Beyond the blunt, crude fact that America is getting less white, there’s a more uplifting reason to believe that the political exploitation of race may be losing its force: As a nation we’ve become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of marriages between whites and blacks, while 54 percent disapproved. As late as 1991 only a plurality of 48 percent approved. By 2002, however, 65 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages; by June 2007, that was up to 77 percent.
This may not seem directly relevant to politics. After all, nobody is proposing to reinstate the laws that once existed against interracial marriage. But the ability of the right to exploit racial tension has little to do with actual policies, and a lot to do with tapping into primal emotions. If those primal emotions are losing their intensity—and they are—the strategy loses its force.
The ebbing of racism doesn’t translate into an immediate political revolution. The deep South, in particular, will probably remain strongly Republican for some time to come. But the Southern strategy is literally fraying at the edges: Border states, a category that now includes Virginia, are becoming increasingly competitive for Democrats. In fact the upset victory of James Webb over George Allen in the 2006 Virginia Senate race was a perfect illustration of the way old-fashioned racism can interact with immigration in a way that undermines movement conservatives. Many people thought so highly of the political talent exhibited by Allen, a California yuppie who had reinvented himself as a Southern good old boy, that they believed he had a good chance of becoming the next Republican presidential nominee. But then came the Macaca incident: Allen began taunting S. R. Sidharth, a dark-skinned aide to Webb who is American born but of Indian ancestry, with what turned out to be an obscure racial epithet. The incident, caught on video (as everything is these days) was enough to put Webb over the top.
The importance of the shifting politics of race is almost impossible to overstate. Movement conservatism as a powerful political force is unique to the United States. The principal reason movement conservatives have been able to flourish here, while people with comparable ideas are relegated to the political fringe in Canada and Europe, is the racial tension that is the legacy of slavery. Ease some of that tension, or more accurately increase the political price Republicans pay for trying to exploit it, and America becomes less distinctive, more like other Western democracies where support for the welfare state and policies to limit inequality is much stronger.
Possibly the most stunning part of that Pew report on long-term trends in attitudes was the section on social and “values” issues. It’s startling to realize how intolerant America was, not that long ago, and how much attitudes have changed. For example, in 1987 more than half of respondents believed that schools should have the right to fire homosexual teachers, and 43 percent believed that AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior. By 2007 those numbers were down to 28 and 23 percent, respectively. Or take the question of women’s role in society: In 1987 only 29 percent completely disagreed with the proposition that women should return to their traditional roles, but by 2007 that was up to 51 percent.
The extent of the change in attitudes is impressive. The political implications are less clear. As I explained in chapter 9, political scientists are skeptical about the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” thesis: crunching the numbers, they find little evidence that religious and social issues, as opposed to race, have actually led a large number of working-class whites to vote against their economic interests. “Values voters” seem to be decisive only in close races. Nonetheless, to the extent that social and religious intolerance has been exploited by movement conservatives, the scope for that kind of exploitation is clearly diminishing.
Furthermore there are hints of a dynamic on social and religious issues that in some ways resembles the dynamic on race: As the country becomes more tolerant the dependence of the Republican Party on an intolerant base puts it increasingly out of step with the majority. The case in point is Kansas itself, where a number of prominent Republicans became Democrats after the 2004 election in protest over the local GOP’s dominance by the religious right. “I got tired of theological debates over whether Charles Darwin was right,” declared the former state Republican chairman as he switched parties. The Kansas Republican Party has responded by demanding that members sign a seriously creepy, vaguely Maoist-sounding “unity pledge,” in which they declare, “I will, at no point in my political or personal future, find cause to transfer my Party loyalty.”[8] At the time of writing, Kansas has a Democratic governor, and Democrats hold two of its four House seats.
Americans are worried about an economy that leaves most of them behind, even in supposedly good times. They’ve become less susceptible to the politics of distraction—appeals to racial and social intolerance, fearmongering on national security. For all these reasons it seems probable that movement conservatism’s moment has passed.
Liberals need, however, to stand for more than simply not being as bad as the people who have been running America lately. Think again of the New Deaclass="underline" The failure of conservative governance made it more or less inevitable that Democrats would win the 1932 election, but it was by no means certain that the victor would leave a lasting legacy. What made the New Deal’s influence so enduring was the fact that FDR provided answers to inequality and economic insecurity. These included, first and foremost, the institutions of the American welfare state—above all, Social Security. As we’ve seen, the New Deal was also remarkably successful at flattening the U.S. income distribution, without adverse effects on economic growth.
Now we’re once again a nation disgusted by conservative governance. It’s not 1932 all over again, but the odds are pretty good that Democrats—and relatively liberal Democrats, at that—will soon hold both Congress and the White House. The question is whether the new majority will accomplish anything lasting.
They should be able to do it. Liberals today have one big advantage over liberals seventy-five years ago: They know what to do, on at least one important issue. In the next chapter I’ll explain the overwhelming case for completing the New Deal by providing Americans with something citizens of every other advanced country already have: guaranteed universal health care.
11 THE HEALTH CARE IMPERATIVE
The United States, uniquely among wealthy nations, does not guarantee basic health care to its citizens. Most discussions of health care policy, my own included, begin with facts and figures about the costs and benefits of closing that gap. I’ll get to those shortly. But let me start with a different kind of question: What do we think is the morally right thing to do?
There is a morally coherent argument against guaranteed health care, which basically comes down to saying that life may be unfair, but it’s not the job of the government to rid the world of injustice. If some people can’t afford health insurance, this argument would assert, that’s unfortunate, but the government has no business forcing other people to help them out through higher taxes. If some people inherit genes that make them vulnerable to illness, or acquire conditions at some point in their lives that make it impossible for them to get medical insurance from then on, well, there are many strokes of bad luck in life. The government can’t fix them all, and there’s no reason to single out these troubles in particular.