Does the Democratic Party Have a Future?
CARSON, BRAD
Does the Democratic Party Have a Future? BY BRAD CARSON Working-class Americans typically vote Republican—and that creates a terrible dilemma for Democrats. The party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...Why did Yankee settlements influence Missouri's politics, but not Kentucky's...
...Judis and Teixeira merely extrapolate today's transitional politics into the future—and it is not actually likely that we will form a long-ruling majority from a Democratic party bereft of new ideas and blithely ignoring (or even, in the minds of some, fomenting) cultural turmoil...
...When the Green votes garnered by Ralph Nader are added to Gore's Democratic totals, liberals won a clear majority of the nation's vote...
...To this base of affluent, well-educated elites, Democrats add a number of historically oppressed minority groups whose cause the Democratic party has long championed...
...The Emerging Republican Majority was Phillips's ambitious attempt to outline the problems and solutions around which the GOP was building a majority for the 1970s and beyond...
...Indeed, they set this problem entirely aside to make instead a rose-colored prediction of looming Democratic triumph...
...But they are less sure-footed in discussing the more interesting question of why certain groups and geographic regions support a particular party...
...With the exception of New Hampshire, Democrats took every state in the strongly professionalized Northeast in the 2000 presidential election...
...Judis, the biographer of William F. Buckley and author of a book on the role of elites in policymaking, is one of the most prolific liberal journalists, a fixture in the American Prospect and the New Republic...
...For many Americans, especially working-class religious believers, there is a growing fear that the culture has become hostile to family, country, duty, and responsibility, and that our civilization's technical expertise has outstripped its ethical wisdom...
...In the meantime, Democrats can only await their Spartacus—the leader of the revolution that will return the party to its traditional concern for the common people, the salt of the earth, the Tom Joads...
...Few have written as interestingly about the Democratic party as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira...
...When Democrats are perceived as unconcerned about cultural changes—or even as the active agents bringing those changes about—then the party suffers the defection of many people who were once part of the New Deal majority...
...In fact, it suggests the opposite: a continuing Republican majority...
...The New Deal coalition assembled by Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression was inevitably fractured by civil rights, just as the Republican majorities of the preceding era—forged in the cataclysm of the Civil War—could not withstand the pressures of a later war and severe economic upheaval...
...The Emerging Democratic Majority exhibits the standard progressive discomfort with the sociological implications of religious faith (most absurdly when Judis and Teixeira cavalierly equate opposition to stem-cell research with support of anti-Darwinian cre-ationism), and the book is informed throughout by its authors' preference—typical of Democrats—to analyze the United States on racial and class lines, rather than on cultural ones...
...If nothing else, the Democrats' failures in Middle America should give us pause...
...But the sparse treatment of American political history and culture means that Judis and Teixeira never adequately explain the "social and political conflict" that, in their minds, presages political realignment...
...Their failure may result from the fact that they're looking in the wrong places...
...Equally important, Democrats commanded majorities— sometimes vast—of the most rapidly growing demographic groups...
...He burst into public recognition last year with a widely noticed book (cowritten with Joel Rogers) called America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, in which he turned his statistical gaze to the electoral rejection of Democrats by the party's ostensible base...
...The party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt still sees itself as representing the common people, the salt of the earth, the hardscrabble men and women of The Grapes of Wrath, the Tom Joads of the world...
...And if anyone receives the lion's share of votes from the millions of Americans for whom the levers of power are far away, it is the Republicans...
...The future belongs to the political party that is able to articulate a coherent public philosophy that recognizes the difference between liberty and license, religious expression and corrosive sectarianism, duty and compulsion, beneficial scientific advances and self-defeating moves into a post-human future...
...He saw both that governing majorities require political compromises and that such compromises cannot forever bind together ideological antagonists...
...Tough work in political philosophy and political science must be done by the Democrats if they have ambitions to establish a new majority...
...For Phillips, small details of geography and history were vitally important, precisely because he sought to comprehend the cultural forces that were causing the Republican realignment he observed...
...The growing Latino vote in New Mexico and, to a lesser extent, Arizona has given both states a Democratic tilt...
...Professional workers (as defined by the Census Bureau) grew by 30 percent during the 1990s, and Gore won their votes by a margin of more than 10 percentage points...
...That's a pity...
...For the sons and daughters of Tom Joad—and, to a lesser extent, for the heavily religious Latino and African-American communities— abortion, human cloning, and Internet pornography are as important as the minimum wage, Medicare, and workplace protections...
...The fact that Middle America is at present such infertile ground for Democrats does not seem to presage a liberal realignment...
...In The Emerging Democratic Majority, despite its occasional strengths, you won't find his biography...
...And it is the lack of deep cultural and political analysis that separates The Emerging Democratic Majority from The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips's seminal 1969 work that Judis and Teixeira took as their model...
