The Democrats are a strong party, the Republicans are a weak party

It's Boss Tweed vs. Boss Tweet.

Loominosity Z, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A year ago today, Hamas gunmen stormed into Israel, slaughtering concert-goers and villagers, raping and pillaging and taking hundreds of hostages. While much of the world condemned the attacks, many Western leftists poured into the street in support of Hamas. Since then, the Palestine movement has evolved into a sort of “omnicause”, subsuming and subordinating various progressive activist movements from anti-policing to climate change to indigenous rights. The movement has become more and more extreme over time, and more tinged with antisemitism:

Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left

Many of the more outspoken members of the movement — some of which have recently but enthusiastically grafted themselves onto the Palestinian cause — now portray it as a “decolonial” struggle that will eventually wipe out not just Israel, but also the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Here are a couple of representative examples from some fairly prominent activists (the first in the U.S., the second in Canada):

But instead of turning into a broad-based street movement the way Black Lives Matter did, or becoming an elite consensus the way MeToo did, the Palestine movement has remained marginal in the U.S.¹ The rallies have stayed small, failing to attain an appreciable fraction of BLM’s turnout. When protesters attempted to shut down elite universities in the spring, administrators — some of the most progressive elites in the entire country — just had them arrested.

But the most important force marginalizing the Palestine movement has been the Democratic party. Democrats that we traditionally think of as “the left”, like AOC and Bernie Sanders, have spoken out against antisemitism in the Palestine movement, causing AOC to lose her endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America. The “Uncommitted Movement” refused to endorse Kamala Harris over her support of Israel, but doesn’t seem to have hurt her in Michigan polling. The Palestine protesters planned a gigantic disruption of the Democratic National Convention, but very few activists showed up. A last-minute push to get a Palestine activist a speaking spot at the DNC was flatly rejected. Even the return of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the leading thinker of BLM and now a strong advocate for the Palestine movement, has failed to really move the needle.

Some of this, of course, is from the nation calming down after the exhausting unrest of the 2010s. But I do think it’s useful to contrast the Democratic Party’s rejection of the Palestine movement with the GOP’s recent embrace of some of its kookier fringe elements. For example, MAGA-supported Minnesota Senate candidate Royce White wrote that “the bad guys won World War II”, while the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina used to call himself a “Black Nazi”. Tucker Carlson interviewed and praised a Hitler defender. A number of prominent right-wing media figures have recently been linked to Russian money. Trump recently did an interview with the far-right streamer Adin Ross, who regularly hosts neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s new allies are noted conspiracy monger RFK Jr. and fringe candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

Online, extremism is even more prevalent, and tends strongly toward antisemitism and conspiracy theories. For example, here’s Will Tanner, founder of a site called The American Tribune, claiming that immigration is a plot by NGOs to destroy Western civilization:

This kind of claim is utterly normal in Trump-supporting circles, and I’ve heard it asserted to me independently by several people I know offline.

Right-wing online activists regularly tweet positive things about dictators like Kim Jong-Un. And antisemitism on the right — at least, online — is easily as rife as anything on the pro-Palestine left. Here’s an example:

In fact, you can argue that Trump himself is the GOP’s extremist-in-chief. Obviously opinions here will differ — Trump supporters call Harris a “commie”, and say that her election would mean the end of America, and so on. But while Harris has embraced patriotism and put forward a moderate economic agenda full of paeans to business and startups and deregulation, Trump has accused Haitians of eating pets in a small Ohio city, spread obvious lies about the government’s response to the Hurricane Helene, declared that immigrants in America have “a lot of bad genes”, and basically acted much like a street activist instead of a responsible politician.

Matt Yglesias calls this the “crank realignment”, and attributes much of it to education polarization:

The crank realignment is bad for everyone

But I sort of suspect that something else is going on here as well. I think there’s a big fundamental difference between the two major parties in America, and that this difference is driving much of the divergent outcomes between the Democrats’ treatment of the Palestine movement and the Republicans’ treatment of their own cranks. I think that in terms of party organization, the Democrats are basically a strong political party, and the Republicans are a weak one.

The Democrats became a strong party in the 1980s

In the late 2010s, I read a bunch of books about the late 1960s and 1970s, in order to try to understand the era that I felt represented the closest parallel to what America was currently going through. Two books I read were Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. They’re incredibly instructive about how the Democrats, in particular, changed in response to the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Mailer contrasts the orderly coronation of Richard Nixon in Miami with the epic chaos of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. After antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy failed to win the primary, his supporters protested the convention, and the police — with the consent of local Democratic party bosses — attacked them brutally.

