Thomas Edsall is a political analyst I respect. I used two of his books in my classes on the politics of health: The New Politics of Inequality, and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes. Both books told how how we increasingly concentrated taxing and spending power in the hands of the affluent, as he puts it in The New Politics of Inequality, moving further and further away from the ideals of the Great Society. In Chain Reaction he showed how race and oppositiion to taxes and more rights for women and blacks were used to create a more conservative climate in both parties.
In writing about health policy, from HIV to national health insurance, I came to call this a "politics of the divides," and more recently, "sectional politics" to stress the peculiar role that the South has played from the beginning. in blocking progressive politics.
Sectional politics is very old, perhaps our oldest democratic tradition. It helped defend slavery and then segregation against the dangers of a strong national government, especially one that would extend political liberty to blacks.
In time sectional politics used religion and the fear of modernism to fight populism or any form of progressive government that wanted to use equality to create a stronger national government. President Roosevelt's New Deal was constantly undercut by Southern Democrats in hiw own party. The Social Security Act was originally passed with provisions that excluded most blacks.
Sectional politics used racial, religious, and states-rights used resentment and racial fears to split emerging national majorities for change.
These divides were not created in the decades after the Great Society. They are the oldest fault lines of our democracy, and, like geological shifts, return again and again in our history. These can only be narrowed or closed with new institutions and institutions like national health insurance delivering tangible, noticeable benefits to the great majority of Americans in their daily life.
Edsall properly calls this way of making policy, "broad-gauged": policies that benefit most Americans and not just targetted groups like the poor. You forge a new and permanent majority for progress with universal or broad-gauged policies like Social Security, or in our time, national health insurance..
Sectional politics had its origins in the South, and the South may have lost the Civil War but its long goodbye and its sectional politics have risen again and again from the ashes and will again revive itself unless this time we provide the middle classes and the poor of the South the same valuable, tangible benefits of broad gauged national institutions that Americans share everywhere. Stopping these new policies from arising is the main object of modern day Republican politics.
Now Edsall summarizes the evidence that a new emerging Democratic majority is forming. It is a fascinating piece, with links to many different political experts touting research that all come to much the same conclusion: the suburban professional vote, a key demographic who have voted Republican for the past decades is shifting hard to the Democratic party.
A realignment of the American electorate may well be in the offing.
The times remind me of when I returned to graduate school in 1969 at Johns Hopkins, and my first course was a course on electoral politics. We studied Kevin Phillip's book, The Emerging Republican Majority. a book that became a blueprint for a new future for the party of Lincoln as it decamped to Dixie, practicing a politics of resentment.
Has enough time passed that now the Democrats are heading to their own generation of hegemony?
I hope so but I offer one big caution: if the Obama administration reacts with timidity and an excess of caution, if the President continues to handle Wall Street with kid gloves, if he continues to practice an "above the fray" bipartisanship and does not try to actively build the Democratic party, and especially if he comes up with some tepid, cautious, and ill-considered health care reform plan, a new majority will go up in smoke.
Voting trends, while exciting, are just openers, and voting trends can be disrupted and displaced by a round of sectional politics exploiting the fault lines of our society.
Everything depends on the Democrats enacting policies that tangibly benefit the middle class and that create new and highly visible institutions that show that government can work. A properly designed national health plan would be just the ticket.
In the case of health, we need a new plan that helps us learn to think about medicine as a common good as well as an individual one, and other institutions that work to simplify our daily life and make it more secure, policies that give working people more power to organize into unions---social policy that, taken together, set our economy on a more secure track for the serious challenges ahead.
Does this sound Utopian?
Well, I remember during the opening of the 1960s, we thought about highway safety and environmental protection and workplace safety in very different ways than we thought about these problems in 1975. And that was caused by new institutions like the EPA and OSHA and NIOSH and the NHTSA for highway safety.
If the Democrats become their usual, pusillanimous selves once again and if they prize the safety of their seats and their re-election prospects above all else, and refuse to fight for a new future of their party, they will fail. If the Democrats in the Senate sit on their hands and allow the Senate and the filibuster to become once again the primary obstacle to the future, then we will blow the opportunity of a generation.
We shall see.
How long, oh Lord?
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