eBook $2.99 at barnesandnoble.com If you vote for candidates based on their party affiliation rather than on their character or their stance on specific issues, it may be the case that your perception of what the parties stand for is out of date. Political scientists generally agree on six distinct "party systems" across the history of the United States, and each of these party systems reflects changes in the names of the parties, or in the alignment of the parties with the major issues of their era, or both. In my new book What Makes a Great President, I describe the evolution of the six historical party systems and defend the proposition that, because of the deregulation of television and radio and the explosion of information technology, we have been living in a seventh party system for about thirty years. The character of the parties under this new system is dramatically different. If you are voting based on an idea of party identity that you inherited from your parents, or that you remember from before around 1994, then it is likely that you are voting for something that no longer exists.
WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET
We all know that elections are close. Parties compete for power and they cater to interest groups that reflect small fractions of the population. The Republican Party has essentially split between extremists and traditionalists. To a large degree, the extremists have pushed out the traditionalists. That is why hundreds of prominent conservatives have either refused to endorse Trump in the 2024 election or have openly stated they will vote for the Democratic candidate to help prevent Trump from winning in the 2024 election. Who is left supporting the Republican candidate? Extremists, those who remain affiliated with the Republican Party through an outdated sense of what that party stands for, people who are captured by one type of news program (like Fox News) that promotes stories based on what those stories do for ratings rather than on their truth value, and people who are afraid of being bullied with terms like "RINO", "Woke" and "Libtard" if they go against what their social circle promotes as "patriotic". The description of the evolution of the seventh party system in my book provides a more detailed look at how the Republican Party has changed over time. For simplicity in this post, I will simply close by noting that some of the extremists who have identified with the modern Republican Party are former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and terrorist Timothy McVeigh (executed for murdering 168 people* and injuring over 500 others by bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995). In the coming election, failure to vote empowers the extremists. And voting for the Republican candidate is a vote for the racist, white nationalist, and anarchist agenda of people like Timothy McVeigh and David Duke. That is why hundreds of prominent conservatives are refusing to support the Republican candidate for president in 2024.
*including 19 children
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