The Decline of the Parties

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

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The Decline of the Parties

The Weakening of the Party System

Historically, the two dominant parties have been crucial instruments that elites have utilized to mobilize broad electoral coalitions. Competition between the parties and among groups within each party has helped elites arbitrate their differences. The parties also have worked as linking mechanisms between elites and the masses, though the relationship has been a hierarchical one in which elite factions have sought to swing mass sentiment or the electorate in one direction or another, or in which they have responded to mass discontent, especially during times of economic crisis like the Great Depression.

Over the past two decades, the parties have largely been supplanted by professional campaign staffs, media specialists, fundraisers, pollsters, political action committees, and other players as "gatekeepers" in the election process. Elections managed by a professional campaign industry possessing the technology to frame issues and candidates' images cannot fulfill the same function as elections conducted through a party system. Media-based elections do not provide an opportunity for mediation and bargaining among elites, and they do not forge a link between the electorate and the elites that win government power. Failing to fulfill their historic political functions, elections in the United States have become increasingly marginal to the governmental apparatus. They have become a part of America's television culture, peopled with media stars and contrived soap opera drama.

The New Deal Coalition and the "Liberal Alternative"

To understand the erosion of the two-party system, it is crucial to examine the structure and internal politics of the Democratic party. This is important because the Democrats have constituted the majority national party-defined by reference to voter preferences and congressional leadership-since the 1932 presidential election. Between 1901 and 1933, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress only three times. Between 1933 and 1989, in contrast, the Democrats failed to control both houses only three times.

The Great Depression revolutionized the group composition of the U.S. party system. The center of gravity for the Democratic party shifted to northern cities, where large numbers of working class and poor people were concentrated. In addition to the cities and the solid South, so many people benefited from New Deal programs that the new voting coalition ensured that the Democrats would become ascendant. In 1936, a Gallup poll found that large blocs of voters benefiting from New Deal programs supported Roosevelt: 59 percent of farmers (Agricultural Adjustment Act Farm Credit Administration, Farm Mortgage Corporation, abolition of the gold standard), 61 percent of white-collar workers (bank regulation, FHA home loans savings deposit insurance), 80 percent of organized labor (government recognition of collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, work relief), and 68 percent of people under twenty-five years of age (Civilian Conservation Corps, National Youth Administration). Among lower-income groups, percent favored Roosevelt, compared to 60 percent of the middle class. In contrast, upper-income groups identified overwhelmingly with the Republican party.

Working-class urban voters constituted the center of the New Deal coalition in the North. Union members and their families, urban ethnics, and blacks voted more heavily for Roosevelt in the 1936 election than did any other groups in the country. Their tacit alliance with the one-party South, where Republicans rarely even fielded candidates for congressional, state, and local offices, created a national coalition of formidable electoral strength. But it was a fragile coalition, and racial divisions threatened constantly to break it apart. In the 1964 election, Republicans began to break the Democrats' grip on the South. In the North, demographic and economic changes eroded the strength of inner-city party organizations. Their constituents were moving to the suburbs, and the sons and daughters of union members were joining the ranks of educated white-collar professionals. In the process, attachments to the Democratic party weakened.

Following the Second World War, serious contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination traded on the rhetoric and symbols of the New Deal: a beneficent government that would help the underdog and downtrodden, a government that would promote equal opportunity in education and jobs. The liberals who sought the presidency ran on platforms that promised government programs to redress inequality even while they tried to preserve the Democratic hegemony in the conservative South. By the 1980 election, however, it was clear that the New Deal coalition had mostly dissolved, and as a consequence Democratic presidential candidates no longer knew how to package the issues. The Democrats' contenders were scarcely able to contribute to a public dialogue about policy and politics at all, as illustrated in 1988, when Michael Dukakis tried to assert that "competence" rather than "ideology" was the main issue in the presidential campaign.

