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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (40310)	1/8/2010 7:34:27 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Dick Morris sees two parties. I see four. By Charles Lane January 6, 2010; 5:38 PM ET PostPartisan - Quick takes by the Post's opinion writers voices.washingtonpost.com I can't remember a more breathtaking 48 hours in politics since Barack Obama's election in November 2008. Byron Dorgan is out; Chris Dodd is out; Bill Ritter is out. Who would have thought that just one year into Obama's promising presidency, the Democrats who had pinned their hopes on him would be dangerously close to political meltdown? No doubt this has to do with all the factors you've read about: the lousy economy, public concern about the messy health care compromise, renewed fear of terrorism, the usual cyclical problems of the incumbent party in an off-year election. But much, much deeper forces are at work -- tectonic shifts in the American electorate that also explain why Republicans are at war with one another and thus unable to take full advantage of the Dems' woes (though the GOP will do well in November if present trends continue). Dick Morris sees a "New Two-Party System" in which centrist Democrats are getting squeezed out of a liberal party that has no real place for them any more. That's about half right. It's more like we have four political parties stuffed into two. Roughly speaking, the Democrats consist of a liberal wing (epitomized by, say, Howard Dean) and a centrist wing (think of Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln). The Republicans include a conservative wing (e.g., Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio) and an ultra-conservative wing (Sarah Palin). These are not recent developments. Both parties have been ideological and regional coalitions for decades. You might even say that the four parties I'm talking about correspond roughly to the four political cultures first identified by historian David Hackett Fischer in his classic book Albion's Seed. That book traced the main currents in American political ideology to the folkways and notions of liberty imported from four British regions that provided the population of early America. East Anglia gave us the Puritans of New England, with their emphasis -- "liberal," in today's terms -- on community virtue. The Quakers who settled the Delaware Valley established a society and politics built on problem-solving and compromise. Southern England gave us the Virginia cavaliers, founders of a conservative, aristocratic tradition. And the Scotch-Irish who settled the Appalachian backcountry produced a populist, anti-government, "don't tread on me" mentality. Now, however, under the Internet-intensified pressure of recession, terrorism and global uncertainty, the four parties are breaking out of the two-party mold that had previously contained them. On the Democratic side, President Obama finds himself torn between progressives demanding an ideologically pure health-care program, among other agenda items, and a pragmatic wing desperately attempting to hold together 60 Senate votes by whatever means necessary. On the Republican side, it's unclear whether the party's right wing is angrier at Obama or at its own leadership. Certainly the fury of the Tea Party and similar groups threatens here and there to overwhelm more conventional conservatives (just ask Charlie Crist in Florida). Dodd, Dorgan and Ritter are victims of the four-way crack-up in the following sense: off-year elections are low-turnout affairs that often hinge on who has the most motivated voter base. In 2010, the Democratic left is turned off while the Republican right is fired up. These three political warhorses could not win under those circumstances. But if the Republicans benefit this fall, their gains may be transitory: their own internal split may flare up once they have to decide how to use their new power. Small wonder that we are seeing so much churning in the political class, as various incumbents either switch parties or retire prematurely -- while both parties emphasize recruitment of fresh blood and contemplate such unorthodox measures as the Democrats' rumored courting of Tennessean Harold Ford Jr. to run for U.S. Senate in New York. Where could it all lead? The past is not prologue, but party instability of this magnitude could be the harbinger of even bigger changes. The U.S. political system actually fractured into four major parties in 1860 -- and we all know what happened next. By Charles Lane \| January 6, 2010; 5:38 PM ET Categories: Lane \| Tags: Charles Lane