LAW & ORDER: If you skipped over Marshall Wittmann's essay (below) this morning I suggest you go back and read it. Wittmann argues that the Republican party's dominance at the national level and its ascendancy in Congress in the post-Watergate era is is based almost entirely on the GOP's effectiveness in catering to the public's urge for social order.
If Wittmann's thesis is right - and he makes a pretty convincing case in my opinion - it confirms what many believe is the Republicans' greatest short-term political vulnerability and the Democrats' most immediate opportunity for improving their electoral prospects. I'm speaking about the issue of illegal immigration.
Clearly there is a segment of the public that sees illegal immigration as a threat to America's social order. A smart Democrat would recognize that getting to the right of the GOP with a hard-headed, no-nonsense immigration policy is a political goldmine - and one that doesn't have to come off as a pander to the Buchanan right who feel betrayed by this administration.
The issue resonates much more broadly with the public, all in ways that could accrue to the Democrats' favor. Illegal immigration is a matter of national security. It's a matter of patriotism and protecting America's heritage. It's a matter of financial security and fiscal sanity. It touches on healthcare, welfare, education, and workers rights.
At the bottom of it all, however, is one basic reason the issue could spell disaster for Republicans and be a savior for Democrats: illegal immigration is a simple matter of law and order.
realclearpolitics.com
June 1, 2005
The Party That Represents Order Wins
By Marshall Wittmann
A single theme runs through the issues that hurt Democrats most -- order. From cultural issues like abortion and gay rights, to crime and foreign policy, the party that represents order wins.
As Democrats analyze their recent losses in presidential elections and plan the party's future, they should focus on one word: order.
Americans long for it -- social order, law and order, world order. But ever since the chaos of the 1960s, voters have felt one aspect of order or another slipping away. And, fairly or not, Americans have perceived a Democratic tolerance for disorder and a Republican commitment to restoring order. That has been the subtext of every presidential election since 1968, although it has usually been called by other names -- like abortion, gay rights, flag burning, or "values." It explains why, in most national contests, Republicans have won.
Only Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have broken through the Republican lock in national campaigns, and both did it by getting on the right side of the order issue. Carter won as a small-town businessman, military veteran, and the restorer of order after the chaos of Watergate. Clinton, too, projected an image of order with his support for the death penalty, his criticism of militant rapper Sister Souljah, and his promise to end welfare as we knew it. But in the past two elections, it was once again Republicans who successfully played the order card -- often in the form of cultural issues such as opposition to same-sex marriage -- and won.
Even now, preparing for the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republicans are raising "cultural chaos" concerns by continuing to exploit such hot-button issues as gay marriage, abortion, and "judicial tyranny." Republicans then make the leap from the domestic front to the overarching order issue: national security. President Bush portrays himself as a war president and a guardian of the nation's security. Even when his actions in war have been controversial, Bush argues that he has always been decisive and resolute -- words that fairly smack of order.
The culture card. These are only the latest examples of a nearly four-decade pattern of Republicans portraying Democrats as out of touch with traditional American values. Since the turbulent 1960s, Republicans have skillfully used cultural issues -- always surrogates for a sense of order -- as political bludgeons against Democrats. The tactic of playing what GOP candidates know as the culture card, the values card, or the social card has been a leitmotif of the Republican Party's post- Goldwater ascendancy from embattled minority status to the pinnacle of power in Washington. Republicans have repeatedly used order issues as a diversion from economic positions that do not enjoy broad support outside the plutocratic interests aligned with their party.
Thirty years after the Vietnam War, the GOP is still stoking the emotions that once divided the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the diversionary issues were law and order, patriotism and national security, busing, welfare, and the drug culture. Today, they still include patriotism and national security, but gay rights, abortion, religion, and the coarsening of popular culture have been added to the list. All these issues appeal to the voters' need for a sense of order and social stability. They reflect Americans' concerns about the breakdown of order and tradition, whether through Hollywood movies or terrorist threats.
None of this should come as a great surprise. Any historical examination of the past three decades of Republican ascendancy shows consistent patterns. As early as 1971, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg wrote about this phenomenon in their path-breaking book The Real Majority. It followed on the heels of the urban riots, the breakdown of traditional authority, and the emergence of an uncontained counterculture in the 1960s. Scammon and Wattenberg argued that "many Americans have begun casting their ballots along the lines of issues relatively new to the American scene. For several decades Americans have voted basically along the lines of bread-and-butter economic issues. Now, in addition to the older, still potent economic concerns, Americans are apparently beginning to array themselves politically along the axes of certain social situations as well. ... We call it the social issue."
Scammon and Wattenberg identified "the social issue" with law and order and the youth rebellion. Ironically, much of the rebellion and chaos of the 1960s was not directed at conservatives but rather reflected a civil war among liberals -- the anti-war "New Politics" left against the Cold War liberalism of President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. It was a class war as well. In contrast to their blue-collar, traditionalist, "regular" Democratic counterparts, the New Politics liberals were generally better educated, higher-income, socially liberal, white-collar professionals and students. The New Politics social profile was strikingly similar to its modern cyberspace equivalents in groups like Moveon.org and Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.
