How The American Three Party Political System Really Works

NOTE THAT THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY MISS-SENT TO PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. IT IS FOR EVERYONE.

Today, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-Oklafornia) decided to use his time to speak on the issue of whether or not to remove statues of Confederates from the Capitol to note that “each of these statues is a Democrat.” He went on to criticize Democrats for supporting the newest Republican bogey man, Critical Race Theory. At the same time, he was able to oppose removal of the statues, a nice bit of deflection.

McCarthy’s not the only Republican to try to tie the Democrats to the slave-owning Confederacy and proclaim that the Republicans - the party of Lincoln! - are the good guys on the issue of race in America nowadays. Conservatism Inc. grifter Charlie Kirk did the same thing ten days ago, and it’s happened often enough in the past year to now be noted as a Republican strategy to deflect public knowledge of the party’s real position on race these days.

Doing this requires a willingness not to understand the concept of dynamic political history, but given that Republican Intellectual has been an oxymoron for the past 50 years if not longer, it’s not surprising that they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing with this “Texas Side-Step.”

To understand how the Democrats today are not the Democrats of yesterday that the Republicans want you to believe they are, you have to first understand that while you’ve been told all your life that the United States has a two-party political system, that’s not quite true. What we have is a three party political system, with the third party having played the role of parasite on whichever of the other two political parties would grant that party the powers it seeks.

The three political parties are: the national conservative party, whatever its name might be at a particular time; the national progressive party, whatever it’s name might be at a particular time; and the Southernist Party. The two national parties are closely divided, and so an alliance with the Southernist Party can provide the margin of victory to allow that party to dominate politics nationally. Originally, and for the first 150 years of our national existence, that party was in fact defined by its physical attachment to a geographic location: the American South; however, in the past 57 years since the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, it has become a party more associated with a state of mind, though one will find that a significant number of its members reside in the Southern United States.

The power the Southernist Party seeks is the power to be left alone to operate amidst its “peculiar institutions.” Whichever national party would agree to that, the Southernist Party would ally and provide the margin of national victory. When American political parties were first created, the Federalist Party was the “conservative” party in favor of centralized national power and policies that favored the business class. The party opposed to central power that proclaimed itself the protector of the “rights of the people” was the Democratic-Republican Party, eventually shortened to the Democratic Party. While it was a national party, its leadership from the beginning was Southern: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and eventually Jackson. That leadership was founded in the Southernist Party as the promoter of the institution of slavery; the majority of Democratic presidents in the antebellum period were Southern slaveowners, and nationally the party took steps to support the institution, though as cities in the North grew in population, the national party favored western expansion.

The national conservative party fractured several times, with Federalists fading to be replaced by Whigs, who faded and were eventually replaced by Republicans. As the question of slavery became the cenral issue facing the nation, the Republican Party became the party of abolition. The result was the Civil War.

Following the end of the Grant Administration, the period of Republican idealism about society, about abolition and promoting equality came to an end. The party represented the great growth of wealth and industrial power associated with the Gilded Age, and became addicted to power to the point that in 1876 it traded its support of Reconstruction for continued possession of the presidency.

During the same time, the Democratic Party became divided between its power centers in the growing urban North as it became the party of immigrants, who were rejected by the proper Republicans. But the party’s solid base of national power was the “Solid South,” the one-party state that had evolved after the Civil War, dedicated to white supremacy administered through Jim Crow laws. A reformer such as Franklin Roosevelt would have the support of the Southern leadership in Congress, where the Southern one-party system, combined with seniority rules, meant that all the powerful committee chairmen were Southern, but their control of the Congress meant that northern reformers only got so far. Social Security, a long-time progressive cause, when first enacted excluded nearly all job categories where a majority of the workers in those jobs were African-American, as a good “for example.” Large federal infrastructure projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority did indeed “electrify the rural South,” but that electrification didn’t extend to African-American communities.Throughout the progressive era that culminated in the New Deal, there was increasing difference between Northern and Southern Democrats, with the Northerners forced to bite their tongues in recognition that it was the Solid South that provided the political power which allowed what progress was made.

During and following the Second World War, there was a great migration out of the South, by both poor whites and poor African-Americans, who took advantage of the opportunities wartime economic expansion gave with better jobs that were available back home. Northern racism, which was as pernicious as that of the South though not admitted to as readily, found reinforcement from the new white arrivals. This was particularly true in the “Sunshine belt” of the Southwest.

At the same time, the war had provided economic opportunity to African Americans, even if they lived lives as segregated in the North as in the South. African Americans who served in the armed forces overseas in Europe came in contact with a society not so rigidly racist as back home, and brought that knowledge home.

A political critical mass that had begun with the election of Roosevelt in 1932 became stronge after the war. The first rupture came in 1948 in two events: President Truman’s executive order desegregating the armed forces (which wouldn’t really happen until the exigencies of the Korean War forced the change), and the Democratic Party’s adoption of a civil rights plank in the party platform that year, which led to the “Dixiecrat rebellion.”

The birth of the Civil Rights Movement and is growth in the 1950s and 60s, culminating in the civil rights legislation pushed through congress by Lyndon Johnson, set the rupture in the Democratic Party on the path to permanence.

1964 saw the beginnings of the national political transformation of the two national parties in the Goldwater Campaign, which was based on a Southernist conservatism that had become national as a reuslt of the great southern migration of the Second World War. The highly individualistic conservatism of the West easily allied itself with the Southernist conservatism into the Goldwater Conservative movement.

In 1968, seeking to gain that margin of victory that would return the Republicans to national power, Richard Nixon promoted the “Southern Strategy,” which consolidated more of the Southern white support for the Republicans, which had first begun in 1964, when Goldwater won the Deep South states in the midst of Johnson’s landslide, as a result of Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Nixon won in 1968 with a slim margin of victory, which was maintained in 1972. Watergate allowed the progressive Democrats to have a term, but when Ronald Reagan’s announcment of his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the 1964 murders of the civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney. Nixon’s “dogwhistle” of 1968 as close to a steamship’s horn as politics got. His victory saw the Republican Party in the South take decisive power from the Democrats.

However, this alliance between national Republican Party and the Southernist Party would be different from the alliance with the Democrats before. As had been the case prior to the Civil War, the Southernist Party would take over the national party; there would not be any chance of “treason” on the part of the national party. In the 40 years since Reagan’s victory, the Southernist hold on the Republican Party has only become more firm. The Solid South is now Republican, not Democratic.

The two national parties have, over the past 70 years, flipped their roles. Whee the Democrats were the party allied with Southern white supremacy and all that means, today that role is held by the Republicans.

When Kevin McCarthy tries to distance himself from the Confederate statues in the Capitol, while also blocking their removal, and claims to be from the “Party of Lincoln,” he hopes you don’t see this history and the new political reality.

Adlai Stevenson put it best way back in the 1952 presidential campaign, when he observed during a speech at Columbus, Ohio, that October that, “The strange alchemy of time has somehow converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party of this country — the party dedicated to conserving all that is best, and building solidly and safely on these foundations.”

So the next time your crazy uncle or your looney nephew try to tell you it’s the Democrats who have a “race problem,” just recite this history to them. They’re probably too dumb - being Trumpers - to take it in the first time, so you may have to rinse and repeat.

Presented for your consideration.