For about two decades after the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the South dominated American politics. True, there were Northerners like Martin van Buren who became President, but they headed a Southern-dominated coalition. By the 1850s this alignment was not stable because the North was developing industrially and outpacing the population of the South. Nevertheless, it took some time for a realignment to occur, where the Mid-Atlantic regions of the North began to vote with Greater New England as a unit, and so would serve as the basis for Republican domination for decades until FDR broke the old parties.
The 1856 election shows the last time that the old alliance won out, as you can see that the Republican candidate had very little support outside of Greater New England. The combination of the moral fervor of the anti-slavery movement, which eventually won over the whole North, and the unreasonable expectations of the numerically inferior South, eventually brought the rest of the North to the Republican party.
Today I feel I see a bit of the reverse. The Liberal Patriot has a post up, Working Class and Hispanic Voters Are Losing Interest in the Party of Abortion, Gun Control and the January 6th Hearings, that shows the Democrat party catering more and more to the interests of college-educated whites, their intelligentsia. One of the arguments you saw around 2010 is that the McGovern coalition of liberal whites and minorities was now actually feasible. But this presupposed that minorities continued to vote Democrat at the same rates as before. The reality is that minorities without college educations are drifting away from the Democratic party.
What’s left then? The Democrats know what it’s like to run a huge and fractious coalition. With fewer and fewer moderates the party will finally have moral clarity. But victory? That I doubt.
Am I the only one seeing so many ads on this website now? Didn’t used to be this way
I am not sure why you are starting with Jackson. Out of the first 6 presidents, 4 were Virginia planters who served 8 of the first 10 terms.
I call the pre-Civil War United States, the Planters Republic because of the reign of planters in the White House until the the 1850s.
8 of the first 15 presidents (7 if you disregard Taylor and Harrison who died early in their respective terms) were planters and they served for 12 of the available 18 terms.
The Planters Republic collapsed in the Civil War and is replaced with startling rapidity by the Industrial Republic. Most discussion of politics of that era is oriented towards endless re-litigation of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. But, the Republican implementation of the Hamiltion program, including the National Banking system, the Transcontinental Railroads, the Land Grant Colleges, and a world class navy would command our attention and respect if there had been no race/slavery issue.
The Industrial Republic in turn died in the Great Depression and World War II and was replaced by the Warfare/Welfare Leviathan.
The first two phases each lasted 70 years. The current phase is now 90 years old. It is clear the current system is sclerotic and plagued by paralytic incompetence. Some crisis such as a war with China or a hyperinflationary blow off of the financial system will kill it — sooner, rather than later.
I am very pessimistic about the survival of the existing institutions of government and finance. But, I am optimistic about the ability of the American people to survive the crisis and create a new set of institutions that will get us through the 21st century as a republic of free citizens in a capitalist economy.
i added ads cuz i was approached by a company. the hope is eventually over time the ads will fit the users more (more genomics stuff). we’ll see.
I am not sure why you are starting with Jackson. Out of the first 6 presidents, 4 were Virginia planters who served 8 of the first 10 terms.
despite the 1812 secession of new england i think the polarization btwn north and south really got way worse after jackson as the south’s slave culture got more entrenched
Jackson is usually portrayed as the West (frontier) vs the East. The tension over the expansion of slavery was driven by the spread of cotton plantations after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Thus the repeated crises over the addition of new slave states starting in the Monroe Administration often referred to as the compromise of 1820. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_states_and_free_states
I would argue that Jackson was more a change in tone and the avatar of populism in American politics. The institutions of the Planters Republic had been created by the Virginia Planters. Jackson’s contribution to that process was to kill off the Second Bank of the United States. His positive contribution was the institution of the Democrat Party as part of his successful 1828 campaign.
Looking at Jackson’s political career I am put in mind of Marx’s apothegm that history repeats itself first as a tragedy, then as a farce. Trump being the farcical version of Jackson.
@Walter:
“ I am very pessimistic about the survival of the existing institutions of government and finance.”
