Is the U.S. on the cusp of a Sixth, or Seventh, political party system?

[BrainGlutton]

Since about 1967, American historians, by general consensus, have divided the political party system in the U.S. into periods, punctuated by realigning (presidential) elections:

First Party System: 1792-1824. Federalists (Adams, Hamilton; for strong national government and commercial interests) vs. Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson; decentralist, populist, agrarian). Encompasses the War of 1812.

1800 election: Rise of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans to dominance, power shift from New England to the South. Period encompasses the Louisiana Purchase.

Era of Good Feelings: 1817-1825. Democratic-Republican hegemony, Federalists reduced to isolated strongholds. Ended with the “Corrupt Bargain” of 1824, which gave the presidency to John Quincy Adams of the National Republican faction.

1828 election: Andrew Jackson (having been balked four years previously) wins the presidency.

Second Party System: 1828-1854. Factions of the Democratic-Republicans in effect split into two parties, the Democrats (Jackson; populist, agrarian, hostile to a national bank) and the Whigs (Henry Clay; favored industry, modernization, a protective tariff, a national bank, federal funding for “internal improvements” such as canals, highways, railroads; ultimately split over the question whether to allow or forbid expansion of slavery to the territories). Period encompasses the Mexican-American War, acquisition of the West.

1860 election: Election of Lincoln, the first Republican POTUS; first presidential election to break down along purely sectional lines (Lincoln won without the electoral votes of a single slave state). Provoked the Civil War.

Third Party System: 1854 to the mid-1890s. Republicans (formed in 1854 out of Free-Soilers, “Conscience Whigs,” and disaffected Democrats) vs. the Democrats. Encompassed the Civil War, Reconstruction the Gilded Age, settlement of the West and the “end of the frontier” (i.e., the final end of the Indian nations as independent military powers). The Republicans evolve from a radical anti-racist party, to the party of the “free, white, working man,” to the party of big-business interests.

1896 election: Republican McKinley defeated Democrat/Populist/“Silver Republican” nominee William Jennings Bryan. Defeat also of the economic-populist, pro-inflationary Free Silver movement.

Fourth Party System: 1896-1932: Republicans dominant, Democrats in minority. A prosperous period encompassing the Progressive Era, World War I, and the beginning of the Great Depression.

1932 election: Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover.

Fifth Party System: 1933 - ???. Democrats dominant. Rise of the New Deal Coalition. Encompasses the New Deal and World War II, and (at least) the beginning of the Cold War.

And there the consensus breaks down.

The party system model with its numbering and demarcation of the historical systems was introduced in 1967.[1] Much of the work published on the subject has been by political scientists explaining the events of their time as either the imminent breakup of the Fifth Party System, and the installation of a new one or that this transition took place some time ago.[2] However, no decisive electoral event, shifting both presidential and congressional control, has occurred since 1932.[3] This idea was particularly popular in the 1970s, specifying dates as early as 1960[4]

Other current writing on the Fifth Party System expresses admiration of its longevity: the first four systems lasted about 30 to 40 years each, which would have implied that the early twenty-first century should see a Sixth Party System.[4] It is also possible, as argued in (Jensen 1981) and elsewhere, that the party system has given way, not to a new party system, but to a period of dealignment in politics. Previous party systems ended with the dominant party losing two consecutive House elections by large margins, with a presidential election coinciding with or immediately following (in 1896) the second house election—decisive electoral evidence of political realignment. By this definition, consecutive Democratic victories in the Congressional elections of 2006 and 2008, in addition to the election of Barack Obama, imply that such a realignment may be underway. However this contradicts the presumption, or begs the question, of which party has been dominant in the period. The collapse of the two party system itself and its replacement with something else is generally not considered a possibility.

The elections of 1964, 1968, 1980, 1994 (Congressional), 2006 (Congressional), and 2008 all have been suggested as “realigning elections” by some historians.

I would argue we are now at the beginning of the Seventh party system. The Fifth ended, and the Sixth began, with the election of Ronal Reagan in 1980.

