Ch 4.1 | 🎉The evolution of the parties
Much of what makes up today’s political system has no basis in the Constitution at all. Did you know that there are only six paragraphs in the Constitution explicitly detailing how Congress should work? The legislative branch’s few enumerated, or listed, powers were contained in Article I, Section 8. These include: to lay and collect taxes; pay debts and borrow money; regulate commerce; coin money; establish post offices; protect patents and copyrights; establish lower courts; declare war; and raise and support an Army and Navy. But the very end of this list contained one more power: to make all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out the enumerated powers. Also known as the elastic clause, this phrase allows Congress to stretch its enumerated powers a bit — well, much more than a bit — to fit its needs.
For instance, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that under the necessary and proper clause, Congress had the power to establish a national bank to carry out its powers to collect taxes, pay debts and borrow money.
In terms of elections, the Constitution contains barely a few sentences that describe how Congress is to be elected.
Article 4, Section 1 includes an elections clause, which states:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.
Clause 2 within that section states:
The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.
As discussed in “Setting the stage,” most of the rules that shape the day-to-day behavior and outcomes in the political system are perversely optimized — or even expressly designed — by and for politicians themselves as well as their allies in the larger political-industrial complex. The average American citizen is rarely a beneficiary.
The increasing divide between political parties and the rise of extreme partisanship has made it difficult for politicians to work together, hindering progress on virtually any issue.
The duopoly is entrenched.
The Democratic Party has allied itself with intelligence agencies, corporate elites and Big Tech, apparently willing to silence dissenters while totally abandoning its once vibrant anti-war image.
The Republican party is on an unpopular anti-abortion crusade, can't find a cultural issue it won’t go to war on, elevates unqualified extremist candidates and seems increasingly uninterested in the ideals of democracy.
🏆Political parties exist to win
I’m not going to go into the history of political parties (although that is a fascinating bit of history) or why they were formed, nor how primaries were initially conceived to make elections "more democratic." I’m trying to make a more basic point.
Political parties exist to win and retain (or regain) power. In its quest for power, the duopoly has discovered something that science is just starting to understand: Our brains are wired to respond to certain stimuli, and the Democratic and Republican parties have been capitalizing it.
A doctor friend of mine recently told me that MRIs can predict how you will vote with incredible accuracy. So I did some research. Sure enough, there is an emerging field called “political neuroscience” that has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions. It seems, according to this science, that partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth.
As the author writes in Scientific American:
Sadly, just knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity.
Partisanship before country
Back to the issue at hand, and how divisive the duopoly has become. I want to wax nostalgic for a moment and harken back to the opening line of George W Bush's State of the Union address in January 2007.
If you want to get a sense of how far we’ve fallen in the past 15 years, just watch:
To hear Bush say that he has the “high privilege” and "distinct honor" to be the first president to begin the State of the Union address with these words "Madam Speaker" reminds how unfathomable Washington has become.
But understand that this began decades before.
As Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter explain, from World War II until the early 1970s, the way the House and Senate worked is sometimes referred to by political scientists as the “textbook Congress.”
During the 1950s and 1960s the parties had not yet gained control of the legislative process; committees were in control. And those committees were insulated from the parties by a set of norms, such as the seniority system, in which committee chairs were selected according to length of service, not by party leadership. Lacking control of personnel, party leaders had much less control over the governing process. Committees were intended to be where dialogue, deliberation, and negotiation took place and where members came together to identify problems and draft solutions.
The "committee takeover" was initially started by the Democratic Party, which had been a permanent majority in the House of Representatives for 40 years starting in 1955. It was then cemented by Republicans when they finally took the reins in 1995 — reshaping Congress and setting our political system on a course toward dysfunction and gridlock.
Allow me to quote an October 2023 post by Ray Dalio ("The Failure of Kevin McCarthy is Another Step Away from Democracy and Toward Civil War") that sums it up fairly well:
I hope it is now clear that the two parties are squaring off into monolithic blocks that are controlled by uncompromising, win-at-all-costs extremists and that most everyone will be forced to pick a side and fight for it. While this tendency is most obvious in the Republican Party, it is also true for those in the Democratic Party. (Though the Democratic Party wisely chooses to make it less obvious, it very apparently demonstrates it in the ideological conflicts that are taking place throughout government, especially in congressional committees.) This is now a fight to win-at-all costs game in which just about anything goes, including fighting dirty (lying and cheating), and respect for the system doesn’t matter much.
