Gauging the Republican Tide

...This coalition has dominated our political life, in the form of the Democratic Party, since 1933...

...The amoeba can function without a brain, man cannot...

...If we fail, this will not turn out to be a significant election...

...Yet if the Reagan triumph resembles the Eisenhower showing, within two years the newly elected Chief Executive will lose ground in the Federal legislature...

...There is only one exception to the midterm rule in this century: 1934...

...in 1940, he slipped to 54.7...

...The FDR coalition sponsored the New Deal, with its outspoken advocacy of an active government role in the economy...

...The simplicities of the isolated rural village have been replaced by the complexities of the interrelated megalopolies, an evolution analogous to the development of the human body from a simple single cell...

...For the next 70 years (1860-1932) the Grand Old Party elected every President with the exception of two—Grover Cleveland and Wood-row Wilson...

...But the Republican Party's victory also was the culmination of a longtime trend away from the Democrats at the Presidential level...

...Indeed, the differences were great enough between him and the Republicans (especially Reagan) for the majority of hard core Democrats—Jews, blacks, unionists, blue collar workers—to stay with the President this November...

...As for the history of the previous three great coalitions, it is one of more, not less government...

...Carter failed to stop stagflation not because he was too liberal, but because he picked up the policies of his Republican predecessors...

...Yet even before Watergate it was clear that the GOP had little grass root strength, despite its Presidential victory in 49 states...

...Right-to-lifers want the government to do more to stop abortions...

...Nor can the Democrats prevail by concentrating on "liberal" concerns—minority, gay and womens' rights, gun control, abortion, etc.—to the neglect of the basic business of bread and butter...

...The Federal presence has grown from colonial days to the present not in response to any ideology but in reaction to natural imperatives...

...To Bill Brock, chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1980 is a pivotal year...

...In that first Congressional contest after Roosevelt's 1932 victory, Democratic strength actually increased in Congress...

...The failure of the Republican Party to develop an appropriate agenda for our time does not, however, mean that the Democrats will therefore remain the majority party...

...Of course, Carter was true to Democratic traditions on such issues as progressive taxation, Social Security, the minimum wage, labor law reform, civil rights, womens' rights, environmental protection, and arms control...

...The cement for this odd alliance was a mutual distrust of the merchants and money-changers of an incipient capitalism...

...Nevertheless, the midterm Congressional election almost always runs against the party in the White House...

...The voters were still venting their anger against Herbert Hoover and voicing their faith in FDR...

...Again in 1972, when Nixon swept George McGovern into oblivion, it appeared to some of the best brains in the Republican ranks that the stage was now finally set for the appearance of "the emerging majority...

...His appointees to head the Federal Reserve System—first G. William Miller and then Paul Volcker—merely aped Nixon's Arthur F. Burns, pushing interest rates higher and higher, spurring new inflation every time they did so...

...What does Ronald Reagan offer to cope with the economy and to solidify a new coalition...

...Eisenhower's election in 1952 had all the omens of a "breakpoint...

...He tried to lower the inflation fever by "cooling the economy...

...We may well re-experience what happened in the period from 1840-60, when Presidential power shuttled back and forth between the Democrats and the Whigs every four years while the nation fussed and fumbled over the impending crisis of Union...

...New York's Jack Kemp, one of the brightest of the conservatives in the House, was even more pointed: "We'll be a majority party when we implement the policies that will bring about the prosperity and the full employment without inflation we have promised...

...His advisers were hypnotized by the Phillips Curve, with its inferred advice to hold down prices by holding down employment...

...A similar stalemate developed from 1884-96, when neither party could cope with an industrializing, urbanizing America and the Presidency moved from one to the other quadrennially...

...in 1944, to 53.3...

...Simultaneously, the quiet of the '50s was shattered by noises such as America had not heard since the 1930s: marches, protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, pray-ins, teach-ins, and riots galore—in the ghettos, on the campuses, around national political convention halls, outside the White House...

...Right now, both parties are going along ad hoc, ad lib, ad nauseam...

