Matt Yglesias

Some Recent History

As you may recall, several months ago it looked as if one of America’s two major political parties was going to have a serious “party unity” problem. Their nominating contest produced a winner who’d prevailed against divided opposition without ever proving himself to be a clear majority choice anywhere. What’s more, the party’s base was divided between a substantial element that strongly approved of the party’s unpopular incumbent president, and another substantial element that joined the majority of the public in disapproving of his job performance. What’s more, the winner had a long history of personal and professional tensions with key stakeholders in his party’s political movement and with leading party politicians.

And yet, these tensions were overcome! And not overcome, primarily, by endless hand-holding sessions in which the various aggrieved parties recited their complaints from one side of their mouth while talking of their admiration for each other out of the other side. And they certainly weren’t overcome by speaking in more detail about a policy agenda. Rather, though there was of course some hand-holding, unity was primarily achieved by shifting attention off the internally controversial of their nominee and his relationship to other party figures and on to the internally uncontroversial subject of how awful the other political party is.

Whether there may be any lessons in this for any other political parties is something I’ll leave to readers to judge.