This, I believe, is the essential narrative:

From 1933, the Democratic Party’s dominance was based on the New Deal Coalition:

The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs that supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until approximately 1968, which made the Democratic Party the majority party during that period, losing only to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a coalition that included the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), liberal farm groups, intellectuals, and the white South. The coalition fell apart in 1968, but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.[1]

Meanwhile: In 1952, the Republican Party was split between its Northeastern moderate faction, which supported Eisenhower, and its Midwestern conservative faction, represented by Senator Robert Taft. The essential difference between them was that the Eisenhower faction accepted the New Deal and the Taft faction did not and wanted to roll it back. Eisenhower got the nomination; but the Taft faction was resurgent in the 1964 Goldwater campaign – which lost, but which kick-started the modern Conservative Movement. You can read the story in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein.

In the social, cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s, the Democrats finally and solidly established themselves as the party of civil rights. Henceforth they would get practically all the black vote, despite the Pubs’ history as the “Party of Lincoln,” but could no longer rely on the “Solid South.” When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he remarked, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.”

Nixon, really a moderate “Rockefeller Republican” like Eisenhower, was mainly interested in foreign policy, which he regarded as a POTUS’ real job. Civil rights was a domestic issue. By habit and personality Nixon was a racist of the most vulgar sort, but he really had no emotional investment on either side of the civil rights struggle. But he readily seized the opportunity to position himself against it and win the votes of white social conservatives, especially in the South. This was the Southern Strategy. He defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in a three-way race with white Southern independent George Wallace. In 1972, Nixon won every Southern state that had gone for Wallace in '68. You can read the story in Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, also by Perlstein.

On the Dem side, the New Deal coalition was broken up by the ascendancy of the New Politics faction represented by George McGovern. This alienated conservative white Southerners, as well as white urban Catholic working-class “ethnics.” The Dems’ traditional class-based politics were abandoned for “identity politics,” defined by the interests of “communities” – African-Americans, Latinos, women/feminists, gays, etc. The Democratic Party became an “hourglass” coalition of '60s counterculturalists and intellectuals, affluent liberals, and poor and working-poor nonwhites – with declining white middle-class and working-class support.

The end of Nixon’s career in Watergate did not end the “Southern Strategy.” Over the course of the 1970s, the GOP rebuilt itself around “movement conservatism” (the Taft-Goldwater faction) and made massive inroads among conservative white Southerners. There was, in fact, a massive exchange of constituencies between the Democratic and Republican parties, many liberal or “Rockefeller Republicans” switching over to the Dems. For the first time in modern history, the Democrats and Republicans became truly ideological parties – each still a broad big-tent coalition of viewpoints and interests, to be sure, but on either side of a definite “liberal-conservative” dividing line. So it remains to this day.

This culminated in the realigning election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, establishing the Sixth Party System, Republicans/conservatives dominant. During this period there was only one Dem POTUS, Clinton; and, like Eisenhower and Nixon, he succeeded only by largely accommodating to the dominant party’s views and narrative.

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

[BrainGlutton]

OP CONTINUED

This was the period in which the Republican Party was dominated by “movement conservatism,” as described in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.”

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

During this period, however, cultural, generational, and demographic changes continued. Gradually, American liberals grew to outnumber conservatives. See The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. See also the Pew Research Center for the People & Press study of “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007”; and the Center for American Progress Study, “State of American Political Ideology, 2009”.

The geographic division today between Dems and Pubs, liberals and conservatives, is not North-South, East-West, or Coasts-Heartland, but City-Countryside. The supposed “red-state-blue-state-divide” oversimplifies the picture. See this map, which breaks the vote down by county, and shades along a spectrum from solid red to purple to solid blue. In Ruy and Teixeiras’ terms, the cities and exurbs are “ideopolises.”

These trends reached a tipping-point and culminated in the election of Obama in 2008 and what I believe is the beginning of the Seventh Party System. For the foreseeable future, the Democrats/liberals will be dominant. Now, as we have seen in the “tea party” protests and “town hall” meetings, the Pubs/conservatives certainly are not going away. There might even be another Pub POTUS or two in the coming era – but only of a moderate, Eisenhower/Nixon sort.

