Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 18, 1995 TAG: 9510180021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the state level, dissatisfaction last year with Republican nominee Oliver North led to Marshall Coleman's independent candidacy for a U.S. Senate seat from Virginia; Democrat Charles Robb was re-elected, but with only a plurality. For a time, former Democratic Gov. Douglas Wilder also was in the contest as an independent.
On the local level, incumbent Democratic Del. Creigh Deeds of Bath County is running for re-election against Rockbridge County Supervisor Ben Nicely, a Democrat-turned-
Republican who acknowledges his discomfort with party labels, and Green Party candidate Stephanie Porras, officially running as an independent. Part of Deeds' House district overlaps part of the state Senate district of Republican Bo Trumbo of Fincastle, who's unopposed this year - but who won four years ago with only 44 percent of the vote against the evenly divided opposition of a Democrat and an independent.
Everywhere, the emergence of a "radical middle" attracts much comment and speculation.
Are the two parties as we've known them on the road to extinction? Maybe.
Is the two-party system dying? No.
Today's parties may well be undergoing realignment - enough so that one or both could even go the way of the old Whig Party of the first half of the 19th century, supplanted as a major party by a new Republican Party.
Disarray among the Democrats is manifest. But, as Walter Russell Mead (in an essay in this past Sunday's New York Times) and others have noted, deep differences lurk as well beneath the GOP's surface unity.
Mead describes the rift and coming realignment as Hamiltonianism (pro-business, internationalist, supportive of certain kinds of federal activism vs. Jeffersonianism (populist, localist, suspicious of federal activism). Others have viewed the realigning connections somewhat differently - for example, as libertarian vs. authoritarian.
For both structural and cultural reasons, though, the result is likely to be a new version of the two-party system.
Structurally, America's electoral system at all levels works against formation of durable third or fourth parties. Multiple-party systems flourish in places like Israel and Italy, whose governmental leaders are selected by parliaments elected under proportional-representation schemes.
Culturally, Americans resist the kind of ideological politics that has defined parties in multiparty systems. In this country, parties have been shifting, adaptable coalitions, ready to steal the thunder of new parties by absorbing as their own any vote-attracting ideas first advanced by others.
If new parties arise better able to do those things - especially to capture the middle - the odds are such parties won't supplement today's parties but, rather, replace them. And that's good. It's how democracy in America works.
by CNB