It’s still too early to tell, but I think my piece on February 7th, What’s a Realignment Look Like?, might turn out to be my best and most prescient piece of the year. Here’s a teaser:
The interesting thing is what happened in 1932, by which time it had become apparent that Hoover’s Republicans had no answer to the hardships of the Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took back the White House for the Democrats after twelve years on the outside, and the Democrats had huge wins in both the House (101 seats) and the Senate (an astounding 12 seats). The gains in the Senate flipped control of the chamber and gave the Democrats a 59 vote caucus. The House margin was 318-117. This is the kind of election the Democrats could be looking at in 2008, if all our ducks line up in a row. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration…we have no way of winning anywhere near 101 seats in the House…but twelve seats in the Senate is not out of reach, we’ll almost certainly take back the White House, and another 30-50 seats in the House are not out of the question.
And then there’s this piece that responds to analysis from David Frum. It’s looks an awful lot like the analysis I did earlier today, Culture in a Realignment.
Of course, Frum has just described the experience of every progressive/Democrat over the last 38 years (just coincidentally, this exactly corresponds to my entire life). Whether we have been in power or out of power, we have not had the initiative on policy since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency succumbed to the violence in Vietnam.
But we’re on the cusp of a new progressive era.
And, as I stated back in February, without Obama, this might not have been possible at all.
When you are considering which candidate has the better health care plan, or housing plan, or whatever, please remember that a realigning election changes everything. Imagine what FDR could have accomplished with a 1928 Congress. Almost nothing. But with a 1932 Congress he gave us the New Deal. It matters a lot more whether our nominees can bring in a tsunami of new congresspeople than whether they have a slightly better policy paper on education reform. We should dare to think big. And, because almost all of us have no memory of living in a country with a progressive ruling majority, we simply cannot dream big enough. In my opinion, Clintonism, the Democratic Leadership Council, triangulation, or whatever you want to call it, is a philosophy for an era of conservative dominance, and it is wholly inappropriate for the times we are about to enter into. In fact, it may be the only thing that can prevent a new progressive era from arriving at all.
I revisited this topic on July 12th, with my Realignment History piece. One takeaway from that:
It wasn’t until the economic and foreign policy disasters of the Carter administration that the New Deal coalition was truly challengable as the ruling party of the country. And we are all more or less familiar with post-1980 politics. But because post-1980 politics represents the majority of most of our lives, we have a hard time envisioning a period of sustained liberal dominance. But there are two reasons why we are about to see a second round of it. George W. Bush’s second-term has been at least as disastrous as Harry Truman’s second-term, and its been more disastrous than Jimmy Carter’s single-term. There’s no question that we are about to see the second shock election in a row. We might worry that the Republicans will quickly recover, as the Democrats did after the shock elections of 1946 and 1952. But what’s really happening is an ideological collapse of the Republican’s rationale for being.
And:
In a country with a popular welfare state (however underdeveloped) the Republicans are more or less a permanent minority party. By 1980, the Welfare State had developed enough to allow for some downsizing and this provided a window for Republican dominance. But that window really closed during the Clinton administration and the first Bush/Cheney term, when unpopular programs were shrunk, reformed, or eliminated. When Bush moved to privatize Social Security the Republicans had reached the end of their viability. They had nothing politically sustainable left to do, and they started challenging the very structure of the Welfare State as we have known it since FDR.
In many ways, the same thing can be said about the Bush administration’s radical moves on the Unitary Executive and the powers of Congress. The American people will accept reforms and occasional downsizing of the Welfare State, but they do not support fundamental changes that betray over a half-century, if not more, of settled ways of doing things. The Democrats will restore the state to the way it was before Bush came to power. The bigger question is whether they will do more. And a lot of that depends on the size and culture of the Class of ’08, and on Barack Obama.
After the realigning elections of 1930-1932, 1958-1960, and 1964, the assumptions about what was possible changed. In every case, there was major progressive legislation that proved to be popular. Will 2006-2008 do the same thing?
As for the Republicans, they may occasionally occupy the White House, but they won’t control Congress again until they find a new reason for being that doesn’t include rolling back the Welfare State.
Read the full articles for the full flavor. But I’m quite pleased with the quality of my meta-analysis of this historical moment we’re living through. Whenever someone suggests that Obama only won because of x,y, or z, you can point them to these pieces to show that the events we’re witnessing were discernible to the careful student of history. Little bits of strategy and flubs and gaffes played incidental parts in a larger historical cycle.