The public philosophy of American liberalism that endured until the 1980s was created largely in the 1950s, but the electoral alignment that sustained it was forged earlier, in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Great Depression, liberals and social democrats like New York's Senator Robert Wagner and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers mobilized workers, farmers, the poor, and blacks throughout the North. Left-wing socialists, religious radicals, independent progressives, and communists also were prominent in union and Democratic party politics.

Within the Democratic party, the 1948 election forced a definitive split between liberals and the Left. Left-wingers formed the Progressive party, choosing former Vice President Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate to challenge Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey. Many of the planks in the Progressive platform presaged legislation that would be enacted later by the Democrats-public housing (in 1949), civil rights legislation (1964), food stamps (1963). Other social welfare programs were never adopted: national health insurance, government assistance for cooperative middle-income housing projects, and a permanent public works employment program.

The Progressives (not to be confused with the "good government" movement just after the turn of the century) also favored nationalization of some of the largest banks as well as corporations that provided energy and transportation, as had been done in several Western European nations. They advocated negotiations with the Soviet Union to outlaw atomic weapons; supported the United Nations and proposed that the massive economic aid program, known as the Marshall Plan, be implemented under U.N. auspices rather than channeled only to governments and groups in Western Europe that the United States supported.

Wallace proposed these programs to 32,000 delegates and spectators assembled at the Progressive party's July 1948 convention in Philadelphia. But the Philadelphia convention marked the end rather than a beginning of a left alternative in American politics. Democratic liberals and the Republicans joined forces to label the Progressive party as a communist front. Inside the Democratic party, liberals organized to drive leftists out. One key figure in the effort was Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey (the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968), who, along with Walter Mondale (the Democratic standard bearer in 1984), took the lead in purging the left from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor party.

A national anticommunist hysteria was whipped up by the inflammatory rhetoric of the 1948 campaign. The Smith Act of 1947 and the Internal Security Act of 1948 gave the government the legal tools to prosecute alleged Communists and "Communist-front" organizations. For almost five years, Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities led a campaign to ferret out Communists from government bureaucracies, the movie industry, the universities, labor unions, and professions. McCarthy dragged hundreds of witnesses before his Senate committee in his search for Communists and their "dupes and sympathizers." Thousands of artists and intellectuals were fired and put on employment blacklists. To promote their own careers, some witnesses enthusiastically provided the names of suspected communists and their "sympathizers." The president of the Screen Actors Guild, a Democrat named Ronald Reagan, cooperated by providing the committee with the names of "security risks" in Hollywood. In Hollywood, as in other professions, to speak out against the witch hunts was a ticket to unemployment.

Beginning in 1947, liberals made themselves complicit with McCarthyism when the Department of Justice under President Truman undertook to prosecute Communists and other leftists under the Smith Act and the Internal Security Act. To prove it was not "soft on communism" at home, the Truman administration required tens of thousands of federal employees to appear before loyalty boards to "prove" they were not "subversive." These boards asked employees questions such as, "Were you a regular purchaser of the New York Times? " "What do you think of female chastity?" "At one time or two, were you a strong advocate of the United Nations?" About 12,000 federal employees resigned under the pressure; another 2,700 were fired for giving wrong answers. Thousands of public employees in state and local governments and in schools and universities were fired. Often, their sin was that they were Jewish, black, or had previously associated with civil rights organizations.

Finally, in 1954, some politicians and media figures began to speak out against the witch hunts. The nation's leading newscaster, Edward R. Murrow, played a critical role m turning the tide of public opinion against McCarthyism. McCarthy overreached himself when he accused military officers of having communist sympathies By then Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general and war hero, occupied the White House. As a result of McCarthy's fall from grace, the pressure was eased, but the Left had already been effectively eliminated from American political life

As a result, American political discourse was sharply truncated. Political alternatives identified as left of center in the ideological spectrum-such as national health insurance, public works, stronger protections for unions and government housing programs-were routinely labeled as communist. In the late 1940s, the American Medical Association launched a campaign against public health insurance on the ground that it was "socialized medicine." Public housing barely passed Congress in 1949, even though it enjoyed widespread popular support, because the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards got a lot of mileage out of calling it "socialized housing." In such an atmosphere meaningful dialogue about domestic policies was difficult to sustain. On foreign policy, it was lost altogether and it has never been recovered. Democratic liberals embraced belligerent Cold War anticommunist rhetoric as enthusiastically as did Republican conservatives

