What Year Is This? Historical Analogies and the Election (From the Daily Kos)

[dtotire]

Good Article

What Year Is This? Historical Analogies and the Election

by DHinMI
Sun Aug 03, 2008 at 08:20:18 AM PDT

History doesn't repeat itself. But in American political history, there have been a series of relatively stable and lasting periods of electoral dominance by one of the major political parties. Since the demise of the Whigs and the consolidation of the Republican party as the alternative to the Democratic party, most historians identify four eras of realignment followed by stability: 1850's to the 1890's, the 1890's to the early 1930's, and the 1930's to the 1970's. I argued here a few weeks ago that we are facing the end of the Reagan Era. The New Deal order, which was brought in by big Democratic victories in four straight elections (1930-1936), ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and his subsequent attack on Johnson's Great Society and Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Reagan coalition was driven by many factors, including economic, but the key pressure points exploited by the Republicans were racial and social-cultural (especially anything touching on feminism, the changing family, and issues of sexuality and masculinity, including homosexuality). Judging it on its overt goals, the GOP during the Reagan Era has been an utter failure. The Conservatives have lost the culture wars. They could, with another seat or two on the Supreme Court, overturn Roe v Wade and many other accepted laws, but on issues of racial and social tolerance, Archie Bunker and the social and cultural reactionaries lost.

Social and cultural issues were, however, mostly a smoke screen floated out by the strategists and leaders of the GOP during the Reagan Era. They concealed from the public most of their economic agenda. Republicans talked about opportunity and getting government off the back of the little guy, but the real goal of the GOP's dominant wing--primarily southern and deeply anti-government and anti-labor--was to turn over the spoils of power to their cronies who could bill the government for services and goods, who could exploit the collapse of government regulation to boost profits for low-wage or extractive industries, and to reverse what economists such as Paul Krugman, referring to the amelioration of the worst excesses of income disparity that existed at the end of the 1920's which then led to the creation of the vast American middle class, call The Great Compression.

What began as the Reagan era became, by the 1990's, the Gingrich/Norquist/DeLay/Rove coalition. It was a coalition built on deception, as the GOP leaders and their funders and think tankers at places like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute and the propagandists like Norquist (with plenty of aiding, abetting and even active participation from the media) concealed their economic goals, which could best be summed up by Norquist's infamous quip that his goal was to shrink government to the point where conservatives could "drown it in a bathtub."

Americans don't want government to be drowned in a bathtub. They want it to work. They can be fooled for a while, but when reality smacks them in the face the way Iraq and the economy have since 2005, they stop believing the lies. Bush's public collapse began when he finally stopped concealing his intentions and openly supported privatization of Social Security. The response to Katrina made things worse for Bush and the GOP's long-running attack on government. Iraq, which was supposed to be a cakewalk, descended in to an open civil war. And a series of financial market crises, collapsing home values, a massive increase in foreclosures, rising unemployment, spikes in the cost of health care and the number of uninsured Americans, losses of pensions, massive and growing disparities of income and wealth, tight credit and now a recession have made it impossible for most Americans who don't vote entirely on conservative social and cultural issues to maintain any trust in the Republican party.
Throughout the day some of my fellow contributing editors will post their thoughts on analogies between this campaign season and other recent presidential elections. My claim that this year could end up being most like 1932 is not necessarily incompatible with what you will read this afternoon and evening. The candidate face-off is different than in 1932, and has more in common with some recent elections. But we might be on the cusp of a major shift, where the emotional bonds voters have with a party and which demographic groups most identify with which party could shape our politics for decades. I've argued since November of last year (here, here and here) that we could be on the verge of a 1932-like election, where the best metaphor wouldn't be a "wave" but that the change would be more geologic. Evidently Chuck Schumer agrees:
Why will Democrats win? Schumer advanced a theory that this is a "tectonic plate election," as 1932 and 1980 were, where voters aren't just responding to one particular event or circumstance but have fundamentally altered their views of what they want from the government and elected officials. Schumer argued that voters want a "stronger government" and are more focused on Democratic issues like the economy and health care than GOP issues like national security and family values.