Bipartisan thoughtful disagreement that leads to compromises and voting on the basis of one's beliefs about what is best for the country are passé. For understandable reasons e.g. — much greater wealth and differences in values and people being fed-up with the system not working for them — and the political system has (d)evolved from where it was when Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil and their constituents had more principles in common that bound them together than those that were opposed and divided them. Because those now controlling the two parties do not want party members to work across party lines and because there is certainly no room for people who put the interest of the country above loyalty to their parties, we are now in a period of much greater conflict both within and between the parties.
🪙The Democratic and Republican parties are two sides of the same coin
I will be the first to acknowledge that it’s not only the GOP — the Democratic Party struggles as well. Please know that I’m not necessarily a fan of all of Bill Maher's politics, but he makes a very interesting point here about both Democratic and Republican parties and their polarizing views of America. It's worth watching.
It's a sad commentary. But what Maher doesn't discuss is the root cause of the problem . And it's not, as he says, they "hate America." It's that they are forced to pander to an extreme within their party: the base.
I hope I've made the case throughout this project that it’s time to fix the system to bring fairness and end the disproportionate voice of the extreme left and extreme right.
Let me also be clear that in order to fix the system, we do not need to dismantle the existing parties. In fact, I agree with Kent Thiry in that I do not object to a two-party system. For what it's worth, while there are advantages and disadvantages, I do not support embracing a truly "multi-party" system that obliterates our two dominant parties.
My concern with fracturing the parties is that achieving a majority requires a "coalition" in order to form a government. Coalitions often lead to perverse outcomes where in order to pass legislation, fringe parties have leverage and we end up with exactly what we're aiming to eliminate (e.g., disproportionate representation for non-majority positions).
In the section on closed primaries, I shared a video interview of Kent in which he stated:
I often get grabbed and asked, “KT, you're trying to destroy the parties.” I say, “Heck no, I'm trying to save them.” You've got your customers leaving in droves and you're building higher and higher fences around smaller and smaller cities. You are on the road to oblivion and you might take our country with it."
The current incarnation of the parties originally faced off against each other from a simple division of beliefs based on our government structure as a constitutional republic. Democrats were more in favor of a strong, federal government with rule by the people en masse (true democracy), while Republicans were more in favor of the individual states having the bulk of the power (true federation).
As discussed in "Can you define socialism?,” it isn’t binary. Politics around the world spreads across a broad spectrum.
For a very long time, both of the parties truly were “two sides of the same coin” — very similar in behavior, just slightly different in ideas on how to do things.
Let’s take a brief look at the history of politics in America.
Founded in 1828, the Democratic Party is the oldest of the two largest U.S. political parties. The Republican Party was officially founded in 1854, but the histories of both are intrinsically connected. Actually, we can trace the two parties’ historical backgrounds all the way back to the Founding Fathers. Differing political views eventually sparked the forming of two factions. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams formed the Federalists. They sought to ensure a strong government and central banking system with a national bank. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison instead advocated for a smaller and more decentralized government, and formed the Democratic-Republicans.
Both the Democratic and the Republican Parties as we know them today are rooted in this early faction.
After World War I, the Republican Party became more and more oriented towards economic growth, industry and big business in northern states, and in the beginning of the 20th century it had reached a general status as a party for the more wealthy classes in society. Many Republicans therefore gained financial success in the prosperous 1920s until the stock market crashed in 1929 initiating the era of the Great Depression.
Many Americans blamed Republican President Herbert Hoover for the financial damages brought by the crisis. In 1932 the country therefore elected Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To get the country back on track, Roosevelt introduced his New Deal. The New Deal launched a number of progressive, government-funded social programs that included Social Security, improved infrastructure and a minimum wage. This meant that a large number of Southern Democrats, whose political views were more traditional and conservative, didn’t support Roosevelt’s liberal initiatives and joined the Republican Party instead. Roosevelt’s progressive, liberal policies played an important role in shifting the party’s political agenda to look like the Democratic Party as we know it today. And, after Roosevelt died in 1945, the Democrats stayed in power with Harry S. Truman in the White House. He continued to take the Democratic Party in a progressive direction with a pro-civil rights platform and desegregation of military forces, thereby gaining support from a large number of Black voters, who had previously supported the Republican Party because of its anti-slavery platform.
In my perfect world, I would have preferred to simply drag the GOP to the middle and have it shed its embrace of the far right and evangelical Christianity, which has no place in politics in America. But that is simply not possible given how far right the GOP's base sits today. While the Democrats are leaning farther left than I prefer, they remain more grounded in the middle than the current GOP.
