A National Party Once More

No, not Labour. Not by a long chalk yet, if ever.

But in 2008, on the same day as Obama received their Electoral College votes, California and Florida voted to re-affirm traditional marriage. Missouri and Ohio voted not to liberalise gambling. Colorado voted to end legal discrimination against white men. And from coast to coast, the people who voted for Obama were the mainstays of, especially, the black and Catholic churches. They still are.

Obama supporters included Bob Casey, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak and others of like mind. Obama supporters included Jim Jones, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Christopher Buckley, the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec, and Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp. And Obama supporters included the recently deceased Squire Lance, Saul Alinsky’s chosen successor and a stalwart of Opus Dei. The attraction of Obama has always been his supporters rather than the man himself. That, and the sheer ghastliness of the alternatives.

Obama has signed healthcare into law after having promised not to do so if there were any provision for federally funded abortion, which there is not; would that there were a public option or a single-payer system alongside that ban, so as to make abortion practically impossible, but one thing at a time. Nor is there coverage for illegal immigrants, still less the amnesty being promoted by Senate Republicans. Traditional marriage is Obama’s own stated view. He has kicked the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and instead endorsed Casey’s Pregnant Women Support Act as well as concentrating on the Employee Free Choice Act supported by pro-life stalwarts such as Stupak and Marcy Kaptur, which latter declined to endorse either him or Clinton because neither was offering enough to the victims of the “free” trade agreements that she and Stupak are now prominent in seeking to repeal.

Kaptur is one of the Rust Belt Catholics who still account for around one fifth of the Democratic Congressional Delegation. Democratic Governor Steve Beshear has just been re-elected by a margin of 20 points. In Kentucky. Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Democrats have just won a special election to retain control of the State Senate. In New Jersey, the land of Chris Christie, they have increased their majority in the State Assembly and retained control of the Senate. Ohio voters have rejected by 61 per cent to 39 a proposal drastically to reduce the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

And in Mississippi, the constitutional recognition of personhood from conception, while opposed by the outgoing Republican Governor, was supported not only by the Republican nominee to succeed him, but also by the (black) Democrat. So, joining the Rust Belt Catholics, the Southern Democrats are on the way back. Only this time, they come in both colours. So that valiant old anti-segregationist, Zell Miller, seems to have spoken too soon as surely Mark Stricherz seems to have done. Superb historical analysis on much of Miller’s part and all of Stricherz’s. But the history books, where many of us spend so much of our time, are where it increasingly belongs.

Miller expected the Republican Party to subsume the conservative Democrats, and in all but the purely nominal sense he now exemplifies that. But in fact it is the Democratic Party that is winning back its old Northern base of “ethnic Catholics” to add to the blacks whom it picked up as they moved North and as Johnson (unlike Kennedy, though like Nixon) backed Civil Rights, all the while slowly but steadily re-conquering the South on something not far short of a miraculous biracial basis.

At the same time, it is not conservative Democrats who are becoming Republicans, but moderate Republicans who are becoming Democrats. Yes, they are social liberals. So are a lot of their new party, and that is nothing new. They have never been monolithic in it, and they are less and less able to pretend that they are. But they have always been there. Only now, they are once again going to have to balance their concerns with those of social conservatives. And the moderate Republicans are the heirs to the Keynesianism, social security, unemployment insurance, labour laws, farm programmes, environmental protection, Civil Rights legislation, healthcare provisions (Nixon’s War on Cancer and War on Drugs), military nonintervention, and active peace-mongering of the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Bush I, and, in certain ways, even the Reagan and Bush II Administrations.

Often in the teeth of opposition from supposed liberal heroes such as John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and, for all his unsung prophetic calls against materialism in general and oil dependence in particular, Jimmy Carter. Although he did sign into law the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion, proposed by a Republican who was not merely a conservative but almost a sort of European Catholic monarchist, but passed by a Democratic Congress, signed by Carter, and subject to an annual renewal which it has never been denied no matter how large the Democratic majority in either House. Likewise, both of George McGovern’s running mates were pro-life Catholics, in stark contrast to the record of his party’s supposed “centrists”.

Their failings have nothing to do with the Democratic Party that began to emerge with the victory of Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. It is truly A National Party Once More.