Why the Mad Rush to the '08 Elections?

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 24, 2007.

Note from TomDispatch.com editor Tom Engelhardt:

Have you already been swamped by 2008 presidential madness -- by Hillary, and her swiftboaters, and Obama(mania), and Edwards, and McCain hawking his wares in Iowa, and Hagel, and a gaggle (or maybe a gagel) of lesser presidential candidates, wannabes, and thought-abouts haggling over their prospects, and the latest definitively meaningless polls on the candidates, and whether various giant states are going to beat out smaller states in the race to be first in the primaries, and which of the candidates are ahead in the mad dash to the various moneybags who finance both parties?

It's a miracle that the initial votes for president aren't being pushed forward to the spring of 2007. If this is the electoral "horse race," the nags are going to be dead by summer.

Why this wild media rush to next year's election? You won't find out from reading your morning paper or catching the nightly news on TV. Sometimes a dash of history, a bit of historical context, not to speak of a little informed speculation is just what the media rush to the polls is lacking. Fortunately, here at Tomdispatch we have the antidote to the already headlong race to 2008. Author Steve Fraser considers just what might be made of last year's November midterm elections and the upcoming one in the great sweep of American history. -- Tom

On the Road to 2008
By Steve Fraser

All media eyes have turned toward the presidential election of 2008. Like the headlights of an onrushing train, it mesmerizes. Every news bulletin about the latest bloodbath in Iraq, each ominous forewarning of a face-off with Iran, the endless dirge of abandonment and despair issuing from New Orleans, the daily register of those cut loose from any semblance of a social safety net, public or private, each new official confirmation that the Earth is reaching a boiling point compels us to anticipate the 2008 election with fear and trembling, and with the greatest expectations. Something momentous might happen then. Haven't we already seen the first signs of that in the extraordinary electoral outcome of November 2006?

All elections are, in some sense, turning points. They register, however murkily, shifts in popular sentiment. But this recent off-year election has excited more than the normal number of pregnant speculations and, of course, put one question in particular in boldface type: Did it signal the end -- or at least the beginning of the end -- of the conservative counter-revolution that first gained traction with Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980?

A turning-point election is something special indeed. Everything about the country's political chemistry changes as its geopolitical make-up is reshuffled, as cities, towns, and whole regions start voting in a new way. Suddenly, the normal fault lines in political demography no longer apply as ethnic, racial, gender, and socio-economic groups simply stop voting the way everyone expects them to.

Turning-point elections can inaugurate new distributions of wealth and power. Social classes and elites accustomed to rule find themselves struggling to hold on to, or compelled to share power, they once felt entitled to wield unilaterally. The whole political economy becomes subject to serious reordering. With so much at stake, such elections can ultimately be the occasions for revolutions in the country's moral tone, its basic cultural and ideological orientation.

Upheavals of this magnitude make up part of our relatively recent history. Here are a few examples: Pittsburgh and the state of Pennsylvania were fiefdoms of the Republican Party, and of the industrial elite which controlled that Party, from the end of the Civil War through the stock-market crash of 1929; nor did the GOP electorate there consist solely of industrialists and the middle classes. Hundreds of thousands of industrial workers -- Italians, Slavs, and other immigrants working the steel mills, coke ovens, and coal mines -- belonged to that cohort of Republican loyalists as well. Then, in four short years, between 1932 and 1936, both city and state became bastions of the New Deal Democratic Party.

At just this same time, Afro-Americans, who since Emancipation had been steadfast supporters of the party of Lincoln, began voting (where they could) in overwhelming numbers for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and have remained steadfast Democrats ever since. Meanwhile, the South, which had emerged as a one-party region after the Civil War, stayed loyal to the Democratic Party for a century until, in the election of 1968, it began its mass defection to the Republicans.

As late as the 1929 crash and Great Depression, free market ideology, social Darwinian morality, and the political and social preeminence of the country's business elite made up the legitimate foundations of the Republic. Within the historical blinking of an eye, however, that legitimacy vaporized in the presidential election of 1932 -- replaced by the regulatory and social-welfare state of the New Deal with its ethos of social obligation, economic security, and industrial democracy.

Turning-point elections that register -- and help usher in -- such remarkable transformations are rare in American history. Arguably, there have only been three: 1860, 1932, and 1980. The elections of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan -- each in its own way -- opened the door to fundamental reform. Clearly the abolition of slavery, the overthrow of industrial autocracy, and the triumphant counter-revolution against the New Deal with which these three elections are associated qualify as turning points in the grand sense.

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Steve Fraser is co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy.

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