As Donald Trump’s Republicans look askance as he launches what looks to some like another long-term war in the Middle East, and as the anti-Trump Democrats hold up Homeland Security funding in what looks to some like prioritizing illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens, one is tempted to ask, what’s going on with America’s political parties?
Something close to self-harm, you might answer. And yet it is apparent that the U.S. parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, are not in as much trouble as many old parties abroad. In Britain, both Conservatives and Labour are trailing the pro-immigration restriction Reform Party in polls.
In France Emanuel Macron’s centrist allies struggle to form a majority in the National Assembly. In Germany, the Social Democrats are in third place and the Christian Democrats are hard-pressed by the upstart Alternative-fur-Deutschland. And so it goes.
One hundred years ago, in the disillusionment over the enormous death toll of World War I, parties labeled as liberal, favoring free trade, market capitalism, and some welfare state, largely disappeared. Britain’s Liberal Party, governing from 1906 to 1922, fell to third place in 1923, behind nationalist Conservatives and socialist Labour.
Weimar Germany saw rioting communists, assassinations of political moderates, Nazi street gangs, and militarist putsches, culminating in Hitler’s takeover in 1933. Anticlerical parties, founded to limit established churches, fell to Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922 and as Hitler’s Panzer troops marched into Paris in 1940.
America’s two political parties had greater staying power despite upheavals. Economic upheaval and Woodrow Wilson’s disability drove Democrats down to 34% in the 1920 presidential election, but with their white Southern base and growing strength among immigrants, they remained competitive.
Similarly, the Great Depression that began in 1929 proved disastrous for Republicans, who fell to 37% in 1936. But with their base among rural and small-town Northern Protestants, they remained competitive, and after Franklin Roosevelt was no longer on the ballot, they won seven of the next eleven presidential elections.
Today, they’re both under stress. In the 1990s, as baby boom leaders came to the fore, Democrats started winning most presidential elections and Republicans started winning most seats in the House. In their competition, they converged on issues, as Bill Clinton led Democrats to take some lessons from Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush led Republicans to learn some lessons in turn.
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In retrospect, the turn of the century was a kind of golden age for the parties. Since then, they’ve changed. Democrats have moved left on cultural issues from abortion to transgender rights, while Republicans under Donald Trump have repudiated Reagan-Bush stands on trade, foreign policy, and entitlements.
Neither is in as much trouble as many traditional European parties. But both are treading on perilous ground.
Trump’s trademark issues helped him win over noncollege grads who never supported earlier post-1990s Republicans and even made inroads, in 2024 at least, among Hispanics and black people. But his insistence on relitigating the 2020 election cost Republicans Senate majorities for four years, and his insistence on imposing, on shaky legal bases, inflation-stoking tariffs for which there is little popular demand has cost his party crucial support.
For reasons that are unclear, he has done little to spotlight his astonishing success at closing the border to illegal immigrants, while authorizing the now-fired Kristi Noem to order unnecessarily violent internal enforcement. His use of military force, very limited in Venezuela and prolonged in Iran, risks losing support among Republicans who see these as recurrences of Bush efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, though that effect has been minimal so far.
Democrats have problems of their own. Their party has always been a collection of out-groups, which at its strongest form a national majority, but which can become weighted down by the unpopularity of stands insisted on by representatives of what journalists call “the groups.” So many of their politicians see no choice but to take unpopular and irresponsible stands such as “defund the police” and “abolish ICE.”
Similarly, many of them interpret the current majority support of same-sex marriage, which was achieved only after extended debate over 25 years after it was first proposed in 1989 by journalist Andrew Sullivan, as a warrant for support of irreversible sex-change surgery for minors or for government-paid sex transition surgery for prisoners. That’s what inspired the effective and fair ad criticizing Kamala Harris for favoring “they/them” over “you.”
Many Democrats hope to avoid damaging cultural issues by promising economic benefits. But the problem there is that the United States already has a generous welfare state and a progressive tax system that extracts more from the rich and less from the less affluent than Europe does.
And as former Sen. Phil Gramm and two economist colleagues have pointed out, government transfer programs provide enough economic benefits that there is little economic difference between the lowest 20% of earners and the middle 20%.
Gathering up these transfer payments requires a certain functional literacy, which may put the neediest at a disadvantage. And one problem endemic to generously funded public services is that for politicians, there’s an incentive to favor the deliverers of public services, who in left-leaning states are aggressively represented by public employee unions, over the intended beneficiaries.
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The default political strategy is to provide “healthcare” — actually, more generous health insurance. But as we’ve seen, most voters don’t want to lose their present arrangements — they opposed Obamacare when Obama was in office and opposed Obamacare repeal when Republicans were — and they’re skeptical of promised improvements.
Things may seem bleak today, with one party, in the phrase of radio talk host Erick Erickson, hostage “to one man’s ego” and the other “to a bunch of bat crap crazy progressives.” But compared to a century ago, when European countries were reeling from the slaughter of and disillusionment after what was then called The Great War, our political parties and the electoral democracies they seek to manage are in perilous but not deadly shape.