The two party system in the US is highly stable outcome. The uneasy alliance of weird factions in each party is less so.
Right. What I’m proposing is still two parties. One would be a left wing party led by Bernie or someone like him once he is too old to lead the party. The other party would be a center-right party led by the likes of Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, with Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and so on joining the coalition. The swing politicians and voters would be those currently somewhat in the middle of the Democratic Party, people like Joe Biden. In this situation, the center-right party would probably have the electoral advantage over the left wing party. The trade off is that to achieve this, they would have to repudiate the Trumpists. Not just the politicians, but the voters. Tell them you aren’t welcome in this new party until you change your ways. Until then you are exiled into the political wilderness.
Well, can parties control membership?
Sort of. My hypothesis is that we reached our current situation because in a sense the Democrats disinvited the Trump voters from the party. Sure, many of the Trump voters were already Republicans. But many of them also voted for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton back in the day, and for senators like Ben Nelson, Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Russ Feingold, Tom Daschle, and so on. Some, but a smaller number, even voted for Obama. Eventually, though, they got the message that bigots and authoritarians of various stripes were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party, and they left. The politicians of the new center-right party would simply have to deliver the same message.
ETA: In other words, in the past I think the authoritarian and bigoted type voters were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. They drifted Republican little by little, and a lot in more recent years, because they were essentially disinvited by the Democrats. If the Democrats can disinvite those voters, why not the Republicans?
Because those voters are a much larger part of the Republican Party, and control more of the money?
Personally, I think the recent partial “re-lefting” of the Democratic Party would never have happened without the rise of crowdfunding. It’s now possible for a more progressive candidate to be genuinely politically viable with small-donor money.
I suppose from a practical standpoint the only way to do it would be to disinvite the politicians who ran their campaigns in such a way as to attract those voters. My guess is if we “re-rolled” the parties, and had a Bernie party on the left and a Joe Manchin + Mitt Romney party on the right with the Joe Biden’s of the world in the middle and the Trump voters out in the wilderness, that the Joe Manchin + Mitt Romney party would probably be the dominant party. Given my understanding, this is in fact the situation in places like Germany.
AIUI in Germany all the entities named would be shifted to the left about two decimal places, but other than that you’re probably about right.
In the US, my unsupported guess is that absent the effects of voter suppression and gerrymandering, such a “re-roll” as you describe would result in two Manchin-Romney and Biden parties about equally dominant, with periodic churn between them being tidally affected by the Bernistas on the left and to a lesser extent by the Trumpolaters on the right.
I don’t see any reason why Democrats should help the Republicans purge out its Trump loyalists and return the party to the control of people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Tom Delay, Karl Rove, and I could name twenty more Republicans.
Was Trump horrible? Yes. But let’s not forget the Republican party was horrible long before Trump showed up. Why should we help them dial it down from eleven back to just ten?
^This.
I am not at all interested in giving a violent, white supremacist movement a fig-leaf of respectability. The sooner it collapses the better.