ME? A TRIBESMAN?
Journal entry:
In the library this afternoon, I came across the following passage. It’s by the political scientist Judson L. James, writing in a book entitled American Party Politics.
Development of a partisan affiliation occurs early in the individual’s socialization into political life. Except for the vaguest orientation toward government and governmental authority, and particularly the president, partisan identification is the earliest political attitude developed….
A person usually begins to regard himself as a Democrat or Republican before reaching voting age…. A party is evaluated well before one has any considerable amount of interest in or knowledge about politics. The “good guys” and the “bad guys” are largely defined by early associations: only later does one acquire a rationale for this choice.
I found the passage infuriating.
“What are you so upset about?” David Brady asked. David’s eyes are intensely blue. He fixed then on me.
“Tribal politics are the way America works,” he continued. “I mean, look at you and me. I was born in an Irish neighborhood. My father worked in a factory. Everybody we knew sent their kids to parochial school, went to mass on Sunday, and had a picture of the pope in their kitchen. Membership in the Democratic Party might as well have been one more sacrament of the church.
“You? You grew up in a suburban town in upstate New York. I’m guessing here, but I’d bet all the fathers in your neighborhood had white-collar jobs, that everybody was of between one half and one hundred percent English extraction, and that on Sunday most of the families went to Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Methodist, or Episcopal churches. Am I right?”
I felt suddenly uncomfortable.
“That’s more or less what the neighborhood was like,” I admitted. “But that’s not why we were Republicans.”
David’s eyes shone with amusement. “Don’t tell me. Everybody in your neighborhood just happened to come to the same position on the issues.”
“Something like that,” I replied.
David laughed.
“Look, everybody in the neighborhood had a decent education,” I said. “They thought things through. They were Republicans by choice.”
David laughed again. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “What’s your earliest memory of being a Republican?”
I thought about it for a moment. As soon as the memory came to me, I knew it would play into David’s hands. But he was eyeing me. I had no choice. At the entrance of the Clayton Avenue Elementary School, I told him, rose a staircase divided by a brass handrail running down the middle. After their school buses dropped them off each morning in the autumn of 1964, the children who supported Johnson for president would go up one side of the staircase, the children who supported Goldwater up the other. I trudged up the Goldwater side. I have no idea how, but by the time I was in second grade I knew I was a Republican.
David roared with laughter. He slapped his knee. “I love it,” he said. “A Republican by choice at the age of seven.”
* * *
Why had I never before recognized the tribal character of the GOP? Thinking about it after my conversation with David Brady, I decided part of the reason involved the peculiarities of my own background. During my six years as a White House speechwriter, I had spent six or seven days a week researching issues and honing arguments. It had become firmly fixed in my mind that politics consisted of just that, issues and arguments. Republicans, I assumed, had given politics a great deal of thought. They had considered the issues. They had weighed the arguments. Then they had concluded that the GOP represented their own beliefs. In making this assumption I exhibited what the French call a déformation professionnelle. I had spent so much time writing speeches that I almost believed people were Republicans because Ronald Reagan and I had personally persuaded them.
The other part of the reason, I decided, was one of my many besetting sins, overweening pride. Me? A tribesman? Naturally I resisted the idea. It was so unflattering. Democrats as tribesmen? Now that was a notion I had no trouble with at all. I’m embarrassed to lay them out for you here, but I discovered I was carrying some ugly, half-formed thoughts in the back of my mind. Irish Catholics like David Brady, I believed, were one kind of people, while WASPs like me were another. The Irish—and for that matter, the Italians, the Slavs, and other immigrants—came to this country late. Ward bosses in city neighborhoods signed them up as Democrats by giving them turkeys for Christmas. They raised their children as Democrats because they didn’t know any better. But us WASPs? We’d been in this country since the beginning. At home here, we were able to consider the issues carefully. We became Republicans because that’s what thinking people do.
I was wrong. I grant it. I may not have liked the idea, but I was born a Republican just as surely as David Brady was born a Democrat.