...American farmers would rise in rebellion if the Federal government were to withdraw price supports and parity payments...

...This could be the breakpoint election in bringing about a party realignment," he said immediately after the ballots were counted...

...The GOP may still hold on to the Senate, since only one-third of that body is elected every two years and most of the seats coming up in 1982 are Democratic...

...The nation was said to be turning to the Right...

...Democrats were losing it...

...And it appeared to be confirmed by Eisenhower's re-election in 1956: His popular vote rose to 57.4 per cent, and his electoral vote to 457...

...His Louisiana Purchase was merely the first of many acts by which he extended the powers of the Presidency in his very loose interpretation of the Constitution...

...He was the first Republican to be elected to the White House in 24 years, polling 55 per cent of the popular vote (more than Reagan's 51 per cent this year), gaining 442 out of 531 electoral votes, and winning both houses of Congress...

...For within the vast, vague confines of both those glittering generalities reside the inevitable conflicts that arise when the question is asked: "Less for whom...

...Enough said no to give the GOP the Presidency and the Senate, recalling the Eisenhower sweep in 1952...

...Through the Nixon years it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who controlled both houses of Congress...

...Beneath these surface phenomena, however, other political and ideological forces were stirring...

...The following midterm election (1958) saw the Democrats add a whopping 49 seats to their House majority...

...or "More for whom...

...Women and minorities want the government to do more to end discrimination...

...In 1976, these voters came home to elect Jimmy Carter...

...Veterans want more care and benefits...

...In part, they turned to Carter to protest Watergate...

...Or is the handsome Ronald Reagan victory this month merely another occasion for the White House to host a transient Republican—as it did after 1952 and 1972, when Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon won the Presidency with overwhelming majorities...

...Appearances in the wake of the election notwithstanding, Republicans and Democrats today face the same challenge: to find a program for America in the '80s...

...In 1952, when Eisenhower became the first Republican President since FDR, some GOPers thought it had arrived...

...Republicans were not winning the Presidency...

...If Bill Brock's dream comes true, America will enter a new political age, the fourth in our history as a nation...

...Reagan's most telling line came at the very close of his debate with Carter when he asked America whether it was living better now than four years ago...

...Particularly disastrous for the Democrats would be their reading the November results as proof that America has turned conservative, and that the smart thing for them to do is to "me-too" the Republicans...

...If they do not devise a positive plan for achieving full employment without inflation, all their talk about the "special issues" will be as effective as Marie Antoinette's advice to the hungry hordes of France to "eat cake...

...In 1968, the Democrats were divided fratri- and suicidally over Vietnam...

...Thus, ironically, in the end the Democratic President's pursuit of Republican policies on the crucial issue of stagflation elected the Republicans...

...The disorder helped Nixon into the White House in 1968 and re-elected him stunningly in 1972, once more inspiring hope among Republicans for an era they could call their own...

...Nobody believes in it because just about everybody in America wants more, not less, government—"more for me" and "less for you...

...In any event, "less government" standing by itself and "more government" standing by itself, are equally inadequate as the basis for a coalition...

...In this election we have brought together the elements of a new coalition...

...The Ike Age had thawed— threateningly...

...Although Jefferson is credited with saying that "the best government is the least government," he abandoned that neat notion the day he became President...

...In part, though, they returned to the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson because they believed a Democrat would know how to bring down the "misery index," the combined curse of inflation and unemployment...

...For the present, the Reagan rubric is "less government...

...American business would label Reagan a traitor if he stopped all Federal subsidies to corporations, including those multi-billion dollar supports that come in the form of tax loopholes...

...The third was the Age of Roosevelt, the great coalition of our time that brought together in an unlikely mix both white supremacists and black voters, machine-minded grafters and high-minded reformers, blue collar workers of recent immigrant stock and family farmers of early origin, enlightened socialists and frightened capitalists...

...Truckers and bankers, hunters and the handicapped, lovers of blue whales and haters of red leviathans—all want more government backing of their respective programs and points of view...

...In the year of Ike's greatest show of popular strength (1956), his coattails were useless: The GOP lost two seats in the House...

