Democratic Control of the House and Senate--What Happened?

[Jim_B]

This year marks a unique anniversary. 1994 was the last year the Democrats had solid control of the House and Senate. Yes, I know 2001 and 2002 they had slim control of the Senate. But what I am saying is, starting with FDR (1933-45) Democrats became the majority party. Then after Kennedy (1961-3) their control seemed to solidify even more. Now they seemed to have lost all this, and there is a good chance they won’t gain control this election cycle either. What happened?

[Spoke]

They were victimized by a very effective and well-financed propaganda machine.

[BrainGlutton]

What spoke- said. Also, 1994 was when the process, begun under Nixon, of the conversion of conservative (and, not to put too fine a point on it, racist) white Southern voters from the Democratic Party to the once-despised Republican Party was completed. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act he said, “We [the Dems] have lost the South for a generation.” Right he was. Look at the map of “red” and “blue” states and note what color Dixie is.

The best and most comprehensive account I’ve yet read of the rise of conservatism in America is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004). The authors are British, and have the advantage of looking at the whole thing with an outsider’s detachment. Their thesis is that the late conservative ascendancy results partly from America’s uniquely conservative political culture, and partly from a process of conservative organizing, and alliances and synergies between different conservative factions (economic libertarians, traditionalists, religious conservatives, big-business interests, and foreign-policy neoconservatives), which has been going on steadily since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

Yet, the authors are at pains to point out, modern American “conservatism” means something rather different than what earlier generations understood the word to mean. From their introduction:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.”

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

At any rate, this is a formula for electoral success: Churchill’s elitist Burkean Tory conservatism could never have had a broad appeal to the masses, but modern American conservatism does have a populist appeal. It gets just-getting-by folks to support a party run by and for the rich and the corporations – because that party also stands for traditional moral and social values.

From “Passion of the Right: The Uses of Persecution,” by David Mulcahey, in the October 25, 2004 issue of In These Times – http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/passion_of_the_right/:

To understand how much work progressives have to do in the United States, one need only look back on the stupendous revolution pulled off by the conservative movement. Its signal achievement—and one that continues to baffle deep thinkers of the center and left—was to win the hearts and minds of vast numbers of Americans who ought to have been, by the standard calculations of the time, easy marks for economic populism.

The closer one looks at the backlash, the more brilliant this achievement seems. Consider the two red-letter years for conservative militancy, 1978 and 1994. The first saw the advance party of new-style conservative populists—Newt Gingrich, to name only one—ushered into Washington. The latter marked their conquest of the U.S. Congress. Each of these events took place against a backdrop of deep economic troubles for the country’s working and middle classes. Indeed, the late 1970s and the early 1990s were pretty much defined by the deep discouragement of working stiffs and their resentment of the economic elite. How, then, did these times give us Gingrich?

The New Right understood that for their party to succeed in adverse times, it had to—in the words of tax rebel Howard Phillips—“organize discontent.” John Dolan, an early conservative political action committee operative echoed this sentiment, boasting that he conceived his mission to “stir up hostilities. We are trying to be divisive. … The shriller you are the better it is to raise money.” Not just to raise money, of course, but to build a movement. Direct-mail mavens like Richard Viguerie, himself the son of the Midwestern working class, understood how to work their humble brethren into a lather about issues with largely symbolic significance to the majority of voters—affirmative action, abortion, gun control. Political power, the New Right understood, grows out of the mailbox of a pissed-off gun owner.

One of the bizarre contradictions of the nascent reactionary movement, as historian Christopher Lasch noted, was that the target audience for these backlash solicitations was anything but a natural constituency for conservatism. Polling data at the time of California’s great property-tax revanche indicated that the movement’s adherents tended actually to favor such unconservative ideas as the redistribution of wealth.