This makes me pretty optimistic actually. I think that the present institutions are doing more harm than good.
I would argue that Jackson was more a change in tone and the avatar of populism in American politics.
i agree with this.
but i was focusing on the north-south distinction, which really becomes crisp after jackson. it was there early on obv, but ultimately new england was the big outlier then and demographically the south was not nearly as disadvantaged.
It seems like one of the ironies of this stuff is that the Republican Party’s greatest advocates in the past of winning the Hispanic vote were people who made their case in ideological terms, that Hispanics would be won over by pro-family ideology and religion; rather than material interests (with the counter cynicism from the anti-migration paleo-cons that material interests would inevitably lead Hispanics to endorse socialism).
However, in actual practice, these same people (e.g. Mitt Romney) and their multi-generational prosperous, highly religious brand of conservatism seem to have actually been repellent to Hispanic voters, and lost more votes the more it was emphasized.
And then in actual practice again, Hispanic voters have switched more due to a candidate who didn’t particularly seem to show any sympathy to them, but moderated on rhetoric about welfare (no talk like Romney of lazy “47 percenters”) and had some pro-worker rhetoric about jobs, and de-emphasized guns and abortion and religion positions that most of urban America (following the trend of most of the world outside America) seems to find alienating.
Finally, at the same time, the Democrats have started working hard to actively alienate Hispanic voters through ideology, while like their previous Republican counterparts, mouthing borderline delusional rhetoric about how this ideology should really win over all the Hispanics. (And the cherry on top is that the most actively socialist bloc within the Left is I believe currently whiter than average for the Left and less Hispanic than average for the Left ).
To add a further comment, part of the reason for the same error to recur might be from a same root cause; the failure of educated, wealthy people to correctly rate how (un)important ideology is to poorer people who are more focused on material “meat and potatoes” and transactional voting?
The older Hispanics might have been natural conservative voters under the old paradigm of “talk a lot about religion and family, don’t talk about immigration or material things”… if the older Hispanics had been rich. The younger and quite urban Hispanics might have been full Woke… if they were as wealthy as young Asians. But neither of these things were, are, or will be true.
Matt,
Do you actually know any working class Hispanics?
Not in Britain; I have a feeling you’re going to tell me a story of how excited they are about guns, anti-abortion etc?
I grew up around a lot of working-class Hispanic, and half of all my friends were Hispanic growing up. They usually think of white progressives as disingenuous, sanctimonious, nerdy, yuppies. Many aren’t woke, and don’t refer to themselves as “Latinx”. I believe a lot of blacks think of white liberals in the same way. Heck, even a lot of whites think so too! If anything, Hispanics are closest to working-class northeastern white ethnics, who vote for Democrats, because they’re in a union. But at the same time make un-PC jokes, have many socially conservative attitudes, etc. They’re not like stereotypical republicans from the mid-west. But they certainly aren’t woke on average either.
@Matt, the likelihood of being woke imho has to do with access to college. So maybe there is a correlation with wealth I suppose. However, if you are an anomaly like me, it had an opposite effect. I was actually more liberal going into college, and became more conservative by the time I finished. I used to have access to see other people’s grades, and it infuriated me to see dumb people get B-s in classes where they deserved to fail. In the meantime I was working my butt off trying to earn an A. That made me realize, not everyone should be allowed to “make it” unless they prove their merit.
@Jovialis, well, the finding tends to be that people get more ideological as they get more wealthy. ‘post-materialist values’. I won’t explain too much more ‘cos it’s out there. what those values tend to be can differ by person.
Yeah, I don’t know Working Class Hispanics, but yes that would be kind of my contention is that moving things towards what their economic concerns are and moving away from the cultural affiliation with highly ideological “stereotypical republicans from the mid-west” probably helped to win votes, and this has some irony as many of those highly ideological “stereotypical republicans from the mid-west” thought that the would win those voters by ideology (which actually represented an approach to politics they found alienating). A shift back to the very stridently pro-family, pro-Christianity ideology by the Republican Party over the next few years, if it happens and is embodied in very visible court decisions, might alienate those voters again, and lose gains, esp. if it comes with a sort of tendency of the Democratic Party to re-embrace ‘popularism’ and its former messy coalition again.
