On the Senility Of Political Parties
Nov. 30th, 2011 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribSo, noted conservative David Frum recently asked, When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?. In his article, he points out such things as, "It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor." By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are "lucky duckies" because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked "churches, synagogues, and mosques." By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55."
I would argue that this is political senility, and it happens, periodically, to every political party and movement. In the late 1960s, the Democratic Party went senile, in strikingly similar fashion. Then, the liberal wing of the party split it in half, causing the conservative Southern wing to go first to Tricky Dick Nixon then Reagan. The 21st Century comparison is the country-club-led bailout of the financial sector (TARP was a Bush idea, vigorously supported by one John Boehner), which split the party, allowing the Tea Party wing to take the drivers' seat.
In the late 1960s, the Democratic Party, led by people who were a hell of a lot closer to socialists than even avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders, tried to regulate the economy to death while disengaging from the Cold War. Now, Tea Partiers want to undo not just the New Deal but to go back to the Gilded Age. For both sets of people, since the facts on the ground were not congenial to their views, they made up their own facts.
Nor is this the first cycle of political senility. I would argue that something similar hit the Republican party in the 1930s, and that both parties suffered senility around the turn of the 20th century and the arrival of the progressive movement. There are several causes of this senility.
First, the party leadership gets infected with the "loudest applause syndrome." Basically, as party leaders move up or out, they select as their replacement those who clapped the loudest at their speeches. This leads to a cycle of radicalization. Second, in a two-party system, political power comes from building a coalition of disparate groups. In "normal" times, the intra-coalition push and pull keeps the party more-or-less grounded in reality. Then something happens that breaks the coalition. Of the last four cycles, the external event was economic (two Depressions), social (Civil Rights) and sheer accident (McKinley's death, putting Roosevelt in the bully pulpit).
In politics as in life, nothing lasts forever.
I would argue that this is political senility, and it happens, periodically, to every political party and movement. In the late 1960s, the Democratic Party went senile, in strikingly similar fashion. Then, the liberal wing of the party split it in half, causing the conservative Southern wing to go first to Tricky Dick Nixon then Reagan. The 21st Century comparison is the country-club-led bailout of the financial sector (TARP was a Bush idea, vigorously supported by one John Boehner), which split the party, allowing the Tea Party wing to take the drivers' seat.
In the late 1960s, the Democratic Party, led by people who were a hell of a lot closer to socialists than even avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders, tried to regulate the economy to death while disengaging from the Cold War. Now, Tea Partiers want to undo not just the New Deal but to go back to the Gilded Age. For both sets of people, since the facts on the ground were not congenial to their views, they made up their own facts.
Nor is this the first cycle of political senility. I would argue that something similar hit the Republican party in the 1930s, and that both parties suffered senility around the turn of the 20th century and the arrival of the progressive movement. There are several causes of this senility.
First, the party leadership gets infected with the "loudest applause syndrome." Basically, as party leaders move up or out, they select as their replacement those who clapped the loudest at their speeches. This leads to a cycle of radicalization. Second, in a two-party system, political power comes from building a coalition of disparate groups. In "normal" times, the intra-coalition push and pull keeps the party more-or-less grounded in reality. Then something happens that breaks the coalition. Of the last four cycles, the external event was economic (two Depressions), social (Civil Rights) and sheer accident (McKinley's death, putting Roosevelt in the bully pulpit).
In politics as in life, nothing lasts forever.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-30 10:27 pm (UTC)I think the core question is while nothing last forever, can we handle the damage that could be done in the process? I see this with people who see the only solution to things like the problems with education to be a complete destruction of the education system with nothing but private schools emerging the other side. It's an interesting thought experiment but one with a dramatic failure mode. Likewise the economic lunacy we're currently dealing with is destroying large parts of the overall economy both here and abroad.
The austerity meme is in that class. I wonder how bad things have to get before Modern Democratic systems start to fail badly?