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As the 2004 presidential primary
season looms into view, the hope always springs eternal that one of the
Democratic liberals will catch fire, capture the nomination, and then conduct
the kind of spirited, cohesive campaign that could upset George Bush and elect
enough Democratic Congressmen and Senators to end GOP control of the House and
Senate. Well, one can only hope, and should you be so inclined, you’ll
certainly want to read The Emerging Democratic Majority, an intelligent
but deeply flawed analysis of why and how the nation’s changing demographics
are now working in favor of Democrat electoral success. It’s written by John Judis, the astute political journalist whose reportorial
venue has shifted from Socialist Revolution in the 1970s to The New
Republic during the last decade, and Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who
wrote America’s
Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters.
The authors want
their book to be as prescient and important as The Emerging Republican Majority which
Kevin Phillips, then a youthful Nixon partisan, wrote in 1969. That book seemed
to accurately forecast the collapse of the New Deal electoral coalition and
herald the coalescence of a new majority that put disaffected blue collar
workers, Southern segregationists, suburban commuters, and country-club
Republicans into the same conservative camp. Judis
and Teixeira now believe that the Republican era
Phillips forecast in the wake of the divisive 1968 election is over. Bill
Clinton and H. Ross Perot began to end it in 1992, and despite Al Gore’s loss
to George W. Bush in 2000, a quarter century of transformations in the American
population, economy and culture all tilt the electoral terrain in favor of the
Democrats.
Judis and Teixeira are clever historical analogists. They argue that
in 1992 H. Ross Perot played the same role for the Democrats that George
Wallace played for the Republicans in 1968. Just as Wallace’s third party
candidacy detached a segment of the white working class from the old Democratic
coalition, and furthered the alienation of the deep
South, so too did the eccentric Texas
billionaire help divide the Reagan-Bush electoral majority and deliver a
portion of their constituency to the Democrats. Bill Clinton did not prove as
successful as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan in binding such disaffected voters
to a new majority coalition, but history is nevertheless moving with the
Democrats. Thus blue collar Macomb County
outside of Detroit, once a fortress
for the Reagan Democrats, has returned to the Democratic fold. The elder Bush narrowly won the county in
1992, but Clinton took it by ten
points in 1996, and Al Gore captured it by 12 percent in the 2000
election.
Judis and Teixeira even
rehabilitate George McGovern, who got less than 40 percent of the vote against
Richard Nixon in 1972, by arguing that his candidacy was not unlike that of
Barry Goldwater in 1964, a overwhelming defeat which nevertheless laid the
basis for a new electoral constellation that in more propitious times would
revitalize and reorient each of the major parties. In McGovern’s case, they
find that his anti-Vietnam war, post-New Deal candidacy confirmed that if the
Democrats did make a comeback, it would be rooted in an emerging
“postindustrial” social polity that rested upon the inexorable growth of three
increasingly important elements of the American electorate. They entitle the
chapter that lays out this strategy “George McGovern’s Revenge.”
The first two
pillars of this Democratic majority are well-known. Women, especially single,
college-educated women, have voted more heavily Democratic than men in every
presidential contest since 1972. And the polarity seems only to increase: in
2000 Bush carried men over Gore by a resounding double-digit margin, but in 12
of the states that Gore carried, he lost most male voters and won only because
of the Democratic women’s vote. Likewise, minority voters, who backed McGovern
even more than Humphrey in 1968, are becoming increasingly crucial to
Democratic prospects. That African-Americans vote for the Democrats by margins
of 9 to 1 is now taken as a given: the real issue in every election is
registration and voter turnout. And of course, even more important in the next
few decades will be the Hispanic vote, not only in California, but in Florida
(where the increase in non-Cuban Hispanics helps explain why the state has
become a toss-up in presidential politics), and in Arizona, Colorado, and even
Texas. Republicans once hoped to
capitalize on the conservative social values held by many Catholic Latinos, but
just as Goldwater and Nixon thoroughly alienated African-Americans of an
earlier generation by making overtures to the segregationist South,
so too has the anti-immigrant rhetoric of many Western-state Republicans pushed
an increasing share of this booming population segment into Democratic Party
ranks.