Journal entry:
When I grew up, Vestal, New York, was a town of twenty thousand, overwhelmingly white, mostly Protestant. It was a good place, I see in retrospect, to raise children. The patterns of life were simple: The fathers worked while the mothers stayed home, and when one mother in the neighborhood had to go out to do the grocery shopping she could ask another to keep an eye on her kids. Everybody had a roomy house with a big yard. In the summer children would play tag, running up and down the front yards, while in the winter they would sled, packing snow and ice together to make a course through the backyards. Vestal was so middle-American that everybody actually thought our high school alma mater (“Along the rippling Susquehanna/The shadow of our high school falls”) contained some pretty good poetry.
A couple of days ago I was trying to tell David Brady that my hometown was a paragon of rationality, the habitation of citizens who considered their politics with great deliberation, supporting the Republican Party as a conscious act. Now I see that Vestal stood in direct line of descent from the small towns throughout the North that supported first the Federalists, then the Whigs, then the Republicans. My hometown, a tribal encampment.
GO AHEAD, LOVE YOUR TRIBE
Yet even after I got used to the idea that I myself was born into a tribe, the tribal nature of our political parties still troubled me. Americans were supposed to cast their ballots as the result of a deliberative process, listening to opposing points of view, then choosing the candidate that best represented their own conclusions. I may have overdone the importance of issues and arguments when I was in the White House, but surely they had their place. Now I saw that most Americans instead derived their predispositions to vote one way or the other, Republican or Democratic, from their family background, their ethnicity, their religion—factors that have nothing to do with a deliberative process.
“You’re a political scientist,” I said to Seymour Martin Lipset over lunch. “Doesn’t that pose a problem for political theory?”
Marty Lipset, who divides his time between George Mason University and Stanford, is the author of Political Man, first published in 1959 and still one of the basic texts of American political science. A big man with dark hair and dark eyes who loves to talk about political theory, Marty swatted a beefy hand through the air to wave my objection aside. “Sure it poses a problem,” Marty replied. “If you buy the idea that every American is supposed to follow debates on television and clip newspaper articles on the candidates as if they were all members of the League of Women Voters. Thank God it doesn’t work that way.”
The political parties, Marty argued, provide the American system with stability and continuity. To do so, each of the parties must be able to rely upon large numbers of loyalists, supporters who will remain faithful to their party even when the party proves unpopular in the country at large.
“Look what happened when the Republicans got crushed by Franklin Roosevelt,” Marty said. In 1932, the Republican Herbert Hoover lost the presidential election to the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide. Four years later, in 1936, the Republican Alf Landon los
t to Roosevelt in an even bigger landslide. “Tribal loyalties were the only reason the Republican Party managed to hang on at all,” Marty said. The wealthy, managerial class and the small-town and rural populations of the Midwest and North continued to vote Republican, giving the GOP a base from which to rebuild.
“Now imagine it hadn’t happened that way,” Marty continued. “Imagine that even the bankers and farmers forgot about their loyalties to the GOP and just asked themselves who seemed like the more attractive candidate, Hoover or Roosevelt in 1932 or Landon or Roosevelt in 1936.” The Republican defeats would have been even worse. The GOP would have suffered such massive defections that it would have effectively ceased to exist.
“After that, the Democrats would have faced nothing more than token opposition from a lot of scattered little groups,” Marty said. There would have been no continuing debate over the New Deal, no organized and sustained critique of Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy. It would not have been long before the Democrats, enjoying absolute power, would have demonstrated the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum, becoming corrupted absolutely. To name just one abuse, Franklin Roosevelt would have been able to get away with his notorious 1937 scheme to pack the Supreme Court. The system of checks and balances the founders devised would have been substantially overturned.
It occurred to me that Marty was overstating his case. That was fine by me. He was making an interesting point. But Marty must have detected some skepticism on my face. “Look,” he said, waving his hand again, “I hope you don’t think this hypothetical. It isn’t. All you have to do is look at Russia.”
