Over in Europe, the trend as of late is to see populist parties of the right made pariahs; that makes it hard for the traditional right-of-center parties to get a majority. The main party of the left then has to be brought on board for a "grand coalition" that tends to lock in place the bigger-government nature of the local government, since the party of the left can veto any change. That is changing somewhat; the current Dutch government has a new libertarian-nativist party in it, but many other such parties are still persona non grata in the mainstream body politic.
The American left is trying to do much the same thing with the Tea Party. Even though it isn't an actual party per se, that faction of the GOP has been demonized and blamed for the current financial situation. If they can make that part of the GOP off limits to civilized lawmaking, the only recourse for establishment Republicans is to reach across the aisle to Democrats, who will look to rein in any budget cuts to a bare minimum; that was what happened in the end-game of the debt ceiling gambit, where a rather Continental Grand Coalition was patched together.
What the Democrats would love to do is to turn the Tea Party into an actual third party; that would turn the US into a repeat of 1990s Canada, where small-c conservative Tories went and founded a Reform Party that split the right-of-center vote with a RINOey Conservative rump and handed easy plurality wins over to the Liberals. It took a decade for the two factions to come back together (largely on Reform terms) and another decade to come back to majority power this year.
Comments