Every four years Americans engage in the ritual of deciding which Historical Moment looks the most like our own.  Is this  McGovern in 72  or  Carter/Kennedy in 80 ?  Is Obama Stevenson?  Seldom do the analyses extend back far enough to be really useful (the period from 146 - 122 BCE might yield valuable insight).  Seldom, too, does analysis rise to quite the level of poetry and insight as   Steve Fraser’s post on the Gilded Age at TomDispatch.


Well, look out your window, because it is 1852.  In that year the Whig party was shattered, and by 1854 it had ceased to exist.  Likewise, in 2008, the Republican party is dead.  And every Republican knows it. 

You can see it in the inability to raise money for candidates, in the number of Congressmen and Senators who have announced their ‘retirement.’  (Let’s face it, there are three reasons for an elected representative under the age of 95 to ‘retire,’ they have lined up lucrative lobbying deals, an indictment is eminent or they are sure to lose.)  You can see it, too, in the quality of the candidates they are fielding.  In reflections on the wild possibility that there will be a Democratic sweep in the Senate races. 

But there are three sure signs that the Republican Party is over.  Rupert Murdoch formed and alliance with Hilary Clinton in 2006, Richard Mellon Scaife backed Hilary Clinton in 2008 and Hilary Clinton raised $10M from 100,000 individuals in 24 hours  after the Pennsylvania primary.  That money didn’t come from a pent up well of Democratic fence sitters.

In the period from 1852 - 1854 the collapse of the Whigs gave rise to two political movements, the rabid anti-immigrant American Party ( known as the Know-Nothings) and the anti-slavery and pro-business Republican Party.  That Anti-immigrant sentiment is gripping the Republican Party today is a no-brainer, that it is driving people away from the party is less obvious, but it is a loser in the long run.

The Republican Party is dying for three reasons, which I may elaborate later:

    It has proven remarkably incompetent to govern.
    It has no record of  positive achievement to point to.
    Its animating philosophy has proven to be wrong on every point.

In short, they have no answers. 

It really doesn’t matter that the Democrats don’t look to have answers either.  And it doesn’t matter that the Democrats are fighting each other tooth and nail, or that there is little party unity.  The thesis isn’t that the Democrats are beating the Republicans, it is that the Republican Party is failing  without respect to the Democrats at all.  The Democrats are irrelevant. In fact there have been two times when one political party in America failed.  The Federalists in the period immediately after the War of 1812, and the Whigs, which I have referenced here.  In neither of the earlier cases did the Democrats (or Democratic-Republicans) really bring about the demise of the other party, they died of self-inflicted wounds.

People tending to see this new political landscape as ‘a new Progressive Moment,’ or the flip-side of Karl Rove’s generation of Republican Party domination are also missing the underlying reality.  Immediately after the failure of the Conservative parties (the Whigs, or the Federalists) the Democratic Party itself shattered in disarray.  In the aftermath of the Federalists came the Jacksonians, in the aftermath of the Whigs came the Republicans, and the end of slavery.  America is not about to become a one-party state, it is about to enter a period of transition, with two new parties, with new alliances and goals.  One of them will probably be called the Democrats, whether they are the left or the right is unclear, the name endures even if the party principles and platform are unrecognizable.  The other party, who knows - Federalist is possible, but I don’t think Whig will test very well.  Libertarian?

The present is always a poor guide to the future, the past is more reliable, because it is more pliable.  The fact that we have all grown up thinking that the two party system is the foundation of our political stability is really just a reflection of  successful marketing by the two parties. The apparent long durability of the Republicans (since 1856!) disguises the fact that they, too, nearly failed - in the period after 1929.  In fact the whole notion of a two party state is ahistorical.  There have been other periods of flux, where political movements rose up in the absence of action by the two national parties.  Some of those movements were quite strong.  The Democrats, themselves, would probably have failed without the reliable whip of racism in the South to keep the party going through its dark days (they bear a heavy burden for Secession and Civil War).

In any event, I think you may get more mileage viewing America as a lot of one-party states (precincts), rather than two big national parties.  If the Republicans are to survive it will be because these one party states manage to hold on long enough to overcome the opprobrium that the current leadership has brought down on them.  Or they will change their names- they won’t morph into Democrats.  Where I live (NJ) you can’t get elected as a Republican, but you can as an Independent, so maybe they become Indys.


 As an amusing tie-in: the election of 1852 put Franklin Pierce in the White House.  Pierce is widely credited as one of America’s worst Presidents.  He was a lawyer from New Hampshire with a deep attachment to alcohol and an admiration for the South and the institution of slavery, and it was his pushing of the Kansas-Nebraska act that undid the Missouri Compromise and split the political parties (both Whig and Democrat) into Northern and Southern factions, rent the nation in half.  Some things do run in the family, George Bush is related (distantly, not directly) to Franklin Pierce through his mother, Barbara Pierce.