Why The Democrats Are Blue

Below is the the Introduction to Why The Democrats Are Blue, by Mark Stricherz:

The Democrats limped out of Chicago divided and discouraged, the latest casualties in a culture war that went beyond differences over Vietnam. It would reshape and realign American politics for the rest of the century and beyond, and frustrate most efforts to focus the electorate on the issues that most affect their lives and livelihoods, as opposed to their psyches. The kids and their supporters saw the mayor and the cops as authoritarian, ignorant, violent bigots. The mayor and his largely blue-collar ethnic police force saw the kids as foul-mouthed, immoral, unpatriotic, soft, upper class kids who were too spoiled to respect authority, too selfish to appreciate what it takes to hold a society together, too cowardly to serve in Vietnam … Much of my public life was spent trying to bridge the cultural and psychological divide that had widened into a chasm in Chicago.
— Bill Clinton, My Life: The Early Years

With the race for the 2008 election underway, it’s tempting to conclude that the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates can ignore former President Clinton’s warning about the culture war. There is a rough consensus that the Democrats are favored to take back the White House; that Democrats, as they did in the 2006 midterms, will do so by riding voter disenchantment with President Bush’s handling of the Iraq War; and that the party’s candidates, as Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama already have done rhetorically, will reach out to culturally conservative religious and blue-collar voters.

The conventional wisdom is reasonable enough. If Iraq continues to haunt the Republicans, the economy nosedives, or the Democratic presidential nominee makes a major concession to social conservatives, the Democrats probably will win the White House. There will be joy in Berkeley and Oakland, Evanston and Chicago, Cambridge and Boston.

But the conventional wisdom is short sighted. Should the bad news from Iraq recede, the economy stay strong, and the Republicans nominate a cultural conservative, more voters are likely to make abortion and homosexuality voting issues. In the past five presidential elections, the percentage of Americans who vote on social issues has swung between one-seventh and more than one-fifth of all voters. Given that the vast majority of “values voters” vote for the more culturally conservative candidate, the Democrats might well lose the presidency.

Again.The “Social Issue” has played a major role in keeping a Democrat out of the White House in six of the last nine elections. When Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon coined the term in their 1970 classic The Real Majority, the Social Issue comprised race, crime, and values. Although President Clinton helped diminish the importance of the first two, Democrats continue to stumble over values issues. As David Carlin, former Democratic majority leader in the Rhode Island state senate, has argued,

As the Civil War approached, the Democrats took the wrong position on slavery, and they found themselves, except for a few episodes of prosperity, America’s minority party from the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. At the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Republicans took the wrong position on the social and economic welfare responsibilities of the federal government, and they remained America’s number-two party until the coming of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s and ‘90s. Today the Democrats are taking the wrong position on morality and religion, which may doom them to remain America’s minority until well into the twenty-first century.

The wrong position that national Democratic leaders have taken is that of secular liberalism. They oppose extending any legal protections to an unprotected class of human beings — unborn infants. And they favor granting public benefits for homosexual couples. Considering that the national party was known as “the party of the little guy” and led by Catholic big-city and state bosses, the post-1968 party’s support for secular liberalism qualifies as a revolution, not an evolution.

So why did the national Democratic Party side with secular liberals (“the kids and their supporters”) rather than religious traditionalists (“the mayor and his largely blue-collar ethnic police force”)? The question is of more than historical interest. To political observers, it should affect how they evaluate the Democratic presidential candidates. To those disgruntled with the national Democratic leadership, it should affect how they seek to reform the party.

I got a chance recently to pose this question to Bill Clinton, when he attended a funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington for Eugene McCarthy. Clinton had delivered a eulogy for the former Minnesota senator, who in his 1968 campaign ran against the "immoral" Vietnam War and "autocratic" Democratic bosses like Mayor Daley. After the service, Clinton ambled over to the southeastern part of the Cathedral, pausing to smile, laugh, chat, and take pictures with those in the crowd. Spotting a lull in his repartee, I asked the former president if he thought whether the McCarthy movement was the transition between the old party, which was formed into the New Deal or Roosevelt coalition, and the current party. He paused for seven or eight seconds, looked away briefly, and pursed his lips.

"Yes and no," Clinton said plainly. "I think that he reflected the beliefs that Democrats had in the '60s. He didn't want to give up the old members of the party, the blue-collar workers. He was someone who, as you heard today, had grown up in a small town. He didn't think that because blue-collar workers favored the war, they would leave the party. And I think he would have been appalled at the massive cultural change that took place between the two parties. A lot of the things that happened in '68 caused that.”

When I tried to ask a follow-up question, he tapped me on the wrists with his large left hand. "I'm fixin’ to say something," he said. "I lived through that time, and I loved Bobby Kennedy, but if you look at what he was doing to get the support of blue-collar workers, he was making very emotional appeals and speeches. See, what McCarthy was trying to do was to get them off the farms. I think they understood that he was from Minnesota and had worked a combine. So they could oppose the war just like the kids were. He tried to talk to them in more of a calm tone [than did Kennedy].” Clinton then got around to addressing the culture wars: "I think he would have been repulsed — I think it would have made him sad — that urban, rural, and suburban voters were voting on guns, gays, and whatever. It all started in the late '60s.”

