John Quiggen makes an important point. An awful lot of the recent changes in American history can be understood as efforts to graft a proper two-party dynamic onto a country that thanks to both an unusual institutional set-up and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one. The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system, at which point it became devastatingly effective because the opposition was still behaving like one half of the old, more fluid system. Much recent progressive activism has centered around trying to turn the Democrats into "the other party" of a two-party system.
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Polarization
06 May 2007 12:35 pm
Comments (12)
Yes, but the point is that these parties did not always represent coherent ideological traditions. As the post says, the two party system isn't going away under this electoral system but the nature of the two parties is likely to change; with the Democrats no longer also the party of the reactionary south the coalitions can be considerably more coherent.
and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one.
I'm not sure that's descriptively accurate. I can make sense of a claim that the South is Democratic because of the Civil War, and Northern Dems changed to make the modern party, but then Jim Crow doesn't figure in unless you mean that it was part and parcel of some change in the North.
I'm not sure, that is, why the Civil War and the set of values that motivated it and found institutionalization in Jim Crow laws are each separately important in describing the Democratic Party's ideological incoherence.
Re: The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system
Huh? 1/2 of 2 = 1. How does that differ from the situation of, say, 1960, when (ignoring minor parties) the GOP also one half of a two party system?
Re: Yes, but the point is that these parties did not always represent coherent ideological traditions.
The GOP is not all that ideologically coherent even today. There is a servere tension in it between its libertarian, small-government elitiest wing and its SoCon, big government, populist wing.
I see no evidence that today's Republican Party has any such "libertarian, small-government elitist wing." Individual voters like that may exist, but they don't seem to matter at all to the party's politics.
"Yes, but the point is that these parties did not always represent coherent ideological traditions."
I believe that's the case, but in what country with at least a semi-long history of party politics is it the case that parties don't change over time? I think the strong central government vs federalism axis is important in American partisan politics historically, but that can be somewhat misleading (was the Louisiana Purchase the act of a genuine federalist? what about driving the Cherokee onto the Plains? what about vastly expanding the federal prison state and denying early release to federal prisoners?). There are periods of definitional transition (when the Democrats started to become the party of "big government" at the turn of the 20th century), and it can also be said that any given time the two major parties are more rather than less in the pockets of rich elites.
But if you can boil down partisanship to simply being act what most people in the other major party are for what you find I think is that since the founding of this country (or homeland, or whatever) the voting patterns of politicians have a partisan character.
I think Matt's point is that in the past on almost very major policy debate has always had people on both sides in both parties. In the last 40 years the Republican party has gradually eliminated most of their liberal/moderate members and coalecsed around the economic/social conservative side.
Granted, the GOP is still ideologically incoherent, with nanny-state moralizers, big-business free-traders, strong-defense hawks, and hosts of other blocs potentially at odds.
the change is not that US parties used to be ideologically diverse, and then all of a sudden the Rove/Bush/DeLay GOP became ideologically coherent.
What changed is that the Rove/Bush/DeLay gang made them *politically* coherent. They voted together. They campaigned together. Talking points were disseminated all up and down the ranks, and you spouted them, whether you believed or not. The entire party voted lock-step for five going on six years. If they had any disagreements on policy--and they did--they kept them completely private.
In other words: the ideological incoherence was submerged in the workings of a coherent political machine.
That's what was unprecedented, at least in its scope and ruthlessness.
'Quiggin' not 'Quiggen'.
Mayor is right in saying the Republicans aren't ideologically coherent, and the same is true of the Democrats. But they are coherent enough to accept the discipline of a political machine, something which could never have been true for the old Democratic coalition including the white South, or for the Republican mirror-image with its contingent of northeastern Lincoln Republicans.
They may have their quarrels, but all the Republican groups disagree more with (virtually all) Democrats than with each other, and vice versa.
I think Duverger's Law might be helpful in understanding this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_Law
But when combined with our system of primaries (which are actually very unusual in the world) means that small parts of society can influence the ideology of a party. This produced the over-pronounced success of the Republicans, even while large majorities of Americans never liked the policies of the Contract with America, Gingrich, Bush, Delay, etc.
Comments closed May 20, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, Whigs and Democrats, Republicans and Democrats; the two-party system is more or less encoded in America's political DNA. (There's a terrific academic paper posted online somewhere concerning this very subject, and which presents a very compelling case that partisanship is the greatest predictor of voting behavior in Congress going back to the 1790s.)
Posted by Linus | May 6, 2007 1:09 PM