One of my co-bloggers wrote me early on that after a while, the anxiety of posting would diminish; it didn’t… or at least hadn’t by the time I took my accidental hiatus. First I just hadn’t posted for a week, then two, then I wrote a post out long-hand and never typed it up, and after a little while, I just took post-writing off my daily “to-do list.”

So here I am, back to the place I can write without readers, back to the place I don’t feel the need to apologize for long absences.  I hope to go back to “real” blogging (the kind that requires risk) at some point – and hopefully in the not-too-distant future – but for now, I feel like it’s just important for me to get some of my ideas out whatever the forum.

Simultaneous to the real-world changes I’ve gone through over the last six months are changes of heart and mind, and things I’ve tried to work through without over-analyzing or over-intellectualizing.  That’s not an easy mission for me.  I’ve always had a tendency to turn a subjective feeling into a theory.  For months, I’ve worked against that tendency.  Not only have I not written any posts, I’ve scarcely read blogs, and I’ve kept my news consumption to a minimum.  My experiment failed.  I may have re-channeled my theories into more personal outlets (marriage, family, religion, education…) but they’re still theories – theories that I know full well have nothing more than that same subjective feeling as their foundation.

When I can (and frankly, when I feel like it), I plan to post some of these thoughts.  I’ve been reading quite a bit about homeschooling recently, and feel like I’ve written a dozen posts on the subject in my head.  Maybe at some point, I’ll put them in writing.  And I’ve started visiting a church that I’d like to write about.  As always, I’ve thought a lot about place; not only abstractly (which is so un-place-like in itself), but also the ways in which where we decide to live as a family will impact the pace of our lives.

Many of these the things I’ve decided have contradicted parts of my politics, and I suppose that’s okay.  I’d rather my personal beliefs shape my political beliefs than the other way around.  It’s something I’d like to explore, even if it is in this risk-free blogging environment.

The sequence of events was also quite odd.  On Tuesday, Anderson made news in two ways – joining the tea party caucus and announcing that he may run for City Council President.  The timing led to speculation that joining the caucus was a publicity stunt, although it’s hard to see how a TP affiliation helps a Baltimore City campaign.  According to Anderson, he joined the caucus because he was in agreement with them on taxes and the size of government and he appreciated that they took no stance on social issues (the fiscal half of his statement is still a little baffling, considering his votes in favor of new or increased taxes in 2007, and his continued support of raising the alcohol tax during this session).

Whatever his reason for joining the caucus, it was met with an intense backlash from fellow Democrats, ranging from the description of the Tea Party as “the Antichrist to the Democratic Party” and “a subset of the Republican Party.”  One member said it “disrespected the City delegation,” and added, “I don’t forgive you.  It hurts.”  Anderson backtracked and resigned from the caucus a day after joining it (and being immediately named Vice-Chair), saying “The President wants us to reach across Party lines… maybe I reached too far.”

Interesting local drama aside, the whole thing got me thinking: who would be the most likely Democrats on the national stage to join a hypothetical, bi-partisan Tea Party caucus?*  And a fun, mini-research project was born…

First, I limited my scope to the Senate.  Aside from the fact that I’m more familiar with its members, it’s also small enough in size to sort through without worrying that I’m leaving many people out.

Second, I wanted the list to reflect multiple interpretations of the Tea Party – not simply read as a list of most conservative Democrats, or even most fiscally conservative Democrats.  To that end, since there’s little agreement about who exactly makes up the Tea Party and what motivates them, I considered four different categories of criteria:

I.                     Conservative Democrats

If the Tea Party is nothing more than a purer, more extreme wing of the Republican Party, then the most likely Democrats to join would be those who are the most conservative – and particularly conservative on fiscal issues.  For this category, I used rankings from the American Conservative Union and the Taxpayers Union.

II.                  Libertarian Democrats

If the Tea Party is at its core a libertarian movement, and its father truly is Ron Paul, then it would stand to reason that the most libertarian Democrats would be most likely to join a Tea Party caucus.  For this measure, I looked at NRA scorecards, ACLU ratings, and votes on re-authorizing the Patriot Act (2006).

