The Electoral Aftermath - Second Shoe Falling?

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The defeat of the Repubs was pretty massive and might reflect the birth of a truly national Democratic party, and potentially the onset of a new realignment (that would be right on schedule if 1968 is considered the beginning of repub ascendancy). A really national Democratic party would actually be a somewhat new phenomenon, as even at its height during the 1930s to 1970s the party generally was an uneasy alliance of Northern Democrats and Dixiecrats. This coalition did not provide a strong foundation for progressive policy, and its most successful policy accomplishments took place either after the 1934, 36 or 1964, 66 elections, following national crises and landslide triumphs. More often, there was a marriage of convenience when it came to organizing the Congress, but on policy most Southern Democrats generally allied with fellow conservatives of the Repub party.

Nixon’s Southern strategy (borrowed from Goldwater) led to the shifting of the Solid South from Dem to Repub, to the point where the Dixiecrats became Dixie-cans, and from Thurmond to Lott, Sessions to Miller ad nauseum, they became Repubs in name as well as in policy. Yet the Repubs maintained and even extended their conservative bases in Western and rural regions, and in suburbia. The Party’s shift from Lincoln to Dixie-can, epitomized by Gingrich, Delay, Lott, Frist, etc, and its success across the country all worked because it picked up the South without giving much ground elsewhere. The Dems often successfully contributed to this effort with circular shooting parties, and failure to get beyond identification as a coalition of various self-interested population sectors without an overall all-embracing theme that could galvanize a broad movement across the country. Maps of the 2000 and 2004 presidential election outcomes, by state, thus, largely coincide with maps of states that allowed/prohibited slavery, but with partisanship reversed (blue states were those where slavery was prohibited of course). Key exceptions to this pattern were Indiana and Ohio. In addition, The New England/Middle Atlantic states retained a fair number of Republican districts where "moderate" repubs still reigned from Civil War days despite the shift of the party’s center of gravity southward.

The pattern in 2006 suggests that the second part of the shifting of parties may now be kicking in. New England Republicans largely wiped out in the House, Indiana and Ohio possibly in partisan transition (despite Lugar), and a number of Middle Atlantic rural, hereditary repub districts gone Dem. In addition, while the Dem victors from Red states (Tester in Montana, Webb in Va.) may not support "liberal" "social" issues (gun-control, same sex marriage) they do seem genuinely on board for a more equitable economic policy approach, and in resistance to the internal and external abuse of power that has become the repub raison d’etre. Thus, the foundation for a more national and potentially cohesive party grounded in the traditional "North" (and now including rural areas there), but focused on greater equity in economic policy and a more civil approach to internal and international politics, may emerge - if the party’s tendency to dissemble can be overcome and common ground among constituents emphasized. That of course is a pretty big if, but given the potential for abuse of power that the repubs have shown, their increasingly authoritarian and demoguogic tendencies in the context of an increasingly cabled and databanked society, the incentives for common sense and collaborative action are certainly augmented.

One other thing, despite the relatively large scale of the Dem triumph, given the utter corruption, incompetence, vindictiveness and clandestine authoritarianism characteristic of the regime, the victory isn’t really all that impressive. What will happen when progressives don’t have the Foleys, Neys, Delays Abramoffs ad nauseum, consistently breaking front page news - bam-bam-bam, while at the same time war deaths surge and intelligence reports show that the reasons for war were not only non-existent but that the war is counterproductive in terms of fighting terrorism, and the military papers all call for the Secretary of Defense's resignation the week before the election. Something to start considering now. Investigations may (and should) be held - this administration has talked about the concept of accountability more than probably any other (though they clearly meant accountability to apply only to those outside their tent) and there's much that deserves to be exposed. This would be good not only for the country, inasmuch as the country values truth and honesty, but also for the Dems as a party if investigations are done with a sense of fair play and openness. The Dems will probably come up with modestly appropriate policies re healthcare and insurance, Iraq, taxes, and not much will probably get done due to the divided state of government. But whether the second shoe remains fallen and a realignment occurs may depend on the success of progressives in establishing and maintaining some emotional and communicative connections with people who ultimately will never read those policy documents (though they might benefit from their implementation), and who will be getting much of their information from news conglomerates and TV ads.

2006 Elections

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The robot calls tactic was precisely the sort of last minute surprise that I think might have been expected from the decadent remains of the party of Abe Lincoln. Remains to be seen how effective it will be, but clearly it comes straight from the RNCC, and displays clearly the ethic of the party in power. In a sense, its the extenuation of machine politics, which have so often pervaded this country at the local level, to National status.

My feeling for the past several years, and one which I find pretty unsettling, is that increasingly this political era is coming to combine both the worse of the pre Civil War era, with its its incompetent hacks in political leadership, Southern control of Congress through demogoguery on behalf of privilege, all completely supported by a reactionary supreme court; and the post Civil War guilded age that enshrined the robber barons and sold out the freedmen , once again supported by a reactionary court. Unfortunately for the country, the ante-bellum politics proved utterly incapable of dealing in any kind of legitimate moral/political way with the overiding issues of the day -e.g., slavery, and the attempts to cover this up would only disintegrate into war. The post Civil War era for years after then demogogued politics into a cultural affair, largely a political replay of the civil war, in a way that enabled the political system to ignore more substantive issues and reforms that it might otherwise have had to deal with.

It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow, but I suppose it may give a clue as to how successfully machine politics have now been transported to the national level. On the other hand, however, I've always felt that the 1968 elections, with the election of Nixon, were the beginning of a new political realignment, which ushered in a conservative era that has ultimately developed into the political reaction that we've seen in recent years. By that standard we're about due for a new realignment, they have generally tended to occur every 35 to 40 years. The two types of realignment which have historically been seen to have occurred have been the reenforcing realignment, in which the party in power gains a stronger hold on power on the basis of its manipulation of political symbology in a way that creates a new supporting coalition (the machine succeeds as in 1896), or else the reforming realignment which tosses out the reactionary party and attempts mild reforms (the New Deal). We may get a glimpse of which way the country goes over the next couple of days, but even if the Repub reaction is ultimately defeated, the legacy it leaves, in terms of more terrorism, incompetence, deficits, etc., is one that will probably not easily be erased even under the best of conditions. And it certainly seems open to question whether the Dems, if successful, are even capable of providing much in the way of a real change of course, with their tendency towards opportunism and dissembly.