I've been writing about hegemony, party systems and realigning elections since at least 2006. And for me, the bottom line is this: (1) elections like 2008--realigning elections--stand out as turning points between different political eras; (2) some such elections--like 1860 and 1932, for example, are quite clear and dramatic in their meanings, while oothers such as 1896 and 1968 (actually a de-aligning election, in that it brought in an era dominated by divided government) are much more muddled; (3) 2008 was a clearly in the second category; (4) but it remains to be seen whether it's an ambiguous realigning election (like 1896) where we have a chance to fight for our vision of what "progressive" means, or whether it's a de-aligning election, that will continue the drift, divison, and disconnect of the past 42 years.
A Republican victory this Tuesday will tilt the odds heavily in the direction of retrospectively casting 2008 as another 1968, despite all the numbers of election night pointing to the contrary. If Democrats hold on to control of Congress, however slightly, that means that we're in a new era, no matter how discouraging the current lack of vision by Democratic leadership may now seem.
That's why I find the following video (h/t Dave Johnson) so compelling. Because as I see it, it's not a dishonest representation of where the current DLC-dominated Democratic leadership is today. It's an honest representation of where we, the conscience of the party, have a damn good shot at taking it back to where it belongs once again. From the International Brotherhoood of Boilermakers Union:
It's time to take our country back... to the future, not the past.
Political scientist James A. Stimson's aggregate measure of policy mood clearly shows that Kennedy/Johnson came to power in part as a result of a significant leftward shift in political attitudes--which they did not cause. Likewise, Reagan came to power in part because political attitudes had been shifting to the right for more than a decade. Rather than moving America to the right, Reagan was a result of a rightward shift that sharply reversed itself throughout his tenure... and beyond.
Sometimes when things are going horribly wrong, it helps to take a look back and ask if there were early warning signs that should have been taken more seriously. Played badly, this sort of exercise is nothing more than a game of "I-told-you-so." But sometimes "I-told-you-so" is not such a bad place to start. And sometimes, it can be more than that. It can be a way of reviving mistakenly discarded lines of thought that can provide fresh ideas about how to get back on track. It's in hopes of this last alternative that I write the following.
I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
While Obama subsequently tried to backpaddle from that, he was never very convincing to some of us. At the time, the Clinton & Edwards campaigns both pounced on him, and one could credibly argue that their attacks unfairly mischaracterized what he was trying to say. This was the argument made by he St. Petersburg Times at it's Polifact.com website, in a piece titled "Obama not a Reagan Democrat" (more on this below).
But even if he wasn't actually enthusing over Reagan--a fair point, if one reads the full transcript--he was expressing himself in Reaganite language, in effect underscoring the point that he would not be a transformational leader, contrary to everything he was trying to convey to his adoring base.
Tomorrow I go to the local fire house to vote in the special election in New York's 20th Congressional district.
The main bit of my preparations is my talking points, just in case a TV newsie shows up to interview me. Not that this is likely -- I have a real face for radio, but it's in the same spirit of planning what I might buy if I win a lottery. And since I look like what they probably imagine a Republican to look like -- fat, white, middle-aged and suburban -- it might be useful to have something to say that would jolt 'em a bit.
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.
Republicans are losing, and they know it. So what to do? In the Washington Post, after his customary thicket of lies, David Frum gets down to his serious advice: Cut and run everywhere else to "save" the Senate, and run on partisan gridlock--as a positive policy. Talk about the politics of the past! While McCain and Palin have been running a very gross version of an appeal to the politics of the past-all the way back to McCarthy, at least-Frum's appeal goes to the underlying mechanics of political power, trying block the transition to a new party system, which a realigning election portends.
In my "Three Waves And A Wall" series, I described the three waves as follows:
The roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, described by political theorists such as V.O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham.
The recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
The first of these three waves is the most regular, and divides US history as follows:
Continuing my series of diaries that touch base with my February diary series, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future", I want to reflect a bit on the impact of online organizing and communication-primarily the latter. Arianna Huffington has a piece up, "The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics", in which she argues that McCain's been done in by the new information infrastructure, which has made the old-style Rovian smear tactics increasingly difficult to pull off:
"We are witnessing the end of Rovian politics," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google told me. And YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.65 billion, is one of the causes of its demise.
Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed.
