Friday Open Thread [8.23.13]

The Around the Horn will be published tomorrow. I had my physical this morning so I did not have time to go through everything.

Bruce Bartlett:

Just as Democrats had depended on the South to maintain their congressional control for generations, Republicans now depend on that region to maintain theirs. This has made the GOP ever more sensitive to issues that especially resonate with Southerners—abortion, gun control, low taxes and a hard line on immigration.

In the process, the liberal wing of the Republican Party completely ceased to exist. Just as all conservative Democrats became Republicans, all liberal Republicans became Democrats. Thus for the first time in American history, our two major parties are ideologically uniform—all the conservatives are in one party and all the liberals are in the other.

Since the GOP is now vitally dependent on maintaining its position in the South, I believe that the South now controls the Republican Party to a much greater extent than it controls the South. This makes it very hard for a Republican presidential nominee to reach out for moderate and swing voters in the North and West.

In effect, the price Republicans pay for holding Congress, by way of the South, is that its presidential nominees become unelectable. Republicans don’t yet believe this, but when they lose again in 2016, at least some will be forced to accept it.

We’ve had periods of partisan press and partisan warfare in our history. Indeed, the notion of neutral independent and objective press was really a mid to late 20th Century invention. Before that, there were reasons why some newspapers were call “the Whig,” (i.e. the Cecil Whig which still exists today) or had the words “Democrat” or “Republican” in them. But I digress.

In early times of partisan warfare, the conservatives in the liberal party made deals with the conservatives in the conservative party when a Republican (or in the 1800’s, a Democrat) was President, and vice versa. Remember, the parties ideologically as we know them today are reversed from what they once were. Yes, business interests, as is the case today, controlled both, but back in the 1800’s, the Republicans were the more liberal and the Democrats the more conservative. Each party had its opposite ideological wings. Slowly, however, the migration began around the election of 1912. Progressives and reformers left the Republican Party when Teddy Roosevelt left, and when Wilson was elected as a result, and instituted many progressive reforms, progressives became Democrats. And slowly, culminating with the election of 1932 and Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, liberals/progressives took over the Democratic party.

But there remained many conservatives in the party, as there remained many liberals in the GOP. Eisenhower. Rockefeller. Javitts. Liberal Republicans that are probably to the left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton today. And these liberal Republicans were able to compromise and make deals with Democratic Presidents and vice versa.

Now that is gone. We are now practicing parliamentary politics in a presidential system. For government to function, one party is going to have to be nearly completely dominant, as the Dems were in 2009-10 and as the GOP was in 2003-2007. Divided government makes governing impossible in our new ideological era.

For whatever reason, in the past, independent swing voters love electing a President from one party and a Senator or Congressman from another. Ticket-splitting, its called. Now that we are essentially in a parliamentary system, such practice can no longer continue if government is to function. You either vote all Republican or all Democratic.