All social welfare programs were inevitably labeled as "creeping socialism" or as part of an international communist conspiracy to weaken the rugged individualism ascribed to Americans. Liberals who favored such programs were therefore always on the defensive, trying to avoid these labels themselves. And thus the crisis of modern liberalism emerged in full bloom. Any attempt to accomplish a domestic agenda of workable social welfare programs came up against the fact that the liberals had helped to destroy their best allies on the left who would have helped mobilize electoral support from blacks, working-class and poor people, small farmers, and union members. Liberals no longer occupied the center between conservatives on the right and socialists or welfare state advocates on the left. Now they were the left, such as it existed in the context of the American two-party system.

The Democrats' Loss of Labor

The marriage between labor and the Democrats was consummated during the New Deal. The National Recovery Act of 1932 recognized the right of workers to organize trade unions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 provided a legal basis to make that right a reality by specifying procedures that workers could follow to establish a union at their plant. Among the achievements of this movement were not only higher wages but protection from arbitrary treatment by employers. Promotion by seniority, grievance procedures, and other rights limited abuse of workers by management. "Unfair" labor practices, designed to intimidate workers trying to found unions or to undercut the unions' effectiveness in bargaining or enforcing contract provisions, were subject to penalties meted out by the Department of Labor. The labor movement also fought for such programs as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and public housing. Union membership shot from 2.9 million in 1933 to 8.9 million in 1940.

Southern Democrats opposed labor unions. President Roosevelt remained generally aloof. But influential northern congressmen and governors, such as New York's Senator Robert Wagner, sought to establish the labor movement as the basic foundation for the Democratic party. There was a strong communist and socialist presence in the labor movement, but even the most radical leaders, with very few exceptions, did not seek to replace the capitalist with a socialist economy.

Although almost all employers opposed the new labor relations system at first, many of them began to realize that unions were not necessarily anticapitalist and that, in fact, there might even be a benefit to signing a peace pact with labor. At the plant level, employers now had to adapt to the loss of some of the arbitrary power to hire and fire, promote and demote, and dictate working conditions. But at the same time, the union-management contract bound union members to follow some work rules and not to strike.

The Second World War was seized on by employers as an opportunity to reverse some of labor's gains. Although workers supported the war against fascism overall, they resisted the repeated attempts by employers to use the war as an excuse to speed up production, lengthen the work day, and take back control of working conditions. The result was a series of strikes in 1944 and 1945. The first year after the war saw intense labor conflict, but in 1947 an effective truce was achieved. Labor leaders accepted a bargain with employers under which wage increases and employers' acceptance of their right to exist were traded for concessions in other areas. Contracts restored management's right to control production on the shop floor, with unions giving up much of the leverage won during the 1930s. Most labor leaders opposed new legislation to curb union power, but they failed to use strikes or other measures to prevent the passage of laws like the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which (among other provisions) permitted states to enact right-to-work laws that allowed nonunion workers to work in union shops and that gave courts and the president the authority to issue injunctions against strikes. Increases in the numbers of supervisory personnel confirmed the new management control over workers. The number of management supervisors rose from fourteen per one-hundred workers in 1950, to twenty-one per one-hundred workers by 1965.

Most unionized workers saw their real wages rise during the period of labor-management harmony, but in the long run the pact between capital and labor crucially favored capital. Labor gave up any meaningful representation on boards of directors or any ability to influence investment patterns, including whether profits would be reinvested locally to improve the quality of life in local communities and keep the industry competitive with firms elsewhere. Later, when corporations would use their complete control over investment decisions to move plants and jobs to cheaper, nonunionized production sites in the Sun Belt or the Third World, the tide turned decisively against labor. Corporations moved plants to "right-to-work" states and opened new nonunion shops even when they stayed in the United States. The unionized sector of the work force plummeted from 34 percent of the nonagricultural labor force in 1954 to 28 percent in 1970, and to 17 percent by 1986.

