Those splits helped to make Richard M. Nixon president—a figure of partisanship above principle. After a moment of posing as an American Disraeli, Nixon set about trying to get not just his party but the government to stand behind what he called the “New American Majority” or the “Silent Majority,” exploiting racial turmoil and resentments, consolidating the Dixiecrat constituency of George C. Wallace, and concentrating power in the executive as never before with a strident political agenda. Now the leader of the Republican Party, he attempted to remake the party in his own image and under his iron control. Watergate—the pursuit of Nixonian partisanship by any means necessary—destroyed Nixon, and with him his meta-partisan plan; it also blew a hole in the center of the Republican Party, which finally allowed the party’s Goldwater wing to recapture control of the GOP once and for all, under the aegis of Ronald Reagan.

In response to Nixon’s crimes, the Democrats selected for the presidency a details-oriented engineer in the Southern anti-party Progressive tradition. Jimmy Carter promoted himself as a moral man who would never lie, would end politics as usual, and would rely on brains, virtue, and talent: “Why Not the Best?” He was, in a way, the Democrats’ version of the Progressive ideal, their own Hoover, although the similarities never crossed their minds.

Carter’s failures paved the way for Reagan’s admixture of a conventionally partisan, ideologically extreme, and peculiarly pragmatic administration that unevenly advanced the new conservatives’ quest to push the sum and substance of government far to the right. Democrats countered by flailing about for a decade, first attempting to revive the spirit of New Deal liberalism with Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, carrying the burden of the distant and recently rejected past, then returning to neo-Progressive expertise with Michael Dukakis, who in his most famous statement declared: “This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.” Eventually the Democrats found success with Bill Clinton, a new sort of partisan Democrat who tried to rebuild the party and relieve it of its accumulated political handicaps, from isolationism in foreign policy to knee-jerk defensive reactions to any criticisms of what had become the nation’s welfare state.

Since 1980, there have been three third-party campaigns in the anti-party tradition: the moderate Republican John B. Anderson’s run in 1980, perceived as a high-minded moderate option for Republicans alienated by Reagan conservatism and liberals offended by what they saw as Carter’s creeping conservatism; the eccentric entrepreneur Ross Perot’s self-funded campaign in 1992, pitched as the chance to substitute a hard-headed, commonsensical private citizen in place of the corrupt professional politicians; and the modern muckraker Ralph Nader’s left-wing anti-corporate Green Party campaign in 2000, dedicated to the proposition that there was not a dime’s bit of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, between Al Gore and George W. Bush. All those candidacies supposedly heralded yet another fresh start for American politics after the events of the late 1960s and 1970s had loosened voters’ attachments to the major parties: an era—the term was now gaining currency—of post-partisanship. In all three cases, anti-party candidacies did nothing to prevent the election of partisan administrations, including the radically partisan White House of the younger Bush. Indeed, Nader’s run ensured Bush’s presidency.

VI.

The Bush presidency brought its own post-partisan ironies, although in retrospect they were superficial. Bush ran in 2000 on the theme of “compassionate conservatism” and promised to be “a uniter, not a divider”—building on his father’s pledge of “a kinder, gentler” America while trying to blame the acidic partisanship of the Gingrich-DeLay Republicans on both political parties. He said that he would change the tone in Washington. It was a transparent campaign tactic, although the Democrats did a poor job of saying as much. From the start, Bush’s administration was marked by efforts to use events, not least the terrorist attacks of September 11, for forging what Bush’s political “architect” Karl Rove believed would be a permanent Republican Party majority, the fulfillment of Nixon’s partisan dream.

It should have come as no surprise that after eight years of George Bush (much as after almost six years of Nixon), American voters would be receptive to anti-partisan or post-partisan appeals, from a Democrat untouched by recent conflicts, who said he wanted to put aside divisive rhetoric and divided government, a Democrat even willing to say admiring things about Ronald Reagan as a “transformative” president. Commentators naturally focused on the post-racial aspects of Barack Obama’s successful candidacy, and how, as the candidate himself put it, he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” Yet Obama has broken the mold in another crucial way: he is one of the only presidents in modern times—Jimmy Carter being the other outstanding example—who explicitly and sincerely ran for office promising not simply to unite the country but to transcend partisanship, substituting a spirit of thoughtfulness, expertise, and integrity above party and politics.

As it happens, though, the post-partisanship trumpeted in 2008 and 2009 was an updated variation of a very old theme in our politics—a theme, with the endless fascination of our political history, that connects George Washington to E.L. Godkin, John Adams’s Federalists to Grover Cleveland’s Mugwumps, James Monroe to John Quincy Adams, and Adams to his grandson Henry Adams—and strangely enough, the first African American president to the Confederate fire-eaters. What all those earlier leaders, parties, and factions shared—in marked contrast to Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt (before and after 1912), Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton—was an antipathy to partisanship. It was an antipathy that failed to prevent the rise of parties or to dislodge them from their central place in American political life.

More important, that antipathy invariably ensured ultimate political defeat and even catastrophe, no matter whether the cause being advanced came from the right or the left. The anti-party current is by definition anti-democratic, as political parties have been the only reliable vehicles for advancing the ideas and interests of ordinary voters. Today’s Tea Party activists, for all their proclaimed alienation from both major parties, understand this: they are not whining about the evils of partisanship, they are working it, and using the party system to advance their hard-right agenda as a wing of the Republican Party.

Whenever political leaders have presumed that their expertise and their background make them special repositories of wisdom above the wheeling and dealing and “spoilsmanship” of democratic politics, the result has been a fatal disconnection between themselves and the citizenry. And not just the citizenry—for without the trust and continuing cooperation born of strong party loyalties, it has been impossible for presidents to work closely with Congress to enact legislation, or to construct an effective executive branch.

President Kennedy is sometimes cited as an anti-partisan who held party hacks in disdain—or so a few liberal writers and historians such as James MacGregor Burns have persuaded themselves. But Kennedy relished being his party’s chieftain, and astutely understood the imperatives of party and party leadership, which he explained as well as anyone has. “No president, it seems to me, can escape politics,” Kennedy observed in 1960, as he began his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. “He has not only been chosen by the nation—he has been chosen by his party. And if he insists that he is ‘president of all the people’ and should, therefore, offend none of them—if he blurs the issues and differences between the parties—if he neglects the party machinery and avoids his party’s leadership—then he has not only weakened the political party as an instrument of the democratic process—he has dealt a blow to the democratic process itself.” Kennedy went on to say that he preferred the example of Abraham Lincoln, “who loved politics with the passion of a born practitioner.”

What distinguishes Obama, like Carter, is that he has operated in an era in which, paradoxically, party ties among the voters have supposedly weakened but the parties themselves have become bitterly ideological. Carter became president in an earlier part of this cycle, which has become more intensely polarized under Obama than ever before. But as contentious as the current tone and substance of our politics has become, the oasis of post-partisanship, by whatever name you choose to call it, is as much a mirage today as it has ever been. The mirage persists in some high-minded circles, where it remains fashionable, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, to revile “the ‘coarseness’ of professional politicians.” (How ironic it is to hear Mark McKinnon and Thomas Friedman, the consultant and the columnist, issue a summons to a new Mugwumpery in response to the Mugwumpery of the Obama administration.) But the beautiful dreamers of this generation, who yearn for an American politics without partisanship, will prove no more successful than those of all the generations that have gone before. And if they persist, they will do far more to damage their political hopes than to secure them.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday). This article ran in the November 17, 2011, issue of the magazine.