Quote:
Originally Posted by #-3
The Canadian examples are pretty much the definition of splinter parties dragging the main party to the extremes.
A brief history of the two parties;
The Reform party was a federal splinter party that ran against the traditional Progressive Conservatives. They actually won more seats then the traditional party forming official opposition, but the Liberals still won elections amid some typical liberal scandals, so the parties decided to merge into the Alliance with I'm going to say was 2/3 of the way right between the PCs & The Reforms. The Alliance did terrible electorally and rebranded itself The Conservative Party which tacked back to the left a bit about half way between the Reforms and the old PCs (dropping progressive from their title).
The Wild Rose ran against the provincial progressive conservative party, from a position to the right of the median republican (which is saying something, because in the 90s US democrats were to the right of Canadian PCs), again the PCs won government and the WR won official opposition twice. Then there was a backlash election to have two conservative parties running the government, and our unionist New Democrat Party won a governing majority. While neither of Conservatives parties were in power they merged into the United Conservative Party and won a supermajority in the next election. I would say about 75 - 90 % of the way to the WR. They are now basically US republicans, which in Canada I would define as right wing extremists and there is no credible conservative movement in Alberta right now, because the splinter party dragged them so far to the right.
With Alberta being the heartland of the Canadian conservative movement, the UPC party has actually dragged the slightly more moderate federal conservative party to the right, who is doing well with some of the divisive rhetoric the republicans are using in Canadas version of the rust belt (suburban Ontario). So the provincial splinter party had even managed to drag the federal party to the right.
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We've had sort of a similar phenomenon in Finland, with a new right wing anti-immigrant conservative party Perussuomalaiset exploding into one of the largest parties in the country, and they clearly moved the Overton window in Finnish politics quite a bit to a more conservative-right position. (Fiscally they're kind of right wing, but mostly just uninterested, so in that sense the change hasn't been significant.)
That said, the GOP as is really can't move much more right without outright digging out the swastikas. I think a party split
right now would leave the rest of the GOP in a much more moderate position. History doesn't always repeat itself.
It also seems to me that the attack on Capitol has sent some shockwaves through the right, with a lot of people suddenly realizing they have to differentiate themselves from the actual extremists and sideline the fascists from positions of power, if not for any other reason than to prevent their own ideas to be completely drowned out among the waves of extremism.
The attack on Capitol
could even mark somewhat of a turning tide globally. For example it seems to me that the Finnish media has suddenly realized they need to be a lot more critical of our local right wing populists, and our other major right wing party has suddenly been a lot less eager to side with Perussuomalaiset. (Both are currently in the opposition.)
(I think this is a temporary situation though, my personal expectation is that things have to get a lot worse before they start getting better.)