Open Left - Realignment

Behind Realignment--House/Presidential Shifts Over Time

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:30:00 GMT

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.
Before examining the pattern of House balances over time, I want to begin by looking at my presidential metric, for two reasons: (1) It's simpler to deal with, with fewer cases to consider. (2) There's more of a gradual ebb-and-flow to long-term House averages, which are my principle means of looking at the House. Looking at presidential elections first establishes a grid against which the more continuous House data can be viewed.

The Presidential Metric Refined

In my earlier diary, I first explained that the collapse of one of the major parties marked the end of a party system, with no need to rely on more technical metrics. (Indeed, such metrics might be misleading, since a good metric would depend on continuous data, while party disintegration could make such data rather anomalous.) Regarding the Presidential metric, I wrote:

For the presidency, we take the last three elections before the potential realigning election and compare them to the three elections after the re-election of the President elected in the potential realigning election. We ask how many presidential elections were won by candidates of the same party--before and after....
Using this metric we get the following:

President/        Same Party President in
Election          3 Prior Elections   Next 3 Elections
                                    After Re-election
Jefferson 1800	           0                  3
Lincoln 1860               0                  3
McKinnley 1896             1                  3
FDR 1932                   0                  3
Nixon 1968                 1                  2
Reagan 1980                2                  1
All the realigning elections have 3 presidents of the same party elected after the first president's re-election. If we included Jackson, however (for whom the first total is ill-defined), we would have one realigning election with only two presidents of the same party elected afterwards--no better than Nixon.

If we use the above metric, and apply it to all 2-term Presidents in historical order (aside from Washington, who was elected in the pre-party era), we come up with the following chart:

Note: One could very well argue that Monroe and Jackson should only be counted as half in the same party, given that both Jackson and Adams were Monroe's party mates when he was elected (and, indeed, Adams was more highly placed.) That would make the figure for "before two elections" 1 (counting "1/2" twice) rather than 2--making Jackson's tally the same as McKinley's. I actually think this would be more accurate, but it makes my schema neater, so to avoid the appearance of being arbitrary and self-serving, I go with 2 instead.

The "strong" realignments are characterized by two things: (1) No president of the same party was elected in the 3 elections prior to the realigning election. (2) Three presidents of the same party were elected in the 3 elections after the reelection of the president elected in the realigning election.

(In addition, though not in the chart, the strong religniments represent a shift from a party system dominated by one party to a party system dominated by the other--except for Jefferson (1800), which represented a sort of mongrel shift from the pre-partisan era (Washington) and a shift within the first party system, from the Federalist's lone victory (1796) to the Democratic-Republican's complete dominance thereafter. However, this presumes the structure of party systems. That's fine with me, because I actually consider them a more suitable basic unit of analyis. But here I'm trying to show how a reasonable set of metrics can be used to "build up" the notion of realignments and party systems from data from small sets of elections.)

The "weak" realignments are characterized by two things: (1) One or two presidents of the same party were elected in the 3 elections prior to the realigning election. (2) Two presidents of the same party were elected in the 3 elections after the reelection of the president elected in the realigning election.

(They also represent a shift from one party system dominated by a given party to another party system dominated by the same party.)

The "dealignment" is similar to a weak realignment. However, it is characterized by a shift from a party system dominated by one party to a system dominated by neither party. The House metric will provide a proxy for this distinction, without assuming the entire party system structure in advance.

All other first elections of two-term presidents are neither realigning or dealigning elections.

There is just one problem with this analysis: Grant. According to the above criteria his first election should qualify as a weak realignment. But this clearly defies common sense. No president who's simply continuing his party's control of the presidency can be considered to have won a realigning election, any more than a 1-term president could. Consequently, we add one more requirement--that for a realignment, the previous election had to be won by a president of the other party. This added condition also serves to further distinguish Madison and Monroe, as it should. The resulting table now looks like this:

And resorting it by strength of realignment, we have the following:

House Patterns

I had originally planned on discussing the wave patterns of House balances, but changed my mind to focus more narrowly on the intersection of House balances and the presidential elections already identified, supplemented only by the peaks and troughs of 6-election House cycles, which I'll explain shortly. First the reasoning, then the definition. The most basic results of any House election as a whole is the balance--how many seats each party has--and the shift from the previous balance. Because elections can swing back and forth a lot (they don't nowadays so much, but historically, they can), if you really want a good feel for a political era, it makes sense to take multi-election averages. And so that's what I've done--take averages over 2, 4 and 6 house elections--and then take the shifts from one cycle to the next--one 2-cycle average to the next one (1980 & 1982 compared to 1984 and 1986, for example), one 4-cycle average to the next (1980-1986 compared to 1988-1994), and one 6-cycle to the next (1980-1990 compared to 1992-2002). The longest one is the one I'm most interested in, but the shorter ones provide a feel for how sharply things are changing.

The following table shows that the strong realignments all correspond with 6-cycle shifts of 20 or more (absolute value), and 4-cycle shifts over 20 as well, always swinging toward the party of the president elected--25.8% more Democratic for Jefferson, 20.1% more Republican for Lincoln, and 24.0% more Democratic for FDR:

The weak realignments are both problematic, but for different reasons. McKinley's 6-cycle shift is barely half what the strong realignments are, while Jackson's is healthier, but in the wrong direction! There are simple explanations for both anomalies. Before Jackson's election the opposition Whig Party had dissolved, leaving the Democratic-Republicans unchallenged, and fighting amongst themselves. It's really impossible to clearly assign party loyalties in a consistent way through the elections of 1824-1828, so the figures I use are arbitrary in a sense, although they have a logic to them. It's just that the logic shifts, because the old frames of reference no longer hold. But whatever metric one uses, the fact that the Whigs left a power vacuum, which the Democratic-Republicans briefly filled, means that even a very popular president like Jackson would preside over a decline in ruling party power. The situation with McKinley is even simpler: the Democrats lost badly in two consecutive elections, 1892 and 1894--so badly that the GOP picked up a lot of seats it could not hold in 1896, even though McKinley won the election handily. So the 6-cycle difference reached its peak in 1894--a peak just under 20 points in the right direction. Of the rest of the two-term presidents, Grant and Clinton are both notable for relatively high values in the opposite direction. Nixon, who won a dealigning election shows the smallest shift of all.

We can get a clearer picture of the ebb and flow of party power balance in the House by charting the years that Democratic Party power hit its highs and lows:

And by combining the two charts we can see how closely the realigning elections converged with those highs and lows:

Note in particular the gray cells at the bottom of the chart. These are projections based on assuming that the Democrats record of gains and losses in the years ahead are the mirror image of the Republicans following 1994. If the GOP does pull of a wave election in 2010, then the 2000 6-cycle would decrease, and the other two might also. But if the Democrats weather 2010 with minor loses, or even gains, their fortunes could pick up in 2012, and increase the 6-cycle figure for 2006. It's almost impossible for it to reach the "strong realignment" range. But there is also no guarantee that future years might yield even higher 6-cycle averages, especially if the GOP really does fragment even further. It is simply too early to say. What we can say is that House swings have become quite muted by historical standards in the past four decades, and so we should not expect further dramatic swing elections--but if they do occur, they could herald a truly dramatic turn in American political history.

Against The CW: Health Care Reform DOESN'T Have To Pass This Year

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:00:00 GMT

In a mid-week comment, I wrote:

The Most Hopeful Thing I'm Seeing
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?

Digby wrote,

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?

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.

Reagan Did NOT Win A Realigning Election In 1980

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:30:00 GMT

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.

All is revealed on the flip....
One reason this is such a persistent political myth--aside from the rightwing deification of Reagan-is that people toss around the term "realignment" without any sort of rigorous thinking about it. One could say the same thing about me, of course. There's a whole lot of literature on the subject, and I've only read a tiny sliver. But I have what I think is a soundly defensible position: (a) whatever the micro-level and meso-level processes you want to focus on, the macro-political beast exhibits certain patterns that are decisive in terms of who governs, and (b) those patterns can be observed as an integrated whole, in a succession of different party systems. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to have problems relating to this sort of organic-whole approach.

Fortunately, there's a couple of metrics we can use that can help us sort through past elections deciding which ones can qualify as realigning. They don't fully explain how the system functions as a whole, they simply work as good "rule of thumb" heuristic guides. But first, there's another rule of thumb to consider: Has one of the major parties collapsed? If so, you're at the end of a party system. Collapse may be somewhat spread out, of course, and marking a new era could be somewhat arbitrary, but my preferred candidate would be the first election of the next two-term President. Those two occasions were the elections of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Since both men put their stamp on their own age, it seems like a pretty good rough cut, I'd say. Plus, in the case of Lincoln we can also use the metrics I'm about to introduce.

First the basic rationale: One wants the most comprehensive and sensible metrics possible. This immediately eliminates the Senate, as (a) only 1/3 is up for election at any one time, and (b) direct election started so recently that it eliminates roughly half our data. So that leaves us with House and Presidential elections. For both, we would like a metric that compares before and after a given election to tell us clearly: Realigning, or Not? Therefore it should measure levels of control. I have not run any sort of extensive test, so I can't claim that the following is the best, but it is a pair of metrics designed to give the largest pre-realignment measurement that can fit before 1800--the first realigning election. For the House--as already seen in my previous diary, "2010 Election Prospects & Strategic Organizing -- Part II: The Realignment Perspective ", we compare average Democratic House percentage (number of seats) for 6 elections before the potential realigning election to the next 6 elections (the one coinciding with the realigning presidential election, and the next five.) For the presidency, we take the last three elections before the potential realigning election and compare them to the three elections after the re-election of the President elected in the potential realigning election. We ask how many presidential elections were won by candidates of the same party--before and after.

The House results you've already seen at the top of the diary. It shows quite clearly that Reagan's election had very little impact on the makeup of the House. But what about the Presidency metric?

Using this metric we get the following:


President/        Same Party President in
Election          3 Prior Elections   Next 3 Elections
                                    After Re-election
Jefferson 1800	           0                  3
Lincoln 1860               0                  3
McKinnley 1896             1                  3
FDR 1932                   0                  3
Nixon 1968                 1                  2
Reagan 1980                2                  1

All the realigning elections have 3 presidents of the same party elected after the first president's re-election. If we included Jackson, however (for whom the first total is ill-defined), we would have one realigning election with only two presidents of the same party elected afterwards--no better than Nixon. The first metric, the House balance shift, however, remains negligible for both Nixon and Reagan. Their initial victories clearly aren't comparable to any identifiable realigning elections.

Realignment In Progress-However Ugly It Looks

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:30:00 GMT

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.

Cut To The Chase?

Paul Rosenberg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:00:00 GMT

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.

I think that's what they call a "no-brainer."

Dday then pivots exquisitely to this:

Yet this transcript from Bruce Reidel, who managed a lot of the policy reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House, might offer an explanation of why he won't go that far.
The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World.This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And, those moderates in the Islamic World who would say, no, we have to be moderate, we have to engage, would find themselves facing a real example. No, we just need to kill them, and we will drive them out. So I think the stakes are enormous.

That's extremely dangerous thinking, as Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum make clear. It's also not new thinking - it's basically what kept us in Vietnam for so long,...
It's not surprising to see establishment figures embrace such a reductive theory based on image and manliness. But the guy who just made the connection between the costs of war abroad and the betterment of the lives of citizens at home?

So, in other words, Obama was elected in a 1932-like moment, and he's acting just like guns-and-butter LBJ knowing ahead of time exactly how that will end. Make every conceivable mistake that Johnson made (and none of the smart moves) plus the greatest hits of the Carter and Clinton eras, too.

What else could he be thinking? Fast forward from 1932 to 1968 in one 4-year term. Utterly and totally discredit the Democratic Party so quickly that people forget the GOP doesn't even have any policies anymore, aside from name-calling.

It makes perfect sense, and from a very simple set of premises.

Except, of course, why?

A Closer Look At Trifectas In History

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:30:00 GMT

In Quick Hits this week, David Kowalski wrote:

Trifecta data
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:

Second Party System:

Third Party System:

Fourth Party System:

Fifth Party System:

Sixth Party System:

The first five party systems were all characterized by a predominance of trifectas from one party. Two had a large number of splits (The 2nd and 3rd party systems), while the other three had either 12 or 13 trifecta Congresses. The 3rd, 4th and 5th party systems all began with a string of 7 straight trifectas for the dominant party. The Federalists--in the First Party System--were the only party to start off in control of government, but to end up being the subdominant party through the whole of the party system.

Increasingly, I've come to believe that the closest parallel to where we find ourselves today is the Fourth Party System, starting in 1896, which was characterized by prolonged GOP dominance in its early years, which encompassed intense differences in ideology within the party. The result was a ruling party sharply at odds with itself, which was eventually dethroned by the rigidity of its conservative wing: In 1912, the GOP finished 3rd nationwide, behind former GOP President Teddy Roosevelt and his Bullmoose Party.

I do not believe that there is anything necessarily predictive about this resemblance, only that there's something indicative about it: A sound majority does not ensure anything in itself, and life can be full of surprises. Despite what happened later on, Roosevelt's presidency did leave a lasting progressive legacy in its wake.

In general, two terms of trifecta rule seem to be necessary to leave a truly substantial, lasting legacy. There have only been six periods of US history that have seen four or more trifecta congresses back-to-back:

1800-1824, which established the dominance of the decentralist Democratic-Republican vision; 1860-1872, which won the Civil War and established the dominance of the centralized Northern industrial vision; 1896-1908, which stabilized the erratic political economy of the preceding era, producing progressive reforms that did as much or more to blunt more radical demands as to place any limits on accumulated power; 1920-1928, which raised the business class to unparalleled political dominance; 1932-1944, which dug us out of the Great Depression, established the American welfare state and won WWII; and 1960-1968, which gave us civil rights law, the Great Society, and all but landed a man on the Moon.

