Uneasy Alliances

Race and Party Competition in America

Paul Frymer

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400836413
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Partiti politici

Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between race, political parties, and American democracy. While scholars frequently claim that the need to win elections makes government officials responsive to any and all voters, Paul Frymer shows that not all groups are treated equally; politicians spend most of their time and resources on white swing voters--to the detriment of the African American community. As both parties try to attract white swing voters by distancing themselves from blacks, black voters are often ignored and left with unappealing alternatives. African Americans are thus the leading example of a "captured minority."
Frymer argues that our two-party system bears much of the blame for this state of affairs. Often overlooked in current discussions of racial politics, the party system represents a genuine form of institutional racism. Frymer shows that this is no accident, for the party system was set up in part to keep African American concerns off the political agenda. Today, the party system continues to restrict the political opportunities of African American voters, as was shown most recently when Bill Clinton took pains to distance himself from African Americans in order to capture conservative votes and win the presidency. Frymer compares the position of black voters with other social groups--gays and lesbians and the Christian right, for example--who have recently found themselves similarly "captured." Rigorously argued and researched, Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between black voters, political parties, and American democracy.
In a new afterword, Frymer examines the impact of Barack Obama's election on the delicate relationship between race and party politics in America.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

IN NOVEMBER 1992, Democratic party leaders did not merely celebrate the first victory by their presidential nominee in sixteen years. They celebrated the revitalization of their party in national electoral politics. Unlike in previous campaigns, which had been marked by division and disorganization, the party’s leadership could claim this time that they were an important factor in Bill Clinton’s successful run for the executive office. In fewer than four years as party chairman, Ron Brown transformed the Democratic National Committee into an effective campaign organization. The DNC provided financial, media, and consulting resources to the party’s national candidates, enabling them to compete more effectively against their Republican opponents.¹ Brown also maintained a degree of solidarity between the party’s various ideological factions not seen in nearly three decades. He successfully exhorted Jesse Jackson, Mario Cuomo, and Paul Tsongas to unite behind Clinton once it became apparent that the Arkansas governor was both the frontrunner and the most threatening opponent to Republican incumbent George Bush.

Perhaps most important, Brown took an active role in formulating the party’s new ideological and policy agenda.² Responding to critics who deemed the pre-1992 Democratic party out of touch with significant portions of the national electorate, Brown worked closely with Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization composed of moderate and conservative party officials. Together they pushed an agenda that would bring ideologically moderate voters back into the party.³ Brown and Clinton emphasized throughout the campaign that this was a “new” Democratic party with a revised message, better equipped to handle the politics and problems of the 1990s. Voters and political elites alike were impressed by the changes. One of the many prominent critics of the pre-1992 Democratic party, Washington Post writer Thomas Edsall, commented shortly after the election that “the rhetoric and strategy of the Clinton campaign restored the Democratic party’s biracial coalition and made the party competitive again in the nation’s suburbs.”⁴ Another critic, political pollster Stan Greenberg, claimed that the party’s moderate ideological mandate “allowed for a Democratic party that could once again represent people in the broadest sense.”⁵ Even the prominent third-party candidate, Ross Perot, attributed his initial resignation from the presidential campaign to Clinton and the Democrats’ recommitment to the moderate voter.

Yet while Democratic leaders were celebrating their party’s revival, many African American Democrats were less enthusiastic. They expressed ambivalence about the party’s general neglect of their interests during the campaign.⁶ Intrinsic to the revamped message formulated by Brown and articulated by Clinton was a distancing from the Democrats’ previous efforts to implement the civil rights goals of the 1960s. Party leaders believed that the Democrats’ identification with policies explicitly designed to integrate blacks more completely into the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions damaged their party’s appeal among key groups of white voters. According to this line of argument, the active promotion of African American concerns made it difficult for the party to maintain the support it once had received from the successful New Deal coalition of southern, working-, and middle-class whites.

In order to increase the Democrats’ standing among white voters and to revive the decaying New Deal coalition, Clinton called for extensive welfare reform, as well as cutbacks on “excessive” unemployment benefits and other areas of government spending widely perceived as benefiting “undeserving” African American citizens. The Democratic party platform reflected this new message. For the first time in almost three decades, it contained no mention of redressing racial injustice. Clinton’s own policy platform, spelled out in a book (entitled Putting People First) cowritten with vice-presidential candidate Al Gore, had only one reference to race, and this was to oppose the use of racial quotas as a remedy for employment and education inequality.⁷ A chapter entitled “Cities” did not mention the problems of inner cities or the continuing existence of de facto racial segregation, while the chapter on civil rights devoted more space to people with physical disabilities than to African Americans.⁸

