A Tale of Two Parties

Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans Since 1952

Kenneth Janda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000338829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Since 1952, the social bases of the Democratic and Republican parties have undergone radical reshuffling. At the start of this period southern Blacks favored Lincoln's Republican Party over suspect Democrats, and women favored Democrats more than Republicans. In 2020 these facts have been completely reversed. A Tale of Two Parties: Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans Since 1952 traces through this transformation by showing:

• How the United States society has changed over the last seven decades in terms of regional growth, income, urbanization, education, religion, ethnicity, and ideology;
• How differently the two parties have appealed to groups in these social cleavages;
• How groups in these social cleavages have become concentrated within the bases of the Democratic and Republican parties;
• How party identification becomes intertwined with social identity to generate polarization akin to that of rapid sports fans or primitive tribes.

A Tale of Two Parties: Living Amongst Democrats and Republicans Since 1952 will have a wide and enthusiastic readership among political scientists and researchers of American politics, campaigns and elections, and voting and elections.

1Stability and Change in the American Polity

Charles Dickens began his classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with the famous sentence, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” Dickens wrote in 1859 about London and Paris during the 1789 French revolution. His opening influenced my thinking about American party politics. I’m no Dickens, but here is my take: “Since its beginning, the American polity has been very stable, but it has greatly changed.” Certainly, American party politics have changed greatly in my lifetime.

The contradictory themes of stability and change run through this chapter. I begin by making a case for the United States’ governmental stability over more than two centuries. As I write at age 85, I describe how our party politics have changed during my life span. When I was in high school in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president by a landslide. He won while most southern states in the old confederacy remained solidly Democratic and voted for his opponent, Adlai Stevenson. In the 1950s, Republican voters were more likely than Democratic voters to hold college degrees. Republicans were also more likely to be women than men, and voters in small towns and rural areas were almost twice as likely to be Democrats than Republicans. In 2016, all states in the old confederacy voted for Republican Donald Trump. Today, voters with college degrees are apt to be Democrats, women favor Democrats over Republicans, and Republicans are more common than Democrats in small towns and rural areas.

I marvel at how much has changed in politics during my lifetime. All my grandparents were European immigrants. I lived in a metropolitan area (Chicago) and attended its public schools before moving to a rural area and graduating from a small town high school in Wilmington, Illinois. I feel close to various social groups that identify with Democrats and Republicans and as qualified as anyone to account for their party identifications. My tale of two parties begins by documenting the party system’s stability during the nation’s lifetime.

The Case for Stability

The American polity has been remarkably stable for over 230 years, despite enormous geographical and demographic changes. The United States grew from 13 colonies clustered along the northeastern coast in the eighteenth century to 50 states extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The new nation expanded commensurately in population. It evolved from an agricultural economy at the end of the eighteenth century, to an industrial economy at the start of the twentieth century, to a twenty-first-century economy based on electronics and information technology. It won a civil war to end slavery in the 1860s, a legislative war in the 1960s to grant civil rights to descendants of former slaves, and political battles later that insured civil rights for women, the disabled, and homosexuals. It welcomed millions of immigrants from Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and millions from Latin America and Asia afterward. Since 1788—without interruption by wars or national calamities—our country has held national elections for president every four years and national elections for Congress every two years. By persevering during social change and political conflict, the United States has demonstrated its stability as a nation.

Although its 1787 Constitution established an untried form of national government, the United States has also been remarkably stable in its politics. While unelected monarchs governed other nations, elected officials governed the United States. Unlike the direct democracy of ancient Athens, where citizens participated directly in government, the new government was designed as a representative democracy, in which elected officials would act on voters’ behalf. Citizens in each state, according to population, were empowered to directly elect delegates to a House of Representatives. Citizens would also indirectly elect the new President of the United States by choosing a number of “electors” equal to their state’s representation in the House and the Senate.¹

Those who wrote the Constitution lacked clear visions of how their unprecedented electoral system would operate. The Constitution does not mention political parties. Although parties or political factions existed then in Europe, they had a bad reputation.² George Washington was elected and re-elected president without party affiliation or organized political opposition. Indeed, he warned about parties’ “baneful effects” in his 1796 Farewell Address. Nevertheless, political parties soon formed, and a party system became integral to American government and—perhaps like a necessary evil—proved crucial to its functioning as a democracy. From a centuries-long viewpoint, political parties contributed to the nation’s stability.

