WRONG TURN
After four years the Trump experiment is coming to an end. Donald Trump is making noises about returning as the Republican candidate in 2024 but in the real world that is highly unlikely. His election was an aberration, the accidental product of an untypical period in which the two parties were almost perfectly balanced. That perfect balance meant that even with a politically inexperienced and controversial candidate, the Republicans with the help of the electoral system, were able to land their candidate in the White House.
The more typical pattern for our political parties has been to have one dominant political party with a secondary party forced to cooperate in order to survive. These asymmetrical alignments are interspersed with brief difficult political periods when the two major parties are near balance. They are then driven by competition to block much getting done. More productive governing must wait until one of the parties again achieves dominance.
It is understandable that voters are frustrated with this government. Those periods of progress-killing balance typically have lasted from eight to twelve years. We have been locked in to a near perfect national party balance at least since 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon was able to end a long period of Democratic dominance by engineering the political capture of the conservative South.
After 1932, propelled by the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was able to put together a dominant political coalition. That coalition included urban and ethnic voters, many agricultural workers, and the white South (The South had been very conservatively Democratic since being defeated by northern Republicans in the Civil War.).
After the Democrats gained a majority in 1932, the shell shocked Republicans who had dominated the government during the previous period, found that they could only get things done by co-operating with the Democratic majority. And, Democrats did have the majority. The Democrats had a majority in the House from 1932 till 1994, a period of sixty two years during which Republicans managed to gain the majority for only two two-year terms (in 1948 and in 1952).
Although the House remained in Democratic hands till 1994 the Republican Party did manage to move toward balance when Richard Nixon and the Republicans began their capture of the White South in 1972. It didn’t happen all at once (Jimmy Carter from Georgia carried the South in 1976.). With regional party changes there is always a lag because high seniority members of the previous party will continue to get elected until they retire. Then, they will be replaced by members of the newly winning party.
Nixon could not stay in office to enjoy his victory (with the Watergate scandal he was forced to resign and was replaced by Gerald Ford), but the addition of the South opened the presidency to Republicans. The real change came when the charismatic conservative, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Reagan was the leader of a party which had suffered in the minority since the early thirties. It had been able to win elections by emphasizing their party’s ability to defend against communism. Reagan with a long history of anti-communism moved quickly to increase spending on defense. He also managed to appeal to new Southern white members with faintly disguised racism (remember all those “welfare queens”).
Prior to 1980 there had been a strong element within the Republican Party which favored moderate social programs (an honest Richard Nixon would be far too liberal for today’s more conservative Republicans). After 1980 those moderate Republicans were drummed out of the Party (and New England, home of many Republican moderates became solidly Democratic). Current Republicans simply do not favor social programs at all. Voting down the Affordable Care Act (which originally was a Republican program) in Congress over fifty times is hardly a ringing endorsement of social programs.
It can be argued that, in its attempt to hold onto traditionally Democratic Southern whites in 1980 and after, the Republicans made a wrong turn. Democrats were certainly willing to move to a more modern political regime that would have built on government help for ordinary people during the New Deal. Many moderate Republicans mostly from more liberal parts of the country would have gone along. We would have ended up with a more moderate version of the political liberalism (not socialism) in the current Scandinavian countries.
Instead a substantial part of the country has found itself wedded to a Republican Party that, given its choice, would do nothing for all those ordinary people who support it. It is willing to run up huge deficits for a military system which finds itself overwhelmed with more funds than it is equipped to handle. The national party in Congress is no longer capable of dealing with real planning (the federal government will lose once more its power to borrow in a few weeks) or real programs (remember the giant job producing infrastructure program).
Those huge deficits mean that the Democrats can do little either. The Republicans in Congress will suddenly discover the horrors of the federal debt once a Democrat has the presidency. If the Democrats do not gain control of the Senate the government will once more be blocked from moving toward a more modern reality based political world.
Republicans for Congress are not those moderates of the seventies and eighties talking about real things. They campaign against socialism, against the mysterious left (no one knows what it is), against the violence of Antifa (an organization which does not exist). Too many are simply not equipped to deal with the real world. It all began with Nixon and then Reagan. We could have developed normally. Wrong turn!!
H.J. Rishel 12/02/2020
