The Vanishing Republican Party

American political parties must have a great capacity for survival, or how could they have endured this long? Herbert Croly, who co-founded The New Republic, in 1914, liked to say that the Republicans and Democrats were (to borrow a paraphrase from Walter Lippmann’s recollection of Croly) like primitive organisms that can’t easily be killed: if their heads and tentacles are lopped off, they grow new ones. That has been pretty much true of the major parties, at least insofar as anyone alive can recall. The overwhelming defeat of the Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in 1964—by what was, at the time, the biggest popular-vote margin in American history—was not, as it turned out, an enduring crisis for his party. Rather, defeat was followed, four years later, by the victory of another Republican, the former Vice-President Richard Nixon. Nor did the defeat of Senator George McGovern, in 1972, by an even larger margin than Goldwater’s, wreck the Democratic Party (Jimmy Carter won four years later), though it did alter its DNA, moving it leftward, much as Goldwater moved Republicans rightward. In good times and bad, this primitive organism survived. Or it has so far.