Russia—lawless, corrupt, bankrupt, violent, and without any foreseeable prospect of climbing out of the mess that it’s in. Marty argued that a big part of the trouble is that Russia lacks a two-party system. “The only stable party is the Communist Party, which gets about a quarter to a third of the vote. The other parties are ad-hoc groupings based on personalities.” There are Putin people. There are Primakov people. But there are no large, enduring political entities that can grapple with issues independently of this or that strongman. In the parliamentary election of 1999, two of the parties were formed only weeks before the elections took place. “Those two parties came up from zero,” Marty said. “Any time you’ve got parties popping up like that you’ve got a very unstable and dangerous situation.” We keep hearing about how the Russians need a stable currency and more secure property rights. Those wouldn’t be a bad idea, Marty admitted. “But you know what the Russians could really use? A couple of functioning political parties.”
Political parties keep the American system stable—and tribal loyalties keep the parties stable. Seeking, so to speak, a second opinion, I presented Marty Lipset’s argument to David Brady. David subscribed to it himself. “As far as I’m concerned,” David said, “every American should get down on his knees every night and thank God that people like the Irish are loyal to the Democratic Party while people like you WASPs can’t stop being Republican even if you try.”
* * *
In turning to the Republican past, I had of course expected to learn something about GOP history. What I hadn’t counted on was quite so many lessons in humility.
First I discovered that I was ignorant. I had supposed the GOP was formed in opposition to slavery. Strictly speaking, I was correct. But I knew nothing of the continuity among the Republican, Whig, and Federalist parties. What would come to be known as the Republican Party formed not in the middle of the nineteenth century but in the earliest days of the nation’s existence. Membership has been handed down as it is handed down in all tribes—unconsciously. I cannot recall how I became a Republican. When I checked with him, neither could my older brother, Don. “I had blue eyes and brown hair and I was a Republican,” my brother said. “It was always just part of my identity.”
Then I discovered that although I had always looked down on people who don’t take their politics seriously, the GOP relies on them. When you think about it, who could live up to the standards the founders implied in the Constitution? The document is so rational, deliberate, and prudent. George Washington may have embodied all those qualities. Few others have even come close. Yet the very institutions the founders failed to take into account, our political parties, manage to mediate between Americans as they actually are—impatient, busy, never more than half interested in politics—and the alabaster coolness of the document by which the founders expected us to live. The preppie on the golf course who can’t name his congressman and the jock who would rather watch a football game than a presidential debate are just as useful to the Republican Party as I am—maybe more so. The GOP can always count on them. I take politics so seriously that if somebody founded a crackpot Reagan Party, I’d actually be tempted to break with the GOP to join it.
I even got a lesson in humility toward Democrats.
A couple of comments he had dropped over the years had led me to suspect that my cousin Dave was himself a Democrat. When I called him, he confirmed it. “I’ve been a Democrat all my life,” he said. I asked Dave for his earliest political memory.
“The year was 1964,” Dave replied after thinking for a moment. “Robert Kennedy was running for the Senate in New York State. There was a reception for Kennedy in Rochester, and my mom went. She heard him speak. Afterward she got the chance to shake his hand. I can remember her coming home and telling us how impressed she was.” The very year that I was trudging up the Goldwater side of my elementary school staircase, my cousin was listening to his mother extol the virtues of a Kennedy.
“Dave, do you think of yourself as English or Irish?” Although Dave’s father, my own father’s brother, Uncle Ken, is of entirely English descent, Dave’s mother, Aunt Rita, born Rita Kelly, is of entirely Irish descent.
“Irish,” Dave replied. “There’s no question about it. Mom was a big one for Irishness. I can remember St. Patrick’s Day in parochial school. Every year Mom sent my brother and me to school in little green bow ties.”
My cousin Dave, Irish Catholic—and a Democrat. I had always thought Democrats were either willfully ignorant or perverse. What other explanation could there be? Now I knew. Like Dave, people could be Democrats to honor the ways of their own tribe.
