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It has become customary in modern American politics, when one party inflicts a major defeat on another, for pundits to consign the losers to history's trash heap. Political obituaries have been written for the Republicans during F.D.R.'s long White House tenure, for the Democrats when Ike was unbeatable, for the Republicans (again) in 1964, and for the Democrats (again) in 1984 and 1988. In every case, the "dead" party arose from the grave.
Sometimes, though, political parties really do die. In the 19th century, the Federalists, the National Republicans and the Whigs, among others, vanished. In our own century, the Populists and the Progressives expired, and if the Socialists (not to mention the Communists) are still alive, no one seems to know or very much care. Now, in the great, turbulent wake of the 1994 elections, it would appear that the Democratic Party may soon join the others in oblivion. A careful look at the voting patterns in the election and at the radical changes that resulted therefrom -- changes in Congress, in America's political agenda, in Speaker Newt Gingrich's attractiveness to the media, including The Washington Post -- suggests that Democrats have lost their raison d'etre and are probably doomed. Democrats may continue to win elections for some time to come. But the party of Roosevelt, of Truman, of Kennedy and LBJ -- of the "Solid South," blue-collar labor, of internationalism, liberalism and welfare state-ism -- seems quite beyond any hope of a Lazarus-like miracle.
In 1994, the Democrats didn't just lose Congress for the first time in 40 years. They also lost 10 governorships and, for the first time since the late 1960s, control fewer than half of the state legislatures. Indeed, so outgunned were the Democrats that they could not manage to defeat a single Republican incumbent candidate for governor, the House or the Senate! Losses of that magnitude mean, among other things, that the Republicans will now play a dominant role in American political life at all levels and cast an even darker shadow on Democratic fortunes in the future.
Nor is that the end of the bad news for the Democrats. The 1994 election returns are yet more evidence, if more were needed, that the Democratic Party has lost not only its way but its heart and its soul, has lost not only its mandate but has utterly lost the key constituency in American politics"the workers of the middle class. As the Washington Post's astute political analyst Thomas B. Edsall wrote after last fall's elections: "While maintaining an alliance with Americans on the margin, the Democratic Party has alienated middle America, moving far from its New Deal roots as the ally of such groups as European immigrants, Catholic ethnics and organized labor seeking entry into the social mainstream. Today, the party is increasingly seen by swing voters as seeking to redistribute income from workers to nonworkers. . . . [The] Democrats are losing credibility as a national party. . . ."
Based on data compiled by Mitovsky International and published after the 1994 elections in The New York Times, blacks, Jews and self-described liberals are the only members of the old Democratic coalition who remain steadfast. In the congressional voting, 88 percent of blacks, 78 percent of Jews and 82 percent of liberals voted for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Outside the dwindling lists of the registered faithful, no other broad national grouping -- including organized labor -- approached that degree of solidarity with what was once America's majority party. Indeed, even gays, lesbians and bisexuals fell away in 1994; Democratic House candidates, who received 77 percent of their votes in 1992 won only 60 percent in 1994. And the "Solid South," which produced the only Democratic presidents since John F. Kennedy, seems to have abandoned the Democrats forever. Only 45 percent of Southerners cast their ballots for Democratic House candidates in 1994.
Some blame President Clinton for all this. But one might as well blame Romulus Augustulus for the decline of the Roman empire. Clinton, like Rome's last emperor, is as much a symptom as a cause. It was Clinton's bad luck to win the presidency at a time when his party had already been decimated by a succession of weak or weakened presidents and presidential candidates; by internal party "reforms;" by the corrosive and corrupting effects of having held power too long in Congress and the statehouses; and, not least, by various ineluctable historical tides -- economic, demographic, social and political. Clinton probably would not have even been elected had Ross Perot stayed home in 1992 and attended to his coupon clipping. But the evidence suggests that the Democrats' general collapse would have occurred sooner or later -- probably sooner.
To understand how the party came to this sorry pass and to find clues to what the future may hold, some historical review is necessary.
In the first half of the 19th century, when modern American politics were born, the Whig Party advocated social conservatism, high tariffs and federal intervention in the fiscal and monetary affairs of the nation. With this broad platform, the Whigs managed, as any successful political party must under the delicately checked and balanced American system of government, to rally many disparate political groups to their banner. Among those calling themselves Whigs were states-rights Southerners, evangelical and anti-Catholic Protestants, and anti-Masons, and such Northern moralists and reformers as Thaddeus Stevens, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Seward, Horace Greeley and a young and ambitious Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. By the beginning of the 1840s, the motley Whigs were quite competitive, North and South, with the older and more established Democrats.