Periods without such long strings of trifectas were generally characterized either by lurching, or by drift. Thus, the Second Party System was generally dominated by the Jacksonian Democratic Party, but it proved incapable of preventing the logic of industrial development in the North from shifting the balance of political power, eventually leading to the abolishment of slavery, following the Civil War. Halfway through the Third Party System, the Democrats broke the total dominance of the Republicans, but the following period of mostly divided government merely saw business run amuck, growing quite powerful, but also increasingly unstable. The Democratic insurgency in the middle of the Fourth Party System proved unstable and deeply self-contradictory, as Wilson's international idealism drove him to criminalize domestic political dissent, effectively destroying his own progressive base. The period from 1946 until the Democratic trifect in 1960 was characterized by a mixture of continued progress along lines laid out from 1932 onward and spasmodic convulsions of rightwing paranoia.

The Great Anomaly

The one truly anomalous period in this story is that of the Sixth Party System, during which there were only three relatively brief trifecta periods--Carter's two congresses, Clinton's first Congress, and Bush's first half-congress (until Jeffords defection) and his middle two (2002-2006). Yet, despite the fact that this period was characterized by divided government, it was a period of a remarkably sustained movement to the right, despite not only the lack of strong trifectas (Bush's congressional majorities were weak historically, as well as relatively brief), but also the lack of any strong underlying shifts in public attitude--as can be seen from GSS data.

Instead, what happened was that conservative power was concentrated and consolidated both within the GOP, and within an organized network of political institutions the likes of which had never been in American politics before. While the number of self-identified conservatives did not increase greatly, their wholesale shift into the Republican Party gave them substantially more power than they had previously enjoyed, and the willingness of top conservative activists and politicians to break the old rules--up to and including federal criminal laws--created substantial shifts in a conservative direction that were never actually ratified by voters.

This began with Nixon's wide-ranging lawlessness, which only became successfully institutionalized by his Republican successors, Reagan (the October Surprise and Iran/Contra), the two Bushes (four illegal wars between the two of them, one and possibly two stolen elections, pervasive fraud and corruption of government, etc), and other leading GOP operatives and political leaders (the Abramoff corruption network, Gingrich's multiple ethics violations, DeLay's corrption of Texas legislative elections, etc.)

Furthermore, while the numbers of conservatives did not substantially increase, their extremism did, feed in substantial part by the failures of their own ideology, which only served to make them more alienated and more angry.

This largely trifecta-less, anomalous aggregation of conservative power--also refelcted in a sharp rightwing shift in the political media--is, I believe the principle under-recognized reason for Obama's astonishingly inept governance in such sharp contrast to his highly polished campaigning. In a comment here this week, historian Robert Cruikshank (Robert in Monterey) pointed to a number of other profound Presidential political disconnects that fall mostly into this same period of history. I will take a closer look at them in the next diary.

Two-Party Fail

Paul Rosenberg — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:30:00 GMT

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.
First off, we're working with a very small data set here, so there's no pretense of statistical scientific reasoning. We're talking about historical arguments that try to make sense of surprising regularities that still encompass a good deal of non-repeating variation.

In particular, both the examples referred to saw the second parties disintegrate before the realigning elections referred to. In one case, the party that died was replaced by another sub-dominant party, in the other, it was replaced by the new dominant party, so that prevents any sort of too simplistic reading of what's involved. However, in both cases the previously-dominant party diminished significantly in terms of cross-regional vitality.

I think it's highly unlikely that either party today would cease to exist the way that first the Federalists, then the Whigs disintegrated in the 19th Century. The institutional structures of the parties are vastly more deeply entrenched at this point in time, and our entire political system is far more developed than it was 150 years ago and more. And yet, it is possible that massive reorganizing shifts could take place in a relatively short period of time that would leave one or both parties substantially changed from what they are like today. So let's review the historical logic of how these realignments came about.

The First Party System pitted the Federalists against the Democratic-Republicans. At first, there were no parties, and the Federalists existed pretty much in the sense of the Washington Administration and its allies. It was the Democratic Republicans who actually initiated the idea of organizing outside of officeholding--something that so offended the Federalist's delicate sensibilities that they passed the highly repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, which took dead aim at foreigners and opposition newspaper editors--though it also ended up putting one Congressman in jail. The ultimate result was a sweeping victory for the Democratic-Republicans in 1800, after which they never lost a national election.

The 1816 presidential election wasn't even close:

But in 1820, they didn't even really have an election. And in 1824, it was strictly an intramural affair, with all the presidential candidates coming from the Democratic-Republican Party, which ended up being decided in the House of Representatives. The winner, John Quincy Adams, was the son of the John Adams, the only unambiguous Federalist candidate to win the presidency. Adams left his father's party because he came to feel it had become a regional party, representing regional interests rather than the national interest. A telling sign of what was to come.

The Federalists failed as a party for a very simple reason: they could not abide an opposition party to exist, and they tried to stamp it out, seriously misjudging how people would respond to that. The Democratic-Republicans enjoyed a brief period of complete dominance, but failed to develop a means for ensuring an orderly succession of power. While the emergence of regional and ideological differences was surely inevitable, a more rationally constituted party was certainly possible... or at least conceivable.

As it was, the Democratic Party that emerged under Andrew Jackson from 1828 onward was relatively coherent as long as Jackson was around. And so was the opposition--they opposed Jackson. Coalescing eventually into the White Party, they were the oddest of our major parties: anti-Jackson in the North because he was too decentralist, anti-Jackson in the South because he wasn't decentralist enough.

Eventually, this split would tear the party apart, as the issue of slavery turned this basic contradiction into one that could no longer be finesses away. The Whigs badly lost the last election they contested:

After which the Republican Party and the American Party (the anti-immigrant "Know-Nothings") battled it out to replace the Whigs. The Republicans were a clearly regional party in their 1856 runner-up role, capturing the lion's share of the former northern Whigs:

And four years later, they triumphed with Lincoln winning less than a 40% plurality, as the Democrats followed suit and split sharply between North and South, backing two different candidates: Stephen A. Douglas, who won almost 30% as the Northern Democratic candidate, but won only a single state, and John C. Breckinridge as the Southern Democratic candidate, who won just over 18% of the vote, but carried every Southern state from Texas to North Carolina:

I first conceived this diary as a simple reminder that it was guite possible for both parties to fail in fundamental ways as part of the same political dynamic, even if one did fail well before the other. The caution is directly relevant to us today: just because the GOP is in total failure mode, it's not without precedent that Democrats are showing themselves to be only marginally better, even in a purely functional sense, without any regard to our judgment of how decent their policies may or may not be.

But in light of the discussion that unfolded in my previous diary, "What's Wrong With The Democratic Party, Part #74,397", in which there was much talk of abandoning the Democrats and starting third parties, I think there's a second lesson to be learned from these examples: Party fragmentation is a very real political threat. However tantalizing it may be to dream of a party that purely represents us and only us, there is no precedent for such a party in American history--although there are brief moments when it does appear otherwise.

While I fully share the disgust that others have expressed here, the reality is that American political parties are not so much homes as they are arenas for conflict, or "sites of struggle" as they say in the trade. My own view is that one should look for purity and unity of purpose in issue activism--and devote one's energy accordingly. Make the party a vehicle for advancing your issue activism, do not expect it to be more than that, and you will have created realistic expectations which it can fulfill--if you do your issue organizing well enough.

But if you try to make the party--any party--the be all and end all of your political activism and political identity, then you are bound for disappointment at best, and may well find yourself lost and abandoned as the forces of history have shown themselves quite capable of tearing parties apart, and scattering their pieces to the wind.

To end on a more prosaic note, Ian's "Shorter Sebelius" diary highlights one of the most pressing problems we face: under Obama, the Democrats seem determined to pass "health care reform" that will tax tens of millions of Americans who can't afford it to fill the coffers of insurance companies.

It's like a plan that Karl Rove would dream up--except that he's nowhere near clever enough to figure out how to get the Democrats to propose something that politically stupid. Only the Democrats could come up with that on their own. Fortunately, the plan doesn't go into effect immediately, so that if it is passed, we will have an election cycle in which to make repeal of this idiocy the defining issue of primary fights that could and should be like none the party has ever seen.

But we can't do that if everyone who's feed up just leaves the party in disgust.

And good luck getting the voters to follow you.

What voters usually do in such terrible circumstances is simple: they just stay home.

So, again, my plea is simple: don't think with your gut. Consider the lessons of history, and think strategically. Things are very grim right now, much, much grimmer than most folks probably thought possible a few short months ago. But they've been far, far grimmer at earlier points in our history.

Persevere.

Changing More Than Congress--Altering The Online/Offline Ecology Of American Politics

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:00:00 GMT

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....
Some Themes From the TPMCafe Discussion

Striking the theme of blogger's outsider roots, and continued outsider status, Amanda Marcotte wrote that this was a good thing, really:

Blogs were built up for a lot of reasons, but as Eric notes, most of us got into this, especially in the beginning, because we wanted to vent. We had no ambitions to change the world, and when we started to get pulled in that direction, most of us shrugged our shoulders and said you can't turn destiny away when it starts knocking on your door.
But like many of the bloggers Eric interviews note, ours is the energy of outsiders. The metaphor people grasp for more than anything is punk rock, and it's apt (especially the way that people who break into the mainstream are berated for selling out). So, instead of being mad at Obama for keeping us at a distance, I humbly suggest that he did us a favor. If he'd brought the bloggers into his inner circle, then it would be a lot harder for us to criticize him and hold him accountable for what appears to be a long 4-8 years of selling out progressive values because the skittish Democratic mindset is kicking in.
Being outsiders actually makes us better allies to the Democrats when they actually deserve it. There were Clinton camps and Obama camps, but both camps jumped all over Chris Matthews for his relentless sexism towards Clinton, which is easier for us to do as we're independent and don't have to worry too much about whether our words reflect poorly on this campaign or that campaign's message.

In his diary "Why Elections Will Continue to Lean Left Due to the Web", Greg Mitchell. editor of Editor & Publisher offered a view from his perch as an internal critic of the journalism establishment, citing the way in which the internet performed an important, here-to-fore missing journalistic function:

I guess I feel that the uprising on the left side of online, pushed also by generational and demographic changes, will keep the country at least somewhat to the left for many years. And you can quote me. In fact, I predicted that last year even before the current rise of Twitter.
I could go on and on, but let me just mention one reason for feeling this way: fact-checking and instant counter-punditry online. And I'll just cite one dramatic example.
Last fall's four major candidate debates could have swung the election, narrowly, to McCain. Obama's lead was not strong and we've seen before what can happen, with Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000. Indeed, the performances by Obama or Biden in the four debates were not particularly strong. But the ticket won going away. For several reasons, of course, but I'd argue that online activity around the debates had a lot to do with it.
Why? You may recall that each of the debates ended with the TV commentators, by and large, claiming the Republican candidates (even Palin) surprisingly "held their own" and maybe even gained an edge. In elections past, this likely would have given the GOP a nice bump in the days that followed and led to a deadlock in the next polls.
But this year that "momentum" was blunted, even reversed by one big factor: the Web. Popular liberal sites immediately fact-checked the Republicans' statements and analyzed why those candidates had, in reality, lost ground. Even more importantly, this time around, various news organizations sponsored scientific instant polls and focus groups - and in every case (even over at Fox), they showed a landslide of public opinion in favor of the Democratic debater. Not even close. Palin, for example, had "held her own" against Biden only in the minds of the pundits.
The results not only came quickly, they were disseminated quickly via the Web, so the next day's news summaries all had to cite them.
It must have been humiliating for most of the TV pundits. One minute they were assuring viewers that McCain and Palin and held their own or more -and within a few minutes they had to cite polls showing that their analysis had been wholly wrong. Whoops.

In a follow-up diary, Eric picked up one of Amanda's themes, arguing that the outsider spirit live--and even has some impact on policy:

Generally, I think Amanda's right that the blogs can maintain an energy and passion by continuing with its outside status, even with a Democrat in the WH. (And I think lib bloggers have proved wrong their conservative critics who claimed they'd simply roll over for Obama in the WH and act as cheerleaders.) They key is that the blogosphere was never created (way back when) to be an appendage of the DNC. There are plenty other Beltway institutions that will robotically cheer Dem politicians no matter what they do. Instead, the blogs were created to give voice to liberalism in America. And if liberals today don't like some of the things they see in government, then the blogs are still quite willing to document that and give a cohesive voice to the left; a voice that did not exist the last time a Democrat was in the WH.
So I'd suggest that the question Armando raised about whether Obama will continue to receive the type of unquestioning love from the blogs (the kind of love he enjoyed last year) is being answered, and the answer is no. (See Amanda's comment re: DOMA.) And those critiques, I'd argue, are paying off. Witness the announcement about Obama extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

But Duncan Black offers a more nuanced view, seeing blogging's impact as perhaps more cultural--creating a liberal narrative--and seeing the major limit of blogging's impact coming from congressional staffers who still don't quite get a clear sense of how bloggers could be more valuable through working more closely together:

To me, since the beginning, the blogosphere's key feature has been to provide a sustained and cohesive unapologetic liberal narrative not found elsewhere. While I certainly hope that the Obama administration moves the country in a more progressive direction, and I will continue to push for this, like Amanda I don't have any sense bloggers are owed some sort of seat at the table.
The important failure of Democrats, particular the more liberal Dems who are obvious allies, to engage the blogosphere effectively comes not from the Obama administration but from members of Congress, and their staffs, who have never understood well enough the power of having alternative ways of getting information and messages out. Liberal blogs have never been empowered by those they have been trying to aid.
Arguably liberal bloggers can, and some have certainly tried to, do more to empower themselves, to leverage what influence they have to greater ends. And, arguably, we should. But few of us started ranting away on the internet with the expectation that we would be sitting down with members of Congress or administration officials. We didn't start blogging because we thought it would change the world.