🤜🏽The civil rights movement had a profound impact on the parties
There have been a few phases of change that have caused the parties to evolve over the past 60 or 70 years, removing any sense of the “two sides of the same coin” idea mentioned earlier. Given my earlier discussion this will sound familiar:
In the 1950s, the U.S. began to experience the upheaval of the fight for racial equality. At the time, each party had very similar structures: They had their conservatives, moderates and liberals. They operated in similar fashion in regard to spending, military might, global influence/expansion, religion, etc. But, as discussed earlier, the growth of the equality movement triggered schisms in each party. The leadership of the Democratic Party viewed this as a moment when the United States needed to act, as a nation, to fix a problem it had been experiencing since the country’s inception. The Republican Party leadership felt that race shouldn’t be a concern of the federal government and should be left to the states (I’m massively simplifying things). That said, even as recently as 1956, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower stated:
In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative.
The GOP platform during the Eisenhower era stated:
While jealously guarding the free institutions and preserving the principles upon which our Republic was founded and has flourished, the purpose of the Republican Party is to establish and maintain a peaceful world and build at home a dynamic prosperity in which every citizen fairly shares.
Through the 1960s, there was a massive change in the formation of the parties. Those opposed to equality in the Democratic Party moved over to the Republican Party, and those desiring equality in the Republican Party moved over to the Democrats. This triggered the change turning the Democratic Party into the party of liberals, and the Republican Party became the party of conservatives. But, aside from racist whites aligning with the Republicans, things were still very similar between the two parties, and they were still focused on governing and there was a lot of “reaching across the aisle.”
The Democratic Party had largely stayed in power from the end of the Great Depression, until 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president. Reagan’s social conservative politics and emphasis on cutting taxes, preserving “family values,” and increasing military funding were important steps in defining the modern Republican Party platform. This was driven, at least in part, by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. In 1979, he founded the Moral Majority, a political organization aligning the Christian right and Republican Party. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s. Its agenda:
Promotion of traditional family values.
Opposition to media outlets accused of promoting an anti-family agenda.
Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.
Opposition to state recognition or acceptance of homosexual acts.
Prohibition of abortion, including in cases involving incest or rape.
Support for Christian prayers in schools.
Proselytizing to Jews and other non-Christians for conversion to Christianity.
Reagan Democrats are a great example of how this strategy flipped a lot of predominantly liberal Democrats (mostly white, union-supporting, blue collar workers) to the Republican Party in the 1980s. It was masterful and Reagan sold it very easily.
Trump is just a further embodiment of this approach and has seemed to have ignited a fever pitch that even GOP leaders couldn’t have imagined back in 2016. So, even though they may loathe Donald Trump the person, they see how he has furthered their agenda and therefore have embraced him — and in the process endangered our future.
☭ The Red Scare
Let's take a moment and look at the impact of the Red Scare and the infamous Republican demagogue: Joe McCarthy. He was a Republican senator from Wisconsin who falsely accused liberals of being communists. His disgraceful brand of politics ended careers and brought shame on his party.
But even now Republicans scream from the rooftops that electing Democrats will result in America becoming a socialist or communist regime.
Let’s take a historical perspective, stingart with the communist movement in Russia in 1917, which did in fact begin as a left-wing effort. But that movement, under Karl Marx, was initially positive and beneficial for society. At the time of the uprising, the population was suffering from oppression under the Russian monarchy. The working class united, as Marx had suggested, to bring fairness to government and improve the lives of ordinary people. The movement was ultimately hijacked by a right-wing dictator named Joseph Stalin, who steered the country in the opposite direction, and transformed the Russian Federation into a right-wing totalitarian state, all under the false pretense of being a left-wing movement.
Since McCarthyism took hold, the GOP has undertaken a relentless campaign that rages to this day of falsely smearing Democrats. But consider the horrendous dictatorships of Stalin in the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler in Germany, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. These authoritarian regimes are actually not textbook socialist or communist regimes.
Consider the Salon article "Republicans claim to fear left-wing authoritarianism — but there's no such thing." Yes, dictators sometimes cloak themselves in "socialism." But tyranny, here and elsewhere, is always right-wing. As the author states:
This 'Big Lie' grew out of the aftermath of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War in the extreme backlash against communism and the Soviet Union. This was the era of the 'Red Scare' and lying Republican demagogue Joe McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, who falsely smeared innocent liberals as being dangerous communists, destroying their careers and lives. This period ranks among the most shameful in American history.
