How parties die

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	How parties die « on: December 25, 2003, 10:18:13 PM »
	« edited: December 25, 2003, 10:19:19 PM by htmldon »

Interesting article from Bret Stephens, Jerusalem Post: "How parties die"
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1072326002291

EYES ABROAD: HOW PARTIES DIE
By Bret Stephens

How do great political parties die? By a great party, I am not referring to specimens such as the Liberal Democrats in Britain or the Free Democrats in Germany – parties that have never captured national leadership positions except as minority coalition partners – much less one-man-shows such as Ross Perot's Reform Party or Ralph Nader's Greens. I mean parties like the Whigs in 18th century Britain and 19th century America, or the Progressive Conservatives in 20th century Canada.

All of them decisively shaped their respective political landscape for decades. Then they vanished.

Today, at least three great political parties are in a bad way. One is Israel's Labor Party, the other Britain's Conservative Party, the third America's Democratic Party. This isn't to say that any of them won't exist in five or ten or even twenty years' time, although in the case of the Labor Party that's not such a sure thing. It is to say that they will either have to change radically, as Britain's Labour Party did under Tony Blair's leadership, effectively becoming a new party, or circumstances will change radically – and in their favor. Right now, neither possibility seems likely.

CONSIDER EACH party in its turn. In 1992, national elections were held in Israel, Britain and the US. In Israel, Labor took 44 seats in the Knesset.

Today they hold 19. In Britain, the Conservatives under John Major won 329 seats in Parliament.

Today they hold 163. In the US, the Democrats held 259 seats in the House of Representatives, to the Republicans 176, and 56 seats in the Senate, to the Republicans 44. Today, Republicans have 229 seats in the House to the Democrats 205, and 51 in the Senate to the Democrats 48.

Up to a point, one might say these are just the ups-and-downs that all great political parties go through. In 1999 it was the Likud that held 19 Knesset seats, not Labor. In 1997, the Conservatives were just coming off of 18 years in government and voters were plainly tired of them. In 2000, Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote.

But none of this explains the long-term trends. In 1996, Labor fell to 34 seats, then dropped to 26 seats in 1999, despite an impressive personal victory that year for Ehud Barak in the prime ministerial contest. In the 1997 British general election, the Tories dropped to 165 seats, which is where they more or less remain despite three changes in party leadership.

In the US, Republican congressional majorities have held for five consecutive elections. And as Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard observes, the trend is even more telling at the state level. In 1992, Democrats held 30 governorships; Republicans held 18. By 2002, the figures had flipped: 27 to 23. In state legislatures, Republicans have also gone from holding a minority to a majority of seats. Redistricting – the process of redrawing constituencies to reflect population changes – will only further add to Republican gains.

There's more. First, none of these parties is succeeding in attracting younger voters. The average age of the Conservative Party's 250,000 registered members is over 60, according to a recent report in the New York Times. The Labor Party depends increasingly on its aging loyalists – younger voters who incline Leftward are at least as likely to vote for the dovish Meretz or the bourgeois Shinui. As for the Democrats, Al Gore could do no better than to split the nine million 18-24 year old voters evenly with Bush. For a party that has traditionally relied on this demographic (Clinton won it by 19 percentage points in 1996), this is an ominous result.

Second, the parties have exhausted their leadership bench. The successive failures of Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Amram Mitzna as Labor Party leaders testifies to this weakness. The same goes for new Tory leader Michael Howard, a one-time has been who's been pushed to the fore mainly because he seems so clever next to his callow and weak predecessors. As for former Vermont governor Howard Dean, his frontrunner status speaks volumes about what the Democratic Party has become.

Connected to this is the heavy legacy of successful past leaders. Even now, the Tories cannot get out from under Margaret Thatcher's shadow – next to her, every Tory leader seems depressingly small. The Democrats remain in the thrall of Bill Clinton, whose personal popularity did nothing to stop his party's slide. And Shimon Peres still runs the Labor Party, testifying equally to his strength and his colleagues' weaknesses.

