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CounterPunch
January
4, 2003
Bleak Prospects
for the Democrats
Conservative Politics in an
Era of Dealignment
by ANIS SHIVANI
A number of structural reasons indicate that the
Democratic party will not be able to revive itself soon in the
way that liberal activists desire. Neither the Republican nor
the Democratic party is likely to gain the decisive upper hand
in electoral politics in the visible future. But this means
by default that conservative politics will retain ascendancy,
even if the Democratic party nominally returns to power. The
reports of a Republican party realignment are greatly exaggerated,
and so are the fantastic musings about a Democratic party realignment
because of emerging demographics. A better case can be made
for continued dealignment since the sixties, despite a rise in
party identification among the electorate and polarized party
line votes in Congress since the seventies. Although roll call
voting in Congress in the last two decades suggests rising partisanship,
this does not translate into enthusiasm among voters. It has
been noted that the Republican party wants to depress voter turnout
to keep poor voters out, and the Democratic party does not feel
at ease with socially conservative poor voters. The current
economic structure works against advocacy of the kind of domestic
social initiatives that the Democratic party has long stood for.
As the parties have come to a consensus on personal rather than
collective democracy, privatization of government services is
likely to be the trend of the future. The possibility of radical
initiatives mostly in the foreign policy sphere favors conservatives.
Continued weak party identification, low voter turnout, and
both parties' emerging consensus on privatization suggest that
a commitment to the working-class is highly unlikely to come
about.
The recent competition for House minority
leader between Nancy Pelosi, representing the "liberal"
side of the Democratic party, and Martin Frost and Harold Ford,
speaking for the "conservative" side, was overdramatized.
Such personalization doesn't take into consideration the structural
reasons why the Democratic party is compelled to follow a basically
conservative line. Pelosi's acceptance speech struck all the
key New Democrat themes: "opportunity, community, [and]
responsibility," seeking "common ground" with
Republicans on domestic issues, being as forceful as the President
on defense and security, and pursuing an aggressive "economic
growth" agenda. It is not simply a matter of the Democratic
party getting its voice back. The progressive instinct within
the Democratic party will remain a minority, and mostly unheard,
voice. Domestic repression has become a necessity because of
the recent transformation of the American economy. Even if the
Democrats return to power, a dismantling of the domestic repressive
structure - except at the margins - seems inconceivable.
The first line of reasoning to confront
in arguing for a continued conservative ascendancy is the flawed
notion of realignment. Both Republican and Democratic claims
of a realignment in their favor rest on a theory of critical
elections first propounded by V.O. Key, Jr., E. E. Schattschneider,
James L. Sundquist, and Walter Dean Burnham. To the extent
that this theory is dubious, we have to wonder if there have
been any critical, or realigning, elections since 1932, and if
there have been any momentous shifts toward either party in the
1968 and 1980, not to mention the 2002, elections. The originators
of realignment theory never made the extravagant claims that
followers of this genre later propounded in their name. Nonetheless,
some version of critical elections theory has become a standard
organizational device in American political science and history
texts. Typically, three eras are considered realigning ones:
the 1850s, the 1890s, and the 1930s. To the extent that we
believe in the theory of critical elections, we're likely also
to give credence to periodicity in American history and major
policy changes associated with such elections.
David R. Mayhew has recently taken up
the fifteen central claims of realignment theory, and systematically
discredited each one of them. He questions whether American
elections can be neatly sorted between realigning and nonrealigning
types, whether there are regular and predictable patterns of
periodicity, whether good third party showings tend to be precursors
of realignment, whether ideological polarization led by insurgents
marks realignment junctures, whether realignments are associated
with significant policy changes, whether electoral realignments
bring about unified control of government by a single party and
whether such unified control is even necessary for significant
policy change, and whether American voters only express themselves
effectively at realignment junctures. One particularly tricky
problem is why there has now been a seventy-year gap between
realignments, when the thirty-year-cycle predicts that it is
long overdue. Mayhew even questions whether the 1896 election
deserves to be kept on its canonical pedestal. These criticisms
open the way to thinking not in terms of critical elections marking
a before and after of a particular policy regime, but in terms
of a permanent campaign. In this view, voters' interests would
be continuously expressed during all elections, thus diminishing
the importance of particular elections.
Realignment theory serves an important
narrative function, letting American history be neatly periodized.
But it is important to shift attention away from realignment
theory to locate major policy change not in critical elections
but in continuous political transformation, determined ultimately
by economic change. Secular changes that are unlikely to be
affected by the electoral successes of either party include declining
voter turnouts, candidate-centered elections, split-ticket voting,
declining partisan identification, the rise of independent voters,
and political alienation of the young. Crotty and Jacobson have
talked about confusing, whimsical patterns in elections. The
Democrats won a close contest in 1960, followed by a landslide
in 1964. Richard Nixon followed the same pattern in 1972. Ronald
Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1996 followed suit. But in
none of these cases was the victorious party able to consolidate
its gains. Beck and Sorauf point out that as issues become nationalized,
third parties and regional interests fade in comparison to national
consensus. The trend is entirely in the direction of nationalization,
particularly since the dominance of electronic communication.
