What Bernie Sanders' gun control plan reveals about the power of political parties

Bernie Sanders, as you may know, is from the fine state of Vermont. Among Vermont's many notable features, in addition to green mountains, muddy roads, and an astonishing lack of non-white people, is an active hunting culture. So it is that even the most liberal Vermont politicians tend to be indulgent of guns. This got Howard Dean into some trouble in 2004 when people realized that the newly crowned champion of young liberal Democrats had for years gotten "A" ratings from the National Rifle Association — and in the wake of yet another mass shooting, it could become a 2016 problem for Sanders.

It's a problem he's moving quickly to address. Sanders has a mixed history on guns — voting for some gun control measures and against others (there's a comprehensive roundup of his record here). Most notably, he voted against the Brady Act in 1993, and in 2005 supported a bill that gave gun manufacturers immunity from lawsuits holding them liable for what people do with their products. But now he's about to put out a plan to address gun violence, which will lean heavily on measures that are supported by liberals and opposed by conservatives.

So does this tell us that Bernie Sanders is a flip-flopping flip-flopper who voters can't trust, just like every other politician? No, it doesn't. What it tells us is that while parties may be less meaningful as institutions than they have been in decades (and perhaps ever), as an ideological force, parties wield tremendous power.

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The story of Sanders and gun control is about the transition from state to national politics, and about how presidential primaries create and enforce consensus on everyone, even those who, like Sanders, start out on one end of the intra-party ideological spectrum. To a striking degree, the primary process forces every candidate to be pretty much like every other candidate in his or her party. And that isn't a bad thing.

That isn't to say presidential hopefuls can't disagree with the party's consensus at all, just that the differences have to be relatively small and confined to issues where there are multiple positions the average primary voter might find acceptable. For instance, Bernie Sanders can advocate free tuition for all public universities, while Hillary Clinton won't go quite that far. But the basic principle — that everyone should be able to go to college regardless of whether they can afford it — is one they share, even if Sanders is willing to endorse a more active government response to achieve that goal.

On certain issues, however — one of which is guns — there is only one acceptable position for anyone in the party to have if they want to represent that party. There was a time in which a pro-choice Republican or a pro-life Democrat could at least contemplate running for president, but that time is passed (and there are precious few of either left). The gun issue has moved from the periphery to the center, particularly in the GOP; today being against any gun control legislation is as important to a Republican as advocating low taxes and small government. A couple of years ago you could be a Republican and advocate comprehensive immigration reform, like Marco Rubio did; today you'd have to disavow that and take a "Secure the borders first!" position, as Rubio has. (He's following in the footsteps of John McCain, who did exactly the same thing when he ran for president in 2008.)

These kinds of shifts are sometimes produced by a genuine change of heart, but more often the politicians either realize that their party has shifted and move in response (as Democrats have on same-sex marriage), or realize they have presidential ambitions and they'd better get in line if they want to have a chance to win the nomination.

When we see them do that, we often call them flip-floppers and assume not just that they have revealed a weakness of character, but that this weakness would make them a worse president. In truth though, a candidate who has flipped toward his party's consensus isn't going to flip back.

Take Mitt Romney. He was the kind of moderate Republican he had to be to get elected in liberal Massachusetts. But when he ran for president, he became as staunch a conservative as anyone else. You can decide that his wholesale reinvention was cynical, but if he had become president, would he have said, "Guess what, I'm a liberal after all! Eat it, suckers!"? Not on your life. He would have continued to represent his party.

And it's polarization that keeps it that way. Prior to the 1960s, there were plenty of liberal northern Republicans and conservative southern Democrats, but the civil rights struggles sent the latter into the waiting arms of the GOP, while the former began to die off or become Democrats. And today, each party represents a clear, contrasting set of beliefs. Even inattentive voters at least have a chance of figuring out what the candidates stand for, without concern that the next president will turn out to be nothing like what they said they'd be.

If nothing else, it ensures that when the next president gets elected, we know exactly what we'll get.