Third, the parties are beset by deep ideological rifts. For Labor, the question is whether the party is "Likud B or Meretz C," as former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer put it a year ago.

The Tories spent a decade tearing themselves apart over the peripheral question of Britain's status in Europe. The Democrats are divided between Clinton-style pragmatists and McGovern-style radicals. The trouble for them is that the first seem unlikely to win the nomination, and the second have no chance of winning the election.

These are the immediate problems. The deeper one is that Labor, the Tories, and the Democrats have been overtaken by history. Like an unwise investor, Labor put all its political capital into Oslo – that is, into trusting Yasser Arafat – and cannot recover from its failure or his treachery.

The Conservatives under Thatcher were all about dismantling the nanny state. Ironically, once that state was dismantled – and New Labour forswore any interest in bringing it back – they had nothing to offer voters. The Democrats, as American commentator Lawrence Kaplan writes, are stuck in a September 10 mindset. They have not yet come to terms with the September 12 reality.

There are historical precedents here. In Britain, the Whigs were the party that wanted to curb royal influence in politics, reform the system of parliamentary representation, and repeal the protectionist Corn Laws. All that accomplished (in the case of the Corn Laws, by the opposition Tories), the Whigs became a party without a cause.

In America, by contrast, the Whigs were a party of economic nationalism; they advocated high tariffs, infrastructure investment and a national bank. In Henry Clay, Daniel Webster (and in a young Abraham Lincoln), they had their share of outstanding statesmen. But they held no firm views on slavery, except to devise compromises over it. And as slavery became the central issue of American politics, the Whigs faded into irrelevance.

Although the analogies are inexact, the story of Britain's Whigs and of today's Tories are one and the same: Mission accomplished. Inasmuch as the Thatcher legacy lives on, it does so in the person of Tony Blair, not Michael Howard. Ironically, the same can be said of Israel's Labor Party. Having struggled so long to convince Israel of the need to withdraw from the territories, it must wait impatiently for Ariel Sharon to carry out his announced plans to do so.

As for the Democrats, it is still too soon to tell whether war on terrorism, like slavery, will so comprehensively define the times that any party on the wrong side of it will meet permanent irrelevance. Yet even if it doesn't, Democratic decline predates September 11, and the problems that beset the party then will continue to operate.

ALL THIS could change. A landslide victory by Bush over Dean will surely cause the Democrats to pick their candidates more soberly next time. Indeed, Hillary Clinton is already anticipating that outcome by espousing hawkish views on terrorism.

In Israel, a successful disengagement with the Palestinians will change the subject politically, put Oslo firmly in the past, and focus voter attention on issues where the Likud is weak. It's only with the Tories that one has a hard time seeing a way out, except if Old-New rifts in the Labour Party cause it to self-destruct.

Then again, things may not change. Republicans may once again assume the national political supremacy they enjoyed from Lincoln's election in 1860 until Herbert Hoover's defeat in 1932. Likud may become what Labor was in the early years of the state.

And New Labour, if it can maintain discipline, may yet dominate 21st century British politics the way the Tories dominated the 20th century. De facto one-party rule, even in robust democracies, is hardly unknown in modern times: Just look at the Gaullists in France, or the Christian Democrats in postwar Germany.

As a partisan Republican, and as a supporter of Likud, there's a side of me that can't help but want this. It's a temptation to resist. Parties are sharpened by opposition and in opposition. Political debate deteriorates when one side needn't pay heed to the views of the other. Political elites ossify when personal advancement depends mainly on party favors. One-sided control of government tends to breed radicalism on the opposition benches.

Politics is about substance. But politics is process. It is not only the laws that are enacted, but the to-and-fro that precedes their enactment. For that to work well, there's nothing better than robust government and healthy opposition. As in love and marriage, you can't have one without the other.

bret@jpost.com

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