But the 1972 primary went very differently. The Democratic Party, not wanting a repeat of 1968, tried to appease the angry grassroots by becoming a more bottom-up party — mandating that all presidential primaries and caucuses be open to all party members. As Thompson recounts, this led to the narrow primary victory of antiwar candidate George McGovern, after a bitterly contested primary campaign and a chaotic national convention.

McGovern was then promptly demolished by Nixon in one of the most lopsided elections in history. The Democrats responded to this — and to Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980 — by becoming a more centralized party again. They created the superdelegate system, endowing a bunch of unelected delegates with the ability to decide a close primary election.

That superdelegate system almost ended up mattering in 2016, when Bernie Sanders came fairly close to beating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. Some Sanders supporters even blamed the superdelegates for his loss — this was unfair, since Clinton won more normal delegates, but had Sanders eked out a narrow plurality, the superdelegates very well may have intervened on Clinton’s behalf. We’ll never know. Anyway, in response to the Bernie supporters’ anger, the Dems tweaked the system again, so that now the superdelegates can only cast the deciding vote if the convention is actually contested.

But in any case, superdelegates aren’t the only way that the Dems are a strong party. The party elite also has a strong institutional culture of coming together to support electable candidates. In 2020, with a heavily divided primary field, Democratic party elders convinced Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer to drop out. Their voters mostly switched to Joe Biden. (Again, Sanders supporters cried foul, but this was again unfair, given that their candidate simply failed to win over most primary voters.) This year, when it became apparent that Biden was too old to keep campaigning, Democratic party elders again stepped in and convinced him to step aside in favor of Kamala Harris — who was chosen by party delegates.

Observers realized that these were signs of a strong political party in action:

In many ways, these are clearly signs of a hale and hearty party. "As someone who thought party power was diminishing, I really discovered that in many ways, shapes and forms, this party's power is actually perhaps more significant than ever," Rep. Dean Phillips, who ran against Biden in the 2024 Democratic primaries…told 538 during an interview…

Those who study political parties were also impressed with the Democrats' ability to engineer the nominee they wanted, especially in contrast with Republicans' failure to do so in 2016. "It showed that [the Democratic Party] can coordinate," said Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari…"It suggested that members of the party have some leverage or something they can bargain with."

Jonathan Rauch, a political scientist who has called for stronger parties to combat the spread of extremism, praised the Democrats for this show of unity and capability.

None of this means that the Dems are as strong as they were back in the days when candidates were selected by cabals of insiders in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms. Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall are never coming back, due to a variety of factors both technological and legal. But by retaining some ability to steer presidential nominations, the Dems have preserved a measure of fundamental strength.

Presidential elections are everything in American politics, and presidential nominees set the tone for entire political movements. When Trump became the GOP nominee and then the President, the character of American conservatism abruptly changed — it became much more anti-immigrant, protectionist, and isolationist, and more moderate on entitlements. Matt Yglesias has argued that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, with its emphasis on anti-racism, facilitated the rise of wokeness.

Thus, the power to control who becomes the presidential nominee means power over an entire movement. Part of the reason the progressive movement overall has not signed on to the virulently anti-Israel stance of the Palestine movement is that the Democratic Party’s leaders — Biden and now Harris — have reiterated strong support for Israel.

That doesn’t mean you have to support Israel in order to be a Democrat or a progressive — in fact, many don’t. But I think it means that you basically have to choose between accepting the package of beliefs that go along with the Palestine movement — that America is supporting a genocide, that October 7th was legitimate resistance, that Israel and America are illegitimate “settler colonies”, and so on — or supporting the Democratic nominee.

Faced with that choice, most people will support the nominee. Abandoning the Democrats means either embracing the GOP, or becoming a politically homeless wanderer in the wilderness.² Remaining part of the Democrats, and of the mainstream progressive movement, means what being part of a big movement always means — having an army at your back, ready to stand up for you and people like you in America’s never-ending internal social struggles for status, money, and belonging. (I also think the presidential system strengthens this tendency, via Duverger’s Law.)

The Democrats’ strength as an organized political party is thus closely connected with its moderation. This is why the leftist faction always reserves its greatest anger and vitriol for the Democratic party establishment — it’s the reason they haven’t been able to take the wheel since 1972, and why pieces of their agenda only make it into policy through layers of Elizabeth Warren-style wonks and Pete Buttigieg-style technocrats. But there’s really not a lot they can do.

And that’s part of how, I think, you get Berkeley kids chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” in 2024, while extremists like Saira Rao complain that progressives don’t listen to them anymore. Not the whole story, but part of it.

Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP

The contrast between the Democrats the Republicans in recent years is stark. As Mailer hints in his depiction of the 1968 convention, the Republicans used to be a strong political party as well. But they also enacted reforms after that year, to allow the grassroots to decide primary elections. This allowed grassroots insurgency candidacies to prevail. Reagan’s near-victory in 1976 was an example.

