Parties Suck Or Do They?

The conventional wisdom says that the country is ultra polarized and that people are deeply distrustful of both parties. Afterall, one only need to look at the polls to prove it. The President's approval rating currently stands at 34% while the Democratic controlled Congress has an approval that rivals that of Vice President Cheney, at 25%. People are hungry for change and talk of a third party has been in the air for the past year. I have no empirical evidence (only anecdotal) to back this up, but I've seen a lot of college aged students (18-24 mostly) lament the fact that there aren't more than 2 viable political parties in this country. The country is so diverse that to pick the Democrats or Republicans is so limiting.

While these are real criticisms, what is missing from the calculus is that even in countries that are multiparty parliamentary democracies, there are still 2 dominate parties. Look at Canada (Liberals and Conservatives), Britain (Labour and the Tories) France (Conservatives and Socialists), Germany (Christian Democrats and Social Democrats), Israel (Labour and Likud), and on and on.

One of the strengths of the American electoral system are the requisite coalitions that serve as the foundation of each party. Since there are only 2 parties, once a party establishes a winning coalition (based around various and often times disparate interests) that party ends up running the country for a generation or two.

Through the Post-Reconstruction to WWI era, the Progressives were generally Republicans, while the Populists were generally Democrats. After the GOP-Bull Moose rift of the 1912 election, the GOP became the Conservative party, while the Democrats embraced both the Populists and the Progressives.

Wilson’s betrayal of the Progressive Movement led to Conservative backlash of the 1920’s — the economic managerial incompetence of the Hoover Administration led to the Great Depression, and the election of Franklin Roosevelt.

The re-alignment of the 1932 lasted until 1968, but even when FDR carried all but two states in 1936, the serpent remained under the table. His victories depended on the Dixiecrat Solid South, which stayed Democratic until LBJ embraced the Civil Rights movement. It was then that the great re-alignment began to happen: the South switched alligence to the GOP and what was once the electoral heartland of the Democratic Party became the lifeblood of the Republican Party.

The Conservative Coalition formed after Hubert Humphrey's defeat to Richard Nixon in 1968. It was massively sucessful as evident by the 1972 massacre of the Democrats, where Nixon won 49 states against George McGovern. It collapsed a few years later due to Nixon's involvement and resignation due to Watergate. Carter took over, only to collapse as spectacularly a few years later. The modern Conservative Coalition was revived and strengthened during the Reagan Administration due to the rise of the social conservatives and large masses of blue collar Reagan Democrats.

My friend Dave Guipe sums up the transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties since 1990:

What the establishmentarians didn’t factor into their equation was the ability of a president to dramatically modify the philosophical core of his party within a relatively short period of time. Evidence for this can be found in the generational transformation of the Democratic Party from what it was in 1990 — a clearinghouse of New Deal interests based in the Old South and the industrial, urban centers of the North and Midwest — to its present-day status as the party of the pro-business Northeast and the pro-NAFTA, pro-growth West, producing pragmatic, technocratic, non-ideological leaders like [Virginia's] Mark Warner and [New Mexico's] Bill Richardson. This seismic shift took place over the course of just a few election cycles in the 1990s, when states like California and Connecticut, which were swing states pre-1992, became the new base states of the Democratic Party. And the shift was due entirely to one man, Bill Clinton, who used his presidency to bring large swaths of fiscally moderate, socially liberal voters into the Democratic Party, the old Rockefeller Republicans, who proceeded to come to town meetings, vote in primary elections, and produce like-minded, DLCified Democratic officeholders like Warner and Richardson. The base of the Democratic Party was changed overnight simply because a different kind of Democrat took the party helm for two presidential terms.

But just as 1992-2000 produced the Rockefeller Republicanization of the Democratic Party, 2000-2008 have quite clearly resulted in the transformation of the Republican Party into an entity that would make William Jennings Bryan swoon. While Hugh Hewitt, et al, were defending Bush’s every apostasy on spending and immigration, confident that the next GOP president would right the ship on those issues before Bush did any lasting damage, something interesting happened to the shape of the GOP base. Fiscal conservatives, libertarians, paleocons, and Main Street business types began to defect from a party that was too fiscally profligate, too pro-war, and that had no qualms about violating the principles of federalism or separation of powers when the president’s personal moral code called for it. Meanwhile, fiscally liberal cultural conservatives began to make their way into the GOP, pleased at the notion of a party whose principles seemed to be sectarian in nature and also motivated by the threat posed by expansionist Islamism to the survival of Christendom. The result, eight years later, is a GOP base that is socially fundamentalist, fiscally compassionate, that puts moral idealism above reality when it comes to foreign affairs such as immigration or the war, and that prefers a candidate for president who is willing to suspend his reason when it conflicts with his predetermined, faith-based beliefs.

It is for this fact, the evolution and dissolution of parties within the two party system that make them incredibly important and more vital than their multi party counterparts.