As Sam Tanenhaus, author of the new book The Death of Conservatism, noted in this recent Newsweek interview:

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn’t quite declare conservatism dead.
Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America’s institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation’s millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by “the trusts”—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The consensus forged by Buckley in the 1960s gained strength through two decisive acts: first, Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society, and made sure when he did it to secure the support of conservative Republicans like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Sen. John Tower. This pulled the movement toward the center. Second: Buckley saw that the civil disturbances of the late 1960s (in particular urban riots and increasingly militant anti-Vietnam protests) posed a challenge to social harmonies preferred by genuine conservatives and genuine liberals alike. When the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called on liberals to join with conservatives in upholding “the politics of stability,” Buckley replied that he was ready to help. He placed the values of “civil society” (in Burke’s term) above those of his own movement or the GOP.

Today we see very little evidence of this. In his classic The Future of American Politics (1952), the political journalist Samuel Lubell said that our two-party system in fact consists of periods of alternating one-party rule—there is a majority “sun” party and a minority “moon” party. “It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out,” Lubell wrote. Thus, in the 1980s, Republicans grasped (and Democrats did not) that new entrepreneurial energies had been unleashed, and also that the Cold War could be brought to a conclusion through strong foreign policy. This was the Republicans’ “sun” period. The reverse is happening today. The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don’t have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh’s stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.

Is there an analogous historical moment? Conservatives argue that this is 1965 and that a renaissance is at hand.
I disagree. Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—“socialist,” “fascist”—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and “Old Right” made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.

Now and for the foreseeable future, the GOP is the “moon party.” The Democratic Party is the “sun party” and all the important issues of the day will be threshed out within its ranks.

Counterarguments?

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

The ultra-radicalism of the Neocon Right, & the bad example of terrorism may lead to large scale political violence.

Or so I greatly fear.

Can’t win the race? Wreck your car by ramming the crowd.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

I like your blaming Abraham Lincoln for provoking the Civil War.
Slavery today, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever!

After that in your opening post, you expect serious comments here?
Go back and play with your white sheets.

[BrainGlutton]

@t-bonham@scc.net

I like your blaming Abraham Lincoln for provoking the Civil War.
Slavery today, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever!

After that in your opening post, you expect serious comments here?
Go back and play with your white sheets.

What?! No, Lincoln’s election provoked the Civil War. Up to that time, the slaveholding-landowning elite that dominated the governments of the Southern states had had one overriding political goal: To protect slavery from political threats. Within the South, abolitionists were routinely lynched. Nationally, the Southerners sought to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states that was one of the principal reasons they backed the Mexican-American War – in hopes of carving out new slave states in the Southwest. When Lincoln – not an abolitionist, only a free-soiler, but still radical by Southern standards – was elected without any slave-state electoral votes, it became clear that their efforts were irreversibly doomed, and that is why they chose that time to declare secession. Practically all historians will agree on these points.

[tomndebb]

@t-bonham@scc.net

Go back and play with your white sheets.

Neither relevant to the thread nor appropriate in GD.

Knock it off.

[ /Moderating ]

[Giles]

I’d agree that the conditions are about right now for the emergence of a new party system. The question is, Which will be the two parties? Because there pretty well always have been two parties, and since 1860 they have been labelled as “Democratic” and “Republican”. The Republican Party was the last third party to emerge victorious out of a presidential election – Abe Lincoln in 1860 – and the closest anyone has come since then was Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party in 1912.

So will it be a new party, or will it be a re-alignment of the Republican Party away from the Southern Strategy? (I doubt if the Dems will split: they are too successful at present, and the Clinton and Obama wings are working quite well with each other). Frankly, I can’t see either happening at present, but who knows over the next 3 to 7 years.

[BrainGlutton]

@Giles

So will it be a new party, or will it be a re-alignment of the Republican Party away from the Southern Strategy?

