Carl et al:
Recent conversations came to mind when I read the following historical
article by Michael Barone. I thought it might be of interest to our
readers.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-break-the-republican-party-1460758576?mod=trending_now_7
The material contained is historical in nature and generally applicable
to both existing political parties and a comparison of present external
conditions with prior historical conditions occasioned by presidential
elections.
Don;'t be mislead by the title.
Richard
Trump Can’t Break the Republican Party/Richard/
Republicans may be split temporarily, but there is no deep
Trumpist movement to push permanent schism.
Photo: Chad Crowe
By
Michael Barone
April 15, 2016 6:16 p.m. ET
969 COMMENTS <http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-break-the-republican-party-1460758576?mod=trending_now_7#livefyre-comment>
Republican primary voters and caucus-goers, we have often been told, award their presidential nomination to the candidate next in line. Conservative Christian Republicans are, as one national reporter once wrote (and later apologized for), “poorly educated and easily led.” Not this year. The normal pattern, to use a word from the Watergate era, is inoperative. Republicans are not supposed to behave like this.
Donald Trump <http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159>’s candidacy has proved as disruptive to the Republican Party as Craigslist was to newspapers’ classified ads and Uber has been to taxi cartels. It’s by no means clear that Mr. Trump will earn the 1,237 delegates needed for the party’s presidential nomination. But the Republican Party seems likely to suffer serious damage either if he is nominated (polls show him far behind Hillary Clinton <http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Hillary-Clinton/6344>) or if he is not (he predicts violence then and won’t rule out an independent candidacy).
Some historic perspective may be useful here in assessing how much potential damage the Republican Party may suffer, and if it will be lasting.
Each of America’s two political parties—the oldest and third oldest in the world (Britain’s Conservatives are No. 2)—has had a persistently different character; political cartoonists appropriately depict them as two different animals. The Democratic Party, formed in 1832 to re-elect President Andrew Jackson, has always been a coalition of disparate groups—white Southerners and big-city immigrants in the 19th century, gentry liberals and black church members today. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 to stop the spread of slavery, has always been supported by a core of people who are seen as ordinary Americans—Protestant Northerners in the 19th century, white married people today—but who are by themselves not a majority in an always culturally diverse nation.
As a result the Democrats have been more often at risk of irreconcilable division. To hold a large and diverse constituency together, the Democratic Party between 1836 and 1932 required nominees to get two-thirds of national convention delegates’ votes. Republicans sought unity by control of convention rules and the chairman’s gavel, which usually worked for a party with a temperamentally loyal dominant constituency. Unapologetic manipulation of the rules produced the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower over Robert Taft in 1952, the only election year between 1928 and 2004 that produced a Republican president, Senate and House. Gerald Ford’s delegate majority over Ronald Reagan in 1976 was narrow, but it held and was respected; Ford nearly won that fall and Reagan did four years later.
Serious division over major issues has been relatively rare among Republicans, with arguments usually limited to tactics and timing. But once every generation or so party opinion has been starkly divided. In the 1870s, radical Republicans wanted to pursue Reconstruction to uphold blacks’ rights in the South; they lost. In the 1890s, some Republicans favored the gold standard, some inflationary silver; gold won. Twentieth-century Republicans differed in their approach to Progressive and New Deal policies; they pursued different policies in different states. Isolationist and internationalist Republicans argued over foreign policy in the 1930s and 1940s; the internationalists won. In the 1970s, Republicans argued over whether to cut back government and just how; in the 1980s Reagan Republicans won.
In each case Republicans argued heatedly, then reached a conclusion and stuck with it. Similarly, as Republicans adjusted to events and opinion, their party shifted from one more supportive of economic intervention in the 19th century to one more opposed in the 20th. The party that was the more cautious about military intervention in the half-century between 1917 and 1967 has become the party less cautious about it in the half-century since. In each case Republicans, operating with a core constituency confident that it embodied much that defines America, emerged with a unified and more politically sustainable position.
It is generally agreed that the presidential nomination process is the weakest part of our political system. One reason is that it leaves the two great political parties vulnerable to disruptive candidates—controversial political figures who threaten to reshape the party to which they have attached themselves.
Usually that has happened to the Democratic Party. Beginning in 1896, William Jennings Bryan took a party that had electoral parity with Republicans and led it into extended minority status. Huey Long threatened to hijack Franklin Roosevelt’s party in the 1930s. George Wallace disrupted national Democrats to varying degrees in four consecutive elections from 1964 to 1976.
Interestingly, the great disrupter this year, Donald Trump, has a background not in Republican but in Democratic politics. His father was entwined with the leadership of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, and the Trump family’s timely contributions to a Democratic mayor in 1973 and Democratic governor in 1974 paved the way for his son’s initial foray into Manhattan real estate (including a 40-year tax abatement just now expiring).
Mr. Trump’s jump to first place in polls of Republicans during the 2016 campaign, and to first-place finishes (though no absolute majorities) in 17 party primaries and two caucuses have owed much to tactics no other candidates have seen fit to employ.
Denouncing Mexican immigrants as murderers, ridiculing a handicapped reporter, announcing that prisoners of war are not heroes, threatening to “spill the beans” on another candidate’s wife—such defiance of political correctness has enabled this celebrity, familiar from 14 years on “reality” TV, to get double the news coverage of all his rivals put together. His attacks on policies backed for decades by presidents of both parties—free-trade agreements, legal immigration, the NATO alliance—have been met with many cheers and assertions of confidence that this one man, simply by making deals, can “make America great again.”