Chapter Three
TO LIVE AND DIE
IN DIXIE
Journal entry:
The South may be the new Republican heartland, but it still feels foreign to me. Taking off from Atlanta not long ago, I noticed that the city’s skyline contains as much glimmering glass and steel as that of Boston. Then I made the mistake of continuing to gaze out the window as the plane gained altitude. Outside Atlanta and its immediate suburbs, as far as I could tell, lies nothing but acre upon acre of scrub trees and red dirt. When I tried to imagine what life must be like down there, I found myself humming “Dueling Banjos” from the movie Deliverance.
QUESTION: What do you call the hillbillies who appeared in Deliverance?
ANSWER: Fellow Republicans.
All right. I’m being unfair. But the reader may as well know that in looking at the South, I’ll be starting out as a skeptic.
In the last several decades a curious event took place in American politics. It might be termed the Big Switch. The Republican Party, which used to be based in the North, has swapped bases with the Democratic Party, which used to be based in the South and the Rocky Mountains. The Big Switch was so pronounced that, as the map indicates, voting patterns in the presidential elections of 1896, before the Switch began, and of 1996, after the Switch was complete, amount to mirror images of each other. The change in the South has been especially dramatic: Dixie, which used to be the most reliably Democratic region in the nation, has become rock-solid for the GOP.
After learning that the region in which I grew up, the North, used to be the stronghold of the GOP, it made sense to look next at the region that is the stronghold of the GOP today. You might think that Republicans would be delighted to have conquered the Old Confedera
cy. Yet it turns out that there are some very shrewd Republicans who almost wish the Democrats had kept the South to themselves.
THE BIG SWITCH
The transformation of the South into Republican territory is actually the last part of the Big Switch. The North went Democratic first. The trend in the North began more than a century ago, during the great wave of immigration to the United States from Europe that lasted roughly from the 1880s until the enactment of strict quotas in 1924. Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Slavs, Scandinavians, and other immigrants settled in the cities of the Northeast and, to a lesser extent, the Midwest. By 1910, three-quarters of the inhabitants of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston were first- or second-generation immigrants. As far back as the eighteenth century the Democratic Party had attracted the support of workers in northern cities. Now the numbers of workers in northern cities expanded dramatically. It often took one or two generations for the new immigrants to become regular voters. But when they did vote, they voted Democratic. The North went Democratic simply because so many Democrats moved in.
The Rocky Mountain states participated in the Big Switch by going Republican during the last several decades, at roughly the same time as the South. The region’s original inhabitants were of two kinds. The first was farmers and ranchers. The second was silver miners. Both voted Democratic because the Democrats—notably under the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan—sought a currency based on silver rather than gold. A silver regime would have required the federal government to make massive new purchases of silver, thereby profiting the miners, while in effect inflating the currency, thereby profiting debtors, such as the farmers and ranchers, who borrowed heavily to bring livestock and equipment into the region. When the Rockies were developed after the Second World War, the population of the region expanded. Quickly outnumbering the thin Democratic population, the new arrivals tended to come more often from the Midwest and South, the first of which was already Republican, the second of which would soon be Republican, than from the urban Democratic strongholds of the Great Lakes and the Northeast. When they reached the Rockies, they found a constellation of special circumstances that nurtured Republican loyalties. Much of the land in the Rockies, for example, was, as it still is, owned by the federal government—in Idaho and Utah the proportion of land owned by the federal government is well over half. This prompts resentment of the federal government and a correspondingly favorable outlook on the anti-big government GOP. Hunting, to name a second example, is popular throughout the Rockies. This leads to high rates of gun ownership and, once again, a favorable outlook on the GOP, which through the years has devoted a great deal of energy to beating back Democratic gun control proposals. Add a growing Mormon population—Mormons, whose beliefs stress traditional morality, represent the most Republican religious denomination in the country—and you end up with a Republican stripe running from Idaho to Arizona.
It's My Party Page 4