III.                Populist Democrats

If, as Matt Taibbi suggests, the Tea Party is primarily motivated by “their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists,” then the anti-globalist, anti-corporate, closed border populist Democrats would make the most comfortable fit in a Tea Party caucus.  For this, I looked at 2008 votes on TARP, the 2005 CAFTA vote and votes on the DREAM Act.

IV.                “Outsider” Democrats

This is the least definable of the categories.  For one thing, most obvious “outsiders” fit in one of the other categories as well.  Points can be earned under this label for an individual who technically does not belong to the Democratic Party (yes, I counted for consideration those non-Democrats – Sanders and Lieberman – who caucus with the Party); any member with a non-legal background, and any member who has expressed genuine frustration with the “way Washington works.”  I mainly included this category as an extra – if a Democrat was borderline in one or more of the other categories, this could push them over the threshold.

Finally, this list is subjective.  I looked at the interest group ratings, I noted the roll call votes, and then I applied more weight to some votes, less to others and made judgment calls where appropriate.  Generally, a Democrat had to appear on any two lists – extra consideration if the two lists didn’t overlap (eg. a vote against Patriot Act authorization and a high ACLU rating would not be enough).  Any further questions about methodology or the lack thereof can be left for the comment section.

Without further ado, here are my nominees for the Democratic half of the bi-partisan Senate Tea Party caucus:

Ben Nelson:

Nelson ends up on more of these lists than any other Democratic Senator.  He rates an A+ by the NRA, has the highest ACU rating of any Democrat, voted against the DREAM Act and is one of only three Democrats to grade above an F by the Taxpayers Union (the other two are McCaskill and Landrieu, and all received Ds).

Jon Tester:

Tester earned a spot on this list for his votes against the DREAM Act and against TARP.  He has gotten high marks from the NRA, is generally skeptical of trade deals (though he wasn’t in the Senate to cast a vote on CAFTA) and has a 93% rating from the ACLU.

Bernie Sanders:

Bernie Sanders:

Yes, the self-identified socialist makes a strong showing on my Democratic Tea Party list.  He voted against TARP, scores a 93% ACLU rating, earned a decent NRA rating (C+, one of the higher grades for an incumbent Democratic Senator) and voted against re-authorizing the PATRIOT Act.

Claire McCaskill:

McCaskill was another one of the three Democrats to earn a passing (well, a D) grade from the Taxpayers Union.  That, plus a relatively high ACU rating and a protectionist stance on trade (she voted against free trade with Peru) make McCaskill one of the most likely Democrats in the Tea Party caucus.

Kay Hagan and Mark Pryor:

Both make the list for a relatively high ACU rating and votes against the DREAM Act.

Tim Johnson:

Johnson has a relatively high ACU rating (and by “relatively,” I mean above 16% for all of these) and he voted against TARP.

Ron Wyden:

Wyden voted against TARP, against the PATRIOT Act reauthorization, and has a 93% ACLU rating.

*Assuming they ever get beyond the Rand Paul/Jim DeMint/Mike Lee stage of caucus-building.

For instance, it’s one thing to talk a good game on loyalty and devotion to family; quite something else to deliberately look for houses that have extra room for an aging parent to one day live in.  Or thinking about having children close in age so that none can have the undivided attention of their parents, none can feel that the world revolves around them, all will learn cooperation, humility, and the art of having to talk over each other at the dinner table.  I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the coming days; for now, I just wanted to make the November deadline.

In the post-New Deal system that exists to this day, the Republican Party is a neo-Jacksonian coalition whose base consists of Southern white Protestants and, to a lesser degree, conservative white Catholic ‘ethnics’ in the Northern suburbs. The Democratic Party is based in big cities and college towns. Among ethnic and racial groups, its most consistent electoral supporters are blacks and Jews, followed by Latinos.

And later…

This fear on the part of Jacksonians, past and present, produces a combination of folksy populism with support for state and local governments, which are less likely to be captured by metropolitan elites who look down on Irish and Italian Catholics in the North and the Scots-Irish in the South.