Moreover, the New Right grasped that many of the so-called social issues were in fact class issues—that the high-minded principles axiomatic among educated, well-off liberals could be distorted beyond recognition when viewed through the prism of class. Decriminalizing abortion, for example, to its proponents meant freeing women from the “destiny” of biology, or alleviating the burden of poor women and families. To a great many with working-class attitudes or dispositions—what today’s political jargon calls “values”—abortion was a moral horror. It took little to convince such people that the only ends abortion could possibly serve were the extreme self-centeredness of the rich or the coddling of the poor.

It took little to convince them, in other words, that abortion—and busing, and affirmative action, and criminal justice reform, and a host of other issues—were antithetical to their way of life. Liberal moral vanity had been foisted on them against their will.

And so flowered the trope of displaced class rage, where the liberal stood in as a proxy for the boss. The deindustrialization of the ’80s and early ’90s continued to produce a healthy surplus of discontent, and the bright young operators of the conservative movement continued to organize and channel it to the Republican Party’s ends.

Now, many have observed that the New Right could not have worked these wonders without the benefit of regular and staggering subsidies remitted to its campaign funds, PACs and think tanks by the heirs of several industrial and financial fortunes. Again, however, one can only stand in awe of the political acumen at work. While assiduously attacking the academy for its liberal slant and declining standards, conservative benefactors set up think tanks as rival sources of authority in public discourse (free, incidentally, from the burdensome professional standards of the academy, such as peer review). Loudly bewailing the hopelessly liberal bias of the media, conservative money men funded magazines, newspapers, television programs, cable TV networks, university chairs and symposia, and made sure that every college in the land had some version of the Dartmouth Review operating on campus.

[Cliffy]

Tough act to follow.

While I think Brain and the sources he quotes have the right of it, we cannot ignore the fact that the long, non-competitive nature of Congress (the House in particular) lead to corruption amongst the leadership and there was a point in the early '90’s when every other news story was another Congressional scandal. This, in addition to long dark Recession of the late Reagan/Bush I years, made for a very powerful anti-incumbent sentiment (which continues to last to this day, at least rhetorically – although I doubt you’ll believe me, Beltway insider that I am). Since the Dems were in power, they were the ones that suffered the brunt of this force, regardless of whether they had engendered its underlying causes or not.

–Cliffy

[John_Corrado]

The '94 ‘revolution’ succeeded for several reasons.

First- As BrainGlutton points out, the South has been trending more and more Republican. However, his statement of why it works (i.e., racism) doesn’t take into account that the South of the 1900-1964 era produced Democrats who were nigh-indistinguishable from Republicans except on the race issue; the South has always been a much more conservative area, and the switch to the Republicans is more of a shift to the natural party to represent them rather than being in an uneasy coalition with the liberal wing.

This means that the Democratic ‘control’ of Congress was actually far less stable than it appeared strictly from party lines- many Southern congressmen would vote with the Republicans on a regular basis, but stayed Democrats because a Republican couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in their state.

Second- From '88 to '94, the Democratic leadership and majority in the House was socked by a series of scandals. Jim Wright was excorciated for a book deal which may have been a bribe. The House banking scandal- where it was found that Congressmen were writing bad checks with no penalties- seriously hurt the image of the Democrats in Congress. And Dan Rostenkowski was then indicted for abuse of franking priveledges. So, by the '94 election, the Democrats in control of the House were seen as inept and/or crooked at a level previous reserved for occupants of the executive branch.
Third- The general preference of the American populace is for a divided government: one where control of the Presidency and the Congress are split, so that nothing too extreme happens. '92 saw both Congress and the Presidency pass into the hands of the Democrats, and the results were not something most Americans were happy with. As Clinton was not up for re-election in '94, many Americans turned to putting Republicans in charge of Congress in order to balance the government.
Fourth- Newt Gingrich organized a campaign to get Republicans elected to Congress that was extremely effective, and very focused, to which the Democrats responded with general confusion and apathy.

[dalej42]

I’d also add the failure of Clinton’s health care plan hurt Democrats running in 1994. Also, the signing of the assault weapons ban hurt some rural Democrats who were ‘targeted’ by the NRA.

