(Given the current state of angst over the direction of the Democratic Party, I think it's great that John is doing this series to give us some historical perspective, and the chance to reason together over what it all means. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
(Over the last many months I've been studying the history of the Democrats and the American Party system, and will be publishing the results piece by piece here. I am not coordinating these pieces with the news of the day, and you shouldn't jump too quickly to conclusions about what my point really is. My source today is Horace Samuel Merrill, Bourbon Democracy of the Middle West, 1865--1896, Washington, 1953.)
Between the end of the Civil War and the New Deal the two parties were, by our standards, about equally conservative; on racial questions the Democrats were the more conservative. Between the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, many Democrats were still very conservative -- not only on race, and not only Southern Democrats. (The Democrats' 1928 Presidential candidate, Al Smith of New York, supported the Republican candidate in 1936.) The conservative Democrats have always been there, and while the two parties are more polarized today than they have been in a long time, if ever, that's mostly because the Republicans have driven out all of their liberals and moderates (and many of their sane conservatives) -- not because the Democratic Party as a whole (as opposed to some of its members) is more liberal.
Merrill's book tells the story of the Midwestern branch of the "Bourbon Democrats", the dominant Democratic faction during the three decades following the Civil War. "Bourbon Democrats" may sound like fun, but they were nothing but a coterie of wealthy, corrupt wheeler-dealers whose only interests were feathering their own nests and keeping small farmers and labor out of power. The Bourbons did not need to win, and seldom did; they only needed to keep control of the party.
Grover Cleveland, the only Democratic President in the 47 years between Appomattox and the election of Woodrow Wilson (and one of the most anti-labor Presidents of all), was a model Bourbon on policy questions, though he differed from the rest in being less corrupt and was nominated for that reason.
The notion that history moves in cycles, or waves is an ancient one. A classic example is the Hindu cosmology of cyclical yugas, starting with the Satya Yuga, and descending through the Trata Yuga, and the Dvapara Yuga., each one more degraded and less refined, until one comes to the Kali Yuga, which, of course, is where we find ourselves today. The ancient Greeks had a similarly dismal view, as seen in Hesiod's Works and Days, which laid a cosmology of five successive, and descenting Ages of Man, each of which ends in destruction.
Modern writers have taken both a more hopeful and a more empirically-grounded approach. The historian Arnold J. Toynbee was a giant in this enterprise--in sharp contrast to Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West built on an entire century of declinist thought among European conservatives and reactionaries, as surveyed in Arthur Herman's flawed, but still somewhat useful guide, The Idea of Decline in Western History . [See Amazon.com review for cautionary advice.]
As Wikipedia notes, Toynbee was neither a determinist, a pemisimist, or a conservative:
With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when "creative minorities" devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. When it fails to respond to a challenge, it enters its period of decline. Toynbee argued that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
Toynbee's spirit is one I share, and in this diary set I want to examine the coinciding impact of two waves that are part of longterm cycles, as well as a third one indicative of global transformation that's been under way for several decades now These three waves all converge on this November's election, and in doing so, they confront a wall-the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers that have maintained a recklessly destructive regime in power, despite its fundamental attacks on principles dating back at least as far as 1215 (habeas corpus, from the Magna Charta).
In ascending order of scope, there three waves are:
The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
My concern here is two-fold: first to lay out these frameworks and explain how they relate to one another, and second to articulate a political argument based on them. The two tasks will not necessarily fall into neat separate categories, but it should be possible for readers to readily grasp the analytical framework, and still critically question my political argument in meaningful ways that incorporate, rather than devaluing or rejecting these frameworks which are the product of considerable intellectual work far beyond my own individual labors.
STATE BLOGS
