There is a lot of talk right now about the diminishing prominence and even the death of the Republican Party in America. A cluttered and perplexed leadership is fighting over how best to convey its image to the public while looking ahead to the 2012 election and foregoing the 2010 midterms. Meanwhile, people like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin champion the national presence of a once proud political movement that is losing its direction and for the first time not finding answers as it looks back to the Reagan legacy one time too many.

Two questions are being overlooked in the discussion of this popular topic: First, why is this happening, and second, if the speculation is accurate, where does that leave us? The first question is often given the over-simplified if not entirely incorrect answer of a single name: George Walker Bush. The second question is another matter altogether.

We are moving toward a new beginning in American politics, a beginning defined not by the philosophy or nature of our political positions but rather one rooted in our perceptions of what methods work best as a practical matter. In an ideal world we might look at this phenomenon as representative of the progress we all hope to see our political system make, but as history has shown us time and again this is in fact not an ideal world.

A political writer for Rolling Stone who has also covered sports named Matt Taibbi appeared this week on a podcast with ESPN columnist Bill Simmons and ended up in a discussion about how modern political affiliation resembles sports fanaticism. (link) Taibbi suggests that more and more, political parties are like sports teams. That the reactions we have are the same – you pick up a blue shirt or a red shirt at a young age and you cheer for your team. If your team supports a particular issue or platform, being a supporter of your team means that you support the issue they do unless you have a compelling reason not to.

His comments are a moving critique of modern political affiliation. If you support a particular football team, he notes, such as the Patriots, you are obviously going to have a more favorable opinion of Bill Belichick than a Jets fan. The same might be said of the Republican who appreciates Ann Coulter versus the Democrat who finds her reprehensible.

This idea is not entirely new, nor is it surprising. Scientific studies of the brain conducted in recent years have already shown that when people who describe themselves as politically committed are confronted with political positions, they respond with the emotional part of their brains, and less reasoning occurs than might in a “dispassionate” or “objective” observer. (link) They are, in fact, just cheering on their side. One can imagine that this is not dissimilar from the reasoning which might occur while a fan decked in silver and white is cheering for the Patriots – and more importantly, against their opponents.

Like the question of what sports team to root for, the question of which politicians one supports may have more to do with when and where you grew up than it does with your internal political objectives and beliefs. Gallup recently conducted a poll measuring partisan gap by age which indicates the fluctuating disparity between Republicans and Democrats.

FiveThirtyEight writer Nate Silver analyzed these statistics through a fascinating lens, overlaying them with a graph of who was president when voters of a particular age group reached adulthood, commonly and legally regarded in the United States as the age of 18. (Full Article, Picture)

Properly considered, the results are staggeringly fascinating and also fairly predictable: the poll suggests that people who turn 18 during the tenure of a popular president tend to favor the political party of that president over the course of their entire lives. Similarly, people who turn 18 during the tenure of an unpopular president usually favor the opposition party for much of their lives. If true this trend is not typically striking, as an average President, being neither very popular nor unpopular, will have a huge effect on the generation who turns 18 during his term. However, in the wake of a wildly unpopular Republican president in Bush and an initially popular Democratic president in Obama, the effect on the current generation of young Americans could be dramatic.

The generation in question is one that has grown up living in a world without failure, wherein many are rewarded simply for trying and have developed unreasonably high expectations about the environment in which they live. That the comfort level of this environment stands in stark contrast with the living conditions of most of the world population makes little difference.

At a time when our economy if in recession and much of the discourse and rhetoric filling the airwaves is directed at finding solution to our fiscal problems, will this generation, the vast majority of whom have no advanced training in economics, finance, or politics, be able to recognize which methods are most likely to produce successful solutions and which are not? Or to discern which methods are responsible if or when we as a society manage to pull ourselves out of the hole? Is it possible that instead, we will find ourselves simply cheering on whatever our side did to help out?

If the data supported by Mr. Silver is consistent in its predictive ability, we are indeed headed for a period in which the Republican Party is vastly diminished in popularity. More and more people are predicting the end of the current two-party system or the rise of a possible third party. Even former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has suggested that we may see the emergence of a major Third Party as soon as the 2012 presidential elections. Every piece of data we have examined points to this being a plausible scenario, and perhaps even a very likely one, if not necessarily as soon as 2012.

As we go into the future of American political discourse, we must ask difficult questions of ourselves if we are to achieve the practical political and economic progress that we crave. We must be able to identify the good idea, wherever it originates. And we must be able to recognize whether we are thinking for ourselves, or whether we are merely cheering on our respective sides.

This post was submitted by John Sandell.