Kim Phillips-Fein has an interesting essay in The Nation on the persistence of the conservative movement in this country. I think one of the key ingredients in their resiliency is that our winner-take-all federal elections make it nearly impossible for the country to maintain more than two seriously competitive political parties. When the Democrats are in power, there is really only one alternative. If you don’t like how a Democrat is doing his or her job, you have to vote for a Republican to get rid of them. If your congressman is a crook, you can perhaps vote for a green candidate in protest, but that won’t remove them from office. So, you see things like New Orleans electing a Republican just to be rid of William ‘Freezer Cash’ Jefferson. This problem is one of the main reasons I am in favor of a progressive movement that consistently challenges Democratic incumbents in the primaries. In some cases this is needed for ideological reasons, but it is critically important when a Democrat is exposed as being ethically challenged.
I am not interested in so-called solutions that require amending the Constitution. I am well aware that the Constitution distorts political opinion in this country and gives it a rightward drift. Any system where California and Idaho have the same number of senators is going to be very biased against coastal progressive opinion. We just have to live with that, account for it, and compensate for it wherever we can. Solutions that have no chance of being enacted are no solutions at all.
The Democratic Party has now incorporated almost all of the non-White, non-fundamentalist Christian population of the country. The rational political debate in this country between the needs of business and labor, and change and custom, are all going on within the Democratic Party. But the Republican Party will be back, and they just might be crazy enough to get us all killed. If you want to study them as an anthropologist might, it is because they are such a danger to humanity.
Your comment is spot on. Either/or is the way this country is being run. When one of the parties is no longer sane, we are in danger.
Everybody needs to imagine what will happen if the Republicans regain the House in 2010. They will take their election victory as a ‘mandate’ for investigation and impeachment. In many ways, they are laying the ground work now with their constant de-legitimizing of Obama. Everything from birthers to people yelling ‘you lie’ shows their plans for our future.
nalbar
The inability of the Democratic party to champion the cause of the lower working class leaves them nowhere to go but the right.
If we had a good, strong, progressive third party the Democrats could remain the party of the center-right and the Republican party would either dry up and blow away or become an irrelevant fringe group.
Yes, the Democrats need to recover their farmer-labor party roots.
i think we’ve heard this tale before …
it ends with the looney catching his beast and going down with it.
There’s a real easy way to deal with low population states. Get a couple million people to move there. Of course for most low population states, that would ruin the pristine ecology. But with the right urban forms, it might could work.
I maintain as a principle that every person in the 192,480 precincts in the US should have the opportunity to vote for a progressive for any office that is open to election. That means primaries to incumbents and a presence in challenger primaries. To pull that off you need a separate campaign infrastructure from the party infrastructure in each state and county but the ability to form coalitions easily.
The crazies disappear or calm down when craziness is delegitimized. It happened during the 1970s, especially in the South, until Ronald Reagan decided to exploit it to get elected — this was a ramp-up of the Southern-racist urban ethnic coalition that Nixon bullt, but hold the ethnics with the abortion issue.
The major force for legitimization of this craziness is the media. I’m not sure what Jerry Springer had in mind to make money in the 1980s, but FoxNews has taken it and put a political spin on it. And the me-toos of the cable industry are trying to compete. Lou Dobbs seeks to divert labor outrage against immigrants. Pat Buchanan keeps the Nixonian Southern Strategy nativist faith. And Glenn Beck converts it to action. That legitimizes it enough that the crazies can get their non-crazy friends to go to a tea party with them and to cheerlead for the “real American” team.
The second force of legitimization was the fundamentalist, pentecostal, Calvinist evangelical, and conservative Catholic clergy. The wedge issue that brought them into politics was abortion. With the spawning of Focus on the Family and the “family values” movement, homosexuality (actually sexuality in any form) was added as wedge issues. As politicians paid lip services but did not get the action that this group wanted to see, it began to grow a crazy fringe. And organizations like Operation Rescue began to legitimize violence. The moral seriousness of this bunch of crazies drives them further over the edge in much the same way that the Weatherman Underground – General Command went over the edge as a result of their moral seriousness about the Vietnam War.
The type of craziness I see among the run-of-the-mill tea-baggers reminds me of the same dynamic in the “Belly of the Beast” days of opposition to the Vietnam War. The street theater involving guns is reminiscent of the Black Panthers with this exception – the Black Panthers caused the police to freak out, a reaction that is absent with gun-toters from the right.
In terms of cost, being a “birther” is cheap. Actually engaging in violence is substantially more risky. A minute minority of the crazies are actually prone to violence.
But the real danger is yet to come–if labor stands firm in its wanting to defend the right to organize. And if management is not accommodating. In this economy, it is quite likely that we see repeats of the organizing and strikes that were a key part of the changes to the American economy during the New Deal. Then the goon squads will come out again. You won’t see crazies in that environment.
Part of the problem that 3rd parties have is the vote counting system that we use. If you have a system that allows you to rank the order of your preference instead of just picking one name would make it possible for someone to vote for the Green party as the 1st preference, the Democrat as the 2nd, and the Republican as the last.
In many cases the Green party person still wouldn’t win, but it would leave voters feeling freer.
The problem of course is that the Democrats and Republicans have absolutely no incentive to make changes in this area…
And on legislation, it still comes down to governing coalitions.
Multiple parties split into governing coalitions on a bill by bill basis.
And the current Congress has evolved caucuses that split alliances multiple ways.
Thinking that changing to ranked or proportional voting will fix the problem is an illusion.
What will fix the problem more than anything else is having more and more active grassroots progressives.
One reason the Right will come roaring back is that the other side says things like “We just have to live with that, account for it, and compensate for it wherever we can.” Now there’s something to get the blood pumping. If this is the vision it’s no wonder the only hope for Dems and liberals is that the GOP will keep screwing up and we’ll still be the only other choice.
You know what’s worse? Looking at the situation and deciding that nothing is worth fighting for until we can amend the Constitution to give California 53 senators, like they deserve.
What is it exactly that you want to fight for on the system level? Nobody’s saying don’t work for better laws, but as things work now, “good laws” are nearly all just holding actions against some atrocity that the Right sailed through the legislative process.
I guess it all depends on whether you think we really do need major change in this country. ATM, the only ones screaming for that are wingnuts. Once in a while Beck says the kind of thing I wish I could hear from Dems once in a while. IE, that the system is deeply broken and needs a restart. I think on the emotional level that’s what the voters whose switch gave the Dems their resounding win thought “change you can believe in” meant.
The system has been corrupted by the infusion of large amounts of money into the electoral and legislative processes thus making system change well nigh impossible. Unless the lobbies are controlled and politicians become more honest, America is doomed to suffocate in the coils of unbridled self interest.
While we are at it, the fairness Doctrine should be brought back to give progressives et al the opportunity to confront the nutzoids and on the national media. Since I do not feel either of these reforms will be effected in the near future, I harbor no hope for the future of collective rationality in our nation.
The virus of insanity will continue to multiply courtesy of the republican party until the USA becomes the United States of Assholes. What with our nuclear arsenals and bloated defense budgets, we will become the greatest threat to planetary well being in the history of the species. The ravings of Beck and Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly and the evil Coulter provide ample evidence of a country deranged and they do all this in the name of liberty and patriotism
Truly bizarre.
I think the constitutional system under which we have been operating has decayed beyond repair, and it’s being eviscerated by the large amounts of money flowing into the electoral process.