To understand why Americans chose to unite under Barack Obama and shed their ‘red’ and ‘blue’ identities, one must look at where our deepest contemporary fissure began: the Vietnam War. It’s hard for our younger generation to imagine how the struggle over Vietnam divided this country. Nixon articulated the division well by describing the Silent Majority: the group of Americans who did not protest Vietnam or engage in progressive politics during the 1960s and 1970s. This majority witnessed the cultural turmoil of the 60s and 70s via traditional media (radio, TV and newspaper) and from Vietnam. They saw the most sensational aspects: anti-war demonstrations, civil rights marches, student uprisings, Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, Charles Manson, Roman Polanski. The far left defined the cultural political environment with their actions and the Silent Majority responded en mass during the 1970s: first unorganized and indignant, and then organized and confident. The Silent Majority was a predecessor to the socially conservative coalition that delivered five elections to conservatives over the last 30 years. This coalition had three main subgroups, nationalists, traditionalists and libertarians, each of which existed in American politics since (at least) the New Deal.
- Nationalists believe that their countrymen deserve more than other people. Historically, nationalists were rabidly anti-communist. When the USSR fell, the neo-con doctrine of using American military power to impose its economic interests on other nations became more apparent and nationalism became a less significant issue for most Americans. 9/11 brought it back with a vengeance. These hawkish ‘patriots’ are distributed throughout socioeconomic brackets and are well represented among urban intellectuals (the neo-con variety), as well as more traditionally ‘conservative’ populations in inland America. The ’security mom’ subgroup of suburbanite parents who were unconcerned about national security before 9/11 bolstered the nationalist coalition significantly.
- Traditionalists could also be called Christian Conservatives. Their ideology has developed from an unspecific anger at the Federal government for imposing ‘liberal’ programs on small towns. Forced school integration, evolution, sex education, abortion, gay rights, media culture and other issues were used by Republicans to whip traditionalists into a culture war frenzy and united Christians together to fight liberal social objectives. Unfortunately for this grouping, the Republican party could do little to advance their objectives. Abortion remains legal in America, despite much conflict schools have changed little about their curricula, our culture has become more accepting of gays and the ‘culture war’ has fizzled. In short, traditionalists put a lot of effort into getting their Republican candidates elected and have little to show for it.
- Libertarians have been a force in US politics since the anti-federalists fought the ratification of the Constitution. These people (and this author considers himself some type of libertarian) believe that government should be as small and as inexpensive as possible. Libertarians found friends among the traditionalists who disliked how the government was imposing ‘liberal’ values on their communities and were a natural ally of any American who wanted lower taxes. The guns rights debate both attracted more people to libertarianism and redefined libertarianism as a populist opinion.
Each of these groups became more active during the Vietnam era as a response to liberal cultural progress. The nationalists grew more anti-communist so they could spar with the anti-war left. The traditionalists tried harder to insulate their communities from outside progressives. The libertarians fractured: the moderates rallied behind Republican tax cuts while the small government core became dejected and isolated as neither party offered a real small government program.
This coalition solidified under Reagan and it proved to be much more useful than the Democrat’s hodgepodge of interest groups: labor, leftists, minorities, college educated ‘liberals’ and others. Due to the stability of the Republican coalition of the 80s, the Democrats responded by embracing more centrist policies and rhetoric. In response to this centrist threat, the Republicans created the ‘culture war’ of the 1990s, a political crow bar that forced Americans apart and into either ‘red’ or ‘blue’ values communities. This was done to obscure the centrist nature of the post Reagan Democrats and the increasing similarities between the two parties.
The culture war was a red herring because there was little anyone in the political sphere could do to influence the primary culture war issues (abortion, gun rights, federal education guidelines, gay rights.) Abortion is a judicial issue that will be resolved through slow progress via judicial channels. Abortion in cases of rape and incest will not be criminalized and late-term abortions will not be mandated legal. Gun rights is another red herring: the issue is deeply entrenched in complex state and community rights issues. Guns will never be illegal to own in less dense areas and assault weapons will always be restricted. Our federal education system is broken but the debate surrounding schools has been one of content, not structure. The content debate has not prevented evolution from being taught to another generation of students, nor have this new generation been taught about the amazing diversity of world religions and worldviews. Watch the film Philadelphia and you’ll be shocked at how much more tolerant our society is of homosexuals than we were just 15 years ago. There is little politicians can do to stop our mainstream culture from continuing on it’s increasingly tolerant trajectory.
Despite these relatively simple facts, the ‘culture war’ propelled a generation of cultural conservatives into office, George W Bush being the most prominent. These men and women were savvy politicians but were also incompetent leaders. Their obvious and undeniable failures left America fractured and angry with it’s political class. During Bush’s second term pop-political science authors were writing books about a second civil war. More astute political observers noticed the growing and unsatiated demand for a truly centrist leader. Enter Barack Obama and the emerging purple America coalition.