“Southern white Protestants…” “Scots-Irish in the South…”  Lind isn’t the first to call to mind the Albion’s Seed theory to identify current political alliances. In a column last February, Chuck Lane argued that the U.S. was really a 4-Party system:

You might even say that the four parties I’m talking about correspond roughly to the four political cultures first identified by historian David Hackett Fischer in his classic book Albion’s Seed. That book traced the main currents in American political ideology to the folkways and notions of liberty imported from four British regions that provided the population of early America.

East Anglia gave us the Puritans of New England, with their emphasis – ‘liberal,’ in today’s terms — on community virtue. The Quakers who settled the Delaware Valley established a society and politics built on problem-solving and compromise. Southern England gave us the Virginia cavaliers, founders of a conservative, aristocratic tradition. And the Scotch-Irish who settled the Appalachian backcountry produced a populist, anti-government, ‘don’t tread on me’ mentality.

Well, I don’t think “anti-government” is accurate.  For one thing, Appalachia made up the backbone of the New Deal coalition.  For another, there’s a difference between being anti-government and anti-centralization of government.  But I get the point: Scotch-Irish = Tea Party.  And they also make up a pretty big part of Lind’s neo-Jacksonians.

Webb – who I mentioned yesterday as the only self-ID’d Jacksonian-populist in modern politics – famously wrote a book on the Scotch-Irish , and has followed that up with high-profile op-eds and commentary about his people.  In a 2008 Morning Joe appearance following a conversation among the hosts that Obama’s poor polling in the Kentucky primary was based on race, Webb asked for the opportunity to comment (at about the 4 and a half minute mark):

Black America and Scotch-Irish America are like tortured siblings.  They both have long history and they both missed the boat when it came to all the larger benefits other people were able to receive.  There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains that they say to one another and that’s ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight.’… when I hear people say this [Obama underperforming in the Kentucky primary] is racism, my back gets up a little bit, ’cause that’s my cultural group.  This isn’t Selma 1965.  This is a result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white, and these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it.  They’re basically saying, ‘hey, let’s pay attention to what has happened with this cultural group in terms of opportunity’… if this cultural group could get at the same table with black America, you could re-change populist American politics because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.

Which, to me, sounds like a slightly more thoughtful way of putting Howard Dean’s 2003 (repeated) comment that:

White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us, and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.

And a slightly less rhyme-y way of putting Bulworth’s observation that:

Ask a brother who’s been downsized if he’s getting any deal/ Or a white boy bustin ass til they put him in his grave/ He ain’t gotta be a black boy to be livin like a slave/ Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people/ but white people got more in common with colored people then they do with rich people.

The first two quotes were, at least somewhat, controversial.  Webb has been called a nativist, a xenophobe, and compared to George Wallace for comments similar to this; Dean earned a bit of criticism from his primary opponents for his comment, and it created one of those “silly season” campaign flaps in ’03.  Bulworth, by virtue of not being real, has escaped any such controversy for his comment.  In other words, building a black-and-bubba coalition is both a long-standing fantasy of some liberal politicians and an ill-advised capitulation of multiculturalist progressive principles in other liberal quarters.

When rural Democratic strategist “Mudcat” Saunders, who coined the term “black-and-bubba” that I just stole, is labeled “knuckle-dragging dumbass hillbilly” (Saunders was photographed with a Confederate flag) , the conversation kind of ends.  Just as careers (like Saunders’) have been made trying to unite the black vote with the Southern white/Scotch-Irish vote, careers have also been made trying to de-bunk the possibility.  Recounting a run-in with Saunders at the ’06 Yearly Kos convention, Thomas Schaller wrote of the following as an unsolvable riddle:

How is it that working-class whites — especially those in the rural parts of the South who sit side by side with similarly situated working-class southern blacks at high school sporting events on Friday nights, shop at the same businesses on Saturday afternoon, attend similar (if different denominational) Christian churches on Sunday morning, and send their kids to the same public schools the following Monday — troop to the ballot box on the first Tuesday every other November vote and pull the lever for the Republicans while their black neighbors are voting overwhelmingly Democratic? The answer is complex but, of course, is rooted in race.

