| We seem to have reached a watershed moment these past two weeks. We've had long enough to process what happened with the Town Hall thuggery, and how it fits into the larger framework of the Democrats' delusional bipartisan fantasy strategy. The GOP has had sufficient time to start building on it, with their McCarthyite attacks on ACORN, and snookering the spineless Dems into going along with them. (Not to mention threatened followup attacks on SEIU). In response, progressives seem to have finally awakened to the fact that we're on our own, and we need to have our own independent strategy that's not subordinate to Obama, and that directly contradicts the Versailles norms by which only Republicans are allowed to be forceful and moralistic--let alone apeshit, batshit, and zombieshit crazy. In light of this, I want to take a look at two broad topics this weekend-perhaps more if I manage to start feeling better. But the top two concerns hare are getting a handle on realignment and the devolution of conservative/GOP lies. Both tie back in part to frontpage diaries earlier this week, but I've got a bunch of other thoughts about them as well-pre-existing intellectual conditions, if you will.
While Chris wrote a diary on Monday, "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment", whose main thrust I agree with --that the Wall Street bailout has been massively counter-productive to the goal of building a solid long-term Democratic majority--I disagree with the underpinings of how he's expressed that argument. First off, not all realignments are as clear cut as 1932-1896 was particularly muddled. Second, even 1932 was not immediately as clear cut as it became over the course of time. Thus, while the precedent of 1932 should have been enough to point the way forward quite clearly (massive gov't spending w/ public sector jobs was key), and that example was foolishly disregarded, that doesn't mean that realignment is kaput.
Inevitable Fact--Uncertain Shape
Quite the contrary. I would argue that realignment is an inevitability that we are living through, even though the shape of what we're realigning to remains very much up for grabs, even though it currently looks very disappointing. I would also argue that because we're living through a time of realignment, different rules apply than during normal periods of political struggle. On the one hand, we're likely to see more upsetting primary challenges ala Donna Edwards and Ned Lamont, and these future challenges have the potential to be even more contagious in terms of spreading to other races. On the other hand, temporary compromises and disappointments that would normally signal the ignominious end of reform efforts may well serve to only encourage another round of effort, which will serve to further energize the forces of a progressive realignment.
Neither of these possibilities-the spread of progressive electoral challenges or the followup of more progressive second-round efforts in areas like financial regulation, stimulus funding, and health care reform-are a given. All that I am saying is that during periods of realignment struggles, they are much more possible than they otherwise would be, and we should not, therefore, simply assume that what will happen in the next few years will inevitably mirror what has happened before. |
| I've been thinking about realignment for a very long time now. In the first phase, I though about it as a living possibility, and dared to think of winning big, beginning with the 2006 elections. I rejected the idea that it was dangerous to think of winning, because then you'd let your guard down. Winning big-the prospect of realignment-could motivate you to work even harder (rather than slacking off) as the prospects of winning seemed more certain. In the second phase, the fact that realignments are generally-speaking open-ended affairs inspires me to keep fighting even harder despite the many disappointments we've already seen. To provide some encouragement for others to join me in that more resilient optimism, I'd like to share some of what's lead me to this sort of thinking.
Party Weakness
It started in earnest back in 2001, when I read Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie by Augustus B. Cochran III, one of the most important political books written in the past 20 years. Cochrane's main thesis is that the flood of southern politicians into leadership roles in the 1990s--Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Armey, DeLay, etc.--was just a superficial reflection of something much deeper, a Southernization of our national politics that was resulting in our national politics coming to resemble the Southern politics of about 1950--a time when the South was utterly incapable of dealing with the challenges it faced, because of its deeply dysfuncitonal politics. Cochrane's argument was guided by V.O. Key's classic, Southern Politics in State and Nation, which presented a variety of state-level models, and was functional, not structural in nature. Cochrane himself used the metaphor of gills and lungs--different structures that fulfill the same function. Both systems, he argued, were incapable of large-scaled practical government action to deal with fundamental challenges of economic transformation--from a traditional agricultural economy to a more mixed industrial economy in the case of the South in 1940s and 1950s, and from modern manufacturing economy to a post-modern post-industrial economy in the nation as a whole 40 to 50 years later.
A key factor in both cases was a weak party system, which lent itself to an entrepreneurial kind of politics, with each candidate, each election standing on its own, putting a premium on money over people, and symbolism and entertainment over substance and information. The one-party system of the Old South, Cocrhane argued, functioned more like a no-party system. With no real organized opposition, there was nothing to compelling to define Democrats positively in terms of policy. So while different states showed different make-do arrangements, none of them produced a truly effective political organization that was capable of and interested in effectively moving their state forward in terms of economic development.
