Reagan even signed an abortion liberalization law as governor of California.
But I think comparing Reagan to the Tea Party misunderstands a few things. Reagan wasn’t an angry conservative, he was a happy warrior. He was always willing to work with the other side, or change course if he realized he made a mistake. That’s a matter of character and tactics, not ideology. In terms of what Reagan believed, he was as far right as any Tea Partier. What makes the Tea Party problematic for Republicans isn’t so much the ideology, although much of it is out of step with the American mainstream, it’s the unwillingness to concede anything and being willing to go off a cliff with all flags flying in every battle, no matter how insignificant. Reagan was able to win over the hard right with the force of his personality, so he earned trust on issues where he compromised. No Republican has that kind of charisma or ability to communicate with the conservative base. All we’ve got are a bunch of true believer red meat throwers on the right and go along to get along guys on the moderate right. The GOP needs another great communicator, a happy warrior.
In general, the laws of political evolution dictate that the parties are about evenly divided. However, it can take time to move, and ideologies can change faster than affiliations.
As others have noted, for many of those years the country was about evenly divided between ideologies most commonly represented by the Republican Party and those represented by the Democratic Party. But for historical reasons, i.e. lingering resentment over the Reconstruction, the South was deeply resistant to the Republican Party itself. Over time those lingering resentments faded, and at the same time the South became more closely aligned with the Republicans on issues (as religion and morality became bigger issues, as compared to socialist populism) and the Republicans rose in the south.
The problem is that at this point (it was not always so), the two parties have completely, fundamentally irreconcilable definitions of “a better job of governing,” i.e., of what government should or should not be doing, let alone how; and neither will let the other govern its own way without obstruction.
Note the corollary: No laws of political evolution dictate that the people should be evenly divided in their ideological beliefs; the parties will simply adapt to reflect roughly half of that range of beliefs, whatever they are.
Likewise with political interests, as distinct from beliefs (except that the political calculus of interests is much more complex, and depends at least as much on who has more money/lobbyists/connections/clout as on who has more votes).
Of course, we can now reasonably expect that religion and “morality” will for the most part lose their political salience in America – though it will happen on a generational time-scale – and thus, this.
That doesn’t help, but it’s still possible to govern well. Clinton did it. GWB and Obama are just incompetent. W had years of experience being incompetent and Obama had no experience at all. So their performances should not have been shocking to anyone.
Morality changes, but it never loses its political salience. What we’re going to be outraged about just changes from era to era. Could be that saying something racist will get you jail time in the future, or at least many liberals will try to get jail time mandated or even amend the Constitution to carve out a “hate speech” exemption.
Lest that statement derails this thread, I’m not saying that’s where things will go, only that morality never leaves politics, we just argue about what kind of morality is important enough to legislate on. If I had my way, we wouldn’t legislate on any moral issue where the public is divided. Laws should be reserved for things that we all agree are immoral, like rape, murder, theft, etc.
Welfare, crime, spending, and basically the role of government in general. Remember “the era of Big Government is over?” That wasn’t just a line to demonstrate Clinton’s broader appeal, he actually shrunk the federal government, both in terms of spending as a percentage of GDP and in terms of federal employees. He also had Al Gore eliminate thousands of regulations.
But his actual governing aside, Bill Clinton ran explicitly as a more conservative Democrat. The Democrats were only ready for that because they really, really wanted a win after 3 straight convincing election defeats.
If the GOP loses in 2016, they’ll nominate Olympia Snowe if they have to in 2020.
Ideology changes pretty quickly sometimes. Republican candidates for years hammered on opposition to gay marriage, while Democrats changed the subject. Now Democrats are all coming out in favor of gay marriage, while Republicans change the subject. In 20 years this won’t be a campaign issue at all, and Republicans will claim they were always in favor of gay marriage personally–ask their gay friends!–it’s just the constitutional issues of blah blah blah and this and that meant they couldn’t vote for it even though they were in favor of it.
And this is likely to actually be true for lots of Republican candidates in 20 years, since there will have been a generational turnover by then and only a percentage of current officeholders will still be in politics by then. There aren’t any Democrats today who voted for segregation even though almost all the southern segregationists were Democrats.
Yeah, no. I imagine that starting in 2016 we’ll suddenly see a Strange New Respect for Obama from the Republicans, and they’ll look back and say, “Hey, Obama had some good qualities, unlike this asshole we have to deal with today!”
Republicans hated–HATED–Clinton at the time. I was THERE. They not only hated him, but despised him, thought he was an embarrassment to the country, a pot-smoking saxophone-playing draft-dodging Oxford-attending Big Mac-gobbling skirt-chasing socialist.
I think you underestimate the magnitude of the seething animosity toward Obama. At least our first black president was not a Kenyan Muslim like this guy. It all seems to have been stirred up to a fever pitch in '09 by the anti-AHCA astroturfers, now any republican who shows any sign of not despising and wanting to screw-over Obama is a Heretic and a Traitor. At least the ones in the 90s were able to work with the black president, these people (including some who were there in the 90s) are just not.
I couldn’t agree more. Reagan’s gift wasn’t so much in converting Democrats to his side as it was converting the people on his side to continue cheering when he made a few compromises along the way.
The Southern Strategy was mainly aimed at winning presidential elections. During the 1972, 1980, and 1984 elections, many southerns split their votes.
In Arkansas in the 1980s, I remember the state being essentially a one-party system at the local level. Every sheriff, coroner, county clerk, and so on was nominally a democrat. The federal and state senators and congress members were mostly Democrats. But these same people voted for Reagan and Bush. I think this was fairly typical in the south. Being a Democrat just seemed to be part of people’s DNA makeup. It was the inertia of the old “Republicans are Yankees” mentality among many whites, greatly compounded by lingering attachments to the New Deal. After the 1960s, the African American vote also boosted the Democrats - but over time, the party could not serve both groups in southern politics.
The decline of Democratic Party politics in local congressional races in the South really set in during the 1994 election.
If the Republicans remain in control of the House to 2020 and beyond - which they probably will - then they could oversee another bout of gerrymandering.
I think another factor was a strong Speaker of the House. While not all of those SOTH were able to focus the party, you did have Carl Alpert, Tip O’Neill and Sam Rayburn.