Both parties are cracking up. What will it take for either one to come out on top?
In the wake of Donald Trump's election, partisans on both sides are anxious about the future of their party. And they should be. Both the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries revealed deep fault lines in the parties' respective coalitions, fault lines that are not going away.
As both parties struggle to orient their future, here are two pieces of advice:
The winning side in American politics is always the side that offers the biggest tent;
Building a winning majority requires thinking past "left" and "right."
The big-tent principle of coalition building in American politics follows from two basic premises.
First, we are a very big and diverse country, and most public opinion across issues does not cohere along any meaningful left-right spectrum. By a political junkie's standard, most voters are consistently inconsistent across a wide range of issues on a conventional liberal-conservative scale. Self-proclaimed "moderates," especially, are all over the place. There are also many single-issue activists groups in politics, all seeking to find a party home.
Second, all our national elections are plurality single-winner elections, which makes it very difficult for third parties to gain traction. As a result, America has always been a two-party nation.
Given the diversity of underlying opinion, shoehorning a plurality of voters into one party is an exercise in trade-offs and conflict management. As the political scientists Gary Miller and Norman Schofield have noted: "Successful American parties must be coalitions of enemies. A party gets to be a majority party by forming fragile ties across wide and deep differences in one dimension or the other. Maintaining such diverse majority coalitions is necessarily an enormous struggle against strong centrifugal forces."
The winning side is the side that does the best job of forcing the most truces among otherwise competing groups. The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once concisely defined a political party as "an organized effort to gain political power." The definition may sound mercenary, but it speaks to the basic reality of political competition. And to gain power, both Democrats and Republicans have enforced illusory binary coherence on the otherwise incoherent miasma of voters and groups in society.
By my guess, if we had a proportional representation system in American politics, we'd have six parties, which I've laid out below, along with my guesstimate on the percentage of seats they'd fill in a national legislature. I also assess where each party would stand on six key issues that could potentially organize politics.
Most people would attempt to place these six parties on a left-right spectrum, because that's how we think about politics. But this is not quite right. Depending on the issue, the six parties would line up differently. There's no universal left-right dimension. Depending on which is the organizing principle of politics, the coalitions would come down differently. Politics is multidimensional.
So the next time somebody tells you Democrats or Republicans should move to the left or to the right, you should look at that person quizzically and ask: On which issues?
Similarly, the next time somebody tells you about a new centrist movement, you should ask them: On which issues? The center varies by issue. Platitudes about civility and process are not the same as moderation and actual issue compromise. Likewise, while bipartisanship is possible, it varies by issue. The dream of a consistent "centrist coalition" is and will always be a fantasy.
The reason polarization relatively was low from the 1940s through the 1980s was because Democrats were a disorganized big-tent party. Democrats and Republicans sometimes voted together because they and their constituents agreed with each other on the substance (or sometimes, in the case of log rolls, the irrelevance) of the issues, not because they subscribed to some underlying Platonic ideal of bipartisan compromise as the summum bonum of public service. The centrists were those who were genuinely cross-pressured between the programs of two major parties.
In a proportional representation system, one could envision a minority governing "centrist" coalition of Progressives and Whigs, and more. This is a good reason why self-proclaimed "centrists" and other supporters of bipartisanship should support electoral reforms that allow for more of a multi-party system.
But in our winner-take-all system, this coalition is not enough for a majority party. Progressives need to band with Labor/Left to have a chance of winning, which creates a Democratic Party that is limited in the ability to achieve possible consensus with what I here call the Whigs (a.k.a. establishment Republicans). In theory, Labor/Left, Progressives, and Whigs could have a majority party. But both Liberals and Whigs would have to agree to disagree on some of their principles for the sake of a majoritarian coalition. For now, they haven't. Old loyalties are sticky.
The big-tent principle in action
From the 1930s through the early 1990s, the Democratic Party was the majority party in Congress. Democrats controlled the House for 58 out of the 62 years between 1933 and 1995, and controlled the Senate for 52 out of 62 years. They also controlled most state legislatures.
The Democratic Party was a majority for a simple reason. It maintained a big-tent coalition capacious enough to allow room for what often felt like two separate parties: Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats.
The two factions within the party often disagreed. Sometimes Northern Democrats voted with Republicans against Southern Democrats (often on civil rights). Sometimes Southern Democrats voted with Republicans against Northern Democrats (often on economic issues). Scholars and journalists frequently bemoaned the incoherence and disorganization of the Democratic Party, a lament encapsulated in Will Rogers's oft-repeated phrase: "I'm not a member of any organized political party ... I'm a Democrat."
But this disorganization was also the Democrats' strength. By allowing a wide range of candidates to claim the Democratic name while standing for different things, Democrats maintained a consistent majority.
As the Democratic Party became more unified in the 1980s and early 1990s, the tent became smaller. The centrifugal forces won out, leaving more and more longtime Democratic groups and voters feeling tossed from their party.
In 1994, Republicans took back the House and the Senate. Southern conservative Democrats got replaced by Southern conservative Republicans. The Democratic coalition narrowed.
The Republicans' big-tent vision was encapsulated in the Reagan coalition: traditional economic conservatives who wanted lower taxes and less business regulation, working-class "Reagan Democrats" who felt the Democrats' civil rights agenda had gone too far, Christian conservatives who wanted a return to traditional values, and anti-communists who saw America as a force for good in the world.
The unifying vision of "limited government" and "conservatism" meant different things to different groups within the party coalition. They were, however, united in their sense that the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy was not for them.
The big tent worked. When the 2018 election rolls around, Republicans will have held the House for 20 out of 24 years and the Senate for 14 out of 24 years.
Are other coalitions possible?