Whig candidates won the presidential elections of 1840 and 1848. By the end of 1840, Whigs had captured both houses of Congress and 20 of the nation's 26 governorships. As the Civil War loomed, however, the Whigs were torn apart. They had been trying for years to have it both ways on the slavery issue, and time simply ran out on them. Whig slaveowners in the South began to see a more steadfast champion in the Democratic Party while many Whig abolitionists and moderates in the North insisted that their party take a stand either against slavery or against its extension into the territories and new states. When Northerners split off to form the new, antislavery (but not necessarily abolitionist) Republican Party, the Whigs were finished as a national party. The election of Lincoln in 1860 as the nation's first Republican president not only helped precipitate the Civil War, it also established, once the war had been settled in the field (and in Union factories), the political foundation on which the modern two-party system was built. For the next 130 years, the Democrats and the Republicans would dominate America's political landscape.
So permanent did the post-Civil War system seem that some high-school civics texts treated it as if it had been ordained in heaven. But the Almighty did not create the system or make it work; that was accomplished by consensus-building, compromising human beings. In the immediate post-Civil War years, the Republican Party combined industrialists, bankers and relatively well-off midwestern farmers with Northern progressives and former slaves, who continued to think of the GOP as the party of Lincoln. It was, and for a long time would remain, a winning combination.
On the other side of the two-party divide, the Democrats managed to unite conservative Southern whites and sharecroppers with blue-collar, Northern workers -- including ever-growing numbers of European immigrants, especially Catholics from Ireland and Italy and Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia. This basic alignment remained in effect, with some adjustments from time to time as the nation grew and the economy changed, until well into the Great Depression. Only then did the alignment begin to change radically. Blacks in the South, finally realizing that the Republicans had abandoned them, began to gravitate in significant numbers toward the Democrats, even though the Democrats were then still happily in bed with Southern segregationists. Work was the key. The Democratic Party at least promised economic reform and paying jobs as opposed to the near-slavery of segregation.
The great African-American migration out of the South to Northern cities and towns, where the jobs were, began just before World War II and became a flood during and after the war. Throughout the '40s and '50s, however, even Northern, voting blacks were far less important to the Democrats than Southern whites and the labor unions. It wasn't until the 1960s that many of the inherent contradictions in the post-World War II Democratic coalition became evident. The most obvious and immediate was tension between segregationist Dixiecrats and Northern liberals who were, belatedly, but to their lasting credit determined to rid the nation of Jim Crow and all his works.
But the facade of Democratic unity was actually cracking in several places at once and with historic effects. The U.S. and the world were entering a period of rapid social and economic change. For a brief period, under John F. Kennedy, the Democrats gave the impression that they were the managers, if not the originators, of that change. In fact, however, they were presiding over a party that had hardly changed at all since the Depression, and a party that, like the Whigs before it, was thus losing relevance. A host of new or radically recast issues -- civil rights and race, poverty, the Cold War, nuclear deterrence, organized labor's role in an increasingly service-oriented economy, changing attitudes toward sex and gender, housing, public education, health care, urban decay -- cried out for new solutions. But as the Democrats sought to find solutions, notably through Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and landmark civil-rights laws, their old coalition began falling apart, with the key elements, labor and the South, growing more and more disaffected with each passing year.
The need to build a new coalition, similarly aimed at the voting center, seemed to elude many of the party's modern leaders. Instead, what the Post's Edsall calls "Americans on the margin" -- welfare recipients, gay-rights activists, pacifists, radical feminists and so on -- began to be ever more prominent in Democratic affairs. The party's old "bosses" from the Deep South and the Northern cities were forced to yield to a generation of "new-left" activists. Attempts by Jesse Jackson and others to find a majority amidst many minorities underscored the party's problem but did not solve it.
At the core of the Democrats' plight was one of American political history's supreme ironies: By pursuing progressive and largely beneficial economic and social legislation that vastly expanded the middle class -- from the National Labor Relations Act and the G.I. Bill to Urban Renewal and the 1964 Voting Rights Act -- the Democratic Party sowed the seeds of its own destruction. The great, optimistic expansion of the post-World War II years, an expansion for which the Democrats may justly claim much of the credit, had magical effects: It turned blue collars into white collars, laborers into burghers, urban liberals into suburban conservatives. In the South, the Democrats were again the victims of their own success. Enlightened civil-rights policies transformed a segregated backwater into one of the fastest-growing regions in the country although white voters did not remain grateful for long, if at all. Newt Gingrich, a transplanted Republican history teacher, would almost certainly never have made it from Georgia to the House of Representatives, let alone to the speaker's chair, had it not been for Democratic policies that conservatives bitterly opposed at the time!