The article continues:
If Karl Marx were here today, he would be appalled by all of these countries that falsely invoke his name and ideas in order to impose right-wing governments of domination and control. This is precisely the opposite of what he had in mind, which was a vision of robust democracy and rule by the ordinary people.
Obviously, I'm not endorsing communism or socialism. I'm simply saying that even though we live in a complex world, the duopoly communicates in simple, easily understandable language in order to maintain power. All nuance and intellectual thought has been sterilized and we're left with nothing more than talking points designed to divide us.
There is one last important aspect to consider: the effect of American imperialism" (for lack of a better word). U.S. foreign policy and our desire to effectuate regime changes in the name of spreading democracy and defeating the “communist” and “socialist” threat to America is part of the reason many "socialist" or "communist" governments failed. Take Venezuela as a use case. At some level our foreign policy agenda of “spreading democracy” also means that we actively work to undermine our “enemies,” which make it more complicated to assess in a truly objective way. In some respects, our foreign policy all but ensures that they are failed states.
🎩From the Party of Lincoln to the current GOP
As an aside, I always cringe when GOP candidates say they are the “Party of Lincoln.” While technically true, the GOP of today is the farthest thing from that. But the complete story of that transformation is too complex to relate here. Let's just look at how the GOP has changed since the early 1990s.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich, a leader in the House’s Republicans, organized a Contract with America, which proposed a series of “promises” to force conservative ideas onto the nation, with a veiled emphasis on it being a Christian movement. This, coupled with the rise in evangelist Christians, triggered a massive change in the structure of the House of Representatives. A total of 54 seats flipped to the GOP, Republicans won control of the House for the first time in 40 years, and Gingrich became speaker. Before this moment, while both sides of the aisle were adversarial, they still worked together rather well and were generally civil towards one another. Several members of the House and Senate during the years prior to 1994 speak fondly of members of the “other side.” They socialized and were cordial. All that changed, seemingly overnight. The Republicans began a smear campaign; it was no longer good enough to say Democrats’ ideas weren’t good. No, now, it was required to call them “un-American,” “treasonous,” and “evil.” Democrats were assailed non-stop, also called “fascists,” “socialists,” and any other scary word that would turn off conservative Americans.
In 1996, Fox News began broadcasting. It was, initially, a fairly honest news network, though with a clear conservative slant. This changed rapidly, with the rise of Bill O'Reilly, essentially the television version of Rush Limbaugh. Fox quickly transformed into a misinformation channel; the amount of dishonest reporting grew exponentially until calling it “news" was laughable. During that time, Republicans began looking for ways to remove “tax-and-spend liberal” Bill Clinton and his “lesbian bitch wife” from the White House. They investigated every aspect of the Clintons’ lives: failed investments, previous jobs they held, until finally finding their golden goose: a young intern with whom President Clinton had an affair. This led to an impeachment by the House — his removal prevented only by a minority of Republican senators who voted “not guilty” on the charges. Making things more reprehensible was the behavior of conservative media personalities behind the scenes. Limbaugh, on the radio decrying drug-abusing Black people and insisting on a return to a moral America, was in fact a drug-addicted philanderer. While leading the Clinton impeachment push, Gingrich was having an affair with a House staffer; he was already on his third marriage. O'Reilly was a philanderer with a penchant for sexual harassment.
From this moment onward, Republican members of Congress would set an astonishing standard of hypocrisy, frequently decrying Democrats, even falsely accusing them, for doing things they themselves were knowingly involved in. To top it all off, there was a new standard in the Republican Party: If it didn’t involve homosexuality, the entire party was expected to circle the wagons and defend any member caught in a bad act. Several Republicans were found to be involved in an Asian sweatshop that abused young women and children, forcing many into prostitution (coupled with forced abortions); none were ever punished in any way. Through this all, Democrats appeared to be attempting to maintain the status quo, not changing tactics despite a steady string of electoral victories for Republicans.
But the GOP’s ability to govern came to a screeching halt in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. From that point on, their only goal was to obstruct. Any attempt to work across the aisle was viewed as a betrayal of the party.
This might be an oversimplification and you might conclude that I have a bias, but it’s important to see how all these moments wove together to create the challenges we face today.
In 2007, former New York Times foreign correspondent and Harvard Divinity School graduate Chris Hedges discussed his book “American Fascists.” In it, he warned that the Christian right is threatening a tolerant, free American society. He said that the movement’s ideological ancestors are the Italian and German fascist movements of the early 20th century. Watch the discussion.
