By Contrast, a Good Piece by Marc Ambinder: John McCain and Millard Fillmore

Marc Ambinder lays out the issues now:

GOPWars: Who Survives --> What The Party Looks Like - Marc Ambinder: To the extent that geography correlates with ideology among congressional Republicans, a major sweep by the Democrats could really be in a position to completely break the gluons that bind the broader party together. The GOP will lose a disportionate number of seats in the Northeast, Midwest and West and keep a disrportionate number of seats in the South. So the remnant of the party, as it were, will be right-wing Southern conservatives.... even more so that it is now.

Additionally, if there's an enormous Democratic sweep, the odds of a reverse sweep two years from now are slim. 2010 won't be like 1994, where Republicans allegedly punished a Democratic Congress and president for the health care debacle and gays in the military. (Would the nation dump 70-80 Republicans over two years only to return them to power two years later?)

One way to read the defeat of John McCain is that the Republican Party today is in a position analogous to that of the Whig Party in 1852, with John McCain having the same problems gaining the nomination this year that Millard Filmore did back then:

Millard Fillmore: Wikipedia: [P]arty harmony became one of his primary objectives [as president]. He tried to unite the party by pointing out the differences between the Whigs and the Democrats (by proposing tariff reforms that negatively reflected on the Democratic Party). Another primary objective of Fillmore was to preserve the Union from the intensifying slavery debate.... [He] announced his support of the Compromise of 1850... helped shift a critical number of northern Whigs in Congress away from their insistence upon the Wilmot Proviso.... [N]orthern Whigs... refus[ed] to forgive Fillmore for having signed the Fugitive Slave Act... deprive[d] him of the Presidential nomination in 1852.... On the fifty-third ballot, the Whigs nominated another war hero, Mexican-American War General Winfield Scott, as their nominee for President.

John McCain didn't want to be Millard Fillmored.

That meant that, once McCain had decided not to accept John Kerry's plea that he be his running mate in 2004, McCain had to tack hard right--he could not afford to give the Republican Southern wingnuts any excuse to do to him what the Northern Whigs had done to Fillmore in 1852. In the short run it worked. In the long run it did not work. McCain won the nomination by destroying his reputation as a bipartisan maverick and an honorable man. But now he finds himself with the very difficult problem of expanding his vote beyond the Republican base while having to explain why:

• his issue positions today are so different from his issue positions in 2001-2004.
• his running mate today is not his preferred running mate--Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.
• his issue positions today--the continuation of George W. Bush's policies in every dimension--are good for a country that has seen George W. Bush's policies fail for eight straight years.

After 1852, the Whig Party collapsed. Out of its ashes arose the Northern sectional Republican Party. Is the Republican Party now collapsing--will the legacy of the race-baiting sins of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan see it consume itself and see from its ashes arise an Evangelical Sunbelt sectional post-Republican Party?

There is one big difference between 1852-1860 and 2008-2016. The North then was 70% of the country. The Evangelical Sunbelt today is 20% of the country.

Comments

[Frank Wilhoit]

Geography is not the whole story. Geography is economics, but economics is not the whole story.

The Republican Party consists of three separate but indistinct factions. One believes that the church ought to be unaccountable, one believes that business ought to be unaccountable, and one believes that the military ought to be unaccountable. The common thread is unaccountability.

If these three factions begin to act each for themselves, it is the church that will win, because it has fewer scruples.

[max]

There is one big difference between 1852-1860 and 2008-2016. The North then was 70% of the country. The Evangelical Sunbelt today is 20% of the country.

