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1/ AS THREATENED LAST NIGHT: This long thread will be me spinning out some thoughts about what’s going on with our two party system right now.
2/THREE CAVEATS: Caveat 1: I made a resolution this year not to try predicting the future. Predicting the future is foolish because it is almost entirely impossible. So please take all I’m saying with a grain of salt labeled: “The future is unknowable.”
3/ Caveat 2: I am not a trained political scientist or historian. My political experience is entirely in topical comedy and occasional union volunteering. What I’m saying may be 101 obvious to experts. Or, I may be totally off-base and misinformed.
4/ Caveat 3: I typed this while listening to “I Lost My Heart To a Starship Trooper” by Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip, which is as good a reason as any to discount everything I think or believe right off the bat.
5/ I’ve been wondering for awhile what the next party realignment in American politics would look like, and why it would happen. Because even though the Republicans and Democrats have been a constant my whole life (and my parents’ and grandparents’), that wasn’t always the case.
6/ American history is littered with the wreckage of political parties that once assumed the support of thousands of voters, but now exist only as remnants spoken of in history books purchased for, but unread by, America’s dads.
7/ Particularly, reading Sydney Blumenthal’s second book about the political life of Abraham Lincoln, “Wrestling With His Angel” made me think about the end of the Whig party and the birth of the Republican party.
8/ Basically, in the 1840’s, you have two major political parties in America: the Whigs and the Democrats. They argued over things like whether the government should invest in roads and what level the tariff should be.
9/ To oversimplify things dramatically, after America invaded Mexico and grabbed half its land and stuff, that system started breaking down mainly over whether or not that land would be turned into free states or slave states.
10/ The Democrats wanted more slave states, and were more unified than the Whigs. They won control of the government for awhile. The Whigs collapsed and fell apart.
11/ Then you had this drastically confusing period where ex-Whigs were swirling around looking for parties to start or belong to. For a short time, an anti-immigrant faux-secret society party got real popular, but didn’t last long. Nobody could tell what the future would be.
12/ To make my read of that clearer: the Whigs were more anti-savery than the Democrats. They were right in their stance and morally correct. But when a political and moral crisis came, they shattered. Victory for the Democrats, right? Well…
13/ Because the Democratic party got SO over-confident pro-slavery radical that it drove away its more moderate elements. Eventually they drifted to the same place the anti-slavery Whigs were drifting to: the new Republican Party, which won its second presidential election.
14/You get your new system, where the parties are more ideologically pure: slavery vs. anti-slavery. At least until the slavery crisis is ended by the actions and deaths of many, many people. And then the parties go back to arguing about tariffs, patronage, and get watered down.
15/ My point with all that is that it isn’t always the more correct of the two parties that survives a clash — and that when a party in power gets too extreme it forces people away. And also, sometimes policies can be so disastrous that fantasy smashes into reality.
16/ TANGENT IN AN ALREADY LONG THREAD: Something I’m fond of saying is that you can ignore reality for a long time, but you can only ignore it for SO long until you crash into reality. Reality can not be imagined away, because it can kill you.
17/ You can wish away reality and enact disastrous policies for a certain amount of time — but inevitably the bill from reality comes due, and must be paid. Then you either change what you’re doing or self-destruct.
18/ BACK TO THE MAIN THREAD: I’ve been wondering if we’re in the final stages of a similar, but much more slow-moving party realignment. Remember, that realignment I was talking about earlier, that took about 13 years to come about.
19/ Parties are always shifting and moving, but I’ve been wondering if we’ve been in an extremely slow-motion party realignment since the 1980s around a question almost as fundamentally important as slavery or anti-slavery.
20/ That question: “Should we have a government that does things?” Not the debate over whether what the government does should be limited or expansive, but should the government do ANYTHING.
21/ Should the government function or should America exist as a sort of violence-drenched Mad Max wasteland nation? Should the President be a national administrator, or just the strongest of many feudal warlords commanding private armies to protect their walled cities?
