GOP, two-party system will survive Donald Trump
Far be it from me to take up for the Republican Party. There is, however, a time and place for everything. Regardless of Donald Trump, the Republican Party will not disappear, nor will the two-party system.
The internecine warfare among Republican presidential candidates is prompting media gurus and Republican strategists to lament the dire fate of the GOP and predict its end, or the end of the two-party system, or — heaven forbid — a brokered convention.
The two-party system has been with us for almost the entirety of the 230-year experience of our great nation. True, it has not performed well all of the time, but it has given us Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Not bad. The two-party system also has produced some lesser lights, but which among our political institutions is perfect?
Some of these all-wise pundits even warn direly of a brokered convention — a tragedy just this side of a nuclear holocaust, by their judgments. But we might want to recall that brokered conventions produced Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
While neither of the current two principal parties is perfect, they have, since 1860, provided this nation with the capacity to select nominees and conduct general elections at all levels of government. Those elections produced presidents who enabled us to survive a Civil War, a monumental economic depression and World Wars I and II. The work of these parties also has yielded a nation of universal citizenship and personal liberties, and the stability that created the world’s greatest, most prosperous economy.
So don’t spill too many tears for the GOP. It will survive, as did the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s when it suffered similar divisions.
As for a brokered convention, that’s something that is possible and survivable because of the two-party system, not despite it.
Don Fowler
Columbia
This story was originally published March 12, 2016 at 12:38 PM.