Schaller had written the book advising Democrats to ignore the South completely and form a winning Democratic coalition of the northeast, mid-west, and New West.  But while it is possible to win elections without the votes of white Southerners, it does nothing to reunite any kind of old Jacksonian (as opposed to Lind’s neo-Jacksonian, already united in the Republican Party) coalition, and it requires the Democratic Party to deliberately ignore one of the poorest populations in the nation.  I’m about as comfortable with that idea as I would’ve been had I been a Republican at the dawning of their very own Southern strategy.  Which is to say, sometimes principle is more important than strategy.

Moreover, with the Left divided on whether or not we even want southern whites/the Scotch-Irish in our coalition, it’s kind of hard to determine whether or not such a marriage is possible.  Somehow, I don’t think running ads at NASCAR races is sufficient outreach, especially while casually insulting and demeaning the intelligence of the entire population is still fairly commonplace.  Similarly, regardless of what some people say, a draft-dodging Yalie neoliberal cannot be classified as a populist simply because he talks Southern and bleeds empathy.  Sometimes, the dissonance between insulting the demographic and desiring a coalition are laughably included in the same thought process, as in the case of one particular blogger earlier this year, who writes of the “racist traditions and phobias of [the Scotch-Irish] tribe,” that they are “natural haters of all that is scholarly or cosmopolitan,” the “right wing’s Rottweiler,” and a “race of hard fighting, hard working, losers.” A few sentences later is a call for progressives to reach out to said racist losers.  Yeah, can’t imagine why those Scotch-Irish wouldn’t jump at the chance to join hands here…

So until we on the Left settle our own internal dissonance about the Scotch-Irish, Lind might sadly be right: there will be no peasants with pitchforks.

I was talking to some people a week or so ago about favorite sub-genres of comedy movies (I believe the conversation started with the proposition: Airplane, overrated or appropriately rated?)  Anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for the screwball comedy, which is the one kind of comedy universally associated with a specific era.

According to wikipedia, “while there is no authoritative list of the defining characteristics of the screwball comedy genre,” qualities most often associated include:

• farcical situations
• fast-paced, witty repartee
• a plot involving courtship and marriage or remarriage
• mistaken identities
• a character trying to keep an important fact a secret
• sometimes involves cross-dressing
• class issues in which the upper class is “brought down a peg”

The screwball comedy is forever linked to Arsenic and Old Lace, It Happened One Night, Some Like It Hot, or maybe most representative of the genre, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell bantering their way through His Girl Friday.  In other words, a largely ’40s trend with some pioneers in the 30s (It Happened One Night) and some throwbacks in the ’50s (Some Like It Hot).

But over the years, there have been so many “throwbacks” to the genre, that it’s sometimes hard to believe that the golden age ever ended.  For my money, some of the best screwball comedies of all time came out in the late-70s, early-80s:

Tootsie
9 to 5
Kiss Me Goodbye
Seems Like Old Times
All of Me

The mid-late ’90s also had a mini-renaissance:

The Birdcage
Liar, Liar
My Best Friend’s Wedding
While you were Sleeping…

And of course, just about every ’90s sitcom featured the obligatory “How-can-I-get-the-tape-out-of-the-answering-machine-before-they-hear-the-message-I-wish-I-hadn’t-left” episode.  Became the most tired trope of the ’90s sitcom and I laughed every time.

So I don’t know.  I’m usually an easy sell on “bring back the golden age” arguments, but on this, I’m not sure it ever really left.

Other than that, I’ll try to post quick thoughts here – interesting clips or links to articles I find interesting – and continue posting the longer stuff over there, with more of an effort to cross-post regularly.

Couple of quick thoughts for today…

1.  Ken Mehlman came out of the closet today and is, predictably, being hit with charges of hypocrisy from the Left.  It’s amazingly silly.  The man is allowed to be gay and Republican.  And as for the argument that during his tenure as RNC Chair, the Party pursued anti-equality measures, well, so what?  Everyone who has ever worked for a political party has advocated some policies they personally do not support.  Only in the case of gays and Republicans have I ever observed that fact labeled hypocrisy.  I personally find Mehlman’s situation far more tolerable than completely unprincipled campaign hacks (Dick Morris, Dick Morris, Dick Morris) who lack any core beliefs and are therefore immune to charges of hypocrisy.

