Political parties, and their travails, have been much on my mind recently as I speak to radio and television interviewers about my new book, How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t). The book’s thesis has been that our two parties, founded in 1832 and 1854, have often changed issue positions but have retained their basic character in a nation that has expanded from 25 million to 325 million people.
The Republican Party has always been centered around a constituency of people thought of as typical Americans but who are not, by themselves, a majority. The Democratic Party has always been a coalition of disparate groups not considered typical Americans but who, when they stick together, can form a majority.
Last week, I wrote about the Democratic party’s travails, as its latest presidential debate revealed sharp disagreements between different groups in the Democratic coalition. Much of the discord arises from the emergence of affluent white college graduates, gentry liberals, as the dominant force in both raising money and generating ideas.
Republicans’ travails arise also from the changing character in their core constituency. From the Eisenhower to the Reagan years, it was centered on the relatively affluent. Since the 1990s, that has been changing, tilting more toward the religiously devout and economically downscale.
That change, as Ernest Hemingway said of bankruptcy, happened first gradually and then suddenly, starting with the Baby Boom tussles of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, then climaxing in the Baby Boom Armageddon match between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
With his distinctive positions on trade and immigration, Trump increased Republican percentages from non-college graduate whites and captured 100 more electoral votes than Mitt Romney. And this new downscale Trump Republican Party supports its president even more steadfastly than 1970s Republicans supported President Richard Nixon.
But a downscale party attracts articulate attackers and lacks institutional support. That’s true of Trump’s Republicans and, across the Atlantic, Prime Minister’s Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, as Johnson struggles to implement Brexit, the solemn verdict of the British electorate in June 2016, to leave the European Union.
Brexit was opposed by elites and minorities in metro London, and in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but was supported by 57% of voters in England outside London, which comprises 70% of the United Kingdom. Similarly, Clinton beat Trump 65% to 30% in metro New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but he carried the other 85% of the voting population by a 4-point margin.
Downscale parties tend to have few champions among the chattering classes. In Britain, most of the print press and the BBC, which every TV owner is forced to subsidize, heap ridicule and scorn on Brexit and its supporters. The financial elite and entertainment celebrities take a similar view.
In America, the former reality TV celebrity who got scads of cable coverage while contesting Republican primaries now gets unmixed negative coverage from all but Fox News and is opposed by just about every newspaper editorial page.
Disdain for downscale parties is nothing new. Sixty years ago, when the Democratic Party was dominated by Southern whites and Northern factory workers, major news magazines and newspapers were complacently Republican and snidely condescending about Democrats. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1940s and 1950s writings are laced with a defensive awareness of articulate readers’ disdain for the Democratic Party, which corresponds to many conservative writers’ attitudes today.
What’s new is the willingness of the downscale party’s detractors, not just to challenge the legitimacy of its victories — something Nixon and Al Gore refused to do in 1960 and 2000 — but even more their sense of self-righteousness in overturning an election result. Brexit opponents in Britain brush aside 17.4 million Brexit voters as bigots or ignoramuses entitled to zero respect.
American intelligence and law enforcement personnel felt morally justified in using official powers of the Clinton-campaign purchased Steele dossier to advance the baseless conspiracy theory about Trump colluding with Russia. Democrats now seek to impeach Trump for a phone conversation and, apparently, for overturning an established foreign policy.
Actually, the Constitution vests “the executive power” in the president and doesn’t mention the State Department. Past presidents have often sent personal envoys on politically sensitive missions: President Franklin Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Winston Churchill, Nixon sent Henry Kissinger to Mao Zedong.
There are signs that the people resist “the Resistance.” Johnson’s Conservatives are well ahead in polls, and the leading Democratic presidential candidates have shown weaknesses that may trump Trump’s. As Schlesinger liked to remind smug Republicans, Roosevelt’s downscale Democrats did win five straight presidential elections.