22/When President Trump was elected, it felt like the question had been answered: America would have apocalypse. But was that the moment of seeming dominant victory before the shattering of the opposition into a new form?
23/ANOTHER TANGENT: Another thing I say is that people want to live through Revolutions or Apocalypses. People desire for their lives to have meaning. They desire to be at the birth of great things or the end of great things — not the mushy middle years when the status quo reigns
24/For instance, I take stupid pleasure in knowing my tombstone will start in one millennium and end in another. These year numbers are meaningless — backdating from roughly the birth of a god I don’t believe in.
25/But on a base, visceral level, I still like the feeling that I’ll have lived through SOME sort of change that all those losers who died between 1000 and 1999.
26/To put it another way, there’s a reason people re-enact the Civil War and not the patronage reform battles of the 1880’s.
27/It’s one of the reasons that we’re told every election that “This is the most important election of our lifetime.” Because people would grow despondent if they knew ahead of time they were voting for a Benjamin Harrison rather than an Abraham Lincoln.
28/BACK TO THE MAIN THREAD: It’s possible we’re watching the Democratic Party experience that re-molding, not in the radical, progressive, exciting, and — to me at least — preferable policy-wise direction that would liberally mirror the GOP political death cult.
29/But rather into the more status quo-oriented image of the candidate, Joe Biden. Someone who projects stability more than anything else — which in times of apocalypse or revolution can be very desirable.
30/TANGENT: Another thing I’ve said a lot is that my main argument if I were running for president now is, “Elect me and I promise you will go whole days without thinking about me.”
31/Because the whole reason we HAVE a government is to live in a world where all individuals don’t have to constantly carry the weight of the world.
32/And everyone wants to live through Revolutions and Apocalypses, but Revolutions and Apocalypses SUCK to live through.
33/ANYWAY: Things like the Lincoln Project, and John Kasich maybe speaking at the Democratic Convention, make me think some new version of that party may be in the offing.
34/One that says on its largest banner: “GOVERNMENT SHOULD DO”, and minimizes other issues until the crisis over non-belief in functioning government passes. This would be, too a voter like me, very disappointing.
35/I’m a liberal. I want more radical actions taken on the environment, racial inequality, income inequality, the size of our military, and so forth. In the short term, I’m worried that those things will be overshadowed by the sheer need to have a functioning government at all.
36/And that might be the case until the GOP changes or the Democrats split into new things. Or, possibly, the newly beefed up Democratics might use the fact that ex-GOPers would be stuck voting for the functioning government party over the death cult, to push more liberal causes
37/That would obviously be much more preferable to me.
38/Or, optionally, we’ll drift back into an era when political parties are not ideological organizations, but instead shifting coalitions fighting just to be on top for the moment so they can get some stuff before they lose power again.
39/OR NONE OF THESE MAY HAPPEN. This moment may be a blip in a larger political saga we will not live long enough to see the whole shape of. That mushy middle I talked about. And frankly our sense of self should not be bound up in world historical events we have no control over.
40/Like I said, predicting the future is dumb. Something drastic and crazy could happen that nobody could see coming and causes history to spiral off into some bizarre new direction. For want of a nail, and all that.
41/But those are the half-informed thoughts that have been swirling in my head while I take care of my children who would be happily playing with another family’s children if not for the apocalyptic warlord death cult the Republican Party has become.
42/Would I like a governing political party dedicated to social justice, economic justice, and a sustainable, livable environment? A billion times yes. But right now I will reluctantly settle for a governing political party dedicated to governing.
43/Of course, that isn’t my wholly my decision. I’m merely one of hundreds of millions who will be making that decision with me in November. And that it isn’t wholly my decision is a source of both great frustration and great relief.
44/END. And for the record, I didn’t listen to “I Lost My heart to a Starship Trooper” for the ENTIRETY of typing that out. It’s not that long a song.
