Sean Trende makes a good point. A solid Republican South was the Democrats’ choice, not an inevitability:
What changed? Part of it is attrition: Voters who remembered their family farms going into foreclosure under Herbert Hoover were dying off. Part of it, no doubt, had something to do with the president’s race. But this has received far too much attention. Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan won elections in 2008 with Barack Obama atop the ticket, while Mark Pryor was seen as so unbeatable that he was unopposed that year. It is difficult to explain change with a constant. If Landrieu had held on to her share of the white vote from 2008, when Obama was atop the ticket, she would have probably won outright in November. The same is true of Hagan.
So while I think Barack Obama’s race mattered, I think there were two more salient features. The first is that the Democrats at the national level increasingly gave up on the South. I don’t mean simply in terms of the issue positions they took, but rather with respect to the entire cultural affect of the party. From 1928 to 2004, nearly every Democratic presidential ticket had a candidate from the South or a border state (the exceptions: 1940, 1968, 1972, and 1984). Three of those four exceptions lost. But in 2008, there wasn’t a real movement to put a Southerner on the ticket.
Moreover, when you look just at the top of the ticket, from Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama, you see a steady decline in the appeal such candidates would have to older white Southerners. The candidates become increasingly Northern, urban, and urbane.
While it may be comforting for Democrats to think of the decline in the party’s fortunes in the South as inevitable or even as good riddance, it does make one wonder which state they’ll write off next? Maryland, which elected a Republican governor? Virginia, in which the Democratic incumbent won re-election by a gnat’s eyelash?
Illinois, where a Republican governor will assume office in just a few weeks?
Moreover, when you look just at the top of the ticket, from Bill Clinton to Al Gore to John Kerry to Barack Obama, you see a steady decline in the appeal such candidates would have to older white Southerners. The candidates become increasingly Northern, urban, and urbane.
Clinton was the key. He was an ordinary working-class guy from nowhere Arkansas who happened to support civil rights. During his eight years, the South treated him as if he was straight out of Andover and Yale. Then when they had a guy who was straight out of Andover and Yale, they loved him to death and considered him brethren.
The giving up has been mutual: Democrats gave up on ‘ordinary’ white people, but ‘ordinary’ white people gave up on a lot of things too. These seem to be the things that normal people actually once wanted in their lives. But at a certain point, they became too liberal, or too secular, or too much associated with thinking.
For example, I grew up in an area that once elected the fabulously-corrupt Paul Kanjorksi every two years. Now it’s some loon who is fired up about illegal immigrants. There used to be a pleasant small town. Now there’s a dead Wal-Mart on one side, a living one on the other. The downtown filled with drugstores, smoke shops, and empty buildings. It’s like a dead zone at night, except around the bars, where you can find people in their mid-40s getting plastered and acting like they are 20. There’s a huge hard drug problem, of course. Few I went to high school with, including the people whose families were there for five generations, have stuck around (if they went to college and didn’t drop out in a haze of drinking and pot after two years). Everybody lives in cities, and goes home, and is sort of shocked by how terrible it is. Nobody wants to stick around, except the religious people. Even then, I hear gossip about families having problems because one child’s best friend is a lesbian, or something.
Also, the gun thing was really strange. My dentist was in the NRA–he had maybe twenty guns, and he was the local gun nut, albeit heavily responsible and into safety and education. Now there’s survivalists and idiots with arsenals fearing that Obama might take it all away everywhere. Somehow it went from hunting and personal use to a cult.
I don’t think where I grew up is an exception. I think it’s the norm or will be for places outside of the suburbs, college towns, and major cities. e.g. places with some sort of economic privilege. Huge swaths of this country are being rejected on a personal basis, because nobody would choose, if they had a choice, to be part of this world. And it’s not because of snobbery, unless you have defined snobbery way down. There’s a huge tradition in this country that is based on acknowledging the errors and wisdom of prior generations, but there seem to be so many personal errors and so little wisdom that it’s hard for it to continue, given how quickly most of America as a geographical unity seems to have gone to shit.
I’m having trouble following the arc of your story, Modulo. As I understand it, the district in which you grow up was represented for 25 years by a corrupt Democrat (by your admission) and during that time the area experienced an economic collapse such that your hometown is a dead zone and there is no viable career pathways for the younger generation. This has led to flight from the area.
So what were the errors of the previous generation to which you refer? Do they not include the continual re-election of a corrupt Democrat who doesn’t appear to have been serving the interests of his district well (or at best, oversaw an economic collapse that was perhaps for reasons outside of his control but engaged in personal profiteering while it ensued?)
Well, I would start with the endless militarism and resentment of hippies that outside of Reagan-like fantasies that never coincided with reality and I would end with the mindless inability to deal the implications of capitalism for a community (other than as a machination of illegal immigrants or far-off elites), and in the middle I would put the endless faith in the idea that government needs to stop interfering and supporting people, while meanwhile continuously paying out SS and Medicare.
This strikes as a temporary thing because the economy is still slow.
Steve
None of this is surprising really – partisan politics is increasingly about servicing narrow interests and demographics. “Big tent” political parties are so 20th century.
Steve, I thought you were of the opinion that the economy has really been slow for at least twenty years, minus bubbles. Thinking it’s going to pick up now sounds like a bunch of Nazis in South America in the 1960s referring to the end of WWII being a tetemporary set back.
Yes, I think we have not had real growth absent a bubble or massive deficit spending in a long time. I don’t know whether we are going to see better growth now. Some signs look good. Others don’t. However, after other international banking crises it took 5-8 years, on average, to see growth return to normal. We are in the proper range.
Steve
Personally, I think we need to start looking at Japan for a glimpse of what our future holds. Of course we don’t have the demographic problem they do, but they are still the post-industrial modern vanguard. It seems to me that there isn’t an obvious choice for returning to the kind of growth we’ve come to expect and other advanced nations don’t seem to have solutions either.
You must have listened to the same “All Things Considered” program that I did since that was the precise phrasing used there.
Between now and 2050 the population of Japan is expected to fall by more than half. Over the same period the population of the U. S. is expected to grow by 25%. Whatever we have to learn from Japan’s demographic collapse, I’m not going to live to see a time when we’ll benefit from it.
Consider this graph of Japan’s real GDP per capita. The rate of growth is practically identical to the real per capita GDP in the U. S.. My point is that I think that Japan’s worries about population decline are very much exaggerated.
IMO our countries are so different and face such different problems that they’re really not much of a model. Here’s another example. The U. S. has had an immigration rate around 8% for the last 200 years. Japan’s is nearly zero and likely to stay there.