I live in a state that has effective one-party rule. You probably do, too: three-quarters of the United States have one political party in control of both its governorship and its legislature. And I can tell you, as an anonymous minor government apparatchik working in that system, the only thing uniting a party's various factions together is the enemy of their enemy being their friend.
I've talked before about how the Republican party is really three parties glued together, with very few overlapping interests: the Finance party, the Bible party, and the Tea party. One cares about capital gains, one cares about abortion, and one cares about immigration. There are slivers of color on the Venn diagram: the Finance and Tea parties both care about income tax, for example, and the Bible and Tea parties care about nationalism. But they all agree on one thing: the Democrats oppose their aims and goals, and they cannot defeat them separately.
(The marvel here is how Donald Trump dominated all three wings of the Republican multiparty by not only being a Tea Party guy but convincing those in the other two wings that he's a also a pious billionaire, neither of which are true.)
(Actually, ha, no, they do not believe that, but they are very, very, very afraid of the Tea Party guys, and will therefore pretend that they do believe it, to ludicrous effect every time they have to act it out, out loud.)
Absent the Democrats, these three wings would eventually be unable to co-exist. They would splinter into Finance Party and Christo-Fascist Party and that would be what we'd be voting for in our elections. That's the thing about having a winner-take-all election system, by the way: it always comes down to two parties. Not three, and not one.
The same thing would happen — in fact, I'm going to say "will happen," if demographics do win out over fascism — if and when the Republican Party is reduced to a historical afterthought. The Democratic Party will splinter into its socialist and centrist wings, and will fight it out for the will of the American voter. Debates will pretty much go like this:
Centrist Democrat: "We should pay for universal health care by consolidating the populace into a single payer, taking advantage of the levers of the capitalist system that I love so much to create a monopsony, spearheaded by the federal government, to keep prices within current entitlements."
Democratic Socialist: "We should have a complete government socialization of health care in the United States; doctors and nurses should be like postal workers, and hospitals should be like the DMV. We're going to up your taxes 30% to pay for it, but it's not like you're going to have to pay for shit like ambulance rides and nursing homes anymore. Most people will probably come out ahead, unless they make eight figures."
Third Party Weirdo ("Republican"): "Well, I don't think there should be universal health care at all... every individual should have to pay cash money for their own health care, thank you very much."
This, to quote 2017, is the future that liberals want.
The problem with a certain kind of liberal (many of which are on this very website) is that they want to have this future today and skip the step where they dump the Republican Party into the dustbin of history. They are invariably Democratic Socialists very eager to get about the business of having that schism with the Centrist Democrats right here and right now. The "Joe Biden is as bad as the rest" types, as if he's in a completely different political party. He isn't. Not yet.
The business of today is doing whatever it takes to keep the country out of the hands of the members of this deeply, deeply weird cult (and I say that as a former Catholic, and a former Libertarian). There's your common ground. Those bizarre cultists are within a fingernail's width of climbing back in... and if they do, they'll never leave, because they know they were lucky to have this last shot and it'll over the minute they're back out again. They'll never forget that they were sliding off the roof to meet their Third Party Weirdo destiny, but grabbed the gutter and somehow survived. They'll climb back on and make sure no one else ever gets near the place again. See, they know this is existential. That's why they're freaking the fuck out so hard about it. That's why they're cheating. They know that — if US society evolves naturally and they're powerless to impede — in ten or fifteen years, it's Gary Johnson-ville for those guys. They can't have it.
But, yeah, tell me you've never spoken to a Democrat, without. They don't want one-party Democratic rule. Those two wings cannot wait to be rid of each other and duking it out on the big stage. They're so anxious to get on with it that they're already getting started, about one to two decades prematurely. They might end up going down together.
