America's Sixth Party System

So far as I can tell, most internet sources explain America's Sixth Party System with a link to something describing the Fifth Party System (which I'll do here), and then saying the Sixth Party System is whatever came after that we're not exactly sure but Republicans tend to win more now. I'll try to do a little more, because if you don't understand the Sixth Party System (and many of you probably do, just not under that name), you may not understand the fundamentals of US politics now, and for the last forty-four years or so.

(UPDATE: This blog post from three years ago, despite a few minor errors and mistypes, gets at some of the details I didn't: The Uniqueness of the Sixth Party System [I'w afraid I have a few mistypes of my own, but I'll have to clean them up later)

Some political scientists and historians still claim we're in the Fifth Party System, but as a practical matter, it's probably important to make a distinction between the New Deal Coalition's era and what we have now, which began around 1968 and gradually shifted, from there to the year 2000, but especially in 1972 (politics-wise), and 1980 (policy-wise) into something different. You miss a lot, if you pretend what we have now is the same thing Franklin Roosevelt created; the consequences of the shift have been huge.

The 5th Party System was inaugurated in 1932, amid the chaos of the depression, with the election of the Roosevelt and more than a hundred new Democrats to the House of Representatives (and many more in the senate). They took office in 1933 amid 25% unemployment, and proceeded through 'bold sustained experimentation' (FDR's words) to use the power of government to stabilize the economy, provide unemployed workers with work on government projects like dams, bridges, roads, and parks and irrigation, and generally be very active in trying to lower unemployment, fix the economy, and provide some minimal benefit to the American people, particularly economically, through a sensible and lively government. Their success was incomplete until The World War (of 1939) put an end to unemplopment and helped America transition from an Agrarian economy into an industrial one. And they made mistakes (the experimentation part, and something known as NIRA, which I won't get into but which everyone agrees was bad), but by 1936 , despite substantial (but much lower, more like 10%) continued unemployment, the political landscape had been transformed. In contrast to before, business was again (as it had been under the first President Roosevelt) checked by the power of government, small old-age pensions had been started for the elderly, and an era had begun in which Liberals and moderates worked together to govern our polity effectively, by regulating the financial lthat'd helped cause the collapse, intervening in the economy when it faltered, promoting union rights to bargain for reasonable pay for their workers, and generally facilitating economic security for everyone within a regulated capitalist society. And these Liberals and moderates were reelected accordingly (with some ebb-and-flow; the Conservative Coalition took power in the elections of 1946, only to receive a thrashing by the New Dealers, led by fighting Harry Truman, in 1948). These champions of the common man and government for the common interest were united across both parties in something called The New Deal Coalition, whose governing philosophy was an economics-focused form of Social Liberalism (you should consider following that link and reading the header). They often shared power with their opponents, The Conservative Coalition, who also had seats in both parties, but never were completely (or mostly) out until 1980.

This began to change in the 1960s, when the challenges of race (which the New Dealers had usually tried to keep off the table--with notable exceptions such as Harry Truman's desegregation of the armed forces in 1948-- in order to keep the votes of white southerners who were willing to tolerate populist governmental intervention, but wanted blacks to remain second-class citizens with few to no rights) forced civil rights to the forefront of American society. A new generation of left-wing activists appeared, too: raised in relative middle-class affluence, they were more concerned with social justice and rights for all* than with a social safety net they took for granted. In 1964 and 1965, the Southern president Lyndon Johnson abandoned the socially conservative wing of the Democratic Party and used JFK's martyrdom to push through the most important civil and voting rights legislation since just after the civil war. In that year (1964), the country chose liberal Democrats in massive numbers to lead us through a crisis in which reactionary southern states were perceived as being in rebellion against decency and order, but in doing so, the New Deal sewn the seeds of its own destruction: Johnson turned to his aid, Bill Moyers (if memory serves) when he signed the Civil Rights Act and stated, roughly: 'We have now lost the South for a generation.' It turned out not to be quite that simple, but nevertheless, from 1966 through 2008, Liberals were never again able to put together a definitive winning coalition (centrist Democrats did win the presidency in 1976, after a historic scandal, and in 1992, but were unable or unwilling (in Carter's case) to govern from the center-left. More on that, later).

From 1968, America's centre-left political coalition, which had been based on economic justice, fairness, and effective governance, was gradually replaced (in the common mind and in the mouths of their opponents more than in reality, but, as it happens, perception is all that counts at the polls) by one in which more emphasis was placed on what might be termed social justice, or social issues: issues often of race, gender, sexuality (as well as a more just and dovish foreign policy) that poor white men and older folk have always had a hard time supporting (America's social change in the 20th century was quite rapid, by historical standards). This, along with the foreign policy switch of the Democrats who formed the majority of the New Dealers--from the moderately hawkish assertiveness of John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman  to something somewhat more dovish at the presidential level, especially in 1968 and 1972--alienated many traditional New Deal voters, particularly ethnic whites (who were then less assimilated than they are now), the South (which had previously voted solidly Democratic, if not always for liberals, than at least for people who'd often go along on a lot of stuff [not race or Feminism, obviously]), and working class voters all over the country who'd formed their traditional base. And that shift, basically, is how we ended up in Nixonland: the gradually shifting political alignment, born partly of political resentments and demonization of minorities (all effectively exploited by 'conservatives' which increasingly meant the GOP), that we call the Sixth Party System of contemporary politics.