2.  This post is a couple of weeks old, but still worth a quick link.  I sent this article to my brother assuming it would be less objectionable than most of the articles we send back and forth.  (sigh)  It just ended up sparking a debate about relative advantages/disadvantages to “hyper-mobility” that, yes, included the number of coutries one of us has friends in.  Incidentally, there was a follow-up post that addressed some of the comment debate from this post, but the follow-up really isn’t necessary to convey the basic point.

3. In my earlier post, I commemorated today’s date, which deserved to stand alone.  On a more light-hearted date commemoration, yesterday was Cal Ripken’s 50th birthday and the 27th anniversary of the Orioles-Blue Jays game in which Tippy Martinez picked three runners off first in one inning.  Still, not enough Orioles Magic in the date to win last night’s game.

Alright, I’m off to cross-post those League posts…

After the news of Senator Robert Byrd’s death broke this morning, I exchanged a couple of text messages with my brother.  In one of them, he wrote that Byrd’s “style of governance has been out for something like 20 years.”  Well, that’s certainly true, but leaves open a couple of questions: what is that style of governance, and are we better off with or without it?

There will be dueling narratives over the coming days about Byrd’s legacy.  To some, he was a giant of the Senate, a keeper of institutional history, the savior of a poor state with every other building in said state named in his honor.  To others, he was an overrated relic, a former Klansman, the example of everything that is wrong with clubby, insider politics.  It would be something of a cop-out to say that there’s truth in both (which, obviously there is) so I choose to associate myself with the first group.

Here’s where I get into all kinds of internal contradictions: I may consider myself a populist above all other political labels, but I have two soft spots that are tough to square with that label.  One, (I’ve written about before) is an odd respect for old machine politics, which I’ve always appreciated for placing tangible results ahead of abstract ideals (and because I tend to think that trading favors is one of the relatively minor forms of political corruption).  The second, and maybe this is related to the first in “working the machinery” terms, is a deep respect for the institution of the Senate.

It’s a thin line between a genuine preference for something that has passed and a sense of nostalgia that exists only because something has passed.  Last year, after the death of Ted Kennedy, a number of journalists referenced the lost age of Senate giants.  I wanted to do some digging for myself – to find out which side of that nostalgia line this argument fell – so I picked a Congress I thought to be emblematic of the age of the Old (but not too old) Senate, the 86^th Congress – 1959 – 1961.  I consulted the prestigious Wikipedia, and read a few thumbnail sketches on the members, and based on that extensive day-long research project, did find some merit in the claim that the Senate then was more impressive than the current chamber in terms of legislative skill or even the desire for legislative skill.  Success as a legislator is sort of a thankless achievement in the current anti-insider mood of the country.

As of today, the 86^th Senate class is all gone.

Back to those two questions: 1) what made Byrd’s “style of governance” different from the style practiced today; and 2) is that style better than what we have today?

On the first, I defer to the title of the post – pork and deliberation.  Or at least, the political acceptability of pork rather the actual existence of pork.  Unlike many of today’s members, Byrd never felt a need to rationalize securing federal dollars for his state.  He remembered he was sent to the Senate for two reasons: to serve the United States and to serve West Virginia.  Serving both country and state can be at odds, often requiring sacrificing the interests of the state for the “greater good” of the nation.  Byrd served both, without apology.

As for deliberation, I can only think of Byrd’s heartbreaking speech opposing the war in Iraq in which he described the Senate as “hauntingly silent” and “sleepwalking through history.”  The world’s greatest deliberative body was too busy with the political maneuvering, either “rolling out a new product,” or the reaction to it to openly debate the most important issue of the decade.

Earlier this year, when Byrd became the longest-serving member of Congress in United States history, he spoke for one of the final times on the Senate floor to mark the occasion.  The only Republican present in the chamber to hear him speak was Orrin Hatch, (disputably) the longest serving Republican Senator.  If Byrd had been a Republican, I have no doubt that only a token Democrat would have turned out to hear the speech.  This is an institution that has to some extent lost its sense of history and more importantly lost its sense of mission.  It now serves almost entirely as a theater for the days’ political – as opposed to policy – battles.  It’s clichéd to say it, and it smacks of “good ol’ days” blather, but it’s hard to look at it objectively and not find it to be true.

