Kim Phillips-Fein has an interesting essay in The Nation on the persistence of the conservative movement in this country. I think one of the key ingredients in their resiliency is that our winner-take-all federal elections make it nearly impossible for the country to maintain more than two seriously competitive political parties. When the Democrats are in power, there is really only one alternative. If you don’t like how a Democrat is doing his or her job, you have to vote for a Republican to get rid of them. If your congressman is a crook, you can perhaps vote for a green candidate in protest, but that won’t remove them from office. So, you see things like New Orleans electing a Republican just to be rid of William ‘Freezer Cash’ Jefferson. This problem is one of the main reasons I am in favor of a progressive movement that consistently challenges Democratic incumbents in the primaries. In some cases this is needed for ideological reasons, but it is critically important when a Democrat is exposed as being ethically challenged.
I am not interested in so-called solutions that require amending the Constitution. I am well aware that the Constitution distorts political opinion in this country and gives it a rightward drift. Any system where California and Idaho have the same number of senators is going to be very biased against coastal progressive opinion. We just have to live with that, account for it, and compensate for it wherever we can. Solutions that have no chance of being enacted are no solutions at all.
The Democratic Party has now incorporated almost all of the non-White, non-fundamentalist Christian population of the country. The rational political debate in this country between the needs of business and labor, and change and custom, are all going on within the Democratic Party. But the Republican Party will be back, and they just might be crazy enough to get us all killed. If you want to study them as an anthropologist might, it is because they are such a danger to humanity.
