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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
How Democrats can win big in 2010 and beyond -- by doing the opposite of what they're doing now. Think FDR-style liberalism, not McGovern.
By Michael Lind
Read more: Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Religious Right, Opinion, Michael Lind, Barack Obama, 2008 election
Mignon Khargie/Reuters image of Obama
Aug. 15, 2008 | Virginia Woolf was wrong when she wrote, in her 1924 essay "Character in Fiction," that "on or around December 10, 1910, human nature changed." But there is no doubt that at some point between 2004 and 2008 American politics changed. It is clear to everyone, not least conservatives, that the era of right-wing hegemony that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 has come to an end. But this does not mean the triumph of post-1968 liberalism by default. If we are really in a new era, then the next Democratic Party will be as different and unfamiliar as the next Republican Party. Or so Democrats should hope, if they're looking beyond the favorable circumstances of this November -- if they want a lasting supermajority and not just a bare majority.
Both of the national parties today claim roots in the older eras of Roosevelt and Lincoln. But I am 46 years old, and today's Democratic Party and Republican Party are younger than I am. What happened beginning in 1968 was that one two-party system -- let us call it the Roosevelt Party versus the Hoover Party -- gave way to the present two-party system, which pits the Nixon Party versus the McGovern Party.
Today's Democrats and Republicans bear little resemblance to the pre-1968 groups of the same name. The pre-1968 Republican Party was based in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast -- the very areas that are the base of today's "blue state" Democrats. The pre-1968 Democrats were the old Jefferson-Jackson alliance of white Southern Protestants and Northern urban Catholics, plus a big chunk of Northern Progressives, many of them former Republicans. Today the Republicans are a white working-class party based in the South and much of the West with a libertarian Wall Street wing. The Democrats since the 1970s have been an alliance of college-educated white professionals from the North and West with blacks and Latinos.
Between 1932 and 1964, the Roosevelt Party won seven of nine presidential elections, losing only in 1952 and 1956. Between 1968 and 2004, the Nixon Party won seven out of 10 presidential elections, losing only three times, to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Was this because red-state Rooseveltians were won over to supply-side economics, while blue-state blue-bloods suddenly became enamored of abortion rights and separation of church and state? No. Today's red-state Republican children of New Deal Democrats still like Social Security, and the Republican grandparents of today's blue-state Protestant Democrats were in favor of birth control -- for the Catholics, in particular. The values of these voting blocs didn't change. The issues that defined national politics changed.
The Roosevelt Party ran on economic issues, and didn't care whether voters were in favor of sex or against it on principle as long as they supported the New Deal. The McGovern Party, by contrast, has made social issues its litmus test. Economic conservatives have had a home in the McGovern Party, as long as they support abortion rights and affirmative action, but social democrats and populists who are pro-life or anti-affirmative action are not made nearly as welcome.
Beginning with its namesake, George McGovern, in 1972, the McGovern Party has been trounced repeatedly by the Nixon Party, not because of its economic agenda, which the public actually prefers to the alternative, but because of its unpopular stands on issues like race-based affirmative action, illegal immigration, crime and punishment, and national security. Progressives are fooling themselves when they dismiss these as insignificant "wedge issues." What can be more important than whether civil rights laws apply equally to everyone -- even those wicked "white males" -- regardless of race and gender, or whether, in an age of terrorism, the nation's border and immigration laws are enforced? There is no democracy in the world today where a party that stood for ethnic quotas that excluded the national majority or welfare benefits for illegal immigrants would not be in political danger. (As I write, all of the major European democracies except Britain are governed by parties of the right that are more nationalist and populist than the left parties they have defeated. And Gordon Brown isn't looking too hale either.)
Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic majority, despite defections by Southern segregationists, wobbled on until 1968, 23 years after his death. FDR was able to assemble his coalition only because social issues did not divide his voters. Nobody ever asked FDR or Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson their views on contraception, or abortion, or censorship. Not only were those issues not central to the message of the New Deal Democrats, they were not even national issues. Before the Supreme Court federalized them, they were fought out in state legislatures and city councils by the very same people who came together on Election Day to send Democrats to Congress and the White House. FDR's followers disagreed about Prohibition, but they agreed about the New Deal.
In fact, the majority of Americans, including many social conservatives, never ceased to support New Deal policies, which from Social Security and Medicare to the G.I. Bill have remained popular with the public throughout the entire Nixon-to-Bush era. Consider the results of a June 17, 2008, Rockefeller Foundation/Time poll. When "favor strongly" and "favor somewhat" are combined, one gets the following percentages for policies favored by overwhelming majorities: increase the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living (88 percent); increase government spending on things like public-works projects to create jobs (86 percent); put stricter limits on pollution we put into the atmosphere (85 percent); limit rate increases on adjustable rate mortgages (82 percent); provide quality healthcare to all, regardless of ability to pay (81 percent); impose higher tax incentives for alternative energy (81 percent); provide government-funded childcare to all parents so they can work (77 percent); provide more paid maternity/dependent care leave (76 percent); make it less profitable for companies to outsource jobs to foreign countries (76 percent); expand unemployment benefits (76 percent).
Note that almost all of the policy proposals that excite the American public are exactly the sort of old-fashioned, "paleoliberal" spending programs or systems of government regulation that are supposed to be obsolete in this era of privatization, deregulation and free-market globalization, according to neoliberals and libertarians. Bill Clinton to the contrary, the public clearly does not think that "the era of big government is over." Nor does the public show any interest in the laundry lists of teeny-weeny tax credits for this and that that neoliberals love to propose, to appear compassionate without spending real money. The public wants the middle-class welfare state to be rounded out by a few major additions -- chiefly, healthcare and childcare -- and the public also wants the government to grow the economy by investing in public works and favoring companies that locate their production facilities inside the U.S. There, in a sentence, is a program for a neo-Rooseveltian party that could effect an epochal realignment in American politics.
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