A new GOP?

Public Interest, Fall, 2004 by James W. Ceaser, Daniel Disalvo

THE midterm elections of 2002 brought the Republican party to the high point of its political strength in the modern era. For the first time since 1954, Republicans held the presidency as well as a majority in both the House and the Senate. President George W. Bush had led his party to gains in both houses of Congress, an unusual achievement for an incumbent party in a midterm election, and this victory seemed to provide him, for a moment at least, with the popular mandate he failed to win in the 2000 election. Republicans also had the edge in the states, with a majority of governors and control of slightly more state legislative chambers.

The GOP had clearly come a long way since 1980, when Democrats dominated at the national and state levels. Except for the presidency, where the GOP had fared well since 1952, the Republican party of that era looked like--and, more importantly, acted like--a permanent minority. But the electorate's perception of failure in Democratic leadership under President Jimmy Carter, both domestically and internationally, opened the door to a Republican revival. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 as an apostle of national optimism and renewed resolve in foreign affairs started a slow-moving electoral wave, punctuated by a powerful surge in 1994, in favor of Republicans. As shown in Table 1, the Republican party during this period has managed to achieve at least parity with the Democrats, if not a slight advantage, and by most accounts Republicans have done more than Democrats to set the agenda of American politics. Two of the major accomplishments of Bill Clinton's presidency, the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, were in fact "Republican" measures.

Will Republicans be able to maintain and consolidate their current position, or has the party now reached a peak from which its support will begin to ebb? Electoral analysts generally approach this question by studying voter groups and demographic trends. This method may be effective up to a point, but it ignores the impact of major events--those famous "tides in the affairs of men"--that can determine a party's fortunes. A moment of this kind is now at hand. President Bush has identified the Republican party with a distinct foreign policy, which he has justified by recourse to certain fixed and universal principles--namely that, in his words, "liberty is the design of nature" and that "freedom is the right and the capacity of all mankind." Not since Lincoln has the putative head of the Republican party so actively sought to ground the party in a politics of natural right. This has led his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, to brand the Bush administration the most "ideological" of recent times. Victory for President Bush in November will surely vindicate his policies and principles. Defeat will mean, at a minimum, a curtailment of the Bush foreign policy, and will also likely bring an end to his understanding of the Republican party.

Who are today's Republicans?

To listen to the Republican party's numerous detractors, the GOP today is a "coalition of the willing" made up of white racists from the South and rural regions, religious fanatics, the rich (but only the greedy among them), plus a handful of neoconservative Jewish intellectuals. This characterization, while perhaps unusually crude as political portraits go, can serve as a useful template for analysis.

Republicans today do indeed enjoy a clear advantage in the South, and since so few African Americans vote Republican (whether in the South or elsewhere), the Republican lead rests necessarily on white Southern voters. George W. Bush swept the South in 2000, although a few states were very close, and over the past decade the GOP has seen its greatest gains across the board in this region. Because the South, when it was Democratic, was the region of one-party rule in support of segregation, those bent on demonizing the GOP have tried to depict it as a replacement of the old Southern Democrats. These critics pounced, for example, on then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's remarks at Strom Thurmond's one-hundredth birthday celebration, in which he lamented Thurmond's failed 1948 presidential election bid. (Lott was forced to step down as a result.) But this "replacement thesis" fails utterly to recognize that the South today is hardly the same South of half a century ago. Civil rights legislation, generational change, and massive migration from other parts of the country--especially by Midwestern Republicans--have transformed the region. The reality is that the GOP has become the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history. Republicans appeal to the same entrepreneurial, socially conservative, and patriotic voters in the South that they do in other parts of the country, with the only difference being that there are more of these voters in the South than elsewhere. Of the important Republican leaders from the South--including George W. Bush, William Frist, John Warner, and Jeb Bush--none can be fairly associated, either directly or by code, with the views of the old Democratic party.