The "Emerging Democratic Majority" in American politics, and its failure to emerge
Recent days in American politics we’ve been seeing huge Republican victories, given by a Supreme Court in the midst of a Democratic presidency (of course with most Supreme Court members nominated by Republican presidents and confirmed by Republican Congresses). Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion criminalized in parts of the country, the court case NYSPRA v Bruen expands the rights to carry firearms, and a potential upcoming case could wreak havoc on the entire regulatory edifice behind environmental laws.
Some weeks ago I read the book Emerging Democratic Majority from 2002, by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (from now: J & T). This book predicted that a situation like this wouldn’t happen; that the Democrats would have a good chance of being in the driver’s seat – maintain presidency and Congress, attain a general social hegemony – for the coming decades. Clearly this wasn’t so. Why?
J & T basically start their book by describing how US parties are different coalitions, how in late 60s Republican strategist Kevin Phillips wrote a book - The Emerging Republican Majority - predicting that Republicans would manage to unseat the New Deal Democrats from their hegemonic position by bringing in Southern whites and Northern (future) "Reagan Democrats" to their coalition, and how this indeed happened.
It's obvious, starting from the name, that Emerging Democratic Majority was chiefly intended to be a riposte to that book, describing a new, post-New-Deal Democratic coalition consisting of affluent, postindustrial, information-society white collar workers in rising big-to-mid-size cities, i.e., what call ideopolises, as well as ethnic minorities and women.
The last two groups are basically an afterthought. The book almost entirely concentrates on talking about the knowledge workers and ideopolises, how they will keep growing and becoming more important and how they can serve as the main plank of the new majority. As far as T & J are concerned, it’s the politics they prefer – a sort of an idealized liberal Clintonism, heavy helpings of social liberalism (feminism, gay rights, environmentalism etc.) combined with regulatory capitalism of the sort that is maybe a few steps to the left to Clinton policies but far cry from Sanders.
This is seen as the policy that attracts the knowledge workers, whose politics revolve around commitment to social, post material issues like environment and human rights, to implicit appeal to material interest. It’s not only that, of course - J & T also mention that one of the things that might serve to attract knowledge workers to the Dems is the fact that the great expansion of this policy has also served to bring them closer in labor-market status to regular working class.
The regular blue-collar working class, though. Indeed, T & J might even talk more about the importance of the white working class than the ethnic minorities, in the sense that their book rests on the assumption that Dems can simultaneously appeal to knowledge workers and minorities and win *enough* WWC votes to form a confident majority.
How? Well, one thesis is that the special thing about ideopolises is that they work so well even WWC voters living in them would keep voting for Democrats. Another is that if Democrats keep running candidates like Bill Clinton, i.e., with personal life-story appeal and a promise of a functional economy providing wealth and jobs, that's going to be enough for many WWC voters to keep voting Dems even if they disagree on values questions.
It seems obvious that, in addition to strategizing to keep the Democrats in power as a party and offering a new mythos to give the party strength, it's a reaction to the first twinges of left-wing reaction to neoliberalism and the Clinton years, already evident in Nader campaign, the popularity of Michael Moore movies etc.
What the book is basically saying, to the Democrats, is: mostly stay the course, steer a bit leftwards but not too much, make the economy hum, and that's how you'll thread the needle of winning wealthy enlightened suburbanites and (enough) white working voters to keep electing Dems to far future. What shouldn’t be done is returning to the New Deal coalition or steering to far leftwards, since that might just fail to attract both the working class and the knowledge workers.
Of course, one of the obvious things about the "Emerging Democratic Majority" is that it didn’t happen. Republicans won the presidential elections of 2004 and 2016, and have controlled Senate, House or both multiple times; this, then, proved to be surprisingly meaningful in 2016-2020 due to its effect on the Supreme Court.
One chapter of the book is precisely meant for debunking the idea that Bush presidency and the post-9/11 move would mean a Republican majority. This basically seems to come down to the other team (Republicans) being dumb and greedy and their team (Democrats) being good and smart, which, well, shall we say, is never a good way to make a prognosis about the future.
So, why hasn’t the majority emerged? Especially in hindsight, it seems that the book indeed has provided a strategy for Democrats ever since; concentrate on “ideopolises”, women and minorities, try to keep enough WWC’s with occasional sops at them. However, while this has managed to win Democrats *a number of* elections, it hasn’t led to the titular democratic majority.
It quite simply hasn’t been possible for them to simultaneously win enough of J & T’s constituencies and white working-class voters, though of course one must also take things like the currently Republican-stacked electoral system and process into account. However, the whole idea that the balancing process J & T wish can be done quite as easily as they want rested on thin ground and just-so assumptions in the first place.
It seems it wasn’t just progressive centrist Democrats who read the book, or at least took it into account. The Republicans seem to have surmised that there exists friction between the Democratic wish to appeal to their new constituencies and appealing to white working-class voters, and striking at this gap by creating a new class-warfare narrative pitting workers against the paper-pushers, particularly the “laptop class”.
This, in the end, is what has created the conditions for a situation where conservatives in the US are suddenly able to forcefully push through many of their key policies through Supreme Court shenanigans, even during a Democratic presidency; while the Democrats grew complacent, trusting demographic developments, growing “enlightenment” of urbanism and the general march of progress to bring them an inevitable hegemony, the Republicans learned the intentions of their enemies, organized, and exploited it.
Of course, there are other reasons, like the loopholes of the system – court supremacy, the filibuster, the gerrymander, the possibilities for v. However, whatever the reasons, the Republicans are picking up the dividends – and bringing US closer to a total sundering of the entire nation, even armed civil strife, than in ages.
"Boston - Freedom Trail: Old City Hall - Donkey statue" by wallyg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.