Clinton is right to focus on the McCarthy movement and the culture war. When political observers discuss the revolution in the national Democratic Party, they focus on the defection of the South in response to the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Their explanation isn't crazy, but it's only half the story. Like them, Clinton failed to identify the real reason that the national Democratic Party sided with secular liberals instead of religious traditionalists. It’s ironic because in the summer of 1969 Clinton visited a friend in Washington who was interning for the McGovern Commission and made the acquaintance of a commission member.

Officially known as the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, the commission was approved at the very gathering that Clinton deplored, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The 28-member panel is best known for creating the modern presidential nominating system, in which primary and caucus voters rather than big-city and state bosses choose the party’s presidential nominee. It is also known for its first chairman, Senator George McGovern, who won the party’s nomination in 1972.

Otherwise, the McGovern Commission has been ignored, an obscure panel whose notoriety is not even one-one hundredth of that of the Warren Commission or 9/11 Commission. This is understandable. The McGovern Commission was overlooked during its existence from 1969 to 1972 and sank into obscurity afterwards. It has not been re-examined by journalists and historians since the early 1980s. This book is the first account of the McGovern Commission in a generation. It draws on interviews with nearly all of the active participants. The book is also based on extensive archival material, featuring memos, personal notes, and oral history interviews from the collections of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter.

The most significant consequence of the McGovern Commission is that the Democratic Party’s coalition changed and shrank. The New Deal or Roosevelt coalition had included white Southerners, Catholics, union members, blacks, and intellectuals. Under this coalition, the national party was a majority party, and its presidential candidates won seven of the ten elections from 1932 to 1968.

The McGovern Commission destroyed this old electoral alliance and replaced it with a Social Change coalition led by secular liberals. The Commission pushed through a rules change that required informal delegate quotas for women and young people. The proposal had three major consequences. First, while the Democratic coalition added feminists and secular professionals, it drove away blue-collar workers and Catholics, many of who became Reagan Democrats. Second, it broke the Democratic Party’s longstanding alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. Third, it reduced the number of Democratic constituents. According to party strategists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, only 21 percent of the electorate identifies as liberal, while 34 percent identifies as conservative.

The fourth consequence of the McGovern Commission is that the Democratic Party’s nominating system reduced the clout of traditional Democrats. Under the old boss system, big-city and state politicians chose the nominee based on the candidate’s perceived ability to help the local ticket back home. While the boss system was undemocratic as a procedure, it was democratic in substance, nominating candidates from every wing of the party between 1932 and 1968.

Demolishing this system was a top goal of several commission aides. The aides created a nomination process that would ensure the nomination in 1972 of a candidate committed to ending the Vietnam War. Under the new system, college-educated and upscale Democratic voters and activists vote for the nominee based on the candidate’s ability to win and conform to their ideological preferences. To be fair, the activist system is more democratic as a procedure than the boss system. But the activist system is also internally undemocratic. It relies on gender and racial quotas for the party’s presidential delegates: those who attend the national convention. The activist system is also less democratic in substance. Not since 1972 has a major Democratic presidential candidate ran as a social conservative.

The fifth consequence of the McGovern Commission is that secular, college-educated professionals hijacked control of the party machinery and imposed their own secular, college-educated agenda. The old presidential or national wing of the Democratic Party had been in the hands of Northern Catholic bosses. Although an elite group, they delivered regularly for their cross-racial, working-class constituents, helping make possible the legislation of the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society. In contrast, the party’s new presidential wing has decreased the likelihood of American troops fighting overseas and stopped the GOP from repealing most federal social programs. However, it has not passed any major domestic initiatives, allowed Republicans to advance their economic agenda of turbo capitalism (e.g. lowering of the capital gains tax and taxes on the wealthiest Americans), and excluded socially conservative Democrats from the national stage.

To millions of Americans devoted to the old Democratic Party, the story of the McGovern Commission and its legacy is a tragedy — a classic tale of understandable but impure motives, an ends-justify-the-mean mindset, hypocrisy, rationalization, and hubris.

The first chapter explores the moral and cultural alienation of many Catholic and blue-collar workers from the Democratic Party. Focusing on several voters in one county in western Pennsylvania, it tells the stories of these “Caseycrats,” who favor liberal or populist economic policies and conservative cultural ones. They once favored Democrats based on economic issues, but they oppose the national party’s secular liberalism. The opposition of such voters has cost Democratic presidential candidates the last two elections, as the party’s own pollsters confirm. Although the national party's commitment to cultural liberalism attracts upscale voters, it also repels downscale voters, who represent nearly three in five of all voters in presidential elections. Why did the national party repel such voters? The standard answers are appealing but fail to explain the magnitude of the change.

