The Republicans and the Democrats Stand for Nothing

To fix our national turmoil, we must fill these empty vessels with new ideas.

What do the Republican and Democratic Parties stand for? If you’re honest with yourself, you don’t know.

The words Republican and Democrat used to mean something. Now they’re empty labels. Nobody knows what ideas they represent. Nobody knows their policies. Nobody knows what they’re going to do. As institutions, both major parties are empty vessels waiting for whomever seizes them to fill.

Everybody needs to face this uncomfortable truth—our parties are containers filled with nothing. This should worry you a lot.

WE USED TO KNOW WHAT OUR PARTIES BELIEVED

For most of my life, when you voted for a Republican or a Democrat you knew what you were getting.

A Republican government would be friendly to markets, reduce taxes, seek to reduce bureaucracy, and bolster national defense. It would make noises about social traditionalism, but probably wouldn’t do much beyond a few symbolic efforts. A Democratic government would seek more national regulation to advance the party’s priorities like social spending and environmental protection. It would support more interventions benefitting woman and racial minorities, fight efforts to reduce social programs, and make a few weak efforts to expand them. It would talk about raising taxes and reducing defense spending, but rarely do it.

If you voted for George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney, you knew exactly what was going to happen if they won. If you voted for Bill Clinton or Barrack Obama, it was pretty much the same. You knew the ideas and policies they would pursue. You knew who would staff their administrations. Most of all, no matter who won the election, you knew America would be fine. Each candidate would pursue some policies you liked, and some you didn’t. America might veer a little more right or left, but no one was genuinely worried about anyone in power doing anything truly crazy. The idea that either major party winning an election could put the American project at risk was the sort of thing you only heard from lunatics and cranks. The worst that might happen is you had to wait a few years until your party was back in office, when it would pursue the things you wanted while undoing anything the other party did you couldn’t live with.

America was stable and politics was orderly because everyone knew what Republicans and Democrats believed. Both parties had well-known ideologies. Library shelves were packed with tomes telling you exactly what conservatism and liberalism meant, and all of them agreed. Both parties had well-established policy books that had been consistent for decades across administrations. Think tanks pumped out white papers each election cycle telling you exactly what each party hoped to do. Each party had its own unofficial wonky magazines to sell their ideological perspective. It doesn’t work like that anymore. That’s why people are on edge, and rightly so.

OUR PARTIES AS EMPTY VESSELS

What does it mean to be a Republican today? What does it mean to be a Democrat? Nobody knows.

There are a lot of people who call themselves Republicans these days who believe a lot of different things. Some still believe in the ideas of Ronald Reagan, while others see those ideas as outdated. Some still talk about reducing taxes and regulations, while others talk more about rural people and the working class. Some talk about bolstering national defense, while others rail against forever wars. There are still plenty religious conservatives, but also a new sort of post post-modern social traditionalist. There are national populists. There are even people who seem to believe personal liberty and democracy are a mistake.

Even though Democrats currently occupy the White House, I don’t have much of a better understanding of what they believe. Some in the party still believe in the ideas of Bill Clinton, but others denounce those ideas as hated neoliberalism. There are old-style social liberals we would consider social libertarians, as well as new-style social progressives who want to use state authority to reshape the culture with a messianic zeal. There are people who still want to fight for the working class, and people who consider working-class people to be backwards degenerates. There are also people who seem to believe personal liberty and democracy are a mistake.

If you elect a Republican or a Democrat, who will be staffing their government? Where will they come from? What will they believe? Will they even represent the same ideas as the candidate, or are they hoping to use their position to push the candidate toward their own goals? Is what the candidates say themselves even a useful guide? They’re politicians looking to win elections, so they say an awful lot of poll-tested things that aren’t even consistent. Sometimes they endorse their party’s traditional boilerplate, while other times they say things that until recently would sound utterly radical. Are they even in charge of their own agendas, or are they front people getting pushed and pulled by other influences? Who knows?

Dick Cheney, of all people, just endorsed the Democratic candidate for president. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Vice Chair of the DNC, endorsed the Republican.

There’s a national struggle to redefine our parties. It’s a scrum where all sorts of people and agendas are trying to use our party infrastructure as vehicles to gain power. There’s a flurry of new movements, some shouting ideas into the public square, and others working quietly behind the scenes. Some are reasonable, some are radical, and some challenge core parts of the American constitutional order. It’s impossible to know which groups have influence at any time because the sands are always shifting. Who knows what these groups will do if they win power? Who knows what agendas they’re truly seeking to advance?

I don’t know. You don’t know. I don’t even think the candidates know. Nobody knows.

Most Americans are burying their heads in the sand at this uncomfortable truth—our parties are so undefined they could be anything. Everyone is just imagining our parties as whatever they wish for them to be. The people supporting them imagine they represent one thing. The people who despise them imagine something else. Nobody knows who will turn out to be correct. It's possible electing a Republican or a Democrat will lead to a better, safer, more prosperous, and more stable nation. It’s also possible it means empowering people with horrible ideas that will bring us to ruin. Nobody can say for sure.