Three Waves and A Wall Redux

If all these bloggers have valuable insights--and they do--what they don't have is any sort of definitive stance with respect to larger historical forces. And that's the new element I hope to add to this mix. This is not to say that I claim to know what will happen, much less what must happen. But I do think I have a sense of some major macro-historical factors that indicate something of what may happen, of possibilities that exist now which did not exist eight or 12 or 16 or 60 years ago. I wrote about them before in an early 2008 series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future. As I explained in the first diary in the series,
the 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 rise and fall of successive world powers-Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us-described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.

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.

The first wave helps explain why the GOP is in such total disarray. Were it not for the wall (described below) and its disorienting effect on Democrats, we'd be in the midst of a full-fledged realignment more similar to the aftermath of the 1932 election than anything seen since, except, perhaps the aftermath of the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson managed to push through an impressive array of programs largely intended to fulfill ambitious first stirred in the early post-1932 period.

The last time we had such an election was the anomalous 1968 election, which ushered in an era of divided government, the only such period in American history. Although nothing is written in stone, the pattern of history strongly suggests that the 2008 election will usher in a period of Democratic dominance lasting roughly 36 years. However, the example of 1896, which began a period of Republican dominance, clearly warns us that there's no assurance the dominant party will be internally unified or coherent.

The second wave indicates that we're at the end of a period reactionary politics that typically follows a stinging defeat at the peak of imperial power (the Vietnam War). The previous three dominant world powers turned their politics in a decidedly more egalitarian direction once the reactionary period came to a close.

The financial collapse of fall 2008 was tailor made for ushering in this change, however (as part of the "wall" described below), Barack Obama turned out to be much more deeply committed the worldview of finance capitalism than anyone seemed to previously realize, and this has lead to a significant blockage of this otherwise expected transition.

The third wave is very much associated with values of democratic participation, self-expression, gender equaltiy, and environmentalism, which have infused the online world not just in America, but around the world, including, as we have recently seen, such supposedly "other" cultures as Iran.

Then there was what the waves were crashing up against--the wall, as described in Part Four:

these forces stand opposed by a powerful obstructing wall, which I have referred to repeatedly under the rubric of hegemony, which has both an institutional and an ideological aspect. The ideology is authoritarian, anti-modern, anti-reason, and anti-democracy. Over the past decade, it has sought to overturn one election (1996) by hounding an elected President into acts of desperation for which it then sought to remove him from office. It sought-successfully, to steal another election in broad daylight by usurping the popular will and preventing the counting of ballots, based on legal "reasoning" by the Supreme Court which were declared null and void for any other purposes. It virtually ignored a mass murderer responsible for killing 3,000 Americans, and fraudulently took us to war with that mass murderer's chief ideological rival. It sought to turn the entire executive branch-but especially the Department of Justice-into an arm of the Republican National Committee, in a quest to establish permanent one-party rule. It sought to undermine the separation of powers, the architectural keystone of Constitution. It sought to nullify the right to habeas corpus, dating back to 1215 and the Magna Charta. It sought to turn the Federal Government into an instrument for taxing the public in order to amass enormous private wealth for friends of the President, Vice President and the Republican Party.
In short, it sought to turn America into a neo-feudal, pre-modern state. This agenda is so deeply and profoundly anti-American that the nation as a whole is in revolt. Approximately 50 percent of all Americans strongly disapprove of President Bush's job performance. At this point, four things, above all, are keeping back the tide of sweeping change. One, a deeply intimidate political "opposition" that is more like the GOP's hapless sidekick than a real opposition party. Two, a press corps[e] that functions primarily as a palace propaganda machine. Three, a broader array of institutional power, from politicized churches, to propagandistic "think tanks" to ideologically lock-step federal judges, that is militantly opposed to allowing even the slightest moves in the direction of changing course. Four, a public that has long been starved of any truly oppositional political discourse, so that it has an extremely difficult time formulating anything it wants in positive terms that are recognizable to more than a fragment of the public at large.
This is the nature of the wall.

Today, I would be inclined to put that somewhat differently. The Democrats are not simply intimidated, as I wrote in the passage above, they are also deeply constrained by having internalized a good deal of rightwing GOP ideology. But for the most part, the descriptions I offered in early 2008 still serve our discussion today.

Our Place In the Macro-Picture

So how does the framework just described relate to the future of blogging as discussed at TPMCafe? Simple answer? It tosses us into a multi-dimensional blender, and says, "Have fun!" While many people feel an understandable sense of let-down, the framework above suggests that we're just passing through a phase that's deceptively slow-moving and static. The fact that Obama's major policy initiatives are both disappointingly centrist and diminutive will not be the end of the story, given the dynamics of history at play.

For example, thinking only in terms of the first wave, for the moment-as if it could be considered in isolation-we need to let go of our disappointment that this isn't going to be 1933 with FDR's Hundred Days. Truth be told, FDR's Hundred Day wasn't all that hot, either. The first New Deal wasn't nearly as progressive as the second one, passed after the first one had largely fizzled and business elites had turned against Roosevelt. And though there's some small hope that we might follow a similar path, that hope, too, should be set aside. A much more plausible guide for what we're going through would be the rather decisive, but deeply ambiguous realignment of 1896. Not that we're living through an exact re-run-we aren't-but that a similar set of tensions are at play. Consider these three points:

(1) Like the Republican Party after 1896, the Democratic Party today is deeply divided against itself, which can potentially cripple its ability to definitively set the political agenda for new roughly-36-year cycle.

(2) Unlike the post-1896 era, there is presently little potential for something like the bipartisan Progressive Movement to emerge. Moreover, to the extent it is possible, this would not be a progressive movement, even in the somewhat conflicted sense of the original Progressive Movement. The record of Washington bipartisanship in recent years has routinely been retrograde, and shows every sign of continuing to be so.

While the Progressives were generally hostile to the Socialists who had a strong base in the recent immigrant class, they nonetheless shared some concerns in common, and their political competition sometimes resulted in genuine progress. This cannot be said of present-day DC-based bipartisanship. However, a similar alliance of techno-elitists and scruffy grassroots radical types definitely can be envisioned not just on net neutrality and related new media issues, but also, potentially, on campaign finance reform. This, in turn, genuinely could start to move mountains. This was brought up in a discussion thread on Chris's dairy, "I Got The 'Make Them Do It' Blues". Yoda made a comment raising the issue of the Clean Elections model and the surprising depth of ignorance about it on progressive blogs. (Yes, I take the hint. I'll be writing something about it soon, I promise). A few other commentators joined in as well. In particular, bruorton added:

I came on the thread to make exactly this point. Time to start coalescing the movement for public financing -- perhaps a timely addition to OpenLeft's excellent projects list? It is entirely possible, starting now, that we could propel this into a 2012 campaign issue.
First, it will need to be a 2010 campaign issue. One opening is the public perception of corporate lobbyists, which led to pledges in the '08 primaries to take various steps to block them from the WH. There is also Lessig's Change-Congress.org which could be a key player here.
This could be a real rallying cry for the many Democrats who do not see the dramatic changes in government they were expecting.

As disappointment with Obama's diminutive agenda sinks in over the next few weeks, months and years, substantially canceling the concentrated power of money in our politics could well emerge as the defining issue long enough for something truly transformational to be done. This is one way, of many that next few years of this highly-contested realignment could unfold.

(3) Directly contrary to Teddy Roosevelt among the Republican leadership of the 1896 era, the Democrats' most charismatic leader, Barack Obama, is aligned with the party establishment against the reformers, despite some very sparkling rhetoric to the contrary. The firmness of this alliance has yet to be seriously tested. If progressives in the Democratic Party mounted serious pressure, Obama might shift his allegiances somewhat, but this is yet to become a serious possibility--although that could be about to change (or is that merely the perpetual illusion with Obama?).

If we add the third wave of post-materialism to the mix, we can add:

(4) Just as Obama's charisma connected to the party establishment reverses the historical precedent of the 1896 era, there is a linked reversal in realm of post-materialist values. Obama is much more in tune with the expressive nature of such values, even though he is actually less supportive of the substance. This relates to the discussion above of his distancing from the blogosphere on the one hand, coupled with his sophisticated use of other online technology, and it contrasts with the more politically progressive members of Congress, and their failure to develop more effective partnerhips with progressive bloggers, also referenced in the TPMCafe discussion, by Duncan Black.

It's as if there were a cross-wiring of the natural connections one would expect from the macro-historical patterns. History, however, is filled with such examples. History is conflictual, not logical. Nonetheless, the existence of such contradictions always holds out the potential for resolution. Furthermore, if the blogosphere is to play a role in resolving such contradictions, we damn sure need to get much clearer on what they are and how they work.

And now to Wave 2:

(5) The attempt to preserve existing levels of elite privilege, most notably in the concentrated power of the financial sector, is almost certainly doomed to fail. The manner in which it will fail, and the fallout that follows from the failure, are far less certain. Nor is the time-frame in any way certain. But the continued well-known (though routinely denied) problems of the financial sector have strong historical parallels from earlier historical examples. Such levels of inequality are simply not sustainable, unless we set off on a new historical tangent, in which case the result is likely to be deeply confrontational, if not bloody.

Connecting all the above with my previous diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", it is at least plausible that the creation of Progressive Block refusing to vote for fatally compromised legislation could trigger a much broader realignment of forces, resolving some of the contradictions referred to above. Underlying this potential is the objective reality that Obama's stated goals cannot be realized by the strategy of top-down bipartisan compromise.

This strategy has already produced a fatally undersized stimulus package, and is on the verge of producing similarly inadequate climate change legislation, with a similar fate facing health care reform. While there may be short-term political gains to be made just from passing anything, no matter how inadequate, such a strategy cannot hold for long. Whatever else it may be, it is definitely not a strategy for ensuring political dominance for a roughly-36-year-cycle of American political history.

The question, quite simply, is whether the various tensions at play can be tamed and contained by the political establishment, or if they will swing increasingly out of control, forcing actions that will in turn create further openings for progressives to bring pressure to bear, and advance new political agendas. The brief survey above is meant to suggest some of the tensions at play beneath the surface of the current play of GOP disarray and Democratic disappointment.

But we would be remiss to also not add the increasing role of international relations that are increasingly liberated from Washington control, and increasingly close to the American people. The Iranian election aftermath is the big example of this so far, but it's unlikely to be the last, though others will surely take much different forms. The simple fact is, we are finally becoming the global village that Marshall McLuhan wrote about, not just in fact, but in common experience. Iran's meaning is dense, dynamic, complex and immediate-it is half like a mirror to us, half like a lover ("I'll Be Your Mirror" as Nico sang.)

I would like to have made this a much tighter, neater narrative, but the very messiness I'm wallowing in is part of the point. That's no excuse really, just an admission that I'm not really on top of this, still struggling in early stages of trying to make sense of how a wide ranging confluence of forces is not about to leave us alone. But if I wait to have it all figured out, I know it will be too late.

The group mind is orders of magnitude smarter than any of us, and that's the biggest point of all to be made here. It's not so much that bloggers can change the world. It's that bloggers are part of the emerging world mind , and because we are here that world mind has a different configuration than if we didn't exist. We're a long, long way from having the influence that the brain-dead troglodytes of Versailles have, but as Greg Mitchell notes above, we have enough influence that we may well have kept them from pocketing the election for McCain-Palin. Thus, however painfully obvious it is to us how much power we don't have, our very presence has altered the world mind in ways we can't usually perceive.

If there are things we can do to be significantly more powerful, those things will primarily be by way of making stronger connections with others-and by way of taking leaps that usually can't be foreseen in advance. It's not us, individually, or even collectively as the blogosphere that has real power. It's larger interconnectivity of which we are a part. And if DC right now can't make heads nor tails of us, we should probably worry more about the larger circle of people in the world we have yet to connect to who make us feel the same way. There's an enormous world of outsiders out there, and our job is to include them all.

It's with this sense of our own intermediary place in the scheme of things that I conclude with some tentative suggestions about things we might do, collaborating with others, to alter the shape of the emerging global mind, the ecology of our shared imaginary landscape. None of this can we do alone. Or even do at all. At best, we can facilitate a coming together that creates it. In that spirit, here's a sample list of three briefly-described suggestive ideas:

(1) Intensifying connections between blogs, advocacy groups, experts and geographically specific constituencies capable of directly lobbying representatives at every level from city councils, up through state legislatures and on to Congress.

"Senator Dorgan Supports The Public Option"

In the effort to pass a public health care option, state blogs are going to be key. Today, North Decoder, a great state blog out of North Dakota, shows why.
Elected officials are very responsive to local media. As such, North Decoder has been pressing the state's two Democratic Senators to make a public statement on the public option. Entering today, Stand with Dr. Dean listed both Senators Conrad and Dorgan as "unknowns" on the public option. However, due to the efforts of North Decdorer to push Conrad and Dorgan to provide answers, we can now put Byron Dorgan in the "yes" column.

not

(2) Developing a coherent methodology of policy preference polling

Locating Consensus for Democracy - A Ten-Year U.S. Experiment

(3) Developing a multi-skill training program for citizen activists to empower people to do everything from citizen journalism to running a statewide campaign.

and

cannot

None of the above can be done by bloggers alone. We cannot will them into existence. Which is why I offer them only as a list of suggestive ideas. My point is not that we should do these particular things, but to suggest that there is an entire realm of activities we can engage in that we have not even begun to consider that could substantially empower common citizens to become much more powerful political actors. And it would be a very good idea indeed for us to spend some time thinking about new ways to empower the other 290-some-million citizen outsiders in America today.