On the campaign trail, Clinton also distanced himself from representatives of the party’s African American constituency. In perhaps the defining moment of his campaign, Clinton seized upon the Los Angeles riots as an opportunity to articulate his differences with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition and to attack an obscure rap music artist, Sister Souljah, for allegedly advocating black-on-white violence. According to public opinion polls, whites not only were aware of Clinton’s speech—twice as many knew about the Sister Souljah incident as knew about Clinton’s economic plan – but they approved of it by a three-to-one margin. Blacks, meanwhile, disapproved of Clinton’s comments by nearly the same margin.⁹ Earlier in the campaign, in an effort to dispel the beliefs of many voters that the party had grown too permissive toward criminals, Clinton traveled to his home state of Arkansas to watch a mentally impaired black man convicted of murder die in the electric chair. Shortly after the Democratic convention, meanwhile, he and Al Gore toured “America” by bus, which ultimately translated into their wearing plaid shirts, chewing on straw, visiting predominantly rural communities, and speaking to primarily white faces.¹⁰

The actions of Clinton and the national party leadership – troubling to many African Americans but deemed necessary by many party elites – reveal a great deal about the relationship between national electoral incentives, competitive parties, and black representation.¹¹ The actions taken by Democratic leaders in 1992 mark merely another chapter in a long-running saga – the efforts of national party leaders to downplay the interests of their black constituents in order to broaden the party’s electoral base and increase its chances in presidential campaigns. At most moments in American history, the desire of political parties to elect candidates to national office has meant marginalization for African Americans. Why this is so often the case and what impact it has had and continues to have on race relations in the United States are the subjects of this book.

In the process of examining these questions, I hope to reformulate some of the ways we think about our national parties as political institutions. Most broadly, I challenge the common belief that a competitive two-party system produces a more democratic and inclusive society. Scholars argue that competition between two parties forces at least one party to reach out to those groups not represented by the other party. As a result of this competition, parties will mobilize these groups to participate in electoral politics; educate these groups about important policy issues; educate and persuade other party members to support the interests of these marginalized groups; and, finally, place the interests of these groups on the political agenda and represent them in the legislative arena. I will argue that while parties often do perform these positive democratic functions, there is nothing that necessitates their doing so. In fact, there are politically compelling reasons for parties not to behave in this manner, especially with regard to African Americans. In their efforts to win elections, party leaders often resist mobilizing and incorporating blacks into the political system, and at times will go so far as to deny completely black Americans their democratic rights.

Insofar as our party system provides incentives for leaders to marginalize black political interests, the United States is unusual. Unlike those in other democratic societies, our party system exacerbates rather than diminishes the marginalized position of a historically disadvantaged minority group. The United States is not the only democratic nation with sharp racial divisions, nor are we the only democratic nation with cleavages between a large majority and small minority. We are, however, one of the few democratic nations where party leaders have an incentive to appeal almost exclusively to the majority group. This type of majority rule is undemocratic, as the minority group is frequently denied effective access to power and is excluded from involvement in a great deal of substantive decision making.¹²

Equally troubling, the founders of our modern party system understood and, in some ways, even intended for party competition to have this negative impact on African American political interests. More than 150 years ago, party leaders conceived of a party system that would avoid, or at least minimize, racial and sectional conflict. As we will see in chapter 2, the Democratic party was founded to a significant degree with this in mind. In the mid-1820s, northern and southern elites agreed to put existing differences on the slave issue aside for the sake of combining forces to elect candidates to national office. They formed the Democratic party, a powerful electoral agency that influenced any potential opposition to follow a similar strategy in order to compete effectively for national office. Both the Democratic and Whig parties in the period prior to the Civil War derived a great deal of legitimacy and strength from their ability to keep slavery off the political agenda. The leaders of the two-party system not only structured electoral competition around the average voter. Over the long run, they structured competition around the white voter.

Although two-party competition broke down in the 1850s and 1860s, it reemerged little more than a decade later when the Republicans and Democrats resumed “normal” electoral competition. The competitive two-party system still provides incentives for party leaders to deemphasize black interests in order to create broad-based electoral coalitions. The party system helps us avoid potentially devastating conflicts—not by appeasing both sides of the racial divide, but by appealing to racially moderate to conservative whites and suppressing the open expression of black political interests.

ELECTORAL CAPTURE

This apparent contradiction, that the success of broad-based parties rests on the marginalization of black interests, demands an explanation. I begin by examining the impact of electoral incentives on party leaders, which reveals two important features of our party system, features generally overlooked by scholars. First, it highlights the tendency of our political parties to “capture” specific minority interests, and in particular African American interests. Hypothetically, “electoral capture” refers to any politically relevant group that votes overwhelmingly for one of the major political parties and subsequently finds the primary opposition party making little or no effort to appeal to its interests or attract its votes. Simply voting for one party, however, is not sufficient for a group’s interests to become captured. A group, for instance, may be loyal to a particular party because it finds its interests well represented by that party or because of historical or organizational reasons. In turn, the opposing party’s leaders may wish to appeal to the group’s vote, but over time stop doing so because they find a significant portion of this vote unattainable. In this instance, the group has chosen to align itself with one party.

By electoral capture, I mean those circumstances when the group has no choice but to remain in the party. The opposing party does not want the group’s vote, so the group cannot threaten its own party’s leaders with defection. The party leadership, then, can take the group for granted because it recognizes that, short of abstention or an independent (and usually electorally suicidal) third party, the group has nowhere else to go. Placed in this position by the party system, a captured group will often find its interests neglected by their own party leaders. These leaders, in turn, offer attention and benefits to groups of “swing” voters who are allegedly capable of determining election...