Election 2012 in Historical Perspective, Maybe (Part II)

In the wake of the presidential election, Chihambuane wondered what I thought about an article on Naked Capitalism by Richard Kline. In his piece, Kline makes some notable comments about the actual motivations of the voting electorate. He's not buying the standard narrative that suggests that the 2012 election was the harbinger of some significant political realignment. As he tells us at one point, "The main reason this vote 'seemed close' was that Obama's side had little faith in him or his record, and did not turn out in close to their actual numbers." All Obama had to do, according to Kline, was "convince his side of the electorate that 'he cares about people like us.'" As for Romney, a candidate who had "little love from his party", his path to victory rested on his ability to convince the base of the Republican Party that "he was a nativist bigot."  Interesting and provocative, but these bon mots are not the main portion of Kline's post.

What Kline spends the bulk of his time exploring is the possible implications of the fact that the rural vote in the country is almost completely contained within one party - the Republican Party.  Mind you,  Kline's not trying to construct an operational theory of post-20th century American politics here; it's just a blog shot. But he does an admirable job of laying out one of the more noticeable schisms in American politics, one that does (even after all of these years, cuz this ain't new) remain under-analyzed. Blue urban centers surrounded by a sea of Red - what's that about? Well, as it turns out, it's about a host of things. Initially (from, say, the 1740s to the middle of the nineteenth century) rural folk across the country were culturally (and therefore largely politically) homogenous; they had a lot in common with the elites who ran the cities they were closest to.  Moving into the 19th century, rural folks were still  beholden to the local political elites, though the Civil War and other political/economic realities softened this allegiance, making people politically more fluid, and likely to join the party that appealed to their interests. The Great Depression also served to keep rural folks beholden to the political party of local elites.  We see the rate of Democratic Party affiliation for rural whites seriously erode during the Civil Rights era. This is a story that's been told many times before: race, economics, culture, regionalism and a host of other factors conspired to send rural whites into the Republican Party, where they remain to this day. It is from this perch that rural whites and other conservatives have launched into an urban/blue-rural/red antagonism that, to hear Kline tell it, is going to be an intractable element of American politics for the foreseeable future. Rural red wants to starve Urban blue of federal funds; Urban blue doesn't "get" rural red, "and really doesn't care to." Besides, the demographics are increasingly in Urban blue's favor; they're growing, while Rural red continues to shrink.  "There simply isn't much of a basis for compromise because the factions are culturally distinct," Kline tells us. "It's not just a matter of political leanings, or a simple few issues. It's everything."

Robert O. Self, an associate professor of history at Brown University, has written a book that will go a long way towards helping us figure out our current political landscape, and towards filling in some of the blind spots in Kline's musings.  Self's book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960's gives us a new tool with which to view the shifting politics of the post-war period - the American family.  Self contends that the struggles of the sixties over race, sexuality, gender and economics, all centered on competing notions of the nuclear family, and on the shift from "equal rights" to "family values." In the center of the conversation is the mythic notion of the nuclear family, neatly defined (as most myths are) as white, middle class, heterosexual. Even while this iconic and largely artificial construct was being contested by blacks, women, gays and others, it's political power remained formidable; both sides of the American political spectrum sought to define its parameters.  According to Self, liberal social/economic policy from the New Deal to the Great Society were designed to make the ideal family structure "attainable for more Americans than ever before." Self calls their operating system "breadwinner liberalism."

By 2004, the nuclear family had been transformed into a repository of conservative ideology. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Pat Robertson and a host of other conservative "culture warriors" had successfully shifted the national political impetus from one that sought to expand the notion of family towards to one that wanted to defend traditional notions of family and cast the liberalization of the nuclear family as a moral (and also political and economic) assault on American families and values.  Self asserts that it is this battle, the battle to define what a "family" looked like, that "drove the larger transformation of American democracy over three generations, remaking a center-left social welfare polity established between 1934 and 1972 as the center-right free market system that emerged from 1973 to 2004." Richard Nixon's "silent majority", the political rise of conservative christianity in the 1970's, the legalization of abortion and the fracturing of the New Deal coalition paved the way for the right's "opposition to the broad liberal left's idea of expanded citizenship - of an expanded body politic." Self calls the operating system of American conservatives in this endeavor "breadwinner conservatism." The family became the central battleground for a moral re-visioning that had explicit political and economic consequences; indeed, the family was the first front in the right's successful reframing of the federal government's role in American life.

Suffice it to say, Chihambuane, I think there's a lot in Self's book that can help us to wrap our minds around the urban/rural divide we see in American politics.