The new wave: all the signs point to a major political realignment in the United States, with the two major parties either changing radically or being replaced. Is anyone paying attention? - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 26, 1994 by Michael Vlahos

All the signs point to a major political realignment in the United States, with the two major parties either changing radically or being replaced. Is anyone paying attention?

IT WAS A strange election. For the first time in decades, there was a real third-party presidential challenge, and its candidate got about 20 per cent of the vote. The new President was elected with only a plurality of the popular vote, but his party once again could claim the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. So, in spite of the rancor and uncertainty, the pundits persuaded themselves that the system still worked. Harper's even said after the election: " . . . how complete is the calm that succeeds the gale! We claim it a credit to our national system of government."

This was Harper's Weekly, the first issue of 1857, just four years before the Civil War. People had no idea of what lay ahead, and certainly no sense that it was so close at hand. American politics today may again be on the edge of upheaval, as happened in 1860, and also in 1828, 1896, and 1932.

How do we estimate the imminence of Big Change in American politics today? We can test the proposition against Sundquist's Sixteen. In 1973 the historian James Sundquist, then at the Brookings Institution, wrote a book called The Dynamics of the Party System, which was revised in 1982 to take into account the "Reagan revolution." Sundquist laid out sixteen preconditions that fit all four major realignments in the American party system. What do his preconditions tell us about politics and parties today.

1. A realignment has its origins in the rise of a new political issue or cluster of related issues.

Washington "experts" have been searching for the new issue for a long time. But there are issues and issues. The new issue is not a particular "matter of public concern," as definition 4(b) in Webster's has it. Look instead at 4(c): "the essential point; crux: the real issue." The real issue 4(c) may lurk inside a cluster of "issues" 4(b).

The first such cluster is grouped around a fear of moral decline. For instance, 65 per cent of Americans told pollsters in 1991 that family values had grown weaker in America in recent years. And polls show that such moral unease stretches over a wide range of social issues, from crime to divorce. Yet 90 per cent say they are satisfied with their own family life; so this is a fear for the future, a fear that a coming apart in the larger society--signaled by out-of-wedlock births, abortion, and teenage lawlessness--will inevitably limit and diminish people's lives and the hopes of their children.

The second cluster expresses the anxiety that a distinctive American identity is disintegrating. Poll questions that illuminate the choice between a unified American national identity and a multicultural vision of America demonstrate an overwhelming popular resistance to the latter and to government policies that seem to promote it. Thus, two-thirds of Americans regularly support a reduction in legal immigration, and there are similar majorities opposed to official bilingualism and ethnic quotas. The voters see government abetting a breakdown in national identity by pushing a multiculturalism that will mean an atomized world of tribes.

The third cluster is about fear and loathing of government. Polls find that 75 per cent of Americans think "the country needs to make major changes in the way the Federal Government works," because it is "incompetent" to solve problems; 73 per cent of all Americans believe the Federal Government creates more problems than it solves, and 63 per cent believe that government is "primarily an adversary" in their lives.

If we put these themes together, we can see a connection between an eroding future, a loss of civic meaning, and a government that not only fails to do what it is supposed to but also invades spheres of life it should leave alone. But people don't hate government as an abstraction--or isolation. They have not rejected government as laws and institutions; they have rejected the national elite which seems to run the government. Almost every poll that shows a decline of confidence in government also shows a loss of faith in non-governmental institutions, notably the press, labor unions, universities, and television. Not only Bill Clinton and Dick Gephardt have fallen in public esteem; Bob Woodward and Sam Donaldson have too.

There are significant exceptions to the decline in institutional respect, in particular the military which is astonishingly popular. But the military is the repository of older cultural and patriotic values. It is admired in proportion to its difference from the rest of the political elite, its disaffection from elite culture.

For the problem of a national ruling subculture at odds with the majority is the real issue in American politics today. Government has been personalized in the minds of most Americans as a society of yuppies who own Washington and its whole national network, from media to academia, from so-called Public Television to its hive of foundation and corporate sponsors. And people resent the elite's condescension expressed daily through the media even more than they resent the elite's power. There is its constant refrain that ordinary Americans are racist, sexist, and homophobic--a mob of malevolent Forrest Gumps--and that other (minority) Americans have to be protected from them by government.