...Two years after Ike's initial landslide victory (1954), the Democrats regained control of Congress...

...His problem was that they did so less fervently and in fewer numbers than in times past...

...Although high expectations were quickly extinguished in each case, these two Republican interregnums provide an informative historical background for evaluating the present Reagan victory...

...The second was the Age of Lincoln, a coalition of farmers, newly enfranchised Negroes, Northern businessmen, abolitionist intellectuals, and the boys in blue, whose Grand Army of the Republic became the ward machine for the freshly formed Republican Party...

...In three out of the four Congresses during the Eisenhower years, both houses were in Democratic hands...

...it is, at best, a nonbasis for a noncoali-tion...

...in 1972, the gentle George McGovern was somehow seen as the embodiment of the disorderly new politics...

...There are several problems with this nonphilosophy: Nobody believes in it...

...Most people in the country still thought of themselves as Democrats and acted accordingly...

...After the exhilarating, but exhausting, seasons of Rooseveltian reform, hot and cold wars, the American people were ready to hibernate in a conservative cooler...

...On a graph running from 1936-56, the Democratic performance at the polls was an almost straight line down and the Republican a straight line up, projecting the continuing decline of the Democrats and the revival of the Republicans...

...The Ike Age foretold a fairly frozen future for America...

...Catholics and other advocates of religious schools want more funds for parochial education, whether directly or indirectly...

...When Jackson renewed the Jeffersonian coalition, Old Hickory's expansion of Presidential (and Federal) power prompted his critics to name him King Andrew 1. The Lincoln coalition—the GOP— brought government into new domains: liberating slaves, occupying the South, subsidizing agriculture and business by grants of land and minerals, erecting tariff barriers, regulating commerce, conserving forests, even busting trusts...

...The evidence was in Congress...

...If Reagan is another Roosevelt, we should be seeing a similiar phenomenon in 1982—a larger Republican presence in the Federal legislature, a portent that theGOP has become the Grand Old Party once more...

...The cement was their common disgust with those "economic royalists" who had brought famine to our land of abundance...

...The 1952 campaign did involve personalities and passing issues: a grand-fatherly war hero running against an egghead burdened with the charges of "Communism, Korea and corruption" inherited from the Truman years...

...So Adlai Stevenson's 44.4 per cent in 1952 seemed like a logical, almost fated, denouement...

...The cement here was distrust of the rebel Democrats who had torn the Union asunder...

...and it goes contrary to the historic trends embodied in the three great preceding coalitions...

...The first was the Age of Jefferson, based on a coalition embracing Aaron Burr of New York that saw rural (mainly Southern) America join with the lesser classes of the Northern cities to dominate the nation's politics from 1800 to the Civil War...

...and in 1948, Truman won by a whisker with 49.6 per cent of the popular vote...

...But, as Bill Brock added in his optimistic interpretation of the November balloting: "The cementing of [a new] coalition depends upon performance...

...Counting on time to turn the tide, Republicans have been waiting for their moment...

...In 1936, FDR polled 60.8 per cent of the vote...

...Neither has the basis for an enduring coalition...

...Colleges and universities want more Federal funding...

...Gauging the Republican Tide BY GUS TYLER Is 1980 another 1932—the beginning of a Republican era similar to the Democratic decades following Franklin D. Roosevelt's election...

...Democratic voters who stood with their party on fundamental economic matters— jobs, income, security—re-elected Nixon to keep the kooks out, while continuing to vote overwhelmingly for a Democratic Congress...

...Instead, over the next four years that index rose...

...The underlying Democratic majority reasserted itself at the Presidential level in 1960 with John F. Kennedy's narrow victory, and in 1964 with Lyndon Johnson's demolition of Barry Goldwater...

...His sanguine view is based on the extent of the GOP victory, which went beyond Reagan's popular and electoral vote landslide to give Republicans control of the Senate, a gain of 33 seats in the House, and some 200 additional seats in state legislatures...

...We've got to act with some urgency to deal with the problems on which people voted—unemployment and inflation...