I recently had a casual conversation with a fellow who went on to make a pretty bold political prediction, which he ended with, “You heard it here first.”
In effect, his prediction came down to The Parties Are Over, at least as we know them. On the paths they are currently following toward domination, the Republican Party would implode first, but the Democrats would not be far behind.
What would emerge would not be the death of parties, but a realignment. The kinds of interests that spur differing political coalitions in the first place would not go away. In his prediction, today’s moderate Republicans and a fair number of moderate Democrats would find common ground to form a new controlling “party,” in fact, a majority party.
Yes, the muddy, mushy, wishy-washy “middle” that recognizes more than one point of view and accepts some tilt-this-way, tilt-that-way compromises in the name of stability and even civility.
I may not have agreed with everything my friend had to say, nor the emphasis on certain points. His prediction might not be so bold or new, but rather a variation on the old idea of “reversion to the mean.”
And recent news items suggest that time and some in-party challenges may – may – be putting some cracks in Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and its hardcore base.
Still, I respect what my friend had to say. I have known him for some time now. He knows a thing or two about history. He has experienced a thing or two in politics well beyond watching nightly news shows in couch-potato mode.
Our conversation has stuck with me for some time now. In part, it is unsettling. I mean, his prediction amounted to a mighty big change, one over which I would have zero control. The world we have now is just the way the world is, right? But another part carries a whiff of hope that what we have now could become the way the world was.
Our conversation had started with some kind of reference to George Washington. Yeah, George Washington, the guy with the funky three-cornered hat and the wooden dentures. Yeah, the Revolutionary War general who in 1789 was elected our first president in an election as close to unanimous as we will ever get.
With his immense popularity, Washington could well have engineered the presidency into a kingship, but he remained faithful to the little-r republican idea of power and authority rising bottom-up from the people, instead of the European top-down model of God anointing the king and the aristocracy around him with the power to rule.
Setting precedents and norms all along the way, Washington led the organizing of a new-fangled government in a new country, with 90 percent of its paltry four-million citizens living along the Atlantic Ocean in a strip 50 miles wide and 1,000 miles long.
His two administrations survived internal in-fighting that makes some of today’s political disagreements seem like patty-cake (see Hamilton and Jefferson and any newspaper of the day).
It maneuvered through both internal and external threats ranging from the Whiskey Rebellion over war debt taxes to the French Revolution to schemes that would set up separate little countries in the backcountry (see Bowen, the Yazoo land fraud, Elijah Clarke’s brief Trans-Oconee Republic right here in today’s Putnam County with its Fort Defiance facing east toward Georgia, and later, Aaron Burr).
Then came Washington’s two long-term signatures on history. One, he did not run for a third term, thereby returning the power given to him back to the people and a rising generation. Some in Europe called it a “miracle” and could not believe it.
Two, in his farewell address, Washington warned against the coming trend of groups, or “parties,” contesting against each other.
It was at this point our conversation devolved into the comings – and goings – of such parties over the ensuing years. The disappearance of the Washington/John Adams Federalist Party, with its business-oriented interests later coalescing into the Whigs.
Jefferson and Madison’s Democratic-Republicans (Democrats); Calhoun’s Nullifiers in the 1830s; the 1850s Whig collapse into splinter groups like the nativist, anti-Catholic American (“Know Nothing”) party and Free Soil party, which in turn joined former Whigs in the new Republican party of Fremont and then Lincoln.
Not to be outdone, the 1860 Democrats splintered into three groups, leading to Lincoln’s election and the civil war.
The Greenbacks in the 1880s. The Populists in the 1890s. The Socialists and then Communists in the 1920s and ‘30s. The Green and Libertarian parties in more recent years.
All fervently raised issues that were being neglected by the parties in power.
As it turned out since our Civil War, both their parties and their issues have been modified and absorbed into one or the other of our two major parties.
So, will one, or both, of our current major parties implode and new ones emerge? Probably not. But it does offer food for thought.