![]() If you look at the new Democratic realignment, it reflects the shift that began decades ago toward a post-industrial economy centered in large urban-suburban metropolitan areas devoted primarily to the production of ideas and services rather than material goods. The voters in these states-many of them white evangelicals-became the foot soldiers of Reagan conservatism. In the case of the New Deal, it was the rise of an urban industrial order in the North in the case of Reagan conservatism, it was the shift of industry and population from the North to the lower-wage, non-unionized suburban Sunbelt stretching from Virginia down to Florida and across to Texas and southern California. ![]() If you look at the two most recent realignments, they can be seen as the political superstructure's belated acknowledgement of tectonic changes that had been occurring in the country's economic base. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham called the realignment "America's surrogate for revolution." It is how a rigid two-party system has adjusted when the ground has shifted that has sustained the dominant party. Realignments are not scientifically predictable events like lunar eclipses, but they have occurred with some regularity over last two hundred years-in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1980. Unlike Carter and Clinton, Obama will be taking office with the wind at his back rather than in his face. The country is definitely no longer "America the conservative." And with the Republican Party and big business identified with a potentially disastrous downturn, it could become over the next four years "America the liberal." That's what makes this election fundamentally different from 1976 or 1992. But underlying these changes has been a shift in the nation's "fundamentals"-in the structure of society and industry, and in the way Americans think of family, job, and government. Groups that had been disproportionately Republican have become disproportionately Democratic and red states like Virginia have become blue. This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography. ![]() His election is the culmination of a Democratic realignment that began in the '90s, was held in abeyance by September 11, and had resumed in the 2006 election. But Obama is taking office under dramatically different circumstances. They tried unsuccessfully to govern a country from the center-left that was moving to the right (in Carter's case) or that was only just beginning to move leftward (in Clinton's case), and were rebuked by the voters. Both Carter and Clinton did misjudge the mood of the country. They are looking at Obama's election through the prism of Jimmy Carter's win in 1976 and Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. These guys-and the others who are counseling Barack Obama and the Democrats to "go slow"-couldn't be more wrong. "America remains, in the main, a center-right nation," Wehner wrote in the Washington Post. In a cover story labeled "America the Conservative," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham warned that, "hould Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal." Meacham's judgment was echoed by Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Judis.Įven before the final results, showing a Democratic sweep, were in, Washington's pundits were declaring that nothing had really changed politically in the country.
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