When Republicans appeared to be in complete control I often noted how fragile their majority is. Now that Democrats are on the rise, E.J. Dionne sees this as a dramatic change. He writes “2006 is looking more and more like one of history’s hinge years, a moment when old ideas are cast aside, new leaders emerge and old leaders decide to speak in new ways.” There is truth to many of the changes he sees:
When the right seemed headed to dominance in the early 1990s, the hot political media trend was talk radio and the star was Rush Limbaugh, a smart entrepreneur who spawned imitators around the country and all across the AM dial.
Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their brilliant ridicule of the Bush administration and conservative bloviators satisfies a political craving at least as great as the one Limbaugh once fed. Stewart and Colbert speak especially to young Americans who rely on their sensible take on the madness that surrounds us. The young helped drive their popularity, and the Droll Duo in turn shaped a new, anti-conservative skepticism.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with “the real America,” which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled — often looking ridiculous in the process — to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.
Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn’t it amazing how quickly the supposedly “real America” was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.
The political shift in the west may represent a change in party alignment, but for the most part things have not really changed radically. The country was never as universally red as those maps of red/blue states appeared. We’ve alternated between Democrats and Republicans in the White House, even if Republicans have had the edge in recent years. This edge, however, is largely due to a fluke in 2000. We all know of the many factors which could have easily changed the outcome in 2000, and that Bush ran pretending to be a “compassionate conservative” in order to win. The Republican edge in sparsely populated states gave them an advantage in the Senate, allowing them to control the Senate despite a majority of people voting for Democrats in Senate races.
This is a large and diverse country. NASCAR and evangelical cultures were never the sole cultures. Nor have they disappeared since the Democrats came back to power. Assuming that the Republicans will remain limited to the South is reminiscent of the Republican predictions of a permanent majority two years ago. It has been far easier for the Democrats to achieve support as the opposition party to an incompetent government than it will be to maintain support when they are in charge. Party positions do not remain stagnant and Republicans will either find a way to broaden their appeal to more groups or, less likely, they will be replaced by another party.
Unexpected events have also played a considerable role in the success of the parties. Butterfly ballots, devised by a Democrat with good intentions in Florida, were sufficient to shift the Presidency from Gore to Bush. The 9/11 attacks gave the Republicans an undeserved period of support despite how badly they botched both pre-9/11 efforts on terrorism and the response to the attack. While Americans were fooled following 9/11, Katrina revealed the truth and abruptly changed the fortunes of the Republicans. Failure in Iraq, and revelations of incompetent leadership, further turned national security from a plus to a negative for Republicans.
Dionne sees the election as redefining “The Real America.” There is no single real America with a diversity of cultures remaining. Most people are not as ideologically divided as the blogosphere and political columnists, and many can shift their votes from a Reagan to a Clinton and then to George W. Bush in a short period of time. If the Democrats govern foolishly, such as they did when backing Hillary Care before losing the Senate in 1994, they can see their majority disappear quickly. They do have the edge at present in light of the Republicans both being exposed for their incompetence and corruption and running on so many unpopular positions. Support for authoritarianism over freedom placed the Republicans on the wrong side of the flow of history. Ultimately political parties will be more successful whenever they can represent the variety of views and cultures in this country. When they attempt to represents the interests of only a narrow minority they will lose, as the Republicans learned this year.