Forgive me if a diary of charts seems dry--the purpose behind it is anything but. I think of it in terms of things I talked about or alluded to in Dollhouse Lessons: Echoing America, like Echo's learning to read, finding ways to remind herself, and looking for ways to wake others up. The purpose is to clear our heads of ghosts and demons that scare us off from seizing the historical opportunities before us. Versailles is blinded by its own gossip and selective short-term memory. Our answer should rely on reality-based, long-term vision--a combination of deep compassion, common sense, rigorous analysis and bold imagination. To accurately see ourselves in history is key to accurately seeing how we can break the narrow bonds of short-term rear-view thinking. That is the purpose of this diary. We need to wake up.
Three weekends ago, I wrote a diary, "Reagan Did NOT Win A Realigning Election In 1980". I wanted to show conclusively that the 1980 election didn't look anything like the commonly-recognized realigning elections, such as 1932 and 1896. In addition to the macro-political event of a political party disintegrating (the Federalists in the 1820s, the Whigs in the 1850s), I identified two metrics to identify a realigning election--one for the House, the other for the Presidency. (The Senate was not directly elected for more than half our history, so it's not suitable to use.) The idea of both was simple: a realignment ought to show a significant before/after shift--and it ought to show up in both metrics. If there is no such shift, then there is no realignment. (Unless, of course, the complete collapse of one party makes use of the metric superfluous and/or problematic.) The comparisons of 1980 to 1896 showed quite clearly what this shift looked like in the House (1896), and what its absence looked like (1980):
Of course, simply presenting these in isolation raises the question of how significant the 11+ point shift in House balance for 1896 really is, historically speaking. And the same can also be said about my presidential metric. This was actually a rather atypical election, since the GOP didn't pick up seats that year--it lost a good number in a counter-swing election after winning two consecutive wave elections. While realigning electios generally involved two consecutive wave elections paired with a decisive party-changing Presidential election, this is the only time that the Presidential election came after both wave elections. And yet, a strong GOP majority remained even after this anomalous House election.
For me, this leads toward shifting focus to the longer patterns of political ebb and flow, a perspective from which the nature of specific biennial and quadrennial elections is more easily understood in comparison to others. Instead of cherry-picking whatever particular fact pops out of us to prove or disprove a favored or disfavored argument, we look to find a consistent guide for analyzing all in a common framework.
is Countdown's Free Clinic partnership events shaping up. I honestly don't know if they can pull this off fast enough to make a difference in the short term, soon enough to win the battle in this go-round. But this is the sort of thing we need to start seeing in terms of changing the whole zeitgeist. The contrast between these mass events of public healing and the jackassery of the tea-partiers should be particularly striking.
It took a couple of years of this sort of thing to build up the momentum for the really big stuff during the New Deal, so I think that if we focus on building strength, and pulling off events like this, our strength will only increase in the years ahead. Maybe not the Conservadem's, but they're really not my concern. And since Obama loves them so much, he's not my concern, either. He will come to us when there's nowhere else to go.
I want to be clear, I'm not giving up on us getting a decent bill this year. But I think that if we take a longer view--and don't buy the Versailles CW that it's got to be now or never--then we'll be much better prepared to hang tough in the short run, and not fold. And that's what's needed to win.
Don't get me wrong--I want health care reform to pass this year. But I want us to be both as clear and strong as we possibly can be. And I want to draw a very clear distinction between the logic of Versailles and the Democratic leadership, and the logic of progressive Democrats out in the wilds of America.
Inside Versailles, there can be no doubt--if the Democrats don't pass health care now, it will be dead for another decade or more--and so will the Democrats. There can be no doubt about this, just as there could be no doubt that Iraq had WMDs, and that Bush's election in 2004 signaled the consolidation of a permanent GOP governing majority.
In other words, it's pure and utter crap. Maybe it will happen. Maybe it won't. Nobody knows for sure. But we do know what follows from assuming that it's true: a wholly uncalled-for degree of Democratic paralysis. In virtually all other walks of life, what's more American than saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"?
But when it comes to health care reform, we're supposed to stand and salute the proposition, "Take anything you can get--brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hot dog--and call it a victory, no matter what." Could there possigbly be a more cowardly, unimaginative, downright un-American fore-ordained loserattitude than that?
Political Poison: None For Me, Thanks...
Furthermore, if we recognize the obvious--that an individual mandate forcing people to buy private crapolla insurance is pure political poison, then how can we not be willing to see health care "reform" die this year, rather than pass such a suicidal bill into law?
