1hundredsixty8

The hand-wringing over the impending demise of the Republican Party as we know it seems ubiquitous these days. Just as an ice pick breaks a block of ice into smaller chunks, the success of Donald J. Trump’s campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination is fracturing the conservative coalition of corporate interests, free-market libertarians, evangelicals and culture warriors that has sustained GOP electoral success for over three decades. With his populist pandering, Mr. Trump resembles nothing if not the opinionated loudmouth on the corner stool in the neighborhood bar. It was inconceivable just months ago that his campaign would endure this far into the primaries, let alone make him the front-runner. Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone last month that “we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.” Mr. Trump’s campaign is proving the truth of Taibbi’s assertion even as it turns it on its head: Supreme Court decisions may have opened the floodgates to the flow of cash that inundates electoral politics, but the super-rich who invested millions in the campaigns of Chris Christie, Scott Walker, et al are probably second-guessing themselves today. Jeb Bush spent $130 million of mostly Super PAC money to not have the opportunity to be President. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has raised and spent a fraction of that amount; his campaign, largely self-funded, motors along without appreciable outside assistance at all. Mr. Trump has neatly done an end run around the campaign finance issue by ginning up media attention and making prolific use of his Twitter account.

At stake is not only the Presidency but, according to anxious party members, the GOP’s Congressional majorities. Despite attempts to obstruct the campaign, the Trump assault on politics-as-usual continues, and a profusion of analyses- the majority devoted to the Republican dilemma and its causes- has emerged to explain its success. According to the Times’ Thomas B. Edsall, assigning responsibility for the party’s hijacking by the real estate mogul/ reality TV star has precipitated infighting among Republican insiders. However, to see the Trump phenomenon as a strictly one-party issue is to be distracted by the shiny object.

There are implications to Trumpmania which extend beyond the damage it is inflicting upon the GOP. In cracking open the Republican coalition, the Trump campaign has also exposed flaws in our political system. I am referring not to issues such as campaign finance or voter access which, though problematic, could conceivably be addressed through legislation- if, of course, the legislators were of a mind to do so. What Mr. Trump is exposing is the inherent weakness of our two-party system, a system that depends on both parties being viable if it is to represent valid political choice.

The organizing imperative of political parties in this country is winning elections. For the greater part of the country’s history, the Republicans and the Democrats sought to gain electoral majorities by building coalitions of diverse interest groups. FDR’s New Deal Coalition, for example was an odd-fellows amalgamation of southern segregationists, urban political machines and organized labor. In an effort to avoid exacerbating differences between various internal factions, parties hewed a line of broad ideological principle rather than strictly-delineated dogma. In such a system, focus in campaigns is directed to the other side. Elections, even when the parties take substantially different positions on issues, have consistently been characterized by demonization of the opponent. (Andrew Jackson was depicted as a jackass in political cartoons of his day, Lincoln as a gorilla.) 21st Century technologies- the Internet, social medial, cell phone cameras- have only further coarsened rather than elevated political communication.

From time to time, these unions crumbled. Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election was due in part to the schism between northern and southern factions in the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960’s precipitated the exodus of white southerners from the Democrats; sweeping this group into the Republican fold was the goal of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968. As Ross Douthat points out, this time seems different; it’s not the type of realignment seen in the past. This time the system itself is showing signs of a potential tectonic shift. Given its tenuous nature, the riving of the Republican coalition should come as no surprise. Perhaps the GOP is a victim of its own success: An avowed antipathy towards “big government” has deprived the Party of a tool wielded by Democrats in the past, namely use of Federal largess to reward the constituent interest groups so necessary for maintaining electoral majorities. While the Republicans do take care of their corporate interests, they have paid insufficient attention to other voting blocs within the Party.

In contrast, most of the world’s democracies have multi-party systems and are parliamentary in nature; coalitions are formed after elections for the purposes of governing. In these environments, it is rare for one party to attain a majority; therefore, forming a government is a matter of compromise and negotiation. Unlike our presidential system, failure to form or maintain a governing coalition results in new elections. The emphasis is on governance.

The more basic issue is, however, the inherently reductionist character of two-party politics. It takes a vivid imagination to believe that, in an increasingly diverse population of over three-hundred-ten million people, selection of those who govern can be reduced to a binary choice. More crucial, the continued existence of the two-party system threatens the grand American experiment in democratically-elected government. Just as business oligopoly limits consumer choice in the marketplace, so do the two parties limit political choice. And in the same way such businesses seek to limit competition, so do the parties. That the two would continue to have a lock on our politics has always seemed inevitable. There have been numerous third-party movements in our history, some substantial, but their record is replete with failure to gain traction in electoral politics (except as a spoiler such as Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000).

Perhaps this time is truly different. The splintering of the GOP has brought with it murmurs of “independent runs”. So here is the hypothetical: The demographic of white-working class males without college educations is at the core of Trump support. If circumstances cause this group to abandon the GOP, it is unlikely to return to the Democratic Party whom they deserted a generation ago. With the Republican Party in tatters, it is not beyond possibity the contagion would spread to the Democrats. The path would be cleared for the formation of new alliances. The vigorous campaign waged by Sen. Sanders shows there is considerable desire for a Democratic standard-bearer who is not a business-centric, DLC-type as is Mrs. Clinton.  Mr. Sanders has cultivated a following among younger voters, unveiling a fault line among Democrats. It is not difficult to conceive of a political landscape in which elections are contested by four or five factions. James Madison may not have gotten it exactly right when he warned about the potential danger in the development of parties: Better to have many and dilute the influence of any one of them than to have too few.  And there is an ironic twist as a consequence of Citizens United:  the powers of party leaders have already been diminished and ceded to Super PACs and other moneyed-interests external to the party structure. In effect, these outside groups act as de facto political parties already.

For some, the end of a two-hundred year tradition will be seen as the sign the end of our democracy is near. I prefer the optimistic point of view. The end of the two-party system would represent a positive change for the United States, an infusion of democratic energy into a faltering system. For that, we may have to actually thank Donald Trump.