[Yes, Virginia, I've been asked to frontpage on the weekends.]
While I dared to dream of a Democratic landslide last year a little earlier than most, I started talking about about realignment just the month before the election. I wrote a post, "What A Dem Landslide Could Mean," in which I argued that political realignments happen when one party wins two consecutive wave elections in the House, It always starts in the House, though the timing of the Presidential election that gets all the glory can vary. In 1896, in fact, the Republicans actually lost a fair number of seats-but nothing compared to what they'd gained in 1892 and 1894.
Yesterday, there were two posts here that touched on the issue of realignment, which made me think it was time to write about it again. Then Chris invited me to start front-paging on weekends, so the opportunity seemed perfect-even if one of the posts was by Chris, and I probably disagree with it more than anything he's posted in months. But that's fine, because Chris's post is clearly part of a thinking-through process, and what I have to contribute here is part of that same process.
The first post is Chris's "It Is Either Iraq Blurring Strategy Or Iraq Realignment" and the second is David Sirota's "1994 Redux: The Consequences of Dems' New NAFTA". While I agree with a lot of the points made in both posts, I think that both contain some errors in perceiving the nature of realignment, what it takes to acheive, and what the possibilities for it are. This post will open up that discussion, and I'll continue it in a couple of follow-up diaries this weekend.
The big picture background for this is the recognition that despite the wave election we won last time, there is still a governing conservative coalition, a somewhat morphed version of the conservative coalition
of Republicans and Southern Democrats that stymied any major liberal policy initiatives between 1938 and 1964. The new conservative coalition has been discussed for a couple of months here at OpenLeft.
Then, beginning on September 10, Chris wrote a series of diaries on what he called "The Iraq Blurring Strategy". At first he was very worried that the Democrats' lack of clarity, courage and commitment-even more than their lack of success-would allow the GOP (especially endgangered moderates in the House and Senate) to blur the issue next year, and escape the voters' wrath:
This strategy would keep the working conservative majority in power not by ending the war, but by making it appear that it wants to end the war.
Now, however, Chris has come to believe that it's just not possible. The voters are too fed up. What they want is not anything that the compromisers can offer:
However, the more I think about it, there simply is no compromise to be had on Iraq at this point within the electorate, which makes me far less worried about the blurring strategy. For the 30%ers who support the working conservative majority, even talk of making withdrawal from Iraq as a "goal" is reprehensible....
For the rest of the country, there is no compromise on Iraq, either. Mere talk of possible future withdrawal is no longer acceptable to the country. Nationwide, the particularly mendacious blurring strategy where bush and Petraeus are selling a forced end to the escalation as a voluntary withdrawal is still viewed as not going far enough by a 50-36% margin nationwide....
So far, I'm with Chris 100%. Where we differ comes toward the end of this next passage:
So, in short, I do not think that there is any compromise to be had on Iraq, and as long as a politician attempting an Iraq blurring strategy is facing a candidate willing to call out bullshit withdrawals for what they are, I don't think the strategy will work. The country simply isn't having it, even if the media and political elite will continue to try and jam it down people's throats. This is extremely dangerous for the conservative governing majority, because when any governing majority is in the minority on the dominant issue of the day, and it is unable to compromise with the majority on that issue, it is removed from power. This is actually why the media and political elite are calling for " bi-partisan" compromise at all costs on Iraq (and other issues), because if they fail to convince the majority of the country that they have developed an acceptable compromise with them, then there will be a realignment that brings an end to the working conservative majority. [Emphasis added.]
What's wrong with this passage is two-fold: First, that getting our of Iraq is not enough. It is merely a reactive move, and does not constittute a positive vision. Second, however important it may be, it does not directly address the core issue of economiccs, and the distribution of wealth and power that not only drives the "war on terror," but drives our entire political process as well. For these two reasons, the 2008 elections could well produce another wave of Democrats ousting Republicans in the House and Senate, even producing an anti-war majority in both bodies, and yet it would still not break the back of the conservative coalition-and it could well even leave us in Iraq, albeit with much smaller "residual forces."
Realignment On Economics?
The reson for this failure can be seen quite clearly in the post by David Sirota, "1994 Redux: The Consequences of Dems' New NAFTA." In it, David reminds us that it was not just the Iraq war that figured in the wave election last year, and is not the only issue on which the voters who elected a Democratic majority are being betrayed. His latest latest weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, "Over The Dead Bodies...Again" is about an expansion of NAFTA to include Peru, Colombia and Panama. In his diary, he says:
in the interest of looking at strategy (this is, after all, the Strategery section of OpenLeft), let's take a moment and go beyond the substance of the new NAFTA as laid out in the column and look at the self-destructively insane politics behind it.
How insane? Consider: :
While the war is the most high profile of the issues, the fight over jobs, wages, the economy and political corruption underlies everything - and is all encapsulated by the trade debate, as it was during NAFTA. And any look at polling trends show that Americans understand that NAFTA sold them out, and want a change. This is why, as I noted in the column, so many Democratic candidates ran explicitly on a promise to end NAFTA-style trade agreements.
That's why Democratic leaders' push for this new NAFTA is not just a shameless reversal of a campaign promise or a wholesale abandonment of the middle class, it is also politically dangerous because it threatens to further depress support for Democrats from Democratic and Independent voters.
