‘A Bustle in Your Hedgerow’: Two Parties Confront Ideological Insurgencies, Part One

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now

It’s just a spring clean for the May queen

Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run

There’s still time to change the road you’re on.

– Led Zeppelin

Well, so hope two political parties, both of which, notwithstanding the sage advice of Page and Plant, are indeed alarmed by extremist insurgencies bustling their hedgerows from different ends of the ideological spectrum and threatening to radically alter their existence and agendas. (Admittedly, there are people of yet another political party doing the same, though that is more a Reconquista. But that is for another day…)

One is a center-left party in the United States; the other is a center-right party in Germany.

Both face an existential crisis from their extreme ideological flanks, and both have undertaken a strategy of co-option to survive this challenge.

One has chosen the path of co-option. One has chosen the path of confrontation.

Which, if either, will stave off the extinction of their party as presently constituted?

The Republican establishment’s separate case studies over the years in confronting grassroots ideological insurgents with wildly varying degrees of success may well have provided an impetus for America’s Democrat Party’s strategy of co-option with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).