Gallup Party-ID Polls vs. Obama Strategy-A Deeper Look

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:30:00 GMT

In my diary this week, "Gallup Shows Broad GOP Losses In Almost All Demographics", I wrote:

Sub-Group Shifts Run Counter To Obama Strategy
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.
To begin with, here again is the full chart of demographic subgroups, with their losses in percent of the total electorate, and as a percentage of the demographic within the GOP as of 2001:

And here's a condensed version highlighting four categories showing distinctly larger losses outside of the GOP base:

From the above evidence, I believe it's clear that the GOP is growing more homogeneous, more extreme, and hence less reachable.

The GOP has been in quite a quandry about how to deal with Obama's bipartisan outreach, which has helped contribute to the Democratic base's embrace of the narrative of Obama's political brilliance. But skeptics--including most of the folks who write here at Open Left--are asking the same question they've been asking all along: what does it translate into in terms of policy? Being popular and winning elections sure beats being unpopular and losing elections. No question about it. But being popular and winning elections cannot be enough in themselves, as the GOP victories in 2002 & 2004 most recently remind us. They have to translate into successful policy--which, for reality-based types means not just successful in the focus groups, but successful in the real world as well. Obama continues to push policy compromises which significantly weaken the chances of them working successfully, in the increasingly vain hope of picking up some voluntary GOP support. But the poll results highlighted above clearly tells this this is a policy without a sound political foundation. Whatever it may be, it is not political pragmatism. Nothing could be less pragmatic than continuing to give the gift of political relevance to this increasingly out-of-touch political remnant.

Legitimate and Illegitimate Questions/Counter-Arguments

All the above is based on data from a single source--Gallup's partisan ID data. While this provides for consistency of the question over time, it does raise the question of whether it tracks with other data sources. This sort of question arose in another closely-related context this week--Pew's figures on partisan ID, showing independents on the rise--which Chris showed was contradicted by the aggregate data from multiple pollsters in his diary, "Independents Declining Since Mid-April".

Speaking of Pew, on the surface, Pew's findings seem contradictory to Gallup's, but if one looks more carefully, this is not actually the case. While the recent data trends (last few weeks) are certainly out of whack with other pollsters, over the time-frame Gallup was comparing--2001 vs. 2009 the picture of the GOP's ideological make-up is generally similar from the two different sources (see Pew chart below). Pew actually starts in 2000, and shows GOP conservatives declining from 46% of all conservatives to 41%--a decline of 11%, compared to a 24% deline among moderates--from 21% to 16%--and a whopping 40% decline among liberals, from 10% to 6%. The numbers here are different, but the overall shift is the same: conservatives dropped the least, followed by moderates and then liberals, in just that order.

Source: Pew

Pew also shows the same rapid rise in Democratic dominance with leaners included over the same time period (bottom chart):

Source: Pew

A third data source for looking at the ideological makeup of the parties is the General Social Survey, conducted since 1974. To present this data in manageable form, I've condensed it into half-decade aggregates, then broken out individual bi-annual polls for 2000-2008 on the bottom. Due to the subsample size, noise is a consideration for individual polls, which is another reason to aggregate polls by half-decade. There's only one half-decade since 1974-75 when the percentage of conservative republicans did not increase--as persistent a trend as one could hope to see. The percentage of Republican moderates has also declined every half-decade since 1985-89, and the number of Republican liberals has declined every decade since 1990-1994. With the smaller sample sized for individual polls, the same pattern does not appear poll-to-poll from 2000 to 2008, but when averaged together it is maintained. There can be no doubt, the GOP is becoming increasingly dominated by its conservative base.

Confining ourselves to the South, we see that concentration is even more extreme--in the last two elections, conservative Republicans now outnumber liberal Republicans 10-1 in the region, now accounting for more than 1 in 5 Southerners, and heading toward 1 in 4.

In contrast, outside the South, the percentage of conservative Republicans is almost 4 1/2 points lower, and roughly comparable to the number of liberal Democrats.

This set of charts clearly shows both the growing dominance of conservative Republicans, and the dominance of Southern conservative Republicans on top of that--trends that have only grown more extreme in 2000s, as liberal and moderate Republicans have continued their declines from already low levels.

In contrast to the valid questions just addressed, the usually sober and reliable robertdfeinman raised a passel of objections that widely missed the mark:

I don't believe it
I think this is yet another example of a poorly designed poll. What it really is measuring is people's dissatisfaction with current economic conditions, but since that wasn't the question asked, the people used a proxy (GOP affiliation) as a way to express their discontent.
More meaningful would be to ask questions about fundamental beliefs that have been strongly correlated with political affiliation in the past. I claim people don't really change their fundamental views much; the changes in aggregate social norms are the result of the old ideas dying off.
Those who get worked up about abortion or immigration or high taxes will always harbor those resentments, but if there is no candidate making an issue of them they will chose some other marker to make a decision. It is true that the GOP is at a loss right now for attractive hot button topics to attract voters and this may affect their electoral prospects, but that's not a proof that attitudes have changed.
The GOP didn't lose by that much, it is mostly the result of our winner takes all election laws which magnifies small differences in voting. Furthermore the Dems have moved so far to the right that many in the GOP aren't afraid of them anymore.
We have exactly two "liberal" members of congress: Sanders and Barney Frank, and Frank has been yielding to the banking sector of late, leaving one, totally ineffective, senator.

While I share Robert's frustration at how timid the Democrats have become, this is neither so recent, nor so extreme as he makes out, and, more importantly, the relationship to the argument being presented is obscure at best. The argument that the GOP didn't lose by much has been refuted by Chris in at least a couple of posts, and others have written about it as well. The Dem victories in 2006 and 2008, while not as great as might be wished for in terms of potential were nontheless more convincing than anything the GOP managed during it's supposed period of "dominance". And the claim that questions about party ID are "poorly designed" and just a proxy for "people's dissatisfaction with current economic conditions" is presented entirely without evidence. There's certainly no doubt that GOP mismanagement of the economy has hurt them badly, just as it did after the 1929 crash. Why that should be regarded as misleading is a bit beyond me.

In short, the information presented in the Gallup analysis of party ID 2001-2009 seems fundamentally sound, and the objections raised do not discredit that. Robert certainly has a point when he says:

More meaningful would be to ask questions about fundamental beliefs that have been strongly correlated with political affiliation in the past.

But such shifts in values and beliefs were already noted during the campaign last year, and phenomena such as the ongoing shift on gay marriage suggest that this process of shifting beliefs in a more progressive direction is only continuing.

There is much more data that could be cited in an argument that Obama's strategy flies in the face of political realities--and I intend to present more such data as time goes on. But the data from this one report from Gallup does not support his fantasy of reaching out to ever-vanishing "reasonable" Republicans in any way. He is simply mouthing a favorite Versailles narrative, which, like most Versailles narratives, has nothing at all to do with reality.

Gallup Shows Broad GOP Losses In Almost All Demographics

Paul Rosenberg — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Sub-Group Shifts Run Counter To Obama Strategy

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.

Losses among Blacks and minorities in general were also small, but these groups already have low levels of GOP support. In fact, the 2% loss in total black support translated into a 17% loss of black Republicans.

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:

Thus, although Gallup did not focus on this, one of the strongest take-aways from these results is that Obama's strategy of outreach to GOP stronghold groups runs directly counter to shifts in partisan trend: he is striving most visibly to reach out to those least inclined to listen, while offering a wide range of compromise, or at least soft-peddling with respect to issues that have have traditionally appealed to the groups where Democratic support has been growing.

The aggregate shift is represented in two charts, the first showing the shift in party support--members plus leaners:

The second shows the shift in support between party members and independents:

This simply reiterates previous reporting from Gallup as well as others, such as Pew, showing that GOP losses exceed Democratic gains. The combined picture is that roughly half of Democratic gains in support are from people who lean Democratic, but don't identify as party members--a further indication that Obama's relative de-emphasis on outreach to the Democratic base looks to be at odds with what would build the party at this time.

The Slime Mold Party

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:17:38 GMT

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.
In order to defend the honor of the slime molds, I want to present a somewhat more detailed life-cycle description from Wikipedia:

The Dictyosteliida, cellular slime molds, are distantly related to the plasmodial slime molds and have a very different life style. Their amoebae do not form huge coenocytes, and remain individual. They live in similar habitats and feed on microorganisms. When food runs out and they are ready to form sporangia, they do something radically different. They release signal molecules into their environment, by which they find each other and create swarms. These amoeba then join up into a tiny multicellular slug-like coordinated creature, which crawls to an open lit place and grows into a fruiting body. Some of the amoebae become spores to begin the next generation, but some of the amoebae sacrifice themselves to become a dead stalk, lifting the spores up into the air.

As you can see, there are crucial distinctions between cellular slime molds and the GOP. These include:

(1) When slime molds run low on sustenance, they secrete a chemical signal that attracts them to all pull together first into swarms, then into a super-organism. When the GOP runs low on sustenance, it secretes a chemical signal that drives it to split apart, first into swarms, then into infantile balls of rage.

(2) With the slime mold, some of the amoebae sacrifice themselves, in order to lift the spores of the next generation up into the air, the better for them to be able to travel far, and find a new, more hospitable home. The GOP, OTOH, has no self-sacrifice, no desire to lift up the next generation, and certainly no desire to go anyplace new. It just stays right where it is, with the intent of making life impossible for itself or anyone else.

(3) Although slime molds appear to be an utterly alien form of life, as if from another planet, they exhibit a fascinating pattern of growth and development that has its own abstract beauty to it. Republicans, OTOH, look eerily almost exactly like us. And yet, they exhibit such grotesque patterns of decay and disintegration as to seem truly as alien at their core as slime molds only seem to be in their outward visible aspect.

There is, surprisingly, a serious point to all this. Fragmented collapse is one form of response to the waning of a political party system as it moves toward realignment. Both the Federalists and the Whigs disappeared prior to the realigning elections that brought the next party system into being. This makes perfect sense, since American political parties are typically coalitions of different groups (sort of like the slime mold swarms coming together to form super-organisms). As conditions change, it becomes increasing difficult for the old coalitions to hold together. They must either find some way to reinvigorate their collaborative relationships, find new coalition partners to bring together, suffer a gradual diminution, or else simply collapse.

While the GOP did not outwardly fragment prior to the 2008 election--and, indeed, may never disappear the way the Federalists and the Whigs did before it--it most certainly did fragment internally. This could clearly be seen in the run-up to the 2008 election, and even before it. Perhaps the earliest sign was the neo-conservative power-grab. The neo-conservatives were always a numerically small group (currently pretending that they don't exist and never did) which wielded enormous power precisely because there was a huge power vacuum left by larger conservative factions that couldn't establish hegemony beyond their own ranks. The simultaneous spread of complete incompetence and complete politicization was the swiftly-following next stage in the pseudo-slime mold life-cycle...or death-cycle, if you will. Decay is what has long given the GOP life--40 years of the politics of resentment--but it's finally caught up with them, and they are going through their decay process at lightening speed.

Unfortunately, the Versailles Dems seem incapable of realizing this, and are doing everything possible, not only to keep the GOP alive and relevant, but at the same time to join in with the rotting process themselves. The Wall Street bailout is the clearest example of this, but there are signs, large and small, in virtually every issue area. So it's no time to stand back and laugh at the GOP. It's time to reflect long and hard on how to avoid becoming exactly like they are now.

Realignment Watch: Presidential Vote Shift vs. Gallup Party ID

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:21:40 GMT

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.
The states on the chart above that shifted 10+ points toward the Dems in the Presidential vote from 2004 to 2008 did not all shift in party ID more than 10 points. But their average shift was 15.1 points. In contrast, the 12 states not on the list that shifted by double digits did so by an average of 15.7 points, further reinforcing the point that there is a stronger partisan shift than was reflected in the presidential vote shift.

The clear implication is that if Obama succeeds in turning the economy around by 2012, he should win a much stronger mandate for his second term, and Democrats as a whole should be in a commanding position. But, of course, the chances of that are very much dependent on the 2010 midterms, which could be a good deal more challenging, given how questionable it is whether things can start to turn around before then.

There is also a clear implication here that Versailles will not like at all: given the uncertainty that things can turn around by 2010, Democrats would be very well-served indeed to send as many populist signals as possible between now and then. If they can't turn the economy around by then, the only thing likely to save them is if they are seen as consistent fighting on behalf of ordinary people, which will then position them to say, "We know it's tough, but you know we've been fighting tooth and nail for you, and you know it would only be worse if not for us. Don't pull us out in the middle of the fight, and we will turn things around. If not, who knows what will happen to you."

Gallup Data Follow-Up: A Center-Right Nation No More

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:05:18 GMT

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.
We begin with this table of partisan shifts by census region, with states unweighted by population. This is the only table carried over from last weekend. It's useful primarily because the Senate is unweighted by population, and as a point of comparison.

Here's the version weighted by population:

As can be seen, in the weighted version, the Democrats lost ground in every census region from 1993 to 2002. At the same time, unlike the unweighted version, they did not trail the Republicans overall in 2002 at the end of this shift. It's also noteworthy that in New England, the Democrats started at a much higher level in the weighted measure, and while they improved substantially by both measures, the measures converged in 2008. This means that the unweighted swing was noticeably larger, which only makes sense, since smaller populations would naturally tend to be more volatile.