Matt,
That depends on which Hispanics. The first neighborhood I lived in 1980’s NYC was heavily Hispanic. They were your “urban ghetto” Hispanics, mostly immigrants from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. My parents quickly moved us on to nicer neighborhoods with Jews and Asians. Very “vibrant” (i.e. lots of street crimes and drug trade, esp. among Colombians – the ladies were attractive though 🙂 ). Many were racially black (e.g. Dominicans).
In college I became a close friend of a Hispanic guy from the Southwest – very Catholic (yes, anti-abortion, at least in theory), very conservative (but more in the way of disliking liberalism of the elites than holding some Burkean principles), and, again, yes, very into shooting guns, especially into the air on holidays. I spent considerable time with him and his family (most of who had not gone to college and some of who didn’t even graduate from high school). They were awfully proud that their ancestors were in the region before the gringos showed up (“We’re the real Americans, Chinito!”). They had unvarnished contempt for blacks and used the “n-word” rather liberally.
Later through my wife’s Cuban friends and colleagues, I got to know the Southern Florida Cuban exile culture. These were physicians and came from old money families among the Cuban exiles (in other words, the whiter and wealthier earlier arrivals, not the latest cohorts that tend to be much more black). They were cultured, sophisticated, and generally assimilationist (most of the younger members of the family intermarried with whites they met in college, med school, etc.). The older folks were quite elegant.
The county where I live now is about 15-20% Hispanic. The largest subgroup is made up of Salvadoran immigrants and they have replaced the blacks as the folks who live “on the other side of the tracks.” They cut the lawns, do construction work, nanny children, clean houses, and work the restaurant kitchens. They fit a lot of the stereotypes about “Hispanics” common in the rigtist media – the men tend to work hard, but are sullen, drink a lot of beer, park cars on lawns, and seem to like young girls little too overtly (they are highly overrepresented among registered sex offenders in the county). The women have kids young (I’ve seen early teenagers who were pregnant), also work hard, but seem to be almost uniformly obese and dumpy. Most don’t speak English, don’t learn it even after years of being here, and even their children, though born here and fully fluent, don’t seem to move up the socio-economic ladder.
There are, of course, many other kinds of Hispanics, but among the groups I am familiar with, the two groups that have joined the Trumpist revolt against the woke leftism of today’s America are groups 2 and 3. To be sure, Cubans have always leaned heavily Republican and often helped to deliver Florida to the GOP along with the rural whites of northern Florida (aka southern Georgia) and the military communities. But in the last couple of decades, younger Cubans had been turning away from the GOP in droves, but the leftist drive for wokism and BLM seems to have alienated them greatly and returned them to the GOP.
The other group, Southwestern Hispanics, especially those in the Rio Grande Valley used to be heavily “transactionally” Democratic, but also have become highly agitated by the Democratic wokism, pro-“transgenderism,” and support for all things black.
I don’t know how long the renewed pro-GOP tilt of the southern Florida Cubans is going to hold, but I do think that there is a real political realignment going on in the Rio Grande Valley and perhaps among other older Hispanic communities in the Southwest (not necessarily just old folks, but the Hispanic communities that have been around for a very long time). There is a great deal of social, economic, and cultural overlap between them and blue-collar whites in rural and rust belt areas. They seem to be tired of being political cannon fodder for wealthy, educated, and liberal whites who seem to champion blacks at their expense (while the liberal whites remain unaffected). And serendipitously for the GOP, these are the Hispanics who are more likely to be citizens and vote than groups 1 and 4.
I don’t know what the future hold, but I now see the signs that the left’s triumphant minoritarianism (cue Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post celebrating fellow-whites becoming a minority in this country as “fabulous”) was premature. As I wrote above, I’m gonna get me a gin cocktail and watch the electronic lynchings of nonwhites by white liberals (for insufficient victimism) occur more frequently in this country… in amusement.