So yes, I do think we would be better off with that out-of-fashion style of governance.  It’s true that Congress is more transparent now, less clubby, and in many ways, politics has never been cleaner.  But the cost has been greater than the benefits and the people who government is intended to serve suffer for it.

In the opening pages of Robert Caro’s “Master of the Senate,” Caro quotes Daniel Webster’s 1839 speech on the concept of Union.  The most interesting aspect of the re-telling was the ability of the speech to move its listeners, even opponents of its content.  John C. Calhoun even grew emotional.  Robert Byrd, more than any of the other 99 members, would’ve been thrilled to have served in that Senate.  He was probably born a century too late and probably lived (or at least served) 20 years too long.   He came to the Senate as a throwback and lived to be an absolute political dinosaur.  I just hope some of the younger members were paying attention.

I just got back from a family reunion in the South, specifically, the North Carolina/Tennessee mountain region.  It really is a breathtakingly beautiful part of the country.  In part because of my family roots, and in part just due to personal temperament, I’ve always felt an attachment to the South, despite never having lived in the region.  For a political junkie like me, it’s hard to travel anywhere without considering the history and political dimensions of a place, and obviously entire careers have been made applying that thought process to the South.

The region is at the center of every story of political realignment; always a “solid South,” whether solidly Democratic or solidly Republican.  The regional flip has become symbolic of a Party flip, and is at the root of one of the most enduring political narratives of the 20^th century: that, at some point in the decades following the New Deal, a realignment occurred that was so complete that many partisans trace their political ancestry to the opposite Party of a century before.  Many modern Democrats feel an ideological kinship to Teddy Roosevelt, Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, or even Abraham Lincoln while modern Republicans often claim the tradition of old ancestral Democrats like Jefferson, Jackson, or William Jennings Bryan – the exact trio Michael Lind lists as the ancestors of the modern Republican Party in Up From Conservatism[i].  Dozens of books have been written on the topic – enough to form a near sub-genre of political books – and while they often cite a different tipping point for the changes, each of them begin with the premise that the realignment did occur and was complete.

Obviously, I am not contending that no regional realignment occurred; that would take a mighty bit of denial.  But the argument that the parties completely swapped values due to a series of mid-20^th century tipping points is a view that only takes into account cultural issues and the role of government, a view that is often applied to any future realignment (which is usually assumed to be along pro-government/anti-government lines).  Two quick side points: 1) as a Democrat, I feel most comfortable dealing with the history of my Party, so this is primarily from that point of view; 2) my argument is not whether or not a party has, at any given point in their history, lived up to its principles – just that the principles exist and are stable.

To sum up the most referenced tipping points, in the way they are most popularly described:

