Hopefully, you understand the Constitutional, institutional, and legal reasons why America is pretty much condemned to have only two national political parties. If you dispute this, or you have some kind of solution, I’ll address your ideas in the comments. I think of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party as basically vehicles. Think of two empty cars. They can carry any kind of people. They can carry abolitionists or Tom Tancredo. They can carry segregationists or John Lewis. There really isn’t any reason for the cars to prefer one kind of ideology over another, but what they’d really like to do is finish in first place. Right now, the two cars have done a good job of segregating liberals from conservatives, but the conservative car doesn’t get the gas mileage or have the quality of pit crew to have much hope of beating the liberal car in a presidential race.
Keep this in mind when you read about conservatives who argue that the Republicans would do better to lose principled stands than lose their reason for being. It’s not true. Republicans would do much better if they abandoned many conservative principles that don’t poll well in today’s America. The losers would be conservatives, who wouldn’t have ownership of one of the two major parties anymore. Conservatives figure that it’s better to be permanently shut out of the White House than to lose control over the GOP. They’re right. It’s better for them that way, but it is certainly not better for their vehicle, or for the country.
Meh, there’s always gonna be a Grover Cleveland.
Democrats in the 19th century must have faced a powerful incentive to become like the Republicans, but they doubled down on local control and waited for the pendulum to inevitably swing back.
Now, you may argue that the federal government is just too darn powerful in this century for this to be viable, but it’s certainly what states like Texas and Kansas and Arizona and North Carolina are attempting.
But when the principled stand resonates only with an ever-shrinking and ideologically homogenous group of people, who are already a minority in the country, then isn’t this simply committing suicide by ten thousand paper cuts?
Hell yes. And who are we to interfere? If they’re going to make their stand on principles like black people shouldn’t vote and it’s better to shut down the government than have affordable health care, then maybe we can finally flush them and their rancid ideas out of the system.
I’m not sold on this. I believe that there are ‘Constitutional, institutional, and legal reasons why America is pretty much condemned’ to give an ever-shrinking and ideologically homogenous minority group of extremists the power to commit murder-suicide.
“Hopefully, you understand the Constitutional, institutional, and legal reasons why America is pretty much condemned to have only two national political parties.”
While I understand the institutional necessity of retaining our 2 party system, and in no way, shape or form am I waving the “THIRD PARTY WAY!” flag, I am not at all clear how such a thing is Constitutionally (big C?) nor legally affirmed.
Please indulge me, if for anything to have something to say to the third party advocates. It’s not enough to say they can’t get the votes.
The Constitution’s establishment of single member districts puts the kibosh on third parties.
Everyone has to go for 50%+, and that results in a two-party system. There is no point in bumping a third party up from 2% to 10%.
Ah, so it’s structurally built into the system. They can’t get enough votes!
It’s about defining “enough.”
State legislatures often have multiple-member districts. It is possible for a “third party” to establish itself in a locality enough to capture Congressional seats and in fact bring a third party to Congress although within the district there were effectively only two parties.
That’s based just on the Constitutional structure alone. In most states the two major parties have created laws to prevent that from happening.
A third party that develops in such states would get big enough to win seats in the state legislature, but would it become big enough to compete on the Congressional level anywhere else? So far, the evidence says no.
It’s like a goldfish in a small bowl. In order to get big enough to compete for Congressional seats, those rules would have to be in place for Congress.
We also need to wait and see how far downhill the Citizens United cash will flow before reaching equilibrium. Third parties–second parties in all too many cases–are likely to get crushed all the way down the line. Texas Board of Education elections come to mind.
This is exactly correct.
The structure of the election systems is winner take all, once you hit 51%. This will over time always create a ‘2-man race’.
The people who clamor for 3rd parties never seem to understand this.
Don’t the UK, France, Germany and Italy also have single member districts? Isn’t the difference that over there the “Speaker of the House” has the powers that here are vested in the President?
I really miss President Pelosi.