American consciousness shifted to a different political value system and we can call it purple. It’s going to ripple through the American perception like a drop into a bucket. The changes won’t be imminent but they’ll be inevitable. You could call it a shift to collectivism but (hopefully) it could transcends that and becomes a celebration of autonomous achievement. A celebration of scale. We can operate a peaceful, humane society not just within a closed house, but in our closed neighborhood, our closed town, our closed region and also in our closed world.
The beauty of a closed community is that it is by definition open within. This requires a certain faith in tolerance. A faith that the current power structure did not have. John McCain was, at the end of the day, the old power structure and Barack Obama was the change.
This election was a rejection of intolerance. Not intolerance of gays, but intolerance of opposing points of view. Bush was a closed leader and closed leaders have opened up to their inner circle but not to the outside. They naturally dislike dissent. Ask Leo Strauss, the hidden godfather of neoliberal/conservativism. (It can be called both neoconservative and neoliberal because it is, essentially, neoism.) David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” defines it as a political-economic system that “proposes that human well-being can be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.” (Harvey, 2)
Neoliberalism, as a philosophy, has a glaring omission in the realm of foreign policy. Neoconservatism fills the void with an aggressive, interventionist one. Neoconservatives do not deny advocating American power projection.
Whether you want to call it “neoism“, neoliberalism or neoconservatism, that was the power structure of America and, with less direct influence, the world.
Of course, the vast majority of Americans don’t know this. They know that things have been very unnatural for a while. Living around farmland and buying food at Walmart? Living around towns with no stores? Seeing a bunch of people on TV that don’t?
Since the 60s-70s we’ve been living in a reactionary world, a closing world built under the specter of communism. The quicker we realize that our closed system is geared towards the wrong struggle, the quicker we can neutralize the next threat. The Republican Party followed the old fear too far and now they’ll suffer. The Republican party has not been the conservative party since Barry Goldwater in the 60s. He couldn’t buid a coalition in 1962 and he was left in the dust and his principled followers scattered. Hilary went to the Democrats and a gaggle went into the Republican party. Ask Ron Paul how many friends he has and you’ll see how solidly Goldwater’s vision was scattered: except for his furious anti-communism. (He later rejected his aggressive foreign policy stance.) That scattering never got to see their vision fulfilled but there is always the next generation.
Is Barack Obama that leader? Yes: not because he’s so special, but because the times are special and he was selected by the mass for his amazing narrative, clarity and calm. He is a void: he isn’t closed to anything and that makes him a centrist: ready to listen to and rule all.
The Purple Coalition is a group of Americans who said no to closed systems and yes to an open ones. The New York Times tells us that this is a collection of people whom the closed system didn’t work. It’s a collection of marginalized people: women (53%), 18-29 years old (66%), racial minorities including with Hispanics at 67%, single people and alternatively sexual, people who didn’t graduate high school (63%), urban residents (70%) and Jews (78%). We all know that when the Jews pick ‘em, they either succeed or don’t.
This coalition isn’t as easy to break down as yesterday’s Republican coalition of traditionalists, nationalists and libertarians: it’s a bunch of Americans who decided to agree with each other so they could create change. This means that Obama isn’t going to rule for his party but for ALL Americans because when you’re selling ‘change’ to people, you’re selling to anyone might like it. When you sell fear you’re removing ’scary’ people from your audience.
Obama is going to frame his change for as many types of people as possible. He is going to try and convince us all that his change is great and it’s going to get better. That is fundamentally different than Bush and his closed political environment where he was trying to convince his constituency that change was to be feared. Terrorism and pessimism are the tools of closed worldviews, celebration and optimism are the tools of open ones. Nationalism and Traditionalism are, by definition, closed. Libertarianism is not. It’s newest iteration could escape it’s current closed iteration and advocate a layered system of governance: an onion of natural jurisdictions. This is the path forward for the Republican party, and what I’ll discuss in Part 3 of the Purple America Series: Tomorrow’s Republican (or Yellow) Coalition.
The “red” coalition that brought Reagan, Bush I and II to power has fractured under the weight of their success because they did not properly serve their constituents. After 8 years of Bush, the traditionalists (Christian conservatives) are still upset about the lack of socially conservative progress, the nationalists (hawks and ’security’ voters) are frustrated by an increasingly unpopular quagmire and the libertarians (small government folks) have watched Bush and the Republicans continue the expansion of the Federal Government. At the end of the day, the only people served by the GOP was the multinational corporations like Halliburton, Blackwater, Exxon-Mobile and other upstanding corporate citizens. Now, the Republican party is in the uncomfortable position of having to chose which subgroups to serve, which to grow and which to drop. In my opinion they don’t have many options if they want to remain relevant.
