We’ve never had a durable ruling majority party in this country that didn’t include the Jim Crow south. The Democratic ruling majority of the 20th century began in 1932, when the Democrats picked up a staggering 97 seats in the House (with four more from the Farmer-Labor Party), 12 seats in the Senate, and Franklin Roosevelt defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover by a 472-59 electoral college vote.
A look at the Senate seats the Democrats won is instructive. None of them were in the South. The Dems won senate seats in Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. Yet, the Dems were building on a southern base. Democratic incumbents were reelected in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri (also Oklahoma, Kansas, New York, Ohio, and Arizona). In the House, there was no net change in House seats in the former confederacy. All the gains came from other areas of the country. The Dems picked up 6 or more seats in California, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In other words, 1932 was the biggest wave election on record, but it didn’t make the Dems any more popular in the South. Rather, the 1932 election diversified the Democratic Party, making it competitive in the North and West, and giving it an advantage in the industrial Midwest.
The Democratic Party was able to digest these newcomers, but fissures opened up soon after the war over desegregation of the armed services. In 1948, Strom Thurmond led a revolt and ran for president as the leader of the pro-segregation Dixiecrats. He was able to win Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and one electoral college vote from Tennessee. Yet, the Democratic ruling majority was so large that Harry Truman won the election without those Southern votes.
There are some that look back on the old days as if the Democratic Party was once a pure force for good that was somehow corrupted. In reality, the Democrats were a ruling majority party only so long as they were able to dominate the South.
There was very little purity in the old New Deal coalition. It was a coalition filled with some of the most vicious racists in our country’s history.
So, as the Democrats take over again as a ruling majority party, we need to understand our own history. A true ruling majority party is not overly ideological. It rules because it has broad agreement on a narrow grouping of popular ideas. And it rules because the opponents do not offer anything that can compete.
This may well be where we are headed. The Dems may begin to attract libertarians, evangelicals, free-trader true believers, and every stripe of unorthodox thinkers. Meanwhile, the Republicans will reinvent themselves in order to reestablish some appeal in the North, on the coasts, in the suburbs, and even in the cities. Many of them may be isolationists, or anti-free traders, or civil libertarians, or progressive on abortion, stem-cell research, gay rights and the environment. In other words, as the Democratic Party grows and the Republican Party evolves in reaction, the locus of progressivism will diverge from the Democratic Party.
And we should expect that and expect to see early signs of it. We’ll see more Zell Millers and Joe Liebermans in the Democratic Party even as we see more Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafees in the Republican Party. And that is a good thing.
