“What has happened to the Democratic Party?” you ask? It’s quite simple: coalition politics.
When winning becomes more important to a party than principle, it will resort to coalition politics: the tawdry art of buying blocs of votes with promises about future policy directions. Coalition politics requires the party to suppress its residual inclinations toward fidelity to principle and get on with the business of selling its soul. Once the coalition approaches 50%, it becomes highly unstable — groups within it begin to ponder the possibilities from shopping their allegiances around — at which point the party must scramble ceaselessly for giveaways and subventions to keep the coalition together. That’s the death knell for any remaining honesty or scruple in the party’s governing cadre.
Coalition politics, in short, overwhelms the decent impulses in those who adopt it. You could say that the truly fatal mistake was to elevate winning above all other considerations, but it’s the adoption of coalition politics that most sharply accelerates the descent into villainy, and makes it more or less irreversible.
Unfortunately, the Republicans are getting into coalition politics too.
“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.” — Thomas Jefferson
