Paul Starr reviews On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship:

At the root of the rise of partisanship is a change in what parties and party attachments in America signify. The standard observation used to be that the United States, unlike Europe, had no mass ideological parties. Both the Democrats and the Republicans were alliances of convenience that included both liberals and conservatives, and the more ideologically defined third parties, such as the Socialists, were too small to be of consequence. Activists tended to form protest groups to influence the major parties from the outside, while the parties themselves often seemed intellectually vapid at best, unprincipled and corrupt at worst. Learning whether someone was a Republican or Democrat did not necessarily tell you much about that person's beliefs. If you took political ideas seriously, it was hard to take party spirit seriously.

That is no longer so.

From the archive, Stanley Fish:

The assumption is that if we were all independent voters, the political process would be in much better shape.

This seems to me to be a dubious proposition, especially if the word “political” in the phrase “political process” is taken seriously.

From Super Tuesday, a dose of Hofstadter:

While most of the Fathers did assume that partisan oppositions would form from time to time, they did not expect that valuable permanent structures would arise from them ...

The Fathers hoped to create not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties.

... Although Federalists and Anti-Federalists differed over many things, they do not seem to have differed over the proposition that an effective constitution is one that successfully counteracts the work of parties.