American politics is cyclical — which means that if one side is up today, it is assured of being down in the near future, as the political tide slowly ebbs and flows

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Cyclical Politics Could Lift GOP
By Salena Zito, January 12, 2014

America is famous for its political duality, despite the vitriol of the left and right wings of its two major parties.

It has a slim, moderately progressive majority when it comes to social values and a slim, moderately conservative majority when it comes to economics.

Our Founders sought both to restrain government with the Declaration of Independence and to empower it, within bounds, with the Constitution, according to Baylor University political scientist Curt Nichols.

“Democrats usually support empowering government, except when (it) intrudes on civil rights and civil liberties ... and Republicans usually support restraining government, except when it comes to national defense,” Nichols said.

Of course, all of this is a reversal from the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Democrats favored restraining government (by limiting states' rights) and Republicans sought to empower government to foster economic growth (until the 1920s).

Both parties are in a constant search for the winning formula that will produce power.

Today's Democrats are struggling with an emerging, loud progressive wing that will have the same fracturing impact that Republicans encountered with grassroots conservative activists in the last two election cycles.

Not long ago, Howard Dean was considered too progressive to win the Democrats' presidential nomination and John Kerry ran from his own liberal bona fides by crisply saluting and “reporting for duty” as he accepted the party's nomination, Nichols said.

“Yet, because President Obama keeps on winning elections and progressives have not lost the Senate, there is evidence to suggest that, whatever the failings of progressive governance, the majority of Americans want progressives to lead,” he said.

That evidence needs an asterisk, however: A lot of people did not vote in 2012 — the first time an incumbent president won re-election with fewer votes than in his first election.

Conversely, to say Republicans can't win big elections is to ignore how they shellacked Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections and won control of the House of Representatives. (That same surge cost them control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012 because of primary candidates whose ideals were too rigid for a general electorate.)

The coalitional strife within Republican ranks basically centers on contrasting visions of the direction that the country should take in response to progressive gains, although that is rarely pointed out.

Historically, a party usually needs to suffer three straight losses in presidential elections before it embraces the need for change. Only when Democrats lost with Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis did they venture to try the “Third Way” centrism of Bill Clinton.

With the electorate's 2010 midterm repudiation of President Obama and the 2008 rejection of John McCain and the 2012 rejection of Mitt Romney, two socially moderate Republican presidential candidates, progressive Democrats have concluded that Americans want them to provide national leadership.

That helps to explain the recent assertiveness and self-confidence that progressive candidates and officeholders like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have shown among Democrats.

But that does not mean those progressives are the harbingers of what will happen in this year's elections. Remember, de Blasio is the first Democrat in more than 30 years to win in the Big Apple, and Warren's win came less than two years after Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won that liberal state's Senate seat.

In other words, nothing is for certain or is permanent for any American political party.

Political schizophrenia is in our national DNA, which is why “wave” election cycles occur fairly frequently and parties rarely hold the White House for longer than two consecutive terms.

Despite sometimes nasty election cycles, when we shift from one party to another, the creative tension that this fosters has always been a source of our national greatness.

“It would probably be bad for the country if one side or the other ever truly won and forced everyone to conform to the tenets of conservative or progressive politics,” Nichols said.

Fortunately for Republicans, American politics is cyclical — which means that if one side is up today, it is assured of being down in the near future, as the political tide slowly ebbs and flows.
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