Party hardy: most Americans agree with Democrats. But will they vote for them? - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Kenneth S. Baer

IN 1974, LANNY DAVIS--WI-IO WOULD ONE day be a White House special counsel in the Clinton administration, but at the time was a young New Left Democratic activist--wrote a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority. Surveying the wreckage of George McGovern's campaign against Richard Nixon two years earlier, Davis argued that the future of American politics lay in a Democratic majority built around the failed McGovern coalition--college-educated middle-class professionals and minorities, plus the white working class. At the nadir of McGovern's defeat, Davis believed, could be found the path to future Democratic dominance.

Twenty-eight years later, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have published a new book with the Same title arguing, essentially, the same thing. In their version of The Emerging Democratic Majority, the authors argue that since 1992, American politics has been in transition from an old order of Republican dominance--which began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and culminated in Ronald Reagan's in 1980--to an emerging Democratic majority built around professionals, non-whites, women, and the white working class. Their home is familiar to anyone who watched the presidential returns in 2000: the "blue" states of the Northeast, West Coast, and upper Midwest. But in contrast to the New Left liberalism of the McGoverniks, their politics is what Judis and Teixeira call "progressive centrism." The emerging Democratic majority supports a strong social safety net, yet retains a healthy respect for the free market, fiscal discipline, and incremental change. They favor an enabling, not mandating, federal government. They are tolerant of "alternative lifestyles" and embrace minorities, yet are opposed to quotas and reparations. They don't belong to McGovern's Democratic Party, or even Hubert Humphrey's, but to Bill Clinton's. And no matter what grand plans Karl Rove has for the GOP, it is Clinton's Democratic Party that will dominate the next political era. In other words, Judis and Teixeira argue, Lanny Davis was right--just 30 years too early.

Having followed both Judis's and Teixeira's work over the past decade, I picked up this book expecting another ideological salvo in the on-going factional wars within the Democratic Party. Teixeira and Judis have usually been aligned with labor-liberal intellectuals such as Jeff Faux, Stanley Greenberg, and Robert Kuttner, all of whom bemoaned Clinton's courting of suburbanites at the expense of the white working class and criticized his administration's fidelity to an agenda of fiscal discipline and leaner government at the expense of large social projects such as national health care.

But Judis and Teixeira seem to have undergone a conversion on the road to a Democratic majority. They have delivered a balanced, accessible volume that offers a well-reasoned and well-supported analysis. While the root of their argument is not entirely novel--it's been a staple of New Democratic thinking since the mid-1990s--Judis and Teixeira move the discussion forward as much through the new data, fresh arguments, and useful critiques of both sides as by the fact that it is they who are providing them. Put simply, after eight years of Clinton, the programmatic differences between most New and Old Democrats are not that vast. And with this growing consensus comes the potential for Democratic dominance as demographic and cultural trends move the electorate toward a Democratic Party that has not only moved toward them, but also may be prepared for their arrival.

But before Democrats cue up "Happy Days Are Here Again," they'll have to grapple with that part of the McGovern legacy which Judis and Teixeira virtually ignore: the party's fractiousness. Putting these disparate social groups into a coalition is no easy task. Indeed, when it comes to putting ideas into action--recruiting candidates, crafting a message, targeting voters, allocating party resources--the gulf between Old and New Democrats is still wide. The challenge for Democrats, then, is no longer getting the party to tack to the winds of change, but to get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Professional Class Warfare

The Emerging Democratic Majority is meant to be the 21st century's answer to Kevin Phillips's 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which argued that socially conservative whites were disenchanted with the Democratic Party, creating an electoral opportunity for Nixon and the GOP. Judis and Teixeira hold that America is undergoing an equally profound realignment that, this time around, favors Democrats. The old industrial economy is giving way to a post-industrial one centered on producing ideas and services rather than goods. In this New Economy, there is a growing group of "professionals"--not quite executives and managers, but not the blue-collar workers producing the goods or the entry-level employees serving them, either. This "creative class" includes engineers, scientists, designers, architects, lawyers, teachers, and social workers. And it's a group that is highly educated, diverse, and--most importantly--was once solidly Republican.