To see this more clearly and more generally, I've prepared the following tables showing the top 10 states for each party in terms of the most favorable shifts for three time-frames, 1993-2002, 2002-2008, and the combined time-frame of 1993-2008. In most cases, the average size of the top 10 states in terms of partisan shifts is less than the size of the average state. In all cases, the average size of the top 5 states is smaller.

Here's the first shift, from 1993 to 2002:

Two large states, Ohio and Texas, make the GOP's top 10 average larger than the national average. But the top 5 averages on both sides are significantly smaller.

Next, the shift from 2002 to 2008:

Here, both the top 10 and the top 5 averages for both parties are significantly smaller than the national average.

Finally, the entire span, 1993 to 2008:

On the Democratic side, both the top 5 and the top 10 averages are far less than the national average. On the GOP side, the averages are much higher--and the top 10 is higher than the national average--but the swings are much lower. Indeed, the only reason the top 10 is higher than the national average is because Texas squeaked into the #10 slot with a shift of just 3 points. That wouldn't be anywhere near the top 10 on the Democratic side.

Overall, this is very heartening news, as it shows that we're gaining the most in smaller states where the gains make the biggest difference in terms of winning elections. This is yet another validation of the success of the 50-state strategy. Clearly, it was not the only cause, but it surely played a part, and it meant we could take full advantage of the other factors that contributed to the shifts.

The message here is clear: outside the Beltway, Democrats have clearly broken out of all the cliches. They are dominating the electorate in sheer numbers, and they have made their biggest gains in the more rural, less densely-populated states.

Stop presses! Rewrite the headlines! The conventional wisdom is wrong once again!

Gallup Data Says: A Center-Right Nation No More

Paul Rosenberg — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:28:16 GMT

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.
There are 17 entries in each of the columns, (50 states plus DC), so one can see at a glance that Democrats enjoy a margin of 17 points or more in 17 states plus DC, a nice little factoid. Democrats also enjoy a double-digit advantage in 28 states plus DC, while the states where Republicans hold an edge (including 3 by 2 points or less) make up less than half a column:

If that isn't lopsided, I don't know what is.

To further sharpen the contrast, here's a snapshot of the ten most Democratic, and ten most Republican states:

Note that the #10 Democratic state is more heavily Democratic than the #1 Republican state is Republican. And, of course, the 9th and 10th most Republican states are Democratic leaning.

And here's a snapshot of the most Democratic and most Republic states in each of the nine census regions:

A majority of the most Republican states in a given census region--five--actually lean Democratic. And two of them do so by double digits.

The current map is especially striking when juxtaposed with a map from 2002:

Looking at this map, it's really not so surprising that so many political experts thought the Republicans really were establishing themselves in a position of long-term dominance--even though this was actually no more than a momentary peak. Looked at as a single snap-shot it was fairly impressive.

And the underlying data:

shows a clear predominance of Republican-controlled states.

Again, here's a snapshot of the ten most Democratic, and ten most Republican states:

Which further shows the Republican edge. All the GOP states are in double digits, with only three of them under 15%. In contrast, one Democratic state is in single digits, and more than half are under 15%.

And the most Democratic and most Republic states in each of the nine census regions:

This view was more narrowly matched, and actually favored the Democrats by one metric: one "most Democratic" state leaned Republican, while two "most Republican" states leaned Democratic.

All the above resulted from a significant shift from 1993 to 2002:

Just seven states plus DC became more Democratic during this time. A whopping 41 states became more Republican, 21 of them by double digits. Still, this represented a period when the post-Civil Rights Southern defection from the Democratic Party was finally filtering down to the level of party ID. Ten of the 21 states with double digit GOP shifts were Southern or Border states. Thus a good chunk of this shift did not represent much of a change in national-level voting behavior, nor did it represent something new, but rather the playing out of an old dynamic. the only question was, had this dynamic played itself out, or was there more of it to come? Given that the two parties where still fairly evenly matched after this heroic GOP surge, there was good reason even then to think that those caught up in the narrative of GOP dominance were not taking a long view of things.

In fact, this actually represented the high water mark of GOP popularity since the Great Depression, so it is remarkable how dramatically things have changed in such a short period of time.

This sort of dramatic shift has occurred before however. In the 1880s, the Democrats seemed to have pulled even or slightly ahead of the Republicans, only be wiped out following the Panic of 1893, first losing their large majorities in the House, then losing the Presidency in 1896. Similarly, the Democrats enjoyed a landslide victory in 1964, unlike anything they'd seen since FDR more than 20 years earlier, but the next presidential election began a 40-year period dominated by divided government, when three Republican presidents won two terms, and the only Democrat to do so never broke 50%. Thus, this sort of shift is readily compatible with an end-of-cycle realignment.

This can be seen quite dramatically in the following map that shows shifts in margins from 2002 to 2008:

Just one state became more Republican. All the rest became more Democratic.

And here's the underlying data:

More than two-thirds became more Democratic by double digits. The entire middle column--17 states--underwent a shockingly uniform shift, varying less than 3%, from 15.2% to 12.3%. Just above them, another 12 states shifted within a band of 3.6%, from 16.5% to 20.1%. Together, these two narrow bands accounted for more than half the states.

Stepping back a bit to take in the larger picture, I now want to look at 1993, and how things changed from 1993 to 2008--combining the 1993-2002 period that moved toward the Republicans with the 2002-2008 period that moved toward the Democrats. First, here's the map showing the combined shifts:

And the underlying data:

The combined data shows more than 2/3rds of the states (33 out of 48 for which we have comparable data, plus DC) became more Democratic, with almost 1/3 (15 states plus DC) shifting Democratic by double digits, compared to just 5 shifting Republican by that much. This is a decisive shift since 1993, a time period when Democrats were still quite strong across the boards, as can be seen from the following table:

Democrats had double-digit margins in 19 states plus DC. Republicans had double-digit margins in just four states--none of them Southern, however.

Looking at the top 10 states for both parties:

we see that only the top GOP state, Wyoming, is more Republican than the #10 Democratic state, New York, is Democratic. More than half the GOP states are in single digist, while more than half the Democratic states were over 20.

And by census region:

Only one "most Democratic" state was in single digits, while three "most Republican" states were actually Democratic leaning, and four others were in single digits.

In short, the dominance of Democratic party identification in 1993 was broad, deep and undeniable.

The fact that the electorate is now significantly more Democratic than it was in 1993 means that the Democrats really are poised for a long period of partisan dominance--if only their national political leadership had the slightest clue that this was the case. Lacking such a clue, there is really no telling how badly they might alienate those who presently identify with the party.

Here's one final way of looking at what's happened over this period of time, a table recording the unweighted averages of party identification in the various regions. Because it's unweighted, it's not very scientific, but it does give a raw feel that's quite in line with everything else we've seen:

There are just two regions--East South Central and West South Central--that have become more Republican. Even the third Southern region--the South Atlantic, which includes Virginia, Florida and the Carolinas--has become more Democratic, as has every other region. Furthermore, the Mountain region is now the only region that leans Republican. Clearly, the notion of a "center-right nation" was at best a reflection of Presidential level politics (which has always been more personality driven than other levels) combined with an historically brief surge in party identification that has now played itself out, and been more than compensated for by a resurgent Democratic Party.

If only someone would tell the party leadership.

If only the party leadership were listening!

Gallup: Vanishing Red-State America--A Center-Right Nation No More

Paul Rosenberg — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:15:00 GMT

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:

I'll work up a more extensive analysis for this weekend, but this shift is so dramatic, and so sharply at odds with the ongoing Beltway narrative, that I didn't think I should wait till then to toss this out for discussion. As a further indication of what this means, consider Gallup's list of the top 10 states for both parties:

As for the amount of data, Gallup reports:

In 2008, Gallup interviewed more than 350,000 U.S. adults as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking. That includes interviews with 1,000 or more residents of every U.S. state except Wyoming (885) and North Dakota (953), as well as the District of Columbia (689). There were more than 15,000 interviews conducted with residents of California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida.

Of course, one can easily come up with plenty of caveats, as Nate Silver does at 538:

Now then for a couple of caveats. Firstly, Gallup's numbers consist of interviews with all adults -- not registered voters, and certainly not likely voters. Depending on the particular application that we're using this data for, that may be helpful or unhelpful. What this perhaps indicates, however, is that even after all the millions of new voters that the Democrats registered and brought to the polls in 2008, there are still probably some marginal gains to be had, particularly in areas like the deep South that the Obama campaign did not really concentrate in.
Secondly, these totals include "leaners" -- independents who lean toward one party or another, but don't identify themselves as such. This tends to increase the Democratic margin by a couple of points.
Thirdly and perhaps most importantly is a point that both Michael Barone and I have raised at various times: one consequence of the Democratic coalition being larger, particularly as it tends to include a miscellany of groups that don't always see eye-to-eye with one another (African-Americans, Hispanics, coastal liberals, union workers, young voters, etc.), is that it is more difficult to harness the entirety of that coalition in national elections. A Democratic presidential candidate from the North might have trouble appealing to voters in the South. A candidate from the South might have trouble appealing to voters in the North and West. A theoretic "generic Democrat" might have a chance at a rather large majority -- but a "generic Democrat" is an abstraction, and most real Democrats will offend the sensibilities of some or another region. In Barack Obama's case, these were voters in Appalachian and "Highlands" states like West Virginia and Kentucky, states that remain highly Democratic at the state level but which have not recently voted for Northern presidential candidates.

But, rather than get down to the micro-level and pick these apart (I promise a bit of that this weekend), just look at those maps like a board game, and ask yourself: which would you rather be: red or blue?

And then ask, given the map at the top of this post, which should Dems be playing right now, every single sound-bite of every single news cycle? Offense, or defense?

The Economic Crisis Leads to Instability in Centrist Politics

MetaData — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:42:48 GMT

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.
Barack Obama's election means that the presidency has moved away from the extreme right. Obama's cabinet may be pretty much centrist, but at least we've eliminated the ideological wack-jobs, and we are seeing a welcome dose of competency and reality-based thinking. The Republican brand is in the toilet, and the most extreme religious, anti-government and neocon elements are out of direct power.

What's different is the economic crisis

Some have suggested that the economic crisis can serve as a kind of progressive "shock doctrine", a sort of reverse Naomi Klein. Specifically, Fiscal Stimulus and "demand side" economics appear to be necessary tools for recovery. Fiscal Stimulus is another word for Deficit Spending. Therefore, the crisis seems to have invalidated one of the primary justifications and tools used by Conservatives to prevent progressive change.

Conservative Democrats differentiate themselves from the rest of US on three issues (1) Social values (somewhat), (2) Business Friendly (mostly) and (3) Fiscal Conservatism (deeply).

In dealing with the economic crisis, Obama will have to implement fiscal stimulus and deficit spending, which will directly confront Fiscal Conservatism, one of the primary ideological underpinnings of the Centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Supply Side economics IS progressive, or conversely attacking deficit spending has been one of the best ways of preventing the implementation of progressive programs.

Obama proposes to solve the economic crisis will include Univerasal Healthcare, Green technology, Jobs, Infrastructure improvements, daycare, etc. These programs are central to progressive values politics. They will require deficit spending. Therefore, they are a direct confrontation to both the Republican Right wing and the Democratic Right wing.

As progressives we rightly view these projects as the tool for
Democratic votes play out.

Over-Running The Table

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:03:31 GMT

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."
Jed's Story

From the map, Obama did fail to win one battleground state--Missouri--by a few thousand votes. But he picked up one "safe McCain" state to make up for it--Indiana--and he added the Omaha-area CD from "safe McCain" Nebraska, to go one over running the table, so far as the over-all score was concerned, winning 197 of 196 bettleground EVs.

Jed L draws one conclusion from the map, and he's got a good point. But I'd like to draw another. Here's Jed's first:

Perhaps they could have avoided publishing such an embarrassing map if they had taken into account that even though the horserace numbers were close at this point, Democrats had a huge advantage in mobilization and intensity and were unlikely to lose any state that they had won in the four previous elections.
Six states on this battleground list had voted Democratic in the previous four elections -- MI, MN, NJ, OR, PA, and WI. Obama won those states by a combined 56%-43% margin, all by double-digits. If the WaPo had excluded these six states, here's what their electoral vote estimates would have looked like:
GOP Leaning: 174
Dem Leaning: 248
Battlegrounds: 116

This list of battlegrounds would have been far more reasonable, even without Indiana. But unlike the chart that was actually published, this table would have made it clear that Obama was in charge of the campaign
Showing Obama's big advantage might not have been Fair & Balanced™>, but so what? The point of reporting isn't to be Fair & Balanced™. The point of reporting is to accurately present the truth. And that makes Nate Silver one of the best political reporters out there.

Jed's 100% correct, especially in light of Post anti-ombudsman Deborah Howell's post-election hissy fit about how biased her paper had been. But there's another story here as well. The Post actually didn't ignore the fact that there were a handful of traditionally safe Dem seats in their "battleground" column. Indeed, that was pretty much their point:

Recent races for the White House have turned on a small group of swing states, and the 2008 general election is likely to be no different. But campaign aides to both Barack Obama and John McCain say their candidate can "change the map" in November and pick off states that traditionally have fallen into the other party's column.

This was the underlying supposition on which their map--and much of the following campaign coverage--was built. Of course it was a wildly mistaken supposition, but it was not entirely arbitrary. McCain had spent the better part of decade positioning himself as "maverick" who could appeal to independents, and the press loved him for it. This positioning went back to a very conscious strategy to pick up Perot voters, the same strategy the GOP had used to capture Congress in 1994.

