A Time to be Partisan - For the Good of Both Parties

A brief history of recent landslide defeats

In my last post, in which I contended that now is a time for partisanship against the Democrat Party, I hinted that partisanship can be good for the party being opposed.  Allow me to explain.

Sometimes a party can go so far off base that the best thing for it is a landslide defeat to give it a reality check and force it to reform.

We saw this in 1994.  After campaigning as a moderate, President Clinton governed decidedly left of center.  He was punished in his first mid-term election with a landslide defeat of his Democrat Party that included losing the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950’s.

To his credit, Clinton heard the voters and said so.  Then he changed direction and governed as a centrist.  And the remaining years of his presidency were at least better for Democrats and for the country than his first two.  (No, I am not of fan of the Clintons, but credit where credit is due.)

More recently in the U.K., Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party took a historic defeat in 2019.  He has since been virtually banished from the party, thank God.  And although his more centrist replacement Keir Starmer is hardly inspiring, Labour is no longer an existential danger to the U.K. and is polling well ahead of the Tories thanks to Boris Johnson utterly squandering that victory.  (Don’t get me started on Boris.)

Thus in 1994, partisanship against the Democrat Party benefited both that party and the country.  Likewise for partisanship against Labour in the U. K. in 2019.

However, I freely concede that parties and political leaders do not always have the humility to reform after a massive defeat.  Such was the case with Democrat President Obama.  He first campaigned in 2008 as a cypher into which people could project all their “hope.”  The sycophant mainstream “news” media enabled this strategy by not vetting him.  Once elected, he governed as a Leftist.  The result in his first mid-term election was a massive defeat for the Democrat Party, including losing 63 seats in the House.

But Obama did not follow the example of Bill Clinton.  He persisted in governing as a Leftist.  He got away with that politically in part because the Republican nominee in 2012, Mitt Romney, after alienating many Republicans with his vicious attacks in the Republican primaries to gain the party nomination, then went easy on Obama. He was harder on Republicans than on Obama and utterly failed to inspire the Republican base.  But when Romney was no longer his foil in 2014, Obama took another mid-term hit with Republicans gaining 9 seats in the Senate.

Yet even then, now with control of both houses of Congress, Republicans were feckless and weak in opposing Obama’s policies.  They were far from partisan enough. Anger at that weakness combined with anger at eight years of Obama are big reasons behind the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  Love or hate Trump, he then probably motivated the Democrat Party to become even more extremist.

My main point behind that restatement of the Obama years is that one or even two landslide defeats might not be enough to prompt reform in a party that has become as extremist and dangerous as the Democrat Party.

Still it is worth a try.  A party with such a totalitarian streak as today’s Democrat Party must be removed and kept from power until it reforms.  And if it stiffens the neck and does not reform, then keep it from power as long as needed, perhaps until it goes the way of the Whig Party.  I know — easier said than done.  But when a major party becomes so profoundly toxic and dangerous, the future of the country demands such principled and dogged partisanship.

Still, the Democrat Party reforming so it is no longer an existential threat to America and to our freedoms is much preferable.  I would like for it to be safe to be non-partisan again!  That will not happen until crushing political defeats assist them to reform.  So for the good of all of us, this is a time for partisanship.