For
Judis and Teixeira the most
important, yet by far the most problematic, of the electoral pillars upon which
a new Democratic majority must rely is that of the well educated professionals,
the doctors, social workers, teachers, architects, the men and women who stand
at the heart of the nation’s “postindustrial” economy. In the 1950s and 1960s
high-status professionals voted for Eisenhower and Nixon, but from the 1970s
onward such cosmopolitan, socially liberal voters have trended more and more
Democratic. Now making up fully 15 percent of the workforce, and 21 percent of
the electorate, they are the people who anchor Democratic strength in the
metropolitan areas that have transitioned most clearly from manufacturing and
goods processing to the production of ideas and services, urban conglomerations
that Judis and Teixeira
call “ideopolises.” In these postindustrial regions,
like Seattle, Austin,
Denver, Boston,
and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the population is diverse, universities
and hospitals are large, and tolerance on social issues is the dominant ethos,
Democrats are thriving. The authors conclude that almost all of the Democratic
gains in presidential voting since 1980 have come in such “ideopolis”
counties. Gore and Nader won 58 percent of the vote in
these burgeoning metropolitan communities.
So
here we have the argument. History is moving with the Democrats because they
are “the party of the transition from urban industrialism to a new
postindustrial metropolitan order” in which constituencies favorable to them
are growing as a share of the electorate. Meanwhile, the Republicans are
strongest with groups and in regions that are in relative decline. In the last election George Bush probably
took every cow county in the nation; those with the most bookstores and
“Schedule C” home offices went for Gore. And Judis
and Teixeira note that the demographic influence of
the religious right seems well past its prime. The ranks of those who rarely
attend church are growing more rapidly than those who do; indeed the proportion
of the electorate who identify themselves as religious conservatives dropped
three points between 1996 and 2000.
There
are two things disastrously wrong with this wishful prognostication. The first
entails a reconsideration of their blissfully optimistic vision of America’s
postindustrial future; the second, which flows right
out of this enchantment, reflects the authors’ virtual abandonment of any
coherent set of progressive politics. After all, if the demographics and
cultural trends are sailing in your favor, why mess up a sure thing with a
potentially controversial set of political or policy prescriptions that might
divide your emerging Democratic majority.
The
authors put the nation’s transition from a gritty manufacturing economy to one
of “postindustrial” education and services at the heart of their strategic
vision. But the
alluring “postindustrial” idea should
hardly be taken at face value. Forty years ago Clark Kerr put the
“multiversity” at the center of an emerging knowledge-based society, and a
decade later Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,
an immensely influential tome, and one cited respectfully by Judis and Teixeira, that also
defined the postindustrial society as “one in which the intellectual is
predominant.” According to Bell, “we in America are moving away from a society
based on a private-enterprise market system toward one in which the most
important economic decisions will be made at the political level, in terms of
consciously defined ‘goals’ and ‘priorities.’” Kerr, Bell
and other social forecasters of the last generation, including David Riesman,
Adolph Berle, and John Kenneth Galbraith, were
actually a good deal more radical than Judis and Teixeira. They thought that the structures of the political
economy, and not just its cultural or social values, were moving us toward the
kind of postcapitalist world that in some sense
fulfilled the radical visions of their youth. The hopes of Judis
and Teixeira are far more constrained, but they share
with Kerr, Bell and the other postindustrial savants what the historian Horward Brick has identified as a “wishful” set of social
prognostications in which a more progressive, even anticapitalist,
set of social relationships and economic institutions come into being, but
without the social conflict and ideological combat that once seemed so
unavoidable.