My puzzlement comes with the phrase “conservative principles”. It’s almost a nonsensical term as the only principle they seem to have is “retain what political power we have” and use racism as the main lever. It’s becoming nonsensical for a lot of reasons, IMHO.
SOME PRINCIPLES SHIFT IN THE WIND
The article used the Panama Canal as a historical example that arguably worked for them in a way. But thinking of ACA as a current example doesn’t come close. For starters: Heritage-RomneyCare-ACA. They can’t claim to have sacred principles worth fighting for if they change or even flip-flop every other Prez election.
THEY LIE TOO MUCH
What constructive policies can they put forward that are based on facts and “conservative principles”? Having principles to me means you have values and opinions, but it doesn’t mean you get to make up facts from bald faced lies. (eg.Issa and the IRS.)
THE GOP IS A PARTY OF RACISTS
Or what about the conservative principles for creating long lines and registration hassles for African Americans? They get some mileage from that but it is unconstitutional at its core and its not like they can blast that out in the press, beaming at us all telling us that is what they stand for. Although they come close to doing that as the truth will out.
THEIR PRINCIPLES ARE SHALLOW
How far can their principles on abortion go if they don’t guarantee prenatal care to all pregnant women? If life is sacred in Texas, why so many executions?
Austerity economics might be the basis for principles but they can’t base the whole show on that. I’m stumped.
The Republican Party embarked on this ideological venture when Anglophiles like William Buckley and others enamored of Winston Churchill and Tories sought ideological purity to sort out the conversatives from the liberals which abounded in both parties.
The “conservatives” today look nothing at all like what Buckley had in mind. Effective primary strategies have had a schismatic holier-than-thou effect on the GOP. And the demand for the walk to follow the 30 years of talk has totally paralyzed the GOP and government itself. And even the Tea Party members of the House are getting shouted down when they say “The votes are not there in the Senate to repeal Obamacare.”
It is going to be hard to get the GOP to drop its ideological fixation.
I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that two parties are an inevitable result of the fact of the Constitution. It certainly is an institutional fact of long standing. And it to the dismay of potential third parties has also become a legal fact in most states. But I do agree that there inevitably will be a governing coalition and an opposition coalition on most issues.
Parties were efficient ways of mobilizing the communications and campaign networks to get elections won, which is why they arose in spite of the Federalist concerns about faction. And they continued to fulfill that function until the campaign finance laws got rigged so that candidates could run without a whole lot of party support and could then thumb their nose at party leadership.
So from an institutional perspective, it could well be possible for third and fourth and other parties to be tightly identified ideologically and be parts of a governing or opposition coalition. Indeed, you see this to some degree with Bernie Sanders and Angus King.
But American expectations and media framing have so engrained the idea of two specific parties as if they are two sports teams that it will take a major change in political culture to have viable third parties.
The alternative change in political culture would be for parties not to represent ideologies at all. No grand systems of principles or great sweeping ideas. Just a practical communications way of patching together enough constituencies to win. Which means some way of adjusting the conflicts between the interests of those constituencies within the internal processes of the party so as to focus on the major conflicts between interests.
Historically, effective third parties in the US are based on a single issue or cluster of related issues. They don’t win national elections, but they influence one or both major parties to give on their issue(s). Examples include the Prohibition Party, and Ross Perot’s vanity party that got the budget deficit on the national agenda.
Since the major parties are themselves coalitions, you could call the gun enthusiasts another successful “third party”, and the pro-lifers have gone a long way toward their goal of prohibition of abortion.
The most successful third parties indeed have been successful at getting their issues co-opted by one of the major parties. Wallace folks got the “Southern Strategy”, the relgious right got abortion and school vouchers front and center in the Reagan administration. The NRA got itself co-opted by the Gingrich Revolution. Getting rolled into the tent was what progressives have been hoping for from the Democrats for seven years.
And, on things like gay rights and consumer protection and crack/cocaine disparity, and health care subsidies, that’s exactly what’s happened.
