Political realignment in black and white (and brown)
Throughout U.S. history, we have seen political realignments roughly every 30 or 40 years. The history books often will assign some precise date or event to mark these occasions. For example, our most recent major realignment is usually traced to 1968, when Alabama Gov. George Wallace split from the Democrats to run in the American Independent Party and Richard Nixon pursued his “Southern strategy” to pick up other disaffected conservative Democrats in the South.
Wallace won five Southern states (and one faithless elector from North Carolina) and Nixon won all the rest, save Texas and West Virginia. Four years later, Nixon would sweep the South. And there it is in a nice tidy bow – realignment!
But there’s a problem with this neat and tidy account. Eight years after 1968, Jimmy Carter won the presidency by sweeping every Southern state except Virginia. Even into the 1990s, Bill Clinton twice won Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, and also won Georgia in 1992 and Florida in 1996.
There also continued to be southern conservative Democrats serving in Congress and as governors long after 1968. Sen. Richard Shelby didn’t switch parties until 1994. Sam Nunn was still in the Senate until 1997. Zell Miller was in the Senate until 2005. Gene Taylor was in the House until 2011.
This is even more true for the other end of the realignment – liberals and moderates (particularly in the Northeast) abandoning the GOP. Lowell Weicker and Jim Jeffords never actually became Democrats, choosing to go by the label “independent.” But later, Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee did change their partisan stripes.
Chafee ran for president as a Democrat this year. Specter had run for president as a Republican in 1996. Weicker ran for president as a Republican in 1980, where one of his rivals was John Connally, who had been the Democratic Texas governor who was shot alongside President Kennedy in 1963 (and who previously was Kennedy’s Navy secretary and later would be Nixon’s Treasury secretary).
All of which is to say, as we appear to be going through yet another of our periodic realignments, that such processes are messy and often not at all clear to contemporaries.
The easy parallel to draw is to point to the Republican voter who in 2016 says “No, I don’t like Donald Trump, but what am I going to do – vote for Hillary Clinton?!” and note there were millions of similar Southern voters who in 1976 would have been saying to themselves “No, I don’t trust this Carter fella, but what am I going to do – vote for Gerald Ford?!”
For modern conservatives, the answer to that question seems obvious. In 1976, it very much was not. Just look at the map.
For that matter, it isn’t only the Republican Party that’s undergoing significant stresses in keeping its coalition together. Similar fractures can be seen in the Democratic Party. It isn’t just that there’s a sizable and vocal minority of Democrats who prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. It’s that the fault lines on which the party sits seem almost guaranteed to crack in the years to come.
Young voters – Bernie Sanders’ bread-and-butter – are more liberal than older Democrats. This, of course, is nearly always true, in any generation. But they’re not just a little bit more liberal, they are massively more liberal. A simple analysis of this trend would be to extrapolate out and plot that the Democratic Party will continue to drift leftward. Except that there’s another major pole shift.
America is becoming less white, and the Democratic Party is similarly growing more diverse. As of 2012, 22 percent of Democratic voters were black and 13 percent were Hispanic, up from 20 percent and 11 percent, respectively, in 2008. We’re seeing this play out in the current Democratic primaries, with Hillary Clinton expected to begin trouncing Sanders as the race moves to states with larger black and Hispanic populations. As Joe Trippi told Politico recently, “Once you leave New Hampshire, the Democratic Party is 44 percent non-white.”
The most common reason cited for why Bernie Sanders is doing more poorly among black and Hispanic voters is that he has lower name recognition than Hillary Clinton. That no doubt plays a part. But another, quite clearly, is that black and Hispanic voters are among the least liberal elements of the Democratic Party.
That claim strikes some as surprising, but there’s good data to support it. Pew has found that where 32 percent of white, self-identified Democrats are “consistently liberal,” among Hispanic Democrats, that number is 15 percent and among black Democrats, it’s 14 percent.
