Part I begins here.
I left off my history with the period of relative harmony between the parties, from about 1920 until the 1950s. Then on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown v. Board of Education. is one of the most important cases in U.S. history. It overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case that declared racial segregation constitution, and it paved the way for racial equality.
Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and their team, the NAACP lawyers who brought Brown v. Board to the Supreme Court worked for decades to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. (I’ll cite my own book as a source. Why not, right?)
Shortly after Brown v. Board was decided, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, kicking off the modern Civil Rights movement. (The timing is not coincidental. Just throwing in a plug for the lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston who made it all possible.)
The women’s movement followed from (and by some accounts, arose from) the Civil Rights Movement. The women’s movement powered by Black women (like Pauli Murray) who had led the civil rights charge, then transitioned to women’s rights.
The call for equality unleashed fury and anger. Those opposed to the Brown decision used the same argument the Confederacy had used: States should be free to decide. SCOTUS overreached.
When the Democrats embraced civil rights, the period of harmony between the parties ended.
About this time, what Boston College history professor Heather Richardson calls the Movement Conservatives arose, fueled by determination to dismantle the New Deal, which included all the regulatory agencies that prevented white men from cheating and looting. (For more on that, see this post.)
White Evangelicals similarly despised federal government intervention. Problems, they believed, should be left to God. The culture was patriarchal, and authoritarian.
Thus libertarians (who were opposed to any federal intervention) the KKK, and white evangelicals found themselves with a common goal: Dismantle the federal government.
The GOP devised the “Southern Strategy” to expand its base.
Max Boot sums up what happened next here:
We’re still riding the backlash from Brown v. Board. In fact, the backlash propelled Trump to the White House.
Political psychologists like Karen Stenner tell us that about 1/3 of the population has an authoritarian disposition. A certain portion of the population will always resist democracy and diversity.
One possibility for the immediate future (meaning the next 10-20 years) is that the GOP digs in as a white nationalist party.
As the GOP loses elections, and a Democratic-held government institutes reform, we can expect (if the political psychologists are correct) the GOP to shrink to about 1/3 of the population.
Look at how California voted in 2016.
In fact, the story of how California went from ruby red to deep blue gives one possibility of what can happen in the US. This chart shows how Californians voted from 1952-1988:
Until about 1991, California was a hotspot for what Heather Cox Richardson calls the Cowboy Myth. We owned the Japanese internment camps in WWII. We gave the nation Nixon and Reagan.
California always had minority communities. Spanish speakers and native people were here first. The Chinese were among the first to settle in San Francisco, after having built most of the railroads. But the electorate was mostly white due to (you guessed it) voter suppression.
Specifically, we had rampant (illegal) voter suppression against non-English speaking citizens.
California’s “Latino and Asian populations boomed in the 1990s.” This alarmed a certain segment of the population.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s came a candidate, Pete Wilson, stoking fears of immigrants.
Here is one of Wilson’s 1994 reelection campaign ads:
“They keep coming . . .” So Trumpian, it’s almost like it served as a model for Trump ads.
Wilson won the election, helped by voter suppression.
Wilson’s signature law, Prop 187 (“Save our State”) was a hateful piece of anti-immigrant anti-minority legislation. Prop 187 denied undocumented persons non-emergency health care, access to schools, etc.
It stoked anger against non-whites.
Shocked into action by Prop. 187, liberals and minority communities organized.
Lawsuits were filed challenging the voter suppression. Voter drives were organized. Lawyers formed voter protection orgs. Prop. 187 was successfully challenged in the courts.
By 2000, CA was mostly Democratic. But all wasn’t well.
California had a 2/3 rule, which required 2/3 vote among lawmakers before anything could pass. This meant the GOP—now a minority—could hold up the works. The 2/3 rule gave them great power. They could be obstructionists.
This was the part of the plot where the party representing a shrinking majority holds disproportionate power, and uses that power to obstruct. Sound familiar?
To get anything done, California either had to:
- get rid of the 2/3 rule,
- let the Republicans shut everything down until they got their way, or,
- work hard on elections until 2/3 of the elected representatives were Democrats.
Guess which happened?
We did it the hard way: Worked hard on elections.
I’ve heard some absurd arguments for how California really turned blue, but I won’t refute them here.
OK, Ok. I’ll refute two of them.
False Claim #1: The supermajority happened because conservatives fled after California started enacting liberal policies.
How silly is that? Liberal policies couldn’t happen until AFTER we had a supermajority.
False Claim #2: California turned blue because white workers left CA because it became too expensive, leaving only wealthy “elites.”
This one is just as silly. We have a $12 minimum wage and lots of protection for workers. And we have a very progressive tax code, meaning the rich pay more taxes (which is good for workers). Besides most of the workers weren’t white. Why would only white workers leave the state for economic reasons?
