Is the GOP America's Party'?
TYLER, GUS
Countdown '84 IS THE GOP AMERICA'S PARTY? BY GUS TYLER The many political analysts who are already persuaded that the November election, like this summer's Dallas convention, will be something...
...Whatever Ronald Reagan and Walter F. Mondale may tell the country at large in the next few weeks, aspiring senators, representatives, governors, mayors, and dog catchers will be saying their own things to their own people...
...The coalition forged by Thomas Jefferson lasted from 1800 to William Henry Harrison's election in 1840...
...The Congress of the United States is still essentially run by the Democrats, too, even if at the moment the Senate is not...
...In the election year of 1972 he took the fiscal and monetary steps needed to spur consumption and output...
...But if recent history is of any use, the evidence is that we are headed for a depression— of worldwide dimensions...
...Such a depression would reverberate globally...
...Below the Mason-Dixon line—a more or less reliable area for their Presidential candidate— they have no strength in county, city or town elections...
...Consider a few pertinent facts...
...These address themselves almost exclusively to what Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon call "social," as distinguished from "economic," issues...
...Populist conservatism appeals to family, flag and faith...
...Economics will force itself upon the attention of the people...
...But ours, particularly the Democrats, have always been amalgams of diverse views...
...As far as the second term is concerned," he says, "the main economic issue will be to prolong the recovery and not to have it end too quickly...
...Further, the Sunbelt has not only become more Republican but also more populous, relative to the nation as a whole as well as absolutely...
...Those, of course, were the years when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson held the Presidency...
...The scenario has plausibility...
...Local leaders will address their localities, cultivating the grass roots according to regional growing conditions —an art Democrats have mastered far more thoroughly than their opponents precisely because the party of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart and Ed Koch is more complex in its make-up...
...It will be economic in nature, as were all previous realignments in this country...
...Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and other debtor nations would default, and our banks would face bankruptcy...
...No matter who may be in power, time has a way of eroding what is to make way for what is not...
...In his campaign, Reagan suggests that the important questions facing the country are abortion, Communism, the Equal Rights Amendment, and impiety—concerns that loom much larger in good times than in bad...
...Whatever the importance of social issues in politics—and sometimes they are very important—the great shake-ups of American parties have in the past been inspired by economic circumstances...
...Roosevelt's 1932 coalition lasted until 1980...
...Reagan's ersatz Keynesianism has also helped diminish the impact of bread-and-butter worries...
...Where Presidential politics is concerned, we are reminded, the South is no longer "solid...
...The Democrats still lead in enrollment by a margin of 5:4, though both parties appear to be losing ground to the independents, who now make up about one third of the voting public...
...In that sort of benign climate, our great national referendums would revolve around the traditional values the GOP prefers to emblazon on its facade...
...Thus a casual investigation suggests that the rising West and South will go Republican while the declining Northeast and Midwest may linger on as Democratic...
...By playing his hand correctly with them, say self-styled "populist conservatives" like Kevin Phillips, Howard Phillips and Jack Kemp, President Reagan will gather in everyone except the blacks, the Hispan-ics, the limousine liberals beset by guilt, and the poorest of the poor, who don't vote anyhow...
...Forces currently at work in the United States could result in the last quarter of the present century proving as conservative as the first quarter was...
...In this year of "recovery" it dropped to 7 per cent and then began climbing again, reaching 7.5 per cent thus far...
...Should this happen it would be the fourth such alliance in American history...
...Both houses of Congress were in Democratic hands, and the program of The Great Society was being written into law...
...Regan goes on to point out that with a "sane and responsible" policy, "it is possible to keep a recovery going for five or six years...
...market...
...Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan is very much aware of the danger...
...The first one was organized by Jefferson after his defeat in the Presidential election of 1796...
...In addition, a new generation grew up that, a la Pharaoh, "knew not Joseph" ; it was ignorant of the past, took the present for granted and blamed anything that went wrong along the way on whoever held office, usually the Democrats...
...In this oversimplified yet persuasive schema, the decisive group could be the suburbanites—neither rural nor urban, tied to the Democrats by past circumstances but drawn to the Republicans by their present prosperity...
...the rate came down, and stayed down at about 5 per cent until 1975, then shot up to 8.3 per cent...
...Catholics and Jews, once pillars on the Democratic side, have become more affluent and therefore less attracted to liberalism and its representatives...
...It not only took a long time to recover—notwithstanding the efforts of President Carter—but unemployment never fell under 5.5 per cent and by 1982 had catapulted to 9.5 per cent, a postwar record...
...A resurgence of fundamentalism among poor and middling elements has added the militant brigade of the Moral Majority to the forces of reaction...
...Other, non-Presidential, indicators do not uphold the vision of a Republican America, however...
...We would lose foreign and domestic markets...
...A considerable consensus holds that the President has used his power so adroitly as to create a national mood that will give his supporters a certificate of occupancy to the White House through the rest of this century...
...Granted, given our highly idiosyncratic system, the GOP could monopolize the nation's highest public office from now to the year 2000 while the House, the Senate, the gubernatorial mansions, the county executive offices, and the city halls—not to mention the voting lists—stay filled with Democrats...
...Paradoxically, a host of New Deal and Great Society measures—Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, Aid for Dependent Children, Medicare, disability payments, food stamps, unions, etc.—have made economic issues less pressing than they once were...
...In other words, Ronald Reagan is expected to make the GOP the Grand Old Party once again...
...Nonetheless, the future does not end on inauguration day, and sometime in the second Reagan-Bush Administration, if there should be one, such matters as unemployment, inflation and interest rates will cease to make way for social debates...