As Digby wrote, regarding individual mandates, and potential Constitutional challenges:
Reform advocates will undoubtedly look back on all this and wonder if the politics of single payer would have actually been easier. In this particular respect, it almost certainly would have been. There's no doubt that the federal government has the power to tax for certain benefits or compel payments to outside parties for certain optional privileges (like driving.) But whether it has the power to compel all citizens to pay money to particular private interests is an unknown. Who knows what the Roberts Court will decide on that?
Of course, if a public option is in place it's a different argument altogether, isn't it?
Sigh! None of this would have happened if only we'd had a constitutional lawyer as President!
I don't think that it needs to come to this. In fact, I think that being willing to let health care reform die may well be the key to ensuring that it doesn't. "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." -- So wrote Goethe, and he was absolutely right. The converse of that is, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." And that's become the Democrat's de factor operating script ever since 1994.
After 14 years of operating out of fear of failure, isn't it time we started operating out of hope of success?
At the very least, can't we just stop trying to out-stupid the Republicans? Because in that game, even when you win, you lose.
The problem of tossing around the notion of Reagan winning a realigning election popped up again this week in the discussion thread of Chris's Monday diary, "Wall Street Bailout Thwarting Democratic Realignment", and so I decided it was time to take another solid whack at it, something to bookmark, perhaps. Which is why I'm going to give you some picture first, and then explain what they mean.
First, here's Reagan's election in 1980, along with averages of Democratic House share for 6 elections before that, and six elections from 1980 on. You will note that there is very little difference between the averages.
Next, here's the same thing, with Nixon's election in 1968--the de-aligning election that kicked off the Sixth Party System, the only party system in which divided government is the rule, not the exception. You will note that again there is very little difference between the averages:
Finally, here's an example of what a true realigning election looks like--in fact, the weakest example of one using this particular tool. The difference between averages is just over eleven points (for other realigning elections it's roughly 20-25 points):
That's step one in the demonstration to be explained below, showing quite clearly that Reagan did not win a realigning election.
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 always expressed a certain bewilderment about Barack Obama. The things he does just don't make sense if you look at them at all carefully. Or rather, they do make sense--but only if you make rather bizarre assumptions. For example, assume on the one hand that (A) he actually does understand the basics of American political history, he knows that no major, transformational policy ever came from bipartisanship, he understands that he just won a realigning election, (B) he's spent years working within the Democratic Party, and (C) that he wants to utterly destroy the Democratic Party's chance for political dominance over the next 40 years. If you accept those three premises, then the following makes perfect sense.
It was laid out exquisitely by Dday at Hullabaloo on Friday, "The Costs Of Reductive Thinking". In it, he quoted Barack Obama from the Organizing for America strategy session on health care saying:
"So for about the same cost per year as we've been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal, just to give you a sense of perspective."
And himself responding:
I don't know if I was the only one, but my immediate reaction was, "Um, well, why don't you do something about that?" I mean, sure, the costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq and a war headed toward quagmire in Afghanistan could have paid for the front end of health care reform. But they're both still raging, at a time when we have few national security interests in those regions, and certainly nothing that could not be handled with a diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence approach rather than a military one.
So if the cost of the wars from 2003-2009 could pay for health care, the future costs from 2009-2019 could go a pretty long way in their own right.
It's particularly pernicious to find the President making this argument, when as commander-in-chief he has the ability to draw down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wants to make that kind of comparison, he ought to back it up.
Democrats currently enjoy a trifecta controlling the US House, Senate, and White House. Trifectas are more common than one might think.
32 Presidents have had a trifecta, 73% of the total. The 24 periods total 135 years or 61% of US history. Only six trifectas lasted at least 8 years and only three Presidents served at least 8 full years with a trifecta (Jefferson, Madison, FDR). The last trifecta to last 8 years was during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations 40 years ago. Although the average trifecta lasted 5.6 years the median is 2 years. The granddaddy of them all was the 22 year reign from 1801-23 ended not by an opposition party but a plethora of factions (see election of 1824).
