Our democracy needs intraparty conflict
One can look to the past four years and see a cautionary tale of what an unwillingness to criticize a leader looks like within a party.
Last February, when Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that no criminal charges were warranted against then-President Joe Biden for withholding classified materials, he based this recommendation in part on his assessment that the jury would not convict Biden because, as he described in his report, he was an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur, a Republican, was lambasted by Democrats far and wide who attributed these comments to his desire to create, what now-Sen. Adam Schiff of California called in a congressional hearing “a political firestorm.”
It wasn’t until Biden’s disastrous debate performance just a few months after those hearings, a performance that reinforced the veracity of Hur’s comments, that any substantial cohort of Democrats began to slowly acknowledge publicly Biden was not fit to run for a second term.
I think part of this unwillingness to communicate honestly about Biden’s fitness for the presidency was the belief that the stakes in the election were so high that Biden’s public supporters had to say and do anything to support their candidate. “Democracy is at stake” was the phrase used by Democrats again and again.
Democrats got it wrong by failing to criticize their candidate, but I think they might have been right to be worried about democracy. I’d argue that the ability to engage critically within our parties might be a significant indicator of how healthy our democracy is — and, by many measures, we’re looking rather sickly.
It’s obvious that it’s not just Democrats who are unwilling to criticize their candidate.
President Donald Trump has described his followers as so loyal that, to use his words, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
But unconditional love belongs in the realm of theology, not government. To remove a person from the realm of criticism puts him in the realm of the divine. Loyalty to a leader, unmoored from character, principles, policies or outcomes, is dangerous and undemocratic.
You can be deeply committed to the policies of your party and critical of some of the actions of its leader.
If your surgeon tells you that you are sick and your appendix needs to come out, you certainly care deeply that it happens, but you also care how it happens (put the rusty hacksaw away!). You might be glad that it’s not the other guy (or the other guy’s policies) carrying the day, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t highlight:
- When your candidate issues executive orders that patently violate the Constitution (yes, even if the other party has issued unlawful executive orders);
- When your candidate nominates someone for attorney general whom you wouldn’t let volunteer in your church youth group (yes, even if the other party had cabinet officers who made comments or supported policies you find deplorable); or
- When your candidate pardons people who harmed police officers (yes, even if the other party pardoned dangerous criminals in the last days of their administration).
Georgians have seen up close what intraparty conflict looks like. It is undoubtedly messy.
Though few could honestly question Gov. Brian Kemp’s conservative policy credentials, the state’s highest elected official had a public conflict with Trump in his first term when Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Contrary to Trump’s demands, Kemp certified the state election results.
Though this conflict happened as Trump was leaving office, Kemp’s actions were not without cost.
Trump frequently tweeted insults about Kemp, even berating him in a 2024 Georgia presidential campaign rally with baseless criticisms I won’t repeat. Kemp has only grown in popularity, with his approval ratings well over the margins of his 2022 election win.
I don’t attribute this approval solely to that 2020 action, but I do think that Kemp’s approval is likely linked to a type of principled leadership that is willing to have conflict for the right reasons.
The thing about conflict is that you almost always have it with your enemies, but in the healthiest of relationships, you also have it with those closest to you. This is what the Bible describes as “wounds from a friend.”
Plenty of barbs come from across the aisle, but we need more of the healthy intraparty criticism and conflict that allows the refining work of friction to reinvigorate our parties. We need a thoughtful and honest engagement that refuses to be drowned out by the screeching social media fringes.
Only with this friction — the ability to debate ideas, approaches and priorities without being held hostage by a blind deference to a party leader — can we ensure that we remain, as John Adams so succinctly described at our country’s founding, “a government of laws, and not of men.”
About the Author
Hannah Heck, a lawyer, founded a public policy, advocacy and consulting practice. She lives in Atlanta and spends most of her time in board service, supporting her four children and writing about life raising a son with Down syndrome.