Clinton benefits from the fact that she enjoys support both among older whites and among nonwhites. But in the not-too-distant future, those older whites will die off. In the even more immediate future, the party almost certainly will become majority nonwhite (if it isn’t there already). How will this coalition of very liberal young white voters coalesce with a party that is mostly less liberal nonwhite voters? It is impossible to say, but one certainly can’t rule out conflicts just as wrenching as the ones we’re currently seeing in the GOP.
The “establishment” wing of the Republican Party long has recognized the destiny embedded in the nation’s demographics. In the party’s post-mortem following the 2012 election, party leaders made explicit the need to start attracting nonwhite (and particularly Hispanic) voters, or else cease to be a viable national party. Given that many black and Hispanic voters already are more conservative than the party with which they identify, this would seem a perfectly reasonable and cogent strategy for the future.
But we’ve seen the result when leadership has taken even the mildest half-steps in that direction – it is the explicitly tribal and anti-immigration backlash of the base that finds its voice in Donald J. Trump. The emergence of this populist backlash – centered, as it does, on a man who dares say that George W. Bush failed to protect us on 9/11 and that Planned Parenthood “does good things” — has prompted no shortage of tut-tutting from establishment leaders. The National Review, that venerable Bible of conservatism, devoted an entire issue to taking down Trump. It appears to have had no effect.
Some have suggested, should Trump actually cruise to the nomination, that this could set the stage for yet another realignment. More moderate Republicans and perhaps even many conservatives could come around to seeing the case for Hillary Clinton as a more attractive alternative. There’s also the “Draft Bloomberg” scenario or perhaps a stronger-than-usual push for the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson. Or maybe it’s Trump himself who will launch the third-party bid, particularly if the nomination is wrested from him in a brokered convention.
All of these short-term scenarios have some degree or other of plausibility. But I want to suggest it’s possible that none actually capture what appears to be the likeliest sort of political realignment we are experiencing. As crazy as it might sound, I don’t think it at all inconceivable that the Bernie Bros and Trumpistas of tomorrow end up lining up on the same side of the partisan aisle.
We are gravitating increasingly toward a two-party system in which one is the party of white people, and one is the party of nonwhite people. Which is which is actually yet to be determined, and the specific political ideologies of those parties likely don’t matter nearly as much as we think.
Indeed, as I tried to outline at the top of the article, ideologically consistent political parties are a very recent phenomenon in American politics. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were part of the firmament of Congress for most of the 20th century. The perfect sorting of all conservatives into one party and all liberals into another wasn’t complete until just about a decade ago, and there are any number of reasons to suggest it’s actually been quite bad for governance. Given our institutions, ideologically lockstep parties will frequently descend into sclerotic gridlock, and get nothing at all done.
The politics of racial identity obviously isn’t new to America. It’s been among the defining features of our common culture all the way back to the founding. The shift of African-American voters from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party was one of the signal events of an earlier political realignment, even though the Democratic Party itself continued to carry the torch of explicitly white supremacist thought for quite a few decades afterward. For its part, the post-1968 Republican Party has not infrequently been accused of using racially charged language and imagery, though it’s generally stopped well short of overt white nationalism.
It’s stopped short, mostly, because it’s been socially unacceptable for at least the past 50 years for political leaders to use such language in public. At the very least, explicit appeals to racial identity have been verboten for white politicians speaking to white audiences. But perhaps one of the inevitable consequences of a majority nonwhite America is that some of the taboo against explicit identity politics of that sort falls away.
Just as a political party that serves as a coalition of mostly nonwhite voters might not actually be terribly liberal, a political party that serves as a coalition of mostly white voters might not actually be terribly conservative. As already covered, most young whites are pretty far to the left. Donald Trump, the candidate, may not appeal very much to Bernie Sanders voters, but one can’t ignore that they share quite a bit in common. Both support universal health care. Both bash Wall Street and the political fundraising machine. Both are skeptical of trade. And most importantly, both offer messages that are custom tailored to be attractive specifically to mostly white audiences.
What I think the rise of Trump and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders both show is that the existing political parties are weak institutions that appear bound to crack up. What they will look like when the pieces are put back together is far from obvious.
