Posted on 10/28/2007 11:27:46 PM PDT by neverdem
The New York Times report that social conservatives are talking of bolting to a third-party candidate, should Rudy Giuliani get the GOP nomination, is another sign of the disintegrating Reagan coalition.
In truth, that coalition—the 49 states and 60 percent of the nation Reagan won in 1984—was but a Xerox copy of Nixon’s New Majority of 1972. A decade before Reagan won the presidency, Kevin Phillips had already published The Emerging Republican Majority.
To understand why the Republican coalition is disintegrating, one must understand what held it together.
To create a GOP majority in the 1960s, as Nixon did, one had first to identify the voting blocs of the FDR-New Deal coalition the GOP could capture. You go hunting where the ducks are, said Barry Goldwater, though Barry proved not all that good a hunter.
Rockefeller Republicans felt the way to go was to appeal to the trendy media, create little Great Societies at the state level, become more boldly progressive than Democrats on social issues.
Nixon saw that the Democrats who were easiest to win were the non-glamorous working-class types who belonged to unions and backed tough-cop Frank Rizzo in Philly, Mayor Richard J. Daley in Illinois, and Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in Dixie.
Savaged for crafting a “Southern strategy” rooted in race, Nixon had a national strategy, even as he doubled Goldwater’s vote among African-Americans and trebled it in the South. But it was the white vote, 15 times as large as the black vote, that mattered. Nixon carried 67 percent of it. Reagan would carry 64 percent. No matter the Democratic lock on the minority vote, as long as the GOP carried these percentages of the majority vote, Democrats were frozen out of the White House.
Nixon and Reagan brought their Democrats into camp on social and security issues. First was anti-Communism and opposition to the antiwar movement tearing Democrats apart. Second was law-and-order, which meant standing up to urban rioters and campus radicals. Third was social conservatism, defending traditional values in the moral and cultural revolution of the 1960s.
On civil rights, the Nixon position was desegregation, yes, social engineering, no. Nixon integrated the Southern schools that had been 90 percent segregated when LBJ went home. While opposing busing for racial balance, Nixon grudgingly obeyed the court orders.
He promised to nominate Supreme Court justices who would be “strict constructionists,” polar opposite of liberal judicial activists Earl Warren and “Wild Bill” Douglas.
“I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master,” railed FDR in his Second Inaugural.
Nixon rallied the New Majority by selecting different targets—liberal media, urban rioters, and student radicals—and stuffing them into the old FDR kill box for round-the-clock bombing.
What is breaking up the Nixon-Reagan coalition?
First, success. With the end of the Cold War, the cause of the Right, anti-Communism, had triumphed. “We are going to do the worst thing we can do to you,” Soviet propagandist Georgi Arbatov said, “We are going to take away your enemy from you.” They did. Without an “evil empire” to fight, the conservative consensus crumbled.
A second cause was shrinkage of the Republican majority as a share of the population because of mass immigration. European-Americans were 88 percent of the nation in 1965. Today the figure is 66 percent. Hispanics are a rising share of the vote in California and the West, and, as they are poorer and less educated, they vote for the party of government, not the party that will cut taxes on capital gains and estates they do not have.
A third cause of GOP malaise is that the social revolution of the ’60s has converted a vast slice of the nation. Where Nixon carried California five times on national tickets and Reagan all four times he ran, Democrats have won it handily in the four elections since 1992.
Just as Bill Clinton, in losing both Houses in 1994, presided over the last stages of realignment begun by Nixon and Reagan, George W. Bush is presiding over the death of the Nixon-Reagan coalition.
What killed it is Wall Street Journal conservatism: a disastrous and unnecessary war; a preferential option for the rich; open-borders immigration; a free-trade fanaticism that is denuding America of manufacturing jobs, sinking the dollar, and growing our dependence on foreign goods and foreign loans.
Now the GOP frontrunner is a New York mayor who is pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-affirmative action, marches proudly in Gay Pride parades, and presided over a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. And the Right let it happen.
Cut the drama Pat, it does not work anymore.
“What killed it is Wall Street Journal conservatism: a disastrous and unnecessary war; a preferential option for the rich; open-borders immigration; a free-trade fanaticism that is denuding America of manufacturing jobs, sinking the dollar, and growing our dependence on foreign goods and foreign loans.”
This much is true.
I forgot to extract the war against terrorism.
The big problem here that Pat fails to mention is the whopping disconnect between the party leadership and the base. The base is mad as hell demanding the party stick to its Conservative principles, and leadership is taking another tack entirely. The latter is going to be in for a big surprise if it foists a liberal RINO (Rudy, Precious Willard, McKook, Shrimp, or Huckster) down the base’s throat next year. A BIG surprise.
What I would like to know is who are we supposed to get behind for the big push against Giuliani? Is it going to be Thompson or is it Hunter? I would love to see Thompson/Hunter ticket. How do we get that to come about is the question I'd like an answer for. If we wait till votes are actually cast it will be too late. One of them has to drop out now. How? Thompson has got to call Hunter and say: Look, this is about destiny, drop out now and then join me later on as VP. It's now or never.