This moved me to take out my table of party systems again, just one week after its last appearance, because I think it has something to teach us that these sort of aggregate statistics can't. Here's the table:
Partisan Balance In US History
Through Six Party Systems
Control of Presidency, House & Senate
Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1
Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7
Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8
Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3
Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4
Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75
Summarizing just the figures from above:
First Party System: Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1 Second Party System: Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7 Third Party System: Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8 Fourth Party System: Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3 Fifth Party System: Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4 Sixth Party System: Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75
I've written a lot about partisan realignments over the past several years. Above all, I've repeatedly pushed the idea that they happen with surprising regularity, like this:
Partisan Balance In US History
Through Six Party Systems
Control of Presidency, House & Senate
Dem-Reps: 12 / Feds: 2 / Split: 1
Dem-Reps: 9 / Whigs: 1 / Split: 7
Dems: 1 / Reps: 9 / Split: 8
Dems 3 / Reps: 12 / Split: 3
Dems: 13 / Reps: 1 / Split: 4
Dems: 3 / Reps 2.25 / Split: 13.75
While the realignment of 1932 is the most archetypal and among the most consequential, it can be quite misleading to think of it as the model. Indeed, there were two realignments in which one of the parties was totally destroyed, and other was radically transformed. In view of how little "change we can believe in" is actually happening post-2008, and how utterly blob-like the GOP has become, perhaps it's worth considering the possible lessons we might draw from the realignments of 1828 and 1860, both of which revolved around slow-moving scenarios in which both major parties failed in fundamental ways, two of them so profoundly that they ceased to exist.
The week before last (week of June 15), TPMCafe hosted a book club discussion of Eric Bohlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, which was as much a forward-looking discussion of the future of blogging as it was a backwards-looking discussion of the Eric's book and the history it covers. One reason for this was that everyone pretty much agreed-Eric got it where earlier authors did not. So discussions of the past linked more naturally to forward-looking speculation than to criticism of Eric's narrative.
That forward-looking discussion links quite naturally, I think, with my earlier diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", and where I want to go next-into a deeper look at what it will take to change the dynamic, not just of Congress, but of American politics more generally. An added factor is the perspective I articulated in my series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future, dealing with the confluence of macro-historical forces in our time, which I'll briefly recapitulate below.
But before doing that, I just want to note that Eric's first post, "The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere", kicks off by mentioning Chris as the very first blogger he talks about:
In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."
There's more about Chris in that diary, so if nothing else, you should read it for that. But there's actually a lot more, with folks like Amanda Marcotte, Armando Llorens, Greg Mitchell and Duncan Black weighing in. I want to cite a few of the things they said, before adding my two cents about how the blogosphere--along with the rest of the online new media--may be able to help do even more than any of the contributors to that discussion have imagined. This is not, I hope, because of an over-inflated sense of the blogosphere's importance, but rather, because of a larger sense of its place within a broader inter-active, flat-hierarchy media environment and how that plays into some much, much bigger historical forces at work....
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP....
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base....
The chart below (which adds a fourth column to the one released by Gallup) shows a loss of at least one in five GOP supporters among eight of the nine groups where the GOP lost eight or more percent support among the population at large. For example, the nine percent loss among moderates in general, from 37% to 28%, translated into a loss of 24% of GOP moderates--just shy of one in five. Combined with a 47% loss of GOP liberals and a 0% loss of GOP conservatives, this is yet another indication that the GOP is becoming more extreme as it shrinks
The logic here seemed incredibly obvious and straight-forward to me: If GOP losses were minimal among their core conservative demographics, and heavy elsewhere, then the party as a whole was becoming more extreme, and hence more unreachable via bi-partisan gestures, directly contrary to the basic logic behind Obama's repeated stress of a commitment to bi-partisan "pragmatism": if the pragmatists are fleeing the GOP in droves, then who's there left to be bi-partisanly pragmatic with?
The utter lack of any serious policy proposals from the GOP since Obama came to office would only seem to underscore the obviousness of the point I was making. But instead, I got a range of counter-arguments, plus several folks who claimed to not understand what I was saying. Obviously, it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was. Hence, this diary.
Frequent church-goers were the only demographic subgroup to show no decline in GOP allegiance from 2001 to 2009, according to a new survey brief from Gallup. Declines among conservatives and those 65 and older were also minimal--the only bright spots reported for the GOP:
Democrats gained most from further consolidating support in their strongest demographic groups, rather than winning over Republican core groups, a shift that goes contrary to President Obama's repeated overtures to the GOP base:
Aside from education, for which the parties were basically at even strength in 2001, the Republicans' losses tend to be greater among groups that were not strong GOP supporters to begin with. These include self-identified liberals and moderates, church non-attenders, and lower-income and young adults. Thus, a big factor in the GOP's overall decline is the Democratic Party's consolidating its support among normally Democratically leaning groups.
