There is a myth in America that we live in a two-party system. This myth has a pervasive quality because it is, on the surface, true. Activists, media, special interest groups, politicians, political scientists, philosophers and many other scholars of the American political system often peddle us regular Americans a tragic tale that in every election we only have two choices: one political ideology, represented by the Democrats, and a virtually opposite but generally still philosophically liberal ideology, represented by Republicans. These two belief systems are, in general, our only choices in every election, and we’re supposed to choose whichever of them we hate less.
In reality, it’s impossible to gain the votes and congressional seats necessary to make policy by representing one political point of view. Anyone who attempts to do so fails the number one rule of any democracy: compromise. The ideologies of the two dominant parties are little more than a compromise of their constituent voters, and they evolve throughout time as those voters move closer and further away from supporting them.
America could be more easily separated, if it must be, into several dominant regional cultures: The Pacific Northwest, for example, differs slightly from the rural Midwest, which differs slightly from the South. Generally, when a political party gains power for any length of time, it does so by building a coalition of two or more dominant regional schools of political thought.
In recent years, control of our government has been dominated by conservative interests: The Republican party. “Liberal” became a dirty word, tax cuts became the solution to every problem, and the Supreme Court was stacked with strict constructionists who threatened to take away the modern conception of rights we hold dear.
But what’s more interesting than the fact of this rise of conservative power was how it came about. For this, we must go back at least to the 1930s, to the New Deal Coalition. The New Deal Coalition was an alliance of white, socially conservative Southerners and liberal Northeasterners who, under the banner of the Democratic Party, largely controlled the government from 1932 through the 1960s. When the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights movement, though, an irreparable fault undermined the Democrats: The Southern faction broke away, even forming significant third parties in defiance. By the end of the 1960s, the socially conservative Southern interest was ripe for the picking.
Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were forces of this “picking,” by building a Republican party from Western libertarian interests (they both hailed from California) and from the conservative South. Thus, we’ve had the rise of the socially conservative, small-government Republican Party that has been the strongest force in American politics since the 1980s.
Democrats, in folly, have made the mistake of trying to win back conservative Southerners and rebuild the New Deal Coalition of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. I’ve read dozens of articles about how Democrats should do a better job of showing they too go to church “like they do in the South,” and speak with a twang about working-class issues. This attempt to reconcile seemingly opposed ideologies is somewhat merited. But the nostalgia for the good old days of Democratic dominance, I feel, has lead social liberals and environmentalists to compromise their values hopelessly for voters they won’t get anyway.
This rhetoric ignores another possibility for a new Democratic coalition that answers to Libertarian voters alienated by socially conservative Southern Republican leadership. Libertarians in the West have been drifting toward the Democratic Party since the early 1990s, only to see the Democrats drift further away, trying to act more like Republicans.
Libertarians have grown increasingly frustrated by the high-spending, big government policies of the Bush Administration its and Republican allies. While they have less disdain for the war than might New Englanders, the Republican policies favoring torture, supporting invasive, socially conservative laws and letting loose on government spending has made Libertarian voters ready to rebel.
Further, Democrats can win the election this year simply by securing Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, and then lose everything else they lost in 2004 – a very real possibility compared with the notion of picking off a Bible Belt state like Tennessee.
Political gossip is already rife with the suggestion that a moderate southerner like Sen. Jim Webb from Virginia would be necessary to target states like West Virginia and Kentucky that Barack Obama can’t carry. But with a careful choice of a libertarian, western Democrat, a coalition could be built in this time of Republican vulnerability that leads to a complete marginalization of the coveted West Virginia voters Hillary Clinton promises to deliver. So let the south vote Republican; it cannot win if it cannot hold the Libertarian West.
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