Assymetrical Polarization: The Future of American Political Parties?

I've long railed against the idea of party "systems," particularly in the U.S. case. Parties operate according to their own internal logics, which includes a competitive calculation, of course, but are largely driven by internal power structures and ideas. This is readily evident in Sen. Arlen Specter's decision to caucus with the Democrats, and in the reaction to it, particularly by those on the right who praise this as a kind of ideological self-purge.

Beginning with the nascent ideational factions of Federalist and Jeffersonian in the early Republic, American political parties have exhibited a dual impulse to ideologically purify and to encompass the entire essence of American identity. Louis Hartz wrote in the 1950s about the inability of a society built on Lockean ideas to tolerate conflict on the fundamentals of politics. The manifestation he denounced was McCarthyism. In a less disturbing but no less anti-democratic form, we see this concept born out in the development of asymmetrical polarization.

In other words, the Republican Party has staked out a claim to a particular, narrow set of governing ideas, leaving the Democratic Party as a programmatic and ideologically varied catch-all party. The choice facing Americans in 2010 will not be expanded government services vs. lower taxes, the right to privacy vs. religious morals, or internationalist foreign policy vs. unilateralism. The choice will be between a catch-all party that leads by piecemeal and patronage and a largely demographically homogeneous party indistinguishable from an angry little ideological movement. The Democrats, as the party in power, should show leadership by building a real coalition, not just a circus of interests and viewpoints who all happened to end up under the same tent. True leadership - not shown thus far by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, or Senate Majority Leader Reid - would forge a coalition based on a set of shared goals. Participants in the coalition need not be ideological twins or neglect their own identities, but they would benefit from belonging to a party that stood for something. A big tent makes for good rhetoric, but the people standing under it need to know why they should stay there.