A few months ago, I pondered the Republican Party's long-term survival. In the wake of Arlen Specter's defection and polls showing historically low party identification, talks about the GOP's death have risen dramatically in the past couple of weeks, even making their way into major newspapers. ("The Republican Party has collapsed," wrote Frank Rich on Saturday, a statement that can be interpreted different ways.)
It's an intriguing idea that the GOP might go the way of the Federalists and the Whigs in the nineteenth century. But I still consider this outcome unlikely. I think the current two parties are just too deeply entrenched, in both a cultural and practical sense.
Consider how many Americans there are for whom being a Republican is part of the very core of their identity. Even if less than twenty percent of the public feels that way, it's probably more than enough to stand in the way of the creation of a new major party to take the GOP's place.
The decline of the Whigs and the Federalists were a different matter. Between the rise of political parties in the 1790s and the cementing of the current Republican-Democrat divide in the 1850s was a span of only 60 some years. The Federalists died an early death that caused relatively little shedding of tears; it wasn't like you had "proud, lifelong Federalists" to contend with. The Whigs had a lifespan of about twenty years and were done in by the slavery question, a bigger issue than anything our country has since had to face.
In sum, these parties were transient entities, hardly comparable to the Republicans or Democrats of today, which have been entrenched in our culture for so many generations we have trouble imagining anything different.
The other reason why the Republican Party is probably here to stay involves the many practical barriers in our system to letting a third party gain a foothold. The makeup of Congress itself, with the gerrymandering of districts and the prevalence of incumbency, makes the takeover of a new party all but impossible. This barrier, in turn, prevents third-party presidential candidates from ever winning. As I have explained in other posts, had Ross Perot won the popular vote in 1992, he would probably have been denied the presidency by a Congress that favors only establishment candidates.
Saying the Republican Party has collapsed is surely an exaggeration. It may be out of power for a while (and even that is unclear), but our current system pretty much guarantees its eventual rise from the dead.