...Together, Judis and Teixeira seem ideally suited to analyze for us the gap between the image and the reality of the Democratic party...
...Blue-collar Americans have largely rebuffed the Democratic party...
...He used the 1968 election as well to look backward and sketch the settlement patterns, Civil War biases, and ethnic politics that determined political outcomes from 1868 to Nixon's success a century later...
...And within these states, Democrats are demonstrating special strength in what Judis and Teixeira call "ideopolises," cities such as San Jose and Raleigh-Durham that have become magnets for well-educated managers, teachers, professors, and engineers...
...African Americans, although not increasing in number, have become even more unified behind the party, giving Gore 90 percent of their vote...
...Judis and Teixeira do a fine job detailing the changes in American demographics that seem to offer optimism to Democrats...
...Democrats today find themselves confronted by two difficulties...
...College-educated women gave nearly 60 percent of their votes to Gore, and 63 percent of women with advanced degrees supported him...
...Teixeira, less fecund if more scholarly, began his career with a trenchant analysis of voting behavior...
...There are exceptions, of course...
...Back in The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips noted that political upheavals—whether the Progressive movement, the New Deal, or Goldwater Republicanism—usually find their initial success in the heartland, that broad expanse that we now routinely refer to as the "red states...
...The truth is exactly the other way around: We must look for the roots of our emerging political crisis not primarily in race and class, but in culture...
...Latinos, rapidly growing and concentrated in such critically important states as California, New York, and New Jersey (as well as Texas and Florida), gave Gore healthy margins of victory, as did the even more rapidly growing Asian-American population...
...Judis and Teixeira may be right in arguing that Republicans offer the wrong answers to today's problems, but at least the GOP recognizes that these actually are problems...
...At the same time, the Democratic championing of social liberalism, appropriate to mitigate oppressiveness in traditional societies, is a tough sell among a growing number of people who fear that liberty, in the absence of premodern virtues, inevitably degenerates into antinomi-anism...
...Phillips understood that political victory goes to those who offer the most appealing solutions to the day's public problems...
...But the party finds little respect in the non-union working class, and its strongest allegiance comes from the professional classes (especially professional women) who form the nation's elite...
...In predicting Democratic success over the next few years, The Emerging Democratic Majority presents no real case for realignment...
...It is exactly this dissonance between the party's reality and its mythology that renders Al Gore's rhetoric of the "people versus the powerful" so unper-suasive...
...Why did Mormons support Democrats for many decades...
...But, despite the pretense, it simply isn't true...
...If anyone can plausibly claim to own the hearts and minds of America's elite, it is the Democrats...
...Phillips used his acute dissection of the 1968 election to look forward and accurately predict the political fallout of federal intervention to desegregate the South...
...With expanding high-technology sectors, North Carolina and Virginia trended Democratic, and Florida, with its retirees and Latinos, has become—as everyone remembers—a battleground, with strong Democratic potential for the future...
...For Judis and Teixeira, Al Gore's victory in the 2000 popular vote augurs an era of dominance for the Democrats...
...The party had similar success in the industrial region of the Midwest, where large states like Michigan and Illinois went for Gore...
...How did Scandinavian immigrants change elections around Puget Sound...
...To the west, California, Washington, and Oregon form an impregnable Democratic stronghold in presidential elections...
...Unfortunately, their new joint effort, The Emerging Democratic Majority, never gets around to doing so...
...At the same time, the Republican alliance with the Religious Right is fraught with danger, for, as Judis and Teixeira point out, a large majority of Americans reject the harsh views of Christian fundamentalists...
...and union voters...
...Their case is not altogether unconvincing...
...In part because of this incongruous union of the educated elite and minority groups, Gore carried the most prosperous and heavily populated regions of the country...
...The Emerging Republican Majority is justly hailed as a classic of political science, and it reads as well today as it did thirty years ago...
...This fear of cultural turmoil often trumps more materialistic concerns...
...Without a persuasive investigation of this question, we cannot know what the trends of the 2000 election mean—whether they mark a tectonic realignment or merely a political hiccup...
...Democrats garner nearly unanimous support among African Americans and receive significant majorities of Latino Representative Brad Carson is a Democratic congressman from Oklahoma...
...At half the length of Phillips's opus, Judis and Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority does not aspire to the same epic scope...
...In a world where skepticism about economic regulation and meddling has filtered down from the intellectual salons of Chicago and Rochester to small towns and suburbs, the Democratic push for governmental intervention in various areas of the economy finds fierce resistance...
...Why was Kennedy's Catholicism essential to his appeal in the aftermath of Eisenhower...
...Republicans and their allies on the Religious Right take these issues seriously, and, as the only party displaying concern about America's moral culture, the GOP reaps all the political benefits...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 1
