Looking More Whiggish . . .

James Howard Kunstler's comparisons of Barack Obama to Millard Fillmore, as a President running a country on the verge of imploding with no idea of how to deal with it outside the realm of petty politics, is suddenly more apt thanks to dissension from the progressive base of the Democratic party. Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are taking a stand against Republican demands for the Bush tax cuts to be extended to everyone, insisting instead that the Republicans vote on a proposal that would extend the Bush tax cuts to the middle class only. And they're doing it whether the White House backs them or not. George Soros, the philanthropist and Democratic party donor, was recently quoted as saying that if Obama can't deliver for the left, then Democrats should look for someone else.

Which is how the Whig party destroyed itself. I earlier noted that the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott, a war hero, to run for President in 1852 because war heroes had helped the party win earlier presidential elections. But there's more to it than that. William H. Seward, an antislavery Whig senator from New York, pushed for a nominee more sympathetic to the party's antislavery wing. (President Fillmore had supported the Compromise of 1850, which allowed slavery to extend into the territories won from the war with Mexico, and he did not believe the federal government had the right to restrict slavery despite his own personal hatred for it.) General Scott was nominated because he was a Southerner with pro-Northern, antislavery sympathies, but a plank in the party platform accepting the Compromise of 1850 undermined Scott's support in the North as easily as antislavery sentiments hurt him among his fellow Southerners. In a latter-day scenario in our own time, Obama could face a challenge from the left in 2012 and lose the Democratic presidential nomination to a candidate without enough party support and lose to an orthodox, activist Republican like . . . Sarah Palin. Franklin Pierce, the man who defeated Winfield Scott for the Presidency in 1852, was nominated for the Presidency for being an orthodox, activist Democrat.

The Republican party of today, however, is much like the Democratic party in 1852 in this respect; it's only stronger by default, as it's ridden with factions of its own and declining rapidly. Michael Moore has even suggested that we could soon face a two Democratic party presidential candidates, a Republican nominee, and a Tea Party candidate, just as there had been a four-way race in 1860. I'm not predicting a repeat of history to the letter, but I am predicting that one of the major parties will disappear and the other will fall into a comatose state when a party that hasn't been formed yet fills the vacuum. The socioeconomic dislocation in the decade that led up to the Civil War made this happen before, and the aftermath was a period of national Armageddon - a conflict joined by disunion. Before 2020, there could be a similar conflagration brought on by decades of predatory capitalism, an angry, deprived middle class, and the ineffectiveness of either party to avert such a conflict. And one side will be disabled long enough to let the other rewrite the laws of the land.

I predict that the Democratic party will fall because they don't know what they stand for and they've been around too long. A new people's party will replace it out of the many parties that form in its dissolution, just as the Republican party was one of the many political organizations aiming to fill the void left by the Whigs. Today's more liberal Democrats - for example, Alan Grayson, just voted out of his House seat in Florida - will either belong to this next major party or belong to a party that doesn't work out, like the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. A Democratic senator elected in 2010 will belong to another party by the time he or she stands for re-election in 2016, just as William Seward began his second Senate term as a Whig and ended it as a Republican. And, like the party that ultimately represents it in the future, the American middle class - if it's to survive at all - will assume a form we do not yet recognize.