Weak parties eat their own. They devolve into intraparty squabbles, turning their most vitriolic rhetoric on members of their parties deemed “squishy” or insufficiently loyal. As a result, their coalitions often shrink over time, accelerating the radicalization process in a partisan doom-loop.
THAT PROCESS ULTIMATELY DESTROYED America’s first political party, the Federalists. The party’s collapse began in 1799, when President John Adams sent a diplomatic delegation to Paris, hoping to secure a peaceful resolution to the Quasi-War with France. The prospect of peace threatened the Arch Federalists, the party’s extreme faction: Military commissions supported their friends and built valuable political networks, and the urgent threat of war helped the party in elections.
The Arch Federalists spent the next eighteen months attacking Adams and the more moderate wing of the party. Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick, an Arch Federalist, referred to the president as an “evil” affliction. In October 1800, Alexander Hamilton published a pamphlet detailing Adams’s flaws, especially his foreign policy, which had “divided and distracted” the Federalists and “furnished deadly weapons” to the rival Democratic-Republicans in the coming election.
Adams lost his re-election bid that fall and the Democratic-Republican party picked up huge wins in Congress. The Federalists never again regained the same electoral or congressional strength. By the War of 1812, the Democratic-Republicans were the only party fielding presidential candidates and had absorbed most of the moderate Federalists into one large party.
Today’s Republican party could undergo a similar radicalization, disintegration, and reorganization. Some of the tendencies of weak parties are visible not just among its party leadership but among the rank-and-file as well. “What I like most about Trump is that he kind of shifted the paradigm of the Republican party away from, you know, guys like Mitt Romney who come in, and they’d say, ‘Oh, we’re going to cut your taxes, but really everything’s going to stay the same,’” said one two-time Trump voter from Texas in a focus group conducted in early 2022. “Trump was a big, loud attack against moderate Republicanism and kind of weak conservatism, and that’s what I like most about him.”
Today, the party faithful call any Republican who criticizes former President Trump a RINO, a Republican In Name Only. Another two-time Trump voter said in an early 2023 focus group that one of the things she liked most about Trump was that, “He’s pointed out the RINOs to all of us and said, ‘These are the people that are causing me heartburn.’” The volatile rhetoric MAGA Republicans hurl at their co-partisans—often including death threats and sometimes escalating to actual violence—has forced many officials to hire private security for their families and driven others from office.