It can be argued that this trend too favors conservative politics.
American parties have tended to be cadre rather than mass parties,
with all that that implies for interest in winning elections
rather than taking principled stands on particular issues.
Progressive era reforms played a key
role in eviscerating the political parties as mass mobilization
forces. There can never be a return to the high turnout rates
before Progressive reforms. Progressive reforms that weakened
parties included the Australian ballot, the direct primary, and
nonpartisan elections at the state and local levels. Civil service
reform, which weakened the power of patronage, dealt another
mortal blow to the parties. When elections become nonpartisan,
this typically favors conservatism. The direct primary weakens
the national party by taking control away from party officials
and activists. In fact, many Progressives were explicitly interested
in striking a blow against the power of the parties by democratizing
the electoral process. What the Progressives actually succeeded
in doing and this has become more evident since the advent
of television was to weaken national parties at the expense
of investing control in the hands of the mass media, and the
special interests that feed the mass media and finance political
campaigns. The case in favor of presidential primaries rests
on disgust with behind-the-scenes manipulations of party insiders,
while the case against it lies in its tendency to generate media-oriented
rather than ideological campaigns. There is no foreseeable change
to this pattern. Both the Progressives and the single issue-oriented
activists of the 1960s and 1970s drove machine politicians out
of politics when they couldn't compete directly with them. Neither
party attempts to win elections anymore by mobilizing the millions
of citizens who don't vote; this simply will not change. On
the contrary, neither party supports electoral reforms that might
spur voter turnout; this too is unlikely to change.
No doubt, in the 1980s and 1990s there
has been an increased degree of ideological cohesion in both
the Democratic and Republican parties in Congress. Nonetheless,
the issues on the plate to begin with are to a great degree consensual.
A look back at the 1988 party platforms shows that on every
issue except the environment, women, and minorities (that is,
primarily cultural issues), there has been a dramatic narrowing
of the range of differences between the two parties. Even with
unified Republican government in 2002, is it likely that the
Republicans will maintain this hold for anywhere as long as a
decade? The likely future scenario is the continued dominance
of single-issue groups that splinter ideological cohesion around
broader class and economic concerns. Campaign finance laws are
unlikely to evolve in such a direction as to return stronger
party organization. (Recall that it was the 1970s campaign finance
reforms that set into motion the explosive growth of PACs.)
The seminal 1950 American Political Science Association document
on a more "responsible" party system called for reforms
that seem even more unattainable today: biennial national conventions
with greater control over the national committees, binding party
platforms with permanent philosophies, elimination of congressional
practices that weaken party discipline, and a redesign of American
parties into forces of mass mobilization. As Crenson and Ginsberg
have pointed out, citizens today tend to be interested in service,
not politics; the reformulation of one's conception relative
to government as customer rather than citizen marks the end of
the politics of mass mobilization.
A case can be made that in a period of
voter disillusionment and apathy, it is conservative issues that
hold the spotlight. This is not to say that the electorate is
necessarily becoming more conservative, but that when voters
don't see the political system able to handle large problems
they vote conservatively. To the extent that the parties
continue to be perceived as ineffective in articulating and solving
the larger issues of the day, a conservative agenda - independent
of which party holds power - will continue to dominate. And
there seems no way out of this dilemma, since the political party
continues to decline in importance in campaigns. Rather than
mass parties that offer coherent ideological platforms to keep
coalitions together, single-interest groups capitalize on voters'
disaffection. It has been noted that the executive party steps
in to fill the vacuum when the legislative party is not strong
or cohesive. Persistent institutional trends, such as the separation
between party loyalty in the abstract and individual candidate
success, mean that the parties have become "executive-centered
coalitions" since the late 1960s. Partisanship in Congress
increased during the 1980s, but the parties in this same period
turned to service-orientation; the resulting influence of PACs
weakens the possibility of stable partisanship. The hope in
the 1980s and 1990s that parties would be able to reclaim their
central role by becoming service-oriented has not borne full
fruition because of greater contradicting institutional tendencies.
It is possible that a weak realignment, in favor of the Republican
party, has already occurred, but it is limited in its capacity
to achieve programmatic goals because of a weaker base than used
to be the case in the heyday of parties. Weakened party organizational
capacities to nominate and elect candidates, and weakened party
loyalties among both legislators and the electorate, counter
the relative resurgence of partisanship since the 1970s.
The traditional argument has been that
dealignment, i.e., declining partisanship among the electorate,
including such reflections as third party voting and ticket splitting,
is a momentary phenomenon to be followed by a new realignment.
Yet, despite the mild comeback made by parties since the 1970s,
perhaps we have entered an extended period of dealignment. If
withdrawal from party loyalty has indeed become a permanent feature
of the landscape, then new party loyalties may not develop.
