The Age of Incoherent Partisanship

[robosmith]

The Age of Incoherent Partisanship

Quote

The Democrats, as a party, are in favor of American constitutional democracy, and when so much of our politics has become nothing but blue flags and red flags, that is enough. As John F. Kennedy once said to Richard Nixon (in the context of foreign policy, but with a sentiment that is more than applicable today): “I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25, in comparison to something like this?”

The Republicans, meanwhile, have in the course of a decade sublimated from a solid party into a miasmic gas of partisan incoherence. As I wrote in the summer of 2022, when I tried to define why I still thought of myself as a conservative, the GOP is not identifiably “conservative” in any way that people like me ever understood that word. I was a Republican because I wanted a small, efficient government that believed in constitutional limits on its own power, a strong national defense, and the advancement of free markets. That party no longer exists.

Partisan inconsistency is hardly news: Political scientists have known since at least the 1960s that voters are attached to parties but are far less coherent about policies. (Although much of this work is about the American system, plenty of evidence indicates that irrational partisanship is something of a natural human tendency that’s affecting other democracies as well.) But one American party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile, but so far dominant, prodemocracy coalition. In this unprecedented situation, our politics have been largely emptied of meaning beyond the existential question of democracy itself.