[alaricthegoth]

Don’t count Bill Clinton out as a force for destroying the dems nationally, just by being himself. Clinton was not only a republican at heart, he was a Reagan Republican.

Richard Nixon was left of clinton on virtually ever issue. (the horror, the horror…)

[Atticus_Finch]

@alaricthegoth

Richard Nixon was left of clinton on virtually ever issue. (the horror, the horror…)

Yeah, remember Dick’s lefty policy of bombing the fuck out of possible Commies in South-East Asia?

[rfgdxm]

@alaricthegoth

Don’t count Bill Clinton out as a force for destroying the dems nationally, just by being himself. Clinton was not only a republican at heart, he was a Reagan Republican.

Richard Nixon was left of clinton on virtually ever issue. (the horror, the horror…)

Hardly. Would Reagan have tried for a national health care program that would cover all uninsured Americans? You are correct that Nixon was very much to the left of the Republican Party today.

[rfgdxm]

@Atticus Finch

Yeah, remember Dick’s lefty policy of bombing the fuck out of possible Commies in South-East Asia?

Johnson started the war. Nixon just screwed up in not realizing the US couldn’t win.

[Cliffy]

@John Corrado

Third- The general preference of the American populace is for a divided government

This could be true, but I don’t think there’s much evidence for it. What is more likely, IMO, is that the country is very evenly divided such that a very small percentage of split-ticket voters decide elections in many precincts. Plus, of course, there’s always other stuff going on in local elections – I live in the very left-leaning Montgomery County, MD, which until the '02 election was represented by a GOP Congresswoman, Connie Morella. Rep. Morella was in the extreme left wing of her party, was well-liked, and had good constituent services, which kept her in her seat for years, being supported (I’m sure) by many folks who’d never voted for any other Republican in their whole lives.

–Cliffy

[JohnBckWLD]

@spoke-

They were victimized by a very effective and well-financed propaganda machine.

@BrainGlutton

What spoke- said…The best and most comprehensive account I’ve yet read of the rise of conservatism in America is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004)…

Quick question: You’ve “read” Wooldridge’s & Micklethwait’s book, referred to it as the “best and most comprehensive account” of the rise of conservatism in the US and still attribute it to “what spoke- said” about a propaganda machine?

There’s very little in their thesis that supports the existence of a right wing propaganda machine. In fact they examine the all too popular belief by urban progressives that the religious heartland of the US are just a bunch of ignorant, easily fooled, gullible morons who live in fly over country and don’t know what’s good for them. Their example that first comes to mind: More people in the city of San Francisco have dogs than have children. It’s no wonder that in a nation this vast, with such varied interests - you’re bound to have a large difference in opinion.

[bup]

Remember when Nixon ordered the military to allow openly gay recruits? Or when he stood up to the NRA, and incurred their wrath? What about his policy of increasing tobacco taxes to help pay for health care?

[Spoke]

I should point out that the South trending Republican is not just the result of appeals to racism (though that plays a part).

There is a very strog “culture of macho” in the South and in the mountain states, and the Republicans are very effective at appealing to this culture and at painting their male Democratic opponents as somehow less macho.

[BrainGlutton]

@JohnBckWLD

Quick question: You’ve “read” Wooldridge’s & Micklethwait’s book, referred to it as the “best and most comprehensive account” of the rise of conservatism in the US and still attribute it to “what spoke- said” about a propaganda machine?

That’s not what I said at all. I simply agreed with spoke- that a Republican propaganda machine exists; I did not attribute that information to him, nor to Right Nation. But I could have done the latter. Right Nation gives a very detailed account of the Republican propaganda machine, and who funds it, who works in it, and how it operates in foundations, think-tanks, media and academia.

@spoke

There is a very strog “culture of macho” in the South and in the mountain states, and the Republicans are very effective at appealing to this culture and at painting their male Democratic opponents as somehow less macho.