But the GOP also had one other feature that made it even more susceptible to populism — winner-take-all primaries. In Democratic primaries, if you win 10% of the votes in a state and you have nine opponents who each win 9%, you get 10% of the delegates. In almost any Republican state primary, you get 100% of the delegates. This is how Donald Trump was able to clinch the nomination in 2016 — he got a minority of the votes in states like Arizona, Illinois, Missouri, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia, but he got all of the delegates from each of these states.

Unlike the Democrats — who would have had a contested national convention had Bernie Sanders pulled off a similar performance in 2020 — the Republicans quickly coalesced around a populist who had minority support but a highly unified base. Meanwhile, party elders were unable to convince Trump’s opponents to unite around an anti-Trump candidate. Powerful conservative institutions outside the GOP, like Fox News, initially tried to stop Trump, but he took to Twitter and did an end run around those as well, harnessing populist energy to cow the establishment into submission.

Trump’s strength came from the GOP’s weakness.

Now the GOP is Trump’s, and he can put whoever he wants in charge. Consider this billboard in Arizona:

And plenty of online MAGA types are hyping the same collection of folks.

Who are any of these people? Tulsi Gabbard was a fringe Democratic presidential candidate who has spent most of her career calling herself a leftist. RFK Jr. is a conspiracy-monger who tried to run for the Democratic nomination before he was (predictably) run out of town. Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy are figures from the tech world who weren’t involved in politics until recently. None of these people — including Trump himself — is a long-standing Republican or a long-standing conservative activist.

From where I’m sitting, it looks like the GOP has suffered a hostile takeover. The shareholders (i.e. the primary voters) approved a takeover bid over the objections of the existing management (elected Republicans and conservative activists).

Now maybe you think that’s a good thing. Maybe you like outsiders and despite party establishments. But as Trump ventures further and further into the world of conspiracy theories and false accusations, a number of prominent Republicans are starting to rue the fact that their party has been hijacked. The New York Times has a feature where you can see quotes from prominent Republicans — politicians, conservative activists, and former Trump administration officials from his first term — giving Trump a piece of their mind. Here’s just a very small sample:

On X, over the past month or two, I’ve very casually kept track of all the Republicans and former Trump employees I see either endorsing Harris or saying they won’t vote for Trump. These have included:

• Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence (of course)

• Former Florida GOP chair Al Cardenas

• Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson

• Former GOP senator Jeff Flake (also pictured above)

• GOP senator Lisa Murkowski

• Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper

• Former Georgia GOP Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan

• Various groups of less prominent Republicans in Wisconsin, Maine, and elsewhere

I didn’t go seek these out; these were just what casually crossed my screen, and I saved the list for fun. (I think the account “Republicans against Trump” keeps a running list of these, but I don’t follow it, since there’s a limit to my tolerance for politics.) And I’ve seen some polls that indicate a modest rise in registered Republicans planning to vote for Harris.

If there’s a similar exodus on the Democrats, I haven’t seen it at all. Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are about the only Democratic defectors I know of, and they were always fringe figures (Tulsi was in the House of Representatives). To me, this is one more piece of evidence that the Democrats are a strong party, and the GOP is a weak one.

Honestly, I don’t think this is a healthy state of affairs. I was never a Republican, and I thought George W. Bush was a terrible President. But a weak, chaotic party like the Republicans are now is way too susceptible to entryism — to people who cynically enter the party and try to seize the reins for their personal gain.

Maybe the least bad outcome is if the entryists are figures from the tech industry — perhaps with Trump slipping into his twilight years, Elon Musk would actually be the shadow President.³ But honestly, seeing what Musk has done with the website formerly known as Twitter, I’m not especially eager to see what he’d do with all of America.⁴ Meanwhile, Trump himself was an entryist, and I think he’s been very bad for America. And when the entryists are obsessed with foreign policy and extremely friendly to foreign powers who wish America harm, that’s when I start to really worry. I do not want to be ruled by the right-wing equivalent of the Palestine protesters.

I wish that the GOP could somehow become a strong political party again — something like what the Democrats are now. That party would make plenty of mistakes (as do the Democrats), but I think it would make for a more stable country overall. Wishing doesn’t make it so, however, and I can’t imagine how the GOP could get from here to there.

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1. The UK, Canada, and Australia may be a different story, but more on this in a future post.

2. Though to be honest, if the Democrats did nominate someone with the Palestine-protester “decolonial” ideology, I would definitely become politically homeless rather than vote for that person.

3. Amusingly, I’ve heard a couple people accidentally use the phrase “if Musk gets elected”.

4. That said, I’m still glad he bought Twitter, because the site is bad for America and I’ve always wanted to see people migrate away.