How Broderism Led To the Rise Of A Third Party; By Destroying An Existing Party
Posted on Sun Aug 26, 2007 at 04:00:09 PM EST
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Matt Yglesias has a great post on how historically ignorant Broderism and its drive for a compromise, issueless pragmatism is. As Yglesais shows, Whiggery led to to the rise of an ideological partisan Third Party - the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln:
I feel like it's worth mentioning here how little time third party enthusiasts ever seem to spend thinking about the rise of the Republican Party -- the only actual precedent for anything of the sort. They often seem to talk as if Abraham Lincoln was just some kind of somewhat disaffected dude sitting around somewhere with this really insightful speech about a how divided against itself, threw his hat in the ring, and -- bam! -- tired old Whig and Democrat ideologies are shunted aside in favor of a bold new era of pragmatism and bloody civil war. One can't do justice to the actual origins of the Republican Party in a blog post, but suffice it to say that it didn't work like that. The history of meaningful third party anti-slavery politics goes back to the abolitionists' Liberty Party in 1840. They later moderated their agenda somewhat, added the support of many breakaway anti-slavery Democrats, and became the Free Soil Party starting in 1848. This party had some very substantial adherents, but still didn't do very well. Then, as the national debate over slavery grew ever-more-intense, breakaway anti-slavery Whigs joined the movement that was now further reconfigured as the Republican Party. This new party did well enough to become a "second party," polling 33 percent while the Whigs got just 21.5 percent.
Matt has written a great concise post that does not, obviously, delve into the complete history of the rise of the Republican Party and the demise of the Whig Party, but I want to explore how Broderism was at the heart of the demise of the Whig Party. To wit, Broder has it backwards - his approach killed a dominant political party and led to an NON-Unity, partisan third party. I'll explore this history on the flip.
Howard Fineman has said:
Using a historical reference he has employed before, Fineman asserted that if Democrats cannot win the 2008 election, they "deserve to go the way of the Whigs, which is a political party that disappeared ... because it couldn't deal with the biggest issue of the time, which was slavery." He added, "[T]he issue this time that could render the Democrats useless to history ... is terrorism" and that "unless the Democrats can figure out an answer on foreign policy, then there is a chance that they could blow it."
Of course, Fineman misunderstands the point, misapplies the Whig analogy and basically is all wet, as he often is, and as Media Matter points out in that post. But it is interesting on how he stumbles upon the demise of the Whigs as a relevant point in history to today's politics.
What does Fineman misunderstand? That the demise of the Whigs was NOT due to their failure to find some "unifying" position on slavery - it was their cowardice in taking a strong stand on slavery that destroyed the Whigs. I feel confident that Fineman's idea of of an "answer" on terrorism for Democrats is some sort of Republican Lite "unifying position" that David Broder could embrace. Call it John Warnerism for short. Another phrase for it would be, well, Whiggery. What Democrats need of course is a confident strong and "non-unifying" (in Broder/Fineman terms) message on Iraq and the War on Terror; a confident critique of the abject failures of the Republican Party and Bushism on Iraq and the War on Terror. For it was the failure of the Whigs to provide a confident contrast to the disastrous Democratic position on slavery from the mid-1840s to the rise of the Republican Party that primarily led to the Whig demise. I think the Wikipedia article on the subject describes it well:
1852 was the beginning of the end for the Whigs. The deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster that year severely weakened the party. The Compromise of 1850 fractured the Whigs along pro- and anti-slavery lines, with the anti-slavery faction having enough power to deny Fillmore the party's nomination in 1852.Attempting to repeat their earlier successes, the Whigs nominated popular General Winfield Scott, who lost decisively to the Democrats' Franklin Pierce. The Democrats won the election by a large margin: Pierce won 27 of the 31 states including Scott's home state of Virginia. Whig Representative Lewis Davis Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slayed. The party is dead--dead--dead!" Increasingly politicians realized that the party was a loser. For example, Abraham Lincoln, its Illinois leader, simply walked away and attended to his law business.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act exploded on the scene. Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs strongly opposed it. Most remaining Northern Whigs, like Lincoln, joined the new Republican Party and strongly attacked the Act, appealing to widespread northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. . . .
. . .In contemporary discourse, the Whig Party is usually mentioned in the context of a now-forgotten party losing its followers and reason for being. Parties sometimes accuse other parties of "going the way of the Whigs."
(Emphasis supplied.) Broderism suggests that "going the way of the Whigs" is the way to success for a third party movement. Of course, history demonstrates the exact opposite. Indeed, Broderism is the way to destroy an existing political party.
There is much more to say on this subject and my desire to further discuss this subject is high. I will likely write another post on this subject later tonight.
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