But this election is much more closely comparable to 1896, with Obama as McKinley:

(Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Party_System )
"McKinley warned that Bryan's Bimetallism would wreck the economy and achieve equality by making everyone poor. McKinley promised prosperity through strong economic growth based on sound money and business confidence, and an abundance of high-paying industrial jobs. Farmers would benefit by selling to a rich home market. Every racial, ethnic and religious group would prosper, and the government would never be used by one group to attack another. In particular McKinley reassured the German Americans, alarmed on the one hand by Bryan's inflation and on the other by prohibition. McKinley's landslide victory combined city and farm, Northeast and Midwest, businessmen and factory workers. He carried nearly every city of 50,000 population, while Bryan swept the rural South and Mountain states. McKinley's victory, ratified by a landslide reelection in 1900, thus galvanized one of the central ideologies of twentieth century American politics, pluralism."

Only in our current (very strange) enviroment is careful regulation, an end to financial excess and some attention to workers 'leftist'. The thing left to do is, once Obama wins, is to bring in the Mountain West. After that, where does the Neo-Confederate party go? They aren't conservative, so there's no ideological binding, and they aren't Jeffersonians, and they aren't actually free marketers, so that only leaves war and hatred.

So I expect the R's to complete the mutation into a fascist party. Assuming we survive that, I expect that we get a split in the D's between the Westerners and the Easterners, with the Westerners taking the role of the whiggish conservatives and the Easterners opting for some vaguely radical leftyish something or another, which allows for appeals to the South.

Certainly, the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln is long gone.

max
['What fun you'll have.']

[Bruce Wilder]

The Whigs and the Democrats were both national parties, assembling rival governing coalitions across regions, each capable of electing a President and a Congress. The Whigs in 1848, after a long, slow rise in the South, were on the verge of becoming the region's dominant Party, with strong support among the planters of the deep South, and their admirers. The most prominent politicians in 1848 were still the nationalists, in both Parties, from the War of 1812 generation -- the first generation born American citizens: Thomas Hart Benton, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Zachary Taylor (the Republican candidate for President in 1848), Lewis Cass (the Democratic candidate for President in 1848), Winfield Scott (Whig Presidential Candidate in 1852) were all born in the 18th century, and first came to prominence in the War of 1812 or its immediate aftermath. And, of course, the conditional nationalist and slavery's champion, John C. Calhoun, was also of this generation.

When the Whigs collapsed, the younger Whigs in the South, somewhat grudgingly, joined the Democrats, forming, for the first time, the Solid South in the Slavepower coalition. It was the Slavepower coalition in the U.S. Senate, which would force the Kansas-Nebraska Act onto Stephen Douglas. Douglas, whose wife's property included the Mississippi slave plantation that would provide the cash to finance Douglas's political and business ambitions, strove to both maintain the Democratic Party's national coalition with devotion to the principle of popular sovereignty (introduced in the Democratic platform of 1848), and to champion the Democratic Party's claim to lead a northern majority, behind the nationalist Young America movement's Manifest Destiny program of national development and western expansion.

It was the generational change in political leadership, circa 1852, which would prove decisive, as men like Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens inherited power from the nationalists of the War of 1812 generation.

The Whig Party withered as a reactionary rump Party of old men, even as young men exercised their ambition in championing agitation over slavery and immigration and nationalist anti-Catholic feeling. Ambitious youth sought outlets in Free Soil and Know-Nothing agitation.

The Slavepower Democrats ruined Stephen Douglas's ambition as a nationalist champion of Manifest Destiny, as the Slavepower Democrats made themselves the silent, but stubborn enemy of the most popular northern programs for western expansion and development: land-grant colleges, free homesteading and a trans-continental railroad. In the election of 1860, it seemed to be about slavery, but the Republicans had a monopoly of credibility on those popular issues.

Barack Obama's election will mark a generational change in leadership, as surely as the elections of 1992, 1960 and 1932, 1920 and 1904. Generational change will interact with the re-alignment of political coalitions, which has brought the secular conservatives into the Democratic governing coalition, at least temporarily.

Can the Democratic Party govern as a coalition of moderate, secular conservatives and liberal progressives? The country has been moving left, on social issues and economics, even as the Republican Party has been moving Right. The Democratic Party coming to power in 2008 will be a much fairer reflection of what is popular in the country. Whether they can govern remains to be seen.