In our current politics, Republicans are still held together by being pro-market and pro–traditional values. Democrats are held together by being more socially liberal, more skeptical of markets, and more supportive of social welfare.
By contrast, issues of both foreign policy and civil liberties now more directly cut across the existing party coalitions, mostly because these issues have played a less central role in our public conversation. But if they become more prominent, party coalitions could change.
For example, if Trump's authoritarian tendencies translate into aggressive domestic spying and crackdowns on First Amendment rights of free assembly, free speech, and a free press, the pushback could be significant. If so, Democrats could expand their coalition to incorporate Libertarians and some Whigs. However, this is complicated by the fact that Democrats and Libertarians would have to resolve some fundamental conflicts over the role of markets and the social safety net, or agree to deemphasize these issues.
Similarly, if Trump makes good on his "America first" foreign policy promises and increases global instability as a result, foreign policy issues could return to the center of American politics. Democrats could expand to incorporate Whigs who placed similar value in preserving and defending America's post–World War II alliances. However, Democrats could also potentially lose some liberals who favor a smaller international role for the United States.
A populist coalition between the Nationalist-Populists, Labor/Left, and some Progressives is also possible, if economic issues come to dominate everything else in politics, including now-prominent social and identity politics issues. This could happen if the economy went into a major tailspin. It would also be more likely if the Democratic Party coalition incorporates Libertarians, Whigs, or both, or becomes more pro-corporate and more interventionist in foreign policy. I suspect this realignment will happen eventually, but it will take some time to get there.
It's also possible that new issues could arise, and give rise to new factions or even new parties. Indeed, many coalitions are conceivably possible. It all depends on which issue becomes the central dividing line of politics. "What happens in politics," Schattschneider writes, "depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes, etc. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position."
For Democrats, then, the strongest winning strategy would be to find a new dividing line. As the political scientist William Riker writes, the winning strategy for a minority is "to divide the majority party with a new alternative ... if successful this maneuver produces a new majority coalition composed of the old minority and the portion of the old majority that likes the new alternative better." But this is easier said than done.
The Republicans' national success — the presidency, majorities in the House and Senate, unified control of 25 state governments — is a tribute to their ability to hold their coalition together. Many different people vote Republican for many different reasons. Republicans also benefit from geography, since their voters are more efficiently allocated throughout the country. Democrats are more narrowly clustered in major metropolitan areas and coastal states, where they have supermajorities.
For the past eight years, Republicans have benefited in holding together their coalition together by focusing all of their energy on a common, unifying enemy: Barack Obama and then Hillary Clinton. They benefited by being the opposition party, which meant they weren't responsible for setting the agenda. And they could vote all they wanted to repeal Obamacare for symbolic reasons, never once having to worry that they would run afoul of Colin Powell's rule: You break it, you own it. Now that Republicans have unified control, the disagreements within the party actually need to be worked out.
When they take over unified control of government in 2017, Republicans will be an awkward "coalition of enemies." Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump all have different visions for the Republican Party, and none are big-tent, inclusive visions. They campaigned separately, and it's hard to see how they can govern together.
As Julia Azari has convincingly argued, Trump's presidency may well signal the "end of the Reagan era." After all, the current party coalition has held together now for about four decades, which is as long as any party coalition has ever held together in the history of American politics. The conditions that brought the current coalition together feel less and relevant as the decades go by. Today, the median-aged American (age 37) would have been a year old in 1980. Party coalitions have a life span. And a "coalition of enemies" can only stay friends for so long.
Can Democrats build a new majority?
One narrative Democrats might take away from the 2016 election is that they are actually the majority party, and they don't need to expand their coalition or change the dividing line in politics. After all, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote. And demography is on the Democrats' side. But demographic change is slow, and its directionality is not guaranteed: It is not destiny. Just because Latinos and African Americans vote Democratic now doesn't mean their loyalty is guaranteed in perpetuity.
Democrats also have a problem in that their core demographic groups — highly educated white liberals and minorities — are highly geographically concentrated. If anything, the Democrats' geographic reach became even more limited in 2016. Democrats can complain all they want about the unfairness of the weird ways in which rural America gets overrepresented, but they need to win big majorities before they can change the system.
Democrats might also comfort themselves that there is always an electoral backlash against the party that controls the White House, an almost "thermostatic" ebb and flow to partisan fortunes in America. The out-of-power party almost always picks up congressional seats in a midterm. But if Democrats are going to make 2018 gains, they're going to have to venture deep into Republican territory. They've only held the House for four out of the past 24 years, and they'll be defending 25 Senate seats, including 10 in states that voted for Trump.
Certainly, Democrats can wait for a collapse of the Republican coalition. But they need to have a winning strategy for building a new majoritarian politics, too. Both civil liberties and foreign policy could be powerful wedge issues. Here, Democrats might be encouraged to note that Mitch McConnell did not take kindly to Trump's suggestion that flag burners be jailed and stripped of their citizenship, and that McConnell has also been a strong supporter of the NATO alliance, which Trump has threatened to undermine.
If a Trump administration enjoins these fights, he could create a lot of disaffected Republicans. Whether Democrats can take advantage electorally depends on whether they are willing to build a coalition that's welcoming to disaffected Republicans. Again, the party that has the most capacious big tent is the winning party. Alternatively, Democrats and Republicans might learn to work together in bipartisan ways on these issues, building some new working relationships.
If Democrats want to start winning, they'll have to find a way to shift the dividing line in American politics to build a big-tent coalition where they're the majority. And to do so, they'll have to think bigger than left versus right. If Republicans want to keep winning, they're going to need to keep political debate where it currently is, and continue to suppress the divisions within their party. Both are daunting challenges. But in the zero-sum nature of two-party competition, one of these two things has to happen.
This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.