Thomas B Edsall: Building Red America

This is the latest of several books on the rise of conservative power in the US by Thomas B Edsall. Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (2006, Basic Books). Whereas Robert Brent Toplin's Radical Conservatism concentrates on ideology and propaganda, this one is more brass tacks politics, including some detailed research on demographics, economic strata, etc.

The arguments are summarized in the Preface (pp. ix-x):

Some of the major points that Building Red America explores and develops are:

• More than in the past, the Republican Party has become a coalition of the dominant, while the Democratic Party has become, in large part, an alliance of the socially and economically subdominant and those who identify with them.

• While there has been a growing recognition of the role of civil rights and of issues directly related to race in shaping partisan identity and voting behavior, much less thought has been given to the pivotal role in American politics of the sexual and women's rights revolutions and the effective use by the Republican Party of reaction to these insurgencies.

• The conservative movement has successfully merged explicit and concealed biases against minorities, homosexuals, "illegal" immigrants, and "radical" feminists with ideological opposition to interventionist government and higher taxes.

• Insufficient attention has been paid by supporters of the Democratic Party to the business and money revolutions of the past quarter century and to the impact on the American progressive movement of the failure of non-market economies in Europe and elsewhere.

• The Democratic Party has substantial vulnerabilities. It is no longer a populist coalition but is now controlled by a well-educated, relatively affluent, socially liberal elite that sets much of the party's program. At the same time, the rank and file of the party -- the majority of its voters -- are women and men from the bottom half of the economic order. There is a wide gulf separating the culturally liberal agenda of the party's leadership elite and the pressing material needs of the party's disadvantaged, disproportionately African American and Hispanic constituents. This disconnect has led to short-lived and transient Democratic victories while seriously obstructing the ability of the party to forge and maintain a powerful, resilient biracial, multiethnic coalition.

• Although the Republican Party has dominated American politics over the past forty years, it has not achieved a political realignment. Instead, the GOP has developed the capacity to eke out victory by slim margins in a majority of closely contested elections, losing intermittently but winning more than half the time. It is likely to continue this pattern for the forseeable future. Conservatives have, furthermore, created a political arena in which winning Democrats are likely to find themselves forced to move to the right.

• When contemporary Republicans win office, their agenda is not moderate. Their effort has been to dismantle the welfare state, a structure built up over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century.

• The GOP has succeeded in institutionalizing a powerful, well-funded, durable infrastructure protecting conservative legislation and regulatory policies to secure ground it has gained, even when Democrats intermittently wrest control of one or more of the branches of government. To quote directly from the first chapter of the book: "In victory and defeat, the conservative Republican Party is certain to continue to press its agenda of weaning individuals from 'dependency' on the state. When out of power, the conservative movement has the resources and the managerial expertise to protect and preserve its ideological and institutional edifice intact. When the movement regains a base of elected power, conservatism is primed and ready to capitalize on prior successes, its agenda ever more aggressive and far reaching."

The main structural weakness Edsall sees in the Democratic Party is the split between a mass majority of the poor and an elite minority of cultural liberals, who are effectively able to control the party platform despite lack of common interests and affinities with the majority poor. Edsall provides some interesting numbers, so much so that the liberal caricature appears to have some statistical significance (p. 18):

From 1960 to the present, the percentage of Democratic presidential voters employed in the professions has doubled. Democratic professionals include academics, artists, designers, editors, human relations managers, lawyers, librarians, mathematicians, nurses, personnel specialists, psychologists, scientists, social workers, teachers, and therapists. While this upscale group, according to Pew Research Center, makes up almost 40 percent of all Democratic voters, it makes up only 19 percent of all registered voters.

A solid 83 percent of these better-off Democratic voters are white. Upper-income Democratic voters have the highest education level of any Pew typology group -- Democrat or Republican. Females make up 54 percent, 41 percent are college graduates, and 26 percent have some postgraduate education. They stand apart from the rest of the population in that 43 percent seldom or never attend religious services. More than one-third have never married (36 percent), 42 percent reside in urban areas, 41 percent earn at least $75,000 a year, and 77 percent do not have a gun in the home. Only 6 percent watch FOX television, whereas 37 percent go online for news. A striking 92 percent believe homosexuality should be accepted as a way of life by society, and 80 percent support gay marriage. Only 7 percent believe peace is achieved through a strong military. Fully 88 percent are persuaded that it is not necessary to believe in God to have good values.

