Great Debate Attempt #2: Does America need an opposition party?

  This post is a follow-up to the discussion here. 

The modern Republican party has taken positions on both social and economic issues that are at variance with the median American voter.  For some time, the GOP was capable of wracking up legislative majorities despite that fact.  This feat was due to three factors, in reverse of order of (IMHO) importance:  (1) the memory of the Reagan years, when the GOP's conservatism did, in fact, reflect a change in the preferences of the median American voter, (2) the impact of 9-11 and the Bush Administration's skillful use of fear and war fever, and (3) the GOP's impressive internal discipline.  A great book on the latter topic is Off Center, although the authors turned out to be wrong about the durability of the GOP's majority. 

Today the GOP appears to be sliding towards regional irrelevance.  Laissez-faire economics has become less popular, for obvious reasons.  In addition, the low-marginal-tax doctrine has also become rather less popular ... and will, in fact, become unsustainable once the economy recovers.  Similarly, the declining quality of private health care has produced a groundswell for reform.  Finally, the GOP is falling behind the curve on “social issues.”  Why the scare quotes?  Simply because said issues are increasingly becoming non-issues, much as they were in 1960.  The society's mores have changed, and electoral preferences are changing with them.  Once that generational shift is complete, a party that hold the GOP's current stances will be SOL.

I don't want to ask whether the GOP can, in theory, offer a modernized conservatism with long-term appeal.  The answer to that question is yes.  Frex, a modern conservative party could, in theory, be constructed around gender-neutral pro-natalism, mandatory national service, free trade, “non-financial defined contribution” pension schemes, German-style health care, re-privatization of the financial system, and other things, some of which are laid out in insufficient but intriguing detail here. 

No, I want to ask if we, as patriotic Americans (or non-Americans who would like the United States to be well-governed, for whatever reason) should care whether the GOP can reform itself.  What would happen if the GOP became unelectable?  The answer is less obvious that it might appear.

My friend Doug Muir is worried that there is a risk that America's opposition party will become unelectable.  More importantly, he is also worried that an impotent and unelectable Republican Party will be bad for America.  The worry, I presume, is the Democrats will eventually become fat and corrupt and lead the country into a ditch.  Without a credible alternative waiting in the wings, the country could drive further into that ditch than otherwise.  

Such a fear isn't at all crazy.  But is it reasonable?

Three things make me rather sanguine about the potential decline of the GOP. 

First, it probably won't happen.  A modernized GOP will still be recognizably conservative.  And its conservative base will want to win elections.  Lose enough elections and the most likely outcomes will be that the base demonstrably modernizes or loses control of the party organization.  If that happens, then the Republicans will once again become competitive.   

Second, even if the Republicans go into long-term decline, it might not be bad for the country.  The Democratic Party is not very centralized.  The DNC lacks the ability to credibly threaten obstreperous members with primary challenges, also unlike its Republican counterpart.  In fact, with the entrance of relatively conservative new members who enjoy their own fundraising base, the Democratic leadership's ability to discipline its members appears to be declining. 

For a few years, it may seem that the Democrats are centralized.  (1) The new President-elect is popular and very skilled at navigating legislative bodies.  (2) There is a large groundswell of opinion that wants to modernize American social insurance, business regulation, and efforts to keep the planet fit for human civilization.  (3)  There is a depression to head off.  Those three things, however, do not change the fact that the Democratic Party is inherently fractious.  (Frex my opinion that the leadership's opinion of Chris Matthews has f@#k-all to do with whether he will run or whether he will win.)  

Once the current progressive agenda finds its way into law, then the party will start to fragment once again.  A national opposition party might not be necessary, given the Democrats' long-standing ability to oppose themselves.  As Will Rogers said, “I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat.”  Politics in a dominant-party America would look rather different from what we are used to, but I am not that it would be bad.

Finally, even should the Democrats become corrupt and unresponsive, and the Republican remain nationally unpalatable (an unlikely combination) the American political system appears quite open to the rapid emergence of a new national opposition party.  There are few of the structural problems that bedevil Japan.  (The Liberal Democrats of Japan have not won a majority of the popular vote since 1963.  Representation in the U.S. Congress is screwed-up, but not that screwed up.) 

