Political parties go generally unappreciated, even among those inclined to celebrate representative democracy. The Founding Fathers famously didn’t like them, yet found themselves forming them, not long after the first Congress assembled.
This suggests something I have come to believe while writing essays on our two long-lived American parties: The quality of electoral democracy depends heavily on the performance, the steadiness, and the adaptability of admittedly self-interested political parties.
They haven’t done very well lately, especially in the European Parliament elections conducted over the last week. Traditional parties of the Left, long the favorite of blue-collar workers in industrialized societies, seem to be fading out of existence. The British Labour Party got 14% of the vote, their worst showing since 1910. France’s Socialists, a governing party just two years ago, got 6%. Germany’s Social Democrats, founded in 1880, were at 15%. The working-class base of these parties has been shrinking, and their metropolitan intellectuals are flaking off to join the Greens or (in Britain) anti-Brexit Lib Dems.
Traditional parties of the Right aren’t doing much better. Fourteen-year Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU was at just 29%. France’s Gaullist Party was swept aside two years ago by Emmanuel Macron’s personal party, which was in turn outpolled last week by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
Britain’s Conservatives got 9%, the worst showing ever for a party founded in 1846, 1834, or 1678, depending on your reckoning. In contrast, the Brexit Party, founded just months ago, finished number one, with over 30%.
This is a rebuke to Prime Minister Theresa May, who was forced to announce her resignation before the results were announced. She failed to achieve Brexit — leaving the European Union — after it was approved amid record turnout of voters in June 2016.
The Brexit vote split the electorate in different ways from traditional patterns. Conservatives had long been the party of the upper and middle class and Labour the party of workers. France historically was split between Catholics and anti-clericals, Germany between Protestant Socialists and the Catholic CDU/CSU.
Increasingly, the split now is between what the British analyst David Goodhart calls the Anywheres and the Somewheres. The Anywheres are the high-education metropolitan elites — think former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron — and their less affluent neighbors, plus racial minorities. Somewheres tend to be less educated and located in the heartland countryside, where their families have been for generations.
Thus, in 2016, London voted 60% and Scotland 62% against Brexit. But the rest of England, the large majority of the country, voted 57% for Brexit. Last week, the Brexit Party carried 9 of 11 U.K. regions, while Lib Dems carried London and Scottish Nationalists carried Scotland.
That’s a fitting response to the Anywheres’ arrogant dismissal of Brexit voters as racists too stupid to decide such an issue. It is also a fitting response to their tone-deaf proposals (echoed by May) for a second referendum and their so-far discredited predictions that Brexit would be an economic disaster.
The division between Anywheres and Somewheres, and a corresponding sweeping aside of traditional parties, is apparent in France and Germany as well. Italy, which seemed to be developing a stable two-party system in the 1990s and 2000s, is now governed by a left-right coalition of a party founded by a left-wing comedian 10 years ago and a right-wing party formerly limited to the country’s prosperous north.
The same division is apparent also from last month’s election in Australia. The traditional parties’ constituencies were altered just marginally by the Labor Party’s climate change policies, which enabled the center-left Liberals to gain blue-collar votes while losing a high-education seat held by a former prime minister.
That’s similar to the movements starting in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats made gains in affluent states and districts while hanging on just enough to win in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Those trends had run their course quite a ways by the time of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and Democrats’ capture of the House in 2018.
The question now is whether the far-out policies backed by many Democratic presidential candidates — the Green New Deal, ninth-month abortions, open borders, racial reparations — will harm their party more than President Trump’s uncouthness harms his.
It may be that, by nominating and now almost unanimously supporting Trump despite his break from party ideology on immigration and trade, Republicans have enabled their party to transition beyond the old 1990-2010 alignments and adapt to the emerging division between Anywheres and Somewheres. Sometimes, even ancient parties must change in order to thrive, or even survive.