Thing is, that strategy represents a massive vote base that is still there and, while always a minority and now declining in numbers, still will be there and still will be massive for some time to come. If the Pubs don’t represent them, who will?

[Giles]

There’s another vote base that’s less powerful than the reactionary Southern white base, and that’s the one to the left of the Dems, which currently is split between voting Green because that’s the only really progressive party and voting Dem because that’s the best you’re going to get (and as a bonus Obama is African American). That base (represented in Congress by a few like Dennis Kucinich) will always criticise Democrat leaders like Obama and Clinton for not doing enough, but most of it is realistic enough to know that they are only going to have a protest vote (voting Green) or a vote for the lesser of two evils (voting for whoever wins the Dem primaries). Unless the Dem leadership goes completely DINO (like Senator Lieberman), that faction is not going to split off seriously.

But if a moderate leader (like McCain, or possibly Jeb Bush) ever took over the Republicans, I can see the right of the GOP splitting off into their fantasy land. But the right of the GOP has such tight control these days that I don’t see how a real moderate could get up again.

[Lemur866]

Look, as I’ve said many times, the notion of radical left party splitting from the Democrats, or a radical right party splitting from the Republicans, is nonsense.

It isn’t going to happen. Neither is a centrist faction going to split from either party.

And there’s no way the Republicans can “jettison” the conservative south. Conservative southerners vote. They may vote in ways you don’t like, that doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to vote. Up until Nixon, conservative southerners voted Democrat, even into the 80s southern conservative voters might vote for Reagan for president but still elected Democrats locally.

And this is why we have the strange spectacle of today’s Republican party. On the one hand you have a populist rural working class party that the Republican party is turning into. On the other hand you have a corporatist pro-business party that the Republican party used to be. The synthesis from this tension is that the corporatists are going to leave the Republicans. Big Business is happy to work with someone like Obama, they aren’t afraid of high taxes or regulations. In fact Big Business loves regulation, because regulation is the enemy of the free market, and the last thing Big Business wants is a free market, that’s too much like work. They prefer a rent-seeking model.

And since the populist wing of the Republican party isn’t very big on capitalism anyway–they don’t trust the Eastern Bankers (you know who they mean), they don’t trust the “elites”, and so on. Sure, they hate taxes, but pretty soon they’re going to decide that the rich are all liberals. The days of the corporatist wing leading the populist wing around by the nose are over. So there will be no opposition on their part to another round of expansion of the regulatory state.

So I think we’ll probably see a Big Government, Big Business Democratic party, run along Obama’s managerial style. And a rural populist identity-politics white Republican party, run along Sarah Palin’s demogogic style. Sure, there’s no way that a Sarah Palin type can win the presidency, but her ilk are dominating the congressional republicans. So they’ll remain an opposition party.

Note that I hope I’m wrong about this, since that essentially leaves no room for a small-l libertarian. I suppose the cycle ends when the populist Republicans lose and lose and lose, and eventually get tired of losing.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lemur866

Note that I hope I’m wrong about this, since that essentially leaves no room for a small-l libertarian.

Well, so does every conceivable scenario that does not include pro-multipartisan electoral-system reforms.

@Lemur866

I suppose the cycle ends when the populist Republicans lose and lose and lose, and eventually get tired of losing.

And? What happens then?

[Captain_Carrot]

@Giles

I’d agree that the conditions are about right now for the emergence of a new party system. The question is, Which will be the two parties? Because there pretty well always have been two parties, and since 1860 they have been labelled as “Democratic” and “Republican”. The Republican Party was the last third party to emerge victorious out of a presidential election – Abe Lincoln in 1860 – and the closest anyone has come since then was Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party in 1912.

The Republicans were not a third party in 1860, they were the second party. Fremont came in second in 1856, and he was only 60 electoral votes short of Buchanan.

[Lemur866]

@BrainGlutton

And? What happens then?

Beats the hell out of me, I’m pretty tentative just on my prediction that the Republicans double-down on the Palinism. How the heck am I supposed to predict what will happen in 20 years of so when Palinism has been beaten into the ground?