The Republican party has a dearth of leaders. Let’s take a quick look at their current roster.
Sarah Palin is a beautiful maverick for whom the Lord has been providing open doors to a serious political career. There are many questions surrounding her qualifications to lead her party, her family life and, most importantly, her political platform. While she has the ability to garner support from traditionalists and nationalists, McCain’s defeat displayed how limited that coalition has become. She needs to reengage the small government people by becoming more belligerent towards the mainstream media and going through an extensive education on some serious issues: (1) she needs to understand the Constitution and that it is a document wary of government. Her principles must be rooted in that document and condemn the Patriot Act.
She needs to begin a national debate about monetary policy and advocate a radically different tax policy like the Fair Tax. She must also stand up against the hawkish members of her party and advocate non-interventionism: hawks have no place in the next Republican party. There is a lot of room to maneuver, but if she doesn’t appear genuinely concerned with the size of government and have a plan to radically reduce it, her coalition will crumble like a deer hit by 180 grain soft points.
Mike Huckabee has been replaced (at least temporarily) by Sarah Palin as the defacto leader of the traditionalists-nationalists coalition. Like Palin, he needs to stand firmly against big government conservatism and corruption. He has already publicly advocated the Fair Tax and I think that’s an ingenious move. If he and Palin can tone down the culture war and imperialist rhetoric and adopt principled small government policies, either (or both together) might have a chance in 2012.
Bobby Jindal, the Indian (subcontinent) governor of Louisiana is often cited as a possible leader of the Republican party. His socially conservative Catholic doctrine might serve him well enough to make it to the mainstream GOP’s floor. If the Republicans chose to become a follow the Democrats towards the center, he is a good choice, but I think that is a losing strategy. Jindal has made a variety of socially conservative stands that turn off small government folks and aside from great anti-corruption rhetoric, he’s seemed too mainstream on tax and Constitution issues.
Mitt Romney was a perfect mainstream GOP candidate: a competent, pro-corporate hawk. Unfortunately for his career, Obama is probably going to hold the purple center of American politics for many years to come. This leaves Romney with an extremely weak coalition: some moderates, nationalists and portions of the traditionalists who don’t think Mormonism is blasphemous. Not a winning coalition.
Ron Paul is the future of the Republican party because the internet is the future of politics. Howard Dean’s unlikely rise to the top of the Democratic establishment (DNC chairman) was built upon his campaign’s use of the netroots. Tens of millions of Americans connected by the internet and engaged with politics. The netroots allowed Barack Obama to defeat the Clinton political machine and the John McCain campaign.
Ron Paul didn’t know much about the internet when he ran for the Republican nomination this year but his supporters did and they created a decentralized network of websites and online support communities that raised over $30 million. This launched him into the national spotlight, albeit a dim one. The energy from his campaign has transformed into the formation of a web-powered political coalition called the Campaign for Liberty.
The most interesting thing about the Campaign for Liberty and the Ron Paul phenomenon is that it has attracted some of the most ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ factions of American politics. Indeed, Ralph Nader, the uber liberal, and Ron Paul, the uber conservative, agree with other third party candidates Bobb Barr (Libertarian candidate) and Cynthia McKinney (Green Party) on a number of issues: (1) a non-interventionist foreign policy, (2) the sanctity of America’s Constitutionally protected rights to privacy and due process, (3) balancing the federal budget and (4) a reevaluation of monetary policy and the role of the Federal Reserve System. These four issues are the foundation of a winning coalition.
This coalition has many subgroups: Marxists liberals and right wing militias, libertarian intellectuals and anti-corporate activists, environmentalists and oilmen. In my opinion the wide range of eclectic supporters of this coalition are calling for a more decentralized governing system like the ones Founding Father and Milton Freedman would fantasize about. A government of layers, each of which is best adapted to the community it serves. Local, regional, national, global ensuring peace within the community and it’s representation to the greater whole. Social programs are not run from far away capitals, but within community partnerships between business and non-profit entities. This fundamental decentralization is worthy of a political platform because it is the root of conservatism: it is Edmund Burke shifting his weight to balance the ship of society.
Barack Obama’s great innovation was his centrist approach to politics during a time of extreme political divisiveness. The Republicans must figure out the next great innovation if they want to remain relevant. That innovation is decentralization and it’s where the third parties are currently coalescing. If the Republicans can’t brand Obama as a big government politician determined to centralize power and take away community’s rights, and then brand themselves as upholders of those rights, then some crafty people are going form another (Yellow?) party and take the Republican’s spot at the dance.
