy weapons most preferred by indebted agrarians" and taken "together, these provisions shifted the locus of fiscal and monetary policy to the center, placing these policy arenas out of reach of agrarian insurgents agitating in each of the American states" (42). This history of social unrest in the early republic is too often forgotten in the construction and dissemination of American founding myths.

In the next three chapters, Selinger turns to political elites. He wants to impress on his readers how much they feared the Union's dismemberment, especially in light of the manifest weakness of the central government. Political leaders sought "to sidestep divisive questions of the day" as they "resorted to a pattern of political evasion to keep polarizing party conflict from escalating into a secessionist crisis or civil war" (56). The central partisan issues between 1793 and 1815, he reminds us, were inspired by opposing views of international affairs, especially the merits of the British monarchy and French republicanism. Those during the antebellum second party system were primarily over national tariffs, internal improvements, and the extension of slavery into the territories. Selinger holds that under both party systems the critical variable in making the elites' avoidance strategy successful was their insistence on building national cross-sectional party coalitions.

The final chapter and epilogue examine the party systems that emerged during and after Reconstruction. These national parties, he explains, came to view opponents as legitimate while viewing politics as a spoils system in which two national parties took turns feeding from the Federal trough. He finds that when Progressives and political scientists looked backward, they saw much of what Selinger had argued in his earlier chapters, that is, political parties had done much "to assuage deep political differences to bind a diverse nation together" (149). Looking forward, Progressives sought to alter the adversarial political system inspired by the English Glorious Revolution to become more like a modern parliamentary system with "responsible party" democratic accountability.

Selinger's most important contention is that early national political elites had consistently and purposefully structured U.S. political parties and national politics to avoid confronting the most divisive issues of the day—most particularly, slavery. It is hard, though, to accept this fully when he needed to exclude many of the most important of the early presidents—including Madison and Jefferson (56), sometimes Adams (65), Monroe (86), and...