How Parties Swallow Insurgents

by Patrick Appel

Over the weekend, Ambidner wrote that national political parties are "withered." Hans Noel counters:

[T]his parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, it extrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such cases happen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders are incapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all the evidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an “intra-party squabble” really is. Today’s outsider is tomorrow’s insider.

Bernstein expands on those points.