Although this well-educated, culturally libertarian, relatively affluent progressive elite forms a minority of the Democratic electorate and a substantially smaller minority of the national electorate, it is this activist stratum that sets the agenda for the Democratic Party and that provides the majority of delegates to the national Democratic conventions, where party platforms and party rules are written.

Edsall doesn't say this, but it's almost as if the Republican strategy was to split the opposition, driving a wedge between the poor and the liberal. Actually, that may have been instinctive, given that the New Deal coalition was built when liberal elites offered politically effective leadership for the poor, who in turn provided the numbers for a Democratic majority. The context for that coalition was the Great Depression, when enlightened leadership was seen as necessary to head off more radical change.

On the Republican attack (pp. 28-29):

The conservative attack on the core beliefs of the left has been paralleled by an assault on the institutions that underpin them. These associations include labor unions -- with a special emphasis on public employee and teachers' unions -- the plaintiffs' or trial lawyers' bar, the media, mainstream liberal churches and religious organizations -- especially those that permit the ordination of gay clergy -- the traditional philanthropic community -- notably foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and MacArthur that have underwritten much of the socially progressive agenda of the past half-century -- major research universities, and the rights movements, including organizations that uphold and protect women's rights, civil rights, criminal defendants' rights, and the rights of the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, and so on.

Leaders of the Republican Party used the 9/11 terrorist attack, for example, to justify an assault on public employee unions, weakening or eliminating bargained protections of government employees by arguing that, in times of danger, management requires the ability to exercise authority over a flexible workforce. Command of congressional majorities empowered Republicans to pass tort reform legislation in 2005, weakening the ability of trial lawyers to bring class action suits -- suits that, in their broadest form, have brought significant protection to consumers, patients, employees, investors, victims of discrimination, and others.

On the partnership between GOP, business, and cultural conservatives (p. 45):

The conservative movement has created a powerful, synergistic system that rewards supporters and expands the base of those whose futures are irrevocably tied to its agenda. Corporate America and the Republican Party, exercising the power of the state, have been fused in a mutually rewarding partnership. The corporate side of the partnership provides the money to win elections and receives the economic fruits of victory through lessened oversight, tax cuts, and other beneficial legislation and regulation. The political party is guaranteed a reliable source of campaign money, a powerful network of corporate-financed lobbyists and "grassroots" activists to produce legislative victories, and a supply of well-paid lobbying and trade association jobs after a politician's service as an elected official, a campaign operative, or a congressional aide has been completed.

For social conservatives, the rewards are far less lavish but not without significance. The Republican Party has expressed platform support for the drive to end abortion and has backed the effort to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage. The GOP and the conservative movement have opposed race-based affirmative action, winning a number of key court cases. The Bush administration has put government money into abstinence education, has begun efforts, by increasing fines and threatening to impose FCC rules and "persuading" the entertainment industry, to regulate "indecent content" on cable television, and has opened the federal grant process to religious organizations. More broadly, the Republican Party has avidly recruited white, born-again Protestants and conservative Catholics into its ranks and into positions of policymaking authority, granting conservative Christian voters the recognition and legitimacy often denied them by liberal America.

Edsall cites a study by pollster Matt Dowd following the 2000 election as decisive in refocusing the Bush campaign from centrist votes to wedge issues (pp. 51-52):

While running for president in 1999-2000, Bush had explicitly reached out to the center-left, a strategy antithetical to that of his 2004 campaign. On September 29, 1999, for example, Bush had sharply criticized the Republican Congress for reducing tax credits for the working poor: "I'm concerned about the earned income-tax credit. I'm concerned for someone who is moving from near-poverty to middle class. I don't think they [House Republican leaders] ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor." [ . . . ]

After examining the election results and survey data gathered in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 election, Dowd reached the conclusion that the center was literally disappearing and that strategies based on winning the center were no longer optimal. Self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd noted. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other. Once these "false" independents were correctly classified as Democratic or Republican, a very different trend emerged: in the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, the percentage of true swing voters -- those who were not virtually certain to vote Democratic or Republican -- had fallen from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent.

The Dowd memo allowed Republican leaders and strategists to return to the kinds of wedge issues and polarizing tactics that had worked so effectively in the decades following the 1960s, once again tapping the party's genius in developing themes that create coherence among angry constituencies on the right. "There are twice as many angry conservatives in this country as there are angry liberals," notes Democratic direct mail specialist Hal Malchow. "Liberals by their very nature don't get as angry as conservatives do."

