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October 31, 2005
Party Boundaries
The US system, because of the nature of how we elect officials, is inherently only stable with two major parties. More than that leads to one party attaining dominance, and the others coming together to counter the majority party, thus resulting in two parties. Fewer than two major parties leads the internal divisions in the major party to come into full play, eventually resulting in a split as the non-dominant faction seeks other outlets to maximize its influence; and again resulting in two major parties. The only way to change the dynamic is to change the electoral rules from simple plurality, so that smaller parties can have a reasonable assurance of representation. (For an idea of some of the possible electoral systems, see this summary.)
You can look at opinion as being a range, centered about a line. (Politics being a zero-sum game, any given issue will break down into two camps in the end.) The obvious division is Left and Right — that is indeed the division that is pushed on us every time a political discussion happens, even if it's not the appropriate division to draw for that particular issue. (I really hate the "Left/Right" paradigm, because it's so non-descriptive. Sadly, without a new political vocabulary, it's the best we've got.) But there is not merely one center around which the whole population is distributed on any given issue: each subgroup of the population also has a center. The centers of each of these subgroups stand in some relation to the center of the population as a whole. The MSM, for example, centers somewhat to the Left of the center for the whole population.
The political parties are, in the end, nothing but subgroups of the whole population who so identify with a particular political label that they see it as their highest calling to politically support others who identify with the same label. It seems petty and shallow — face it: it is petty and shallow — but that's how political parties work: they maximize their power by maximizing the number of people who identify with that label regardless of policies. The balancing act required to maintain that maxima is what has party positions moving around a little at a time, but constantly; the idea is to prevent either of the extreme ends of the party from getting so upset with the balance that they leave the party.
The balancing act is imperfect, and all political parties change their centers somewhat drastically over long periods of time. Since each party is a coalition of what would be several mid-sized, or many minor, parties under a different voting system, parts of each party break away or join over time, leading to shifts in the party's centerline. The Democrats' "solid South" that turned into the Reagan Republicans are one example: that shift was so large as to realign the parties, giving the Republicans a clear and lasting majority for the first time since the 1920s. The breakup of the Whigs and the formation of the Republicans prior to the Civil War is another example. There are many more, most quite smaller than that. And as the parties change their centers, in response to groups moving in or out, new opportunities for unity or disunity are exposed. (The coming of the neocons — economically and socially somewhat liberal and hawkish on foreign policy — to the Republicans for foreign policy reasons, for example, diluted the power of the economic conservatives that had dominated the Republicans during the Reagan years, and led to the current profligate Republican Congress. This is leading the economic conservatives to look for options.) This will happen despite the party's attempts to keep the party center consistent, because even minor shifts throw off the groups at either extreme, and draw them in at the other extreme. The Democrats can't keep both the DLC and the MoveOn/DU crowd happy for long; one or the other will give up.
In the most extreme cases, the center of a party will shift so far so fast that the party falls apart. This is how the Whigs were destroyed and the Republicans created. What happens in such a case is that the party's center moves too quickly for the subgroups of the party to react to it. When the center stops moving, one or another very large subgroup finds that it has no power, will have no power, and cannot abide the center of opinion of their party. So that subgroup will break off. In a case where the group that breaks away is quite large, the party splits. Otherwise, the group that breaks away will generally move to the other party, shifting its center closer to their ideal, and probably driving other subgroups away from that party.
The Democrats are shifting fast at the moment, indeed have shifted so far to the Left as the MoveOn/DU crowd comes increasingly into power within the party that people who used to be moderate Democrats are finding themselves voting Republican (mostly for foreign policy reasons, because that is the current impetus for the shift in the Democrat Party's center). This is leading to a major regrouping of the Democrats, which is why they cannot consistently beat the Republicans, who are quite disorganized and tend to offer up weak candidates of their own.
The Republicans, too, are undergoing a rapid shift of center, as a result of electoral success, the influx of many former moderate Democrats, the pressures of the war, and the differences between fiscal conservatives (now in the minority of Republicans) and social conservatives (reemerging into the majority). It is beginning to look like the current Republican pattern is that fiscal conservatives take over when the Republicans are out of power, and social conservatives when the Republicans are in power.
Will either of these shifts result in the breakup of one of the parties? I think so. There are basically four groups that come out of the two parties at the moment: the international socialists (far Left Democrats), the DLC (moderate left Democrats), the fiscal conservatives (moderate right Republicans) and the social conservatives (far Right Republicans). In the Republican case, the far Right within the party is still reasonably close to the moderate right. But in the Democrat case, the far Left is not only much further to the left than the DLC, they are also moving further Left as fast as possible. If this continues, and if the DLC cannot regain control of the party, the DLC will soon find itself leaving the Democrats. Then what? The rapid leftward shift in the Republican's party center caused by the DLC aligning with the Republicans would spin off the social conservatives so fast it will make you dizzy. This would leave three groups remaining: the international socialists in charge of the smoking remains of the Democrat party, the classical liberals (DLC + social liberal/fiscal conservative Republicans) and the social conservatives.
The Democrats, in that context, would be too small to stand on their own. Stripped of a large numbers of moderates, the Democrats would collapse as a major party. In the meantime, we would once again settle down with two parties, and I believe they would look a lot like the two parties we had in the period between 1930 and 1965: they would largely agree on foreign policy, and the fights would be over money and how far government can go in pushing a social agenda.
The key potential tipping point will be 2008: if the DLC puts forth Hilary, and loses, the far Left will pull the Democrats further to the Left than the DLC can tolerate. If the DLC wins, or if the international socialists end up picking the candidate and lose the general election, differences might be papered over long enough to become irrelevant, as new issues arise.
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