The Democrats Got Crushed in the Midterms. But “the Republican Brand [Still] Sucks.” Here’s What’s Next.

It’s always easy to confuse the most-recent
election as they most important and a bellwether for the next big
thing in politics. And there’s no question the the GOP has a ton of
momentum after winning a majority in the Senate and making gains in
the House of Representatives and state houses and legislatures
around the country.

But the long-term trends strongly suggest that this recent
uptick in the GOP’s favor is only a temporary reprieve in the long,
slow decline of both parties. Voter identification with both
Democrats and Republicans is way down from a few decades ago and
political independents are on the rise. That’s especially true
among voters below the age of 30. What’s going on?

The short version is that political, cultural, and even economic
power has been decentralizing and unraveling for a long time.
Whether you like it or not, The
Libertarian Moment is here, a technologically driven
individualization of experience and a breakdown of the large
institutions—governments, corporations, churches, you name it—that
used to govern and structure our lives. The result is that top-down
systems, whether public or private, right wing or left wing, have
less and less ability to organize our lives. That’s true whether
you’re talking about the workplace, the bedroom, or the bar down
the street (that may now be serving legal pot). This is mostly
good, though it’s also profoundly disruptive too. 

That’s from my Daily Beast column. For all sorts of
reasons, we’ll always have two major parties in America, but what
they stand for can and does change on a regular basis. Neither
party enjoys anything close to majority (or even plurality) support
from most Americans. They’re going to have change their frameworks
and fast if they want to flourish.

In a world where you can personalize and individualize your
online experience, your clothing, your work situation, even your
sexuality, why would anyone join up for ossified, rigid,
centuries-old groups such as the Democrats or Republicans?
“The
Repulican brand sucks,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said
recently of his own party, which he compared to Domino’s Pizza. If
the Republicans are Domino’s, then the Democrats are Pizza Hut.
Neither is appealing in a world of easy-to-find gourmet fare.

And that’s why the future of politics and
policy doesn’t belong to doctrinaire Democrats or Republicans who
want to control large swaths of everyday life. It belongs
ultimately to the libertarian decentralists such as Paul who not
only understand what is happening to America but are growing
comfortable with it. Americans are increasingly wary
of government’s
power, and they don’t want it to teach a single set of morals
either. Everything is proliferating and people
just want a government that will keep people from starving on the
streets and get out of the way as they go to the corner pot shop to
buy edibles to take to their friends’ gay wedding celebrated by
ministers who are not forced to do so.

Politicians and parties who champion policies that embrace
economic and social decentralization will own the future, even as
they wield less power by letting people discover how they actually
want to live. Whoever wins tonight would do well to remember that.
Because if they don’t, they’ll be losers again, and sooner than you
think.