It is my belief that as we are approaching what will soon become known as the 2008 Realignment. As such it is important to understand that this moment in time does not exist in a vacuum, but has come about because of several historical events.
The Republican Party was created by radical abolitionists, out of the muddled wreckage of the Whig party. After the Civil War, the radicalism was replaced by corporatism, while the Democrats became the party of aggrieved Southerners and Western reformers.
It’s no accident that President William McKinley and Sen. Mark Hanna are Karl Rove’s role models — their Gilded Age divide and conquer manipulations advanced the corporate agenda, and kept the reformers at bay. Had President McKinley recognized Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive impulses, he would never have been on the ticket.
Through the Post-Reconstruction to WWI era, the Progressives were generally Republicans, while the Populists were generally Democrats. After the GOP-Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) rift of the 1912 election, the GOP became the Conservative party, while the Democrats embraced both the Populists and the Progressives.
Wilson’s betrayal of the Progressive Movement by taking the US in WWI led to Conservative backlash of the 1920’s — the economic managerial incompetence of the Hoover Administration (not the crash of 1929) led to the Great Depression, and the election of Franklin Roosevelt.
The re-alignment of 1932 lasted until 1968, but even when FDR carried all but two states in 1936, the serpent remained under the table. His victories depended on the Dixiecrat Solid South, which stayed Democratic until LBJ embraced the Civil Rights movement. It was then that the great re-alignment began to happen: the South and rural America became solidly Republican, whereas the Northern cities became Democratic bastions.
The Conservative movement has managed to become the dominant force in American politics for the past 40 years, but as we saw in 2006, the movement is breaking apart and is vulnerable to Liberal attacks. Case in point would be the fact that prominent Libertarian writer and Vice President of the Cato Institute Brink Lindsey wrote an article titled "Liberaltarians" last year arguing that Libertarians should not be adverse to forming an alliance with Democrats and abandoning the Republican Party. Also, just today Newsweek has an article about how Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is strongly courting evangelical voters into the Democratic party and apparently having some success.
All of this means that come January 20th, 2009 things will look very different in the country.
First off, I want to thank you for the link to Brink Lindsey article. When I first read your blog I couldn't come up with any reason why Libertarians would change sides but I do agree with his statement that "the new one [Republican Party] seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government." However, I am not quite convinced that this election will result in a great realignment. In spite of Dean's apparent success in courting evangelical voters, I find it very hard to believe that this traditionally core group of Republican supporters will actually go Democrat. The Libertarians don't have the numbers to make that much of difference. And the Democrats seem to well on their way to endorsing one of two very polarizing candidates, Obama and Clinton. I do look forward to the results of the election so as to judge the accuracy of your prediction.
ReplyDeleteErik,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. I feel that I should elaborate on why I think that 2008 will produce a realignment. If you look at the polling done by Gallup, Pew and a few other groups you notice a couple trends. The generic Republican vs. Democrat matchup was about 50-50 a year before the 2004 election. Gallup's latest poll has it 51-36 in favor of the Dems (that's the lowest GOP score since right before the 1992 election).
Not only that, but the conservative movement is exhausted and is splintering apart, just like what happened to the Democratic coalition in 1968. That's why you have 4 viable GOP candidates, because whereas the party had long unified around Bush in 2000, now each GOP candidate represents a particular segment within the fractured Republican tradition. McCain represents the military, Romney is business, Giuliani is the GWOT and Thompson is the traditional conservative.
And I mean, Democrats are making inroads in the South and Mountain West in what had been unquestioned GOP territory for 40 years. Bush is President because he won Ohio in 2004, but as we saw in 2006, their popular Senator Mike DeWine lost by 10 points to a relative nobody because the state had turned deeply against Bush. Hillary leads in polls in Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Colorado, for pete's sake. That means that the Red State strategy that worked for Bush in 2000 and 2004 will be meaningless come 2008.
You know as well as I do that polls at this point in race mean little. Even if they are meaningful, a 51-36 leaves 13% undecided or 3rd party (and thats with a 0% margin of error).
ReplyDeleteIncluding Romney in your list of viable Republican candidates is comparable to including Edwards in your list of viable Democratic candidates. Excluding those two, the Democrats have 2 to choose from(each of which would be the first of there respective kind to be secure a nomination) and the Republicans have 3 to choose from. So it will come down to a choice between a liberal and a conservative. When all is said and done, liberals will rally behind the liberal, republicans will rally behind the republican, and everyone else will vote for whom ever they are least pissed off at (which at this point seems to be the Democrats because Bush is an easy target right now).
As to Senator Mike DeWine defeat in 2006 being indicative of Ohio going blue in 2008, it is not that uncommon for the senate to change hands at a midterm election (especially considering the current popularity of our ongoing military engagements). After all, Dewine obtained his seat during Clinton's midterm election. And if you look at Ohio's senatorial history since 1911, you can hardly call them a Red state.