I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
It's that transition--from one form to another, much like the phase transitions from solid to liquid or liquid to gas--that's what slime molds have in common with the GOP. Only instead of the chemical secretion bringing them all together into one super-organism, it's the other way around: they're secreting chemicals like there's no tomorrow, and flying off in all directions at once. It's almost as if they were a slime mold living backwards through time.
As the Democratic Party is not only growing in size, and growing more coherent in its policy, but also attracting increasing support from independents and Republicans, the exact opposite is happening to the GOP. It's not just a matter of religious conservatives vs. "free market" types, much less conservatives vs. moderates (both of them!) It's much worse than that. Like a disintegrating slime mold, they are falling apart into separate lumps--the Sarah Palin lump, the (rather tiny) not-Joe-the-not-Plumber lump, the always-reincarnating Newt Gingrich lump, the (possibly now extinct) Bobby Jindal lump, the (utterly hilarious) Michael Steele lump, and of course, the Rush Limbaugh ubber-lump.
On Thursday, Kos posted a diary listing the states that fell into three categories of shift in voting margin for president from 2004 to 2008: those that had shifted to the GOP, those that showed no shift, and those that shifted to the Dems by 10 or more points. I took those states and compared them to the Gallup Party ID shifts from 2002 to 2008, and this is what I came up with:
There were 12 other states which also shifted Democratic by 10 or more points in party ID from 2002 to 2008. This is the strongest indication that the partisan vote shift over 6 years significantly exceeded the presidential vote shift from 2005 to 2008.
This is a followup to my diary last weekend, "Gallup Data Says: A Center-Right Nation No More". Since it seems that Barack Obama and the DC Democratic establishment have completely forgotten what happened last November, I'll just remind them: they won. And I I'll start off with this visually reminder of the party ID shift over the last 6 years that fueled that victory:
Now, the main point of this diary is to add in what was left out of the first installment, an examination of the shifts that includes state populations. Fun and games on the flip.
This week, Gallup released a report on the partisan makeup of the states, based on all its interviews during 2008. I diaried about it hurriedly here, and promised a more comprehensive diary on the weekend. Voila! That promise is hereby kept.
Here's the map that Gallup put out, showing just 5 red states:
I used a more nuanced division, and put it onto a map divided into census regions, producing the following:
The most obvious thing about these results is that they provide yet another form of evidence for a massive realignment-something that Versailles is still massively out of touch with. In fact, it's still quite a distinct possibility that the current Democratic dominance could fall apart precisely because they fail to give the people what the people are hungering for-a sweeping and fundamental change of direction. (See David's latest post, for example.)
A table of the underlying state-by-state data kicks off the extended diary.
Gallup has just released "State of the States: Political Party Affiliation", the first in a four-part series to be released this week on Gallup.com, based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008. And the results could not be clearer: GOP plurality states (including leaners) have been reduced to a mere handful: the Mormon mountain heartland, plus Alaska and Nebraska. That's it:
This contrasts sharply with what Gallup found as recently as 2002:
The 2008 elections may have sent the Republican Party into the wilderness, but we can't yet call it a true realigning election. Let's give thanks for getting rid of some of the insanity of the past 8 years, but even with the religious right and other reactionary voices out of direct control, Moderate (i.e. Conservative) Democrats in the House and Senate retain inordinate power to stop progressive reform.
Aside from his personal beliefs (whatever they may be), Obama is leading from the center for two practical reasons: (1) the legislative blocs remain split (for argument's sake, let's say 1/3 each) between Conservative, Moderate and Progressive, which gives the middle the controlling, swing vote. (2) While the election demonstrates considerable destruction to the Republican brand, and put the Democrats in power, it hasn't really resulted ideological realignment. In particular, it hasn't been sufficient to disempower Conservative Democrats, who remain the biggest obstacles to progressive change.
The economic crisis is an opportunity to consolidate both political and ideological realignment. This isn't a new idea here on OpenLeft. But we haven't considered how the crisis leads to instability in the power of the centrist bloc, i.e. the Conservative Democrats.
My contention is that Obama's attempts to resolve the economic crisis are likely to push things toward progressive solutions and a more progressive realignment, and the politics necessary for fixing the economic mess favor progressives rather than the Republicans or the Conservative Democrats. In other words, the Conservative Democrats will be forced to choose between supporting Obama's programs or not, between opposing progressive changes or siding with the Republicans.
