Could the growing split over Donald Trump bring about the end of one of our major political parties?
The truth is that American politics doesn’t offer many points of comparison. The first two parties to vanish, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democrats, were proto-parties that lacked much of the organization that really makes parties succeed. A later party, the Whigs, which collapsed in the 1850s, was similarly loosely organized, and its members had decidedly mixed feelings about how things like patronage and campaigns should work.
Since the Republicans formed in 1856, the two major parties have bent but not broken. But, as incredulous commentators consider the possibility that 2016 could be the end of the GOP, they are missing the issue about which they should be most incredulous: Our two political parties are still, in some sense, vestiges of the parties they were in the 1850s. Despite changes in coalitions and ideology — to say nothing of revolutions like industrialization, the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, two world wars, and the changing composition of the electorate — the two parties have proved immensely adaptable.
Asking whether the GOP is not long for this world is, in a sense, the wrong question. Here’s the right one: Are the parties too resilient for their own good?
Democracy needs political parties to function. But our two major parties have become constrained by holding onto more than 100 years of ideas, constituencies and practices that can come into conflict with what those parties need right now to be competitive.
Perhaps the starkest example of this is in the area of race relations: The parties have historically been structured to accommodate racism and racial conflict. Neither one was created with our current norms about racial equality in mind.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... z4HUy18cqq
It's not a bad article. There are some brief, historical insights into both parties about times when they could've dissolved (for instance, those horrible Democrats led by Strom Thurmond in the 1940s). It remind us of some things that people either forgot or chose to ignore like
Another identity crisis happened as the era of Ronald Reagan unfolded and a group of moderate Democrats organized under the banner of the Democratic Leadership Council to promote an approach to governing that was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a “third way.” This movement culminated with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose support for traditionally Republican stances like welfare reform led some on the left to question what the Democratic Party stood for at all.