Many have written about how Republicans’ failure to produce policy results their voters expected and yearned for has opened the way for the Trump appeal. So has—and this also is visible on the Democratic side in the persistent support for Bernie Sanders’s candidacy—a dull sense of discontent after 15 years of mostly sluggish economic growth and unsuccessful foreign military interventions.
Republicans have faced a similarly, or even more, disruptive candidate only once in the party’s long history: another rich man from New York with an unusual intellect, universal celebrity and a freedom from ordinary political constraints. This was Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1912 challenged his more-or-less handpicked successor William Howard Taft, first for the Republican nomination, and then as a candidate for the newly formed Progressive Party. Roosevelt was the author of some three dozen books, a serious scholar (his naval history of the War of 1812 is still considered definitive) and rugged outdoorsman, a veteran of military combat and a one-time police commissioner in New York City.
Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in his case for actually making peace, between Russia and Japan after their 1904-05 war. Succeeding to the presidency after William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901, Roosevelt served for seven years with high job approval and won a full term in 1904 with the highest popular-vote percentage and electoral-vote total of any Republican up to that point. A comparison of his credentials and those of Donald Trump brings to mind Karl Marx’s comment, prompted by Napoleon III’s coup d’état, that history tends to repeat itself—the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.
Roosevelt won nine of the Republican Party’s 13 recently created presidential primaries in 1912, but the Taft forces held the gavel and the delegate majority and renominated the president. Roosevelt then got the nomination of the new Progressive Party, while Democrats chose Woodrow Wilson, the New Jersey governor and former president of Princeton University. Taft’s support flagged and he finished third, with 23% of the popular vote and eight electoral votes; Roosevelt had 27% and 88. So even though the two Republicans got 50% of the popular vote, Wilson won with 42% of the popular vote and 435 electoral votes.
For a moment, in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s independent campaign, the Republican Party looked to be in danger. Progressive Party candidates won 5% or more of the vote in 216 House races in 1912 and 156 House races in 1916. But the schism was temporary. In 1916 Roosevelt and Taft both supported Republican nominee Charles Evans Hughes, who lost a narrow race—by 12 electoral votes—to Wilson. Two years later Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress. Roosevelt was considered the favorite for the party’s 1920 nomination but he died in January 1919, at age 60. The nominee that year, Warren Harding, was elected by the largest popular-vote percentage margin in history, 60%-34%. Roosevelt, the strongest disruptive candidate imaginable, had not permanently disrupted the Republican Party.
Still, differences on issues divided Republicans along regional lines in the first half of the 20th century. Heavily German/Scandinavian Upper Midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota were isolationist and progressive domestically. Older Midwest states such as Ohio and Indiana were isolationist, antiprogressive and anti-New Deal. Northeastern states were internationalist and more open to big-government policies.
Increasing Republican strength in the South and West helped secure the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. In more recent presidential primaries we have seen divisions between evangelicals and others, and between affluent suburbs and strapped small towns.
Those divisions have not been replicated in the response to Donald Trump’s disruptive candidacy. It has been noted often that his 37% of primary and caucus votes so far come disproportionately from downscale, non-college-graduate, modest-income voters. But not uniformly. My examination of the results suggests that Mr. Trump’s support comes disproportionately from those low in what the scholars Robert Putnam and Charles Murray call social capital or social connectedness—people who are not likely to participate in civic activities, or regularly attend church or social clubs. Republicans with high social connectedness—most notably Mormons—have given Trump very few votes.
People of low connectedness seem unlikely to be the basis of a movement to permanently transform the world’s third oldest political party. Even if Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination and somehow overcomes current polls to be elected president, there will be few Trump clones among Republicans in Congress and in state and local office.
If he is nominated and defeated by a wide margin, he will not leave behind a Trumpist movement with the popular and intellectual depth of the conservative movement following Goldwater’s defeat 52 years ago—his legacy may be little more than an impulse toward opposition to trade agreements and legalization of illegal immigrants. If he is not nominated and tries to run as an independent, he will not have the support of as significant a third-party apparatus as Theodore Roosevelt did 104 years ago.
As this is written, it seems likely but not certain that Mr. Trump will fall visibly short of the 1,237-delegate majority, and that he will inflict significant damage on the Republican Party by protests or perhaps an independent candidacy. But probably nothing like the serious, though temporary, damage inflicted by that vastly more talented, experienced and intellectually serious disruptive New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt.
/Mr. Barone, longtime co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics,” is the senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute./
Your choice of, "outside parties" was exactly the right expression.
They are "outside" because the Two Headed Monster will not permit them
to play on Its playing field. That should say volumes about how
tightly controlled our political system is. Reform is a pipe dream if
there ever was one. Restructure , is closer to what we need to do. I
say, restructure, in place of the more emotion laden word, Revolution.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/18/16, Bob Hachey <bhachey@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Miriam,
I agree with you here.
No doubt that parties like the SWP and the greens have been around for many
election cycles with very little impact to show for it. AT least the
Sanders
campaign and the outspokenness of folks like Elizabeth Warren have a chance
to impact policies going forward. The hope is that it may be easier for
outside parties like the SWP and the Greens to get media coverage going
forward.
One thing that does seem to be different this time? The number of Americans
who think our system is broken is growing rapidly.
Bob
Bob Hachey