But the McCain campaign hasn't gotten the message, hence the blizzard of racist, alarmist, xenophobic, innuendo-laden accusations being splattered at Obama.
This is certainly a very big part of what's going on, even if it's not the whole story....
David's been tearing things up lately with a series of posts on how Versailles is freaking out over the fear that Obama just might keep a campaign promise or two. Well, no, it actually goes a bit deeper than that. But not much.
The reality here is something I wrote about in a diary series last February, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future", and now that the election is upon us, with early voting well underway, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit that series and some of what it had to say. I started things off in a more down-to-earth way with "The House Vote and the Shape of Things To Come". Now I want to pull back and talk about things from a broader perspective.
My premise in the series was simple: we are living through a time in which powerful historical forces for change on three different time-scales are pressing us forwards, and confronting an historically unusual barrier, for America-the power of rightwing hegemony infused into the conventional wisdom. In the initial diary of the series I described the three wave thus:
In comments Friday to Chris's diary, Presidential Forecast, October 24th , fladem argued that there was a much greater chance of later volatility in the race than people were anticipating, that historically, there was a 50% chance of a 5-point swing or more, which could go either way, and that therefore McCain had a 25% chance of winning, rather than the 3.7% that 538.com is projecting.
It's good to be challenged like this, with a well-considered data-driven argument. It makes you think more carefully, and not get intellectually lazy. That said, I think it's pretty clear that fladem is wrong on this one, and I want to quickly run down why. The reasons range from macro to micro, but most of all, they gain from being mutually reinforcing. Fladem's argument and my response on the flip.
As Glenn Greenwald points out , there's been a dramatic sea-change in the rules of effective political rhetoric. Glenn cites three examples over the course of one week's time--GOP Rep. Robin Hayes, VP nominee Sarah Palin, and GOP Rep. Michelle Bachmann--all attacking Democrats' patriotism, then denying it, turning tail and running away.
There's clearly something interesting -- and different -- happening here. It's not that right-wing politicians are accusing liberals and Democrats of being unpatriotic, anti-American subversives. There's nothing new about that. To the contrary, that McCarthyite accusation has virtually been a central plank -- one could say the defining plank -- in the GOP platform for the last three decades, at least.
What's different -- markedly so -- is that once they do it, they feel compelled to backtrack, deny they said it or meant it, rescind it, and -- in the case of Palin -- actually "apologize" for it.
There's no doubt about it, as Glenn's book, Great American Hypocrites documents, demonizing liberals while buildging up phony conservative heros has been central to the GOP's political strategy for decades now, and the fact that it's falling apart so dramatically is big news indeed. How big? Well, Glenn goes on to quote Zogby saying,
If Obama wins like this we can be talking not only victory but realignment.
Last weekend, in "The 'Mapping-Changing' Meme In Historical Perspective, 1896 To Date", I looked at the changing patterns of electoral maps from 1896 to date, taking them in series of time periods. In this diary, I want to step back an look at the overall patterns, and see if there aren't some lessons we can learn from them.
I looked at all the maps, and tried to come up with a sensible way of grouping them. The discussion below is based on that grouping, but I'm open to suggestions about other ways of grouping them as well. I'm going to be working at three levels in this diary. The lowest level-which I'll get to last-is that in which every map appears, and they are all shown in their groupings. The middle level-which begins below the fold-shows one representative map for each of the groups. The top level-shown immediately below-groups all the Democratic-leaning maps and all the Republican-leaning maps together into two supergroups.
Democratic Vs. Republican Maps
The archetypal Democratic victory of the past 100 years was Roosevelt's re-election in 1936. The archetypal Republican victory of the past 100 years was Nixon's re-election in 1936 1972. Roosevelt's victory was a resounding affirmation of the New Deal. It's hard to believe it, but Republicans actually thought they were going to win in 1936, and a bit winning issue for them was going to be.... Social Secutiry! With the government taking money out of people's paychecks-and no one getting anything back, at first, the Republicans thought they had themselves a sure-fired winner. On the other hand, Nixon's 1972 victory was all about "us" vs. "them"--but he did not threaten the core New Deal accomplishements, and in fact, he used cooperation with the still-powerful, still-liberal Democratic Congress to help give him the freedom to act in the areas he really cared about-primarily foreign relations.
