After the Parties Collapse
By 
Let’s look to the future. Today, more than most days in the past, really does feel like the wheels are coming off. Once the chaos is no longer driving the day, we are going to have to make many changes.
This thread caught my eye over the weekend. Definitely possible that both parties collapse, although the ends are likely to come differently for each of them. It’s a thought experiment.
Mixing in with the other party indeed. If the party you have belonged to becomes the tool of a racist, sexist would-be dictator and you’re a kind of middle of the road, live and let live Republican, you might move over to a party that has declared itself against racism and sexism. There are a lot of these people in the Democratic Party right now, and I don’t grudge them that. Our two-party system is limiting.
I think of Amy Klobuchar, for example, as a liberal-leaning Republican I could respect. She is entirely the wrong person to speak for the Democratic Party, but she would have done well as a Rockefeller Republican.
The centrists are basically Republicans from an earlier time mixed in with the Democratic Party. Again, people I could respect but not agree with, but utterly wrong as drivers for a Democratic agenda.
I’ve left out her discussion of the formation of a new party in Honduras in 2013, the Libre Party.
A new Democratic agenda would be more left than the party leaders are now. It’s hard to tell from current polls where the rank and file are if one subtracts the centrists. On the other side, too many leftier folk have given up on electoral politics and insist on purity tests. Whatever turns out to work as core values for a reconstructed Democratic Party will not be as left as some want and will be ragged around the edges. But if the centrists decamped to a new Republican Party, we could have a productive discussion.
It’s still some distance into the future, although Trump has sounded seriously unhinged over the past 24 hours and has illustrated a disastrous inability to understand what foreign relations entail over the last week. Might that precipitate something? Stay tuned, as I think he said in one of his posts.
One way or another, this is worth thinking about.