More than a few Democrats saw their party's problem and sought to correct it. The late Sen. Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson, former Democratic party chairman Robert Strauss, former Senators Paul Tsongas and Fred Harris, even Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton tried to move the party off the margins and back toward the center. But the marginalized party, reinforced by internal rules that gave disproportionate power to its own "special interests," was bigger than they were and always won. Today, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which "Scoop" Jackson, Clinton and others created in response to the crisis, continues to churn out position papers and policy statements. Their aim is to find "a progressive alternative to the [GOP's] 'Contract With America.'"
Many of the DLC's ideas make sense and address fundamental issues -- market-oriented health-care reform, work-oriented welfare reform, reality-oriented military spending, to cite only three examples. Moreover, the devilish details of specific DLC proposals often do seem to have a "progressive" cast. Still, the question remains: Can the Democratic Party, as presently constituted, overcome the inertial thrust of the historical forces that brought it to its current pass? And can the party reform itself, as it were, on the run? On the record to date, the answer is decidedly no. Much more likely is that the party will experience further decline and gradually be supplanted, from within or without, by some new coalition of forces better able to cope successfully with the exigencies of the 21st century.
The disparate and rather inchoate elements of such a new coalition are already in view: Ross Perot's following of disaffected independents and Republicans who invite a plague on the houses of both major parties; moderate Democrats of the "Scoop" Jackson stripe; moderate Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller stripe; and the relatively new members of what might be termed the "minority middle-class" -- Asians, Latinos and African-Americans -- who, while uncomfortable with the Democrats' marginalized, "big government" approach, are even more dissatisfied with the tendency of the modern GOP to embrace various extreme policies, while ignoring the legitimate needs and concerns of racial minorities and the poor of the inner cities. It is conceivable, though barely, that the Democrats might be able to reconstitute themselves and rally these groups and others to some sort of "New Democrat" banner. But it appears more likely now that another party will form, a third party that for a period would provide the "swing" votes necessary for election before it finally supplanted the old Democrats as the second major party.
Former U.S. Senator David Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, has predicted that an "independent" presidential candidate -- i.e., one with no party affiliation -- will be elected to the White House in the next decade or so. Given the current power of independent voters and the nation's antipolitics mood, it is not unthinkable that a nonpartisan candidate could capture the presidency. Nor is there any shortage of potential candidates. In addition to Boren and Ross Perot, retired Gen. Colin Powell (who, when he was on active duty, registered in New York as an independent) and Democratic Senators Bill Bradley and Sam Nunn are possibilities.
The American political system tends to discourage truly independent candidacies, however. The nuts and bolts of presidential campaigns -- fund-raising, qualifying for federal contributions, attracting endorsements and volunteers, developing state-by-state strategies and advertising campaigns, primaries, to name just a few -- are all much easier and more likely to succeed in the context of an organized national party. That is a major reason why past "independent" candidates, including George Wallace, John Anderson and, in a somewhat different way, Perot, formed parties when they ran for president. Then, too, the democratic dynamics of a political party make it possible to develop a platform with broad and lasting appeal and can provide the discipline and the intellectual and political resources necessary for effective governance. Should some "man on a white horse" win the presidency, the hard work of finding a true successor to the old Democratic Party -- one that competes successfully over time and at all levels for middle-class voters -- would still remain to be done.
And what of the victory-drunk Republicans? Is the U.S. going to have to endure one-party rule until the Democrats get their act together again or a new party replaces them? Perhaps so. It would be foolhardy to predict the outcome of the 1996 elections this early. Yet it is nearly impossible to see how the Democrats, even allowing that they still have some election victories left in them, will be able to roll back the GOP tide with their current leaders and current policies. The Republicans are riding a crest. It will be very difficult indeed to deny them their hard-won days of wine and roses.
But they should heed the counsels of caution that even now are heard in some Republican caucuses. The marginalization of the Democrats could happen to the Republicans, too. Some think it already has. Nativism, isolationism, racism, a frightening disregard for the civilizing qualities of art, education and (yes!) government, a belief that the interests of people and society at large are always best served by business and the marketplace -- all of these tendencies, and others as destructive, are clearly evident in the modern Republican coalition. To the extent that the party allows them to direct its affairs and dominate its governance, to that extent it will hasten the birth of a serious and worthy opposition.
For, while the Democratic Party appears to be on the verge of extinction, the political system -- a reflection of the nation's determination not to let anyone have the upper hand for too long -- is hardly dead and, in all likelihood, is gathering strength for the new century that will soon begin.
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