Three things drew me to this project. In my earlier work on freedom of association in the U.S., Membership and Morals, I attended to virtually every sort of voluntary association from religious groups to right-wing militias – except political parties. What I neglected is the most important voluntary association for representative democracy: only parties with their armies of “civilian” partisans can organize elections, mobilize participation, and create on-going connections between citizens and representatives. On the Side of the Angels is my mea culpa for ignoring them.In addition, over the last decade or so my students at Harvard have been increasingly vocal (and hubristic) in vaunting their status as political Independents. Declining partisan identification (a “no preference” response on a survey of political attitudes) is widespread throughout advanced democracies. But the proud self-designation “Independent” is unique to the U.S. I wanted to understand why.Finally, in my own academic subfield, democratic theorists write as if we should have democracy without parties and partisanship. They favor impartiality in politics as in ethics. Proponents of democratic deliberation, for example, favor specially created Deliberative Polls and Citizens’ Juries removed from conventional political arenas, with participants chosen to represent “lay citizens and nonpartisans.” This was my motivation. I set out to comprehensively trace the long history of antiparty arguments in political thought.I identify two “glorious traditions” of antipartyism. The first insists that political society should be a unified whole and that divisions are unwholesome. This tradition sees every partial group as divisive and no form of pluralism as benign. Because political parties exist for partiality and conflict, they are particularly anathema, disfiguring what should be a unified political community. This aversion is still with us; we recognize it in the preference for consensus, and in models of political deliberation and decision-making by impartial, public-spirited citizens, and in turns to nonpartisan (and non-democratic) commissions and boards of experts.A second antiparty tradition accepts pluralism and accommodates divisions in a system of representation (think of the early mixed constitution: Crown, Lords, and Commons) but still find parties anathema. On this view, parties turn acceptable divisions into warring factions or invent novel divisions in their pursuit of power. They are magnifiers or creators of cleavage and conflict, fatally divisive, and partisans are zealots and extremists.American antipartyism flows from both “glorious traditions,” and has its own source as well. The peculiar luster of political Independence in the U.S. owes to a civic ideal of self-reliance as a virtue and social condition. This ideal preceded organized parties, and was later replanted in the soil of electoral politics. From early on partisanship was cast as degraded citizenship, as abject dependence rooted in clientelism, capture, or blind loyalty. Independents characterized partisans as ignorant, inert, set in some “deadly groove” and under some affective thrall. “The ‘good people’ are herded into parties,” Henry Adams wrote, “and stupefied with convictions and a name, Republican or Democrat…”Today, the contrast is posed in cognitive as well as moralistic terms. Where partisans are “judgment-impaired,” crippled by perceptual bias, the Independent is a nimble “positive empiricist,” “cognitively mobilized.” These assertions do not stand up to empirical scrutiny, as I show. For over a century, the progressive ideal has been to circumvent parties and convert partisans into Independents.My defense of partisanship begins by undermining the claim that Independents are uniquely disinterested, or bravely Thoreauian – “doing what I think right” in every case (after all, she is reduced to choosing among courses set by others), or the claim that Independents are judicious umpires inclining victory to one side or another as they think the interests of the country demand.The chief deficit of political Independence in contrast to partisanship, however, is weightlessness. Partisanship is identification with others in a political association. “We partisans” organize and vote with allies, not alone. Independents are as detached from one another as they are from parties. If Silone is right that the crucial political judgment is “the choice of comrades,” Independents do not make it. They are not sending a coordinated message (even if analysts are in the business of interpreting what their votes meant).Independents do not assume responsibility for the institutions that organize public discussion, elections, and government and are not responsible to other like-minded citizens. Fundamentalist Independents reject party systems per se as too rigid to accommodate political judgment, and circumstantial Independents regret the current configuration of parties. But the avowal that she is not a partisan is what gives Independence its luster. Hence the apt term “closet partisans” with its implication of covertness rooted in shame, applied to Independents who end up voting regularly with one party.I’ll give the last word on this point to Edmund Burke, who said it first: “In a connexion, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the publick.” This discussion sets us up to perceive grounds for appreciation. Party competition is constitutive. It creates a system of conflict. It “stages the battle” that is democratic politics. Partisanship is the ordinary not (ordinarily) extraordinary locus of political creativity.Parties draw politically relevant lines of division, reject elements of the others’ account of projects and promises, and accept regulated rivalry as the form in which they are played out. Party antagonism focuses attention on problems, information and interpretations are brought out, stakes are delineated, points of conflict and commonality are located, the range of possibilities winnowed, and relative competence is up for judgment.Without party rivalry, “trial by discussion” cannot be meaningful. It will not be if interests and opinions are disorganized and are not brought into opposition, their consequences are not drawn out, argument is evaded. Nor can it be fruitful if the inclusion of interests and opinions is exhaustive and chaotic; parties are about selection and exclusion. Shaping conflict is what parties and partisans do, and what will not be done, certainly not regularly in the way representative democracy requires, without them.