An interesting speculation from TPM Reader MH, building on Christina’s article on Jim Demint …
Re Jim DeMint vs the GOP establishment: what DeMint is doing now may be pointing the way to our congress’s future– 18th-century British-style factionalism, something you’re familiar with academically.
Look at the relatively new elements coming into play: the rise of PACs, 529s, and other conduits that have no necessary connection to a major-party structure, together with the unshackling of really big-time money thanks to our supreme court, and the perfecting and spread of astroturf organizing practices. This can tremendously empower the kind of factional or regional differences that have always existed within the parties– it potentially brings in rafts of new money and makes it available to individual empire-builders like DeMint, who can use it to cultivate their own circles of adherents, clients, connections, or whatever you want to call them.
Add in the existing networks of think-tanks and dissemination media, most particularly on the right, and we now see the potential basis for a patronage system divorced in any meaningful way from national parties as we’ve known them. It could look surprisingly close to the parliamentary patronage system of 18th-century Britain, something straight out of Namier, with factionalism solidified by all that outside money. (No surprise that DeMint, coming from the PR world, would see this chance more clearly than most career politicians; and no surprise that his expressed views could easily attract people with very big money for a cause like that.)
Against that possibility, parties are, of course, currently central to the actual workings of both houses, where a majority caucus sets the rules, appoints committee chairs, apportions committee seats, and in the house, controls the agenda (or, in the senate’s case, attempts to do some of these things). But at this juncture it isn’t clear they have to remain so institutionally important. They could easily become less so if other patronage networks arise and solidify, networks that could work out majorities among them, as happened in England and in our political history in the 1790s and later within the Democratic-Republican party.
Parties aren’t sacred or immutable. But the real concern here would be that virtually all factions would have to be subservient to the money that sustains them. Some might say that’s the way it is now. But my guess would be that a truly factional system would depend on moneyed interests to an extent few today can imagine. And could factions sustain themselves without immense amounts of money? In those circumstances it would be hard to envision even a centrist faction, let alone a center-left one. Our political tenor might look a lot like it did in the 1890s, with vast swaths of opinion denied political representation.
Not a certainty, but what DeMint is doing surely points to it as a possibility.
