Right Down the Middle?
'Honor, trust, and respect for the Senate and the Constitution." These were the exalted words that enabled a bipartisan group of senators to avoid a destructive confrontation over judicial appointments. They overcame the threat to impose what Republicans themselves branded as the "nuclear option," which would have changed the long-standing rules that permitted the use of the filibuster to delay votes on judicial nominees. Many conservatives feel the Supreme Court is at the heart of the culture war in American life because of its rulings on issues like school prayer, obscenity and, above all, abortion.
In truth, this was really just another battle in the nation's culture war, and it reflects the growing significance of values--how people live their lives--versus economic class that has played such a critical role in the struggle between the Republican and Democratic parties and conservatives and liberals. At this point, the momentum is with the Republicans. Their popular majority may be small, but it is part of a significant trend, one that they believe they can convert into a durable political supremacy that could determine the nation's destiny for decades, similar to what FDR created in 1932 for the Democrats, which lasted until 1968.
The Republicans have had the Democrats on the defensive. They have won seven presidential victories in the last 10 elections since 1968; control of the House since 1994; and, recently, control of the Senate, both with increasing majorities. The Democrats have not broken 50 percent in any presidential election since 1976 or 48.5 percent in the six congressional elections since 1994. They have not won a majority of the white votes since 1964, and their geographic base has come to be concentrated on both coasts. You can fly over virtually the entire country without flying over states that voted Democratic.
This Republican resurgence has upended the traditional rule in politics that incomes, jobs, and economic outlook are decisive: "It's the economy, stupid." If it were, the Democrats should have coasted to victory in the 2000 election on the back of the boom of the Clinton years, and in 2004 on the developing squeeze on the middle and working classes from slow income growth and fast costs for healthcare, energy, and education that have led many families to feel they are falling behind, no matter how hard they work. The average two-income family earns far more than did most single-income families a generation ago, yet they have less discretionary income and savings than the latter because virtually all of their higher earnings go to keeping their families in the middle class, especially in homes near good and safe schools.
The "have nots " The ease of entry to the middle class that once buoyed the working lives of Americans and lies at the heart of the American dream has eroded. Higher education is now the ladder for moving up. But for many children the rungs are beyond reach, intensifying the growing gap between those with college and graduate degrees and those with only a high school diploma or who are high school dropouts, not to mention the bottom end where self-defined "have nots" have increased sharply, going since 1988 from 17 to 28 percent among whites and from 24 to 48 percent among blacks.
The Democratic Party has long cast itself as the party of the little guy fighting against the party of big business, privilege, and wealth. So why has it been unable to capitalize on these anxieties and connect its version of progressivism with American life? The roots of disenchantment lie in the 1960s and 1970s when Democrats began to focus less on economics than on liberal social programs to promote the interests of blacks, women, gays, and other groups. This pushed a lot of traditional Democrats into the Republican column--blue-collar workers, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans, cops, evangelicals, rural residents, and ethnics. They saw the efforts of the New Left to weaken oppressive authority as corroding all authority. Woodstock and Hollywood came to epitomize what was seen as a narcissistic assault on conventional values played out daily in the coarsening of our culture in gangsta rap, cable ranters, and pornographic websites, accompanied by the delegitimization of the sanctity of marriage, drug abuse, and recasting wrongdoers as victims of society instead of the reverse. There was a sense that the Democrats had become dominated by elitist, highly educated, progressive classes who believed they knew better than average folks.
The Republicans are not stupid. They tagged the liberals as "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, school-busing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists," as commentator Jason Epstein described it, soft on communism, soft on crime, opposed to capital punishment, and soft on the new war on terrorism. At the same time, they tried to shed the country club-boardroom image and portray themselves as the party of the hardworking, plain-speaking people who like country music and NASCAR, attend church regularly (as 120 million Americans do), and live in those parts of the country that fill the ranks of the military, defend the flag and patriotism, and are tough on national security issues. George Bush was an effective politician in exploiting the cultural alienation of the Democratic Party from its working- and middle-class roots, while a windsurfing John Kerry was the ideal candidate to aggravate it. Bush won culturally driven voters by over 70 percent and became the first president since FDR to preside over a steady gain in his party's seats, despite the fact that many social indicators that fomented the cultural divide had begun to improve, among them crime, abortion, teenage birth, illegitimacy, divorce rates, and teenage drinking.
