Keynote Address by David Brooks, Friday, June 25, 2005
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PRESENTATION BY
DAVID BROOKS
SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2005
I will start with a few things that I can’t get an answer to. I might as well start by addressing the role that economics play in voting patterns and I accept that Republicans continue to have a huge advantage among voters in the upper third of income distribution and that Democrats have a huge advantage with people in the lower third of the income category. But the changes in the middle class strike me as the more interesting change. There was an exit poll result that Ruy Texiera, somebody who looks at this stuff, has made hay with, that Democrats lost the white working class by 23 percentage points. And those people are probably not in the lower third or some of them are and some of them aren’t. Something has happened in the middle class that explains why Democratic Party registration, which used to be after WWII at close to 50 has dropped down to 30 and Republican, which used to be 20 has risen up to 30. So something’s happening in the middle class, which seems to me more interesting than what’s happening at the bottom and at the top.
But, secondly, let me go to a few questions that I would have for [Professor] Mo [Fiorina], while agreeing with him but just wondering: if there’s this big middle out there, if they’re all independents, why is the electorate so stable? You’d think if there were a lot of independents making up their mind, they’d be swishing back and forth from election to election. And yet, if you take the elections from 1996 to September 11, 2001, they were incredibly stable. It was 49-49. You could add up the presidential elections, the congressional elections, the state legislative elections, they all add up to 49-49. Uncannily tied. We had three election cycles and these numbers didn’t move.
Somehow, that suggests to me that somehow people are really firmly anchored in their parties, as evidenced by the fact that there wasn’t more swishing around. And then after September 11th, we’ve had two significant elections and they’ve basically looked very much the same, the 2002 election and the 2004 election. So then again, we’ve gone from a 49-49 nation to a 52-48 nation. If they’re independents and they’re not firmly rooted in a party and in some ideology, why aren’t they moving around? And this was Rove’s strategy. Rove’s strategy was that the number of persuadable voters in the country are not 20% of the electorate; they’re 7% of the electorate. His further point was that that 7% of the electorate is not stuck in the middle somewhere; they’re scattered randomly across the electorate and it doesn’t make sense to try to appeal to them because there’s no single place to appeal to that 7% who are persuadable. Therefore, he ignored them. That was Rove’s essential strategy and it seems to have worked. If you had told me that George Bush would have been re-elected with events in Iraq the way they were, with the jobs data we had, I wouldn’t have believed you a year before the election. Yet, that strategy must have had some success.
The third thing I’d ask Mo [Fiorina] is why is there so much less split-ticket voting. I’ve read some political scientists who talk about how there used to be a lot of people who would vote Republican for one office, Democrat for the other. You have fewer of those people than you did a generation ago. That also suggests to me that there’s some increased aligning with the parties. As I understand it, one of the things that’s contributed to this is the rise in education. In 1960, the electorate had something like 4% of voters who were college grads. Now it’s up to like 20 or 30%, I’m guessing here, and I think that 10% have post-graduate degrees. And as I understand it, the more educated a voter is, the less likely that voter is to split tickets. You’d think education makes people more independent-minded, but the reverse is true because they ask themselves, “Am I liberal or am I conservative?,” and once you give yourself an ideological label, you vote for the same party again and again and again.
The fourth thing I’d ask is that, if you ask about specific issues and you ask about party labels, you do get the center and you get people giving themselves a conservative or a liberal label, but the ideological labels and the party labels are incredibly malleable. Newt Gingrich came into office in 1994 saying “we’re going to shrink the size of government by 25%. We are part of the leave-us-alone coalition. Let’s cut government – we’ll cut the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and the State Department,” to take Newt to his extreme, and that was one style of Republican conservatism. Then George Bush came in in 2000 and said the purpose of government is not to leave people alone, it’s to help people. He doesn’t promise or even say that he’s going to cut a single part of the government and in fact, he hasn’t. In his first term, domestic discretionary spending, this is the stuff that has nothing to do with the war, nothing to do with homeland security, domestic discretionary spending under Bush rose more than twice as fast than it did under Clinton. It rose faster than it did under LBJ. He spent more money on the Department of Education, which saw its budget double on unemployment benefits, on what we think of as liberal program after liberal program, much faster than any Democrats. There’s an iron rule of politics that if you want to increase domestic spending on welfare programs, vote for a Republican because whether its Bush the first, Bush the second, or Nixon, they do it a lot more than Democrats because they don’t have to worry about the charge that they’re big spenders, which Clinton and the Democrats tended to worry about.
