When I was the EU ambassador in the US, from 2004 to 2009, I devoted much of my working time to meeting members of Congress. Simultaneously, I devoted much of my recreational time to studying US history and the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. What struck me most forcibly was the extent to which historical divisions, dating back to the pre-Civil War era, influence voting patterns in congressional elections today.
While the issue over which the Civil War was fought, slavery, was abolished in 1863, geographic patterns of political allegiance dating from the Civil War survive to this day.
The big change is that the two big parties have swapped supporters. Districts that supported the confederacy in the Civil War supported the Democrats at the time but now support the Republicans.
A major turning point occurred at the Democratic Convention of 1948 when Hubert Humphrey persuaded delegates to put a pro-civil-rights plank in their platform for that year.
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Another turning point was the Republican Convention of 1964 when Barry Goldwater got his party to endorse policies that would minimise the federal government’s role in the economy. Traditionally, Democrats had supported states’ rights. Now that policy has been adopted by the Republicans, as we are seeing on the abortion issue.
Voting patterns dating back to American Civil War can still be observed at local level, within states. The areas of the south where slavery was prevalent, and which were Democrat in the 1860s, are solid Republican today. The prevalence of slavery was influenced by the type of farming that predominated locally. Cotton growing required a lot of labour, so cotton-growing areas had a lot of slaves. Mixed farming areas required fewer, if any, slaves.
Mixed farming was practised in the eastern part of Alabama, so that part of the state tended to support the Union and favoured the abolition of slavery. A similar pattern can be discerned in Tennessee. This can be observed in the political geography of the southern states up to the present day, with Democrats winning support in the areas that were Republican in the 1860s, and vice versa.
In the post-Civil War era, the Democratic Party supported states’ rights. This was because it did not want federal laws to be used to grant civil rights, notably voting rights, to African Americans. In contrast, Republicans insisted on a strong role for the federal government in promoting voting rights and land redistribution.
Gradually, Republicans moved into the political territory previously occupied by the Democrats. As Democrats won new voters among the expanding workforces in the industrialising northeast, the Republicans had to look elsewhere for votes, notably in the previously solidly Democratic states of the old confederacy.
The Republican Evolution: From Governing Party to Antigovernment Party, 1860–2020 attempts to quantify the timeline, and the turning points, in this journey of the two big parties into one another’s heartlands. Kenneth Janda uses the policy platform published before each presidential election since 1856 to illustrate how the parties swapped electorates.
Little attention is given by the European media to the content of the policy platforms of the two US parties. There is a widespread assumption in Europe that, once the election is over, the planks in the platform will be ignored. Some planks may indeed be ignored afterwards, but, generally speaking, the pre-election platforms are a good guide to party behaviour after the election.
The wording of particular planks in the platform is often hard-fought. An attempt to renege on a plank in the party platform would be resisted strongly by the interests within the party who had had it included in the first place.
Bargaining can lead to very long platforms. For example, the Democratic platform for 2020 ran to more than 42,000 words. In contrast, for the first time in more than a century, the Republicans had no platform at all in 2020.
The outgoing president, Donald Trump, wanted to be seen to do things differently from his predecessors. He did not have the attention span to wade through a 60-page document. Neither did he want to be constrained by any document composed by party “elites”, for whom he had no time. This was a signal of his authoritarian tendency, which has since become more and more obvious.
Another topic the book touches on is the forces which have made American politics much more polarised. A major contributor was the decision, in 1987, to abolish the “Fairness Doctrine”, by which the US Federal Communications Commission required cable networks to present political issues “honestly and equitably”.
There is much fascinating, even entertaining material in this book. It would reach a wider audience if substantially rewritten to add some colour.
John Bruton is a former taoiseach and former EU ambassador to the United States
