Coalitions and realignment - examining American political parties
Sixty-six days to go….
Overseas friends who follow American politics find our two parties a puzzle. Neither represents a far-left philosophy, and for much of our history our two parties have seemed very similar. Now we have the curious reality that the Republican Party, known as the party that best serves the interests of business, is also the party of the alienated white workers who have seen their jobs disappear with the decline of manufacturing.
How has this come about?
In the decade leading up to the Civil War (1861-1865), the Republican Party, formed in 1854 with the goal of preventing slavery’s expansion, had a strong base in the North and was the more liberal party. And immediately after the Civil War, its1866 Civil Rights Act locked in universal male suffrage and opened to African American men full participation in the political system.
The Democratic Party pre-Civil War, with its base in the South, was a party of disparate interests largely held together by Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian society with minimal intervention by the central government. In 1860 this latter view was expressed as “states’ rights,” in other words, the view that the balance of power between the Federal government in Washington, DC, and individual state governments should lean heavily to the states. The implication was that any decision about slavery should be taken by individual states rather than Washington.
Post-Civil War, the white south remained loyal to the Democratic Party and this continued for the next hundred years. Blacks tended to vote Republican. But they were betrayed by the Republican Party, champion of anti-slavery and policies to help southern Blacks after the war known as Reconstruction, when it abandoned Reconstruction in 1877 and shifted to pursuing a pro-business agenda. This shift occurred for several reasons, one being growing concerns that blacks and immigrants, who were becoming more vocal, were demanding a redistribution of resources. Republicans opposed resource sharing but their racism was cloaked in a vocabulary of opposition to “activist government,” “big government,” and “socialism.” Comments Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson, “The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. ”
In other words, racism, cloaked in American ideals of minimal government and self-help, has prevented the emergence of a coalition of the disadvantaged challenging business interests.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans of the later 19th century wanted minimal involvement from the central government. Both parties were coalitions of conservatives and liberals. Neither party championed civil rights. While the Republican Party served business interests, it also drew in farmers and laborers. The Democratic Party served the interests of white southerners of all classes. The crucial shift came with the economic crisis of the Depression at the beginning of the 1930s. The Republican Party’s lack of compassion became totally visible with the presidency of Herbert Hoover, 1929-33, who at the outset of the Depression refused any government intervention to help those whose lives had been shattered.
The Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency began in 1933, reversed this policy, promising government intervention and declaring that the government’s primary role was to help ordinary people have better lives. This was startlingly new for the United States and was opposed by big business. His programs – dubbed the New Deal - quickly distributed emergency aid, created jobs paid for by the government, and introduced legislation to regulate wages, hours, and child labor, and introduced collective bargaining. He introduced government insurance of banks and other initiatives to restore investor confidence. And at the end of World War II, Roosevelt and his successor Truman were responsible for the “GI Bill” which enabled qualifying veterans and their families pay for school or university or job training.
Blacks began to shift to the Democratic Party in large numbers in the 1930s, and over the next decade blacks were split about 50-50 between the Republican and Democratic Party.
Roosevelt had moved American political life leftwards, opening the way for government spending on projects in the ’50s and ’60s that benefited all Americans. This state of play - Democrats as a coalition supporting the disadvantaged but also remaining the party of white southerners, and Republicans as pro-business - remained for thirty to forty years. But several events in the decade 1962 – 1973 made way for the polarization of the parties that we see today.
First, Milton Friedman’s articulation of “small government” in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom gave ammunition to Republicans who objected to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and encouraged Republicans to push more aggressively for tax reduction and fewer business regulations, and thus to create a supposed “trickle down” economy that would benefit all. This policy was aggressively promoted by Ronald Reagan when he became president in 1981, and paralleled Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism that swept the UK at the same time. It has never been proven to help the disadvantaged.
Secondly, the passing of the civil rights act of 1964 followed by the voting rights act of 1965, both Democratic Party initiatives led by President Lyndon Johnson, caused Southern Democrats to switch over to the Republican Party. Culturally conservative southerners now brought a new set of concerns to into the Republican Party, which included resistance to school integration and gun control.
Thirdly, the Thirdly, the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision of 1973 created a legal precedent requiring that all states must make abortion legal. Those already promoting a conservative agenda in the Republican Party picked up this issue. Though Ronald Reagan was not sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause and was more interested in an economic policy to serve the business community, he reluctantly embraced the culturally conservative agendato maintain the party unity that would guarantee his election.
The anti-abortion lobby, previously led by Catholic groups who were largely Democrats, now was taken over by the newly emerging Christian Right, based in the South, that had found its way into the Republican Party. This group recognized that their best chance of reversing the abortion decision was by getting an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court, and over the next thirty years they carefully prepared the way for this.
Thus began a new era in American politics where the two parties began to coalesce behind ideologies, creating a more extreme difference between the parties. From the Republican side, a series of conservative goals, including “supply side” economics that served business, an anti-communist agenda that more frontally challenged the Soviet Union (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!”), assertion of the right to have guns, anti-abortion, and anti “crime” policies that were surrogates for keeping blacks down or in prison, became locked together and defining of the Republican Party. A century earlier, Republicans had been the liberal party. Now they were the conservatives.
In 1980, of the one-third of the population that were self-described conservatives, 41% were Democrats, 35% were Republicans, and 24% were independents. By 1990, conservatives as a fraction of the total population had barely changed, but now 20% were self-described Democrats and over 50% were self-described Republicans.
Next week, we’ll look at the implications of this switch for the Democratic party and American politics going forward.