On policy grounds, the actual change in the left-wing coalition, was more one of emphasis (the heart of the New Dealer activists of the 30s had always believed in racial justice, and often acted--very quietly before 1960--to do what they could within the political constraints of the time) than actual content, but the change in emphasis was key, and was exploited deftly by Republican opponents in the realignment of 1968-1972 (both important GOP presidential victories) that occurred because of it.**

That's the political world we've been living in all my life, one in which the white working class and southerners increasingly didn't/don't trust Democrats or Liberals. And that's only beginning to change now, in 2012 (which, in contrast to 2008, 1992/6, and 1976, was a clear (if somewhat narrow) victory for the centre-left coalition on its own terms and in comparison to its opponents' vision, and not (in part) because of disillusionment with an unpopular incumbent, as in 2008, or by running and governing partly against the left wing of their party, as presidents Clinton and Carter had to do (and which brought only very partial victory to both: a limited mandate in 1992 for Clinton, and then six years of cohabitation with a Republican Congress, and only a single term for the [admittedly fairly incompetent] Carter).

I realize that in explaining all this I've shorted the evolution of the Republican Party (which was not always synonymous with 'Conservatism'), but for that we'll have to wait for another time (in short, from 1964 to 2010, Republicans moved from a moderate, ideologically diverse party based in largely in the Northeast, tolerant of moderate change on social issues, moderately supportive of racial equality [and less divided than Democrats on that issue] and supportive of business interests, yet with an acceptance of a role for government in things like public safety and public investment, especially--and accepting of the level of taxation necessary to fund that government--to what it is now, which is...well, still changing, but much farther to the right, based more in the South, exploitive of religious, racial, and economic paranoia, and fairly Libertarian on issues of economics and governance [and with increasing Libertarian influence in other areas, at least for the moment, though Right-Libertarians are still a fairly small part of the coalition, except with voters under thirty) .

**Not at all fun fact: Nixon's subtly racist 'law and order' campaign of 1968 (which also ran against Federally forced black-white integration of local school systems in the South and elsewhere) was based on Ronald Reagan's successful 1966 campaign for the governorship of California, which occurred after riots had broken out in black neighborhoods in L.A., particularly Watts, where 34 people died and a black rioter took the stage at a public meeting and, on national TV, threatened armed insurrection and violence against the women and children of the white community of L.A. and the broader US. This was the sort of thing that so quickly soured white portions of the 1960s US electorate, who'd been promised progress and a more perfect union if LBJ's civil rights bills passed, and had voted for him in huge numbers (61.1% of the popular vote, the greatest victory for any US President since records have been kept) to vote for him less than a year before. See also the 1969 armed takeover by black students of a building at Cornell--and that university administration's timid response to the incident [which, among other things, turned the donor who the hall had been named for from a civil-society, PBS and Sesame Street supporting moderate into a right-wing nutball for the rest of his life, and sent huge sums of (seed) money into far-right organizations from 1970); things seemed to be getting out of hand, not going forward. Depressing, I know).

*The New Left also wanted (and wants, to the extent they still exist, now assimilated into the larger Progressive movement) a more dovish foreign policy, i.e. not spending the lives of young American men to support an authoritarian, capitalist and very corrupt regime in a strategically weak location--Vietnam--against that region's nationalist movement, which identified with communism but received easy aid (both effective weapons and training) from the Great Powers of communism, China and Russia, over a shared border.
--It's worth mentioning that, as a member of and occasional activist within the Democratic Party, while social issues have a powerful hold over the party at most levels (there are still a number of [sometimes potential] Democratic voters, often older, whiter ones, I believe, who care much more about economic issues than social ones), the McGovern doves have very little sway over Liberal elected officials in government; i.e. while most activists and many Democratic voters in the Sixth Party System are doves on foreign policy, their representatives in the US Congress and Presidency (with the partial, much-exaggerated exception of Jimmy Carter [who ordered the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw and started the US intervention in Afghanistan], in addition to being a decorated ex-Naval Officer, in contrast to his opponent, Reagan) very rarely are. There's a large coalition of moderates on national security issues, but even 'doves' like Socialist Bernie Sanders support the military industrial complex very substantially, and generally support military action as long as it seems to be prudent and not guided by a crony defense-industrialist chicken-hawk who never served like Dick Cheney (which latter skepticism I believe to be ultimately both wise and principled, if also motivated by peak).

To expand on that a little, while I think it's appropriate to vote against sixth party system Democrats Liberals on the grounds of social issues, if you disagree with their stance there, on national security there's really very little to worry about from the right. The doves (who in my view hold somewhat naive (though sometimes correct; see Iraq, 2002-3) world-views that don't hold up very well once one gets into office and actually has to deal with security issues) just don't have much power in the party, and there's little reason to believe this will ever change, President Obama very much included in this analysis (his foreign policy, while not my favorite, is not really problematic for being too dovish--rather, I find it too Kissengerian in its amoral and somewhat short-sighted Realpolitik [the so-called Idealists have their problems too] ). But enough digressions. I'm done.