Interesting post, Dick. Thanks.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/19/16, Richard Driscoll <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
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
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