A New Alignment
The party out of power tries moving to the left.
BY THOMAS F. WOODLOCK
Monday, September 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
(Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 1936. In the previous day's election, Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican challenger Alf Landon, 523-8, with 60.8% of the popular vote to Landon's 36.5%.)
This writer does not know the result of yesterday's election, so far as the fate of the candidates is concerned, for as he is writing the votes have not all been cast, much less counted. He does, however, know one result (and an important result) that is fixed no matter who is elected, because it was a fact before voting began. The Republican Party as we have known it for two generations and the Democratic Party as we have known it for as long a time have disappeared from our politics forever. Today, we have a new main cleavage of political opinion which, whether for good or ill, will be with us as far as we can see into the future.
The first thing to note in that cleavage is that it is deeper than any heretofore experienced since the Civil War. It is a cleavage of opinion touching the very foundations of our governmental system. It is a cleavage of opinion touching the fundamentals of our economic life. Finally, it is a cleavage upon lines largely of economic class divisions, more extensive than any similar cleavage in our experience in the past. In all three forms it is very real, although it has not as yet expressed itself in complete and clear-cut fashion in all respects.
It would be a blind observer, indeed, who could not see in the party represented on the ballots by the traditional Democratic emblem a definite dislike of the restraints imposed by the Constitution, and an attitude toward the judiciary, as such, incompatible with a real interior assent to the whole theory of its place in our system. So, too, is observable in that party a definite trend to state collectivism per se with a strongly centralized authority to administer it. Finally, party divisions have been drawn in this contest more closely than in a century upon strictly economic standing, perhaps not quite on a fully "haves-havenot" basis, but definitely leaning in that direction. If proof of this were needed, all that is necessary to do to find it is to recall the tenor of utterances by the party's leaders.
Great as is the change in the Democratic Party, it is at least partly matched by that in the Republican Party. Looking back at the Republican convention proceedings last June, it is evident that three things then happened to it. It went young; it went West and it went a good way to the left. Characteristically, it choose for its leader a Bull Mooser who has since made no secret of his adherence to the ideas of Theodore Roosevelt; and its discarding of the Old Guard personnel from its councils is significant of its abandonment of Old Guard ideas--abandonment for keeps. Willy-nilly it is committed now to a general social program which forty years ago it would have called radical. In its reaction to the new Democratic Party it has found itself in the unfamiliar position of fighting centralization of power and defending states rights. Finally, and this is the very ark of its covenant, it is as never before genuinely alert in defense of the Constitution and all that implies.It is a political alignment wholly new in this country. Yesterday's votes will show us how our people have chosen their sides. The important thing about it is, not so much the numerical distribution at this particular election, as it is that the issues above-described will have to be finally fought out and settled in such a way as to remain settled at least to the point where they no longer furnish the main electoral debates and conflicts. In other words, we have reached the place where what de Madariaga called the bed-rock single-mindedness of the nation on the real fundamentals has passed away. Upon what fundamentals we shall achieve a new single-mindedness remains to be seen. It is absolutely necessary for us to achieve it if we are to secure continuance of anything approaching to a really democratic form of government.
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