1. Hubert Humphrey, Strom Thurmond and the walk-out at the ’48 Democratic convention. Several liberals within the Party, most famously Hubert Humphrey, advocated adding a “minority plank” to the 1948 Democratic platform, which was significantly stronger and more specific than the existing language on civil rights.  Humphrey announced from the podium that “the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”  Following the adoption of the minority plank, Democrats from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the convention and nominated Strom Thurmond as the nominee of the newly formed (and short-lived) Dixiecrat Party.
2. Joe McCarthy, the age of the intellectual, and the egghead Left. Unlike the ’48 example, there was no single defining moment that distinguished the Left of the ‘50s from their predecessors.  More likely, it was just an outcome of the (at least political, though I would argue actual) success of the New Deal and a lull in major post-war issues.  Without a Great Depression or a World War, liberals turned increasingly to a showdown with McCarthy – a battle that, regardless of importance, was not particularly relevant to the lives of average Americans.  The chasm between the intellectual Left and the old Democratic coalition grew and resulted in the nomination of Adlai Stevenson – the only Democratic Presidential nominee of the 1950s.  Stevenson was the original “egghead,” or, as George Packer described, he was “the candidate of the arriviste intellectuals who as likely lived in suburbs as cities, worked for large universities and corporations, did not think of themselves first as Jews or Protestants, craved what Howe called ‘that restrained yet elegant style of life which Stevenson himself embodied’”[ii].
3. The signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Of all of the supposed tipping points, this is probably the most popular.  That popularity continues in part because LBJ himself called it; famously telling an aide that the Democratic Party had “lost the South for a generation.”
4. Mayor Daley vs. the Yippies. When violence broke out during the protests at the ’68 Chicago convention, the Democratic coalition of blue-collar party regulars and young liberals fell apart.  As this theory goes, Humphrey may have won the nomination, but the future of the Party belonged to the New Left.  Four years later, the Party nominated George McGovern whose candidacy went down to epic defeat, carrying only Massachusetts and Washington DC.  The Party never won back the regulars lost in Chicago, and instead built a new base out of the values of the New Left, while the Republicans began employing populist rhetoric to win voters previously considered Democratic stalwarts.
5. The Reagan Democrats. In 1980, Reagan was able to finally pull away the socially conservative, working-class Americans who had been alienated by the New Left of the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Reagan’s pro-American rhetoric and nostalgia for small-town values effectively took precedence over economic policies that had defined political constituencies in earlier years.

The proponents of all of these realignment theories love to use electoral maps.  No proof like visual proof.  Just look at the difference between the 1896 electoral map, the first of two contests that pitted Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan against Republican nominee William McKinley…

… and the 2008 Obama/McCain electoral map.*

A near-perfect inversion.  These or similar maps have been the basis of explaining the changes in political parties, and their use is not accidental.  As mentioned above, Bryan, like all populists, has always been a favorite target for realignment theorists; at least as often considered the ancestor of the modern Right as the modern Left.  Or, to quote Lind again, “we should not be surprised that the grandchildren of free-silverites should become enamored of supply-side economics in the 1980s and the flat tax in the 1990s.[iii]”  Well, yes we should, but that isn’t my point right now.  Instead, I’m interested in the assumption that the South went for the Democrat only when the Democrat was rural and overtly religious (1896) and voted Republican as the Democratic Party became increasingly cosmopolitan.  It wouldn’t play as neatly into the storyline to include the ’52 electoral map, the contest between Stevenson and Eisenhower…

So Adlai Stevenson, the candidate most representative of the growing cosmopolitan Left, carried the Deep South, parts of the Upper South, West Virginia, Kentucky, and nothing else.  In fact, until 2000, the realignment was at best inconsistent – very clear in ’68 and ’88, very unclear in the Carter elections (in ’76, Carter carried every Southern state minus Virginia), and mixed in the ‘90s.  But in the last three elections, the trends have solidified.  When a Democrat’s support bleeds south, as it did in ’08, it’s a result of a national popularity rather than a regional realignment.

All of the changes of the second half of the 20^th century did happen, and all caused an evolution in emphasis on each of the Parties.  But why, after decades of “tipping points,” did the new map finally crystallize only ten years ago, the election that led to the coining of Red States and Blue States?

One of the leading predictors of political party has always been the political party of the parents.  Ancestral partisanship, in the past, trumped ideology.  But as the 20^th century wore on, voting for “the person, not the party” became a mark of political maturity, breaking many people of the centuries-old practice of voting the way their parents and grandparents had voted.  Without the ancestral ties, realignment could be swift and complete.

With so much talk about newly forming coalitions, the meaning of the Tea Party, and a predicted realignment that breaks down along lines more relevant to today’s conversation, it’s interesting to note that what once took multiple igniters and decades of gradual change to complete could now theoretically be accomplished in one or two election cycles.  Party structures are increasingly obsolete, a fact I view as a negative, but also as a point of fact. 

