[D66] What is an American “political party”?

[Antid Oto]

What is an American “political party”?
by Adam Kotsko

On this Election Day, I find myself puzzled as to what the American 
political parties actually are. They clearly aren't classical 
parliamentary parties. There's too much entrepreneurialism among 
politicians (who can freely choose which party to identify with), and 
strict party discipline is viewed as an unfortunate aberration by most 
observers.

Nor are they coherent organs of any particular class or ideological 
interest. Most vividly, the Democrats used to be the party of racist 
Southerners and has in recent decades become the party of 
African-Americans. Only in recent times have the two parties sorted out 
neatly according to a left-right axis (so that every Republican is to 
the right of every Democrat), but that has apparently been more by 
default -- as the Republicans have become more hard-core right-wing, the 
Democrats have absorbed everyone else, so that the incoherence of the 
Democratic coalition is directly proportional to the coherence of the 
Republicans.

Obviously the idiosyncracy of U.S. constitutional arrangements is a huge 
factor here. Staggered elections and procedural quirks conspire to force 
the parties to cooperate to get anything done, militating against 
ideological coherence.

In a very real sense, we could say that this reflects the much-vaunted 
"wisdom" of the Founders, who designed the republic with an eye toward 
avoiding the dangers of factions. We really don't have "parties" like 
those found in other parliamentary democracies -- their design was 
successful!

But what we have instead is something even worse: two totally nihilistic 
and opportunistic apparatuses that compete for power as such. The 
"parties" don't seek power so that they can implement their programs or 
serve their constituencies -- they advocate policies and court 
constituencies so that they can gain power. (If we doubt this, we can 
simply look to Mitt Romney's career trajectory.)

Adam Kotsko | Tuesday, November 6, 2012 at 7:11 am | Categories: 
politics | URL: http://wp.me/p2IRQ-2gE