And here is a great article from Tangle: "Which Party is More Extreme" is a fantastic read full of interesting data.
Unfortunately, it’s the GOP's current policies that are now very clearly and strategically designed to impose the party's beliefs (especially dogma of a religious nature) upon us, and in the process are taking away our liberty. And that has caused me to lose faith in the current incarnation of the GOP.
In 2020, after witnessing Trump and the GOP foment hate and division in our country, I succumbed and voted for Biden. Not because I liked or respected him, but because I couldn't help Trump have another term.
But before I made that decision, I did a lot of research to ensure I could get accept that Biden wasn’t going to fulfill the fears that the GOP instilled in me for the past five decades. (See "Today's GOP" and "Today's Democratic Party").
With the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement, I would have thought that millions of us would send a signal to the GOP (as I have) by taking our money and resources with us. If we did that in sufficient numbers, I thought, the GOP would have had to move to meet us in the center. I had hoped that they would once again start governing and finding solutions to the problems that we face both as a nation and as a world.
Alternatively, since Biden's election, I had hoped that sufficient money and influence from independent voters and moderate conservatives would have flowed to the Democratic Party, so that we would have marginalized the influence that the far left has within the party thereby — dragging it firmly into the middle.
Unfortunately, neither has happened and we are more divided than ever. The vast majority of Americans are disenfranchised and have lost our voice in politics. And now we are looking at a rematch at 2020.
This is unacceptable! We must find a way to give the silent majority a voice again. To achieve that, we can't rely on the current system. We must push for structural changes that are nonpartisan and that can move us toward fairness and proportionate representation.
In the video about liberals that I included in "Can you define socialism?" the one thing Dennis Prager doesn’t discuss is how "illiberal" the GOP has become. As best I can tell, Republicans have abandoned most of the conservative values that I valued growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, when my early political beliefs were formed.
I agree with Lydia Storella, who wrote "Republicans aren’t conservative anymore" for The Michigan Daily.
Conservatism, as a political philosophy, espouses a commitment to liberty, the market economy and existing traditions and institutions. In the United States, conservatives adhere to the traditionalist principles in the Constitution and the values that the Founding Fathers included in the documents that created our nation. Essentially, conservatives want to conserve. Incremental change should always be preferred to radical change. Government involvement in our citizens’ lives is overreach.
Today's GOP has abandoned what I would call "traditional" conservative values (except around religion, of course, where I have often diverged from the evangelical Christian right, which has had a disproportionate voice in setting the Republican agenda for decades).
To once again quote Jonah Goldberg,
“[Trump] has done lasting and permanent damage not just to our institutions in the country but also … because conservatism is now being redefined into a kind of right wing populism which is antithetical to actually being a conservative.”
A since-deleted tweet by Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times, supports this point of view:
I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.
It’s probably easy for many to dismiss this comment as just another journalist pushing the “liberal agenda.” But then retired Gen. Michael Hayden responded:
I agree. And I was the CIA Director.
Take a moment and let that sink in! Hayden was appointed by George W. Bush in 2006. Now that is a perspective!
That said, I do want to recognize that the Democratic Party isn't as "liberal" as they think.
Again, back to Bari Weiss' point that I made in “Can you define socialism?” when I explained that when the word "liberal" is used in this context I don't mean the politicized definition. In "Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think," Matthew Hutson writes:
The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals.
Everyone on the right says they are afraid of the left because that side of the spectrum will turn us into a socialist or communist country. I hope I've given you sufficient pause to buy into that talking point.
We can argue about their tactics and some of their extreme beliefs and positions — which are, in my opinion, too extreme and lack common sense, including their embrace of illiberal ideologies around the "colonial state."
But, with a centrist view and a little bit of common sense, we should be able to find a way to improve fairness without pandering to extreme dogma on either side.
Is it so frightening that we need to vote for a party that is so out of touch with the vast majority of Americans? Trust me, I don’t agree with the far left on almost anything. No different than how I feel about the far right. The current system continues to foster giving the extremes within both parties a disproportionate voice.
Most of us lie far closer to the middle and most of us feel we have no voice. The vocal minority has an outsized voice, not only in the media but at the polls. We can and must change that dynamic.
Until we can bring competition back into the system, we must continue to be vigilant in ensuring we elect less extreme candidates.
Here's a great discussion with Mitt Romney at Georgetown's Institute of Politics & Public Service on Oct. 18, 2023. It's well worth the time to watch to hear Romney’s thoughts on the dysfunction in politics in America, and especially his commentary on his own party!