At DKos yesterday, Jed L posted the following map in a FP diary "Obama Won 197 Of 196 Battleground EVs": It's a map of supposed "battleground states" from the Washington Post's Dan Balz and Alec Macgillis on June 8, 2008:
As Jed L notes, Obama did indeed win more battleground EVs than the Post had identified just over a week after Obama had clinched the Democratic nomination. And therein lies a tale quite opposed to the current narrative of a "center-right nation."
Beyond the sheer mendacity of the 'center-right nation' meme, there lies serious discussion of whether the election we just had is, indeed a realigning election. The mendacious meme and the serious discussion are clearly related: if this was a realignment, then we can say, "Well, maybe it was a center-right nation, but it isn't anymore." There's just one problem: no one can quite agree on what a realigning election is. I can sympathize with this confusion, have struggled with it myself, but I've come to a embrace the view that realigning elections can only be understood by their place in the periodic cycles of American party systems-as I'll briefly recap on the flip.
On Tuesday, at DKos, DemFromCT called attention to two similarly-themed pieces that stopped short of calling 2008 a realignment-but did so on what I regard as dubious grounds:
Stu Rothenberg and Jay Cost have interesting pieces up about the realignment idea. Based on Obama's historic win, they both see this as more than a usual election, and less than a realignment.
Rothenberg's approach is to look at the good news for the Dems, say, "that's a lot," and then look at the not-so-good news, and say, "but there should be more if it's a realignment." Cost's approach eschews the term "realignment." Instead, he compares this election with 1860, 1896 and 1932, and concludes that it doesn't compare. While both writers make some good points, they miss both the complexity and the simplicity of a realignment. The complexity is that they are messy things, they don't always look the same. The simplicity is that one thing is certain: you can never go back again.
In my previous diaries, "Three Lies of Saint Ronnie And One Truth From Michael Moore" and "Drilling Down Into Reagan's Big Lie About The Economy", I looked at some founding lies at the core of modern conservatism under the banner of Reagan, focusing in one economics in the second diary. The bottom line there was that Reagan continued relying on Keynsian economics-but without crediting Keynes and without following the principles inherent in Keynesian models for managing the economy responsibly. Instead, the new conservative economics was presented in a barrage of distracting explanations that appeared to be designed for maximum gut appeal regardless of whether they actually made any sense or not.
Democrats generally were totally flumoxed by this approach. It simply confounded them what to say beyond, "But that's ridiculous!" Because Democrats did not want to cut domestic programs to balance the budget, and were sensitive to "soft on defense" charges when it came to the bloated military budget, and "tax and spend" charges when it came to trying to close the budget gap by restoring revenue balance, they ended up going along with a clearly unsustainable fiscal policy, which increasingly disturbed a certain centrist constituency, which Chris has argued elsewhere represents a long-term intergenerational presence of reform-oriented voters, who have voted populist, progressive, even socialist in various past elections dating back over a century now. Whether these are actually the same voters or their desecendents, we cannot actually say. But we can say that a certain level of these reformist sentiments seems to be an enduring feature of the political cultures of some states far more than others, and Perot's support came disproportionately from these long-term centers of reformist tradition.
In this diary, I want to discuss how Perot's Reform Party presidential bid precipitated a flipping of partisan allegiance among a segment of these voters sufficient to switch control of Congress from Democratic to Republican in 1994, and to "elect" George W. Bush in 2000. I also want to explain how this process fits into my larger framework of realignment theory, as well as how this contradicts the currently popular Versailles media meme that the Clinton Administration got into trouble by trying to be too liberal for the country. In doing so, I rely heavily on the book, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence by Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone. All that begins on the flip.
I've written a lot about realignment this year. And in my series "Three Waves and A Wall", I connected the repeated waves of realigning elections with the longer waves of rising and falling world powers. Here's a chart--a modified version of one I came across yesterday (more aesthetic original here), from Visualizing Economics--that helps show how the two are connected. A second chart on the flip completes the process.
The long, relatively constant climb of income from 1933 to 1973 represents the rise of American power to its peak, when, like others before it, America experienced a rude, unexpected military shock, in Vietnam. As Philips explains, the elites continue doing well after such shocks, while the people as a whole do not, a condition that's bouyed by reactionary, jingoist politics. This lasts for a generation and a half or two, before there's a return to the more traditional eglitarian values that were the bedrock of national well-being in the first place. This realigning election should herald the beginning of that return. The dramatic end of that upward slope has given way to a long period in which average incomes have risen so slowly that they've only now reached the point they would have been in 1980 if the pre-1973 pace had continued.
I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