There are some significant differences between 1932 and now. While John McCain is running to extend the Bush policies in to a third term, technically he is not, as was 1932 Republican nominee Herbert Hoover, an incumbent. Because of the Republican successes in redistricting and reapportionment, there is no way Democrat will gain almost 100 Congressional seats as they did in 1932. We're at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while in 1932 the US was isolationist and the electorate did not seek to change that stance. Neither Roosevelt nor Hoover were "outsiders" from what had been the previously dominant social and cultural classes. In this regard, Obama is probably more like John Kennedy, who had to overcome questions of whether voters would trust a Roman Catholic, while Obama has to overcome questions about his racial background and ties to countries and cultures like Kenya and Indonesia which are to some voters exotic and misunderstood places.

The economic distress of today is nothing like what Americans experienced in 1932, when almost a third of American workers were without jobs. Indeed, what remains of the New Deal has and will probably continue to prevent the depth and scope of devastation that happened during the Depression. But if one looks at the economic distress in relative terms, in comparison to times of greater growth and security, where people were more likely to have health care and pensions and had homes that were creating significant equity and growing wealth, the situation today is a shock. And the broader insecurities of the financial crises has created major anxiety for many, especially those looking at their 401(k) accounts shrink just as they approach retirement.

Certainly on the operational/tactical level, things look great at recreating the type of election we had in 1932. It was a landslide, with FDR winning all but six states. But his percentage was only 57%, less than his percentage in 1936, and less than the winning percentages of Eisenhower (1956), Johnson (1964), Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1984). However, in 1932 Democrats picked up 97 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate. With the NRCC broke and the DSCC with a 2-1 cash advantag over the NRSC, with the Republicans demoralized and Bush polling under 30 percent, with more open Congressional seats than any time since at least the 19th century, and with numerous Republicans in ethical or legal trouble, we could post major gains in both chambers, quite possibly bigger than what we had in 2006.

In 1932, ethnic Catholics came out in large numbers and strongly supported the Democratic ticket. It was the start of the coalition of Northern ethnics (Catholics and Jews), northern Blacks and union members along with southern white protestants that held solid at the presidential level until the elections from 1968-1980 and on the Congressional level in to the 1990's. This time around, we should expect a surge of new black voters. Black voters have been reliably Democratic for decades, but participation levels are much lower than with white voters. With the Obama candidacy, that may change.
The Latino population is becoming a huge percentage of the vote nationally and especially in several western states. Latinos have regularly voted over 60% Democratic, but with them becoming a much larger share of the vote, keeping that percentage or growing it—as seems likely, at least this year—could contribute to building a long-lasting coalition.

Finally, young voters of all races and ethnicities have moved solidly toward the Democrats since 2002. It's widely accepted that if a voter votes for one party three straight elections, chances are they will maintain their loyalty to that party for many years to come, maybe for the remainder of their lives. Issues and world views certainly have contributed to this move toward the Democrats. Young people are much more tolerant on issues like sexual orientation and race than their parents and definitely more than the averages you see with the elderly, which pulls them toward the Democrats.


One should note, however, that the Democrats currently dominate the Republicans in their ability to effectively solicit online contributions, appeal to blogs, use social networking sites like Facebook, text messaging and handheld devices and other forms of new technology that connects people and conveys message. Barack Obama wears a blackberry, while John McCain admits to knowing almost nothing about computers and the internet. In this regard, there is a strong corollary with FDR's embrace of and Hoover's disdain for the new media of 1932: radio.

The similarity we all want with the 1932 election is the election of a tremendous leader like FDR and a Congress that passes transforming legislation like the creation of Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and the regulatory and social welfare programs that we associate with the New Deal. It will take some years before we know if the analogy was in that regard apt. But for the possibility of creating a lasting connection between a majority of the electorate and the Democratic party, the evidence suggests that this year could be much like 1932.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/3/111919/0350/677/561726

[Doctor_J]

1. I hope that the writer is not underestimating Big Media and E-voting

and voter roll purges. If the election is on the up-and-up, Obama will get 55% or so and we will pick up 30 House seats and 8 Senate seats. If the media weren't a GOP propaganda arm, the numbers would be 59, 40, and 10.