As the Bush presidency enters its final, flailing year in office, the Democrats’ hopes of avenging the memory of their last two bitter presidential election defeats are high. The party’s current favourite for the nomination, Hilary Clinton, has begun to build a consistent and solid lead over her most likely Republican opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, and, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the polls indicate that the Democrats should not only retain, but also strengthen, their hold on Capitol Hill.
Add to that George Bush’s rock-bottom approval ratings and surveys indicating that a large majority of Americans believe their country is heading in the wrong direction, and the constellation of forces needed to deliver an across the board Democratic win next November are beginning to fall into place.
Much could go wrong, of course, as befits probably the most open presidential election – for the first time since 1928, neither an incumbent president nor vice president will be on the ballot paper – in decades. On both the Democrat and Republican sides, the potential for upsets remains in the new frontloaded and claustrophobic primary calendar. And whoever emerges as the Democrat nominee will have to brace themselves for a ferocious assault from the right.
But it’s also just possible that we are witnessing the turning of the high tide of modern American conservatism, and, as it retreats, an opportunity for the Democratic party not simply to win next year, but also to build a coalition which sustains it in power over the longer term.
Bush’s victory three years ago left the Republican party arguably in its strongest position since 1928: the president re-elected with a strong popular vote lead and the Republicans’ majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate strengthened. Bush was, moreover, surfing on a strong historical tide. The modern conservative movement, which first began to emerge in the 1950s and had managed to secure the nomination of Barry Goldwater as Republican presidential candidate in 1964, has landed a series of blows on liberal America over the past 30 years: shattering the Democrats’ hold on the once ‘solid south’ in 1968; electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980; and ending 40 years of Democrat control of Capitol Hill with Newt Gingrich’s ‘Republican revolution’ in 1994.
Seven of the last 10 presidential elections have been won by a Republican party which, at the national level at least, is now firmly in the grip of the conservative movement. And that movement – with its belief in low taxes and high military budgets, opposition to government, and steadfast commitment to conservative social values – has also shaped and constrained the terrain on which policy is debated and elections fought.
But while Karl Rove’s hope, that the Bush presidency would represent the culmination of these trends and the cementing of a permanent Republican majority, appeared to be born out by the 2004 elections, the picture now looks far less clear. Last year’s Democrat victory in the Congressional elections – 30 gains in the House, six in the Senate, six gubernatorial wins and 321 state legislative seat gains – appears to be more than just a rejection of Bush’s policy in Iraq, his mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or the series of scandals which hit the Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Instead, as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, argue, the 2006 elections suggests the trends which were developing prior to 9/11 have ‘reasserted themselves with a vengeance’. With the old New Deal coalition, which had sustained Democratic domination of national politics from 1932 to 1968, ripped apart during the conservative era that followed, Democrat hopes by the late 1990s had come to rest on growing support among three groups – women voters, college-educated professionals, and minorities – supplemented by splitting the declining but still critical white working-class vote with the Republicans. This emerging coalition allowed the Democrats to win two presidential elections in the 1990s and fight the Republicans to a virtual draw in 2000.
The domination of American politics by the issue of national security in the wake of 9/11, however, gave Bush an opening to play the Republicans’ traditional trump card and raid the Democratic vote; an opportunity he skilfully exploited in both the 2002 Congressional elections and in 2004. But this upswing in Republican support, last year’s elections suggest, has been temporary. ‘The electorate of 2006 was like the electorate of 2000 – only more so,’ argue Judis and Teixeira, ‘all the groups that had been part of the emerging Democratic majority in the late 1990s came roaring back into the fold.’ And groups such as Hispanics, single and college-educated women, and professionals are all set to increase as a percentage of the electorate.
The potential for the Democrats to create a new progressive majority rests on more than demographics, however. Stan Greenberg, a former pollster to Bill Clinton, believes that ‘the scale of the shift away from the conservative ideology and its policies is breathtaking.’ Pew Research Surveys, which track Americans’ social attitudes, have, for instance, seen a sharp increase in the number of people agreeing that ‘government should care for those that can’t care for themselves’ – up from 57 per cent in 1994 to nearly 70 per cent today. At the same time, support for abortion and gay rights has risen and socially conservative ballot initiatives on both were defeated last year. On foreign policy, support for multilateralism has also risen.
While public opinion appears to be swinging decisively against conservatism, divisions within the American right as to how to dig themselves out of the hole in which they now find themselves are growing. Believers in small government survey ballooning federal spending and deficits and accuse the Bush administration and its former allies in the Republican Congress of betraying core conservative principles. Libertarians suggest social conservatives are frightening off moderate voters; social conservatives respond that it was only because their ‘values voters’ turned out in 2004 that John Kerry is not now preparing to run for a second term. And, of course, isolationist ‘paleoconservatives’ assail neoconservatives for saddling the Republicans with utopian missions overseas, including the deeply unpopular war in Iraq.
But, warns Greenberg, the legacy of the Bush administration for Democrats is more complicated than it might at first seem. While a majority of Americans now say they want to see a more active government – two-thirds, for instance, back stronger regulation of business to tackle global warming and, by a margin of two-to-one, voters opt for universal health care – the sheer scale of the Bush administration’s incompetence and failure has seriously dented the reputation of government more generally. Perceptions that politicians put their own interests above those of the public and that government is unaccountable and wasteful run high thus, Greenberg argues, undermining ‘people’s faith in the very instrument that we as progressives want to use to solve problems’. ‘To have any chance of getting heard on their agenda,’ he suggests, ‘Democrats need to stand up and take on government – not its size or scope, but its failure to be accountable – and deliver the results that people expect for the tax they pay.’
And the current crop of Republican hopefuls appear to have decided that competence, not conservatism, rests at the heart of their party’s current difficulties. By pledging their fidelity to Bush’s foreign policy and to the conservative totems of tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government, while also stressing their executive experience, candidates like Mitt Romney and Giuliani are placing their faith in the belief that Americans’ patience with conservatism, as opposed to its incompetent practioners over the past seven years, is not yet exhausted. If that gamble proves correct, it will speak volumes for the remarkable resilience of American conservatism. If not, the Democrats will have a narrow window of opportunity to prove that they have a credible alternative to a movement whose influence has, for the past three decades, reached far beyond America’s shores.