Ellis G. Arnal, the former governor of Georgia, wrote a contrarian but, it turned out, highly accurate article in the October 1948 issue of the Atlantic Monthly called “The Democrats Can Win.” In it he emphasized the underlying strength of a Democratic coalition that “is described by its critics as a combination of the South, the labor unions, the city machines, and the intellectual Left. Not a wholly accurate description, it will serve.” I’ve already talked about the South and the unions. Let’s briefly consider his other two elements.
Urban political machines, based largely on the support of immigrants, predated the Roosevelt years. In fact, they had been a major source of Democratic support since the nineteenth century. And the New Deal’s policies had the effect, if anything, of undermining their power. The key to the machines’ appeal to urban voters was their ability to provide aid to families in trouble and patronage jobs; the New Deal’s expansion of the government social safety net and the rise in wages as a result of the Great Compression made these services less crucial. Nonetheless these urban machines were still powerful well into the 1960s, and their persistence helped Democrats win elections.
What about the “intellectual Left”? Obviously there have never been enough intellectuals to make them an important voting bloc for either party. But to focus on the mechanical side of things gives too little credit to the importance of message and ideas. In the 1930s the left had ideas about what to do; the right didn’t, except to preach that the economy would eventually heal itself. FDR’s success gave liberal intellectuals credibility and prestige that persisted long after the momentum of the New Deal had been largely exhausted—just as, in our own day, it remained common to assert that all the new ideas were on the right long after any real sense of innovation on the right was gone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith wryly remarked that among liberals, “To proclaim the need for new ideas has served, in some measure, as a substitute for them.” But the sense that new ideas came from the left remained an advantage of the Democrats.
Meanwhile, by the 1950s the Republican Party was in many ways a shadow of its former self. Before the Great Depression and the Great Compression, Republicans had two great political advantages: money, and the perception of competence. Contributions from a wealthy elite normally gave the Republicans a large financial advantage; and people tended to assume that the GOP, the party of business, the party of take-charge men like Herbert Hoover, knew how to run the country.
But the Great Compression greatly reduced the resources of the elite, while the Great Depression shattered the nation’s belief that business knows best. Herbert Hoover became the very symbol of incompetence. And after the triumph in World War II and the great postwar boom, who could credibly claim that Democrats didn’t know how to run things?
Still, the Republican party survived—but it did so by moving toward the new political center. Eisenhower won the White House partly because of his reputation from World War II, partly because the public was fed up with the Korean War. But he was also acceptable because he preached “moderation,” and considered those who wanted to roll back the New Deal “stupid.” The Republican Party became, for several decades, a true big tent, with room both for some unrepentant small-government conservatives and for big spending, big-government types like Nelson Rockefeller of New York. To get a sense of just how un-ideological the Republicans became, it’s helpful to turn to quantitative studies of voting behavior in Congress.
The seminal work here, already mentioned in chapter 1, is that of Keith Poole of the University of California, San Diego, and Howard Rosenthal of the Russell Sage Foundation, who have developed a systematic way of locating members of Congress along a left-right spectrum. (They also identify a second dimension of politics—race—which has been crucial in the rise of movement conservatism. But let’s leave that aside for now.) The method, roughly speaking, works like this: Start with roll-call votes on a number of bills that bear on economic issues. First, make a preliminary ranking of these bills on a left-to-right political spectrum. Second, rank members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on these bills. Third, use the ranking of legislators to refine the left-right ranking of the legislation, and repeat the process all over again. After a few rounds you’ve arrived at a consistent ranking of both bills and politicians along the left-right spectrum.[5] Poole, Rosenthal, and Nolan McCarty of Princeton University have applied this method to each Congress since the nineteenth century. What stands out from their results is just how modest the differences between Republicans and Democrats were in the fifties and sixties, compared with a huge gulf before the New Deal, and an even larger gap today.
Poole and Rosenthal measure the gap between the parties with an index of political polarization that, while highly informative, is difficult to summarize in an intuitive way. For my purposes it’s sufficient to look at two descriptive measures that behave very similarly to their index over time. One measure is what I’ll call “minority-party overlap”: the number of Democrats to the right of the leftmost Republican, when Republicans controlled Congress, or the number of Republicans to the left of the rightmost Democrat, when Democrats controlled Congress. The other measure is what I’ll call “minority-party crossover”: the number of members of the minority party who are actually on the other side of the political divide from their party—Democrats who are to the right of the median member of Congress, or Republicans to the left. In each measure more overlap indicates a less polarized political system, while the absence of overlap suggests that there isn’t a strong political center.
Table 2 shows these numbers for three Congresses: the 70th Congress, which sat in 1927–28 and 1928–29; the 85th Congress, which sat in 1957 and 1958; and the 108th Congress, which sat in 2003 and 2004. The table shows that congressional partisanship was much less intense in the 1950s than it had been before the New Deal—or than it is today. In the 70th Congress, in which Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, there was hardly any minority party overlap: only two Democrats were to the right of the leftmost Republican. And there was no minority party crossover: all Democrats were left of center. The situation was even more extreme in the 108th Congress, which was also controlled by Republicans: Every Democrat was to the left of the leftmost Republican, and needless to say there was no crossover. In the 85th Congress, however, which was controlled by Democrats, there were many Republicans to the left of the rightmost Democrat (largely because there were a number of quite conservative Southern Democrats.) More amazingly, nine Republican members of the House were literally left of center—that is, voted to the left of the median Congressman. That’s a situation that would be inconceivable today. For one thing, a twenty-first century Republican who took a genuinely left-of-center position would never get through the primary process, because movement conservatives would make sure that he faced a lavishly funded challenger, and because Republican primary voters, skewed sharply to the right, would surely support that challenger. In the fifties, however, Republicans couldn’t afford to enforce ideological purity if they wanted to win elections. As a result, actual liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, who would have been summarily excommunicated today, remained party members in good standing.
| Table 2. Measures of Similarity Between the Parties | ||
|---|---|---|
| Minority Party Overlap | Minority Party Crossover | |
| 70th Congress, 1927–29 | 2 | 0 |
| 85th Congress, 1957–58 | 112 | 9 |
| 108th Congress, 2003–4 | 0 | 0 |
5.
The actual process of estimation is considerably more sophisticated than what I’ve described, but is similar in spirit. See McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal,