The future of the two-party system: "Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right"

In 2016, while circulating petitions at the Iowa State Fair to get third-party presidential candidate Evan McMullin on the ballot in my adopted state, I was struck by two things. The first was the eagerness of people to sign simply because the petition was an attempt to get an option on the presidential ballot whose name was neither Clinton nor Trump. The second was the number of people who declined to sign because "I believe in the two-party system."

That seemed odd because 2016 was the year in which the two-party system had failed us more spectacularly than in any year since 1856, the yeard when the Whig Party imploded and the Republicans had yet to establish themselves as a credible alternative to the Democrats. That was the year we elected the Democrat, James Buchanan, an ineffectual bumbler who simultaneously insisted that secession was treason but that he lacked the authority to do anything about it. Buchanan was, in essence, the embodiment of the straw man extremists use when they use the word "moderate:" someone so dedicated to reason and reconciliation that he seemed to lack any convictions whatsoever and was utterly unable to act decisively even when the country was literally breaking apart.

At one level, Donald Trump- an obviously unqualified and patently unfit presidential candidate, a conspiracy theorist and crackpot with the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old and a knowledge of politics, foreign policy, strategic affairs, history, and-yes- economics to match- was a fluke. Our deeply-flawed contemporary presidential nominating process followed its usual pattern, with the primaries failing to establish a consensus candidate but instead nominating a candidate commanding a mere plurality. In Mr. Trump's case, an unusually large field of far more qualified alternatives split the "grown-up" vote between them while the crackpot minority was able to rally behind one of its own.

The degree to which the crackpot wing took over and came to absolutely dominate the Republican Party may be the most depressing feature of contemporary American political history. On one level, it was made possible by the Democrats' nomination of a highly flawed and widely despised candidate of their own, Hillary Clinton. The number of people who despised the former Secretary of State was far larger than the number of those who were even aware of her Republican opponent's unstable personality, deep corruption, profound yet self-assured ignorance, bizarre and irresponsible policy positions, and general clownishness.  Secretary Clinton ran an abrasive and not particularly smart campaign, and Mr. Trump simply played the buffoon,  rallying the ignorant and the disaffected to his banner with a passionate if often mindless loyalty rooted the very sense of grievance they found disagreeable when it animated the politics of the minority groups they often feared and despised.

As a result, a geographical fluke was able- barely- to make Mr. Trump the winner in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. It's tempting to see the process by which the Republican Party lost both its mind and its soul as a consequence of a freak accident. Alas, it is not so. The causes go far deeper.

I served twice on the Polk County Republican Central Committee, once during George W. Bush's first term and the second time during Barack Obama's. During my first term, the local GOP was deeply divided ideologically but unified by a desire to reverse the more regrettable consequences of Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House. People were willing to compromise, even if they grumbled as they did so because they saw the things that united them as more important- or at least more urgent- than the things that divided them.

Things were different the second time. Four years of Barack Obama and the prospect of four more had radicalized the party. Ideology now was king. I had to resign because I moved out of the area of suburban Polk County I represented back into the city of Des Moines, but it was not without a degree of relief. The Ron Paul and Ted Cruz extremists had flavored the committee with fanaticism and a current of frantic xenophobia and rhetorical hyperbole had come to characterize it. The isolationist, conspiracy-minded Ron Paul craziness had been apparent in certain corners of the Iowa party four years earlier; now, it was far more common than common sense 

I, for one, was not surprised when Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucuses in 2016; I fully expected him to be the nominee and had for quite a while. I supported Jeb Bush until the ineffectuality of his Iowa campaign convinced me that his was a hopeless case, and ended up caucusing for Marco Rubio. I wish in retrospect that I'd stuck with Jeb, who at least is a vertebrate.

The Trump phenomenon took me by surprise, and I remain convinced that it was possible only because the opposition to him was split in so many different directions. Nevertheless, I was sure that the Republican rank-and-file would be too smart to choose someone as obviously unfit to be president as Mr. Trump. Obviously, I was wrong.

For a while, I cherished hopes that a massive Trump defeat would lead to the same result as the Goldwater debacle in 1964: that the grown-ups would take over the Republican Party once again, and that the neo-fascists, racists, and authoritarians would be forced back under the rocks from which they had come. They were not worthy of a man of Barry Goldwater's personal decency, even if his extreme positions beckoned them into the light.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, is their kind of guy.

I sensed- more rightly than I knew, as it's turning out- that 2016 was like 1976: a "poison pill" election in which the winner was doomed to be a one-term president. Better that it should be Hillary who would be voted out in 2020 and a sane and competent Republican elected even if it meant a couple more liberal Supreme Court justices than that an inept and unstable Trump spend four years bringing the Republican Party into such disrepute that he would be the last Republican president elected for a generation.

I was wrong. Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. has an enlightening article over at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com on how the nationalization of politics has tribalized our parties and worked a surgical feat I would never have believed, removing the backbones of all the Republican moderates who haven't felt compelled to leave the party rather than get aboard the Trump Train and made sniveling sycophants out of Republican politicians and conservative journalists who had always previously seemed paragons of common sense, principle, and courage. In today's nationalized, tribalized, us-versus-them political climate, political parties don't recover from takeovers by their extreme fringes; they become the extreme fringes. There is no incentive to appeal to the center because the center no longer exists. Conformity means irrationality, and perversely, irrationality becomes the price of relevance.

People like John Kasich and Mitt Romney and Larry Hogan remain in the Trumpified GOP. But they have no constituency beyond the Republican minorities blue states where they are most often found. They have been marginalized, and those who have not felt compelled in conscience to disassociate themselves from a party gone mad are pariahs. Even in the face of the disaster that apparently looms for the Republican Party in November. there is no longer a moderate wing of the party to pick up the pieces. The crazies own the party now, and they will not cede ownership even when Donald Trump has left the scene.

Those who might have been led the party out of the wilderness and who have managed to avoid becoming irrelevant have done so at the price of turning into Trumpkins.  Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley and Joni Ernst (if she survives in the Senate beyond November, which I hope she does not) will provide no relief. They cannot save the Republican Party from the craziness because they have been forced to conform to it, and if they are feigning madness the pretense will prove impossible to drop. As Drutman points out, in today's tribalized political climate even rank-and-file members of our political parties don't rise up to challenge what is distorted and malignant in them. They are conformed to it by peer pressure and the "us-versus-them" spirit of the age.

They have not all conformed to equal degrees or in the same ways. It takes a fair degree of ideological distortion to equate support for Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court with Trumpism as opposed to constitutional originalism; to portray hurting poor people  (as opposed to frugality in government spending) as necessarily a unifying and defining characteristic of Republicans- yet; or to buy so completely as he seems to into the myth that the condition of the Democratic Party is substantially any healthier than that of the GOP. But Percy Baker, Jr., who seems to believe these things, still managed to write another useful article that appeared on FiveThirtyEight.com in March of 2018. It's called  "The Five Wings of the Republican Party."  In it, he distinguishes between:

1) The out-and-out Trump loyalists (who simply parrot the President's line no matter what);

2) The "Pro-Trumpers" (those who disagree with the President on certain specific policy matters- often because they see him as insufficiently conservative- but generally toe the line; essentially, the remnants of the Tea Party Movement);

3) Those who might be called the "Bush Lite" wing, who are careful to avoid criticizing Trump publicly but have substantive differences with him on policy and who may be the most influential wing of the institutional party; once (though no longer) the folks who ran the show, but now in disrepute with the rank-and-file, they're the remnants of what was once called "the Establishment;"

4) Trump-skeptical moderates- who are generally quite conservative on policy matters, contrary to what many on the Republican right seem to think, but who are willing to forcefully criticize Trump's more outrageous statements and behavior while generally siding with him on policy, and in the case of Mitt Romney actually voting to convict him on amply-proven impeachment charges; and finally,

5) The out-and-out Never Trumpers such as myself, a small, forlorn band whose future in the Republican Party is non-existent.