So, the point is that the labels can sometimes stay the same, but the content can radically change. It’s most noticeable in foreign affairs. Believe me, the Republican Party that nominated George Bush in 2000 did not think it’d be going on this massive, nation-building enterprise by 2004. They did not think there would be a worldwide crusade for freedom. That sounds like what Woodrow Wilson and Democratic liberals used to talk about. So, these things change radically, even while the electorate stays the same. Why? I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’m not a professor.
I’ll continue with this trend a little more and that’s the emphasis not on labels, but on the power of ideas to shape elections. Friends of mine wrote a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority four or five years ago and their argument was that growing parts of the electorate are Democrats – Hispanics, college-educated folks in university towns, and the white working-class. They said that these growing groups would guarantee a Democratic majority. Their book is going to have a long shelf-life because it’s taking a long time for that majority to emerge.
But my argument to them is that demographic trends are important in politics, but they never fundamentally explain what happens. It’s always events and ideas that change and as labels can come and go, demography gradually has its effect, but the change of ideas and parties has a much bigger effect that swamps it all.
In the last few years, we’ve seen this dramatic change in both parties. I mentioned the change from Gringrich – really a kind of libertarian conservatism – to Bush – compassionate conservative/neo-Wilsonian conservatism, which is a dramatic change. I think there’s been an equally dramatic change in the Democratic Party. If you wanted to be a cool, young Democrat in Washington 10 years ago, you were a New Democrat. You were a centrist, DLC Democrat, for free trade, Clinton, third-way, Tony Blair, reinventing government, cutting back the size of government, pre-pro-business. That’s what you were, because that’s where the center of gravity and energy in the Democratic Party was ten years ago. Now, there are no New Democrats in Washington. The people who call themselves New Democrats are opposing CAFTA, this free trade deal. Andy Kohut, who’s a pollster with the Pew Forum, recently did a survey of the electorate and they found out that it no longer makes sense to distinguish between New Democrats and traditional, liberal Democrats because there’s no distinction to be found there.
So the energy in the Democratic Party has moved leftward and we’ve seen that, starting with the election of Bush. And I see it every day and one of my closest friends in Washington is a guy named E.J. Dionne, who writes a column for the Washington Post. E.J. wrote a book about 6 years ago called Why Americans Hate Politics, about moving beyond the false choices between left and right. It was a book about Clintonism and why we should transcend ideological divides. E.J. is now so far left that he’s a very orthodox liberal and the idea of transcending ideological differences is something he’s not interested in. He’s pretty ideological. He thinks Bush is a menace and he wants a left-right ideological conflict.
And that’s what’s happened to the Democratic Party. As the Republican Party has been transformed by Bush, the Democratic Party has been transformed by itself. It’s been transformed into a party that isn’t New Democrat. It’s more George Soros. It’s more Howard Dean. It’s more Nancy Pelosi. And that’s a change that’s going to influence the next election more than what people think out in the country. Because people only have an option of choosing between what the two party leaders present in front of them, and we will have a much more liberal Democratic party in 2008 than we had in 2000 and certainly than we had in 1996. And, you know, it might be run by Hillary Clinton. I suspect it will be. But she will have to represent the party elites, just as every other candidate represents the party elites… not consciously, but unconsciously.
