A certain portion of the GOP base will seemingly forever remain racist, religiously extreme and utterly self-centered and driven by greed. But other portions of the GOP base might be swayed to shift their political allegiance if the Democrat Party can successfully rediscover its former populist appeal. At least that is the premise of a piece in Salon that notes the stirrings of a new populism such as that preached by Elizabeth Warren. The biggest obstacle to such populist message is the huge amounts of money that would be oligarchs like the Koch brothers and others who want a new Gilded Age will throw in opposition to policies that might assist the working and middle classes rather than favor the most rapacious of the wealthy. Here are article excerpts:
Elizabeth Warren’s rock star reception at Netroots Nation came as a surprise to absolutely no one, but not so her popularity as a draw for red state Democrats running for Senate, like West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant or Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes.
Yet, there shouldn’t be anything surprising about Warren’s broad economic populist appeal. It was, after all, the foundation of Democratic Party power from 1932 through 1968, a period in which Democrats won seven of nine presidential elections and controlled both houses of Congress continuously with only two brief blips in 1946 and 1952. It was a period of single-party dominance unmatched by any other in U.S. history, except for the First Party System, which the Democratic Republicans dominated so thoroughly from 1800 on that the opposition Federalist Party eventually just disappeared.
The New Deal era may have been a long time ago, but its political basics remain as popular as ever — as seen in programs like Social Security and Medicare, . . . . . What’s been lacking in recent years is the political leadership and infrastructure to tap into that popular sentiment, which is just where Elizabeth Warren comes in.
First, the Democratic coalition is larger than the GOP coalition — Republicans have won just one presidential election since 1988 with more than 50 percent, Bush’s reelection in 2004 … the closest reelection since Woodrow Wilson’s in 1916. Their current House majority is built on pure gerrymandering — House Democrats got half a million more votes than Republicans did in the last election. Republicans can keep up only by keeping Democratic voters down. They cannot compete on a level playing field. Voter suppression, political intimidation, mud-slinging that turns people off to politics completely, these are overwhelmingly Republican weapons of choice, because the two coalitions are not equally balanced. Smaller, off-year electorates favor Republicans. If everyone votes, Democrats win consistently. That’s not a sign of two equally large political coalitions.
Second, the Republicans are more ideologically extreme, dogmatic and uncompromising, as well as being far more reliant on long-range deep-pocket funding to shape the political landscape/battlefield. This combination makes them tactically strong, at the cost of being strategically vulnerable, but only if Democrats are willing to challenge and change the way that politics is played. The Democrats’ numerically dominant big-tent, loose coalition, on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand approach makes it child’s play for the Republicans to engage in tactical divide-and-conquer games, primarily because Democrats have taken their eyes off the ball, the underlying populist economic vision that appeals to virtually all elements in their coalition—and many Republicans as well.
Putting Warren on the ticket in 2016 — either in the top spot or as vice president — would help Democrats take maximum advantage of the first asymmetry, and overcome the disadvantage of the second one. And that’s not just my own pet theory. We have a solid set of polling data from 2008 to support this view (presented and analyzed here)
There’s a strong probability that Hillary Clinton will be elected president in 2016. The GOP field is a mess, and the media’s desperate attempts to revive corpses like Chris Christie and Rick Perry only makes the picture even clearer. But the attacks on Clinton will surely escalate exponentially, putting the prospects of a landslide in doubt, no matter how inadequate the GOP candidate turns out to be. The Edwards record from 2008 strongly suggests that Warren as V.P. could help to ensure that landslide — and with it, a workable Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, even despite the intense GOP gerrymandering that currently has the House paralyzed.
What happens after that will be crucial, of course. If, like Obama and her husband before her, Clinton tries to “move to the center” and spurn her party base, then the 2018 midterms will be yet another disaster, and political gridlock and dysfunction will continue in the years ahead. The Ron Brownsteins of the world will be “vindicated.” But if Elizabeth Warren does have some influence, if Clinton does learn from past Democratic mistakes, then maybe, just maybe, we could see America break with its recent history of almost 50 years dominated by divided government and return to a more traditional, more functional political pattern, in which one party — and its vision — dominates for a period of decades, and the other party survives by adapting to the world that the dominant party has created.
Is the premise of the piece correct? I'm not sure, but the concept is worth exploring and gets to the heart of the Democrat need to make inroads with those who vote Republican even though the GOP's agenda is truly against their best interests.
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