It’s Fred. He’s already either tied or leading Rudy. The media pretends this isn’t the case, but it is. They want us to nominate a divisive liberal RINO because they know Conservatives won’t turn out, and they get their President Hillary her 3rd term.
Who is Shrimp?
Ron Prawn, er, Paul.
A useful tool for MSNBC but not an expert on everything.
If there’s anyone carrying Buchanan’s torch now its old Ron Paul with his “stay out of it” mentality.
Buchanan wouldn’t be so bad if could get over his St. Louis isolationist heritage.
He still thinks we should have stayed out of World War II.
Disintegration is too strong a word, drift seems like a better one and I still think a moderate type could pull in more “evangelical” votes than some might suspect.
Rick Warrenism is a step down from the Christian fervor of the 80’s but anyone who talks about compassion or comes off compassionately will do quite well, pro-life or not I’m sorry to say.
While his explanation is mostly off target, Buchanan is correct in saying that the “Reagan Coalition” has been severely damaged. You can see that damage manifest itself on a daily basis on this site as the majority of members rail on and on about “Rino’s” and “Rudy” and blah, blah, blah....
It’s a damn shame, but there are elements on the Right who now seem to be engaged in some bizarre form of “ideological purge” that would make Stalin himself proud. Any candidate or supporter who does not adhere to the vast majority of the “right thinking” is trashed as if they were far worse than the very Leftists we must defeat in order to preserve oour mostly shared vision of this nation.
If Ronald Reagan was an up and coming politician in the CURRENT political environment, a large percentage of the posters at THIS SITE would refer to him as a “RINO” and a fraud because he used to be a Democrat....or because he got divorced...or because he raised taxes once in the 1960’s...or because his son doesn’t like him...etc, etc, etc
The bottom line is that WE are to blame for not sticking together. It is OUR fault that Hillary will likely sit in the White House in 2009 because WE focused on the issues that divide us rather than focus on that which brought us together behind the Republican Party in the first place.
In the 1980’s, there was room for ALL kinds of conservatives in our party....religious, social, economic, foreign policy, neo-cons, etc...and this carried over to the 1990’s for the most part. But now we have become so unrealistic, so dogmatic, that we are willing to turn over the nation to VERMIN like Hillary Clinton and her ilk rather than compromise and coalesce behind whatever candidate we nominate, whether it be the most conservative or the most moderate.
So unless we snap out of it, that fool Buchanan will be proven right in the 2008 Election! And we’ll ALL pay the price from a Democratic Administration in the White House.
We've been talking about "compassion" since LBJ's Great Society. What do we have to show for it? The Evangelical Crackup
How compassionate is it to have a more devalued currency after leaving your descendents a $9 trillion debt and Ponzi scheme financing for entitlements?
What keeps the party together is that each interest group gets one or two of its most important positions, but doesn’t get all it wants. The religious get pro life, the sportsmen get pro-second amendment, the western property rights folks get small government, the south gets state’s rights, wall street gets lower taxes - etc.
I don’t see that Rudy can hold it together because he doesn’t hold the primary stands that each interest group can embrace.
“The latter is going to be in for a big surprise if it foists a liberal RINO (Rudy, Precious Willard, McKook, Shrimp, or Huckster) down the base’s throat next year. “
It is this kind of sarcasm and derogatory name calling that spreads disgust, anger, and disunity among the Republicans. He keeps doing it. And every time he does it, I am sure it spreads ill feelings. If I wasn’t for Thompson I would do the same with Thompson to show him what it is like. Thompson has characteristics that could be parodied to make him look ridiculous too.
I don’t see that Rudy can hold it together because he doesn’t hold the primary stands that each interest group can embrace.
OK, but not A+. The Second Amendment wasn't written for sportsmen. It was written for citizens, not subjects.
It’s a damn shame, but there are elements on the Right who now seem to be engaged in some bizarre form of “ideological purge” that would make Stalin himself proud. Any candidate or supporter who does not adhere to the vast majority of the “right thinking” is trashed as if they were far worse than the very Leftists we must defeat in order to preserve our mostly shared vision of this nation.
It is this kind of sarcasm and derogatory name calling that spreads disgust, anger, and disunity among the Republicans. He keeps doing it. And every time he does it, I am sure it spreads ill feelings. If I wasn’t for Thompson I would do the same with Thompson to show him what it is like. Thompson has characteristics that could be parodied to make him look ridiculous too.
As soon as I saw the author, I stopped reading. He is irrelevant.
That’s not sarcasm, Bronc, that is the reality. I’m long past supporting people that aren’t interested in a Conservative agenda that yields positive results. Why would I support people that champion a failed and destructive liberal agenda that enriches the Democrat party ? We already have a Democrat party for that. No more trojan horse RINOs.
Please don't start in on Fred...
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