Walter Dean Burnham has argued that the American party system
has become so weakened by loss of party control over nominations
and the scheduling of many state and local elections in off-years,
that it may no longer be capable of realignment. As far back
as the late seventies, weakened party organizations as factors
in the nomination process were said to have resulted in a "no-party
system." Another way this has been expressed is to say that
the presidency has become its own national party, formed on a
plebiscitary leadership model. The ascendancy of the executive
as opposed to the legislature reduces members of Congress to
playing the "nonpartisan" role of "ombudsmen"
promising constituents an ear with the federal government and
bringing home pork-barrel projects. A strong case can be made
that the sociological characteristics of large parts of the electorate
that led to the building of the New Deal coalition are in permanent
eclipse, and that a new party system is not likely to take its
place anytime soon. At the same time, too much can be made of
Republican strength since the 1980s; the case for realignment
in that direction is also exaggerated. The rise of "pure"
independents has been demythologized by much research; yet such
nominal identification by increasing numbers of voters suggests
a loss of partisanship among the electorate. Independents tend
to be the least informed voters, and it is no good sign of the
return of partisanship that among the young perhaps half of all
voters consider themselves independent. How lasting will the
present Republican coalition be? Will it too succumb, sooner
rather than later, to the large-scale dealignment characteristic
of recent American politics?
In all likelihood, the future of American
politics is toward what Ted Halstead and Michael Lind have called
the "radical center." It doesn't matter that in fact
the middle-class is rapidly disappearing, and that the working-class
has pressing unmet social service needs; both parties are addressing
themselves toward the mythical swing voter, because his putative
needs accord best with the economic transformation occurring
in America. Acknowledging the severance of the stable employment
contract, Halstead and Lind offer as part of a new social compact
mandatory private health insurance as the solution to the health
care crisis, replacement of the Social Security system by a public
pension system based on individual savings, personal development
accounts of $20,000 by the age of eighteen for all Americans
to meet the challenge of rising inequality, radical change in
immigration policy to favor skilled over unskilled workers, ending
fixed retirement ages to meet the problem of the underutilized
elderly, and regulation of human germ-line enhancement rather
than its outright prohibition. It is as safe a bet as any that
all or most of these "pragmatic" solutions (though
intensely conservative, if viewed in the traditional political
perspective) are as likely to come about as any other set of
policy options. The postindustrial economy the Information
Age economy, to put a positive spin on it demands "pragmatic"
solutions along these lines, breaking the compact that was necessary
between workers and the state under a different order. Theda
Skocpol has recently articulated the need for a new social compact
that cuts across classes, but fails to identify the instrument
of "a new popular mobilization by and for ordinary American
families." Skocpol desires social programs for working
families "in return for contributions to the larger community"
in accord with what she claims is the history of the most successful
social programs in America. More likely, however, any new social
engineering will take the turn Lind and others in his camp have
recently been outlining.
The health of the parties in the nineteenth-century
can never be recovered. The mass parties of the time aggregated
and articulated class interests in a way that's not really possible
under the new economic conditions. Progressive era reforms fatally
weakened national parties, and the thrust of modern reforms (including
the newest campaign finance law) is in the same direction. The
conservatives have the upper hand, since it is only in foreign
policy that great initiatives can be taken; the Democrats have
come to a consensus with the Republicans on deficit reduction
as priority, making no new large social programs possible. In
the new economic order, Social Security and Medicare privatization
and some sort of a consumption or flat tax (or at least further
scaling back of progressive taxation) are the kinds of policy
initiatives likely to get play regardless of the party in power.
An alignment of liberals with conservatives on civil liberties
might be a fond hope, but the conservative libertarians' economic
agenda puts them so much at odds with liberals that this is not
too likely. Since no real realignment seems to have happened
since 1932, it is vain to hope that the Democratic party will
offer a new social program without the strength of an electoral
realignment. Weak party identification should continue to favor
the conservative economic and social agenda. Conservative economic
forces are really operating without much filtering by either
party, Republicans or Democrats, since neither party is strong,
or has a mass base of the kind seen in earlier generations.
The rise of independent voters is another chimera; in practice,
they tend to be weakly affiliated with either party, not ideologically
motivated or informed voters who might support strong domestic
initiatives of any kind.
The decline of the Democratic party is
actually associated with the decline of the Republican party
- the party system in general. It may seem that the latter party
has dramatically gained at the cost of the former, even to the
extent of almost attaining realignment, but in fact abiding institutional
factors continue to emasculate both parties. Both parties have
in fact moved toward a new consensus on distribution of economic
resources. A conservative politics has filled in the vacuum
left by the general decline of parties. If neither party gets
credit or blame for economic performance to the extent that used
to be the case, then character-centered campaigns become all
the more important; again, this favors the conservative agenda.
The advantage, in the absence of fully resurgent grassroots
parties, will remain with highly organized minorities whose interests
tend to be conservative (although this is presented as bipartisan
pragmatism or the vital center). The return of the disenfranchised
as the key component of a resurgent liberal party does not seem
to be in the cards.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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