Kevin Drum, riffing off a post by John Quiggin, has an interesting take today on some of the potential reasons we're seeing growing fissures within Bush and Reagan's conservative coalition. It's all based on a reading of the massive survey on American's political attitudes released by Pew late last week.
First, Quiggin:
On the one hand, the Pew Survey shows that Democrats and Independents are becoming pretty similar in the views to people elsewhere in the developed world (such as Europeans) – liberal on social issues, moderately social-democratic in social policy, preferring peace to war and so on. Not surprisingly, this translates to a strongly negative view of the Republican party, just as it does everywhere else in the world.
On the other hand, Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party’s success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.
Now, Drum:
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First is John's suggestion that the conservative infrastructure built up in the 70s and 80s has become one of the right's biggest weaknesses. I'm not sure I buy this, but it's an intriguing thought because American liberals have recently become pretty entranced by the success of all those right-wing thinktanks and radio bloviators John is talking about. If he's correct that their very success has now backfired on conservatives, what lessons does this hold for the left as we go about the task of recreating much of that infrastructure for our own side?
The self-imposed ideological isolation of the right is something I've only started paying attention to very recently. For most of the last decade or so, the narrative-industrial complex that movement conservatives built seemed both unstoppable and indestructible. If it didn't seem that way before 9/11 and the early days of the Iraq war, it certainly did afterward. But then, sometime around Katrina, it all started to go wrong. Having built a machine that runs entirely on half truths and lies, it slowly began falling victim to its very real imperfections. At first I didn't really want to believe it; I mean, really, it just seemed to good to be true. But day by day, little by little, I'm starting to believe.
Was its collapse inevitable? I think not. The problem for conservatives, I believe, is that they firmly hitched their wagons to a very, very lame horse. The incompetence of this administration has been staggering. Reagan's 11th commandment - "Thou Shall Not Speak Ill Of Fellow Republicans" - demanded that conservatives build a palace of lies in order to conceal the truth about the man they had chosen as their king. But rather than protect him, the lies merely hid the truth about his actions from his supporters, with each error compounding on top of the last. It's not the first time it has happened in American history, and it certainly will not be the last.
Think I'm being overly optimistic? Go take a look at the results of the survey for yourself. Pressed for time? Take a look at just this one image:
As bad as that looks for the GOP, like both Quiggin and Drum I would argue that the data within the report is actually much worse. On page 7, for example, you'll find two graphs digging a bit deeper into the trends in party ID. For those who have studied James L. Sundquist's theory of party dynamics and electoral realignments, it should jump out at you immediately: those graphs scream "realignment potential."
Since 9/11, support for the GOP among self-described partisans has dropped 5 percentage points. At the same time, among Independents who described themselves as leaning towards one party or another, support for the Democrats had increased 6 points. Among the same group, support for the GOP has dropped 2 percentage points.
Ah... but what about that flat Democratic partisan percentage. That steady 33% must suggest something is amiss with a claim that a realignment is coming, no? No. Realignments, according to Sundquist, occur in stages. Partisan identification is a psychological commitment that is highly resistant to change, and so when it does change it does so in steps.
Step one? An individual decouples from his or her previous partisan commitment, flirting with a change that nevertheless leaves them deeply conflicted. Step two? Triggered by a change in the political environment, an individual forms a new, temporary alignment with the party he had once opposed. Think of it as a trial run; the voter is considering the possibility of a commitment, but they want to give live together for a bit before tying the knot. Should things go well, step three makes things formal, leading to a new long-term attachment.
Throughout our history, realignments have been driven by the rise of a new set of issue clusters in the electorate, clusters that cut across previous party coalitions in a way that forces people to shift allegiances. Key to this process is something political scientists refer to as "generational replacement." Think of it as an odd euphemism for the cycle of life and death. Over time, old generations die and new ones are born, and at any given point the gap between young and old is both ideologically and experientially immense. As the oldest generational cohort dies, they take their political commitments, ideas, ideologies and symbols with them, making way for a new generation with entirely different concerns.
Just as an individual voters realignment is a three step process, so too is the process of realigning a nation. Step one: A great crisis occurs that transforms our political process, rearranging party coalitions around new issues and understandings of government. Bonds formed during moments of crisis are enduring, forming habits that most voters take with them to their graves. If you have grandparents in your family who tell stories about the Great Depression you'll know exactly what I mean. Step two: This generation has children, and, as all parents do, they pass their ideas and ideological commitments along. It is not a perfect process, of course, but by and large it works. But step three? The children of these children are often simply too far removed from the events that that defined their parents and grandparents political commitments to even understand them. They may keep up appearances, but should another crisis come along, this "ripe for realignment" generation will form new enduring bonds of their own.
Which brings me full circle to the Pew poll. Throughout the report you'll find frequent references to the pre-Boomers (step one), Boomers (step two), and Gen's X and Y (step 3; the two generations must be combined to achieve a generation equal in size to the Boomer generation). The key, I believe, is Gen Y. The difference between their views and the previous generation is astonishing. More to the point, if you watch the data over time, it is very, VERY clear that their attitudes shifted to the left dramatically following 9/11. The data is there. Go see for yourself. I'll wait.
So why no realignment in 2004, you ask? Again, Sundquist's framework provides us an answer. Realignments, despite what previous theorists have said, are not processes that work themselves out in one or two elections. Institutional forces, for example, can often hold them at bay for decades; think of the segregationist "Democratic" South of the 1950s and 1960s and you've got the idea. On top of that, generational replacement itself takes time. Majorities, in the words of Kevin Phillips, aren't formed overnight; they "emerge."
Ever since the earliest days of this blog, realignment theory has been one of my major, ongoing concerns. I've long argued that a realignment is on its way. But this Pew report? This report gives me the very real sense that we've reached a moment when our politics are a realignment waiting to happen.
It's coming.... It's coming....
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