With wages and benefits improving during the postwar economic boom workers and their union leaders showed little interest in how management used profits, and even less in extending their unions into the southern and southwestern states. These were areas that held great attraction for corporations, for their cheap labor and absence of strong unions served as magnets to management looking for ways to cut costs. At the same time, the economy was changing. The two fastest growing sectors were domestic labor and food services, both difficult to organize because many of the employees were minorities, women, very young or old, or illegal immigrants. These developments further undermined union strength.

The pact between organized labor and management relied upon economic expansion. When the recession of the 1970s hit, a crucial prop was pulled out from under labor-management relations. Productivity per person hour in the United States rose at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent in the 1960s, and as late as 1970 U.S. manufacturing was still about twice as productive as Japanese manufacturing, and a third more productive than manufacturing in Germany and France. But the other countries were catching up fast. They built new plants with the latest technology made possible in part by government subsidies and a degree of joint government-corporate-labor planning that was rejected in the United States as "socialistic." Their economies were also not as heavily burdened by military spending. By the early 1980s, average output per hour in manufacturing in the United States trailed behind output in France and Germany and only slightly outpaced output in Japan. In 1958 it took 27 hours to make a ton of hot rolled sheet steel in Japan, compared to 9 hours in the United States. By 1980, it took only 4.4 hours in Japan, and 5.3 hours in the United States. In 1965, it took 9 hours to produce a television set in Japan, compared to 7.6 hours in the United States. By 1980, it took 0.8 hours in Japan, but 2.6 hours in the United States. In machine tools manufacturing the Japanese were, in 1965 about 40 percent less productive than U.S. workers, but by 1985 they were about 25 percent more productive. In the critical industry of the postwar economy-automobiles-the Japanese lowered their average number of hours per car from 260 hours in 1970 to 140 hours by 1981. The U.S. automakers stayed right at 210 hours. Other industries in which the U.S. lost the productivity edge included watches, cameras large electric motors, trucks, bulldozers, agricultural tractors, buses, and subway cars.

Much of the reason that U.S. productivity lagged was because American firms had failed to invest in new plant, equipment, and technology. Instead, profits were used to build plants where labor was cheaper or to reach agreements with foreign firms. U.S. banks provided much of the capital for foreign companies to compete with American manufacturing. In addition, U.S. foreign policy helped provide the "right" kind of business climate (cheap labor, low taxes, little regulation) for the expansion of multinational capital into the Third World, even as the U.S. economy became less competitive.

A common myth in the United States is that the blame for falling U.S. ' competitiveness in the world economy lies with overpaid workers. But productivity rose much faster than salaries during the postwar boom. Between 1948 and 1966, the average production worker's hourly output increased by $2.68 per hour, but the average hourly wage increased by only 86 cents per hour, leaving a difference of $1.82. The government took 61 cents in taxes; only 35 cents of the remaining $1.21 generated by workers was reinvested in new or better plant and equipment. The remaining 86 cents went for higher dividends paid to investors, higher profits and executive salaries, and more management employees.

To have insisted on a wiser use of the nation's wealth would have required a labor movement and leadership interested in the overall political position of labor. In an era of prosperity and anticommunism in the mass culture, and following the purge of the Left in the early 1950s, there was little chance of such a development. Labor had long given up its voice in corporate decision making and had purged the labor leaders who might have pushed hard for an influential voice in investment and production decisions.

In 1936, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed to represent those members of the industrial labor force that the more conservative, white, skill-and-craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) had long eschewed. Communists and leftists had been courageous and essential allies in the struggle to organize the CIO in the face of well-organized violence meted out by industry's hired thugs and state National Guards. Following the war, however, Phillip Murray, president of the CIO, joined with Walter Reuther of the United Autoworkers and James Carey of the United Electrical Workers to rid the unions of their leftist members.

