Jim Geraghty of the National Review has admitted his party is falling apart. But then he goes on to a false equivalence claiming the Democrats are also collapsing.
For a long time, the question “why doesn’t the United States have a multiparty system?” had an obvious answer: Unlike other Western democracies, America’s political factions coalesced into the two major parties, noisily agreeing to move the country in a generally more conservative or a generally more liberal position. These factions may have chafed at each other, but they generally saw each other as irritable (and irritating) allies, not enemies indistinguishable from the opposition party. Until now. There have always been primary fights and rivalries, but the fights within the Democrats and Republicans this cycle are as intense as the partisan divisions were in past ones. More important, they’re not just about personality or style. Within the parties, primary voters are choosing among extremely different visions and policy ideas. Chunks of each party are looking at their traditional allies and asking just what interests and ideas they really have in common any more.
Here, Geraghty gets history very wrong. There have been tons of inter party spats. The Democrats fell out over the Vietnam War in a very violent way in 1968 and the rifts that opened weren’t completely healed until Bill Clinton came along. At the 1948 convention, a huge chunk of southern delegates walked out after the Democratic Party adopted a plank in favor of Civil Rights. And in 1912, Left Wing Republicans formed their own ticket under Teddy Roosevelt and ran against GOP standard bearer William Taft, effectively handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
For each of these factions – Clinton, Sanders, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio – the other four alternatives offer almost nothing. This is a formula for widespread dissatisfaction on election night — and a new president with almost no mandate on January 20, 2017. Will the Democratic and Republican parties break up? The enormous logistical challenges of building a new nationwide party from scratch make it unlikely that any faction will want to completely break away. But with such intense and irreconcilable divisions about the role of government, policy priorities, and just what the country needs, the two parties are already broken. And neither one looks likely to be genuinely united any time soon.
It’s ridiculous to claim the disagreements between Clinton and Sanders are anything approaching the GOP’s civil war. One only need to look at the debates. Hillary and Bernie discuss the issues and even offer praise for each other while the only thing the Republicans care about is who has a bigger penis. And the fact that the city of Cleveland is stocking up on riot gear, obviously worried about a repeat of Chicago in 1968, for the GOP convention while Philadelphia isn’t doing the same for the Democrats’ convention says all you need to know.