Will a win by Obama result in both parties moving to the right?

Kevin Drum suggests that an Obama win Tuesday is going to push both the Republican Party and the Democratic party more to the right. The political losses for the Republicans will be among the more moderate Republicans, leaving the extremist right survivors in safe seats, while the Democratic wins in previously Republican districts are going to bring in more
Blue Dog” or conservative right-wing Democrats.

Which "right" will the Republicans move towards? There are at least two major directions the Republican right are moving, and they don't get along with each other well.

One direction is the small government - no regulation right, and the other is the religious right. It was the alliance of these two groups into the Reagan coalition that has given the conservatives political dominance since the Reagan era. At that time the Goldwater conservatives joined with the Christian Coalition to dominate national politics.

But what we saw in the 2007 - 2008 Republican presidential primaries was that those two groups no longer support the same candidates. Romney couldn't get the support of the religious right, Huckabee couldn't get anyone but the religious right, and the Ron Paul libertarians (a consistent 10%) couldn't accept either group.

In the meantime the traditional good-government pro-civil-rights Republicans no longer have political representation through the Republican Party. They disappeared with Lincoln Chaffee; Olympia Snowe and Chris Dodd linger on. Their descendants make up the Northeastern Democratic Party now.

The shorthand "moving to the Right" has become quite meaningless ideologically as the conservative Republican Party has fractionated into different groups of extremists. About the only thing the various groups making up the Republican Party have in common now is an extremist willingness to use authoritarian powers of government to get their own way and the willingness to spend government money corruptly to gain and maintain power.

Kevin’s analysis is a logical conclusion based on the older model of a left - right linear continuum which does not, in fact, exist. It was an artifact of the Cold War, and as a model explained the differences between American democracy and Socialists authoritarianism to some extent. But today the left – right model is as imaginary as the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It no longer explains significant political and economic realities because the Cold War is over and the institutions based on that bipolar world are gone. That means that Kevin’s analysis doesn’t work.

The older stability will be replaced by a new one when new institutions are created that reflect the new political and economic realities. Obama’s anticipated win is clearly being driven to a great extent by his ground game and his broad-based fundraising. His fundraising has permitted the development of a nationwide political organization, one which represents the moderate views of average people. This contrasts with the conservative think tanks which represent wealthy extremists and gives average people a way to effectively block those extremists.

After the election Obama’s organization is going to shrink, but it is not going away. Too many people have been trained, mobilized and motivated, and winning causes people to do the same thing that led to winning. Since the organization is funded primarily by a broad group of small donors it will be a moderate organization which will contrast to the narrow extremist organizations that make up the rightwing think tanks have been created since the Reagan era by wealthy donors. The Obama organization is the framework for a new institutional basis for American politics.

The Republicans and Democrats are not likely to both move “to the right” nationally as a result of this election. What is much more likely is that both parties are going to reorganize themselves. The Democrats are going to establish new institutions that allow them to effectively represent the majority of moderate voters, while the Republicans are going to continue to break up into competing extremist and generally authoritarian groups which will decline in political importance. After about two elections there will be Democrats who disagree with the dominant Democratic positions and who will break away to form new competing parties. Some will move over to the surviving Republican organizations which will become more moderate after the continued losses they are going to experience.

At least that’s what I think is most likely to happen. That’s on a national basis. Locally, of course, remnants of the older party structures will remain for at least a decade, probably longer. The development of a new political stability is going to take a while, and the Recession is going to last a number of years to scramble that development.