It was not an illusion that the GOP had captured Congress, which is why I say that the map-changing supposition was not arbitrary. It was not simply based on competing campaign spin. The spin had a rationale. But the reporting never explained that rationale. Well, now is the time to do so. And explaining the roots of that rationale leads to a slightly longer story than the one that Jed had to tell.

Roots Of A Problematic Realignment

According to Walter Dean Burnham's account of realignment theory, realignments happen because party systems reach their limits in terms of their problem-solving abilities. An early warning of this is generally the emergence of prominent third-party movements--such as that of Ross Perot. However, Burnham was also the first to cite the period just concluded as an anomalous one--characterized by divided government, rather than one dominant and one subdominant party. He therefore referred to 1968 as a "de-aligning" election. And this produced a deeply anomalous situation, a party system that never functioned well enough to deal with the problems it faced.

Now, to be honest, the American political system is never all that effective in problem-solving. For example, even with the election of our first black President, the legacy of slavery is still with us. Just look at a map of counties where Obama did worse than Kerry. But we do, generally, at least begin to make progress on managing the most intense, intrusive consequences of those underlying problems.

But 1968 was different. That de-aligning election did not come about because the previous party system had failed to solve the problems before it. Quite the contrary, that de-alignment happened because the party system was too ambitious at problem-solving. It wanted to solve problems that some people really didn't want solved. This was the downfall of LBJ's Great Society--not that it might fail, but that it might succeed. For the Great Society was 100% American--it was John Winthrop's shining City on A Hill, only not just for a select few, but for the most sprawling diversity of humanity ever gathered together in one nation.

Oh, sure, there was a war--Vietnam--that was hugely unpopular. But that war was not one the LBJ wanted to fight. It was a war he thought that he had to fight in order to remain in office and pass his Great Society agenda. And even with Vietnam, the Great Society could have continued under Humphrey, were it not for the southern-centered defections over race, capitalized on by Wallace, as well as Nixon's sabotage of the Paris Peace Talks.

Nixon resented the grandeur of LBJ's vision. Johnson was born about as much of an outsider as Nixon was, but he was much more of a classic American optimist. Although Nixon's whole career would revolve around portraying others as un-American, it was his own lack of characteristic American optimism that made think he could only win by tearing others down. And that was the very basis of his politics.

Rather than continue LBJ's trajectory of confronting our contradictions and overcoming them, Nixonian politics meant a new trajectory--a trajectory of denial, deceit and projection. One of the most central features of this, early on, was the recasting of the Vietnam War. Nixon knew two things: it could not be won, military, and it could not be lost, politically. There had to be an illusion of victory, even in defeat, and part of gaining that victory required the recasting of the core mission of the war itself.

Enter Ross Perot. Perot's activism on the POW issue played a major role in Nixon's effort to recast Vietnam as a war fought to rescue American prisoners of war held by Hanoi. I know it sounds ludicrous, but this actually happened. It wasn't the only thing that happened. But it was a major theme, made all the more politically necessary as anti-war Vietnam Vets emerged as Nixon's most fierce critics. Perot's mythologizing of the POWs--especially the historically unprecedented conflating of MIAs and POWS--allowed us to forget the monstrous atrocities that we were even then still committing in Vietnam.

If we were fighting to rescue our captured soldiers, then we were returned to the theme of white America's first best-selling genre--the captivity narratives born of the early conflict with New England Native Americans, known as King Phillip's War. And the theme of the captivity narratives was never that we had wronged those who in return had captured some of us. No. The theme of the captivity narratives was that we needed to get right with God, and then we could go back to pleasantly plundering everything in sight, always careful not to enjoy it too much.

Fast Forward From Nixon/Perot To Reagan/Perot

This is the vision that Ronald Reagan fully embodied. He represented a full-blown re-mythologizing of absolutely everything. And those who dared point out that everything he said was a lie, they were just a bunch of kill-joys.

Except, they were right. One of the key promises Reagan made was that we could painlessly just do away with all that caring about the poor stuff. We could care about ourselves, and the poor would just take care of themselves. We could cut taxes, and the budget would just magically balance itself.

It didn't happen.

But it was such a powerful myth, such a happy-faced version of Hitler's Big Lie concept, that Democrats didn't know how to fight it. And thus the deficits boomed--producing, ironically, a classic Keyensian-style expansion, albeit a weak one, which was credited, deceptively, to the free market ideology of Milton Friedman. At the same time, Reagan's boundless, unfounded optimism also meant we paid no attention to the devastation of our domestic industrial base. Instead, we welcomed a new economic dogma that told us that trade was always good--even if we were always the ones on the wrong side of a multi-billion dollar trade imbalance.

The American people remained highly ambivalent throughout all this. They liked Reagan's optimism. His policies, not so much. Throughout the 1980s, public support for increased social spending grew continuously, whether anyone was listening or not. Liberal Democrats--not your yuppified latter-day latte drinkers, but Tip O'Neill type children of the New Deal were listening to the people, but were at a loss to craft a new presidential election-winning narrative. Meanwhile, conservative Democrats argued that the problem was not how to puncture Reagan's happy-talk illusion--but how to join it.

Out of this impasse--after George H.W. Bush proved much less a showman than Reagan--H. Ross Perot again stepped forth, leading the charge to cut the deficit, and fight the outsourcing of American jobs. It was, in fact, a profoundly anti-Reagan conservative agenda. But it was also, in a way, a conservative anti-conservative agenda. It styled itself an All-American, no-nonsense, no-ideology, just hands-on, pragmatic, fix-what's broken, no pointy-headed-types allowed type of no-nothing populism.

While Tip O'Neill-style liberal Democrats could have won Perot voters back by showing how their policies could fix the problems facing us, the conservative Democrats strategy of emulating Reagan could not. Bill Clinton split the difference. First, he ran a Tip O'Neill-style campaign, "Putting People First," and then he governed within the box that Reagan built, albeit with a different end in mind. As Mike Lux has previously explained, shrinking projected investment spending, turning increasingly to deficit reduction, and, of course, passing NAFTA without any of the previously promised offsetting labor or environmental safeguards.

Newt Gingrich jumped at the opening this created, and began aggressively courting Perot and his legions. After all, now that a Democrat was President, why not make balancing the budget job one? Of course the Perotistas got snookered by Newt. The "Contract With America" was written just for them. No Christian conservative elements appeared in it at all. But once Newt & Co were in power, things changed. And so did Newt's majority, as the GOP House majority became increasingly more Southern. It was a strategy that could only succeed by plunging deeper and deeper into fantasy--such as the six-year obsession to impeach Bill Clinton for something, anything that could prove he was evil, evil, evil.

In the 2000 election, John McCain wanted to position himself in line with Perot, capturing the broad middle, and while taking advantage of the Newt-lead over-reach to pick up conservative support as well. But Bush out-maneuvered him. By being a governor well outside the Beltway, taking un-earned credit for education reforms that Perot had actually had a big hand in, and adopting the language of "compassionate conservatism" Bush pulled off a far more skillful finessing of the Gingrich/anti-Clinton disaster.

But, of course, all that was pure show. Beneath the surface, Bush was merely more of the same than anyone could imagine--more extreme, more irresponsible, more delusional in his own grandeur than even Newt Gingrich ever was. Then, eight years after he missed his shot in 2000, John McCain wanted to try again. But it was eight years too late for that. Things had moved on. Positions had hardened. The chance to meld Perotistas with social conservatives--if it had ever really existed in the first place--was long gone by 2008. Against the right opponent, those two constituencies still might be united in voting "no", but there was no way left to unite them in voting "yes." George W. Bush had seen to that. He had acted out in spades what had previously only been implicit, or acted out symbolically. He had recapitulated Reagan with all the vicious charm of Richard Nixon.

And so, the Washington Post battleground map reflected the last gasp of GOP strategizing along the path first charted by Richard M. Nixon in 1968. The fact that Obama swept virtually all the states in question--plus one state and one CD that was not--clearly shows the end of that era. This is what realignment looks like. The map has changed. More importantly, what is behind the map has changed in ways that still remain obscure, even to those whose campaign helped change it.

But that's only the beginning. As with the realignment of 1896, most of the winning party's establishment has formed all of its assumptions under the old order, and has not the slightest clue of what a new order should look like. Barack Obama may not be William McKinley, but he's not Teddy Roosevelt, either. At least not yet. And this is even more true of those he has surrounded himself by.

The 1896 realignment was one of the more uncertain, ambiguous ones in American history. It was halfway between the sharp clarity of 1932, and the utter confusion--no, make that delusion of 1968. Right now, 2008 seems very much like 1896. What has been rejected, what is now the past, is far more certain than what has been affirmed, than what the future is. For that, the real struggle has only just begun.

Realignment Redux

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:58:26 GMT

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.
Realignment Refresher

Before turning to the look at what Cost and Rothenberg wrote, I want to provide a quick refresher on how I see realignment-a view that's primarily based on Walter Dean Burnham' work. The main points are:

(1) Realigning elections generally define the end of one party system and the beginning of another. The election of 1800 was the sole exception, as the first party system hadn't fully gelled at the time of the first partisan election in 1796.

Party systems are defined by a constellation of issues, political narratives, semi-stable party coalitions-usually with one dominant and one subdominant-and stable or slowly-changing methods of political organization and communication. They last roughly 32-40 years, before succumbing to an accumulation of new problems and issues that draw out new constituencies, typically manifest in increased third party activity. The following table summarizes the six party systems we have had so far:

Table 1: Party Systems & Balance Of Victories: House, Senate And President Summary Table
	Number of Victories			Percent of Victories
Party System	Dem	Fed/ Whig/ Rep	Split	Dem	Fed/ Whig/ Rep	Split
First: 1794-1822	12	2	1	80	13	7
Second:1826-1858 *	9	1	7	53	6	41
Third: 1860-1894	1	9	8	6	50	44
Fourth: 1896-1930	3	12	3	17	67	17
Fifth: 1932-1966	13	1	4	72	6	22
Sixth: 1968-2006	3	2 1/4	13 3/4	16	12	72
* 1824 Election anomalous, not included. See text.

The Sixth Party System, just concluding, is the only one without a clear dominant and subordinate party, as divided government was overwhelmingly more common.

(2) Realigning elections are not necessarily landslides, though they can be. More often, they are followed by landslides, which confirm the initial turn in direction signaled by the realigning election.

(3) Realignments are seen in the House as well as the Presidency. The House is where we see evidence of realignment closest to the people, requiring at least two consecutive wave elections. But it's Presidential elections that definitively alter the course of national politics. Realignment either appears first in the House, then the Presidential election, or in both simultaneously.

Rothenberg's Argument: On the One Hand/On the Other

Rothernberg begins his article by admitting the obvious: this was no mere hiccup. He then goes on to cite several different sorts of evidence of the gains Democrats have made, electoral, demographic, and in terms of issue support. He begins like this:

The big question that everyone is asking is whether this month's general election marked the beginning of a political realignment that will create a new dominant party. Have Americans shifted their loyalties and fundamental assumptions about the parties and about the government, or did we just witness a short-term reaction to years of bad news?
Let's be clear: The election results in 2006 and 2008 constitute the kind of one-two punch that is rare in modern American political history. It would be silly to portray this year's election as a minor hiccup. The nation elected a liberal African-American Democrat from the North as president, and it gave him a majority of all votes cast.
Moreover, in the past two elections, Democrats gained at least a dozen Senate seats and at least 50 House seats, taking total control of Congress. At the state level, they now have 4,090 state legislators to the GOP's 3,221.

But after touching all the bases mentioned above, he says:

Democrats and liberals would prefer the story to end here, but it doesn't. Other data paint a different picture.

And then goes on to make four main counter-points:

First, in an election with a highly unpopular Republican president and a severely damaged Republican brand, the Democratic share of the presidential vote increased from 48 percent of the vote in 2000 and 2004 to 53 percent of the vote in 2008, hardly a landslide figure or evidence of a new dominant political coalition.

I, for one, think the Democrats seriously under-performed what they should have. Although much improved over their past performance, they were still far too cautious for my tastes. I think that Obama should have gotten 55% at a minimum, and could have gotten it by pressing McCain more forcefully for his decades-long deregulation mania, among other things.

But just because the Dems fell short of what they could have done doesn't mean this wasn't a realigning election. The three most frequently cited examples of realigning elections (see below) are 1860, 1896 and 1932. The winning percentages in those elections were 39.8, 51.0%, and 57.4%. If the Wall Street meltdown had begun in 2005 or 2006, it seems quite likely that Obama could have made up at least half the gap between his 52.7% and FDR's 57.4%. Maybe even all of it. As it was, Obama did better than two out of the top three examples. I said above, "Realigning elections are not necessarily landslides, though they can be."

Second, one of Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) biggest problems among core groups was a 5-point drop among white men. President Bush carried 62 percent of white men in 2004, while McCain won only 57 percent of them.
The drop easily could have been caused by growing concerns about the economy, as well as the lesser salience of national security concerns between 2004 and 2008, rather than a fundamental shift in partisan loyalties.

As Chris has pointed repeatedly, the GOP's greatest problem is not among their core groups-it's that their core groups are shrinking as a whole compared to ours. So even if this 5-point drop among white men was temporary, the longer-term drop in the relative size of the white male electorate is not.

Third, the lack of any statistically significant shift in self-described ideology of voters also argues against a fundamental realignment. In 2004, 21 percent of voters called themselves liberals, while 34 percent said they were conservatives. This year, 22 percent said they were liberals and the same 34 percent identified as conservative.

