When former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard secured sufficient signatures to gain a place on the November ballot for his newly formed Lincoln Party, he touched off an argument in his old party.
The Republican Party.
Indianapolis Star columnist and former press secretary for the GOP caucus in the Indiana Senate Jacob Stewart published a piece dissecting Ballard’s ballot access triumph. In it, Stewart said Ballard’s triumph showed that it was too easy to gain access to the ballot in Indiana.
Conservative commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz — who supports Republican ideas and candidates with the same predictability as that of the sun rising in the east — took issue with Stewart. While acknowledging that his views might be colored by his friendship with Ballard, Shabazz contended it wasn’t nearly as easy to get on the ballot as Stewart made it sound.
Shabazz also suggested that opening the process a bit might not be such a bad idea.
Like most people not intimately involved with GOP family feuds, I watched this little squabble/debate with amusement.
Stewart’s argument didn’t surprise me.
Like so many other advocates for either established political party, he seems to extol the virtues of uninhibited competition and abhor monopoly in the abstract.
When the discussion becomes more concrete and affects interests he holds dear, though, he’s all in favor of erecting barriers to participation and entrenching competitive advantages.
Shabazz’s thinking is a bit more complicated.
A Black man with a pronounced libertarian streak, he’s touted the GOP as the party less likely to compromise freedom and curtail personal initiative. For an observant fellow, though, he often has seemed willfully oblivious to the rise of authoritarianism in Republican thinking and among the Republican Party faithful over the past two decades.
His discoveries that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith aren’t friends to personal liberty left him in the position of reenacting Claude Rains’ great scene in “Casablanca.” Just as Rains sputtered that he was “shocked, shocked” to discover that there was gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s casino/café, Shabazz seemed stunned to learn that Republicans such as Rokita and Beckwith care no more about constitutional principle than a dog does a fire hydrant.
Nonetheless, this friendly tiff between Stewart and Shabazz was instructive, if for no other reason than that they both missed the larger story.
That Ballard — the last Republican mayor of the state’s largest city — broke with his party was inevitable.
If there is a pattern to American political history, it is that neither party manages overwhelming majorities well. When parties grow too big, they splinter.
Our political parties are not and never have been cohesive units. They are collections of human beings with interests that overlap, more often marriages of convenience than true, deep-seated partnerships.
There’s always tension because of that. We’re seeing that with both Republicans and Democrats at the national level — with their jousting over which concerns or guiding principles should have priority within both parties.
When the party grows too big, the faction that feels its interests have been ignored begins to shift into a position of opposition.
Republicans have controlled Indiana politics for more than a generation. They’ve had supermajorities in both chambers of the Indiana General Assembly for more than a decade.
When the GOP first gained power in Indiana, the wing that focused on business interests ruled the caucus and gave the concerns of the wing that focused on social issues and cultural resentments — the wing that eventually became MAGA — attention only as an afterthought.
Things change.
MAGA now has the upper hand in the Indiana GOP and business-friendly Republicans such as Ballard now are in the minority.
So, some of them have decided to create their own party.
The story here is that the marriage of convenience that helped the Indiana Republican Party achieve long-lasting dominance in and over the Hoosier state now is headed to divorce.
Ballard’s establishment of a political party that will provide a refuge for disaffected Republicans is a product of that divorce, not the cause.
What will come from this split will be fascinating.
If Ballard runs strong, at the very least he’ll deny both established parties a clear majority.
This means that, to gain power, the members of one of these parties will have to try something that seems radical in today’s politics.
They’ll have to talk with and listen to people who don’t agree with them on everything.