A century ago, the Republican Party chose to become a permanent minority, not wittingly or directly but inevitably. It spent most of the succeeding decades trying without great success to overcome its mistake. Today’s GOP is at a similar crossroads that could take it into the political wilderness for years to come.

The Republican Party’s embattled moderates finally seem to recognize that possibility, as seen in an extraordinary series of blunt statements this week from House Speaker John Boehner. “Frankly,” Boehner said Thursday, ripping into the hardline outside groups that sought to scuttle a budget compromise with Democrats, “I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be.” Fifty right-wing groups put out a statement in response, complaining that “the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill.”


As they pick sides, Republicans would do well to study the 1912 presidential election, which was the last time their party faced a similar dilemma. That campaign is remembered as a gift to the Democratic nominee. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, Woodrow Wilson owed his election to a split in the majority party. When Republicans divided their vote almost equally between William Howard Taft, their party’s nominee, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose Party candidate, Wilson slipped into office with 42 percent of the vote. That defeat was forgotten in the elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928 when the Republican nominees—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—cruised to landslide victories.

The deeper story of 1912, however, was the Republican Party’s rebuff of its moderate wing. Roosevelt challenged his party to embrace the Progressive movement, which had taken aim at the business trusts that were exploiting markets and labor. Factories were unregulated hell holes where children and adults worked six days a week in unsafe conditions. “We Republicans,” said Roosevelt, must “hold the just balance and set ourselves . . . resolutely against improper corporate influence.”

Ignoring Roosevelt’s plea to reject “crooked business” and embrace “the general right of the community,” the 1912 Republican Party Convention sided instead with proponents of unfettered capitalism, even to the extent of purging the progressives from its leadership ranks. Although they continued to call themselves Republicans, many felt unwelcome in the party, and several, including Henry Stimson and Harold Ickes, later served in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic administration.

When Hoover, because of his party’s commitment to the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, refused to use the power of government to relieve the poverty and unemployment wrought by the Great Depression, his party lost its hold on the House in 1930 and on the Senate and the presidency in 1932. As Kristi Anderson’s The Creation of a Democratic Majority shows, first-time voters in the 1930s came to identify with the Democratic Party by a two-to-one margin, making it the nation’s majority party and enabling it to dominate national politics through the 1970s.

The GOP had picked the wrong side of history and had misjudged the dynamics of a two-party system. These dynamics can be easily misunderstood today in the midst of our polarized politics. The political center is weak, most clearly in the Congress but also in our elections. Efforts to turn out the partisan vote have trumped efforts to woo the shrinking number of swing voters. One might assume that a permanent majority can be constructed on the right or on the left.

It’s a mistaken assumption. The center of gravity in a two-party system rests somewhere near the middle—not in every election but always in the long run. Abandon the middle, and the other party will seize it. That was the GOP’s mistake in 1912. It chose the faction on the flank over the one nudging the center. When conditions changed, as was inevitable, the GOP had no maneuvering room. It’s political science 101.

The Republican Party again faces a factional choice. A showdown is looming between its Tea Party-driven right wing and its less sharply defined center-right faction. If the reactionary wing prevails and fails to accommodate the party’s moderates—which appears likely—the Republican Party will cement its place as the 21st century’s permanent minority party.

Tea Party advocates would deny this, of course. One reason is that they live in an echo chamber, surrounded by people who think as they do. All politicians face this problem, but what compounds it in their case is the fantasy that, somehow, huge numbers of Americans will rally to their side once the logic of their reactionary platform is made clear. American history has few supportive examples but many contrary ones, including the thrashing that Barry Goldwater—“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”—took in 1964. The historian Daniel Boorstin explained why: Most Americans are temperamentally adverse to zealotry.

Democrats are rooting for the GOP’s right wing to win out. What would be good for the Democratic Party, however, is not what would be good for the country. America’s political system works best when the two parties are competitive. It gets wobbly when the stronger party is unchecked. The Watergate scandal, for example, handed the Democratic Party a large congressional majority that, believing the advantages of incumbency would keep them in power indefinitely, went on an undisciplined spending spree. Three decades later, Democrats are still dealing with some of the fallout.

The Republican and Democratic parties are nearly the oldest in existence, a tribute to their capacity to seek the center when threatened. “Creatures of compromise,” is how the historian Clinton Rossiter described them. Large chunks of the Republican Party have been acting as if the historical tendency of our two-party system is a relic of the past. They have been pushing their party ever further to the right. The level of ideological purity of today’s GOP is nearly unprecedented. Gallup polls indicate that, whereas those who identify themselves as Democrats are rather evenly mixed between self-identified liberals and moderates, seven out of 10 Republicans are self-identified conservatives.

It is these conservative identifiers who will decide the eventual outcome of the intra-party fight that surfaced this week in Washington. If they heed the urgings of their party’s right-wing groups and donors—who have a lot of organizational and financial muscle—the GOP could have an unabashed right-winger as its 2016 presidential nominee. At that point, the party’s more moderate followers might ask themselves whether the party still has a place for them.

Although Theodore Roosevelt didn’t live to see the demise of his party, he predicted it, saying it was “madness” for the GOP to think it could stay in power on an ideologically extreme platform. Madness is apparently still in fashion in some Republican circles. The triumph of the party’s right wing would assure the party’s marginalization, throwing our two-party system out of balance for years to come.

Thomas Patterson (@tompharvard) is the Bradlee professor of government and the press at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His latest book, Informing the News , was published this fall.