Our Four Political Parties

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 15, 2025

 

We don’t have two political parties in the United States—we have four of them, but it gets confusing because the two smaller ones share their names and P.O. boxes with the two larger ones.

 

Each of our major parties has within it two major factions, one dominant and one subordinate. The transformation of the GOP over the past 15 years did not begin with Donald Trump and it will not end with him: It began with the Tea Party movement, which has made the long journey from outside-out to inside-in.

 

When the Tea Party protests began in early 2009, their organizers comprised a movement of the out-of-power faction in the out-of-power party: They were right-wing populists who loathed the GOP “establishment” and demanded a different direction for the post-George W. Bush party, and they were operating during a time when the Democratic Party enjoyed a trifecta: Barack Obama in the White House, Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, and Harry Reid presiding over a Democratic Senate majority that was, for a time, filibuster-proof when accounting for notionally independent Democrats-in-all-but-name Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman.

 

As my friend Charles C.W. Cooke very intelligently explained in a recent episode of The Editors podcast, it is much easier to argue for radical and unpopular policies when you are out of power than when you are in power. The Tea Party movement called for a smaller federal government with much less spending and a nearer-to-balanced budget, sometimes articulating an intelligent and coherent program but as often as not sinking into the familiar incoherent populist morass or vague attitudinizing.

 

The Tea Party went from the minority faction in the minority party to the majority faction in the majority party very quickly by historical standards—unhappily, it did so in no small part by abandoning its small-government principles and embracing a low-rent demagogue and building a personality cult around him. Note that the most abject Donald Trump sycophants on the scene today—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Mike Lee—were Tea Party insurgents back in the day. Same ol’ politicians, brand-new set of unshakeable principles that will be traded in for fresh ones when the winds shift. The two conservative types identified by Irving Kristol—anti-state and anti-left—both were at work in the movement, but the anti-left tendency prevailed over the anti-state tendency, because the left has no constituency on the right but welfare spending (in the form of Social Security, Medicare, business subsidies, etc.) does. The only thing the right agrees on in 2025 is that it despises the left—but it despises it as an identity, not as a set of policies or principles, which the Trump-era right is happy to embrace or imitate.

 

As it stands, the traditional conservatives, what remains of them, are the outside-in party, i.e., the subordinate faction of the dominant party; the “establishment” Democrats are the inside-out party and no doubt “inside out” is precisely how they are feeling as the populist left, personified by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others of her kidney, works to move from outside-out to inside-out—and, if its aspirations should come to pass, to inside-in, more or less the same way the Tea Party did.

 

What that means for our true-believing left-wing friends is that they should expect their most passionate advocates to drop their cherished principles when they get too heavy to carry while hiking along the path to power and become, just like the Tea Party Republicans did over the course of their own journey, an even worse version of the establishment they claimed to despise.

 

What that means for our true-believing conservative friends is that the emerging split within the Trump movement is one more piece of evidence (as though any more were needed) that the old conservative movement is dead, leaving room for a new faction to emerge through the usual mechanics of intra-party polarization. Expect to end up with a GOP with an anti-war welfare-chauvinist faction and a more hawkish welfare-chauvinist faction, which may prove durable enough to last until its fiscal imbecility drives the federal government into a credit crisis.

 

What that means for Elon Musk is that he is hunting in vain for a fifth quadrant in our two-by-two political grid. Not that trying to wed green-eyeshade fiscal probity to insipid tech-bro Kulturkampf was ever a very good idea. Go play with your rockets, boy.

 

There is no fifth quadrant.

 

The obituary for Republican conservatism is long overdue, with most of the old Buckley-Reagan right having abandoned its old positions in the pursuit of the money and status that currently can be had most easily from joining the Trump cult and with a few having migrated to the Democratic Party. There they might have joined the moderate progressives to provide a kind of neoconservative bulwark against the hard left on the perfectly defensible grounds that a Democratic Party that is pro-abortion and pro-capitalism is preferable to one that is pro-abortion and anti-capitalism, single-serving libertarians on mifepristone-misoprostol and étatiste on just about everything else. But these new Democrats have not shown much interest in trying to change the party they have just joined, there probably are not enough of them in any case to make much of a difference, and the old Clintonite establishment apparently does not understand that its declining numbers and waning influence necessitate new allies recruited from the part of the political spectrum that is to the right of the current median Democrat if what is left of the Democratic center is to hold against the more extreme populist elements. The days when the party bosses and the New York Times could pronounce with one voice that a professing socialist cannot be the Democratic presidential nominee or speaker of the House—and expect to prevail—are gone.

 

Demagogues and demagogic movements prevail only erratically, because they are hostages to fortune: the right kind of charismatic candidate arriving at the right moment, when one side is operating in sluggardly satisfaction (2016 Democrats led by Hillary Rodham Clinton) and the other is riven by an urgent discontent (Republicans from 2009-16) that has not yet been fully exposed and coopted. But demagogues can last a long time and do a lot of damage while they last. If the more sensible kind of Democrat or Republican is to prevail, then they will have to understand the nature of the coalition politics of the moment we are in. Understanding that we have a four-party system rather than a two-party system is the place to start.