US politics in a nutshell....
August 28, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
Michael Lind
The meanings of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” (and its synonym “progressive”) have been altered by two long-term trends in American politics. The first is the replacement of ideology by partisanship; the second is the alignment of partisanship and identity.
In living memory conservatism and liberalism referred to ideological movements, not political parties. The conservative movement was not identical with the Republican Party, nor was the liberal movement identical with the Democratic Party. This is no longer the case. Today conservative means partisan Republican and liberal means partisan Democrat. Ideological liberals who deviate from the Democratic party line of a given moment are ignored or vilified, as are ideological conservatives who deviate from the Republican party line.
Without ideological movements, there is no place for ideologues. Most of those who pass for prominent conservative and liberal intellectuals today are actually engaged in public relations. It is the job of these apparatchiks to sell a party line to the public, after the party line has already been determined in private by negotiations among donors, special-interest spokesmen, pollsters, and politicians.
The replacement of ideology by partisanship has been accompanied by the alignment of partisanship and ethnicity. The major divide between American politics is not geographic. Maps of how counties vote show that there are no red states and blue states, only red states and blue cities. But the city-suburb divide itself is merely a surrogate for an ethnic and religious divide.
Today the Republican Party is the party of the ethnic and religious majority, white Christians, and the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic and religious minorities—non-whites (blacks and Latinos) and non-Christians (Jews and post-Christian secularists). The fact that the Republicans get some non-white and Jewish and secularist votes, while the Democrats get a minority of white Christian votes, does not alter this pattern. The big cities are Democratic because that is where blacks, Latinos, Jews, and post-Christian secularists are concentrated, and the suburbs and small towns are Republican because that is where most white Christians live.
The emergence of a pan-white, pan-Christian majority party, the Republicans, shows that the melting pot worked for whites. The ethnic divisions among Anglo-Americans and European-Americans have been effaced by assimilation and intermarriage. The once deep theological divide between Protestants and Catholics in the U.S. has been replaced by an alliance of conservative Christians against moral liberalism in both its secular and religious varieties.
By contrast, the core of the Democratic Party is a coalition of ethnic and religious minorities that have little in common other than suspicion of the white Christian majority. Blacks fear white racism; Latinos fear Anglo nativism; and Jews and post-Christian secularists fear Christian triumphalism. A traditional big-city patronage machine, the Democratic Party offers each minority what it wants: affirmative action (blacks and Latinos), mass immigration from Latin America (Latinos), and strict separation of church and state and moral liberalism (Jews and secularists).
The party of the majority and the party of minorities naturally look at government in different ways. Because it represents the white Christian majority, the Republican Party of today is nationalist, identifying the majority with the state; communitarian, thinking that the values of the majority should be enforced by the state; and majoritarian, trusting in elected representatives. As a coalition of minorities, the Democratic Party, with equal consistency, is anti-nationalist, insisting on the difference between the majority and the state; multicultural, rejecting the idea that majority values should be enforced by the state; and anti-majoritarian, trusting in unelected judges to protect ethnic minorities and maverick individuals against the national majority.
Identity politics lives and dies by demography. Democrats hope that mass immigration from Latin America will permit a growing Latino population, allied with the urban minority coalition, to dominate the government. The Republican Party, as the nation-state party, cannot incorporate Latinos as a distinct voting bloc with distinct group privileges the way that the group-based Democratic ethnic machine hopes to do. The white Christian majority, however, might absorb most second- and third-generation Latinos into a mixed-race Christian majority, a task that would be easier if fewer Latinos were foreign-born.
And what of ideologues in this ethnically-based political system? There will still be libertarians, social democrats, greens, populists, and others. If they have any strategic sense, they will not try to take over one of the two parties. Instead, they will organize themselves as non-partisan movements that seek to influence both of our identity-based national parties.
These ideological movements should call themselves by their proper names. Libertarians and populists who argue that they are the true conservatives are wasting their breath. So are social democrats and greens who argue that they are the true liberals or progressives. For the foreseeable future, the term conservative will be a synonym for Republican and liberal or progressive will be a synonym for Democrat. As labels for genuine public philosophies, those terms are gone for good. Good riddance.
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President.
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