The Parties Are Over
There was a time during my lifetime when political parties were organic, exhibiting a life-cycle of sorts, leaning this way or that depending on which issues pulled this way or that. Bags of money provided by interested private parties helped move the scale and such behavior will never change. We had a Two-plus Party System: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and those previously mentioned interested parties.
The Republican Party has been the party of slow from its emergence out of the corpse of the Whig Party in the mid-nineteenth century. It boasted a liberal wing, based in big cities where votes available for sale were more available for progressive social issues. Big city Republicans liked showing the big stick and giving business some elbow room to thrive (within reason), just like their rural counterparts. But they were still city boys, whose educations were often completed on the docks and shorelines. Differentiating between urban Democrats and Republicans during campaigns was difficult, with both targeting many of the same social factions. Liberal Republicans retained their go-slow character, but were infected with noblesse oblige, being surrounded by and sometimes knowing firsthand the ill-effects of poverty and substandard living conditions. These came to be known as Rockefeller Republicans. But Republicans in the Ohio Valley and on to the south and west were a different breed. They were landlocked. They had no interest in the tides, or what arrived in their wake. It had no apparent effect on their lives. It was none of their business. These were our traditional Isolationists.
In the former Confederate states, there were no Republicans. The party of Lincoln was barely acknowledged to exist south of Maryland through the first half of the twentieth century. These politicians, referred to as Dixiecrats, composed most of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. That is, until issues concerning civil rights, Jim Crow laws and forced integration under the Kennedy/Johnson administrations saw them send the donkey packing and with it, their balancing effect on the Party. The inevitable response from the country was to reject the newly unbalanced incumbent Democrats and their Progressive standard-bearer Hubert H. Humphrey in favor of an impossibly vague neoconservative California Republican, Richard M. Nixon. The winning motto could just as well have been “Vote Slow.”
The 1968 Presidential Election was not a referendum on either candidate, though both appeared less than worthy in light of what they were following. It was a statement of dissatisfaction over the Vietnam War from both doves and hawks, the watershed event that saw political labels redefined. Where the words conservative and liberal were previously seen as adjectives within the vocabularies of both parties, during the civil strife surrounding the war in Southeast Asia they became trademarks, forever after banned from crossing party lines in polite discussion. Conservative Democrats and Liberal Republicans are now seen less often than a Sasquatch. The result is as you see it playing out in the newspapers and on television.
The Republican and Democratic Parties still both exist in name, but neither is representative of a highly developed organism. Each lacks an opposing side of its brain, which prevents proper fact assessment. Party faithful cannot sleep because they cannot find peace in just one side of any issue. Both parties are terminally ill and will soon die unless some miracle cure presents itself. Then, what was once an adjective shall become a noun, who you’re with and how you vote. It won’t make it easier to run for office, or to vote, for that matter. Maybe that is a saving grace for losing the political party apparatus. Organizations will be strictly fly-by-nighters, issue-based and answerable to no parties, except those previously mentioned interested ones. At least, the façade of unity may finally fall and we can then wave flags of either red or blue to display our half-wits to the world.
