Have You Tried Turning Your Party Off and then On Again?

Short post with free advice for Reince Priebus: Abort the mission. Just give up on 2016. It's best for everyone: your party, your adversaries, and most American voters.

Shorten the convention to one day, and let Trump get the nomination, assuming he's won it outright. Don't wince when he nominates some dumbass as his VP. Don't fund ANYTHING to do with his campaign, and be clear to your rank-and-file operatives that his tenure is the remainder of the 2016 Election season and no further. No one who sucks up to him will be accepted by the party upon his general election loss. You'll be subjecting Chris Christie to a bitter primary, for example.

Go back to drawing board: get together the smartest (read: not TV personalities) people in the party and figure out what platform planks have to stay and which have to go in order to preserve an electorate. It may be that gun control obstructionism and climate change denial are not actually that important. Find out what makes likely Republican voters excited to go to their polling places, and make that happen. Cut the rest. Literally, recommend that candidates not talk about issues that are not part of the platform, if they can avoid it.

Appoint Merrick Garland now. You're not getting a better offer.

People are saying that Obama-blocking, as the party's primary strategy, created the Trumpocalypse. Perhaps this is so, perhaps this is not. Either way, it's now your mess. It would be wise to clean it up, to ensure there's something left of the party in the future.

The Seventh Party System And Bad Solidarity

The theory is that American political parties have realigned five or six times in our country's history, with the fifth realignment coming after the political fallout of the New Deal, which handed the White House to the same president in four separate elections, and re-elected his VP when he died in office (side note: if you do a Washington, DC tour soon, do not miss the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial). Arguments continue as to whether a sixth realignment occurred in the 60s or during the Reagan Administration, though personally I believe that sixth realignment occurred due to the effects of the Southern Strategy of Nixon's and Goldwater's presidential campaigns. (And should you choose to believe the "Suburban Strategy" variant of this historical narrative, it doesn't matter: it has the same result.) We are now clearly witnessing the beginning of another party realignment, which should be called the Seventh Party System when it's complete, in fairness to the debate as to the existence of the Sixth.

This realignment is coming to both parties, but unequally. The Republicans have it in the most serious way, with two outsiders (Trump and Cruz) dominating the 2016 landscape after the base rejected the establishment candidates, possibly as a reaction to Mitt Romney's failure in 2012. If the Sixth Party Realignment was a change in party values with regard to civil rights (the Democrats finished their long arc from their anti-abolition stance in the Third Party System to supporting the Civil Rights Movement, while the GOP picked up a large bloc of voters who were opposed to it), the Seventh Party System will be a result of the cognitive dissonance distilling upon the cloud grain of misplaced solidarity.

The anti-Obama strategy of the GOP from 2008 to present, and the grassroots efforts that accompanied it, in the form of the Tea Party Movement aligned the establishment with a mobile, reactionary base. The wing was now folded in. The values and tactics of what was once the fringe were now the domain of the base. Mobilizing the base meant moving to the right, not the center. Solidarity was intra-party, rather than among members of similar views, and moderate Republicans tended to leave the scene after ideological purity requirements became obvious to all involved.

On the other side of the fence, Democrats tended to open the tent doors wide after the Great Shellacking of 2010, and, unable to move the needle on anything significant after Obamacare, #UniteBlue became the watchword, weak as it was. The great grassroots movements of the left during this realignment phase have been Occupy Wall Street and the populist leftist rumblings of people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. These movements have tended to divide, rather than solidify the Democratic Party, and indeed we see a relatively bitter (for Dems that is) primary race between the establishment and the somewhat disenfranchised left wing because of it.

Both, if you think about it, have been cases of solidarity gone awry, and both cases have shown that party solidarity in the US is a drug with a serious risk of overdose.