[BrainGlutton]

@Lemur866

Beats the hell out of me, I’m pretty tentative just on my prediction that the Republicans double-down on the Palinism. How the heck am I supposed to predict what will happen in 20 years of so when Palinism has been beaten into the ground?

If you’re looking at a 20-year time scale, it’s not unlikely that by then most Americans who now think that way will be dead or retired, and not replaced by a like-minded younger generation.

[Giles]

@Captain_Carrot

The Republicans were not a third party in 1860, they were the second party. Fremont came in second in 1856, and he was only 60 electoral votes short of Buchanan.

This may just be a matter of terminology, but the Republican Party moved from being founded to 1854 to winning the election in 1860. So I guess that you might say they were a third party before the 1856 election, became the second party in 1856 because the Whigs disappeared, and became the first party in 1860 because the Democrats split. They were the last party to move from third-party status to winning the election, and they did so over the six-year period 1854 to 1860.

I’d guess that means that in present-day terms, a centre-right party could form next year (2010), could push the Republican Party out so that it became the second party in 2012, and could win the election in 2016. As the saying goes, a week is a long time in politics, and almost anything could happen in six years.

[YogSothoth]

I would say that Johnson election and signing of the Civil Rights Act changed eras. There had been a shift between conservatives and liberals that began from about the time of the Civil Rights Movement that Johnson crystallized with his legislation. Suddenly, Dems were the liberals and Reps were the conservatives. This era lasted a few years until Roe vs. Wade when the extreme right wing decided to get into the act of politicizing everything, and they got their dog in the yard with the election of Reagan. I see the rise of the fringe right into the mainstream coinciding with the creation of Fox News. Perhaps violence is next, I sure hope not though

[BrainGlutton]

@YogSosoth

Perhaps violence is next, I sure hope not though

There certainly seems to be some thinking along those lines, but I’m holding out hope it’s all talk and bluster.

[Chronos]

While I would agree that the Republican party was the last party to go from being a third party to winning, I would maintain that it most recently happened at the beginning of the 1900s, not with Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Mooses did better than the Republicans in 1912, leading to his faction essentially taking over the Republican party. They continued to call themselves Republican, but the party that resulted owed its descent to Roosevelt, not Taft. In other words, the third-party Progressives became the second party, and in the process changed its name to “Republican”.

I could see something similar happening now: Some prominent Republican leader (who, I don’t know specifically) could announce the formation of a new party, with a platform different from the current Republican party on at least some points. The new party does better than the old one in the next election, and as a result we end up with a party calling itself “Republican”, but with those new planks.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

@Giles

There’s another vote base that’s less powerful than the reactionary Southern white base, and that’s the one to the left of the Dems, which currently is split between voting Green because that’s the only really progressive party and voting Dem because that’s the best you’re going to get (and as a bonus Obama is African American). That base (represented in Congress by a few like Dennis Kucinich) will always criticise Democrat leaders like Obama and Clinton for not doing enough, but most of it is realistic enough to know that they are only going to have a protest vote (voting Green) or a vote for the lesser of two evils (voting for whoever wins the Dem primaries).

<ahem-ahem-ahem> Ralph Nader<ahem-ahem-ahem>

[BrainGlutton]

@Chronos

While I would agree that the Republican party was the last party to go from being a third party to winning, I would maintain that it most recently happened at the beginning of the 1900s, not with Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Mooses did better than the Republicans in 1912, leading to his faction essentially taking over the Republican party. They continued to call themselves Republican, but the party that resulted owed its descent to Roosevelt, not Taft. In other words, the third-party Progressives became the second party, and in the process changed its name to “Republican”.

I could see something similar happening now: Some prominent Republican leader (who, I don’t know specifically) could announce the formation of a new party, with a platform different from the current Republican party on at least some points. The new party does better than the old one in the next election, and as a result we end up with a party calling itself “Republican”, but with those new planks.

In this scenario, is the short-lived-but-ultimately-successful third party to the right or to the left of what is currently the GOP’s center-of-gravity?