Unfortunately, we have very little evidence about how realignments affect people's ideological identifications, if at all. What is important, however, is party identification and voting-although even here that's not necessarily immediately true. When it comes to both those, Democrats are doing fairly well, but Rothenberg comes up with a new "problem":

Finally, the 2008 exit poll found far more Democrats turned out than Republicans. In the exit poll four years ago, self-identified Democrats and Republicans each constituted 37 percent of the sample, but this year 39 percent of voters were Democrats compared with 32 percent of Republicans. Fewer Republican voters meant fewer votes for Republican candidates.

And that's a problem for a Democratic realignment? How?

Rothenberg:

While this change could reflect a fundamental shift in self-identified partisanship, it could merely be a dip in GOP turnout caused by any number of factors (possibly dissatisfaction with McCain's candidacy, the selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate or the issue agenda of 2008) or a one-time shift in partisanship. Party ID, after all, reflects the popularity of the party at any moment, and the damage to the Republican brand certainly could have caused a short-term dip in GOP identification.

Except that Pew and Rasmussen both show long-term data telling us that the party ID gap opened up a couple of years ago:

Furthermore, the GOP only got party ID close for a few years. The future looks even better for Dems, given the demographic trends cited repeatedly by Chris, as well as the huge youth vote margin.

Rothenberg continues:

At this point, it is far too premature to claim that 2008 was anything more than a dramatic reaction to an unpopular president and to a party hurt by its own ineptness. Obama will have a chance to change the nation's political landscape. But his election, by itself, isn't necessarily a sign of a new partisan alignment.

But, of course, that's just the thing: no election by itself is a sign of a new partisan alignment. Realignments are creatures of larger historical patterns, along with more immediate occurrences that get folded into them. The truth is that 2004 was probably a much better candidate for realignment up through September 10, 2001. 9/11 altered the pattern, but did not obliterate it. History has patterns to it, but they are always loose enough to allow for significant variation, as well as human action, individual and collective, for good and ill. So it has been this time, too.

Cost's Cut-Rate Theorizing

Cost first sets out to muddle things by calling the very notion of realignment into question:

Barack Obama's decisive victory last Tuesday has some wondering whether this was a realigning election.
"Realignment" is an overused term, and some scholars have questioned whether it is a profitable category to apply to elections. Temple University's Robin Kolodny wrote this a few years ago:
Realignment has been in trouble as a theory for explaining party identification and electoral behavior for some time. The most obvious problem is that there has been no full realignment since 1932, and no consensus has emerged on what, if any, partial realignment has taken place in 1968, 1974, 1980, or 1994.

Yale University's David Mayhew wrote a cogent critique of realignment theory in 2004, arguing that the facts don't fit the story so well.

The problem with all the above is that it's written without regard to (a) the cycle of party systems, and (b) the combined importance of House and Presidential elections. Mayhew's arguments (which fill a book, but are summarized here) are election-centric, marginalizing the very historical context that's key to making sense of realignment.

Things become much clearer simply by keeping points (a) and (b) in mind. Viewed from this perspective, it should be evident that none the elections mentioned above--1968, 1974, 1980, or 1994-fit the second criteria for a realigning election. However, in terms of party systems, it's quite clear that from 1932 to 1966 the Democrats were the dominant party, while 1968 onward was an era dominated by divided government, unlike any other in our history. (See Table 1 above.) Therefore, it makes eminent good sense to refer to 1968 specifically as a de-aligning election, as what it produced was a dealigned electorate, rather than a realigned one. We cab also refer to it generically as a realigning election, but should only do so with respect to the characteristics it shares with the true realigning elections: those that come from its pivotal role in initiating a new party system.

As for the other elections listed above-1974, 1980, and 1994-these are all significant elections on the time-scale within a particular party system. Again, referring back to Table 1, we see that all party systems involve some back-and-forth, with subordinate parties holding power some of the time, along with divided government. Therefore, the shifting of power within a party system is not unusual. Such shifts in power do not alter the underlying dynamic. The closeness of the 1976 presidential election after the Democratic House wave election in 1974 indicated that the basic dynamic of divided government had not been overturned, but merely disrupted. Likewise, the Democrat's wave election victory in the House in 1982 was a normal corrective indicating that 1980 had not fundamentally altered that dynamic either. Similarly, Clinton's easy re-election in 1996 negated any thought that 1994 could have been a realignment away from the dynamic of divided government.

In short, Cost has tossed out a barrage of objections for which answers do indeed exist, answers which take us beyond the perspective of merely looking at one election in isolation, which is the key to understanding realigning elections. Interestingly, however, it is just such a larger perspective that Cost then returns too-but not one that is fully integrated across time. Instead Cost chooses to look at three of the five realigning (plus one dealigning) elections in our history, not in terms of the party systems they ended or began, but simply in terms of certain big issues they involved.

This sort of arbitrary choice of three of the most extreme examples naturally has the effect of distorting all the conclusions drawn from it. It's perfectly legitimate to use extreme examples to highlight certain aspects of any phenomena, but such an approach always carries with it risks and blindspots. If used consciously, with the awareness of its inherent limitations, such an approach can be quite valuable. But if used in isolation, even in denial of a larger context, it was easily lead us far astray, which is what Cost proceeds to do, however unintentionally.

I'll skip quickly through the brief particulars of each, then focus on how he ties them together. First, 1860:

Upon James Polk's election in 1844, the Union was equally balanced between slave and free states. The addition of so much territory during his term disrupted that balance. The South wanted to extend slavery to the Pacific. A growing segment in the North wanted to limit it to existing slave states...
By 1860, the stage was set....
Lincoln won less than 40% of the popular vote, not having appeared on the ballot in most Southern states, but his Electoral College victory proved how politically powerful a unified North could be: 180 for Lincoln, 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas.

Lincoln's 40% "landslide" (actually, 39.8%, but who's counting?) should forever remind people that realigning elections and landslides are anything but synonymous. What is significant is not the size of the victory, but the change in direction, the irrevocable close of a door on the past. That, however, is not Cost focuses on, as we shall see.

Next, 1896:

By the 1880s, the Democrats had returned to electoral competitiveness by accepting many of the political premises of industrial development. The end of Reconstruction and the Panic of 1873 ultimately gave them control over the House for eight of the next ten Congresses. The lone Democratic President of the era - Grover Cleveland of New York - favored the gold standard, which was good for industrial interests in the East but hard on farmers in the South and Midwest.
The grievances of farmers and rural people found expression via the Populist Party.... in 1896 [when] William Jennings Bryan captured the Democratic nomination, promising "free silver." His opponent, William McKinley, supported the gold standard. The election of 1896 was fought over the currency issue, and the result produced a sharp industrial-agrarian divide.
Though the South is joined this time by the Mountain West and the Great Plains, the divide again favors the North. McKinley won 271 electors to Bryan's 176.

This was yet another stunning "landslide"-McKinley won 51.0%, of the popular vote. Note that two examples in a row have a sectional theme that proves decisive in the electoral college.

Now, 1932:

This was a significant election not simply because the Depression began under the GOP's watch. It also had to do with the party's response. President Herbert Hoover failed to address the crisis to the public's satisfaction. Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, who had a great last name and a solid reputation of his own, having mobilized his government to fight the Depression in the Empire State.
Unlike in 1860 or 1896, a very broad transregional consensus emerged. As famed newspaper editor William Allen White later observed, the election of 1932 signaled "a firm desire on the part of the American people to use government as an agency for human welfare."

Here the pattern of the two previous elections is broken twice-First, FDR won a true popular landslide, 57.4% of the popular vote (as well as winning xxx in the electoral college). Second, as noted by Cost, it was not a regionally-based consensus.

So what do these elections have in common, then? According to Cost:

While the particulars of these elections are different, they tell a similar story about the political parties. In all three, the parties had to manage issues of great importance that could not be ignored. This is why we remember Lincoln's "House Divided," Bryan's "Cross of Gold," and Roosevelt's "New Deal." They each took clear stands on issues whose resolutions would determine the course the nation would set.
What's more, there was little room for common ground those years. Either slavery would expand or it wouldn't. Either the government would authorize the free coinage of silver or it wouldn't. Either it would take a more active role in the economy or it wouldn't. Practically speaking, the differences could not be split.

This is not quite true, however. Bi-metalism was not the only issue in 1896-the tariff and government regulation and relief were also major issues raised by Bryan. And while supporters of the gold standard insisted it was all or nothing, there certainly could have been a limited allowance for silver-backed currency. It didn't have to be an all-or-none proposition.

Likewise, in 1932, the issue of government activism clearly could have been a matter of degree, scope and purpose. In short, the expansion of slavery was by nature a lot more inflexible than the issues underlying the elections of 1896 and 1932-and this was so in past because the preceding decade had been dominated by failed attempts to find some workable compromise for controlled expansion of slavery. Yet, it should be noted that the issue of the expansion of slavery was itself an evasion of the underlying issue of slavery itself. In short, these were elections of great moment, when great change was afoot and could not be avoided. Yet, that did not mean that it was straightforwardly addressed.

Lincoln's "House Divided," speech had been given in 1858. In 1860, he secured the Republican nomination by striking a more measured tone. It was the South's hysterical reaction to his election that made it seem far more sharp and decisive than it actually might have been. Roosevelt's "New Deal" was little more than a placeholding phrase in his acceptance speech until after the election, and even then it was extremely fluid, changing substantially from the first to the second incarnations.

Many commentators here have raised the point that Roosevelt ran on a balanced budget and didn't say much about what he intended to do, striving to portray him as a more Obama-like figure. They have a point that Cost's presentation tends to obscure, even though Roosevelt also had a clear record as Governor of New York that spoke of sweeping, progressive government activism. Thus, both Lincoln and Roosevelt were undeniably figures of fundamental change who campaigned in a way that downplayed the scariness of change that some people always feel more than the hope and opportunity. The same can clearly be said about Obama.

Bryan, on the other hand, failed to win, in part because he represented a weaker political coalition, and in part because he did not seek to temper his message of fundamental change. 1896 is still legitimately seen as a realigning election, but it remains difficult to explain why, unless one considers the party system perspective.

What Cost says next is certainly true, and indeed it's an important part of what happens when the old party system starts to run out of steam, and can't respond to new issues as they arise-which is why third parties tend to become more active before most realignments. However, it needs to be tempered by what I've just said. Cost:

So, these issues upset the normal functioning of the parties. By their nature, parties select issue positions and emphases in pursuit of electoral majorities. Obviously, no party can undertake a full-scale reinvention of itself. However, in pursuit of a majority, it can frequently "finesse" matters. It can slightly alter some positions, it can equivocate or obfuscate on others, and it can emphasize particular issues or personalities depending upon the audience. The goal is to string together an electoral majority among the diverse elements of our large Republic.
In these years, this process was disrupted to some degree. Issues of great salience dominated the political discourse and forced the parties to stake out relatively clear positions. There was little room for finessing. Thus, votes from those years can be seen as opinions on the critical issues more directly than votes from other years.

One can clearly see where Cost is going with this. There was little room for finessing then, but differences were blurred in this campaign. Yet, as I've argued above, both Lincoln and Roosevelt did take the edge off their campaigns-knowing full well that this would not mitigate the objective needs once they took office. Bryan did not take the edge off, and he lost. McKinley won in part because his candidacy was sufficiently blurry-it was a victory progress, and Bryan was cast as a voice of the past. Thus, McKinley was a "progressive" without all the reformist aspects that term would soon acquire. And, indeed, the very blurriness of what McKinley's win meant, and what "progressive" meant was to haunt the entirety of the Fourth Party System.

Cost continues:

So, examining the parties and the issues they handled this cycle might help us understand how 2008 stacks up against these three elections. Did the parties behave similarly this year as they did then? Were the issues similar?
I think the answers to both questions are negative, which cuts against the hypothesis that this election was a "realignment." For starters, there was no central, defining issue that disrupted the normal party process. Instead, both candidates covered a variety of issues, few in any depth. There was also a scarcity of clear contrasts between Obama and McCain. Indeed, on the subject that might have emerged as a realigning issue - the financial bailout - they voted the same way.
Relatedly, both candidates made the search for common ground a defining feature of their candidacies. McCain would cite Hillary Clinton just as often as Obama would mention Richard Lugar. There was no House Divided, no Cross of Gold, no New Deal. There was the promise of pragmatic governance and a change in tone toward bipartisan conciliation.
This evidence disfavors the idea that 2008 was like these previous elections.

The evidence Cost sites is certainly true. But does it mean what he thinks it means? I would argue not, and for one simple reason: it ignores the nature of the party system we've been living under, a party system dominated by divided government. Divided government has had a paradoxical result: it fails to accomplish much in dealing with fundamental problems, but it manages to project the blame onto "partisan extremism" when it is actually the lack of a strong dominant party that's primarily at fault, if we look at how our political system usually operates.

Under this divided setup, it is relatively more difficult for voters to assign praise and blame, which is why the generic claims of "partisanship" and "polarization" are so rhetorically appealing. The fact that Obama and McCain both ran as "trans-partisan" "reformers" was thus a reflection of the limitations of Sixth Party System. Both were trying to break out of its limitations, but doing so by accepting the flawed logic that the system itself has generated to excuse its failings. Thus, Cost is correct that the pressing issues were suppressed, but what he ignores is the degree to which suppression of the issues has been structurally reinforced throughout the Sixth Party System. One cannot understand realigning elections without understanding the party systems that precede them, and differences in party systems will produce differences in realigning elections.

The most dramatic proof of this is the dealigning election of 1968. It was so different from other realigning elections that it doesn't deserve to be called one in any meaningful sense except that it brought one era to an end and began a new one. And yet, this difference is perfectly understandable, in that the New Deal coalition, which dominated the Fifth Party System, combined Northern liberals and labor with Southern conservatives. As the South gradually industrialized, and more and more blacks moved north, and as the Cold War took hold, and America had to compete with Russia in appealing to the Third World, it was inevitably that eventually this odd-couple pairing would fall apart.