This is why there’s so much division and chaos. Neither party has a stable ideology. Neither has a stable base or a stable agenda. We can’t trust what they say they’re going to do because we know they’re making it up as they go along. Our parties are hollowed-out institutions available for anybody to seize. Nobody knows what we’re electing. It’s scary, and it should be.

POLITICAL VACUUMS ARE DANGEROUS

I’ve long been worried things would come to this. When I wrote The Next Realignment, I counseled that we needed to renew our parties with fresh ideas before things started to collapse. If we’re heading into a realignment, we don’t want it to crash into chaos like during the breakup of the Whigs, rise of the Know Nothings, and turmoil prior to the Civil War.

When the world changes, our political parties naturally start to come apart. Their ideologies, agendas, and coalitions, are designed for a different moment in history, so they lack the tools to deal with the new problems America faces. Since our parties no longer represent anything relevant, they become hollowed-out anachronisms—a great vacuum at the heart of democracy. There are two ways that this can go. Best case, a movement forms within a party to update and reform it before everything comes apart. Worst case, they don’t and the system implodes.

A political vacuum is dangerous to a democracy. Every society has always had a wild collection of radicals, crazy people, and zealots outside its gates with genuine complaints, but that should never be allowed to wield real power. They’re useful when throwing ideological grenades from outside the walls because they bring attention to real problems. They’re dangerous if they ever seize control of the levers of power themselves. A democratic republic relies on vetting reasonable people to wield power. In a political vacuum, these mechanisms break and such militants, fanatics, and dangerous utopians, have a chance to actually obtain power over other human beings. That can only lead to ruin.

A vacuum also makes impossible the coordination democracy requires to get things done. The point of republican democracy is to channel the will of the people into republican institutions that can convert what people want into organized coherent action. When everyone is pushing and pulling in multiple directions, nothing important can get accomplished. A political vacuum turns a democratic republic into something closer to the dangerous chaos of direct democracy—the model America’s Founders rejected as dangerous because it empowers demagogues, radicals, and would-be tyrants.

Our parties, in other words, have become dangerous because they’re weak. Their weakness has made them easy targets for terrible people and ideas. They don’t have ideologies. They don’t have agendas or ideas. The problem isn’t that they stand for the wrong ideas. It’s that they don’t stand for anything. They have become empty vessels anyone who wants power can capture and fill with whatever ideas they want. The only cure to this dangerous situation is to refill our empty parties with good ideas.

WE FIX AMERICA WITH NEW IDEAS

Even though our parties are political zombies, I understand why most Americans still fight to prop them up. Inertia is powerful. Americans are still in deep denial that the parties they once loved no longer stand for the things they care about. They have much personal loyalty and history tied up with these ancient party brands. Even when they can see their party clearly failing, they naturally cling to it as a vote against the other party they still fear more. This is why new party efforts are unpopular. People have emotional connections to dead institutions and fear acting as spoilers for something worse.

So they stick with a broken status quo everybody hates

I wish we could count on the system righting itself from within. I wish we could count on a Franklin Roosevelt coming along to revolutionize a party from inside with fresh ideas, dragging America into the future. Sadly, it’s wishful thinking. Nobody inside the machine today has what it takes. If someone did try to inject a party with fresh purpose and new ideas, forces within the party working for other agendas would certainly kneecap them before they could get their effort off the ground. Nobody is coming to save these dying institutions from inside. It’s too late.

The only remaining choice is a movement of ideas working from outside the system. We need people with fresh ideas to build a common identity as reformers. We need to develop a common ideology and compelling new ideas. We need to build infrastructure outside the party system and seize the system before it collapses under its own weight. We need a repeat of the Progressive Movement formula for national reform. Since Americans aren’t going to suddenly walk away from the major parties until these new ideas are clearly formed and in place, this work can and must happen in parallel with normal politics. By all means, continue helping your favorite party for now, so long as you do so with open eyes. Then at the same time do the work to start building a future outside it. Start building the coalitions and ideas outside the channels of normal politics that can one day seize and revitalize the system and put us back upon a stable path.

This isn’t some Pollyanna call for utopia, unicorns, and rainbows. It’s a warning. Not only can we accomplish this, it’s the only path to righting America’s lurching ship before it dashes upon the rocks and leaves us gasping amid the waves. Until we get back to two working parties with compelling ideologies holding together stable coalitions that support useful policies and ideas, the chaos ripping America apart will continue and just get worse. The open door for bad people, radicals, and zealots to seize real power will remain open. Our political system will continue to grind its gears without yielding results. Eventually, our parties will crash and die unleashing something similar to the turmoil of the horrific 1850s after the destruction of the Whigs up to the Civil War.

The first step is acknowledging this uncomfortable truth. Our major parties are dead. They are brand names that stand for nothing. They are hollow shells not worth saving. Stare this fact squarely in its face and then prepare to act—let’s seize our parties back and fill them with new ideas before something terrible does it first.

Do you agree our parties are empty vessels? Join the community in the comments.