When Movements Anchor Parties

Electoral Alignments in American History

Daniel Schlozman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400873838
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Partiti politici

Throughout American history, some social movements, such as organized labor and the Christian Right, have forged influential alliances with political parties, while others, such as the antiwar movement, have not. When Movements Anchor Parties provides a bold new interpretation of American electoral history by examining five prominent movements and their relationships with political parties.Taking readers from the Civil War to today, Daniel Schlozman shows how two powerful alliances—those of organized labor and Democrats in the New Deal, and the Christian Right and Republicans since the 1970s—have defined the basic priorities of parties and shaped the available alternatives in national politics. He traces how they diverged sharply from three other major social movements that failed to establish a place inside political parties—the abolitionists following the Civil War, the Populists in the 1890s, and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Moving beyond a view of political parties simply as collections of groups vying for preeminence, Schlozman explores how would-be influencers gain influence—or do not. He reveals how movements join with parties only when the alliance is beneficial to parties, and how alliance exacts a high price from movements. Their sweeping visions give way to compromise and partial victories. Yet as Schlozman demonstrates, it is well worth paying the price as movements reorient parties' priorities.Timely and compelling, When Movements Anchor Parties demonstrates how alliances have transformed American political parties.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

THE MAKING OF ANCHORING GROUPS

“CLEAR IT WITH SIDNEY.” THE TIME WAS JULY 1944, A WEEK BEFORE THE Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Sidney was Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and chairman of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee. The speaker was said to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, instructing Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a St. Louis pol, to get Hillman’s approval before selecting a vice presidential nominee to replace the erratic Henry Wallace. As a Republican catchphrase, the slogan aimed to show FDR in the pocket of sinister elements sympathetic to communism. Exactly what Roosevelt told Hannegan remains frustratingly out of reach; the evidence is stronger that Hillman quashed the nomination of Jimmy Byrnes, a conservative from South Carolina, than that he affirmatively approved Harry Truman.

Whatever the particulars, granting something like a veto over the year’s most important political decision to the leader of a small men’s clothing union, an immigrant with a thick Eastern European accent, confirmed major shifts in both the Democratic Party and the labor movement. Wallace having become unacceptable to southern conservatives, the party regulars—Hannegan and his pals in other big-city organizations—sought a candidate who would satisfy all factions, including labor. The new reality was clear. As a leftist magazine explained, “there was a deeper reason for the choice of Senator Truman: he was the only candidate on whom both the conservative pro-Roosevelt elements and the most advanced labor groups could agree.”¹ For the labor movement, the moment marked a turning point: the breakaway CIO had abandoned organized labor’s long-standing practice and, through CIO-PAC, embraced party politics to press for broad social legislation that would benefit all workers.

“I know you can’t endorse me. But … I want you to know that I endorse you.” The date was 22 August 1980. The speaker was Ronald Reagan. The place was the National Affairs Briefing, a gathering of fifteen thousand conservative evangelicals organized by a who’s who of the emergent Christian Right and its allies in the conservative movement. And the line was hardly spontaneous: James Robison, a Fort Worth televangelist who entered politics the previous year when his program had been yanked from the local station after he discussed homosexuals recruiting children, had fed it to Reagan in a meeting on the way from the airport.²

The National Affairs Briefing represented a major departure for white evangelicals, who had long shied away from direct engagement in party politics and from alliances that crossed sectarian boundaries. The Dallas event heralded the shift. As Robison told the crowd just before Reagan spoke, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the Communists coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the closet.” Six members of Congress, Republicans all, addressed the crowd; New Right political guru, Paul Weyrich, an Eastern Rite Catholic, spoke on emulating liberals’ organization; Phyllis Schlafly, also Catholic, denounced the Equal Rights Amendment; Paige Patterson, a driving force behind the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, addressed how “The Bible Sets the Agenda”; and a Georgia judge spoke on “Scientific Creationism.”³ The Republican Party, too, had begun to shift. In the 1970s, surveys show, Republicans favored fewer restrictions on abortion than did Democrats.⁴ Yet the party had begun to expand its issue agenda, emphasizing social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer, and linking them to the embrace of traditional American values.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Each gathering marked a pivotal juncture in alliance—that is, institutionalized accommodation of mutual priorities—between what I term an “anchoring group” and a major political party. Anchoring groups are organized actors that forego autonomous action to ally with major political parties. Inside parties, anchoring groups exercise broad influence on national politics by virtue of the money, votes, and networks that they offer to the party with which they have allied. Just as other influential actors may keep would-be anchors outside the party, anchoring groups control the entrance into the partisan coalition of new claimants. More than just a logroll, anchoring groups shape parties’ long-term trajectories by enacting favored policies and shaping parties’ ideological development.