In short, in the unlikely event that the Republican Party refuses to modernize despite a few more electoral wallopings, American democracy could function just fine under a decentralized Democratic hegemony.  And in the equally unlikely event that a hegemonic Democratic Party should become centralized and therefore resistant to primary challenges, a new opposition party would emerge rather quickly. 

In fact, the Democrats only just regained power in the 2006 and 2008 elections, after some time in the wilderness.  And the Democratic Party remains remarkably decentralized.  I cannot see why a speedy revitalization of the GOP is necessary for the health of the Republic.  Yes, a non-crazified GOP would make it easier for the president-elect to make necessary changes ... but so would a 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate.  It's a lot less risky to support a 60-seat majority with votes and money than it is to support moderate Republicans in the hope that they'll undercut their own leadership from within.

But I could be wrong.  Thoughts?

Comments

[Andrew R.]

Well, I'm particularly saddened by the fact that as the normal people increasingly flee the GOP, it gives the lunatics more and more power. What needs to happen is for normal people to get involved in the Republican party. But no one wants to get involved with a party where the inmates have taken over the asylum.

I think I've mentioned this before here, but Democrats occupying an analogous role to Canada's Liberals is not the worst thing I can imagine. My big worry (and this is purely me) has to do with two things, namely the death penalty and Second Amendment. With uncontested Democratic power, they could vanish and Justice Kennedy would finally have his wish of us not looking like rubes to those sophisticated Europeans.

[Noel Maurer]

Canada's Liberal Party is a good analogy, although the Democrats wouldn't quite look like it, for the simple reason that Westminster-style parties need to be highly disciplined operations for the system to function, whereas the Democrats can do fine as a loose and woolly coalition. Not as loose or as woolly as the one that controlled Congress in 1954-94, but loose.

I can't imagine the Democrats ever trying to abolish the death penalty, although the institution is dying as state governments increasingly grapple with the fact that a substantial number of innocent people have been executed ... and the fiscal cost of insuring that does not happen more is extremely high.

As for federal gun control, well, the real question is whether a future Democratic government would attempt to strengthen it in the face of public opinion.

Thoughts?

[Andrew R.]

You know, I suspect that gun control may remain a non-issue and likewise there will be lots of pressure on capital punishment for the same reason. We're rapidly getting to the point when the Ramadification of many American cities of the late 80's will have faded from public consciousness (especially now that The Wire is done with. So barring a repeat of the meteoric rise in crime from the late 60's through the late 80's, these things just aren't going to have the emotional resonance necessary to get people riled up to Do Something. As a result, both executing criminals and stopping gun violence will seem less urgent to the public in general. That gives the advantage to the folks who want to abolish the death penalty but also to those who want to keep the right to own firearms intact.

[Doug M.]

Possibly useful data point: I spent a couple of years in Britain in the mid-1980s, right around the time Labour was hitting absolute rock bottom.

You mentioned Parliamentary democracy, yah? Recall that Labour lost a breathtaking four general elections in a row -- 1979, 1983, 1997, and 1992. That's actually worse than losing four US presidential elections in a row, since UK GEs determine control of Parliament as well, and governments can last up to five years.

Labour was locked out of power for 18 years -- and for about 14 of those 18, they were pretty much completely useless as an opposition.

My very strong impression is that this was not a good thing for Britain at any level.

I note in passing that from May 1997 to sometime in 2006, exactly the opposite situation prevailed: the Tories were trashed so thoroughly that they were almost meaningless as opposition. (They've become a bit more of a menace lately.) Note also that this situation is in large part a product of Labour's earlier uselessness; governing with no real opposition helped the Tories become completely flabby and stupid, so that when they finally went down it was in the manner of the one hoss shay. The recent Labour ascendancy has been much less bad than the previous Tory dominance, in part because it hasn't lasted as long, in part because Labour is just a lot less evil. But it's still bad.

More perhaps in a bit.

Doug M.

[Noel Maurer]

I'm eagerly awaiting what more you have to say, and I mean that quite seriously.

I wrote above: "In short, in the unlikely event that the Republican Party refuses to modernize despite a few more electoral wallopings, American democracy could function just fine under a decentralized Democratic hegemony. And in the equally unlikely event that a hegemonic Democratic Party should become centralized and therefore resistant to primary challenges, a new opposition party would emerge rather quickly."

