The results of the recent election inevitably lead to speculation about the future of the two-party system in the United States. It is clear that the Republican Party remains a dominant regional force in the states of the Old Confederacy and the Plains and Rocky Mountains. However, the electoral map paints a very different picture: with few exceptions (South Carolina, Indiana, Alaska) states of the east, west, and north coasts are solidly Democratic or at least in play (North Carolina, Georgia by 2016). Only the southern coast remains Republican. In other words, there are very few scenarios under which a Republican candidate could win election to the White House. This appears to be a long-term trend rather than a short-term anomaly; as the U.S. becomes “majority minority,” more urban and socially liberal, the likelihood of an increasingly strident and nativistic Republican party finding national electoral success becomes remote.
The striking feature of the fall of the Republican Party is the degree to which the wounds were self-inflicted. George W. Bush and his allies, as well as the 2008 nominee John McCain, attempted to attract minority voters, especially Hispanics, and women. The election of Barack Obama seems to have unleashed the Republican id, nostalgic for an America of the 1950s, or perhaps the 1890s (and on some issues, a Europe of the Middle Ages). Virulent and open racism, in defiance of the consensus developed in the previous four decades by politicians of both parties, flourished and became a central aspect of the face of the Republican Party. Despite entertaining an African-American candidate for President, and featuring a few other African-American and Hispanic members of Congress, by the eve of the 2012 election polls showed 1-2% of blacks favoring the GOP. (One poll actually had that number at 0). A return to the dog-whistle messages about “welfare queens” and nonsense over Obama’s citizenship from the leadership, in tandem with spontaneous actions from the rank-and-file, such as the notorious peanut throwing incident at the RNC (the irony of peanuts as a cheap and nutritious snack food being the invention of a prominent African American being lost on the perpetrators) finally and thoroughly alienated African Americans from the “party of Lincoln.” Similarly, the vicious attacks on Hispanics, native or immigrant, with or without documents, especially in the Border States, pushed them from a party that may have held some appeal on the basis of “values” issues. The main reason that Hispanics did not abandon the GOP as fully and finally as blacks is the traditional affiliation of Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans with the Republican Party. But even that is changing in the younger generations. Finally, the alienation of women by Republican candidates such as Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who possess a pre-scientific understanding of reproductive issues and an agenda that would have disempowered women in the most personal arenas, including contraception and rape, completed the dissociation of the Republican Party from the broader American society, which is urban, secular, diverse, and tolerant, and becoming more so.
While the “values” issues are the most obvious sense in which the GOP has lurched to the right, this has been a sideshow to the political economic agenda. After all, outside some isolated parts of the South, “personhood” provisions (obviously unconstitutional and subject to being overturned) will never be enacted. However, marginal tax rates as low as 0% (as Paul Ryan suggested for capital gains) could be enacted if the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. Indeed, tax rates are lower than they have ever been already, which explains not only the increasing inequality of American society, but the economic crises of the past decade. Much of GOP politics since 1994 has been bait-and-switch. As Thomas Frank argued in What’s the Matter with Kansas? they campaign on abortion but legislate on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and deregulation, all of which have undermined the white working class who supported them.
Democrats are not innocent in this either. In fact, if it were not for the spectacular Republican transformation into an ultra-rightist party, the changes in the Democratic Party would be among the most dramatic in American history. Since 1988, every Democratic President or nominee has been to the right of his Democratic predecessor in terms of political-economic policy and to the left of him in terms of cultural issues. Obama embraced the Republican version of health care reform, developed in opposition to Hillary Clinton’s in the early 1990s; he also voided “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and declared his support for gay marriage. While the Democratic shifts have tended to track trends in public opinion (the so-called “libertarian consensus” deriving ultimately from cultural roots in the 1960s and 1970s), they have in fact left the nation without a viable leftist party.
In an era in which capital has finally been unleashed from the constraints of government regulation and even the inconvenience of national borders (see: Romney, Mitt), the deck is stacked against not only the working class but those traditionally higher up the food chain: information workers, managers, “content providers” (writers, artists, and teachers, I suppose). Under these circumstances, having only a socially liberal center-right party and a reactionary party (I avoid the term “fascist” not because it is incendiary but because European fascist parties have always been in some way concerned with the social welfare of their favored groups) represents a national failure to address the effects of Thomas Friedman’s Flatland. This leads us to consider what the American political landscape will look like in another decade or two. Will the Republicans be extinct except as a regional identity party in the South? (Oh, great ghost of John Brown!); or will it have been replaced by a non-racist, non-science-denying alternative? (possibly still called the Republican Party but fundamentally different); or will a third party have evolved (maybe on the model of Germany’s Green Party and, more recently, Pirate Party)? Stay tuned.
Michael E Harkin is a cultural anthropologist and ethnohistorian at the University of Wyoming. He is editor of the journal Reviews in Anthropology and co-editor of Ethnohistory.
via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/12/14/election-night-thoughts/
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