We see the same thing happen to British Conservatives in the wake of their 1906 defeat and to the German DNVP in the wake of their 1928 defeat. Perhaps one can pose a theory that it is a sign of political tranquility for parties to respond to defeat by moderating to win back lost voters, and a sign of political crisis for parties to respond to defeat by radicalizing. But Zimblatt does not research this topic and neither have I.
An alternate theory is that it is normal and expected for a political party to respond to defeat by doubling down. After all, defeat means the loss of moderate voters, so only the more ideological voters remain. This theory would also hold that a party with a very narrow majority will be more ideological and less inclined to compromise than one with a broader majority. Zimblatt offers a British example. The Liberals lost their majority after the 1910 election and were able to hold onto power only by forming an alliance with the Irish Party. In order to do so, the Liberals had to make excessive concessions to the Irish, promising home rule to all of Ireland, very much against the wishes of the Protestants in the North. With a larger majority, the Liberals might have made the less controversial offer of home rule that excluded the North.
We see the same phenomenon with the Republican Party in the U.S. A classic example would be the first election of GW Bush. News media suggested that, since he had such a narrow victory (having lost the popular vote and holding a razor-thin margin in Congress), he should govern as a moderate. But what they failed to take into account was that with such a narrow margin, the Republicans could not afford even a small number of defections and therefore were in no position to moderate or compromise. Likewise, the narrower the Republican majority today, the more it has been dependent on the dogmatic Freedom Caucus, and the more ideologues have a veto.*
Finally, there is a deeply disturbing aspect of Zimblatt's theory of the value of conservative parties. He argues that the key to a successful democratic transition is the creation of a strong conservative party, representing the interests of the pre-democratic ruling elite, that can find appeals cutting across class lines to the broader public and be competitive in elections. These appeals tend to be appeals to social conservatism, to traditional values, and to national greatness.
But there can be darker things at work, too. The authors focus on electoral democracy (majority rule), rather than the distinction between electoral democracy and liberal democracy, i.e., majority rule with protection for the rights of the minority. And the minority here means not just the losers of the last election, but permanent minorities of excluded identity groups.
Simply put, one form of cross-class appeal the old conservative party can find is in scapegoating some minority identity group.** As I understand it, that is what the landed aristocracy ultimately did in the post-Reconstruction U.S. South. And there are traces of that in the examples Ziblatt gives in Britain and Germany.
In Britain, one of the cross-class appeals the Conservatives found was in matters of religion. Most of the Church of England's old privileges were gone by then, but Conservatives did find an identity appeal to Church of England members while the Liberals appealed to dissenters. I don't think appeals to a common identity are necessarily dangerous -- so long as they don't include denying rights to outsiders. And when Conservatives emphasized denying home rule to Ireland -- well, one can see a definite danger there. The danger was rather more obvious in Germany. All attempts by the German Conservatives (pre-WWI) or DNVK (post WWI) to expand their appeal seemed to mean cutting a deal with anti-Semites and adopting some measure of anti-Semitism that party leaders disliked but could not get rid of.
So this may be the answer to the defect in Zimblatt's theory that I pointed out before. A successful conservative party, representing the interest of the pre-democratic ruling elite has to find some sort of cross-class appeal to a broader public. This cross-class appeal may lie in a shared identity with a large section of the public. But ties of shared identity can easily descend into bigotry. Perhaps what Zimblatt is arguing is that the delicate task of a democratic conservative party is to hold its members together in a sense of common identity while holding the outright bigots in check.
Thus the British Conservative were able to appeal to a sense of solidarity with Irish Protestants and their legitimate fear of their fate in a Catholic Ireland, but without letting those fears run riot and define the party. A weaker party might have allowed the Irish Protestant fears to take over the party and turn it into an anti-Irish, anti-Catholic band of bigots. And he may be arguing that a strong German Conservative Party might have made itself over into a rural party, championing the traditional culture and religion of the German countryside, low land taxes, pro-agriculture trade policy and agricultural improvements without yielding too much to anti-Semites. Like all counter-factuals, we will never know.
Zimblatt has written another book entitled How Democracies Die that addresses contemporary failures of democracy, and the issue of identity in US politics. I have begun but not finished it. I intend to review it here at a later date.
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*This has served to block compromise on ordinary legislation. On the other had, for must-pass items such as passing some sort of budget or raising the debt ceiling, it has forced non-Freedom Caucus Republicans to make an alliance with Democrats and therefore served to moderate.
**The sources I link offer another alternative as well. The ruling elite can also form an alliance with minority identity groups and offer them protection from the majority, thereby forming a liberal autocracy. That has frequently been done.
***Japan may be a rare example of a country without significant identity splits.
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