People simply don’t identify with Party labels as strongly as they once did, leaving political philosophy and cultural identifiers as the primary determinates of voting.  To stay relevant, the Parties end up polarizing along the same lines as the electorate – cultural and ideological.  The only open question is how those divisions are interpreted.  For instance, there has been a lot of consideration here and elsewhere of a possible liberaltarian realignment.  That is one interpretation, and would divide up the map in certain ways that can be predicted.  Such a coalition would probably skew younger, better educated, and more mobile – all factors that are easy to imagine having a larger constituency in California than West Virginia.  If, as it’s usually imagined, the Democratic Party is the inheritor of this coalition, then the current electoral map is likely to continue along the lines it has over the past three elections, with the possible swap of the currently Democratic rust belt for the currently Republican (but quickly cracking) new West.

But that’s not the only possible outcome.  For the Democratic Party, it is possible to draw a straight line from Jackson to Obama, passing through Bryan, FDR, LBJ, and most other major Democrats in between – including Adlai Stevenson.  This argument would suggest that all the tipping point events that sparked the current ideological demographics (roughly: single women, minorities, city-dwellers, and the professional classes vs. white men, Southerners, gun-owners, and church-goers) were made on the basis of changes in emphasis and issues, not underlying principle.

I’m thinking here of the new ideological groupings suggested by Noah Millman at The American Scene a few months ago.  With these labels, the Democratic Party has been at times liberal or conservative, reactionary or progressive, but they have almost always fit this definition of “Left.”  Millman argues that “issues of the individual versus authority are not fundamental to the left-right axis,” and further, that “a left-wing perspective is animated by failure and the consequences thereof,” while a right-wing perspective seeks to “design a system that adequately rewards success.”  While I don’t fully agree with that categorization, the theme of protecting those left behind – either by denouncing or championing government – has been a relative constant of the Democratic Party, while the Republican Party has advocated policies that prioritize the encouragement of success over the defense of the less-successful.

When Andrew Jackson opposed the re-chartering of the National Bank, he did so because he believed the bank tended “to aggravate the inequality of fortunes; to make the rich richer and the poor poorer; to multiply nabobs and paupers[iv].”  For Jackson, the best argument against the Bank was the outcome, not the Constitutionality (although that was a secondary point for him).  Not a great leap from these views to FDR’s views about the evils of “economic royalists.”

The end result is dueling narratives: in one, the ideological differences are about the appropriate role of government and the balance between individual liberties and social justice; in the other, government is a side point, a tool equally likely to do harm and good.  What matters isn’t the tool, it’s the constituency – the interests of society’s winners balanced against the interests of its losers.  That would create an entirely different electoral map, one that would likely look closer to the maps of the late 19^th century, but with Texas, Washington, and the new West moving into the Republican column (they were Democratic states in 1896) and the rust belt and the Midwest (Republican states a century ago) going for the Democrats.

Realistically, I think the first scenario is the most likely to take hold for now.  The role of government is being more hotly debated than the purpose of government.  Almost everyone who predicts a coming realignment believes that some sort of small-l libertarianism (socially liberal, economically conservative) would be one of the two surviving factions.  Its opposite is not described nearly as consistently – sometimes assumed to be Statist or Leftist, other times small-minded and reactionary – all depending on the political perspective of the observer.

But in an age with diminishing ancestral partisanship, these coalitions can change very quickly.  Coalitions dissolve, issues change, and political parties react – or at least try to – in order to stay relevant.  The fact that this process has sped up over the last several decades is all the more reason to assume that people will increasingly associate a stable set of values to each Party.  Role of government is not that value – its consideration leads to connections between Jefferson and Goldwater, hardly something that has remained stable through all the incarnations of each Party.  But the winner/loser divide Millman described is relatively stable, properly connecting Hamilton to Goldwater to the Tea Party crowd (who tend to be better educated and higher income than the average American).

As for the role of the South in any future realignment, my trip didn’t offer any clues.  The very limited number of political conversations I had mostly betrayed, if anything, a centrist character to the region; a fairly even mix of moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans.  I ate a lot of amazing Southern food, got to relax on a porch swing, and even caught lightning bugs with a few children in my cousin’s back yard.  Not a bad way to spend a few days.

*Thomas Schaller uses almost the same elections to make the realignment point in Whistling Past Dixie.  Instead of the 2008 map, he uses the 2004 map – the most recent election results at the time of the book’s publication.  I substituted the ’08 data, but the point is still the same.