Two Cheers for the GOP and the Dems
Happy Thoughts About the American Political Settlement
The United States of America has a constitution that doesn’t mention political parties. We wrote it pretending they don’t exist. We knew better. But we imagined that no good would come from accommodating them within our constitution. We are a lucky country. I want to make some observations about Europe's alternative, parliamentary systems, alternately called these days, “parliamentary democracy,” contrasted with the United States Presidential System.
Start with the Germans and the problems they have with the voters who support the Alternative für Deutschland party, the AfD, usually called, the far-right party. The AfD is considered ‘extremist’ because it favors the mass deportation of resident aliens. The line graph below shows their support hovering around twenty percent. In the 2024 September Bundesländer (state) elections in Germany the AfD got over thirty percent of the votes in both Saxony and Thuringia, which are in the former East German territory. In Thuringia the AfD got more votes than any other party. But they are not part of any coalition state government anywhere in Germany. Sunday, today, Germany is holding National elections. The AfD will almost certainly poll as the second most popular party. Here is the problem, the other political parties in Germany have ‘firewalled’ the AfD, meaning they will not be part of any coalition that includes the AfD. Which means twenty percent of the voters are frozen out of all possible governing party coalitions. A primer on the German elections, by Eugyppius
In the United States Constitution there are no political parties. Yes, we have political parties, but they are pre-electoral coalitions of many different voters/interests/parties. As the celebrity comedian Will Rogers said in 1935, “I am not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat.” The fluidity and diversity of our two political parties is as constant as their durability. The idea that over twenty percent of the voters in an American election could be firewalled is farcical. I think this sums up the difference between the European Parliamentar00y Constitutions and our Presidential System. In times of substantial change, politics also change substantially. The structure of political settlement changes also. European political parties circle the wagons to protect what ‘is’ and become a fortress against change. They tend to become, ‘uni-parties.’ That is what has been happening in Germany. The center-right CDU has been fulfilling the policy goals of the SPD and the Greens to stay in power. The political correlation between Germany’s AfD, The Reform Party in Great Britian, the PVV in the Netherlands and the National Front, now the National Rally party in France is obvious. and The exclusionary tactics of the established political parties towards these reform party adversaries in those nation’s governments is quite obvious. The established uni-parties freeze out the rising reform parties. What can be done, is done. Because politics is about power and what is possible.
There are exceptions that prove the rule, Denmark, of course in Denmark, the Social Democrats are in power, and they are fierce against immigration. An EU member, Denmark got an exemption from the immigration rules. The Danes meet irregular aliens at their fortified frontier and basically rob them of their valuables, to discourage additional visits to the checkpoints. The Dane’s stated goal is to reduce Denmark’s asylum seekers to zero. Political settlements in nations of one blood can look easy.
I am aware about one-half of the United States hates Donald Trump’s Republican party. It is definitely a different Republican party than it was when I was growing up. Back then there were ‘Rockefeller Republicans’ who descended from the progressive Republicans of the first half of the twentieth century and they were way more progressive than the conservative senators and congressmen from the South. I am going to assume my readers are aware of the history of our two political parties and your author will hit just a few recent highlights concerning the pace of change. The ‘solid south,’ the Republican Negro vote, the ‘yellow dog’ Democrats who suppressed the Blacks from voting. They were called ‘yellow dog’ Democrats, because they would vote for a yellow dog, before they would vote for a Republican, as long as the dog was a Democrat, ...and I assume spoke with a southern accent. Horse thieves and Klanmen were always Democrats. But all Democrats did not belong to the Klan and steal horses. Eisenhower carried a plurality of the black vote (almost a majority) in ‘56. The Democrats decidedly got behind the proposed civil rights legislation and eight years later not a single, solid-south-state failed to vote for the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. It was the first time since 1872 and reconstruction that any southern state voted Republican, but not the last time. I’m just saying the Democratic Party has changed too.
I grew up hearing about how Roosevelt and the Democrats changed everything and ruined the Republic in the thirties, but I also observed Eisenhower and Nixion left the new political settlement of an expanded Federal Executive Government largely intact. The worst of the Democrat’s economic damage was repaired when labor union power was curtailed with, essentially the repeal of the Wagner Act and the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947. I think I read there were around two hundred bills introduced in Congress to repeal the Wagner Act between 1936 and 1947. Five years before the election of a new Republican president, we fixed it, because we had to. I think the ‘pre-electoral coalition’ political parties of the US work better than the much more defined and comparatively static European parties, who are right now very much the recognizable descendants of their former selves. When someone says, “I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me.” They have my sympathy. “But look what happened to the Democrats!” is my reply.
Change is the only constant. The Conservative spirit rightly understood tries to conserve what is good in the ocean of constant change. The global network has been very destructive to the ancient social fabric. We are living together in the ether of illuminating fiber optic strands that lets us look at and talk to potentially anyone, anywhere, anytime. We can move goods, tangible and intangible, and money too, around the globe effortlessly. Because of the network, the efficiencies of scale seem to be limited only by the planet itself, and Mr. Elon Musk thinks that’s too restrictive. We see how others live, even as they see how we live. And the biggest change ever? We can imagine living anywhere, everybody can, perhaps everybody does. We go everywhere on holiday. Who wants to live in the Boondocks?
But, not Mars, please. Untimely death will stop migration to Mars. It looks like a planet suitable enough for graves, but not anything else. Seriously though, how are we going to curtail immigration? This is the question that all the world is asking. It’s a political question and it will take an act of political will to answer it. And that’s why I like our old familiar two-party system. It’s so responsive to voters. It can’t ‘freeze’ out the opposition. Goodness knows the Democrats tried to freeze out Trump, but it can’t be done, the system is too responsive to his voters. Good thing too. You need a political settlement that can be responsive to the changes, without changing the political settlement. We fought a civil war, and our constitution and our two-party system stayed intact. I know Democrats believed we dodged a political crisis in 2020. Perhaps we did. But the system was pretty resilient in the face of that ’mostly peaceful protest’ at the capitol. And it was resilient in 2024, the Democrats handed Trump’s Republican Party the keys without a whimper. And I predict we will have peace in ‘28 & ‘32 too. The Democratic party will rise again. Let it rest and bleed a while. It will come back. Changed and reinvigorated with new voters and new interests.
To be against mass immigration is to be for historical consciousness. Only sociopaths want to sponge away the history of their own people. When the river is rising or the forest is burning, you can’t stop the change, but you should try save your house. Maybe we live in a lucky place. Let's be like Denmark, let's be lucky. Be thankful for your political settlement and make it work. Fight, fight, fight.
