Prashad: The Ideological Tides Have Turned, and Republicans Are On the Ropes

In 2004, a pall of gloom fell over American liberalism. George W. Bush was re-elected the United States' President against all odds: a quagmire in Iraq and a faltering economy were not sufficient to bury the Republican Party. In fact, the opposite, as conservative strategists plotted for a permanent Republican majority. The Republican Whip, Congressman Tom DeLay, whose nickname was the Hammer, spoke for his Republican troops: "If 1994 was the year we stopped thinking like a permanent minority, 2004 is the year we start thinking like a permanent majority: unified, aggressive, rightfully confident of victory."

In Pennsylvania, the Republican ascent fuelled the campaign of former Congressman Pat Toomey, who ran in the primary election against the long-time Republican Senator Arlen Specter. Toomey cut his teeth in the world of finance, dealing in currency swaps and derivatives, and then became a Republican politician with a commitment to free markets and minimal taxes. People like him formed the Club of Growth in 1999, which heavily supported Toomey's campaign for the Republican seat against Specter. To them, Specter was a RINO: Republican in Name Only. Specter prevailed, but only barely. The year 2004 seemed to sound the last post for the Democratic Party and for "moderates" (such as Specter) in the Republican Party. Conservative ascendancy was complete.

A few months before the citizenry went out to vote for Bush over Senator John Kerry, conservative icon and head of the Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist published an article called "The Democrats are Toast" in Washington Monthly. Norquist argued that the social basis of liberalism had vanished. As more Americans had their retirement in the stock market, and as fewer Americans belonged to unions, the language of class resentment or warfare had no appeal. The Democratic Party, without access to state largesse, was enfeebled. It would soon vanish, as the Whigs before it. The jubilation in the Republican camp was met by utter despondency among the liberals. If Bush, with the lodestone of Iraq around his neck, could not be defeated, then the game seemed over.

In the summer of 2004, as the country geared up for the election, cultural critic Thomas Frank published What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Frank's thesis was elegant: conservatives have shifted the terrain of American politics away from "bread and butter" issues towards "moral" issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. When confronted with this "moral" agenda, the working class tends to vote for the conservatives, and therefore against its own class interests. The brilliance of the conservative strategy, Frank pointed out, is that it is fated to be a war without end, since on none of its issues can it actually win. There is too much resistance to the abolition of abortion and to the sanction against gay marriage.

Victory is not as important as the existence of the issues, for they are useful to divert attention away from the eviscerated economy and the collapse of the social security net. Frank's analysis attempted to unmask this powerful but decadent thing called conservatism and to salvage a weakened but essential populism. The book was an instant bestseller, and it became a reference point after Senator Kerry's defeat at the hands of what appeared to be a weakened Bush.

Signs of change were, however, in the very entrails of victory. DeLay won with 55 per cent of the vote in his own re-election in Texas, but his total was down 8 per cent, while the Democrat gained 6 per cent of the votes. Specter defeated Toomey in a highly partisan primary, and then walked away with the support of many Democrats in the general election. An enlivened Democratic Party turned to Vermont Governor Howard Dean to lead them out of the wilderness, and a young Senator Barack Obama offered a new vocabulary of post-partisanship around which many of the wizened elders gathered. But at that time all this was wishful thinking for the liberals.