The climate of ideas shapes where politicians are, and one thing we’ve noticed in Washington is that there are a lot of centrists in the polls, but there are no centrists in Washington and there are no centrist think tanks in Washington. If you go to a conservative think tank dinner, there are a lot of scholars; there are a lot of people writing books. If you go to a liberal think tank dinner there are a lot of academics and there are a lot of people writing books. If you go to a centrist think tank dinner, there are a lot of lobbyists… because, you know, it’s like being bisexual. It doubles your chance of getting a date. The lobbyists find it in their interest to be centrist. So I think all of these things are sort of swamped with the idea that we’re going to move to the center, which is sort of what I want.
And let me just finally mention two other things which have leapt to mind this morning on why we have this polarized climate in Washington. The first and, I’m mostly pro-choice. Nonetheless, I think that the effect of the Roe v. Wade decision has massively contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. This country was denied having a normal debate about abortion, which it could have. If it did have it, we would have state-by-state solutions, which I think would be centrist or pro-choice in their orientation. But because we couldn’t have a normal debate in Washington, we suppressed that debate. We have half the country or at least 30% of the country who thinks it was fundamentally decided in an illegitimate way. If we had had an honest debate in state legislatures about abortion, the pro-life community may not like it, but they would decide, “OK, it’s democratic. It was legitimate.” They do not regard Roe v. Wade as legitimate. They think it was imposed by a small minority from above. And because we haven’t had an honest debate about that, we have a pseudo-debate in the form of fighting over judgeships. So the pro-life forces and the pro-choice forces get together and they don’t really argue about abortion, they argue about whether Robert Bork is a terrible man. Or whether Clarence Thomas is a terrible man. Or whether Anita Hill is a terrible woman. They try to destroy the nominees on each other’s sides. And that’s not an honest way of going about the debate. They really want to talk about abortion, but they end up just trying to destroy judicial nominees on either side. And its poisoned the Judiciary Committee and, since then, the whole Senate. And I think that’s a big contributing factor to why we have this polarized election. I think if Roe v. Wade was reversed, and we had the debate about abortion we need to have, it would de-toxify a lot of the atmosphere and you would not get these interest groups who make money off of bitterly polarizing politics.
One final thing is that we’re in the middle of a war and, with the exception of World War II, wars in America are polarizing events. You know, in WWII, we were more or less united, but in most other wars – the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 – we were not united at all. We had draft riots in New York in the Civil War. It’s normal and it’s healthy to have angry exchanges in times of war, because war is fundamentally so serious. What its done in this climate and, probably what its done all the time is, . . . it means that you can’t have a normal conversation.
I’ll just close with this observation. One of the reasons we can’t repair the climate in Washington is that no one can afford to be honest. For example, George Bush was asked, “Have you made any mistakes?” All of us in the punditry world said, “Oh, he should admit mistakes.” But there is no political consultant I’ve ever met who said he should admit the mistakes, Democrat or Republican. They all say his answer of not admitting mistakes was exactly the right thing to do because, once you admit the mistake, that doesn’t close the debate – people give you no credit for candor – it opens you up for another three weeks of exploring that mistake. And, so every consultant I’ve ever dealt with said he did exactly the right thing. And I tasted a little of this in my little world when the Iraq war was going terribly, which it still sort of is, and I wrote a series of columns on what I got wrong about the Iraq War. In the e-mail that came in in droves after those columns, my friends were furious with me. My enemies sensed weakness and they were more vicious than ever. This wasn’t a big deal to me because I don’t have to worry about being popular, but a politician does and you should never admit a mistake. You should never have a normal conversation if you want to survive politically.
So these are just some of the things going on in Washington that are sort of re-toxifying the world. And I agree with Mo about the state of the electorate. I agree that the country does not match the political world. There’s a mismatch there. We have two parties in the political world, but three parties in the country – a liberal party, a conservative party, and the McCain-Lieberman party, which will never come into being because of our primary system. Some day that will change, but nonetheless, the stubbornness of the polarization of the last decade will be with us for some time.
Thanks.
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