I warned against this. Not vaguely, not as a polite formality at the close of my public life, but with specific dread. In my Farewell Address I called faction "the worst enemy" of popular government, because a party — once it hardens into a permanent institution — stops asking what serves the Republic and starts asking what defeats the other party. That inversion is fatal to self-government. What I see described of the present age is precisely that inversion, carried to an industrial scale.

The parties of today are not mere coalitions that form around a pressing question and dissolve once it is settled. They are permanent enterprises with revenue models, media arms, and professional staffs whose livelihoods depend on the quarrel never ending. A citizen who finds herself disagreeing with her own party on a single issue does not correct the party; she is corrected, or expelled. That is not deliberation — that is a loyalty oath. Free government cannot survive the replacement of persuasion with compliance.

I am equally suspicious of the claim that one party is the party of virtue and the other the party of corruption. Every faction, once it tastes power, is tempted to confuse its own continuation with the nation's welfare. The danger is not that the wrong faction will win; the danger is that the logic of faction itself — permanent, self-reinforcing, contemptuous of opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens — corrodes the institutions that protect everyone regardless of who holds office. A republic governed by people who believe their rivals are traitors cannot long remain a republic.

The practical remedy I would counsel is not the abolition of organized politics, which is neither possible nor desirable. People of like mind will always combine; that is their right. The remedy is institutional: rules that force deliberation across factional lines, norms that punish the subordination of the public interest to the party interest, and above all citizens willing to hold their own side to the same standard they apply to their opponents. That last requirement is the hardest, because it demands exactly the self-discipline that faction is designed to erode.

The question every citizen should put to herself is simple: do I support this position because it is right, or because my party holds it? If the honest answer is the second, the Republic has already lost something it will not easily recover. The office, the law, and the compact among citizens are greater than any faction. They must be treated that way, or they will not survive to be worth defending.