Interesting article in Salon today by Michael Lind about the evolution of the Democratic Party from the party of Jefferson/Jackson to the party of Roosevelt to the party of McGovern, and now looking forward to the possibility of a realigned party of of Obama. This post links to themes I developed in my post last week entitled "Weak-Kneed Liberalism."
I think there's much to debate about the points he makes in his article, and some of the more thoughtful commenters to the article raise questions similar to ones I would raise. But he's saying in this article essentially what I've been saying since Day One: No realignment takes place so long as social conservatives feel locked out of the Democratic Party. The only long-term realignment that will restore Democracy in this country requires that the secular left and the traditionalist right push culture war issues to the side and form a coalition around economic issues and a commitment to the constitution and the rule of law and on insisting that our government officials be held accountable for abuses of power and illegality.
Is this possible? At this point it would appear a long shot, but until it happens, the power elite have the electorate exactly where it wants it, divided and bickering over stuff that should have secondary or tertiary importance in in relationship to issues of enormous consequence developing now in the political sphere.
Read Lind's article in its entirety, but for those who don't have access to Salon, some excerpts at the jump. I will probably update later when I have more time to write.
Lind:
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.
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. . . .
There would have been no Progressive Era without the followers of William Jennings Bryan and no New Deal without the support of ancestors of many of today's Protestant evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics. Social conservatives, having lost the culture war, should be offered not only a truce but also an opportunity to join a broad economic campaign for a middle-class America, as many of them did between 1932 and 1968. When pro-choicers and pro-lifers unite in cheering the public investment and living wage planks at the convention of the neo-Roosevelt party, we will know that the political era that began in 1968 is truly and finally over.
If Barack Obama is elected in November, he will have a choice. It would be easy for a President Obama to be the third president of the McGovern Party, following the examples of Carter and Clinton once in office by rejecting expensive New Deal-style public investment and middle-class entitlement expansion in favor of a neoliberal program of deficit reduction, dinky feel-good tax credits, equally symbolic Green initiatives and robust defenses of affirmative action for amnestied illegal immigrants. Or he could try to be the first president of a new party that is also called the Democrats, a party that would combine post-racial universalism in public policy with intelligent government activism to promote technology-driven economic growth and middle-class economic security.
If he were elected and made the right choice, there would be no need to call the successor to the McGovern Party the neo-Roosevelt Party. It would have a name of its own: the Obama Party.
Commenter JSwift
The Roosevelt party collapsed because once abortion, affirmative action, and other social issues became federal issues, people who disagreed on those policies could not leave those disagreements at the statehouse steps. Blame the Supreme Court, or lawyers, or activists who weren't content to fight these issues in Albany, Austin, and Sacramento, but propelled them to Washington. Now that those issues are part and parcel of national politics in America, those groups are probably irrevocably split.
What secular, East Coast, agnostic, professional woman is going to support a candidate who vows to appoint a pro-life justice to the Supreme Court, endangering her right to lead her secular lifestyle? What working class Catholic, or devout Southern Baptist is going to support a candidate who is in favor of dropping all federal restrictions on abortion whatsoever, including partial birth abortion and the like and vow to keep Roe v. Wade in force, and expand it to late-term abortions, or euthanasia or some other social cause anathema to him or her? Very few. And if those people are in the same party, they will have to agree on a presidential candidate, and that candidate will have to take a stand on those issues because they are now in the realm of control of the federal government.
Swift is quite right in describing how things are now, but not how things could be in future if the non-elites on the cultural left and right bracket cultural-values issues in the political sphere. That means both lefties and conservatives giving up something to get something, which is their country back from the power elite which is playing a divide-and-conquer game with both sides.
Disagree with Lind about some of the particulars, but I see him at least asking the right question, which I would paraphrase: Are there any grownups out there williing to step forward who can agree to disagree about
cultural-values issues but who see they have common cause on power and
economic issues?
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