The first ideological era of government?

I recently bought a book at the local flea market entitled The Encyclopaedia of World Politics, copyright 1950.

When you look up “Republican Party,” it says:

[The Republicans are] regarded as the more right-wing party. Yet, strictly speaking, the two great American parties cannot be exactly classified under the left-and-right pattern, and there are conservative as well as progressive republicans, as there are conservatives and progressive democrats. Both parties include sections of all classes of the population.

The same thing is repeated when you look up “Democratic Party.”

This is obviously not an accurate description of modern American politics, where both parties are now hugely ideologically limited in agenda and appeal, and getting moreso with each passing year. It reads as very quaint and dated, but keep in mind the 1950s were not that long ago. Indeed, almost all of the recent political establishment grew up in that era, the era in which one’s party label was still fairly vague and unideological designation. Until pretty much the last two decades, in fact, the party you joined was primarily an expression of familial solidarity, a narrow ethnic or religious identity, or a desire to participate in an existing regional power structure. A consistent ideology or philosophy was tacked on later, if at all.

Presidential politics provides a lot of nice case studies. Jimmy Cater and Bill Clinton, for example, became Democrats simply because their states were under a form of one-party rule at the time, making Democratic membership their only feasible path to political power. Al Gore, the two George Bushes, and Mitt Romney joined their respective parties because they had fathers who were already well-established politicians in their own right, and were thus forced into uncritically adopting the existing family “brand.”

Then you have people like Bob Dole, who joined their party simply for reasons of strategic opportunism. They wanted to get elected, one party was currently in power, so they joined the other one.

It’s not a coincidence that all of these guys have faced accusations of being wishy-washy, centrist sell-outs. Since they didn’t join their parties on ideological terms, they’ve have to struggle mightily to fake an ideological orientation for themselves.

The most notable counter-example to this trend was good ol’ Ronald Reagan. He started off as a Democrat — because that’s what all good unionized actors were — before ditching the party in the early 1960s. That was an ideological choice; as Reagan became more politically active he believed that the Republican Party would prove a more hospitable vehicle for his increasingly conservative agenda.It was still a gamble, though, and a lot of the Republican establishment of the time distrusted Reagan for trying to narrow the party’s appeal on such starkly ideological terms.

Obama is probably the second genuinely ideological president of the modern era. He went through his 20s during the Reagan years, and thus grew up in a political culture that was already beginning to polarize on a stark left-right axis (at least in popular perception). It’s not fair to call him a socialist, or whatever, but it is fair to describe the President as a genuine creature of “the left” in a way few other successful Democratic politicians of recent decades have been.

Anyway, I guess my point is that the polarization and partisan bitterness of modern Washington is unlikely to be going away anytime soon. Meaningful cooperation between parties is only possible when the parties are either so ideologically similar, or so ideologically amorphous that there is no pride or principle to be lost through through collaboration. From Obama’s generation onward, all would-be politicians have understood political parties to exist primarily as a way to express a very particular ideology in government, so as the ruling generation of Washington grows younger, I suspect partisan deadlock will only get more and more intense.

It’s interesting, because the end result of this cultural shift will probably be the establishment of a more parliamentary-style of governance in America, which is to say, very rigid and homogeneous parties with highly disciplined caucuses voting in very predictable ways. This is a bad thing, I believe, because it undermines one of the greatest institutional strengths of the American system of governance, namely the very weak party structures, which I’ve previously praised.