...Moreover, only 15 of the 50 governors are Republicans...
...It may be just about adequate to re-elect President Reagan, yet turn into the prelude to a disaster that, judging from past patterns, would push joblessness up to double-digit figures...
...Reagan's re-election would make the score 24-12—a rather decisive showing...
...It brought together totally disparate elements: the Southern gentry (embodied by Jefferson himself) and the Northern rabble (led by Tammany Hall chief Aaron Burr), both responding fearfully to the nascent capitalism exemplified in the policies of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton...
...That we are destined to return to the party of Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding is not a new prophecy...
...Simple boredom set in, too, for each tomorrow smelled as if it were each yesterday...
...Nixon's initial victory, which he attributed to an "emerging Republican majority" whose backbone was the attachment of America's heartland to traditional cultural values —as contrasted with the intellectual exotica prevalent in New York, Cambridge, San Francisco, and Georgetown...
...That catastrophe will overshadow social disputes...
...Those who have prophesied an emerging Republican majority assume that current levels of prosperity, or something better, will continue indefinitely...
...You'll recall that, I think the President's [first] State of the Union message was the last week in January 1981, and by the last week in June 1981, we were officially in recession...
...Europe and the Third World depend very heavily on the U.S...
...If that actually happened, the United States would be roughly divided between the regions attached historically to a rural culture and those conditioned by urban traditions...
...Consequently, the social issues the Right-wing populists are counting on may after all return the Republicans to the White House this year...
...In 1969, the unemployment rate was 3.4 per cent...
...If we go into a slump so would they...
...At the most basic level, the South remains solid...
...the victorious Democrats were a mad mix of fundamentalist "crackers," Irish Catholics, Baptist Blacks, Jews, Harvard haves, and Appalachian have-nots...
...Of course, they assume that a party is a framework for ideological consistency...
...Over that stretch FDR's achievements lost some glamour even among their beneficiaries, who began to ask, "What have you done for me lately...
...America would be back to 1929 with Reagan in the role of Scrooge, not of Santa Claus...
...Since it is doubtful that a re-elected Reagan would suddenly pick up where JFK and LB J left off, we may expect the big slump to come within the next four years...
...From that point of view I would not want to see the President deliver a State of the Union message in '85 and have a recession starting in '85...
...Indeed, in the eyes of those subscribing to the notion the underlying elements still exist and, if anything, are stronger than ever today...
...One can be sure he wouldn't, for the span of recovery would have lasted a mere two years...
...And in several smaller Western states where the census numbers have been stable, the party picks up a freaky edge because these habitually Right-wing backwaters have disproportionate strength in the Electoral College...
...Despite the Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan landslides, they have hung on to the House of Representatives for all except four of the past 52 years, to the Senate for all except six...
...The pendulum that swung from Right to Left in the second and third quarters may swing back to its starting point...
...The Lincoln coalition (and the so-called System of 1896 that followed it) dominated the years 1860-1928, with but two interruptions, for Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson...
...Should Ronald Reagan be re-elected, history is likely to repeat itself during the next four years...
...This enigma—the simultaneous return of a Republican President, Democratic governors, a Republican Senate, and a Democratic House—is to Europeans clear evidence of American immaturity...
...Kevin Phillips advanced the daring thesis at thetimeof RichardM...
...As proof, hecitesthe boom of 1962-69...
...BY GUS TYLER The many political analysts who are already persuaded that the November election, like this summer's Dallas convention, will be something of a coronation have been putting their talents to work speculating about the future of the Republicans after the inauguration—from 1985 to the year 2000...
...Empirical evidence for this conservative script is drawn almost entirely from Presidential elections...
...In the almost 50 years separating Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 triumph and the end of Jimmy Carter's term in 1981, the Democrats occupied the White House more often than not and controlled both houses of Congress almost continuously...
...When it does, political discourse will turn away from social issues as traditionalist families lose their overmortgaged homes, fundamentalist farmers lose their land, and upwardly mobile Yuppies become downwardly mobile Dumpies...
...by 1971, when Nixon decided to "cool the economy," it had risen to 5.8 per cent...
...So it is certainly possible that a Reagan coalition with the solidity and strength that characterized its Rooseveltian predecessor will emerge in the next four years...
...It, too, united strange cultural bedfellows: New England Brahmins, Scandinavian and German immigrants, recently liberated blacks, Wall Street moguls, and uneducated farmers...
...The GOP has held the White House for 20 of the 32 years since 1952, when Eisenhower broke the New Deal's spell over the electorate...
...These men and women are the Yippies turned Yuppies, hoping to become Uppies...
...Then came Watergate, temporarily sidetracking all Phillips' hopes and prognostications...
...On the other hand, we would do well to remember that the predictions of a Republican-dominated Presidency rest on the primacy of the old-fashioned cultural values the GOP claims to reflect...
...The second coalition, formed around Lincoln, was the industrial North's answer to the continued domination of national politics by the Southern slavocracy...
...The party realignment the Republicans have been working for will take place, but not along the lines they expect...
...it leans heavily toward the GOP—especially the whites...
...The present "recovery" may be the undoing of the Republican Party...
...In November—to quote Indiana's Senator Richard Lugar, who heads a special task force to preserve the GOP's control of the Senate, "the odds are against us...
...Since the start of the Nixon era, the nation has been riding an economic roller coaster, with each trough plunging deeper than the last and each upswing shallower...
...The Roosevelt coalition was provoked by the trauma of the Great Depression...
Vol. 67 • August 1984 • No. 15
