Sorry for the cagey post yesterday, but I’ve been mulling a pet hypothesis: that the major political parties in the US are due for — or at least may likely see — a major realignment of their base coalitions. I first really got thinking about this when I read a Mark Schmitt post last year:
As Mike indicated in a comment to Josh, when he referred to 2004 as a "realigning election," he didn’t mean the literal term that political scientists following Walter Dean Burnham use as the basis for endless scholastic disputes, in which at certain moments, such as 1932, a changed set of economic and demographic circumstances are reified in a new alignment of partisan loyalties. What Mike is saying is that a significant economic realignment has already occurred, that the Democratic Party can no longer build a majority coalition on working-class urbanites, educated liberals and minorities alone, and that the kind of shift that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had been talking about, toward a suburban base that unites upwardly-mobile service-sector professionals with the traditional Democratic constituencies, had better start happening or else we should worry that it’s not going to happen at all.
But what if there is a realigning election ahead? Not the next one very likely, but maybe the one after, in 2012? The sea change in the coalition of the Democratic party to include more suburban professionals will then seem much like the Al Smith ticket — a failure at the time, but setting the stage for a stable reorganization of the Democratic Party’s coalition in the next election.
In order to realign, of course, constituencies need others to put their lot with. On the Republican side, the main divide of course is between economic conservatives and social conservatives. Since Reagan, the political coalition has been nearly seamless. Sometimes it’s true that, as Thomas Frank sees it, the neoliberals use Christian conservatives to their achieve own political ends; at other times, both are sincerely allied by their contempt at what they see as the moral laxness of the bohemian bourgeoisie.
In fact, if you can find a single underlying logic to the political realignments from 1968 to 2004, it’s that social prestige (cultural capital) trumps wealth and income (economic capital). Or more properly, it’s the relationship to cultural capital that trumps one’s capital per se. I’m drawing heavily on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as usual. Bourdieu maps societies around two axes of social difference, the first how much wealth they have, and second how important economic or cultural capital are in individuals’ overall wealth.
That’s schematic, to be sure, and I’m not tyring to slag off anyone’s profession by downgrading it. But the point is that in terms of overall weath, social groups by class, broadly speaking, and the bourgeoisie (intellectuals, professionals, managers) will share much in common and differ in their sensibilities from the petit bourgeoisie (middle management, small business owners, teachers), and working class (industrial workers, service, retail). In terms of prestige and cultural identification, however, each class is split by how much economic and how much cultural capital they have. Underpaid public librarians have similar politics and lifestyle patterns as well-paid academic stars and even lawyers. Upper managers and financiers respond to the same Fox News broadcasts with the emotional fervor as poorer, working class social conservatives. Thus, political alignment tends to break down more by the ratio of economic to cultural capital than anything else. Those who emphasize cultural capital (prestige) in their overall class position tend to vote Democratic; those who emphasize economic capital (wealth and income) tend to vote Republican.
This is why I disagreed so much with Thomas Frank’s book. He sees class-as-prestige as illusory when in fact it structures contemporary political life on the left and right.
But I doubt that prestige will always be the primary axis of political alignment. One can easily imagine party coalitions coming apart. Anti-abortion forces may get their state by state battle and send the economics-focused Republicans running. Anti-free-traders may force their issue, or dailyKos-ers may stage a purification of the party. Politicians and mavericks may be waiting in the wings to ride the waves of dissatisfaction, or to capitalize on unexpected alliances (two, three, many Paul Hacketts…). The minute you can get the Cato crowd to vote for a national-health-care candidate because of her realist foreign policy, or you find urban blacks and Hispanics voting for a Christian-conservative, anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights candidate in significant numbers, the party coalitions as we know them will be dead.
At this point, of course, such musings are hypothetical. But the possibilities don’t seem far-fetched to me, even if they’re a little ways off.
Cross-posted at TPMCafe.
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