The effect of removing militant and radical labor leaders was that many of the union leaders who remained were interested less in the political and economic influence of workers than in enriching themselves by pursuing full-time careers as union bureaucrats. The idea that labor had a distinct political interest antagonistic to or even separate from capital was completely lost. George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO after the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, exemplified the new generation of union leaders. Meany was a Cold War liberal to the core, and when some unions, such as the United Auto Workers, announced opposition to the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, he forced them out of the AFL-CIO. Meany and the labor movement supported the civil rights movement as long as it stuck to the concept of equal rights under the law, but when it became clear that black leaders were going to challenge white political bosses in the cities and seek a more influential voice in the Democratic party, Meany resisted any further concessions-particularly since many affiliate unions were guilty of racial discrimination and were unwilling to cooperate with equal opportunity employment plans. Meany and his successor, Lane Kirkland, worked against any kind of quotas for minorities and women, both in employment and in delegate selection for national party conventions. When blacks, women, and the youth movement entered Democratic party politics in 1968 and 1972, Meany aligned with older, white male party leaders, like Mayor Daley of Chicago, to resist.

After Jimmy Carter's defeat in the presidential election of 1980, Kirkland and other labor leaders decided to make the Democratic party into a surrogate labor party, and they pushed hard to make an old labor ally, Walter Mondale, the party's candidate. But they were at least twenty years too late. The union leadership attempted to convert the Democrats into a vehicle for representing labor at a time when 70 percent of the public (according to one poll) agreed that the "high wages paid to American workers are primarily responsible for making U.S. products more expensive than imported products," and 51 percent of blue-collar workers agreed that "unions are not concerned enough with increasing productivity" (only 38 percent disagreed). For at least three decades, Americans have seen big labor leaders repeatedly indicted for corruption, violence, and close associations with organized crime. Most of the labor leaders who were committed to worker democracy and workers' welfare were kicked out long ago, labeled as Communists or Socialists. For the Democratic party and its liberal leadership, the chickens had finally come home to roost. The basic foundation of their party hardly existed as a political force anymore.

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... the ties that bind politicians to elites are stronger than those that bind them to the public. The Democrats are as dependent on the new technologies of campaigning, on the media, and on corporate money as are the Republicans. A populist-style campaign appealing to discontented and disadvantaged voters works at cross-purposes to candidates' attempts to get early money for the "hidden primary." Voters in the bottom third of the income pyramid turn out for elections, and especially for primary contests, at a far lower rate than upper-income voters. A populist campaign must change this well-established pattern and mobilize the very groups that have stayed away from the polling booth. Recent Democratic candidates running for the presidency have attempted to win the presidency by leaning to the right and have failed in the last three elections. As a result, a tug-of-war over the Democratic soul is taking place. On one side are voices who argue for a populist reorientation; on the other are those who believe that a populist-style campaign simply would not work, that instead it would alienate too many white middle-class voters.

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Kevin Phillips, the author of The Emerging Republican Majority, expressed the fear that without the mediating influence of the party system, the electorate, especially the middle class, might turn to authoritarian solutions under the influence of the mass media. "American mass culture, epitomized by Hollywood and the movies, was turning to a kindred emphasis on force, will, power, irrationality and mythology in a series of sword-and-sorcery movies", he warned. To the voter getting most information from a television screen, modern elections already may have become as distant from and as contrived and fictional as the movies starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Clint Eastwood, and Chuck Norris.

Politicians are tempted to project the same image as these actors. Political leaders are becoming habituated to think, or to act as if they think, that there are no real problems, only public relations problems: "Expressing compassion through photo opportunities at disaster sites or slums takes the place of political action.'' Image sells, not substance, so that George Bush, the "education president," initiates no programs for the schools and declares a "thousand points of light" as the solution to poverty, homelessness, and Third World conditions in the cities. Political leadership has become an exercise in image making rather than the ability to find new solutions to intractable problems, to mediate political differences, and to articulate a political vision. Leadership defined by hype and advertising copy produces political figures bereft of past accomplishment or substance and vision, such as Dan Quayle.

The Democratic Facade

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