Postindustrialism is therefore a seductive obfuscation of
the real problems facing the Democrats. Sure, the number of farm hands and
blue-collar factory workers has declined, but during the last quarter century
these hourly workers have been replaced by an army of low-wage service
employees, as well as by the “proletarianization” of
many of the new professionals: airline pilots, HMO-employed doctors, Microserf programmers, and college professors of the
freeway flying variety. Judis and Teixeira
sometimes assert this
reality, which is why they heap score on the Democratic Leadership Council and
Gore campaign adviser Mark Penn who bought the idea that computer savvy “wired
workers” had become “the dominant force in the new economy.” Gore soon fired
Penn, and found that a populist appeal to those with economic grievances proved
the best ammunition against Bill Bradley in the 2000 primaries and George Bush
just after the Democratic Convention. Indeed Judis
and Teixeira agree with Gore campaign adviser Stanley
Greenberg that responsibility for the presidential defeat lay
primarily on the decline of the Democratic vote among white working-class
voters, particularly white working-class men. According to Greenberg, they
backed Bush rather than Gore because they didn’t trust Gore—a sentiment
traceable to the Clinton
scandals—and because they rejected Gore’s gun control and pro-abortion views.
Gore’s decidedly non-postindustrial vow to fight “big tobacco, big oil, the big
polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs” was the only kind of appeal
that could make large inroads among non-union working-class men.
And
this brings into relief the other problem with the author’s deterministic
electoral demography. It is detached from policy, ideology, and organization.
The Republican Right is dominating
the issue landscape today, not because it has a majority of the populace on its
side, but because it has a clearly focused program that it seeks to transform
into law and policy, in the Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures.
Conservative Republicans are a far more unified and ideologically purposeful
formation than the Democrats. They dominate the Washington think tanks, AM
radio, and the cable talk shows, and they win elections not only with tons of
corporate cash, but by enlisting an electoral infantry mobilized by the
National Rifle Association, the Federation of Independent Businessmen, and a
network of politicized denominations. In the aftermath of 2002 elections, Ruy Teixeira minimized the
debacle and instead put the blame for the Democratic failure to retain the
Senate or win the House on President Bush’s last minute barnstorming tour of
battleground states, in which he excoriated his opponents for standing in the
way of his efforts to make America secure in a perilous world. Well, what do
you expect? Now and in the future, progressive Democrats will face opponents
who wrap themselves in the flag. You can’t just call that “dirty politics” and
hope it will pass.
Indeed, Judis and Teixeria seem
uninterested in exploring how the Democrats might generate a set of politics
and institutions that could provide a basis for a countermobilization.
They see foreign policy as a distraction, dismiss Clinton’s
health care initiative as “too complicated” and ignore the fate of the labor
movement, which even in its current shrunken state,
remains the single most important institution capable of mobilizing the crucial
downscale slice of the national electorate. It’s not just that the unions put
thousands of troops in the field during each campaign season, but more
importantly, they transform the consciousness of those who are even slightly
touched by their existence. In 1998, for example, the AFL-CIO found that
rank-and-file unionists, even those who had received absolutely no guidance
from their leadership, voted for Democratic congressional candidates by a 31
point margin over that of the GOP. The pro-Democratic margin rose to 44
percentage points among those who received direct mail, to 54 points among
those who got a call from a fellow union member, and to 58 points, with 76
percent voting Democratic, among those who read a flyer at the workplace.
Statistics of this sort this explain why energetic, politically attuned unions
like Service Employees International Union
and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union have begun to transform Los Angeles, Las
Vegas, and New Orleans into liberal Democratic strongholds.
Judis and Teixeria are
undoubtedly pro-union liberals, but by the evidence in this book, they would
see this kind of mobilization as dangerous to their electoral project,
upsetting the carefully calibrated “progressive centrism” that they think
capable of enfolding a new Democratic Party majority. They are looking for a
new set of personally attractive, politically inoffensive Democratic candidates
who will ride into power on the demographic tide generated by the
“postindustrial” currents flowing through 21st century America. But this is a is
a receipt for defeat, both electoral and legislative, and the sooner
progressives recognize it as such, the better for labor, liberals and everyone
else.
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