It's My Party by Peter Robinson Read Free Book Online

way or the other, Republican or Democratic, from their family background, their
     ethnicity, their religion—factors that have nothing to do with a deliberative process.
    “You’re a political scientist,” I said to Seymour Martin Lipset over lunch. “Doesn’t that pose a problem for political theory?”
    Marty Lipset, who divides his time between George Mason University and Stanford, is the author of
Political Man
, first published in 1959 and still one of the basic texts of American political science. A big man with dark hair and dark
     eyes who loves to talk about political theory, Marty swatted a beefy hand through the air to wave my objection aside. “Sure
     it poses a problem,” Marty replied. “If you buy the idea that every American is supposed to follow debates on television and
     clip newspaper articles on the candidates as if they were all members of the League of Women Voters. Thank God it
doesn’t
work that way.”
    The political parties, Marty argued, provide the American system with stability and continuity. To do so, each of the parties
     must be able to rely upon large numbers of loyalists, supporters who will remain faithful to their party even when the party
     proves unpopular in the country at large.
    “Look what happened when the Republicans got crushed by Franklin Roosevelt,” Marty said. In 1932, the Republican Herbert Hoover
     lost the presidential election to the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide. Four years later, in 1936, the Republican
     Alf Landon lost to Roosevelt in an even bigger landslide. “Tribal loyalties were the only reason the Republican Party managed
     to hang on at all,” Marty said. The wealthy, managerial class and the small-town and rural populations of the Midwest and
     North continued to vote Republican, giving the GOP a base from which to rebuild.
    “Now imagine it hadn’t happened that way,” Marty continued. “Imagine that even the bankers and farmers forgot about their
     loyalties to the GOP and just asked themselves who seemed like the more attractive candidate, Hoover or Roosevelt in 1932
     or Landon or Roosevelt in 1936.” The Republican defeats would have been even worse. The GOP would have suffered such massive
     defections that it would have effectively ceased to exist.
    “After that, the Democrats would have faced nothing more than token opposition from a lot of scattered little groups,” Marty
     said. There would have been no continuing debate over the New Deal, no organized and sustained critique of Franklin Roosevelt’s
     foreign policy. It would not have been long before the Democrats, enjoying absolute power, would have demonstrated the truth
     of Lord Acton’s famous dictum, becoming corrupted absolutely. To name just one abuse, Franklin Roosevelt would have been able
     to get away with his notorious 1937 scheme to pack the Supreme Court. The system of checks and balances the founders devised
     would have been substantially overturned.
    It occurred to me that Marty was overstating his case. That was fine by me. He was making an interesting point. But Marty
     must have detected some skepticism on my face. “Look,” he said, waving his hand again, “I hope you don’t think this hypothetical.
     It isn’t. All you have to do is look at Russia.”
    Russia—lawless, corrupt, bankrupt, violent, and without any foreseeable prospect of climbing out of the mess that it’s in.
     Marty argued that a big part of the trouble is that Russia lacks a two-party system. “The only stable party is the Communist
     Party, which gets about a quarter to a third of the vote. The other parties are ad-hoc groupings based on personalities.”
     There are Putin people. There are Primakov people. But there are no large, enduring political entities that can grapple with
     issues independently of this or that strongman. In the parliamentary election of 1999, two of the parties were formed only
     weeks before the elections took place. “Those two parties