The Elections: 1932 or 1976?

The potential for a realignment in American politics is getting a lot of press. The lead editorial in The Economist last week asks "Is America Turning Left?," and the lead story on the US, Under The Weather," concludes that the Karl Rovian vision of a permanent Republican majority, forged out of a combination of libertarians, business interests and evangelicals is, if not dead, then in intensive care.

Given its politics, it is not all that surprising that The Economist takes solace in the truism that "[t]he Democrats' good fortune is much more the result of a Republican collapse than a Democratic revival," and it concludes that the ascendancy of the Left is most likely to be temporary: more akin to the post-Watergate election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 than the post-Depression election FDR in 1932.

Ross Douthat of The Atlantic is not so sure. He begins an article entitled " Blue Period" with what is probably his wildest dream:

The last enduring Democratic majority began with a midterm sweep. After being routed by Herbert Hoover’s Republicans in the 1928 election, the Democrats stormed back to pick up 56 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, leaving both chambers roughly split between the two parties when the 72nd Congress convened in December 1931. The victory, coming on the heels of the 1929 stock-market crash, set the stage for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932, which ultimately left the Democrats with 60 seats in the Senate and 313 in the House, and established Roosevelt’s party as the dominant political force in American life for a generation.

He briefly comes back to earth and denies that "even the most optimistic Democratic strategist dares to dream that the Democrats’ midterm sweep in ’06 will presage a Roosevelt-style landslide in ’08. " Yet he then spends the rest of the article citing reasons why he thinks "Democrats . . . suddenly and unexpectedly have the makings of a durable majority of their own within their grasp."

Perhaps my own politics are showing when I say that I think the Economist has the better of this argument, but there it is. Douthat's reasons for hope strike me as grasping at straws. In the near term, he sees the differences within the Left resolving themselves. Really? It's hard for me to see the likes of Dennis Kucinich and MoveOn.org agreeing to compromise with the centrists that brought us NAFTA and acknowledged that "the era of big government is over." But it is when he moves beyond the near-term prospects and explains why the tide of history is on the Democrats' side that wishful thinking edges into something close to delusion:

[I]n the long term, a new-model populism’s prospects look brighter still. The Republicans are to a large extent the party of married couples with children, while the Democrats are the party of unmarried voters, who tend to be more sensitive to economic risk, and thus more supportive of welfare spending, than members of intact nuclear families. But the nuclear family has been in steady decline for years, pushed along by falling marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock births, trends that are likely to create an ever-larger base for a left-populist majority.

The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.

But Dothout himself provides what I believe is the real reason 2008 will be much more like 1976 than 1932:

Long-term trends make new majorities possible, and traumatic events (such as 9/11 and the Iraq War) can help catalyze their formation, but without effective leadership, the opportunities are easily squandered, whether on the campaign trail or in the White House. Just ask Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

This is, I think, the Democrat's biggest problem. I see no one among the gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates who seems capable of leading the country anywhere because none has any unifying vision that can attract the allegiance of anything like a majority of the electorate. The plans and programs of each candidate are idiosyncrasies generated either by what the candidate came to believe in the 60's in college or by what the latest focus group tells him (or her) the electorate wants this week. It is a party of issues not principles. And, to the extent it does have unifying principles, those are not the principles that win elections today.

The problems with the available candidates is not confined to the Democrats, of course: can you imagine a party so completely devoid of talent that its leading candidate for President is Rudy Giuliani? But for all their faults and hubris, the Republicans have an articulable vision, both domestically and in foreign policy. And it is a vision that has the support of a very significant majority of the electorate. In 2008, the Republicans are going to pay the price, not for a failure of vision, but for a failure of execution. The neoconservative vision has much to recommend it, but Bush ran it aground in Iraq. The advocates of smaller government are so popular as to claim even Bill Clinton as a convert. Yet they were betrayed by the biggest increase in federal entitlements since the '60s -- not to mention the embarrassment of runaway "earmarks." Civil rights and liberties are part of the American political bedrock; yet Bush betrayed those principles with far more intrusive government, electronic surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo, and the greatest assault on civil rights and liberties since at least the Second World War, if not the Civil War. Tolerance and the separation of Church and State are two other great bedrock principles that were trashed by the Bush administration. By seeking to relentlessly pander to every constituency of his coalition, Bush ended up betraying all of them. The result is that, barring some kind of deus ex machina, the Republicans are going to get beat badly in 2008.

Yet, looking at their situation long term, I think the Republicans have a far, far better chance of staging a comeback than the Democrats do of sustaining the gains George has dropped in their laps. Why? Because they, unlike the Democrats, have a coherent political theory that underlies their rhetoric.

Again, I am probably projecting my own political desires on the country, but I tend to think that the country still wants what Bush promised: a compassionate conservatism. They want a conservatism that, first of all, cares about people but refuses to adopt them. Government should -- must -- help the needy. But it must do so without making them wards of the state or so far insulating them from risk that they cease to have any incentive to strive.

They want a government that leaves people alone, except as necessary to protect the weak from those who would prey upon them, the law-abiding from those who are not, and the different among us from those who hate difference.

They want a government that is more concerned about expanding the economic pie than it is in generating conflict over who has the biggest pieces.

And, most of all, they want a government that recognizes its own limitations; that realizes that it's efforts, however well intentioned, will frequently do at least as much harm as good; that sees itself as the provider of last resort tackling problems reluctantly and only after it becomes clear both that the problem is serious enough to preclude doing nothing and that there is a plan for addressing that problem that has some reasonable chance of producing near and long-term outcomes materially better than doing nothing.

At this point, the Republicans seem far more likely to be able to persuade people that they can deliver these things than the Democrats. Which leads me to believe that we are likely to elect a one-term Democrat in 2008: a Jimmy Carter rather than Franklin Roosevelt.