In a column devoted to the “Democrats’ clown car,” Kevin Williamson of National Review Online nonetheless makes an argument for well-functioning political parties.
How incompetent are the 2020 Democrats? Incompetent enough to make the 2020 Republicans look . . . sort of okay by comparison — and that is saying something.
Populists and pseudo-populists Left and Right sniff at the idea of political parties, at the idea that there should be some mediating layer — they call it “the Establishment” — standing between the People and power. …
… Opposition to parties is a deep current in U.S. politics — one that precedes the existence of organized political parties, in fact.
It is an error.
The United States needs functioning political parties.
Institutions are important for a pretty straightforward reason: They do things that need doing.
In the case of political parties, that means organizing primary elections, for one thing, but also recruiting and screening candidates (bitch all you like about “the Establishment,” a Democratic party with a functioning leadership would not let Bernie Sanders get within smelling distance of the presidential nomination, not least because he is not a member of the Democratic Party), helping to build and connect politically engaged organizations (consider the many intersections between abolitionist and Republican groups in the 19th century or pro-life and Republican groups in the 21st), maintain organizations (such as the National Federation of Republican Women), etc.
What the parties are not there to do — when they are functioning properly — is to act as mere aggregators. Unhappily, that is largely what the two major parties currently do.
They have gone from being organizations with standards, procedures, and interests of their own to being “a vehicle that anyone can drive,” as Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report puts it.