I think you're responding to the second contingency.

Most of my analysis presupposes that the Democrats do not become a centralized parliamentary party. "A national opposition party might not be necessary, given the Democrats' long-standing ability to oppose themselves."

The corrolary is that the British example holds few lessons for America ... unless the Democratic Party becomes as centralized as the Republicans' most-recent incarnation.

There are structural reasons to believe that won't happen, but past performance does not always predict future results. There is nothing intrisically irreplacable about the GOP's control over its congresspeople or its (somewhat weaker) ability to insure that the "right" candidate wins the primary season.

(McCain, oddly enough, was the establishment candidate in '08; that was the price he extracted for coming back to the party fold in '04. The cost, of course, was that he had to adopt the establishment's positions. Hmm. When was the last really competitive Republican primary? 1980? 1976?)

In other words, the British experience only holds a warning for the U.S. should the Democratic Party transform itself into something other than what it currently is. But how likely is that?

What say you? What say others?

[Andrew R.]

Doug, I have a question for you about Labour. Surely you're a bit too sanguine about certain "softly authoritarian" measures enacted by New Labour. England is now the most surveilled country on the planet Earth, and that the government can say things like, "We need more convictions for certain crimes, double jeopardy be damned" seems to indicate that a center-left government left unchecked can combine some of the worst aspects of left and right with respect to a government that Really Cares but also embodies a general desire seen to be tough on crime.

[Jussi Jalonen]

You know, Noel, this is one of those moments where I have no choice but to run the risk of irritating you. Because there are actually some people who might be slightly shocked when they hear normal, intelligent people phrasing eloquent arguments with words such as "A national opposition party might not be necessary, given the long-standing ability of the ruling party to oppose itself."

Well, yeah. The Mexican PRI and the Kemalist CHP had internal factions as well, and their period of governance as the single, ruling party was arguably more or less beneficial for both countries, with some exceptions. Same goes for the present-day Yedinaya Rossiya, obviously - and the supremacy of that party could also be justified by those same reasons.

So, your above-quoted phrase may look to some people as the Beginning of the End. Would you really like the political system of the United States to be compared in that same category? Call me old-fashioned, but I think that some kind of an actual national opposition party should be always considered necessary. And preferably, it should be an opposition party which has not emerged simply as a split from the ruling single party.

As for your suggestion that "a new opposition party would emerge rather quickly"... would it? Would the American political activism be able to spawn a new, viable movement to challenge the ruling regime in this century? Assuming that this opposition party would not be founded merely by exiled Democrats, that is?

And when it comes to the suggestion of a temporary hegemony, during which the pre-existing opposition party might presumably be able to reform itself... well, I'm not sure how accurate it would be to make a prediction that the coming decades might end up resembling the period of Republican hegemony during the 1870s and the 1880s. And the said era was not exactly famous for its good, clean politics.

I'm not sure if Doug had that example also in mind, aside the British parallel that he mentioned.

Cheers,

J. J.

[Noel Maurer]

Irritate me? No way. I'm playing with a provocative idea, and I hope to get more responses. As you know, I'm perfectly open to changing my opinion.

I am sort of pleased that I managed to shock you.

Knowing something about the CHP, and a bit more about the PRI, I'm inclined to dismiss both analogies. Both parties existed as part of an authoritarian polity. Down to secret police, sudden disappearances, and nothing resembling a free press. Nor was authoritarianism an outcome of single-party rule; single-party rule was the result of authoritarianism.

Factionalism inside both organizations is nothing like democratic primary elections. That doesn't mean that you're wrong that a prolonged period of Democratic hegemony in the United States would be bad for the Republic; it just means that comparisons to Mexico or Turkey don't tell you anything.

There are several American states that are run under Democratic hegemony, with the GOP serving mainly as an occasional vehicle to elect a non-ideological governor ... and unless the counterfactual is utopia, many of those states (such as the one that I live in) are not too badly run.

I need two things to be convinced that the reduction of the Republican Party to a regional force (which I don't think is likely) would be a bad thing for the Republic.

First, a compelling argument explaining why Democratic primary elections would eventually fail to serve as a way to discipline governments or mobilize popular opinion.

Second, a compelling argument explaining why a coherent opposition would fail to emerge fairly rapidly in the event of Democratic failure.

Takers?