Trump, Party Strength, and GOP Dysfunction
Plus all the links.
So I saw a comment today somewhere on the intertubes attributing Donald Trump in part to the breakdown of previously strong political parties in the 1970s and…well, I don’t think that’s quite it. Here’s my view.
First shouldn’t-be-controversial point: US political parties have always been relatively weak by any measure compared to many other democracies.
Second probably shouldn’t-be-controversial point: By most assessments, US political parties in the 1970s were weak even by US standards, having declined from their peak in the 19th century. Scholars had disagreed about the shape of decline; some have things remaining reasonably steady until the 1960s, while others see more ebb-and-flow over time.1
Now for the not-nearly-consensus part. What I see is a strengthening of the parties since that low point, so that US political parties, made up as they always were of both formal organizations and informal networks, are (give or take) as important and central to politics in the US as they ever were.
So how could Donald Trump, a total outsider, take over the Republican Party? In part, because of a fluke; a whole bunch of improbable things allowed Trump to win the 2016 nomination despite opposition from the party. In part, because the Republican Party, while strong in many sense, was and is deeply dysfunctional, with party-aligned media disproportionately influential within the party.
And in part, because several important strains within the Republican Party associated with people such as Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and others, contributed to making the party open to bigots, authoritarians, and demagogues.2
All of which aligned with Trump after (and in some cases while) he won that first nomination, forming an alliance between Trump and those strains of the GOP that have dominated the party since. And that’s important because parties are so central to US politics that it really matters which faction dominates each party. In particular, it makes Trump and his allies much more dangerous than Nixon was when he was president. Nixon was a conventional Republican politician with strong party backing from the start, but there just wasn’t much party strength for him to use for much of anything. Policy development, coordination with Congress (and the courts), coordination with the states, controlling nominations…1970s parties just couldn’t do much of that. Now, they can and do.3
So that’s roughly what I think, although plenty of parties scholars disagree. For a very different view, see my GP/BP colleague Julia (short version here, longer version in here).
On to the links:
1. Must-read Sarah Binder at Good Authority on the institutional lessons and effects of the megabill.
2. Jennifer Victor on unpopular populism.
3. Lindsey Cormack on partisanship, social media, and Members of Congress.
4. Matt Motta and Dominik Stecuła on public opinion and attacks on higher education.
5. Natalie Jackson on public opinion and natural disasters.
6. Michael Tesler at Good Authority on public opinion and ICE.
7. And Dave Karpf on Elon Musk and his party.
It doesn’t prove anything, certainly not definitively, but people in the 1970s certainly thought that the parties had faded badly and become unimportant.
Not the entire party! Even now there are plenty of Republican party actors who want nothing to do with that stuff. But they have, of course, been largely and increasingly sidelined. At least for now.
You’ll notice that I’m not defining “strong” or “weak” here — hey, it’s a short newsletter/blog post! — but this bit is what I’m thinking about. What do parties actually do, out of all the things happening in politcs?