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Kincaid's Site

Making Sense of U.S. Politics

Let's start by looking at where we've been.

The present period began in the late 1960's when the Republicans figured they could win elections with racial appeals to an overwhelmingly white electorate. This was Richard Nixon's famous "Southern Strategy." But the racial appeals had to be coded -- "law and order," "welfare cheats," "quotas" -- because even then it was not socially acceptable to be an open racist. So this was only a limited strategy, though it continues today, because it had to be kept under cover. By now an entire generation has grown up never knowing a time when one could say openly -- without being immediately vilified -- that whites are superior to non-whites. And as long as the antidiscrimination laws remain in force, making it illegal to act on any racist attitudes one may harbor, the days of really open racism are unlikely to recur.

Meanwhile, of course, the country is undergoing a demographic change, toward a non-white majority, which makes it ever harder to even contemplate a serious roll-back of racial progress. We should therefore act on the assumption that -- however slow and painful the progress -- we can crush any real backlash.

So in the late 70's, the supply-siders made a fundamentally unprincipled alliance with the religious right and similar cultural and "family-values" forces. This alliance enabled the Right to win a series of elections with phony populist appeals to "mainstream" values -- which were already well removed from how people were actually living -- and with economic policies which kept things just good enough for just enough people. (Meanwhile, of course, the wealthy were making out like, well, bandits.) This electoral strategy was helped by the general collapse of New Deal liberalism, which left people with no alternative and caused voter turn-outs to fall.

But the "disconnect" between the family-values rhetoric and the actual lifestyles of the people always presented a potential problem. Again, an entire generation has grown up never knowing a time when it was seriously unacceptable to live together unmarried. The result has been that the religious right has had surprisingly few real policy victories, and there has also been the real possibility of a socially libertarian backlash.

Free-market policies have brought much of the world -- Russia, East Asia, Latin America -- into a serious slump, and most people doubt the U.S. can be kept free of that forever. (For a while there, it looked like the trigger for a collapse would be seeing the stock-market bubble burst because of impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton because of his "zipper problem" -- wouldn't that have been delicious?)

With luck, this could be the beginning of the end of the conservative cycle.

The American political system was set up in the Eighteenth Century by a bunch of elitists who were determined to keep the "riff-raff" out of power. So they set it up to make sure that not much could get done unless the overwhelming majority of the population wanted it -- mere majorities are not enough. We need a majority in the House, two-thirds in the Senate, control of the White House, and the consent of a judiciary appointed for life. That was intentional.

Add to that the political party structure, which is set up so that there can be only two real parties, with any chance of gaining power, both of them gravitating around the political center. Partly this comes from the high barriers to the ballot which the existing parties have set up to keep others out. But mostly it comes from the "first past the post" way we run elections, with the candidate getting the most votes being elected -- even if most voters wanted other candidates. This makes any candidate without enough support to try to come in first a "spoiler," and a vote for such a candidate is basically wasted. This helps keep new ideas from even being heard.

Also keeping out new ideas is the funding system for our election campaigns, which is essentially legalized bribery. The only way a party or candidate can get into the media is to raised incredible amounts of money -- by cozying up to wealthy individuals and interests.

What all this leads to is a political system in which the needs of the non-wealthy majority cannot be met. Because their needs are not met, people see no point to getting involved -- even to the extent of voting. So their needs are totally ignored. So there is no point to their participation. So . . . but you get the idea

We need to make a few fundamental reforms in the way our political process works to make it responsive again. (Okay, maybe it never was.) We could really use:

• Proportional representation, so that the government really reflects the views of the voters
• Public funding of campaigns and free access to the broadcast media, so that ideas that don't have big money behind them can be heard
• Easier ballot access, so that more groups can be heard

This is a tall order, but these things will be necessary if we are to make any serious progress.

However . . .

Sorry folks, but we have to do some math here. According to the Census Bureau, the present population is about one quarter non-white. That is expected to rise to almost half by the middle of the new century, but we can't really wait that long. For now, we have to work with an electorate that's maybe fifteen per cent non-white -- many Asians and Hispanics aren't citizens yet, non-whites tend to have lower participation rates anyway, and we should never assume that all non-whites vote alike -- so to get a majority, we'll need about forty per cent of the white vote.

All right, now let's assume that we'll have a "gender gap," that white women will vote more heavily progressive than men. Gender gaps, however, never amount to more than a few percentage points -- ten per cent is optimistic. That means the least we can get by with is maybe forty-five per cent of the white female vote and thirty-five per cent of the white male vote.

In other words, make up your mind to it -- we'll have to get at least one third of white men to vote for our side if we want to win elections. And that is just to get a simple majority. To make serious change, we'll need more than that. A winning strategy must be solid on issues of racial and sexual equality, therefore, but it cannot be openly hostile to white men.

This is where building the coalition largely around economic issues comes in. It's not because economics matter more than other issues, but because it is what can unite a coalition large enough to get things done. We don't really have a lot of choice.

There is no particular reason to hope for a Democratic victory -- Al Gore is certainly no prize from our point of view -- but a Republican defeat is crucial. The mid-term elections in 1998 gave the GOP a good scare. They are trying to distance themselves from the social reactionary politics which have been the basis of their electoral strategy for the last generation.

If they lose the White House again in 2000, and especially if they also lose one or both houses of Congress, it may spell the end of the strategy of trying to govern by running against "the Sixties." That in turn would mean the end of the main dividing lines of the last generation -- with the main achievements of the forces of equality and individual freedom intact. The Republicans would be left with the sucker bet of trying to win by promising tax-cuts for the well-off. The door could be open for creating a new governing coalition around greater economic equality and (hopefully) reorganizing the corporate economy on a democratic and participatory basis.

But first, we have to organize against the GOP -- even if not for the Dems -- in the next election.