Next David cites an analysis by Public Citizen that I think is flawed, as I explained in my comment. It doesn't undermine the main thrust of David's argument, but it does add an important analytical point that matters more for the big picture. Public Citizen argued:
"In 1994, the Democrats lost control of the House after turnout amongst labor households and non-unionized working class families declined. Polling found that upset about NAFTA's passage and specifically about local representative's support of NAFTA moved many traditional Democratic party voters to stay home on election day. The 1994 elections were remarkable in that low turnout -- not swings from Democratic to Republican party support -- decided many of the seats which switched parties on margins of fewer than 1000 votes."
In response, I cited data from the American National Election Survey that contradicted this claim. It could still be true about voters in specific marginal districts, but it is not true of the nation at large-although that could be entirely (rather than just partially) the result of more contested elections boosting turnout overall. Still, the national data also shows the most dramatic swing away from voting for congressional Democrats among people in the middle third of the income strata and above them, rather than those below, who shifted much less dramatically. Here's a table I didn't include in my comment:
Democratic % Vote By Income Percentile 1986-1998
Year
1 0 to 16 percentile
2 17 to 33 percentile
3 34 to 67 percentile
4 68 to 95 percentile
5 96 to 100 percentile
All Voters
1986
78.8
72.2
58.6
53.4
51.9
60.8
1988
73.5
62.4
57.3
55.0
35.1
58.1
1990
75.9
77.0
71.0
56.1
25.6
64.3
1992
70.5
71.0
60.8
54.2
30.8
59.4
1994
67.6
69.9
47.6
34.9
32.0
46.8
1996
64.2
66.7
50.5
37.0
38.3
48.9
1998
56.5
58.0
49.4
42.6
45.2
48.4
It is simply not credible that battleground districts could be dramatically out of sync with such a strong national trend. The 1994 election was a seismic shift in Congressional voting, but it did not create a true ruling majority. The House margin was extremely thin-as the Democrat's House margin is today-and the policies pushed were significantly to the right of the country as a whole (as Newt found out rather rudely, when the country reacted in outrage when he shut down the government). Furthermore, it was a lone wave election, not followed by another. This is not the pattern for a full realignment, but it is a very significant realigning-style shift, and looking at marginal defeats in closely-contested districts only serves to distract from this basic fact.
Looking Back To Perot
Why is this point so important? Simple: It's a bridge to the big picture explanation of what's really going on here regarding the realignment politics-and what's been going on since at least the 1980s.
In the book, Three's A Crowd: The Dynamics of Third Parties, Ross Perot and the Republican Resurgence by Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone, they argue-following realignment theorist Walter Dean Burnham and others-that third parties impact American politics by articulating concerns that aren't being addressed by the political system, and creating a constituency for which the two major parties then contend. While Clinton made an initial bid for Perot's support, it was the GOP, culminating with "Contract for America" which made the more serious and succcessful bid, which is what brought the GOP the margin they needed in 1994. The GOP didn't really deliver on what the Perot constituency wanted, but it took a long time for this to finally sink in. 2004 was the first year that they went majority Democratic. In contrast, the Clinton Administration's push for NAFTA was very high profile, and involved a direct confrontation with Perot-the one time that the American people got to see Al Gore debate with real ferocity and passion.
The authors show a strong correlation between the Perot vote in 1992 and the Congressional Republican vote in 1994. Without a strong showing by Perot in 1992, the Republicans would never have taken over Congress. But what drew poeple to Perot in the first place? Two issues seemed to be of utmost importance: economic nationalism-seen in the opposition to NAFTA, and the strong desire for a balanced budget. But what's behind those issues? I would argue that it's primarily the weakening of the New Deal economic order, and consequent rise in personal economic insecurity, and the failure of the Democrats to vigorously fight to defend it.
It's the hegemony of "free market" ideology, widely embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans, and virtually ubiquitous among the media, that is central to the problems we face. Of course, "free market" is a heavily-loaded ideological term. There is a world of difference between the competetive marketplace-which capitalists have always loathed because it drives down profits-and the oligopoly capitalism that has been the mainstay of those promoting this ideology until very recently, when crony capitalism has emerged as even more central and pernicious.
Thus, in my analysis, the challenge we face is to address a dominant, hegemonic ideology that favors a tiny slice of the rich at the expense of everyone else. This is manifest in the trade deals that David Sirota writes about, it is manifest in the intense establishment resistence to single-payer, despite the obvious enormous savings involved, and it is manifest in the continuing mania for privatization, despite its failure on every front.
We need to discredit the narratives of free trade ideology and replace them with new narratives that tell of real alternatives--that the market is good servant, but a terrible master, and that democracy is more than a beauty pageant front for plutocracy.
This, For Example...
I have much more to say, but I'll leave with a teaser for the next diary. As just mentioned, one thing that's vitally necessary to fight back is the development of counter-narratives, and journalists/author/filmmaker Naomi Klein has a new book out, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, Klein argues that "free market" ideology is so wildly unpopular that it has only been possible to impose it by force, or by taking advantage of natural shocks, such as Katrina or the recent Southeast Asian tsunami. She draws a direct parallel to the development of shock treatment, and its exploration by the CIA as a tool for brainwashing and reprogramming.
Here's a short (just under 7-minute) film synopsizing her argument, co-produced by the director of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón:
The Shock Doctrine Short Film
A Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein, directed by Jonás Cuarón.
(If you think this video should be front-paged, be patient. It will be with my next diary.)
STATE BLOGS
