The Parties of Now

At his Bloomberg blog, poli sci guy Jonathan Bernstein often affirms the power of parties and "party elders" in U.S. politics, which he maintains trumps issues most of the time in determining election winners.  This was a common view in past decades, but seems mildly unusual these years.

He recommended a piece by Seth Masket on how political parties now work--basically not as they used to, but as networks. Masket's most daunting sentences: "Now, it is entirely possible that a party network may be more prone to extremism than a party hierarchy. Ideological activists play a much larger role in the modern party system, and many candidates now come from their ranks.Yet just because a networked party may be more extreme doesn’t make it any less effective."

Theoretically this should make a highly progressive party as possible as a highly reactionary one. But that's not the case now; only the Republicans are really extreme, as evidenced in part by how extreme their rhetoric is condemning the historically center-right orientation of the Democrats as socialist.

 What Masket does not mention is that the Democratic Party was national to the extent that it had national allies in powerful labor unions, at least in the period of the 40s-70s. The unions were an institutional countervailing force to the corporatist Republicans.

Today the two party system seems to be fossil fuel money against Hollywood and some progressive tech company money (with Wall Street money as opportunist.)  Basically the money networks favor the Republicans, and so, the extreme right. What the Democratic party has going for it is demographics. But with this kind of party structure, people can be more easily panicked into voting a rashly extreme government into power.