True dat! Just ask Max Cleland! :mad: :mad: :mad:

[BrainGlutton]

From the “Emergin Democratic Minority,” by Michael Lind, in The Financial Times, November 8, 2002 – http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=1036

Licking their wounds, Democrats may try to blame the outcome of Tuesday’s mid-term elections, which gave the Republican party unified control of the US government, on contingent factors such as inept candidates and President George W. Bush’s war-boosted popularity. But it is clear that the results are the latest episode in the 30-year decline of the Democratic party.

Today’s Democratic party coalesced in 1972, during the anti-Vietnam war presidential campaign of George McGovern. The McGovern Democrats replaced the Roosevelt Democrats, a different party with the same name led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. The Roosevelt Democrats were a coalition of urban industrial workers, rural populists and suburban progressives, with strong support in the south and west. The McGovern Democrats are an urban party of the north east and the west coast, uniting urban blacks and Latino immigrants and their children with affluent white social liberals. The McGovern party began to die the moment it was born. It became an urban party at the very moment when the US became a suburban nation. With each election cycle, fewer Americans live in big cities and more live in the suburbs. Focused on the problems of the inner-city poor and funded by the urban elites of Wall Street and Hollywood, the Democrats often seem irrelevant to the middle-class suburbanite who is today’s average American.

As well as being stuck in the cities, the Democrats are stuck in the past.

While a number of Democrats have tried to identify themselves with the technology revolution, all too many have tried to save obsolete rust-belt industrial jobs by means of protectionism that imposes costs on most American consumers. Democrats reflexively attack any proposals to modernise mid-20th-century social insurance programmes such as Social Security and Medicare. In the realm of civil rights, Democrats continue to treat American society as though it were still rigidly divided between black and white - even though the mixed-race population is exploding and Latinos will soon outnumber blacks.

[alaricthegoth]

@Atticus Finch

Yeah, remember Dick’s lefty policy of bombing the fuck out of possible Commies in South-East Asia?

I was more thinking of nixons guaranteed national income, epa, whathaveyou.

I don’t think fatbill has anything to blush about when it comes to realpolitik as compared with tricky dicky. (see, for example, vaporized aspirin factories and incinerated waco hostages.)

we have gotten the scumbag government we deserve,.

that’s the horror part.

[guestforever]

@BrainGlutton

That’s not what I said at all. I simply agreed with spoke- that a Republican propaganda machine exists; I did not attribute that information to him, nor to Right Nation. But I could have done the latter. Right Nation gives a very detailed account of the Republican propaganda machine, and who funds it, who works in it, and how it operates in foundations, think-tanks, media and academia.

True dat! Just ask Max Cleland! :mad: :mad: :mad:

Where is the info on Right Nation. I looked it up but couldn’t find anything.

[BrainGlutton]

@guestforever

Where is the info on Right Nation. I looked it up but couldn’t find anything.

It’s a book, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

[guestforever]

Thanks Brian, I see now you listed that in your initial post.

Here’s just one more piston in the Rep machine. K street in Washingtom DC is basically booty for securing both houses and for the creation of such a dominant horse (machine). Subsequently, there has been a very concerted and organized effort to turn the town over to Republicans. All appointments are going over to the Rep party now.

"WASHINGTON – The hottest speculation in Washington isn’t over who will fill a possible Supreme Court vacancy, but who will take over Jack Valenti’s perch atop the Motion Picture Association of America - and the buzz is narrowing to three Republicans, all present or former members of Congress.

Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana says he’s running for reelection, but insiders say he might yet be open to the top lobby job in Washington, should Mr. Valenti, a Democrat, step down. The others mentioned are former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Rep. David Dreier of California.

It’s a sign that the ties between the GOP-controlled Congress and the lobby shops on K Street are getting tighter - with significant consequences for issues ranging from tax policy to healthcare…"

“…The trend stems in part from expectations - by both politicians and industry groups - that Republican will retain control of Congress for years to come. In that scenario, K Street can be a fount of money and ideas for Congress, while Congress can supply a stream of experienced and well-connected former lawmakers.”

Republicans take over K Street