Youth will find a way, and ambitious youth may well find its way up, in a re-conceived Republican Party in the West and Northeast. Or, it may find its way up, in the dynamics of a progressive Democratic Party, in power and on the move. We'll see.

We'll see.

[Jim Harrison]

It's going to be damned hard for the Republicans to rally because what they need to do--change their policies to appeal to non-whites and voters in the productive states--will require them to break with the guarantied votes they get from the South and the goofier mountain states. Some of their spokesmen will have a more attractive set of options. Rush and the other radio rightists can always make a hell of a living off the rump of the Republican party until some catastrophe gives them an opening for a come back.

[P.M.Lawrence]

"There is one big difference between 1852-1860 and 2008-2016. The North then was 70% of the country."

Actually, no. The USA then was some outliers and three major sections, the North, the South and the "West" (as it was then called, now known as the Midwest). I was surprised to find that this was even properly appreciated at the time, by observers like Trollope in his "North America". It's just that the "North" that fought in the US civil war was both the North and the West, holding together despite real differences.

[Altoid]

No parallel or analogy is exact, as we all know. American politicians are very conservative generally in that they keep using the issues that worked in previous elections even as the country and its real issues change around them. At certain points someone comes in and for a variety of reasons crystallizes the notion that political discussion needs to happen around different focal points, a little closer to what's actually going on.

Obama's candidacy and his possible presidency have the prospect of bringing what politicians talk about much closer to what's actually been happening in the country over the past 25-40 years. Republican "issues" have been the issues of 1968 and 1984, and Democrats through that time have been either content to respond to those issues as if they were what really mattered, or unable to reframe the discussion.

Obama is able to change the subject. No other major Democrat could it this time around, not even Hillary-- she's too much a part of the 80s and 90s for that. This is why I hoped Obama would get the nomination. That he may win suggests that the nation really is ready to talk about other things. I sure hope so.

We can't know what the next political alignment will be until we see what the nation wants to talk about. Then the Democrats will line up fractiously, sort of on one side, and what's left of the Republican party will begin to coalesce around another side and attract disaffected groups now part of the Democratic coalition or independent. Probably they'll be mostly regionally-based but not entirely, because the whole history of parties in the US is that we have to avoid parties that are purely regional. But what the point of cleavage will be is something that I don't think we can know until we see the kinds of things people want to talk about around an Obama White House.

[Julian Elson]

My prediction: the Republican party will survive a good deal longer. In fact, the coming years of Republican marginalization will not even be the closest that the Republicans have yet come to oblivion, compared to the Democratic dominance of the 30s, say. The idea of Republican extinction will prove as illusory as Rove's permanent Republican majority of four years ago.

[Robert Waldmann]

Brad I was just kidding about the references to Shakespeare's plays about very old events references. You don't have to go alll the waaaay the other way and write only about elementary particles. But now that you've done gluons and gravitons, I propose

1. What sort of particle did Enron transmit through high tension wires Hadrons or Leptons ? Neither they used Kleptons.

2: We don't know if a neutrino has mass but we know that Palin lacks gravitas.

3: or Sarah Palin's brain has the gravita of a neutrino -- however, unlike a neutrino she has charm.

4: Strange times.

5: Republican Up is Down ism is strange but has no Charm.

6: Tops and Bottoms against Prop 8.

7: Move on is not a muon they are related to strong forces.

8. What would have happened if Gore hadron ?

9. Is the McCain campaign approaching the event horizon ?

10. Are they so close to the pointIs spheroid of no return of their black hole of spin that they can't keep track of which is their yardstick and which is their clock ? This can happen when, were it not for the spin, they would already have been sucked into the black hole with no hope of escape.

(if I recall Bill Press correctly 10 is a paraphrase of a lecture).