In 2008, I wrote Defeat pushes parties towards the victors in an effort to spell out what I saw (and still see) as the futility of 3rd party spoiler politics as a vehicle for changing the Democratic party:
The basic problem is that voting is a very blunt instrument for influencing policy. You may be sending a message, but it is not heard clearly and usually misinterpreted. The other problem is that this theory is based on entirely too much reification of parties. We discuss them sometimes as if they are coherent even monolithic actors, but this just isn't so. The Democratic party does not have a brain and nervous system that reacts to stimuli like a person might.
The thesis was that defeated political parties tend to move toward the ideology of the party that won, because that's where the votes are. Since then, the behaviour of the Republicans after successive defeats in 2006 and 2008 would seem to have shot a gaping hole in that. After all, in no way did the Republicans even entertain the idea of moving toward the Democrats and the few who suggested anything like that (say David Frum) are now outcasts on the right. So what gives?
It turns out that there is a deepliterature on the subject in formal political science circles, and as summarized by UCLA Professor John Zaller to a class of his I listened to in podcast, the thinking is that it often takes sustained and severe defeats to produce the effect. That makes a lot more sense. At risk of reifying parties, a person who has long succeeded doing a particular thing will probably not give up that tactic on the first or even second failure.
In more systemic terms, the literature suggests (quite plausibly) that for a variety of reasons it is difficult to turn a party around that is out of step with the electorate. Reformers will easily find themselves cast out for getting too far from the acceptable norms, and a wary public will hardly ever deliver immediate electoral rewards to reformers early enough for them to survive challenges by the old guard who may pull the party back into the previous established mode. As early reformers get shown the door, other reform minded individuals may bite their tongues for fear of the same. Most of this is fairly predictable human groupthink behaviour. It's particularly easy to see all this happening on the right where orthodoxy and slavish adherence to prescribed ideas are themselves ideals.
That last though suggests the real flaw in my 2008 piece: I was forgetting the left/right asymmetry. They're not the same and I think the past 3 cycles demonstrate that. Two consecutive wave defeats giving the Democrats popular vote majorities at all levels in addition to congressional majorities larger than Republicans have held since before the Great Depression would certainly have the Democrats whimpering had they been on the receiving end, yet the Republicans just turned the crazy knob past 11 and the bad economy (and bad policy) delivered for them. Meanwhile Obama continues to lecture about the urgent need for entitlement reform, HAMP is still a failure, and the odds of letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire are pretty slim. When Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterms, they impeached Clinton. Clearly my 2008 theory does not apply evenly to left and right.
The downside of right wing resistance to ideological moderation in the face of crushing electoral defeats is obvious. The upside would take place if the Democrats could ever get their acts together a la FDR - it took 5 successive defeats - nearly 20 years of Democratic trifecta rule before the Republicans delivered the New Deal accepting Ike in the midst of the Korean war to finally pull off a win. Even so they could not hold on to Congress for decades following which suggests that their ability to coordinate on moderate Presidential candidates acceptable to the post New Deal electorate, like Ike and Nixon did not extend well to the Congressional level, where the crazies still dominated. That could happen again if the left can understand the asymmetries and exploit conservative weaknesses rather than trying to ape their tactics.
The key is just to get the Democrats to start acting like Democrats and actually advocating and implementing good policy that actually fixes stuff. You know, liberalism. Details...
