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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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LIMITS OF THE BIG TENT Politicians always dream of fashioning a political party broad enough in its appeal to attract a political base of diverse elements that can become a permanent majority. The Party becomes a “big tent” whose constituents work to achieve their own interests, while electing representatives under the Party’s banner. The political Big Tent is an amalgam of “mutual self-interest”. The political Big Tent resembles an “entrepreneurial” company – a modern construct little known when I began my professional career in 1964. The industrial biggies then were top-down monoliths like GM and IBM. We ribbed friends who were IBM-ers about being “Identical Business Men”. They wore conservative suits and conformed to a common style and business purpose. A friend who joined IBM in 1956 said the company song came on the loudspeaker at their Hudson Valley plant every day at a set time. Employees sang the song together at their desks. Try to picture that today. (Karaoke, perhaps?) More a California than a New York creation, the entrepreneurial company depends on the initiative of its people. Instead of conforming to top-down objectives, employees form their own goals for increasing the company’s business. They may ask the company to support these pursuits, but the initiative is theirs. The company’s biggest rewards go to employees who bring in new work. Typically, the entrepreneur who wins the work manages its technical quality and finances. Husbanding the company’s profit for that work is his chief task. I know about this because I spent thirty years in such a company. Professional life was rarely dull, sometimes insecure, always challenging, and ultimately rewarding. You managed your own career; no one took care of you. The company blessed those who helped it grow. And that growth was impressive. I joined the company as employee #500. When I left (under my own power) thirty years later, the company had over 40,000 employees and annual sales exceeding $5 billion. Along the way we found that the size of the entrepreneurial big tent and the diversity of its business interests required close attention. Our managers understood some kinds of business but not others, so the company learned to be cautious about expanding too adventurously (and too expensively). When the harsh realities of experience (and its lack) were disregarded, some entrepreneurial efforts crashed. Other new ventures threatened the company’s existing business by causing conflicts of interest. But profit is a powerful motivator. Gradually, we learned valuable (but sometimes expensive) lessons about the big tent and its limitations. I mention this only by way of example in discussing politics. The Civil War influenced American politics for nearly 70 years. Republicans had won the war and freed the slaves, so the GOP was blacks’ natural political home. In reaction, Democrats became the party of the white South. Jim Crow laws kept blacks from voting in the South, where most of them lived. Republicans failed to see blacks as a valuable constituency during an era when whites of both parties saw segregation as acceptable and were indifferent to blacks’ disadvantaged situation. Republicans controlled national politics for most of 1865-1933, but the Great Depression turned the game-board over. In 1932, an alliance of unions, farmers, poor people, minorities, ethnics, intellectuals and entertainers swept Herbert Hoover and the Republicans from office in reaction to the Depression. The Party of the Old South became larger than ever, but blacks were not in it. FDR was hailed as a political genius. Democrats in the flush of success didn’t worry whether his big tent really could hold all those disparate interests. Democrats held the White House for five straight terms (1933-’53) and the Congress for all but two of those years. (The span even included two wars!) With only scattered exceptions, the Congress remained solidly Democratic, 1933-’95. Three generations grew up knowing only Democrats running the national government. FDR and Harry Truman appointed twelve Supreme Court justices – creating a liberal Court whose legacy persists to this day. The natural condition of American politics looked Democratic for the future. An axiom of politics, however, is that nothing remains static. (The corollary is that politicians always overreach.) Although Democrats’ southern white base was implacably hostile to black civil rights, northeastern liberals such as John Kennedy could not resist trying to enlarge the party by reaching out to blacks. Robert Kennedy’s famous telephone call to Coretta Scott King when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in a Georgia jail (October 1960) won JFK 70% of the black vote and helped him narrowly defeat Richard Nixon. Thereafter, black voters began to think of the Democratic Party as friendly to minority