Twelve years later, Ronald Reagan would win a similarly strong landslide, basically on much the same terms-even though the foundation was far more questionable. Reagan was much more hostile to the New Deal than Nixon had been, and the Congress was weaker. But while programs were cut back, the post-double-dip recession boom provided enough short-term prosperity that most folks simply weren't thinking about such things, so it was relatively easy to keep them out of the debate-especially with Walter Mondale talking about raising people's taxes. Thus, what these high-level maps have to tell us is that Democrats win when the issues of public welfare and the common good are front and center, while Republicans win when such issues can be shunted aside, one way or another, and issues of identity--"us vs. them"-come to the fore.
Not a real surprise, you say? Well, maybe not. But if not, then why does virtually every Democratic candidate ignore the power of Roosevelt's message? Bill Clinton, for one, did not. He ran as an economic populist. Governing, not so much. But he knew what to tell people, and won eleciton by comfortable margins.
Here's another way to look at the two groups of maps, in terms of recent victories by the two parties. The maps are quite similar. But Clinton won a cluster of key states in 1996 that Gore did not.four years later. A principle reason was that Gore simply lacked Clinton's capactity to campaign as a populist:
On the flip, we look at the wider variety of map groups associated with each party's success in different forms at different times.
The term "map-changing" has become one of those buzzwords this election cycle. It was, like most buzzwords, high on sizzle, low on steak. Why? Because candidates don't change maps-map-changing conditions change candidates-at least, successful ones. Which means, in effect, that any Democrat who won the nomination this time had a decent shot at becoming a map-changing candidate. To see why this is so, I've assembled a series of maps showing all the presidential elections from 1896 to date, so that the the progression of changes can readily be seen. At the end, I'll return to the current election, and dove-tail with the analysis in the previous diary, looking at what sort of map-change we can expect if all the swing states looked at go the Democrat's way. Of course, there's no guarantee that will happen-but that's what real map-changing elections are all about-sailing with the flood of a rising tide, and taking all the credit for the work of the elements.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
For a very long time now, I've been extremely skeptical of Barack Obama as a progressive leader--except in the early 20th-Century meaning of the word "progressive," as I wrote some time back. The problem I had was simple: since 2006, I've been looking forward to 2008 as a high-potential realigning election, characterized by a sea-change in politics, which necessarily means a wholesale rejection of the conservative Republican worldview.
It's not just that realigning elections require such an overthrow. They don't, necessarily. But the last 40 years has been an eerie twilight era, in which a substantial majority of people have been center-left on a substantial majority of the issues, but the elected leadeship--and the predominant political discourse--has been just the opposite.
I've looked at this disconnect in terms of Gramsci's concept of hegemony--an acculturated understanding of the world determined by those who control the dominant instutions of society. I like to refer to it as "ideology in drag as common sense." A similar hegemony prevailed in the 1920s, before first the Great Depression and then the New Deal washed it utterly away. Something similar was needed now, I believed--and was possible, given the collosal failures of the Bush regime--failures on a scale not seen since Herbert Hoover's presidency.
But instead of any of this, Barck Obama offered an eager embrace of the very Versailles media that stood as one of the key enforcers of this decrepit status quo. People gave all sorts of explanations and justifications for this, but everything offered seemed utterly inadequate or beside the point. Obama might be modestly, or even solidly liberal, but he was no progressive leader. And what's worse, he could not even be a successful modestly liberal president, so long as he continued to identify with and echo the hollow shiboleths of Versailles media.
I put this argument out various different times, and got a wide variety of responses, none of them, generally anywhere close to a satisfactory answer--because, it seemed to me, virtually no Obama defender or apologist really understood the problem. There was, I thought, one possible way out, though I never offered it myself. I was waiting for Obama's supporters to offer it. They never did. And so now, circumstances have forced me to name it myself, because--for a moment, at least, it appeared altogether possible that Obama himself was about to take that way out: choosing his own way, time and place to break with that Versailles media consensus, doing so in such a way that the consensus itself is sufficiently shattered to give him vastly more room in which to manuever.
This final installment to this series was delayed because of a domino effect set in motion when I had to cover a 6-hour Long Beach Harbor Commission meeting on Tuesday. For a refresher on the earlier installments, just click the links below
In this diary set, I've worked with the notion of historical cycles, or waves-specifically, three differently scaled waves all of which converge on this November's election, and in doing so, confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, The second part dealt with 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 third part dealt with 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.
Now, I look at the wall those waves are crashing up against...
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