Yet, the longstanding decentralized and regionalized nature of American politics effectively decoupled the presidential and congressional trajectories, resulting in a presidential realignment, without a congressional one-something never seen before. Furthermore, once established, this divided government structure took on a life of its own, as accountability became increasingly difficult for people to assign. And thus, we had divided government under most of Clinton's term, as well as during all of Nixon, Reagan's and Bush I's.

The fact that the dealigning election of 1968 can only be understood in a party system context holds an important lesson for us in thinking about 2008. It is far more different from 1860, 1896 and 1932 than 2008 is. It did not produce-even fleetingly-a unified dominant political party. And yet, it did produce a distinct break with all that went before it. If it belongs to the family of realigning elections-however qualified that belonging may be-then we need to approach 2008 in similar terms, viewing it in the context of the party system preceding it.

In effect, Cost is rejecting 2008 as a realigning election because he rejects realignment itself. Seeking clarification by looking at extreme cases, he essentially abandons the sort of contextual approach that really gets at the heart of the matter.

Of course, Cost is hardly alone in this. Quite the opposite: Cost's ready abandonment of theoretical frameworks is directly analogous to the "transpartisan" abandonment of "ideological rigidity" and "partisan extremism." It represents the kind of small-bore pragmatism that is incapable of successfully grappling with problems on a systematic basis adequate to actually solving them.

This is the basic mindset of the old order, brought in by Nixon and the Southern Strategy. It is a mindset that is dying, even though Barack Obama still embraces it himself. The problems looming now are simply and obviously too big for such an approach. Even apart from their differing political philosophies, John McCain was simply incapable of ever recognizing this. Obama, I believe, is not. And thus, the practical necessities of governing and dealing with the outsized problems we face will move Obama forward toward the more systematic-and hence "ideological"-thinking that a new order requires.

The Perot Pseudo-Realignment-Lessons For Today

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:04:45 GMT

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.
Realignment Background

In Three's a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone argue that third parties play a critical role in facilitating political change that's normally resisted by the two-party system. This is consanant with Walter Dean Burnham's realignment theory, which sees a succession of distinct party systems, which grow ossified over time, until the accumulating tensions result in a realignment of forces, around a new constellation of issues that have not been dealt with by the previous dominant and subdominant parties. Burnham sees the emergence of third parties as a symptom of the growing ossification. In the first two party systems (1796-1828 and 1828-1860), one of the major parties disappeared entirely as they came to a close, while the Third Party System (1860-1896) saw the merging of a rising third party-the Populists-with the subdominant Democratic Party, under the banner of William Jennings Bryan. Furthermore, the Fifth Party System (1932-1968) ended with emergence of the segregationist candidacy of George Wallace, a constituency that Nixon absorbed via his "Southern Strategy."

Things were a good deal messier with the Fourth Party system (1896-1932), which saw much stronger and varied third party activity in the middle decade (particuarly in 1912) than it did toward the end, and during the Sixth Party System (1968-2008), which similarly saw the highpoint of third party activity in 1992, a full 16 years prior to the realigning election which has just ended this period. The reasons for these anomalies are similar, in my opinion: both the elections that began these party systems were inherently more ambiguous than the other ones, with greater tensions within the dominant and subdominant party coalitions than during other party systems. Indeed, the 1968 election can better be thought of as a "de-aligning" election, in that it gave birth to a period in which party identification was significantly weakened, and divided government became the rule, rather than the exception. Thus initial divisions within a small, yet significant portion of the electorate had consequences that spread the blurring more generally. This was capitalized on in 1980, as I have described in the previous diary, when Keynsian economics was hijacked, disguised and used to confuse and confound the already fragmented Democratic Party, as described in the introductory paragraphs of this diary.

The Perot phenomena emerged in large part because of this confused state-though economics alone was not the sole factor involved. The book Three's A Crowd does not focus on the broader sorts of issues just described, but is generally (though not perfectly) consistent with them. I will quote some passages, and present some graphs to show how their argument fits into and provides supporting detail for the broader framework of realignment as I understand it.

Ross Perot, the 1994 Election And Beyond

The importance of the 1994 election can be seen most dramatically in the sharp increase in Southern GOP seats that it produced. Although the trend had long been underway, this represented a sharp shift that was only further consolidated in the following elections:

This is readily observed backdrop for the more precise analysis presented below.

At first, Perot appeared to have a stronger affinity with the Democrats, once Clinton emerged as the nominee. He even went so far as to withdraw from the race for a period of time. However, after the 1992 election, the Clinton Administration alienated both Perot and his supporters, most strikingly by pushing through NAFTA without any meaningful labor or environmental provisions, which they had promised during the campaign. Even though more Republicans than Democrats voted for NAFTA, the Clinton/Gore leadership was decisive in pushing the agreement through Congress-something Bush could never have accomplished.

The book then has a rather extensive discussion of how different forces within the Republican Party struggled over the question of whether to make a play for engaging Perot and his supporters. For example:

"As the dynamic of third parties suggests, after Perot identified and mobilized a large constituency, both major parties bid for its support in subsequent elections. The Republicans, as the party out of power in both houses of Congress and the presidency, had the greater opportunity and incentive to appeal aggressively to the Perot constituency. Beginning with the February 1993 Republican postelection retreat, a group of Republican leaders, spearheaded by Newt Gingrich and John Kasich, established close ties with Perot and his UWSA organizations. Despite initial reluctance form other party leaders, including Bob Dole and Haley Barbour, Gingrich and his collegaues brought the Republcian Party into line behind a Perot-base strategy. Most impresdsive in this effort was the Contract with America, which reflected both the form of Perot's checklist for candidates at the end of his book United We Stand America and many of the same issue priorities of Perot and his supporters, while ignoring issues--such as abortion and free trade--where differences between the GOP base and the Perot movement were sharp."

This was, in effect, an example of profound ideological deception. In fact, one can argue that the Contract With America was not very strongly believed in by the Republicans who advanced it. Many, for example, who pledged voluntarily to abide by term limits would later go on to seek continued re-election. More striking, arguably, was the greater importance that these Republicans placed on the missing issues-abortion, free trade, etc.-as opposed to the issues included in the Contract. This would eventually be reflected in the erosion of GOP seats held outside the South, and they were replaced by more Southern seats. But all that had not yet come to pass.

The authors go on to argue:

"The 1994 Republican landslide two years after Ross Perot's remarkable 1992 campaign was no coincidence, nor was it simply the culmination of long-term partisan trends. Rather, the GOP victory was firmly rooted in Perot's electoral success two years before and in the dynamics of third parties.

Figure 8.3 connects the size of the 1992 Perot vote in congressional districts with the Republican vote share and the chanced the district flipped from Democratic to Republican control in the 1994 elections. Only 2.2 percent of Democratic districts where Perot received 10 percent or less of the district vote flipped to the Republicans in 1994, while 42 percent of Democratic districts where Perot ran most strongly in 1992 switched to the GOP. The question is whether this relationship between the 1992 Perot vote in districts and Republican success in 1994 holds up in a more fully controlled analysis."

The authors then go on to demonstrate that it does. After doing that, they go one step further, and ask the question, "What would have happened if Perot's 1992 vote hadn't been that large?" They answer:

"Had Perot won the same popular vote as he captured in 1996 (8.4 percent, less than half of what he actually received in 1992), we estimate that the Republicans would have picjed up about twenty-nine seats over what they held in 1992, leaving Democratic control intact. If the Republicans had gained twenty-nine seats, their performance would not have been exceptional for a midtern election--the average number of seats lost by the president's party between 1946 and 1990 was twenty-six. If Perot had received the same popular vote as John Anderson did in 1980, the Republican total would have been even lower. Had Perot won the same popular-vote share that George Wallace secured in the 1968 presidential elections (13.5 percent), the Republicans would have won a bare majority of House seats. By our estimate, if the Perot vote in 1993 had been below about 13.2 percent, the Republicans probably would not have won control of the House in 1994.
"In sum, we have shown that the Republican victory in the 1994 elections resulted from the party's successful bid for the Perot constituency's support. That bid reflected coordinated actions by national party leaders in the form of the Contract with America, and it came in the form of individual decisions by strong potential House candfidates on the GOP side who saw opportunity signaled by the size of the Perot vote in their districts. Districts with the largest concentrations of Perot voters responded, in turn, by producing the change in party control and the GOP House victory."

The authors also go on to show that there is a correlation between Perot votes in 1994, and presidential votes in 1996 and 2000. Without the influence of Perot in 1994, they conclude, Bush would not have been "elected" in 2000.:

Conclusions

Several points can be drawn from this analysis.

First, that Perot's 1992 run had a significant realigning impact, but that this impact amounted to more of a reshuffling from one unbalanced state to another. It did not result in Clinton's defeat in 1996, nor did it result in a majority vote for Bush in 2000. Thus, it and its resultant shits to the GOP appear to have more in common with "failed realignments" like the Democratic victory in 1912 or the GOP victory in 1952 than it does with successful realignments. The bare Republican majority it created was highly unstable, and propelled the party to increasingly self-contradictory policies over the following decade and a half. These internal contradictions within the GOP appear to have taken the place of a resurgent third party-as can be seen most vividly in sharp divisions visible in the GOP presidential primary of 2008.

Second, it is obvious that Clinton did not suffer as a result of trying to govern too far left in 1993-1994. Rather, Clinton shifted to the right of where he promised to go-most notably by passing NAFTA-and thereby opened up space for the GOP to make a direct play for Perot's support. Thus, the same party that created a huge national debt, and outsourced millions of manufacturing jobs was able to gain the votes of millions of Perot voters who were most upset by precisely those same policies, precisely because Clinton moved right and aligned himself with the very policies that Perot voters most objected to. (This was not the sole fact, as Mike Lux recently pointed out-there was also a sharp drop in base Democratic voter turnout, due some the exact same reasons, as well as failure to deliver on promises such as health care.)

Third, although the timing and other factors strongly suggest that 2008 is a true realigning election, there remains a very high probability that if not handled properly, it could be a very ambiguous realignment, much more like 1896 or 1968 than 1932 or 1860. The blurring of alternatives currently being promoted by the political establishment is precisely the sort of thing that leaves voting blocks in a prolonged state of flux, and that is precisely what leads to policy incoherence of the sort seen throughout much of the Fourth Party Sytem (1896-1932) and the Sixth Party System (1968-2008).

What is needed--not just for progressives, but for the political system as a whole to function effectively in making decisive choices and forging proactive policies--is a significant clarification of ideological differences and alternatives. Such a clarification need not be incompatible with a subsequent negotiation of policies that can satisfy people across a signficant spectrum of opinion. Indeed, such clarification most likely is necessary in order to reach such agreement. Without a clarification of terms and alternatives, political discussions remain mired in multiple misunderstandings that leave large blocks of voters profoundly confused about the sources of their own discontent, and thus fundametnally powerless to do anyhthing about them.

P.S. On McCain

The authors also note that McCain qute consciously modelled his 2000 presidential campaign in terms of trying to capture the Perot/Reform vote. It appears vitally important to consider McCain's ultimate failure, and the many gyrations he went through over the past 8 years as further symptoms of the ultimate incompatibility of the Perot reformists and the GOP base. This is further complicated by McCain's own inability to decide exactly who "the Real McCain" ultimately was.

Realignment And Economics

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 15:47:04 GMT

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.

Click image to enlarge

But if average incomes have risen slowly, that hardly means that rich have suffered. Indeed, as this chart shows, the income shares of all other groups have declined markedly in contrast to the top 1%:

In 1980, the income of the bottom 50% was twice that of the top 1%, now it's less than 3/4ths. But it's not just the bottom that's getting squeezed. Even the third quartile (top 26-50%) and the fourth quartile below the top 10$ (11-25%) have fallen from three times the income of the top 1% in 1980 to rough parity today. And rather than countering this extreme concentration of what little growth there is in the hands of the already wealthy, the tax code has increaingly abbetted the concentration, as shown by another graph from Visualizing Economics:

Electing Obama won't magically end this troubled era in our history--particularly given the Wall Street-heavy nature of his inner circle of economic advisors. But it is a first step away from the era of stagnant income growth for America as a whole, and soaring incomes for the elite few.

Indeed, back on September 15, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center reported, summarizing its detailed analysis:

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years, according to a newly updated analysis by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Compared to current law, TPC estimates the Obama plan would cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018. McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion. Obama would give larger tax cuts to low- and moderate-income households and pay some of the cost by raising taxes on high-income taxpayers. In contrast, McCain would cut taxes across the board and give the biggest cuts to the highest-income households.

In short, Obama's embrace of Reaganite tax-cutting rhetoric, even shorn of its Bush II excesses, is anything but a responsible approach to our future. When you look at what he's actually promising to do, it's not that difficult to understand why he's picking up some of those conservative Republican endorsements. This doesn't mean that things will actually work out that way. But we should be clear that Obama is still playing the game according to the rules that have been in place during this long period of income stagnation and polarization.

If your income isn't going to rise, then tax cuts take on a greater importance. But investing money in future growth is what we did during that long period of explosive growth from FDR to LBJ. It's something we need to return to again--particularly since the threat of global warming demands massive investments to fundamentally change our energy economy.

In short, the campaign has been so wildly distorted and delusional, that we haven't even begun to seriously address the real problems that lie ahead. What we're fighting for these last few countable hours now is the opportunity to engage with those very real problems--not the certainty of having them solved.