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August 9, 2006
What Lieberman's Defeat Means
QandO and The Glittering Eye both have interesting posts on the meaning of Lieberman's primary loss to Ned Lamont. They are well-considered and worth reading. My take is somewhat different, though.
What interests me is that there could be a party realignment like that which destroyed the Whigs. While the political system in the US only supports two parties over the long term, and mandates that those parties, or at least any party capable of winning elections, must be a coalition of interests, there is no mandate that the parties remain the same over time. The Whigs exploded, and the Bull Moose movement could have (but did not) done the same thing to the Democrats in the early 20th century.
What it takes for a new party to rise to prominance are a significant number of voters not in either party coalition, prominent leaders who will bring their following into the new party, and a committed base of support for fundraising. At least two of those conditions currently exist, or may exist in the near future.
Currently, the Republicans represent those who are conservative on social policy, statist on economic policy, and aggressive on fighting the war (in broader terms, the Republicans don't have a coherent position on intervention generally, though President Bush has generally seemed to be minimalist in that sense). Currently, the Democrats represent those who are progressive on social policy, progressive on economic policy, and broadly against aggressive pursuit of the war (though ironically interventionist in every other way). Crime policy is not really much of a debate in the US any longer, so I've left it out of consideration. The broad swathe that is unrepresented are those who are generally liberal or libertarian on social policy, libertarian on economic policy, and committed to aggressively fighting the war (with a broad range of opinion on other interventions). So there is certainly an untapped consitutency. (I should note that if a party arises to meet this need, there is no guarantee that the whole agenda of such a constituency would be embraced, or even that any of it would. It is enough that there are a large number of voters willing to take the chance.)
If Lieberman loses in the general election, and McCain loses the Republican presidential primary race in 2008, they would have a powerful incentive to form a third party, for their own self-aggrandizement if nothing else. (Dave notes this in regard to Lieberman and his likely independant run for Senate.) Each has a following, and much of that following would transfer to the new party. In addition, as noted above, a significant number of voters could be swayed just to take the chance of getting something better. (The normal argument against third parties, that they are incapable of winning office, would certainly be less plausible with two such prominent politicians heading the party. If Hillary Clinton loses the Democratic presidential primary in 2008, she could potentially find common cause here as well, and that would further boost the party's credibility.) The unknown will be whether a large enough base comes along to make the party competitive.
In other words, what Lieberman's defeat could mean, provided other events fall out in not-unlikely ways, is that in three years we'll have a real third party to challenge the existing political order.
So let's say that a third party along these lines is formed, and has a general policy position of liberal socially, statist economically, and interventionist abroad, which would somewhat match the preferences of McCain and Lieberman so far as I can tell. What would happen then? There are two likely paths. The most likely is that the party will for all practical purposes disappear within two presidential election cycles. But it is possible that the party would do well enough to become kingmakers. If such a party were able to gain regional votes in both the northeast and southwest, it could prevent a first-ballot election of a president by the electoral college. That would in turn position the new third party (assuming they had the fewest electors) as kingmakers: they could promise their electors' votes in exchange for concessions in terms of cabinet positions (maybe even VP) and the like, concessions that would increase their odds of winning in the next general election.
If that were to happen, there would be a general realignment, and one of the three parties would be destroyed in the shuffle. I cannot do more than guess at what the alignments would be afterwards, though I suspect that the central dividing issues would not be economic, but social and national security issues. I suspect too that the extreme Left and extreme Right would end up in one party, with the two remaining parties being broadly centrist, both committed to aggressive conduct of the war, and differing on social issues. In other words, I suspect that we'd spin off the extremists and be back, more or less, to the political alignments of the early 1960s.
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