This book offers a new framework for understanding party development from the Civil War to the present day, emphasizing the crucial role of social movements. Repeatedly, movements have redefined the fundamental alignments of political parties and, in turn, the organizable alternatives in national politics. The alliances between labor and the Democrats, and the Christian Right and the Republicans have defined parties’ basic priorities, and exerted long-term influence away from the median voter. The two alliances’ fates have proceeded in close parallel with each other. Still more important, they diverged sharply from those of major social movements that failed to find and to maintain a stable place inside political parties.

Mass movements and mass parties emerged together at the dawn of modern democracy, as means for ordinary citizens to influence the state. In the United States, these developments define the Jacksonian era; in Europe, they began in the Age of Revolution and quickened through the nineteenth century.⁵ Movements and parties share a common history—but they hold very different roles, and operate on different time horizons.

Social movements hold special possibility to disrupt the terms of debate and expand ideological horizons. The movements in this study have all offered public philosophies that reframe basic questions asked since the founding. Each has thrust into party politics conflictual, moralistic traditions of reform, protest, and dissent.⁶ Social movements seek radical change—but they cannot simply institutionalize their visions and call it victory. Instead, the American electoral system agglomerates social cleavages inside parties. Given the realities of the Electoral College and a first-past-the-post voting system, movements that seek durable change in the state and its priorities must confront political parties.

“A political party,” wrote E. E. Schattschneider in 1942, “is an organized attempt to get control of the government.”⁷ This venerable definition zeroes in on the goal of parties, and of parties alone. Because political parties organize social conflict—the sine qua non of a democratic party system⁸—they also structure the possibilities for movements to achieve ongoing influence. Movements for fundamental change in American society seek influence through alliance, by serving as anchoring groups to sympathetic parties, because parties hold the special capacity to control the government and its resources, and to define the organizable alternatives in public life.

Through the votes, and networks that they offer to allied parties, anchoring groups gain influence when they ally with a party—but they also gain the power to mold ideological possibilities in republican government. Just as Felix Frankfurter once said of Franklin Roosevelt, anchoring groups “take the country to school” as they inject ideas into partisan politics.⁹ So, too, anchoring groups loom largest in coalition management, allowing into parties’ orbit only partners whose visions can be rendered compatible with their own. These patterns link together: social movements inject foundational ideas into the party system, which then defines the democratic questions to which partisans offer differing answers.¹⁰

Movements join with political parties only on terms acceptable to winning coalitions inside those parties. Political parties want to win election. Otherwise, the politicians and interests that constitute them have no hope of wielding power or setting policy. And pragmatists inside party coalitions know this lesson best of all. Parties accept alliance only with the support of a winning coalition inside the party, including hard-nosed realists as well as ideological sympathizers. If the movement threatens the pragmatists’ core interests, whether electoral or pecuniary, then the party seeks other paths to majority. No movements that meet the terms parties set, no alliance. If parties believe that movement radicals imperil their electoral prospects, then movement moderates must jettison their brethren if they want to sustain alliance with a major party. Anchoring groups pay a high price to join together with parties. Yet given the rules of the game, it is a price well worth paying.¹¹

In a two-party system, it takes a majority to win election and gain access to the levers of power. Alliance requires parties, including pragmatists as well as strong sympathizers, to believe that they can win an ongoing majority with the movement incorporated. Parties must perceive that movements offer them votes and the resources needed to get votes—time, money, and access to networks—to make alliance a beneficial proposition. When movements knit together effective organizations, often politicizing face-to-face networks and exploiting new technology, then parties will find them attractive partners. When they fall apart, parties will swoop in, and organize their supporters directly.