The second chapter examines the overriding virtue of the boss nomination system: It was democratic in substance. David L. Lawrence, as mayor of Pittsburgh and governor of Pennsylvania, was known as “Mr. Democrat” in western Pennsylvania. Lawrence not only sought to extend legal protection to an unprotected class of human beings, black Americans, by playing a key role in passing the civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention. He also played a key role in choosing every presidential nominee from Truman to Johnson. Lawrence, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, and John M. Bailey, boss of the Connecticut state party, exemplified the strengths of the boss nomination system. They were more ethical and less sectarian than their predecessors; still retained patronage, which kept them close to voters; delivered for their cross-racial, working-class constituents; went beyond their base to choose the party’s presidential nominees; and had no litmus test other than the candidate’s perceived ability to win.

The third chapter examines the main defect of the boss nomination system: It was undemocratic as a process. The Lawrence Commission (1965-68) did make the boss system more democratic. However, antiwar Democrats were marginalized in 1968. Consequently, young aides to Gene McCarthy’s campaign succeeded in passing a minority report at the Chicago convention that sought to democratize the nomination process.

The fourth chapter explores how secular activists overthrew the party bosses: by acting like old-style bosses. Young McCarthy aide Eli Segal feared that his efforts in 1968 to reform the party’s nomination system would fail. Although party officials appointed a successor to the Lawrence Commission, which became known as the McGovern Commission, Segal believed that party regulars would undercut the commission. Consequently, Segal created a small executive committee within the McGovern Commission to control the commission’s agenda. Rather than making the executive committee broadly representative of the party, he stacked it with supporters of the New Politics. While Segal and other former McCarthy aides were drawing up their preferred rules changes, they gave off the appearance of having consulted with the other wings of the party. In truth, they flew ideologically sympathetic commissioners in for key votes, coached Representative Allard Lowenstein of New York before a commission hearing about his testimony, and misleadingly claimed that Democrats endorsed their version of party reform.

The fifth chapter reveals the true motives of the activists in wresting control of the party machinery. It focuses on Fred Dutton, the chief designer and builder of the post-1960s Democratic Party. While serving on the Board of Regents at the University of California in the 1960s, Dutton believed that baby-boomers and college students were the future of American politics. Unlike the founders of the Democratic Party and Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 campaign Dutton managed, Dutton wanted to reduce the party’s ties with working class whites. Like theoreticians of the New Left and New Politics, Dutton believed that the cultural agenda of students should outweigh that of blue-collar workers. The chapter also shows how Segal, Anne Wexler, and Ken Bode sought to scrap the boss system in favor of a new activist system, which would be based on participatory democracy, in which voters discussed the candidates. Segal, Wexler, and Bode were motivated by their opposition to the Vietnam War specifically and the military-industrial complex in general. Bode proposed informal quotas as presidential delegates for women and young people, the two groups most likely to oppose the war.

The sixth chapter examines the first result of the McGovern Commission’s rules changes: Liberation feminists entered the Democratic coalition. In November 1971, leaders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a newly formed nonpartisan group, met with DNC officials in Washington. The women demanded that they enforce the quotas passed by the McGovern Commission. DNC officials complied. At the time, it was unclear whether the emerging feminist movement would side with the Republicans, Democrats, or form a third party. An upper class and secular group, the feminists immediately sought to remove legal protection for a class of human beings, lobbying on behalf of an abortion plank at the 1972 Democratic convention.

The seventh chapter examines the second result of the commission’s rules changes: McGovern won the party’s presidential nomination in 1972. McGovern faced long odds in his bid. He had thin or frayed relations with union leaders, Catholics, and blacks; and his main issue, opposition to the war, was losing steam politically. But McGovern recognized that the party’s new nomination system had been revolutionized. So he became the candidate of liberal activists; used his chairmanship of the McGovern Commission to tell party leaders that he would not form a third- or fourth political party; and ran on Dutton’s Social Change coalition. His strategy worked, sort of. On the one hand, McGovern won the party’s nomination. On the other hand, Catholics and white working-class voters defected to the Republican Party in November.

The eighth chapter details the third result of the commission’s rules changes: secular liberals completed their takeover of the national party. No individual Democrat could stop them. DNC Chairman Robert Strauss, a staunch party regular, in the early-to-mid-1970s was unable to release their grip on the party machinery. Jimmy Carter, as both a presidential candidate and president, was unable to prevent secular feminists from controlling the party platform in 1980. And Bill Clinton, as a presidential candidate in 1992, was unable to prevent feminists from denying a speaking slot at the 1992 convention to Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania. As a result of this takeover, support for a once-great national party has dwindled to “blue” states on the coasts and Great Lakes region.

The afterword argues that the Democratic Party can return to being a People’s Party. To do so, party officials will have to shift power to the people. State caucuses and conventions, which reward highly motivated activists rather than ordinary voters, should be abolished. Independent voters, rather than Republican voters, should be allowed to participate in state primaries. Demographic quotas for delegates should be repealed. Super-delegates should be eliminated. And swing states should hold the first primaries in the nation. Enacting this package of reforms would dilute the power of party activists, but it could revive a once-great party.

http://whydemocratsblue.com/

The latest in the long line of effects can be read about here. And the British parallels are, of course, obvious.