Maintain "Big Tent" Parties in the US

It's been said that traditionally the US had 4 parties - Northern/National Democrats, Southern Democrats, Moderate/Liberal Republicans, and Conservative Republicans. In the last 20 years or so, the Southern Democrats and Moderate/Liberal Republicans have more of less faded away.

What would it take to maintain Big Tent politics in the US?
 
. . . and Moderate/Liberal Republicans have more of less faded away. . .


interesting, William Buckley's conservative publication National Review in the 1950s kicked out the John Birch conspiracy theorists, the Ayn Rand atheists, and the extreme libertarians.

Now, as always it is hard to establish cause and effect for this or any other factor that this is why movement conservatism grew from the '50s to Reagan.

It's paradoxical but maybe it works, you kick out the most extreme elements and then other people feel comfortable joining. And a guy who's editor of a magazine can easily enforce the kicking out.
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=U... battled with the John Birch Society"&f=false

' . . . Buckley and other conservatives had battled with the John Birch Society, finally expelling its leader, Robert Welch, from the conservative movement. They also successfully marginized the influence of anti-Semitic and racist . . . '
It sounds kind of crazy. But maybe kicking out extremists does help to grow the group.

Of course, some of them are going to try to come back a generation later. And if you do it poorly, you might make the extreme ideas seem 'brave' and taboo.
 
I don't see how Buckley can be seen as the demise of GOP moderates. They mostly fell apart during the George W Bush administration.

Dixiecrats disappeared in the 1990s meanwhile.
 
I don't see how Buckley can be seen as the demise of GOP moderates. They mostly fell apart during the George W Bush administration.

Dixiecrats disappeared in the 1990s meanwhile.
Yeah. For the Republicans, the exodus of the more liberal members really noly happened in earnest partly in 1994 and Gingrich's agenda, and then finally in 2006 when a lot of the liberals and moderates lost to Democrats due to the clusterfuck of the later Bush Administration.
 
Fixing a date for when things changed is kind of a sucker's game. We've got at least half a century of decisions that have contributed to the change in party ideology, which occurred gradually between the 1940s and ??? (some would say we still haven't finished). For me there are a few clear facts that help inform good PODs:
  • The South was voting as a largely unified bloc of racists with a wide range of opinions on economic matters from Reconstruction until the 1960s, after which racism was only the most significant driver of regional opinion and economic policy began to narrow towards the conservative band. I think this is overlooked because the backlash to Civil Rights was so overpowering, but you do see the emergence of fairly modern "Carter-style" Dems at this time along with the more dominant hardcore racists getting fed up with the party and hogging the national focus.
  • The average Republican elected official was getting more and more liberal right up until 1980, at which point a dramatic new trend line emerged. It's worth pointing out that nationally-elected bodies tend to trail popular opinion trends, so it's probably too late to change things by 1980.
  • The Southern Strategy was a real thing- despite some revisionist hot takes- but it required most of the major Civil Rights legislation to be put into place and be considered a "settled issue" before the Republicans and Southern Democrats could think about a true merger. Whether it was Republican squeamishness about out-and-out racism or Southerners reading the writing on the wall and moving on (in tactics, if not in spirit) that's up to interpretation.
Then there's the major dichotomy that allowed the big tents to exist: a group of pro-labor factions vs a group of pro-business factions, both with varying opinions on everything else.

So when you get right down to it, you need something that meddles with Civil Rights. The most straightforward way to do this is to have the GOP unabashedly own Civil Rights legislation and win the loyalty of the African American community. It's a bit tricky to have African Americans come down against labor, but not impossible. And perhaps exceptions could be made- a situation where the GOP moderates a bit on labor to keep the black vote but retains enough pro-business cred not to lose their conservatives.

Now this creates a lot of tension- you have one faction that favors business but welcomes in a downtrodden minority, forcing them to have a muddled opinion on economic issues. You've got another faction that favors labor but welcomes in a bloc of racists, forcing them to have a muddled opinion on social issues. The two-party system has been tested before and has always emerged triumphant. But this could lead to another serious test. If the big tents fail here, it'll be because conservatives bolt from both factions and form a third party. Then we either see the disappearance of two-party politics in the US (the factor that makes big tents at all possible) or another kind of realignment as the three parties fight for two spaces. It seems like the ideological sorting that's happened IOTL is inevitable in that case, but maybe coalitions reemerge similar to the ones that existed in the big tent days and those days continue.

So my scenario isn't a guarantee of success for big tents. It's just the best one I can think of.
 
Going off the point about blacks and labor, it doesn't seem like the DLC Democrats today are having much of an issue there. True, they're not outwardly hostile to labor, but they mostly ignore labor and tend to be the go-to faction of the Democratic Party for black voters (in contrast to the alternatives of progressives and blue dogs).

There's also something of a mixed history with regards to labor unions and racial issues.
 
Going off the point about blacks and labor, it doesn't seem like the DLC Democrats today are having much of an issue there. True, they're not outwardly hostile to labor, but they mostly ignore labor and tend to be the go-to faction of the Democratic Party for black voters (in contrast to the alternatives of progressives and blue dogs).

There's also something of a mixed history with regards to labor unions and racial issues.

Which one could argue is the story of how labor ceased to matter as much to the Democratic coalition. Labor voters don't vote as reliably for Democrats as African Americans do (at least partially due to the racism of working class whites), so labor dims in importance as part of the coalition; so labor votes even less reliably, and so on, a self-reinforcing phenomenon that sees labor's importance to the coalition diminish with each passing cycle.
 
I don't see how Buckley can be seen as the demise of GOP moderates. They mostly fell apart during the George W Bush administration. . . .
the claim is the opposite.

That back in the 1950s Bill Buckley helped to kick out some subsets of extremists, and therefore made the party more inviting to moderates.
 
I think what basically happened is that over time people realized that the party labels were meaningless. What mattered was if you were "liberal" or "conservative"

Conservative democrats realized they had more in common with Conservative republicans than liberal democrats.
 
I think the claim of the decline of the GOP Moderates not occurring until Bush needs some perspective. Somebody like Nelson Rockefeller would have been laughed out of the party by the late 90s
 
I think the claim of the decline of the GOP Moderates not occurring until Bush needs some perspective. Somebody like Nelson Rockefeller would have been laughed out of the party by the late 90s

Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chaffee among others were still kicking by the 2000s and John McCain, while definitely right of center, was noticeably less conservative in 2000 than George W Bush.

Nelson Rockefeller was always more liberal than moderate. He was certainly to the left of Nixon or Eisenhower.
 
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