Ross Perot and deficit reduction.
Hm. Does this mean that both vehicles, in an effort to optimize their capacities, will converge into a single vehicle?
That is, shouldn’t both parties simply get themselves on the right side of all the polling issues? What would that look like?
The closest thing we’ve come to that would probably be the period from 1945-1976.
I dunno. I’m reading Nixonland at the moment, and that’s certainly not the impression I’m getting. And weren’t the Republicans viciously anti-New Deal all along?
Eisenhower wasn’t viciously anti-New Deal. And he was president for 8 key years.
It definitely wasn’t exact but there was a consensus of both parties on a lot issues during those times.
Another example would be James Monroe and the Era of Good Feelings.
Wasn’t that era somewhat improperly named, in that it was the opposite of “good feelings”?
When one party simply exhibits a reflexive and visceral denial of any conclusions that are drawn from scientifically quantifiable evidence which do not align with their desired outcome, then this would seem to be an impossibility.
I think Boo’s saying that it’s conservatives who ‘exhibit a reflexive and visceral denial of any conclusions that are drawn from scientifically quantifiable evidence which do not align with their desired outcome,’ not necessarily Republicans.
That’s correct.
In 1960, we could have described the entire South as filled with hateful white supremacist Democrats and that would have been totally accurate. But there was no reason that had to be Democrats, and they aren’t anymore. Also, the strongest voices for civil rights were also Democrats, just from different part of the country.
Ideology can attach itself to one of the two major parties, or to both of them, and it can flip from one to the other. At this point in time, the parties are basically polarized (North Pole, South Pole). There is no reason it has to be this way or that it will stay this way, but a sustainable Third Party can only survive by supplanted one of the Big Two, because it can’t co-exist with them over time.
That’s certainly true. The Republican Party supplanted the Whig Party.
I have no data to support this but I think the Civil War was the turning point. It was then that Race became the defining difference of the parties, although since then the R’s & D’s have flipped positions, Racism still defines which party you belong too.
It’s tough to do Civil War history in a comment, but you can think of the Republican Party as initially a party determined to resolve a festering and hitherto irresolvable problem. Would the new western states be slave states or free states. Certainly, they had their hard core abolitionists, but they also had plenty of pragmatists who were perfectly willing to allow the South to continue slavery in the interest of peace. Lincoln was one of these.
But the South seceded before he could take office and forced his hand. That refusal to compromise forced Lincoln to take a harder stand and go for abolition. And when he was killed, the hardliners were empowered within the GOP.
Yet, once the slavery question was finished, they had to go back to other issues, and that’s where the Republicans began to show some disturbing traits, like corruption, crony-capitalism, pandering to their Know-Nothing wing, and so on.
Other than two non-consecutive terms with Pres. Cleveland, the GOP ran things from 1861-1912. By that time, they’d spawned the Progressive Movement and then rejected it. Progressives lived on as progressives with footings in both parties for a while into FDR’s presidency. But they couldn’t sustain themselves as a third party.
And that’s really the last we saw of any major third party movement with any kind of staying power. I’d argue that they would have died earlier if FDR didn’t have so much room for error. It’s easy to be for a left-wing third party when the left-wing Democrat is assured of victory. It’s much harder when your efforts might put a conservative Republican back in power.
I don’t disagree and as I said, I have no data, but the question remains, why did the Republican Party supplant the Whig Party and why hasn’t that happened since?
I do recall now that Lincoln won in a four or five man election with the Democrats split and fielding both a Northern and a Southern Democrat from two rump conventions. A weak major party and a fissioned second major party could well give a strong third party control of the White House. Once you hold the White House, do you become, ipso facto, a major party? Speculating along those lines, consider a republican split into the Northeast Wall street branch and a largely Southern rural Tea Party branch, each endorsing candidates. To be analogous, the Democratic Party would have to be waning and corrupt (doh!) and the populace deeply split over an issue espoused by a third Party with a position not co-opted by the Democrats.