Parties and movements cannot magically join together. While conditions present the opportunity for elites to forge alliance, the real work falls to brokers, midlevel figures with deep ties spanning party and movement. They build coalitions from neither the top down nor the bottom up, but from the inside out and the outside in, stitching together different blocs of supporters and finding policies and candidates with appeal across them. Brokers lower transaction costs, explaining to parties the deal that makes alliance work for both sides: use of the movement’s grassroots networks to offer the party electoral support, in return for the party delivering on the movement’s substantive priorities.

Over time, parties have lost their monopoly over political resources. They have relied increasingly on outside partners who provide the money, time, and networks required to win office. Those outside groups, for their part, demand policy payback—what I term “ideological patronage”¹²—in return for their support, pushing parties away from the median voter. Through this dynamic, anchoring groups and their competing ideological agendas lie at the roots of polarized politics.

TWO TRANSFORMATIVE ALLIANCES

The reciprocal processes by which organized labor came together with the Democratic Party, and the Christian Right joined with the Republican Party demonstrate remarkable similarities.¹³ Although the cases may seem disparate—a movement of the left centered on the job site and a movement of the right centered in the church—no other social movements have built such broad and deep relationships with political parties over such a long stretch of time. Religion and work, defining sources of meaning in modern life, have animated these alliances. Rather than taking each in isolation and emphasizing its particular telos, systematic comparison emphasizes their similarities as organizers of political conflict.

Both alliances built on connections and alignments adumbrated in prior campaigns. In 1908 and 1916, the American Federation of Labor supported Democratic presidential candidates in exchange for promises to limit labor injunctions. “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s third-party insurgency in 1924 brought together many of the key supporters of labor-liberalism in the coming decade: old Progressives from the West and the settlement houses, moderate socialists, and labor unions. So, too, the networks forged among conservative activists in the Goldwater campaign and the Young Americans for Freedom formed the nucleus of the political New Right. Yet these early efforts hardly resembled full-blown party-group alliance.

In 1936 and in 1980, anchoring groups mounted large-scale, nominally independent, efforts to elect realigning presidents. Group leaders vouched for the candidates, as they gave entrée into voting blocs not yet cemented in their partisan loyalties. Labor’s Non-Partisan League, spearheaded by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, spent millions to reelect Franklin Roosevelt. In 1980, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, along with other new groups such as Christian Voice, sought to rouse the “sleeping giant” of American evangelicals against the born-again Jimmy Carter, whom they viewed as a failure in office. However unsophisticated in the mechanics of electioneering they may have been, these efforts set out the leading edges of campaigns to reframe electoral coalitions and Americans’ expectations of the state.

Amid convulsive social change, midlevel entrepreneurs from both party and movement took advantage of opportunities around galvanizing events to politicize key actors in civil society and meld internal group and broader partisan cleavages. In 1935, John L. Lewis stomped out of the AF of L convention in Atlantic City after punching the Carpenters’ “Big Bill” Hutcheson in the jaw. He formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations to embrace positions long anathema to the federation: to “organize the unorganized” in industrial unions, and to fight for social legislation that would benefit all workers, organized or not. In 1979, conservatives began their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, committing the SBC to a platform of biblical inerrancy—and also, for the first time, to opposing abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.

More than realigning presidents, midlevel brokers such as Hillman and Weyrich, located at key sites of power across the sprawling American state, made alliance. Young movement loyalists and their intellectual allies moved into government, aggressively staffing up the New Deal administrative state, and decades later attempting to channel hiring, regulations, and rulemaking to new ends. The executive branch followed the dictum of New Right operative turned Reagan aide Morton Blackwell, who expressly emulated Franklin Roosevelt: “personnel is policy.”¹⁴

In Congress, partisan brokers reached out to give the movement space to organize, and to demonstrate the rewards for involvement. The key figure in the Second New Deal of 1935 was Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, the loyal Democrat who wrote the law guaranteeing most workers the right to bargain collectively. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a passel of congressional conservatives stopped the Carter administration from revoking tax exemptions for discriminatory schools formed in the wake of school desegreg...