I left off with Part II addressing the nature of parties by V.O. Key's tripartite conceptualization. The GOP cannot govern. Its "party-in-government" aspect is fundamentally broken. Why? That leads us to its tangled relationship between the other two aspects of "the party"-- the "party-in-electorate," and the "party-as-organization."
Throughout the primary campaign, my favorite book to bash was a piece of garbage called, The Party Decides, which argued that the party organizations-- hint, hint-- had managed to recover from the damage done to them by the post-1968 reforms and reasserted control of the presidential nominating system. In 1968, the Democratic Party's rules didn't have any real role for primaries, so even though Eugene McCarthy performed best in the primaries, "the party," meaning the muckety-mucks who had the real juice at the nominating convention chose to nominate sitting-VP Hubert Humphrey. Riots ensued, Humphrey lost to Nixon, and the party changed its rules to tell the states that they had to select delegates through primaries and caucuses. Sorry, muckety-mucks, no juice for you.* Then, time passes, and according to The Party Decides, the muckety-mucks were back in control by the new millennium because they can send signals to the automaton-voters through endorsements and yadda, yadda, yadda. (Do people still get Seinfeld references?)
Eeeeeeexcept that that was bullshit, and I was saying so long before Trump actually wrapped up the nomination, right here on this pretentious, little blog. Other countries have party systems in which the parties do control the nominating systems. The UK has a system actually called the "Westminster system." Getting on the parliamentary ballot requires having your party put you on the ballot through their convoluted party rules. Then, there's "proportional representation," in which the proportion of seats a party gets in the legislature is the proportion of the vote that it gets, and the specific legislators who get into the chamber are selected from a list composed by... yup! The party!
We just have a structure with weak parties. Make that, weak party organizations. As a result of that, and the fact that the party doesn't fucking decide, we wind up with not just Donny-boy, but Roy Moore, Ted Cruz, the House Freedom Caucus, and in general, enough wackos to make that fucking "PIG" I showed in the other day's post go hog-wild. The party-as-organization just isn't strong enough to nominate the kinds of candidates to prevent that.
Of course, there's something missing here. The electorate. I'm getting to that. In another post.
*I was trying to figure out how to do a Seinfeld-Arrested Development thing, but I couldn't really get the line to work. You'll have to take this footnote as a what-might-have-been. All you get is the Soup-Nazi.