Apart from an epiphany in the Democratic Party, what could threaten the Republicans' ascendancy? Quite simply, overreach. As the Democrats discovered before them, Americans do not long attach themselves to ideology or extremes. The Republican Party moved to the right under pressure from its southern base and by a congressional membership fearful of an attack from the right during a primary, so much so that it now risks alienating mainstream America across a range of issues. Over 60 percent oppose the privatization of Social Security; roughly 70 percent of moderates disagree with the president's opposition to the financing of stem-cell research; 82 percent objected to Republican intrusion in the sad case of Terri Schiavo; and there is uneasiness about the creeping abandonment of federal rules governing safety at home and in the workplace and the erosion of environmental controls.
A bulwark. The public concern is that pressure from the religious right was pushing the Republican Party out of the mainstream and that it was this pressure that precipitated the showdown on federal judges resolved this past week. This was not a religious issue but a judgment about fitness for office. Yet a teleconference in which Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist participated characterized the filibuster as a campaign "against people of faith." For two centuries the filibuster has been a bulwark against majority tyranny. As such, it is a force for compromise and moderation, since it would enforce the need for support broad enough to gain the requisite 60 votes rather than the minimal 50 votes in the Senate. It also reflected the fact that the Senate is made up of two senators from every state, and thus a majority of senators voting does not reflect a majority of the popular will in the way that the House does. Wyoming has as many senators as California. Given that judicial appointments are lifetime appointments, the argument that only moderate judicial nominees merit confirmation by the Senate carried weight with the public. No wonder then that the elimination of the filibuster was opposed by 66 percent of the American people, compared with 26 percent in favor, in a recent ABC/ Washington Post poll.
Will the Republicans make the same mistakes the Democrats did when they abandoned centrism and centrists?
Republicans would do well to reflect on the fallout of 1995, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government and helped the re-election of Bill Clinton. But the more the Republican edge is concentrated in the South, the harder it will be for moderates to steer the party away from extremes that overreach and alienate noncommitted voters.
This does not imply that the public demeans the role of religion in American public life. Religious leaders, after all, have long played a crucial role in American history. In the Great Awakening of the 19th century, antislavery forces were marshaled by Christian ministers (virtually every soldier on both sides of the Civil War carried a Bible), and in the 20th century it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who galvanized America to end segregation--both among the finest moral moments in American history.
Republicans and many of their supporters may not appreciate their vulnerability, since they have gone from triumph to triumph by embracing a strongly conservative agenda. But most Americans remain fairly centrist and pragmatic, and a plurality of over 40 percent like to think of themselves as moderates. No wonder the Republican Congress is altogether not an American Idol. In a striking NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll conducted two weeks ago, Americans, by 65 to 17 percent, said Congress does not share their priorities; only 42 percent say their representatives should be re-elected; and when asked which party they want to control Congress after the 2006 election, 45 percent called it time for somebody new. In their best showing since 1994, Democrats had a 47 percent to 40 percent edge; only 33 percent approved of lawmakers' performance (while 51 percent disapproved), the lowest approval rating of Congress since 1996. The greatest erosion of approval has been among self-described Republicans.
If this trend continues, it will frustrate Republican political hopes of a historic tipping point and return politics to the seesaw. Neither party has created a winning coalition with a large enough body of nonideological centrists, who now feel abandoned by both parties.
So which party will dominate over the next generation? The envelope, please. We will read it out at the midterm elections next fall.
This story appears in the June 6, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.