Deep divisions. In contrast, many of the traditionalist Democratic voters would eventually become "Reagan Democrats." While they were economically progressive, these traditionalists were patriotic, hawkish, family-oriented, and concerned about the deterioration of public order and the influence of the counterculture. (Today, they are known as "values voters.") The 1960s and 1970s further cemented the Democrats' image as the party of chaos and disorder. Scenes like the riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and 1972 presidential nominee George McGovern's tag as leading the party of "amnesty, acid, and abortion" did lasting damage. At the same time, deep divisions arose within the Democratic Party over the Vietnam War and social instability. That cast further doubt on whether Democrats were the party of social order, even on the bedrock issues: crime and national security. The hard-headed liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy was under attack by the New Left and its sympathizers.
With an uncanny prescience, Scammon and Wattenberg diagnosed the Democratic challenge in the decades to come when they wrote: "The manner in which the Democratic party handles the Social Issue will largely determine how potent a political force the party will be in America in the years to come."
Even after the cultural war intensity of the 1960s and early 1970s subsided, the "social issue" would retain its power into the 1980s and 1990s. Liberalism increasingly was viewed by large segments of the electorate as an elite movement. Liberal judicial activism, however justified, in areas ranging from school prayer to abortion alienated many socially conservative Democrats who agreed with the party on those bread-and-butter economic issues. In these decisions -- including those on abortion and school prayer -- the seeds of the religious right were sown. To these Americans, it seemed that the traditional social restraints were no restraining "guard rails" for the social order.
While economics would remain a critical voting issue over the next several election cycles, the ability of the Democratic Party to inoculate itself against culture war attacks would be decisive in its success. It is no accident that the only two Democrats who have been elected president since 1960 have been Southern Baptists. It appears that Democrats -- and even most Republicans -- must play against cultural type in order to win the White House.
Carter did it in 1976 by presenting himself as a born-again Christian identified with the moderate wing of his party (but then he lost it in 1980, when Ronald Reagan attacked him for the disorder of the Iranian hostage crisis, long gas lines, high deficits, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Clinton did it in part by running to the right of then-President Bush on appeasement of China and the crisis in the Balkans. It was more evidence that only hawks, not doves, win presidential elections.
A significant factor in the Republican successes has been the rise of socially conservative foreign policy hawks. Their rallying cry was articulated by former Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention, when she decried the "San Francisco Democrats" and the "blame America first crowd." The GOP attack message was not primarily an economic one; rather, it was based on values and patriotism. Democrats were portrayed as weak on protecting America and as hostage to liberal special interests.
In 1988, the Republicans destroyed Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis' credentials on both law and order and patriotism, with vicious and demagogic attacks. Then, after 12 years in the presidential wilderness, Democrats rallied to Gov. Clinton, who positioned himself in the 1992 campaign as both hard-headed and warm-hearted. He proved that he would defend the social order by not only supporting the death penalty but actually taking a break from the campaign trail to return to Arkansas to preside over an execution. In addition, both Clinton and vice-presidential candidate Al Gore supported the 1991 Iraq war.
Going overboard. But in their ideological zeal to seize the order issue back from Clinton, Republicans went overboard. By shutting down the government in an attempt to undermine popular programs in 1995, they inadvertently cast themselves as agents of disorder. The tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City government building by right-wing extremists also called into question the virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Gingrich Republicans. Meanwhile, Clinton co-opted conservative rhetoric and policy and declared: "The era of big government is over." He also promoted progressive reforms such as child support enforcement and replacing welfare with work. Republicans were on the defensive, and it was no longer clear that they could rely merely on playing the culture card.
But the Republican impeachment drive knocked Clinton off the order track. While George W. Bush pledged in 2000 to change the tone in Washington, Gore never found a way to reprise the Clinton-Gore campaigns' promise of New Democratic order. Despite two terms of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, the Democrats were unable to hold on to the presidency.
Then, after 9/11, President Bush was able to effectively exploit the issue of order in the 2004 campaign. His image as the guardian of order was best communicated through a campaign advertisement that adroitly captured the nexus of family values and national security. In the ad, the president and the first lady spoke about the dilemma parents faced on 9/11 in picking up their children from school. "I can't imagine the great agony of a mom or a dad having to make the decision about which child to pick up first on September the 11th," Bush said, in a direct appeal to "security moms."
The order question runs through American politics of the past four decades like a bright red thread -- mostly to Democrats' disadvantage. The issue can turn quickly, as illustrated by this spring's upheaval in Congress, where Republicans supporting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay found themselves incurring public ire over the disorderly mess surrounding the investigation of DeLay's ethics, while controversy also raged over judicial appointments and a possible Senate filibuster rule change. Yet to take advantage of such reversals, Democrats face a special challenge: They must find a way to reassure voters that they can defend American values and uphold order, while still promoting progressive principles.
Marshall Wittmann, author of The Bull Moose blog, is a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council. This article appears in the May 2005 issue of the DLC's Blueprint Magazine. |