interests. Ironically, many southern Congressional Democrats continued to oppose black civil rights initiatives. The Party became schizophrenic on race. Democratic Senators Sam Ervin, Al Gore, Sr., Richard Russell, and Robert Byrd filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act – proposed by JFK before his death – for over 80 days until Republicans led the way to cloture. It was the first time in 37 years that the Senate had brought civil rights legislation to an actual vote. Post-1964, liberal Democrats welcomed minorities to their Big Tent, but it was classic overreach. White southerners would not stay while blacks came in. A trickle of white southerners going Republican grew to a flood as Democrats aligned themselves increasingly with minority civil rights. Liberal courts accelerated the southern migration with rulings favorable to affirmative action, preferences, and quotas. Catholics – once the Party’s backbone – started their exit when abortion became the signature Democratic cause. Inclusion of homosexuals in the Democratic tent drove both Catholics and Evangelicals into the GOP camp. Democrats’ anti-business posture and commitment to high taxes disaffected investors and small businessmen. By the 1990s Democrats still had a big tent, but it was filled with racial minorities, unassimilated ethnics, militant homosexuals, the permanent poor, aging socialists, union leaders, Hollywood actors, radical billionaires and academic liberals. Most “normal culture” constituents from FDR’s old coalition had gone Republican. In 1994 the GOP won both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1950s. By 2003 Republicans controlled the Congress and the presidency – not seen since Eisenhower’s time. George Bush became the first Republican president since McKinley to launch a major war effort. Republicans were the new majority party. Times had changed. As Republicans solidified their hold on the Congress and the presidency – re-electing George W. Bush to a second term by a clear majority in 2004 – GOP leaders began to plan how to attract ethnics, including the swelling tide of Hispanics who have passed blacks as the largest ethnic group. A former governor of Texas, President Bush seems to have a particular vision for drawing Hispanics into the party. In 2004 he won 40% of Hispanic votes – a remarkable achievement in an ethnic community that had been considered solidly Democratic only four years earlier. Mr. Bush’s Hispanic strategy included doing something about 12 million illegal aliens – most of them Mexicans – residing in the country with no prospects for achieving legal status under current law. His insistence upon “normalizing” their situation has sparked a furious response from the conservative base of his party. Conservatives see the unchecked flow of illegals as a threat to the country’s security and a drain on the resources of communities forced to absorb large illegal populations. A duel of polls is being waged. “They’re doing jobs Americans won’t do” is endlessly repeated. And charges of racism are being used to discredit advocates of border control. Constituents of both parties agree that deporting 12 million people is impractical, but most also agree that blanket “amnesty” would simply encourage more border-crashers. Notwithstanding Mr. Bush’s bold call for “guest worker” legislation, a large majority of Republicans – perhaps as many as 80% – and probably 50% of Democrats want the flood of illegals stanched before any move is made to legalize those who have broken the law to get here. This brief description, of course, scarcely represents the complexity of the illegal immigration issue. The GOP’s chief political difficulty is that the Party’s leadership and its base are miles apart. The Big Tent GOP leaders want cannot accommodate all of: business interests who want illegals for cheap (legal) labor; conservatives (including legal immigrants) worried about wage-depression and security; and elites who want illegals to become new Republicans. As Democrats found earlier, the Big Tent cannot house interests whose objectives are fundamentally in conflict. Mr. Bush hopes he can square the immigration circle, but I believe he has miscalculated his base. His advisors feed him received wisdom that ignores the fact that communities are drowning in a flood of unskilled illegals who depress wages and exhaust public resources. Ignoring this reality fails the “reasonable man” test. Mr. Bush has been out of touch on these matters. If Republicans continue on this path, their base could migrate to a party that respects their concerns. Certainly, this will not be the Democrats, who also see illegals as potential Democratic voters. Instead, a new party could arise, populated largely by disgruntled conservatives. The GOP will dwindle to a minority party. And the Democrats, who lost majority status by “big tent overreach”, will rule again because Republicans repeated history instead of learning from it.
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