Key to his analogy on the national level was Cochrane's argument, based on the work of Walter Dean Burnham, that we were living in a period of political de-alignment, unlike any other in American history. And Cochrane's integration of Burnham's work into his own is what first really fixed my attention on realignment theory. There was actually a wide range of different ideas and approaches kicked around in the formation of realignmnet theory. Much of it began with very close scrutiny of small geographic areas, and specific concentrated demographic groups.
But my take on the theory derives from a more mature point in its development, more of macro-level take on the long cycles of American history than a micro-focus on individual voters or demographic subgroups. It's this level that Cochrane connects with, as we see how the breakdown in party alignment leads to a situation typified by divided government--with a President of one party and one or both houses of Congress controlled by the other. In every other previous party system, divided government appears in a minority of cases--sometimes very few, sometimes almost half, but never a majority--even though Burnham actually argued, quite plausibly, I believe, that party decomposition had started with the Fourth Party system. Despite the earlier weakening of party structures, only during the period from 1968 onward has divided government been the rule, rather than the exception.
Divided government has produced a lot of benefits for insiders and elites, but for democracy and the American people, not so much.
Unified government tends to produce accountability, however imperfectly. Thus, the Republicans controlled both Congress and the presidency in the 1920s. As things appeared to go well, they were re-elected to continue governing. When things went horribly wrong with the Great Depression, they were voted out, and the Democrats were given a chance. But from 1968 onward, it was generally much more difficult to know who to credit and who to blame, Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford or the Democratic Congress (1969-1976)? Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, or the (at least parially) Democtatic Congress (1981-1992)? Democratic President Bill Clinton, or the Republican Congress (1995-2000)? Only two Presidents--Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, spent most of their time in office with same-party control of both house of Congress. And neither of them ended up being seen as a strong president. Unlike earlier eras, the strongest presidential figures of this time period--Nixon, Reagan and Clinon--were all defined by how they stood apart from or against a Congress controlled by the other party.
Looking Forward--Analytically and Politically
It's my position analytically that that era is almost certainly behind us. What's far less certain is what is before us. Part of what has defined party systems is the ways in which parties are organized--how messages are disseminated, how power is wielded, how loyalty is kept--and how elections are conducted. Another part is the nature of the political issues confronting the political system, including outside forces as well as domestic dynamics. Voting blocks have always had a profound foundation in cultural identity, but how these identity groups fit together into core voting blocks and swing demographics can shift significantly over time. Such shifts tend to be sharpest around times of realignment, but they were generally more gradual during the Sixth Party System, characterized as it was by dealignment. Whatever happens with demographic voting blocks, it seems clear that new ways of political organizing will continue to emerge, making this period less and less like the Sixth Party period, along with the emergence of new issues, such as climate change, and other energy and environmental concerns--such as water. The old order simply no longer seems tenable, whatever is to come.
And I would argue that-quite contrary to the conventional wisdom of Versailles, a coherent progressive agenda will not only be more practically effective in solving realworld problems, it will potentially form the foundations of an enduring political coalition as well.
My position politically is that only some form of social democracy can equip us with the policy tools needed to meet the coming challenges of global warming, resource depletion, rising expectations for equitable opportunity, and cultural polarization--all on a global scale. Not only that, however. I believe that only such a strong, coherent progressive vision can sufficiently unify Democrats as a party in order to assure that we return to something akin to the political dominance we experienced during the Fift Party System. If the Democrats take this path, they should win at least 6 of the next 9 or 10 presidential elections, and control at least 70 percent of the congresses in both houses. If not--if the Democrats take the narrowly technocratic neo-liberal parth, currently represented by Barack Obama--the Democrats and Republicans are more likely to see-saw back and forth, as neither will prove able to solve the big problems, or cement an enduring majority, unless the Republicans take over, as reality-based political considerations fade from view, and our country spirals into irreversible decline.
The bottom line for me is that Burnham is fundamentally correct: the almost tribal, machine-driven mass politics of the Third Party System have been shattered since then. The Democrats overcame this shattering effect during the Fifth Party System by the sheer pragmatic power and success of their policies. But conservatives managed to shatter the New Deal Coalition, based first on racial resentment, and then on building a permanent authoritarian movement that feed on demonization, and projection of its own failures onto the liberal and outcast group "others".
The Obamaite/neo-liberal response cannot overcome the historical party-shattering trend that Burnham first described at the very beginning of the Sixth Party System. New communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter are most likely to only be more fragmenting in their effects, unless joined to a broader vision of social justice and shared progress and prosperity. Neo-liberalism, with its vast gadget-like array of purported policy fixes (more like a junkies' than an engineers') simply lacks the sort of countervailing power to produce a long-term, cohesive, shared political identity, the foundation of a governing coalition with enough long-term constancy to solve the deep problems that we face. |