Aside: Given how California finally turned blue (the hard way, campaigning, one election at a time) you can see why I’m a believer that elections fix problems—even problems in which a minority holds most of the power because it obstructs and suppresses votes.
The states most likely to follow CA’s lead share CA’s demographics. Looking at you, Texas. CA’s white population is about 37%. In Texas, the white population is about 42%.
Note: Turn Texas blue with its 38 electoral votes and you end the GOP’s electoral college advantage.
States with a large number of non-whites are in the South and Southwest.
Red states in the South are really voter suppression states⤵️
Makes sense, right? Shrink a white nationalist party by working on the voter suppression problem and mobilizing minority communities. No surprise: This is exactly what Stacey Abrams (who knows about losing an election to cheaters) is working on.
It happens like this: As Democrats assume more power, they enact legislation that makes voter suppression harder, creating a cycle.
Enacting voter protection legislation enables non-white supremacists to be elected, thereby dooming white minority rule, and shrinking the GOP.
It’s simple math.
Texas and GA are on the brink.
If we reduce voter suppression, we should see a shift in the map: the South and West (formerly strongholds of hierarchy and white male dominance) will become Democratic.
The South and West would then join the northeast corridor to create a formidable Democratic block.
Sounds great, right? Well, there are a few obstacles.
Problem #1: The white nationalists will not willingly give up their power. California can still produce a Devin Nunes. They won’t go away and they remain dangerous.
Problem #2: What happens to the traditional conservatives? Do they get their own party?
First, some definitions. The Fox-Trump-GOP is not a ‘conservative’ party. It is a reactionary (or regressive) party. Political psychologists Capelos and Katsanidou define reactionism as “a forceful desire to return to the past.”’ They’re willing to destroy to get there. The “again” in Make America Great Again signifies reactionary politics.
So what is conservatism? That is the question. Stuart Stevens explains that actually, nobody knows:
If the conservatives want their own party, they have to recreate American conservatism from the ground up, and attract a majority of voters.This takes time.
The only time we had what might be called a traditionally conservative party, from the 1920s until the 1950s, conservatives were ‘pro-business.’ For the extremists who eventually took over the party, this meant no regulation.
Well, the business and industrial centers of the US are in New York and California, and these are democratic strongholds. I suspect this is because FDR had it right. Business needs to be regulated to save itself from its own worst impulses. Without regulation, industry destroys. Examples: The environment. The subprime mortgage debacle. When Andrew Jackson destroyed the central bank, effectively deregulating the banking and financial industries, he sent the nation into our first serious depression..
If conservatives wrest control of the GOP from the white nationalists (or form their own party), they’ll have to figure out how to win elections without outsourcing voter mobilization to Fox News or the NRA, and without these guys:
Both options open to conservatives who want their own party (retake control of the GOP or form their own) present the same question: Where do guys like those go?
There has always been a party that welcomed them. The Trump era showed us how many of them there are. Which party do they join?
OK, time to talk about the 2-party system.
No, and George Washington warned against them, but they’re now deeply entrenched.
The framers of the Constitution imagined no parties, but the constitution they designed doesn’t work well with more than two. That’s because the framers avoided a parliamentary system.
A presidential system with multiple parties creates problems. For example, if the people directly elect a strong chief executive and the vote is split, say, 4 ways, you run the risk of a person becoming president with 30% of the vote. So this guy could easily win:
See the problem? He could also more easily get elected to Congress. To make it harder for a fringe extremist to become president, we have the Twelfth Amendment:
If no presidential candidate achieves a majority, the House selects the president from the top three candidates. (I don’t actually see that working well either).
In this paper, prof. Mainwaring argues that multiparty presidential democracies are difficult to sustain because such a president represents a minority of voters. (Note that states are basically presidential systems with Constitutions modeled on the US Constitution.)
So unless we entirely change our form of government or risk minority rule, we’re better off with a 2-party system.
This brings us to another obstacle: Winning a majority in a two-party system means being in a big tent. A big tent sounds good, but lots of people will hate it.
I guarantee that if you’re under a tent with more than half the voters, you will not agree on all issues. Big tents require compromise. It means getting along with people who hold views you hate and did things you despise. Lots of parties mean little tents. Little tents mean being with only friends.
If the conservatives split from the liberals and (wisely) refuse to join with the reactionaries, we have (at least) 3 parties, which means someone with 33% of the vote can become president, which increases the chances of another Trump.
So it’s possible that, for the foreseeable future, the white nationalists need their own party and the rest of us will have to learn to get along under a big tent to avoid leaders coming to power with 30% of the vote.
Are we all up to it?
