Kevin Williamson‘s latest column at National Review Online focuses on the days when political party bosses gathered behind closed doors to choose their presidential nominees.
Political parties are mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, but for most of our history they played an essential role in moderating those spiteful popular passions that so worried Madison and other founders, including John Adams, who described “democracy” as a system that soon “murders itself.” In our modern political discourse, we hear a great deal of lamentation about deals made in “smoke-filled rooms,” but in fact that horse-trading led to some pretty good outcomes. Vicious demagogues such as Donald Trump and loopy fanatics such as Bernie Sanders were kept from the levers of power with a surprisingly high degree of success. Sure, you got the Corrupt Bargain and Teapot Dome, but you didn’t have unfunded welfare liabilities equal to the value of literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!) all the money in the world.
The difference between the American system and European parliamentary systems, it has been remarked, is that we form our coalitions before elections, while the Europeans form their coalitions after elections. The parties — and the dreaded “establishments” that ran them — helped make that happen. There is, after all, no deep reason why the gay-marriage voters and the Teamsters ought to be in the same party, but the Democrats found ways to make them work together. Likewise the free-trade voters and the immigration reformers on the right.
It is a little ironic that at the very moment when railing against the “establishment” of either party is so very fashionable, the parties are in fact shells of what they once were. To the extent that there is a Republican-party establishment, it plainly does not have the power to, e.g., call down anathema upon a potential Republican-party presidential nominee. The day before yesterday, Marco Rubio was the anti-establishment, tea-party insurgent; today he is the establishment, if the doggie-treat salesmen on the radio are to be believed. If that leads you to believe that the word “establishment” does not actually mean anything, you are correct.
