Writing in The Atlantic, Ross Douthat sees parallels to another period in which the Democrats were routed in a presidential election only to take control of Congress in the midterm elections, followed by total Democratic control of the government in the next presidential election. This was when FDR won overwhelmingly in 1932, and we may see a repeat in 2008. While I do not anticipate as tremendous a Democratic victory in 2008 as in 1932, there is an excellent chance that George W. Bush will be remembered as doing even more harm to the nation than Herbert Hoover. Douthat believes that the Democrats are more prepared to govern than in recent yeras as they are more united:
So the opening has passed to the Democrats, who suddenly and unexpectedly have the makings of a durable majority of their own within their grasp. What’s more, they have the outlines of a message that might allow them to seize that majority. The issues that split the Democratic Party throughout the Clinton years—between the center and the left, the deficit hawks and the Great Society liberals, The New Republic and The Nation, Robert Rubin and Robert Reich—still stir passionate debate, but in recent years the factions have been converging. This convergence has been particularly evident in foreign policy, where the debate over the Iraq War has been decisively settled in favor of the opponents of preventive war. But it may prove more enduring on the domestic front, where the gap between the left and the center-left has closed dramatically since the days when the two sides feuded bitterly over everything from free trade to health care to welfare reform.
On the one hand, you have The New Republic, the flagship magazine of centrist liberals, expressing regret for its role in derailing the Clinton health-care plan in the 1990s; on the other, you have the left-wing economist James Galbraith counseling readers of The Nation that “it’s time to get over” the free-trade battles of the ’90s and accept that both NAFTA and manufactured imports from China are here to stay. Protectionism and corporation bashing still find an audience, but even John Edwards, the progressives’ darling in the ’08 race, is running on an antipoverty platform that seeks to build on, rather than overturn, the welfare settlement of the mid-’90s, and is pushing a relatively market-friendly plan for universal health care. At the same time, many of the architects of Bill Clinton’s deficit-cutting centrism—including Larry Summers and even Robert Rubin—are paying greater attention to left-wing concerns over outsourcing and growing income inequality.
The result is an emerging consensus that uses the centrist achievements of the ’90s as a jumping-off point for a new-model populism. Conservatives have spent years mocking liberals for lacking big new ideas, and in a sense their charge still rings true. But the new-model populists have a big old idea, universal health care, that’s increasingly popular, and a host of smaller ideas—from wage insurance to assist the victims of outsourcing to universal 401(k) programs to help working-class families build assets for their children—all paid for, presumably, by tax hikes on the rich.
This populist mind set is unlikely to work for long in a post-industrial society where a growing number aspire to be wealthy and at least have a fighting chance at a fair degree of affluence. The failure of many Democrats to understand this is a major reason whey the Republicans ruled until their incompetence and corruption was too much for even those who have historically benefited from Republican government.
Counting on some potentially favorable trends might ultimately backfire for the Democrats:
These are the short-term trends that helped tip ’06 to the Democrats; in the long term, a new-model populism’s prospects look brighter still. The Republicans are to a large extent the party of married couples with children, while the Democrats are the party of unmarried voters, who tend to be more sensitive to economic risk, and thus more supportive of welfare spending, than members of intact nuclear families. But the nuclear family has been in steady decline for years, pushed along by falling marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock births, trends that are likely to create an ever-larger base for a left-populist majority.
Relying on those who suffer economically to make a majority worked fine during the depression, but is also a major reason why the Republicans have controlled the White House for a majority of the post World War II era. By supporting the war and adopting the social policies of the religious right, the Republicans have made themselves unattractive to a growing number of people of all socioeconomic backgrounds As a consequence, a growing number of “Starbucks Republicans” and independents are voting Democratic, along with those living in affluent suburbs.
Opposition to Republican policies, both on social issues and the war, makes it easy for affluent independents and former Republicans to vote Democratic in the short run. Whether the Democrats can keep such votes depends upon the policies they promote once in power. Edwards-style populism, as well as economic arguments which pit those at economic risk against the successful, will have these new Democratic voters willing to overlook what might be dismissed as a few nutty ideas and return to voting Republican.
Republicans have often made the mistake of thinking they can profit indefinitely by only concentrating on defending the rights of the wealthy. Ultimately businesses are more profitable when there is a prosperous middle class which can afford to spend money. Many Democrats make the same mistake in reverse, seeing going after the wealth of the affluent as an easy solution as opposed to improving the economy for all.
The problems with the world views of both the Democratic and Republican Parties is one reason for the Perot movement of the recent past and the interest in an independent candidate in 2008. In an educated affluent post-industrial nation neither the social conservativism and disastrous foreign policy beliefs of the Republicans or the populism of portions of the Democratic Party provide a satisfactory alternative to many voters. The question is whether the Democrats realize it is not 1932 and develop a governing philosophy for the 21st century or see recent electoral advantages as an excuse for advocating reactionary populism.
