David Graham in the Atlantic discusses the idea that the Republican Party may be on the verge of a real schism or crack-up. I think it would be incredibly healthy for our democracy if it were but he throws cold water on that idea:
This is a bleak era in American politics, but it has been a golden age for scholars of the Federalists and the Whigs, whose knowledge of party collapse is suddenly in demand with pundits and reporters. The problem with these historical analogies is that they don’t account for the radically different character of party politics in contemporary America.
As Jelani Cobb noted in a thoughtful New Yorker examination of party collapse this week, the Whigs, Federalists, and old Democratic-Republicans are only the largest and most successful American political parties to go extinct. “What we refer to as the two-party system has collapsed twice before,” he writes. “The Democratic and the Republican Parties have endured as long as they have because they have significantly altered their identities to remain viable; in a sense, each has come to represent what it once reviled.”
The Federalists relegated themselves to electoral obsolescence, handing one-party rule to the Democratic-Republicans, but the American system—first-past-the-post elections and (predominantly, and later statutorily) single-member districts—more or less demands two parties. The Democratic-Republicans split, producing a new two-party system, with Democrats and Whigs. Then the Whigs fractured over slavery, with some of them creating the Republican Party. Since Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860, the Democratic and Republican duopoly has been only fitfully and weakly challenged.
Jamelle Bouie, in The New York Times, introduces some reasons to be skeptical that the collapse of either the Federalists or the Whigs is an apt comparison, parsing the specific historical context for each collapse. But the best reason to doubt a Republican collapse comes from looking not at the past but at the present. Previous party collapses have occurred when parties have splintered, and there’s no sign that that’s happening in today’s GOP, because modern political parties are much harder to break apart than their historical antecedents were…
One reason there is less schism is that the parties have fundamentally changed in nature. Parties today are nationalized, ideologically uniform, and financially wealthy, bolstered by internal and external infrastructure that manages to hold the parties together no matter what forces push them apart. The centralized nature of the parties made Trump’s takeover of the GOP possible and almost inevitable, but also decreased the chances of a split afterward.
He discusses all the structural advantages the Republicans enjoy — the electoral college, the senate, gerrymandering etc. and the fact that Democrats are concentrated in certain states and cities. And the ideological sorting is a huge change. There used to be conservaives and liberals in both parties but that is no longer true.
This, I thought, was a particularly interesting observation that I haven’t seen others discuss. It’s important:
Beyond matters of policy and ideology, politics has become an industry unto itself. Enormous sums of money flow through both party apparatuses and outside groups, and politicians and operatives gather under the same banners. The Republican Governors Association includes everyone from Hogan to the devoted Trump disciple Kristi Noem of South Dakota. The National Republican Congressional Committee backs both Jamie Herrera Beutler, who spoke out in favor of impeaching Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is Marjorie Taylor Greene. GOP politicians hire the same strategists and pollsters, read the same outlets, and attend the same events at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and CPAC.
This structure doesn’t make parties static; it just makes them less likely to splinter and more likely to transform themselves in order to remain electorally viable. That’s how the Democratic Party of segregation and the Solid South became the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It also points to some of the possibilities for the Republican Party. As Cobb writes, the GOP could continue to use voter-suppression laws, combined with its structural advantages, to remain a powerful party even without the ability to win majority national support. The Democratic analyst David Shor worries that Republicans could continue to peel off the votes of ideologically conservative minority voters, a process that would be very detrimental to Democrats. The GOP could also continue to strike the dubious populist pose—more cultural than material—that Trump did.
Any of these approaches (or some combination of them) would produce a Republican Party in a generation or even a decade different from the one we know now. Fifteen years ago, Hugh Hewitt was forecasting permanent Republican dominance. Now, perhaps wised-up from that misfire, he writes, “In American politics, renewal and comebacks are never far away.” Luckily for him, that applies as much to the pundits who keep telling us a party is on the verge of obsolescence as it does to the parties themselves.
I think in the short term Republicans are going to stick with their culture war strategy and use whatever levers they can find to win power from the minority. Who knows how long that will last? But it’s vitally important the Democrats do everything in their power to stop them. They are on a fascist trajectory. And that’s a “different” Republican party we do not want to see in power.