The first faction will dissolve, mostly into the second, once Mr. Trump is gone. The third- what I think of as the "Bush Lite" group- will remain a force in the post-Trump party, though a much-weakened one, and might unsuccessfully contend going forward for a more traditional Republican Party, maybe in most respects resembling the policy profile of George W. Bush. Whatever forlorn hopes of a return to normality the GOP may have rest with them.  The Romney-types and the out-and-out Never Trumpers are pariahs in the national party despite sometimes being quite conservative ideologically and might or might not grudgingly be accepted back into the fold in time if they are sufficiently contrite and promise to be good. But if they were sufficiently craven to do that, they would probably have done so already, and most (including me) are openly supporting Joe Biden this time around.

But my experience before the Trump takeover of the party tells me that it's the second group- the remnants of the Tea Party, the most ideologically extreme and purist branch of the GOP- with whom the party's future lies. I fully expect Ted Cruz to be the Republican nominee in 2024 regardless of what happens on November 3. Maybe Mike Pence might win a few primaries, too, but Cruz strikes me as smarter, more aggressive, more philosophically substantial, and he already has a built-in national base from his 2016 run. The Republicans, like the Democrats, are no longer a political party, but a tribe. Although he will never accept obscurity, the disappearance of Donald Trump from political relevance will coincide with his departure from power: I doubt that many Republicans in any camps (except maybe a few in the first) have any respect for him personally. Once he has no power to punish dissenters the same thing will happen that happened in Russia after the fall of Stalin: the critics will all come out of the woodwork, and suddenly everybody will be quite open about the "grave reservations" with which they supported the most unfit president in our nation's history.

Drutman says it this way:

In a survey of party chairs at the county-level (or equivalent) branch of government in 2013 — well before Trump became president — local party leaders said they preferred more extreme candidates to more centrist candidates. This finding was true especially among Republicans, who preferred extreme candidates by a 10-to-1 margin. (Democrats preferred more extreme candidates just 2 to 1.) If anything, this ratio may be even more lopsided among Republicans. One of the underappreciated changes in the past few years is the extent to which Trump-style Republicans have taken over the machinery of state and local parties, which means they’ll be able to shape the GOP well beyond 2020, too.

This swing toward more radical candidates may sound surprising — after all, shouldn’t party leaders want to nominate moderates to win? But considering that the overwhelming majority of legislative elections are now safe for one party, most parties can win regardless of who they nominate. In fact, there’s even evidence that the long-standing electoral price of extremism has all but vanished.

These patterns are all part of a vicious cycle that has been feeding on itself for decades. The more extreme the Republican Party has become, the more moderates have opted out or just been passed over. The more moderates have opted out or been passed over, the more extreme the party has become. And the more the Republican Party recedes to just elected officials in solidly conservative states and districts, the more they define the party.

There is an understandable tendency on the left to downplay the Democratic drift into extremism. I'll do a post at some point on the empirical evidence of how far that drift has already taken the rank-and-file. But suffice it, for now, to say that while pragmatism stopped the Democrats short of nominating Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren this time around, it's my profound conviction that Joe Biden is the Mitt Romney of the Democratic Party. Après Joe, le déluge.

The nation will be left with tribes instead of parties and a polarized America will live in a state of perpetual political civil war, unable even to debate the issues of the day, reduced to screaming slogans and bumper-stickers at each other which neither side will understand but upon which the other will place the most sinister possible construction. Rational, moderate Republicans and Democrats will find themselves unable to influence the direction of either party, but plenty of us will remain- and it is with us that any hope of America surviving as a functioning democracy resides.

The paranoid craziness of the Republican National Convention just adjourned is a glimpse into the future not merely of the Republican Party but of the Democratic Party as well. The Republican Party is dead as a forum for rational discourse and coherent, pragmatic policy, and the Democratic Party is dying.

The future of America literally depends on our recognition that the two-party system has failed catastrophically and that a third and perhaps even a fourth major party is needed if we as a nation are going to be able to govern ourselves going forward. We no longer have a healthy two-party system, but a perpetual war between to tribes of fanatics. And that is no foundation with which a free people can govern themselves.