You can read up on the Whigs here. On the good side, they were all about capital investments in infrastructure, like the Erie Canal. On the bad side, their president, Millard Fillmore, was a dunce who ran his party aground. What ultimately sunk them was an inability to take a side in the question of expanding slavery into the territories.
The Republicans basically retained the pro-investment part of the Whigs and added the Know-Nothings who wanted to kick all the Irish and Italians and Chinese out of the country. It’s really not all that dissimilar from the situation today, but their opponents had a lot less to offer in their defense.
One big difference is that the Know-Nothings were basically an appendage that they needed, but they didn’t run the show like they do now. Another is that their opponents, like Grover Cleveland, were basically indistinguishable from Rand Paul in that they would deny disaster aid on the premise that suffering builds character.
Plus La Change …
That’s a good question. I think that if the two parties did somehow get on the same side of every issue, that would only hold until the next election. Personal ambition is also a factor, of course, so anyone who wants to get into public office will have a strong incentive to distinguish him or herself from the other candidates.
Well, and the mere fact of having regular elections will tend to encourage differences, since an election is a contest and voters need some basis on which to make their decisions.
Yes, radical nativist & Christianist extremists don’t have to control the “Repub” party. They just do. Rightwing plutocrats own that vehicle and staff it with these lunatics. Today’s reality is the “Repub” party IS the “conservative” party.
It seems that it would be easier to (somehow) completely defeat the vehicle called the “Repub” party than to have another group with substantially different (so-called) principles take control of that party from today’s “conservatives”. There won’t be any new drivers of that vehicle until today’s crazed conserva-drivers actually run it off the cliff, killing all occupants, such as monsters like Iowa’s Steve King and the many, many federal and state “conservative” reps like him.
And that does not appear to be happening or likely to happen any time soon.
Ooh, or how’s this for a thought experiment?
What if, starting tomorrow, every Democrat switched and became a Republican? Obama, Biden, Pelosi, every office-holder and every registered Democrat?
How would that play out?
They’d all lose in the next primary?
Why? All the current-Dems would be voting in the Republican primaries. In fact, there would only be Republican primaries. Because we’d all be Republicans. No general elections at all.
So you’d choose, in California, between Barbara Boxer (R) and Carly Fiorina (R). There’d still be more Boxer voters.
Also, if this is really happening? http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2013/08/why_seniors_are_turning_agains.php
I’m going to have to retract all my bitching about how the Republicans pay no price for extremist. And I will be thrilled.
So why is Obama doing his best with Chained-CPI and Medicare cuts to stop this trend? I don’t want to get off on a tangent but it seems more and more that Obama is a Republican mole. I know that doesn’t make sense but neither does his apparent love for republican administrators, memes, and policies.
Well, apparently the trend is happening despite the mole-itude. So if the whole ‘adult in the room’ thing is trumping the whole ‘catfood for dinner’ thing, then I’m absolutely wrong on the politics, and much of the bullshit bipartisanship was in fact hugely effective.
The policy is a different question, of course. Not a fan of catfood. But on politics alone, I’ll be pleased to be proven wrong.
(And I should apologize for the tangent; I started it.)
I’m telling you: Any. Day. Now!
One thing that greatly holds back third parties are state laws enshrining the two party system. Here in Illinois a third party or independent needs at least an order of magnitude more signatures to get on the ballot than the two established parties.
As for third parties, it seems like nothing can be done short of Constitutional amendments, which pretty much by definition means it’ll never happen in our lifetimes.
But if it did, I’d argue for two separate fixes:
But it’ll never happen, or at least not in America as we know it. We’ll have pitchforks and torches before we get significant reform via the Amendment process.
I used to think so.
No more, though.
Parties live by commitment to opposing agendas.
You don’t win votes by saying “Me, too.”
A third party that develops in such states would get big enough to win seats in the state legislature, but would it become big enough to compete on the Congressional level anywhere else? So far, the evidence says no.
Die Abnehm Lösung