Letter to America
II…After Iowa….
The aftermath of the caucuses in Iowa has led Michelle Bachmann…darling of the mad hatters of the Tea Party movement…to withdraw from the Presidential election…
Her withdrawal speech invoked God so many times I lost count… yet that commonplace of modern Republican Party politics is revealing and in its way a true revelation….
Although the republic of the United States of America was founded upon the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment despite the boldness of the language of the Declaration of Independence its polity had shallow roots in the theories of Reason. The politics of the thirteen states that won their independence from Great Britain in 1776 had long rested upon unstable foundations and an almost schizophrenic tension between secular and religious; property rights and wrongs; justice and injustice.
The same religious impulse that carried the Pilgrim Fathers to America’s wild shores also justified them in relentlessly driving the Native Americans from their lands. The Pilgrim Fathers wouldn’t have conceived of this as anomalous behaviour. Neither later did southern slave owners see slavery as inimical to an espousal of the rights of man…if self-evidently all men were created equal…it was just as self evident that indentured servants, women and black or non-European or Native American peoples weren’t numbered amongst them and were therefore self evidently incapable of owning the same inalienable rights as their masters…
The tectonic plates of these countervailing forces were explicit from the outset…the political tensions caused by them remained largely unresolved by the creation of a Federal State – which was from its inception a messy compromise between rival polities and political rivals. The founding fathers soon fell out and fell into the habit of a bitter, polemical party politics…
Despite the horrors of the American Civil War those same inherent unresolved tensions were still unresolved in the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement finally overcame and in the process rewrote the political map of modern America.
In between those two shattering events of America’s history a third force shaped American society…religion. The religious revival in the nineteenth century Europe helped create universal education and the anti-slavery movement and awakened a wider sense of public social conscience. These also stirred up the Temperance movements in large cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Millions of new immigrants brought their religious observances with them to America and these shaped the values of public education systems in the USA.
Once out in the West, on the broad plains, these plain religious sentiments melded with as yet plainer version of the Puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers. Adapting the methods of the Baptists and Methodists to the frontier created a formidable, missionary, quasi-messianic, evangelical revivalist Christianity that quickly took root and spread….
It was the impulse of this revivalist religion that swept the West and carried Prohibition into the mainstream politics at the end of the nineteenth century. It was this religious impulse that made the 18th Amendment and made prohibition an article of the constitution.
Before we, worldly, Europeans shrug our shoulders in intellectual despair we need to remember that Bachmann and the Tea Party are deeply rooted in an activist American political tradition…one that took hold of the American political imagination before and has continued to fascinate it since. And arguably one that also took hold of the Republican Party in the western prairies before, as surely as it today dominates the south and non-urban America that thinks of itself as defining Middle America; or, as outspoken outriders of Nixon’s silent-majority.
America’s politicians have long had to ride these two wild horses…the religious impulse and the secular wild romantic…both often irrational…both re-imagining history only in their own terms and each with their own myths and legends…and always the enduring myth of the one strong good man defeating every evil.
These imaginings overlook inconvenient truths – whether the bigotry of small towns and their incipient sexism, racism and anti-intellectualism; or the urban squalor of America’s cities, where poverty brushes up against flagrant wealth; where nothing exceeds like excess and only success succeeds.
But it’s a mistake to think these American foibles as better as or worse than any imaginings of any modern society. They are merely strange to us because we are strangers to their world. We mistake our shared convenience food for experiencing a shared culture…but drinking coke and eating Big Macs no more makes us American than their fine viticulture makes them European…as surely as we mistake those speaking in English for also thinking like us too…and the sorry history of Ireland and England is bloodied by the brutal truth that hides behind that easy misunderstanding.
We should see the events in Iowa and in the Republican Party in that context.
In my short lifetime the party politics of America has been turned upside down and it may be about to repeat…or perhaps complete…one of its periodic upheavals.
Before Barak Obama was elected in 2008, President Kennedy was the last non-Southern-Democrat to be elected President. His election rested upon the solidly Democratic states of the old southern confederacy…states that then would never vote for the Republican Party…the party of Lincoln…the party whose very name stood for their well remembered humiliation.
Though Kennedy won a clear majority in the Electoral College the Democratic Party carried no state west of Texas save New Mexico and Nevada. Nixon carried the entire West Coast including California. In 1960 the Democrats failed to either carry Ohio or Florida and the New England states of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were carried by Nixon despite Kennedy being from Massachusetts.
Jimmy Carter…a southerner from Georgia…was the last Democrat to carry the states of the old south. Clinton was the first modern Democrat to be elected without carrying Texas and all the states of the old confederacy. Every Republican winner or loser since 1980 has carried Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri and the Carolinas.
The defection of the south to the Republican Party has kept the Democrats from power longer than Roosevelt’s New Deal has kept the Democrats in power in Washington DC by uniting the economic interests of the industrial states of the north with the regional interests of Dixiecrat states of the South.
Since 1968 the Republican Party has been the majority party in America…until 1992 when the stirrings of a new Democrat majority were first seen in Clinton’s election and then again in his subsequent re-election in 1996…before the transformative result of 2008 when a Democrat nominee was elected with a convincing majority both of popular vote and Electoral Votes for the first time since 1944….neither of the Bush victories were convincing. The educated suburbs of the new middle America of college and university graduates is increasingly socially liberal and economically cautious…a constituency Clinton and Obama have made the Democrats’ own.
If that coalition holds…then Obama’s will be a truly a transformational Presidency…like Nixon’s election was in 1968….one that changes the politics of American presidential elections…equally his opponents are buoyed up by their success in 2010 and full of faith, they now man the barricades… determined on battle…determined to see Obama like Jimmy Carter consigned to history’s footnotes.
What follows will be brutal, cruel and bloody…but never less than defining and compelling.
Santorum, Paul and Gingrich might yet stop Romney. Romney’s vote in Iowa was a few thousand votes from his 2008 total…this a some way from the sorts of turnouts the Democrats generated in the 2008 Primary Season when voters came out in record numbers…casting hundreds of thousands of ballots. Nevertheless these conservative candidates speak to the Republican Party’s soul…and there are those in the Tea Party and beyond for whom this election is a crusade against the forces of secularism, socialism and the state… a fight that comes only once in a generation…will they seize their chance to fully seize the Republican Party no matter the electoral cost? Will this be the Republican’s McGovern moment? Or was Obama’s election a false dawn for the Democratic Party?
The last question will not be fully answered until November but by the time South Carolina (21st January) and Florida (31st January) have voted we’ll know which way the winds blow in the Republican Party and that and what happens in the process of selecting the next Republican nominee may yet tell us more about America than the election itself in November will reveal….
If you got through this you deserve some light relief….see here for a spoof of Michelle Bachmann and marriage/gay issues…