Thinking about this piece by Armando, I was suddenly reminded of something. During the 1990’s, when the Republicans were attacking Bill Clinton for being a non-inhaling pot-smoker and a draft-dodger and a philanderer, a lot of analysts saw it as little more than a continuation of the cultural wars of the 1960’s, a self-obsessed battle among aging Baby Boomers. People my age, born at the very end of the 1960’s and beginning of the 1970’s who were beginning to vote for the first time, kept hoping that this stale debate would burn itself out. We didn’t want to fight about school prayer or Roe v. Wade or who fought in the war.
But things didn’t get better when Obama became president. Our generation is starting to dominate is some ways. You can see it in how attitudes have completely changed on gay marriage and marijuana use and interracial dating. You can see it in the demographic makeup of the Obama coalition. But the behavior of the Republicans has just continued to get worse.
This actually has come as a surprise to me, or at least a disappointment. Because I really do believe that Obama was always right that there is more stuff that unites Americans than divides us, and that the disagreements between the parties are exaggerations or caricatures of how most people think. There really is a giant middle in this country that is made up of different kinds of people, most indifferent, but some genuinely moderate, who have no more use for Bernie Sanders than they have for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.
These aren’t the most informed people in the world, and they certainly aren’t sitting on a hidden mine of brilliant policy proposals. You can’t look to them for real wisdom. But you can win their allegiance, and that can bring you the power to win national elections and perhaps even to pass a bill or two once you get there.
I think what annoys a lot of progressives about any kind of post-partisan talk is not just that it fails to unreservedly take their side but that many of the people proposing post-partisanship seem to think that the correct decisions are right smack dab in the middle between what some mainstream Democrat like Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia thinks and whatever unhinged lunacy is being blasted across right-wing radio. I never thought that Obama thought like that. I thought Obama knew how to build a winning coalition and that he thought that a winning coalition would be able to do more to pressure the Republicans than actually turned out to be the case.
After all, a winning political coalition says something pretty definitive about the culture of the country. If a previously losing coalition becomes a winning one, that means the culture has changed and a new politics should be possible. But Obama seems not to have won with a previously losing coalition so much as he discovered a winning coalition that had never been tried before.
And then he had to try to get it to work in the midst of the biggest economic collapse since the 1930’s. I don’t think we can ever forget that things would have been different in unknowable ways if Obama had taken office in good times.
Still, as the country changes, the Republicans show very few signs of moving with it, and many signs that even conservatives who weren’t alive in the 1960’s will never get over that decade.
