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McCain's success means Democratic distress
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March 6, 2000 | The party is the Democratic Party. Forget everything the talking heads have told you. McCain's success in winning the votes of Democrats and independents in open primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan and elsewhere bodes ill for the Democratic Party. Even if Al Gore were to win the presidency, the prospects of a new Democratic majority look much weaker, thanks to McCain's campaign. Here's why: American politics is tribal, and there are only a few big tribes. From the 18th century to the present, the two most important tribes have been Yankees (New England Protestants and their descendants in the northern tier of the United States, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Northwest) and what I call Southrons (planters of the Deep South and their descendants and followers). There are a few other substantial tribes: Rednecks (Scots-Irish Highland Southerners), Ethnics (white European Catholics outside of the South, of whom Irish-American Catholics are the most important), Nordics (German- and Scandinavian-Americans, concentrated on the northern prairie), blacks (in the South and major cities nationwide), Jews and Latinos (a new group, concentrated in the Southwest). Putting combinations of these blocs together to make a national majority is like solving a word problem in high school math. You have to follow certain rules.
The first rule is that majorities of Yankees and Southerners can never be in the same party. They hate each other so much that they fought a civil war. From the administration of President Washington to the administration of President Clinton, the Yankees have been in the party that was the rival of the one that had most of the Southrons, and vice versa. If a Yankee comes into a room, the Southron will leave. The second rule of American national politics is this: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. For most of American history, Southrons have been allied with Ethnics or white Catholics in the North and Midwest. Why? They have nothing in common, apart from their common enemies -- the Yankee Protestants, whom working-class Ethnics hated for their wealth and anti-Catholic bigotry, and whom the Southrons hated as rivals for control of Washington. Having common enemies is enough to sustain an alliance, though. For the same reason, the Yankee Protestants have always been allied with Southern blacks and the black Southern diaspora throughout the United States. The enemies of blacks were the enemies of the Yankees -- Southern whites (whose social order was based on black subordination) and northern Catholic Ethnics (who competed with northern blacks for jobs and neighborhoods). The Yankees found white allies against the Southrons and Irish Catholics among Nordics-German and Scandinavian immigrants whose cultures were very similar to those of New England Protestants. The Rednecks of the Highland South have always been divided in their loyalties. During the Civil War, Lincoln, leader of the Northern Party, won the allegiance of the West Virginians and East Tennesseans (the fact that his Vice President Andrew Johnson was a Redneck helped). In 1992, Bill Clinton, the Redneck leader of the Northern Party, managed to win over a number of states in his native Highland South. The two main parties in American history have been the Northern Party -- the Yankee-Nordic-black alliance -- and the Southern Party -- the Southron-Catholic alliance. The Northern Party has been called the Federalists (in the 1800s), the National Republicans (in the 1820s), the Whigs (1830s-1850s) and the Republicans (1850s-1960s). The Southern Party has been called the Republicans (1800s), the Democratic Republicans (1820s) and the Democrats (1830s-1960s). As late as the 1960s, the Democrats -- led by an Irish Catholic, John F. Kennedy, and a Texan, Lyndon Johnson -- were based on the old Southron-Ethnic alliance that dated back to the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Republican Party of John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller was still the Yankee-Nordic-black Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. But the parties switched labels in the 1960s, thanks to the third rule of our word problem: Majorities of Southrons and blacks can never be in the same party. When Lyndon Johnson invited blacks into the Democratic Party by promoting desegregation, the Southrons left -- first to follow George Wallace, then to join the Republicans. By the 1990s, the Southrons -- formerly the base of the Andrew Jackson-to-Lyndon Johnson Democrats -- had become the core constituency of the Republicans. Since the rules of the word problem are inflexible, the migration of blacks into the Democratic Party and of Southrons out of the Democratic Party rearranged the party system. Many Ethnics followed their traditional allies, the Southrons, into the Republican Party (in 1994, for the first time in U.S. history, more Catholics voted for Republican House candidates than for Democratic candidates). Meanwhile, old-fashioned liberal Yankee and Nordic Protestant Republicans, disgusted with the takeover of their party by their hereditary enemies, the Southrons and Ethnic Catholics, switched to the Democratic Party. As a result, the party labels changed -- but the historic alliances remained the same. The only group that has actually switched from one of the permanent parties is the American Jewish community. During the New Deal era, most Jews were Democrats, that is, allies of the Southrons and Catholics. Since then, they have remained Democrats, which means that they have really changed parties, since today's Democrats --Yankees, Nordics and blacks -- are actually the Republicans of the pre-1960s era in disguise. Why didn't Jews leave the Democrats for the Republicans with their former coalition partners, the Southrons and Ethnics? Two reasons: class and ideology. Jews were once heavily working-class allies of northern Ethnics in the labor movement; today they tend to be affluent allies of Yankees and Nordics. Meanwhile, from the 1930s until the present, the socialist ideology that influenced so many Eastern European Jewish immigrants has steadily declined. The grandchildren of Trotskyists and Stalinists and Mensheviks tend to be centrist liberals with values not much different from those of Yankee Methodists or Nordic Lutherans, their partners in today's Democratic Party. What does all of this have to do with John McCain?
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