We Really Do Need A Healthy Republican Party

Jim Himes, once a Goldman Sachs banker, now vice-chair of the New Dems, is working harder than anyone to gut the derivatives regulations Wall Street hates

Zack Beauchamp made an elegant case for why America needs a mainstream conservative party and an electorally plausible GOP. "Progressives," he writes, "should want the Republican reformers to succeed in creating a party that’s both more substantively tethered to reality and, as a consequence, more electorally viable. The current Republican party is a serious threat given the structure of American politics even if it’s in long-term decline, and the benefits of it collapsing down the line are uncertain at best." In other words, it may not be well liked and may be in a state of decline, but it's in a position to take us all down with it, so long as its under the control of an extremist faction. They still can win elections and even when they don't win, they can be a spanner in the wheel of good governance, as they are currently.

It is impossible to separate the Republican Party’s declining political fortunes from its right-wing radicalization. Here’s the basic dynamic: after the conservative movement captured the Republican party apparatus, the GOP embraced severely conservative policies, turning off more moderate voters. This makes the party’s base more conservative, which leads to more conservative candidates running in primaries and winning. While a smaller percentage of those candidates might win office, the ones that do govern from further to the right, alienating moderates and setting the cycle off again. Hence what’s called “asymmetric polarization:” while Democrats have made a soft turn left, Republicans have lurched right, making Democrats the party better equipped to appeal to the majority of Americans.

Nate Silver, who identified this cyclical pattern in 2009, named it the “Republican death spiral.” Subsequent events, particularly the Senate primary victories of candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin and the House GOP’s consistently abysmal poll numbers, have borne Silver out. Moreover, the 2012 Obama coalition is made up of groups (like young voters and minorities) that represent growing segments of the electorate, whereas the base Republicans are consolidating down to is a dying breed of old, white men. So the GOP is not only appealing to only a minority of Americans, but that minority is itself becoming smaller. Unless Republicans can fix this problem, they’ll be playing with a large and growing handicap for the forseeable electoral future.

...The progressive case for GOP reform isn’t entirely negative. Conservatism as an intellectual tradition has had genuine political insights; having a serious, reflective conservative party would help keep progressive thinking sharp. Republican intellectual vacuity may lead to Democratic intellectual laziness. A conservative party with genuinely good ideas, proposing smart laws addressing progressive blindspots, would genuinely make the country a better place. What such a conservative party would look like, and how it could appeal to Americans beyond the current GOP base, is a question for another time, but one I hope to tackle soon

. But wouldn’t all the risks be worth it if decades of progressive political empowerment a la the Democratic-Republican reign after defeating the Federalists from 1800-1824 were a guarantee? Even assuming one-party rule isn’t inherently corrupting, that line of thinking rests on a fantasy. A modern Democratic-Republican party would likely be more conservative than the Democrats are today, as a one-party system would reflect the fact that many Americans are genuinely on the right side of the spectrum. Moreover, one-party rule is unsustainable-- inevitably, the progressive and conservative poles would break off and create a new two-party system. So even in a world of complete Republican collapse, there’d be another conservative party soon enough. Not much of a prospective gain given the risks.

Let me take another fork from this path Beauchamp has been clearing. As the Republicans become less plausible and more radical, as crackpots like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Paul Broun (R-GA), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Trey Radel (R-FL), Ted Yoho (R-FL), Phil Gingrey (R-GA), Michele Bachmann (R-MN) rise to national prominence, mainstream conservatives are packing up (their conservative ideas and ideals) are moving to the Democratic Party. In Florida lifelong Republicans Charlie Crist and Patrick Murphy have been welcomed by corporate-friendly, anti-working family elements in an already too conservative Democratic Party. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is threatening armageddon on any real Democrat who tries to run for governor against Charlie Crist.

Patrick Murphy is already in Congress and working hard with his Republican brothers-- including many of the worst of the worst-- to bring naive Democrats over to the GOP way of thinking. Murphy is a full-fledged Austerity freak-- inside the House Democratic caucus. He's far from alone in that position. If the Republicans keep getting more radical, more and more conservatives will see the writing on the wall and opportunistically joining Murphy as "Democrats." Worse yet, power inside the House Democratic caucus has shifted dramatically away from progressives and towards the conservative, Wall Street-oriented New Dems whose agenda is, basically, the GOP agenda of your father's day.These faux Democrats have nothing whatsoever to do with the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the party and only minimal interest in the legitimate aspirations of working families.