Political Parties

The New Republicans content that something like this is happening to our GOP. Did anyone see the protestors at the DNC convention shouting "Jesus! Jesus!" and being hauled away in handcuffs? It was the worst caricature of the right made manifest.

From the very beginning, whenever one party has gotten strong enough to start passing horrible laws such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, it has crumbled soon thereafter. Empowered, the parties overreach. Or members let some element of the party push its dogmas to the extreme, thus driving away moderate supporters. Or they calcify and then find themselves unable to deal with emerging problems. Something happens, and the pendulum swings. This happened to the Federalists. Years later, outrage at the tyrannical airs of the populist strongman Andrew Jackson split Jefferson's party into two camps -- the Jackson Democrats vs. the Whigs of Henry Clay -- and left it unable to cope with the issue of slavery. Then the Republicans had a heyday after winning the Civil War, but they, too, soon got to infighting. More recently, the Democrats deflated like a leaking dirigible after Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In other words, there is something about our parties, some power-sensitive self-destruct button lodged deep in the machinery, that keeps them from getting too big. On the surface, that might not seem like much. It is so much a part of American history that we take it for granted. But think about it -- what did the 20th century teach us about parties that grow too strong? The fact that our parties, at their most powerful, just . . . fall apart . . . would have seemed like a priceless blessing to the Jews of Nazi Germany or to the gulag prisoners of the Soviet Union.

washingtonpost.com: Origin of the Species