The Case for Change Within My Lifetime

Media moguls classify me as belonging to the “Silent Generation,” people born between 1928 and 1945. Born during the Great Depression in 1935, I don’t remember living during that time of deprivation, but I vividly recall the later years of World War II, which ended when I was ten years old. My political memory starts with the decade of the 1950s. The war had destroyed or crippled former powers in Europe and Asia, and the United States was the world’s preeminent military power. Only China and India, both underdeveloped countries, had populations demonstrably larger than the United States’ 150+ million. The Soviet Union may have been larger, but its data were suspect.³ Everyone expected America’s population to grow, and Figure 1.1 shows that—70 years later—the U.S. population had doubled in almost a straight line from 1950 to 2020.

Figure 1.1U.S. Population Counts and Projections: 1950–2020*

Despite World War II’s costs, the nation was the wealthiest on earth. In 1950, the United States’ Gross Domestic Product was $1.5 trillion, three times that of the Soviet Union, five times the United Kingdom’s and Germany’s, and six times China’s.⁴ Americans were vigorous and optimistic. Moreover, 73 percent of the respondents said they could “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” when asked in the American National Election survey.⁵

By 2020, the United States population growth rate had slowed, as shown in Figure 1.2. Its 0.5 percent growth rate in 2019 was the lowest in history. In part, this is due to people in the Millennial Generation (born 1981–1996) having fewer children. Also, the nation added only 600,000 immigrants, versus more than a million three years earlier, before President Trump’s administration.⁶ Today, the United States remains the world’s wealthiest nation but may not remain so for long. Its GDP in 2019 was $21 trillion, but China at $15.5 trillion was second and closing fast.⁷ Despite its wealth, U.S. citizens have lost trust in their government. Only 17 percent in a 2019 national survey said they could “trust the government in Washington to do what is right,” versus the 73 percent in 1958.⁸

Figure 1.2U.S. Population Growth Rates, 1950–2020*

By the summer of 2020, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had caused over 200,000 deaths in the United States, left over 20 million unemployed during the year, and cost over $3 trillion in government expenditures (and debt). Americans who identified with the Democratic and Republican parties differed substantially in how they viewed the health crisis and subsequent economic calamity and how government should respond to both. In mid-May, Gallup poll’s senior scientist, Frank Newport, reported on “The Partisan Gap in Views of the Coronavirus.”⁹ He found that Democrats and Republicans turned to different sources for cues on virus-related issues and that they differed on government’s role in dealing with the pandemic. While recognizing that “partisan differences in view of issues and policies are built into the American system, and can be a plus,” Newport warned that Democrat and Republican differences “in their acceptance of and adherence to government mandates” hampered dealing with both the health crisis and the economic calamity.

For decades, the media had described American party politics in terms of “political polarization.” Political scientists now said that partisan groups were demonstrating a special type of polarization, a general animosity toward each other called “affective polarization.”¹⁰ Democrats and Republicans did not just differ on policy, they increasingly disliked and distrusted those from the other party. “Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines.”¹¹

That was not true of Democrats and Republicans after World War II nor for decades afterward. In 1948, both parties courted General Dwight D. Eisenhower as a possible presidential candidate. Democrat Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House 1949–1953 and 1955–1961, enjoyed good working relationships with Republicans. In 1946, after Republicans won the election and Rayburn temporarily lost his Speaker’s private automobile, 50 Republican congressmen contributed to the Democrats’ fund to purchase a car for him as Minority Leader.¹² In 1972, Republican Senator Bob Dole headed the Republican National Committee when his good friend, George McGovern, lost to Richard Nixon, but Dole and McGovern remained friends until McGovern’s death in 2012.¹³ In the 1980s, Republican President Ronald Reagan enjoyed a close “after six” drinking relationship with Democrat Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House. In the 1990s, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy and Republican Senator Orin Hatch shouted at each other on the Senate floor but worked together in Senate Committees.¹⁴

If members of Congress in opposite parties form close friendships today, they are not publicized. One study of C-SPAN videos of the House floor from 1997 to 2016 showed members of one party increasingly unlikely to “cross-the-floor” to speak to members of the other across the aisle.¹⁵ Before trying to understand how such partisan enmity developed, we should briefly review the history of party politics in the United States.

The Origin of American Political Parties

After George Washington declined to run for a third term, ambitious politicians organized with other elites to seek the presidency and fill Congress. Equally ambitious political aspirants organized in opposition. Even if avoiding the term, these nascent groups met the formal definition of a political party: a political organization that seeks to place its avowed representatives in government positions.¹⁶ That Americans would form political parties was a foregone conclusion.

Democratic governmen...