The North, it seems, shall rise again.
The North, it seems, shall rise again.
Most of the House seats that the Democrats are expected to take from Republicans are in the Northeast and industrial Midwest, heartland of the old Republican Party of Lincoln, McKinley, and Eisenhower. Many of the Republicans holding these seats are a distinct minority in a party now dominated by southerners who are more supportive of executive branch authoritarianism and yet also more government-phobic. And the Republican moderates, judging by their own comments, are boiling mad that the Democrats are going after them.
"There is no one who has voted more often with the Democrats than Linc Chafee," Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, told The New York Times of her Rhode Island colleague, who is trailing Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in the polls. "Yet that didn't stop them from going after him with everything they had."
And we all remember how moderate Republicans stopped the conservatives who control their party from going after moderate Democrats in previous elections, right? How they pleaded with Tom DeLay not to push through his mid-decade reapportionment of Texas, which led to the ousting of such veteran conservative Democrats as Representative Charles Stenholm? How they deplored the campaign that Republican Saxby Chambliss waged against Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who'd lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, for being soft on national security?
Indeed, it was precisely the Republicans' success at defeating the centrist and center-right Democrats in the South over the past two decades that has driven the GOP steadily rightward. And for all their protestations of moderation, the northern Republicans -- from Susan Collins to Lincoln Chafee to Representative Chris Shays -- abetted that transformation. While some of them may have favored raising the minimum wage, all the Republican moderates in the House voted for rules that prohibited the Democrats from bringing a minimum-wage hike to the floor unless, as their Republican leaders dictated, it was linked to other provisions (such as a permanent repeal of the estate tax) that would doom it in the Senate. While they may have harbored doubts about the wisdom of the president's course in Iraq, their party conducted no oversight hearings.
Since George W. Bush's election, the rightward gallop of the Republicans has only accelerated. Karl Rove became convinced that independent voters were a myth, prompting Bush to govern as if only his most conservative supporters really mattered. Denny Hastert let no bill come to a vote in the House unless a majority of the Republican caucus backed it -- essentially giving veto power to the House right-wingers. Gerrymandering has made many Republican members more fearful of a primary challenge from the right than of a Democratic challenge in the general election.
But what next week's election seems likely to illustrate is that the laws of thermodynamics -- in particular, the one that states that for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction -- have not been repealed. Upstate New York, the Philadelphia suburbs, Connecticut's tweedy enclaves, and the Microsoft precincts surrounding Seattle seem poised to show that they've had it with the party that restricts funding for stem cell research. In Arizona and Colorado, secular libertarians have grown estranged from the party that invested the power of the federal government in the cause of keeping Terri Schiavo in a vegetative state. In Ohio, voters look to be revolted not just by the corruption of their state and national Republican parties but also by the party's indifference to the collapse of the state's industrial economy.
Historically, the major parties in America have yoked together the most disparate groups for long periods. The New Deal Democrats were a party of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists. But once Lyndon Johnson committed the Democrats to civil rights for African Americans, the white South up and left -- a process that took 40 years to complete but that left the Democrats struggling to assemble congressional and presidential majorities and that converted the Republicans into a party where Southern values were dominant. Now the non-Southern bastions of Republicanism may themselves up and leave the GOP, seeing it as no longer theirs.
Susan Collins may protest that she has a quarrel with the Democrats, but it's her own party that provoked this transformation. And in a larger sense, her quarrel is really with history.
Harold Meyerson is executive editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
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