It seems likely to me that Dowd's survey wasn't a new discovery in late 2000 -- that Bush's moderating tone in 2000 was just window dressing for the hard-right conservative agenda that became evident the day he took office. There are various strategic reasons for the tactic, but one thing that made it possible was that the right and the left were already cognitively isolated (p. 63):

Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and bad, are now judged differently depending on the partisanship of the person making the judgment and the credibility he or she is willing to grant to the source of information. This makes it much easier for a Republican, for example, to discount as purely partisan unfavorable news coming from the New York Times, NPR, or CBS. A Democrat can similarly discount a negative story from FOX News, members of the National Association of Religious Broadcasters, or Rush Limbaugh. Each side is prone to distort reality, rejecting information that is out of line with prior ideological commitments -- a development that makes the possibility of reaching agreement or consensus in a dispute highly unlikely.

On the Republican spoils of victory (p. 116):

The changing flow of money as power shifted was striking. In 1993-1994, the last session of Congress when Democrats were in control, defense industry PACs gave Democrats $2,937,459 and $2,138,388 to Republicans, a 57 percent to 43 percent split; as soon as the GOP took over in 1995-1996, the industry switched to a 72 percent to 28 percent margin favoring the Republicans, $4,051,907 to $1,564,640. The energy and natural resources industries went from a slight 53 to 47 tilt to the GOP, $6,604,225 to $5,637,728 prior to the GOP takeover, to an overwhelming 77 to 27 split favoring the GOP in 1995-1996, $10,207,407 to $3,065,220. The pattern was almost universal as business leapt on the opportunity to join forces with a party that explicitly supported its goals.

The shift of financial resources to House and Senate Republicans as the Democrats lost their half-century hold on the levers of power was the backdrop to what became known as the "K Street Project," a concerted and highly successful effort to convert basic political resources such as top-paying lobbying jobs, the money donated by business PACs, and the muscle of the Washington trade association and lobbying communities to the Republican cause. While presidential fundraising changed dramatically under Bush 43, at the congressional level what had been the shadowy underbelly of the money culture in Washington became its public face. The secretiveness and the element of shame that accompanied Washington special interest fundraising in the past have by now virtually disappeared.

On business spoils of victory (pp. 125-126):

For business interests, liability reform is all about money. That the issue in addition has recruited racial and cultural conservatives, opposed to the use of the courts to advance a liberal rights agenda by means of lawsuits, is profoundly advantageous. It allows corporate powers within the GOP coalition ever greater leeway in Washington while being solidly backed by loyal social-issue voting constituencies. The Republican battle for "tort reform" thus captures almost every aspect of the fundamental Republican partisan electoral strategy, simultaneously uniting, in a perceived common cause, the major wings of the GOP -- social and racial conservatives on the one hand and corporate America on the other.

Much of the book details how white males have shifted to the Republican Party, especially in reaction to advances by non-whites and women, although one could also point to the decline of unions and manufacturing jobs. Edsall argues that white male opposition to affirmative action represents rational self-interest. However, he also points out that males have problems assessing risk (pp. 205-206):

One of the most Republican demographic groups -- affluent white men -- is the demographic with the highest number of confident risk takers. Among academic researchers, this phenomenon is known as "the white male effect." A 1992 study reported in the journal Risk Analysis found that, in a survey of 1,512 people, men saw less risk than women from each of twenty-five potential health hazards including nuclear waste, pesticides, blood transfusions, radon, and X-rays: "Sizeable differences between risk perceptions of men and women have been documented in dozens of studies. Men tend to judge risks as smaller and less problematic than do women." [ . . . ]

This group of risk takers is made up of men included toward the Republican Party. Not only are conservative white men risk takers, but they are, on the whole, relatively successful risk managers, as shown by their high incomes and net worth.

There is another group of risk-tolerant males: criminals. These men are majority nonwhite -- 64 percent of prison inmates in 2001 were members of racial or ethnic minority groups -- and have failed to manage risk effectively, as evidenced by their high incarceration rates.

More on risk and self-perception (p. 207):

A strikingly high percentage of young people in the United States today, 63 percent, say there is a "good chance" they will be rich someday. In terms of voters judging their own capacity to manage risk, among all Americans fully 69 percent believe they are "above average" in their overall personality and character, and 86 percent say their intelligence is above average. And it can make such voters angry (tap their "anger points") to be told that the government they view as wasteful, spendthrift, and unwisely redistributive can do a better job of allocating their dollars than they can.

Wonder how this correlates with the subset that vacations in Las Vegas.

posted 2007-03-11