Breakthrough Election? (I)

The Civil War defined America until the Great Depression. The North won, its capitalist elite ran the country through the Republican Party, and Democrats, the South, workers and farmers made do. The Compromise of 1877, the one that put Republican Rutherford Hayes in the White House when Democrat Samuel Tilden [pictured] had actually won, kept national power with the GOP. Democrats in turn got back control of the South, as Hayes promised to end Washington’s Reconstruction efforts to empower Southern blacks.

From 1860 to 1932, Republicans controlled the White House 78% of the time. No Democrat besides Tilden (not Cleveland, not Wilson) ever won a popular vote majority. Unchallenged in Republican- controlled America, a white, male, Protestant, capitalist northern elite built on small business and backed by conservative newspaper publishers ran the nation.

Underneath, America was changing, reshaped by millions of immigrants. The New Deal brought to power the largely immigrant proletariat, poorer farmers, and especially, the proletariat's vanguard of intellectuals, along with a far more conservative Southern elite that had been the Democrats’ core group during the wilderness years. While the North’s upper class remained largely Republican, the country’s East Coast-based meritocracy moved Democratic. This Democratic coalition controlled the White House 78% of the time between 1932 and 1968.

The New Deal coalition fractured in the 1960’s with the civil rights struggle. Republicans under Goldwater in 1964 first captured a South that resented the integration Kennedy and Johnson forced on them. Then, as the civil rights struggle moved into northern working class neighborhoods, it alienated another Democratic core group--white ethnic Americans. But meanwhile, the Republican northern elite shifted independent or Democratic, in support of civil rights and in opposition to the Vietnam War conservative Republicans still endorsed. By Reagan’s election in 1980, much of the white working class and most of the South had left the Democrats. So in spite of poweerful elite opposition to its rule, Republicans controlled the White House 70% of the time from 1968 to the present.

Is 2008 another turning point? Republicans now depend upon northern churchgoing anti-abortionists, upon a shrunken slice of the elite limited mostly to small-business and the military, and upon people throughout the country but concentrated in the South who feel alienated from today’s secular, unpatriotic national elite. This grouping no longer seems large enough to win a national election. Many who supported Bush in 2004 now feel Bush kept us in an unnecessary war (Iraq), that he cares only about the wealthy while leaving working stiffs behind (the economy), and that he mismanages government (Katrina). They are looking to vote Democratic this fall.