Paul Waldman has a nice post today about GOP "rebranding." He's quite right: ideological shifts, real or perceived, do far less to explain electoral results than basic economic performance and other "retrospective voting" things.
In particular: I think it's very likely that a Democrat would have won in 1992 even if there had been no DLC. And I think that at best Democrats have a very narrow national advantage based on perceived Republican extremism, almost certainly smaller than the presidential vote margin in 2008 and 2012.
However, as I've said before: that doesn't mean that party reform isn't necessary. If it's really true that Republicans have become "post-policy" -- both indifferent to public policy choices in many cases, and incapable (or at least severely challenged) in devising complex policy -- then their ability to govern will be compromised. Indeed, in my view, that's a large part of what went wrong during the George W. Bush years. To begin with, Republicans nominated a president ill-suited for the policy demands of the job without apparently seeing the dangers in that; once he was in office, a Republican Congress too often abdicated its own policy role missed opportunities to nudge the party back on course when policy disasters were looming.
To put it bluntly, I think Democratic success in 1992 and 2008, and Republican success in 1980, was basically an accident -- but Republican failure in 2008, and perhaps Democratic failure in 1980, was no accident at all.
(1980 is tricky. That Carter was a failure of a president was no accident, as Nelson W. Polsby argued in Consequences of Party Reform. But I'd say it's very much open for argument whether the process which produced Carter's nomination was a consequence of a broken Democratic Party or, perhaps, just a fluke of history. Regardless: I see no reason to believe that Walter Mondale in 1984 or Mike Dukakis in 1988 (or Gerald Ford in 1980 or perhaps Bob Dole in 1996) couldn't have governed successfully).
And I think it would have been very difficult for a Republican elected in 2008 or 2012 to govern successfully.
So, I do think that Republicans desperately need to reform. But not in order to win.
...then their (the GOP'S) ability to govern will be compromised.
ReplyDeleteThey are ready to govern, today.
They've just narrowed down the definition of 'govern' to two or three things -- foreign adventurism, wringing the last bits of progressivity out of the tax code, and federal-level policing of private sexual behavior.
Within those parameters, they're ready to govern, today.
What do you imagine the GOP will do if, for example, they take over the Senate in '14 and take over the White House in "16? Do you expect a repeat of the Bush years? Worse than that?
ReplyDeleteI'd expect far worse, since the failures and catastrophes of the Bush administration turned out to have minor impact, in the long run. And the pattern of going for broke will still be highly profitable. And given the demographic problems of the GOP, extreme measures will be doubly called for, since they'll need to lock in an advantage.
DeleteI don't know if the failures of the Bush Admin turned out to have minor impact. Katrina destroyed old New Orleans. Many, many people died in Iraq and Afghanistan and those wars re-shaped that region. His Admin's and that Congress' reaction to 9/11 fundamentally changed the way that the country reacts to terrorism threats (real and imagined), how the country views and values privacy and the domestic presence of military. His appointments to the Supreme Court have fundamentally changed the Judiciary branch, leading to the Citizen's United ruiling and several other high-profile cases that have changed the way the country works. And that leaves aside all the subtle changes in the way the country and the country's bureaucracies work (or don't work).
DeleteAnd the Bush Admin operated at a time when the Republican Party had a policy agenda... even though it was badly impaired by the far-right (see Immigration Reform of 2005 as an example). I guess that you could argue that the GOP has a policy agenda in a way... they want to turn Medicare into a voucher system, empower employers to exert more control over the labor force, and they want to move towards some ambiguous "flat tax" or at least more regressive tax system. But, as JB has written extensively about, these aren't traditional "policy agendas" in the sense that the details of how these ideas will work either don't exist or haven't been divulged to the American people. Furthermore, the behavior of the House GOP leads observers to wonder if the rank-and-file Congresspeople will ever be able to act in a cohesive, deliberate way.
How did Bush's failures destroy old New Orleans?
DeleteA functional government response to the disaster would have mitigated the lootings and property destruction, and would have prevented the disaster of housing people in the Superdome. A lot of people had their lives destroyed in the aftermath of Katrina, and the community that made up New Orleans never recovered. That was a government failure, it was the Bush-era FEMA's failure and it was the Bush Admin's failure.
DeleteWithout judging whether Carter was good or bad, wouldn't 1980 be a textbook case of a fundamentals driven election due to the bad economy?
ReplyDeleteDefinitely. Carter wasn't responsible for the bad economy (though he was partly responsible for the outcome of the hostage crisis, which did hurt him), and it's very likely that any incumbent president at the time would have been doomed. It leads to some interesting counterfactuals. Had Ford won the '76 election (and he very well could have), it's very likely a Democrat would have been elected in 1980. Then there would have been no President Reagan. Alternately, if Reagan had defeated Ford in the '76 primaries and gone on to be elected that year (not quite as plausible, but still possible in my view), he would probably have lost reelection in 1980 and gone down in history as a failed president.
DeleteAre you sure Carter wasn't responsible, at least in part, for the bad economy? I'm not.
DeleteLook, I was never a fan of Bush II, and I did not respect his intellect at all. But it's a re-writing of history to say that that the Republicans of the 00's were post-policy.
ReplyDeleteThe Iraq war was policy; so was the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance activities. They set an enormous amount of long-term policy, particularly in the energy and forestry sectors, but also in education and in financial regulation.
That many people do not see those policies as benefiting ordinary Americans does not change their existence.
Backyardfoundry, have you really forgotten how the Bush Administration feuded with the governor of the state of Louisiana for six days while NOLA drowned? How the director of FEMA declared that Katrina had missed New Orleans, and Bush went golfing? Did you never read the stories about people lying to the National Guard to get their boats into the Ninth Ward to rescue people off their roofs in 106F heat? About the doctors in the Superdome treating people having seizures from the heat in the hallways?
National Geographic had a beautifully documented story about the disaster that was the response to Katrina.
In particular: I think it's very likely that a Democrat would have won in 1992 even if there had been no DLC.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting you mention that, because I've been preparing a post in which I briefly make that point. But what's important to keep in mind is that the elections were what influenced the Democratic Party's direction. The defeat of Mondale and Dukakis in the '80s contributed heavily to the rise of Clinton. And then Clinton's victory further cemented the party's taste for centrism. If Mario Cuomo had entered the '92 race, there's a good chance Mario Cuomo would have been elected president in '92. That would have sent a different message to the party, and probably propelled the party in a different ideological direction.
I agree with this. I don't think Jesse Jackson would have beat GHWB in 1992, but Cuomo almost certainly would have, if he had won the nomination.
DeleteDepends on whether the present regionalization of the parties is a cause, or an effect.
DeleteMissouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee and of course Arkansas, all went for Clinton.
Do they go for an ethnic Northeastern governor, instead of a good ol' boy governor from Arkansas? Or do they become the red bastions they are now, just earlier?
And for the record, I have now finished my post:
Deletehttp://kylopod.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-liberals-became-progressives-and.html