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November 01, 2006

Allegiances

John Cole is, understandably, upset about the direction his party has taken over the last six years.

And it makes me mad. I still think of myself as a Republican- but I think the whole party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills, and it frustrates me to no end to see my former friends enabling them, and I wonder ‘Why can’t they see what I see?” I don’t think I am crazy, I don’t think my beliefs have changed radically, and I don’t think I have been (as suggested by others) brainwashed by my commentariat.

If there were one thing I could point to in this country as the biggest thing damaging the political process, it would political parties. Political parties (at least successful ones) exist for only one reason: to get people elected. Obviously each party wants to elect people who subscribe to certain common principles, but the nature of the American system guarantees that only two parties will be ascendant at any one time, and that those parties will of necessity have very big tents. Pick an issue, and I'll wager I can find someone in that party who's on the other side. The parties have to do that, because if they're overly doctrinaire, they can't get people elected. (See the Libertarian Party as a prime example of this.) But that focus on getting people elected means that parties are willing to put anything else aside in order to hold onto power. One need look no further than the Republican Party's embrace of the prescription drug benefit, a benefit tacked onto a program that Republicans once planned to eliminate. But that bill was seen as beneficial to the party's electoral prospects, and so it was pushed through.

Political parties also undermine the checks and balances built into our system. A major reason President Bush has been able to act with so few constraints has been the presence of a Congress dominated by the same party. Congressional Republicans don't want to harm their party, and an investigation that embarasses a Republican President would do just that. So they all go along to get along, and the vital check of legislative power has been nullified by the power of parties.

But political parties also attract personal loyalty, as I noted a few weeks ago. While the parties themselves exist to get their candidates elected, most people are drawn to a political party because they have some basic philosophical agreement. Prochoice voters tend to be drawn to the Democratic Party, while voters who care about gun rights will skew Republican. (Again, these are trends; I happen to be both prochoice and pro-gun rights and I'm neither.) Once a voter chooses a party, he will tend to identify with that party because he views it as his 'tribe.' Even a decade after leaving the Republican Party, I tend to notice slights to Republicans far more quickly than similar slights to Democrats.

We are never going to eliminate political parties. The costs of getting people elected to national office are too great, both in terms of money and organization. The checks and balances built into our system must be replaced by checks and balances imposed by the voters, by maintaining split government, for example. And we can hope that the pursuit of power for its own sake by the parties continues to drive people away from parties.

The more people who break away from the party structure, the more the parties will have to adapt to attract their votes. John is astounded that many of his old friends are still going to vote Republican, given all he has seen. But this is no surprise: I'd wager that roughly one-third of the electorate would vote Republican no matter what, and a similar number would do the same for the Democrats. It is these people, the parties bases, that help to lead to some of the problems John decries, such as the Terri Schiavo mess. Each side has to keep its base satisfied, because they're the ones who are most likely to vote. Only by peeling away some of those bases and forcing the parties to address other concerns will these things change.

And that will take time, if it happens at all. I asked a hypothetical question at Obsidian Wings of the (generally Democratic) comment base there, if they could vote Republican if the Democratic Party went bad. A fair number of them argued that the question was silly, because the Democratic Party wouldn't go bad, Republicans are evil, etc. It should hardly surprise them that many on the Republican side tend to feel the same way about Democrats. But it does, and as long as that is the case, John will continute to be shocked by how people he thought he knew can act so (in his perception) irrationally.