How the GOP Killed the Reagan Democrats
There is a lot to be said about the whole Obama-taking-over-the-American-auto-industry line, but the thing that has been bothering me for months is how Republicans have dealt with the current situation, which is to say, they have dealt with it by acting rather boorish.
Now, I know some liberal wags will say that this is the only way that Republicans know how to act, but that is not necessarily so. Listening to this recent comments like this one from Kevin Hassett and the recent glee from some conservatives on the Swedish Government deciding not to support Saab as well as Senators like Richard Shelby rants against the the Big Three has made it seem to many a worker living in states like my native Michigan, Illinois and Ohio that the GOP doesn’t give a damn about them or their lives.
And the fact is, those workers are in a way correct.
There was a time when conservatives led by Ronald Reagan, went after the Reagan Democrats. The GOP was interested in getting these blue collar voters in the Industrial Midwest.
But that was so, 1982.
Now, it seems that the GOP has lost interest in these states as they have with other parts of America save the South. There is a lot of cheering about how Sweden is allowing the free market to deal with Saab, and how we should be doing the same thing here. That is all fine and dandy. In some cases, it would make sense for GM and Chrysler to just deal with bankruptcy to get their financial houses in order.
And I agree with fellow conservatives that yes, the UAW has to share some of the blame here by wanting benefits and pay that was beyond what the companies could afford.
But what happens after that? What do you tell the guy who has worked at a GM plant in Michigan for 20 years and gets laid off in order to help GM restructure? What do you tell that person who might not have any other skills and now has to try to get retraining? What does the GOP has to say other than the wonders of the free market?
Right now, we have nothing to say and that has made that worker decide to vote for the Democrats since they do have something to say.
As the writer at New Majority.com who goes by “Henry Clay” notes, that a lack of real policy from the GOP means that the Republicans have lost the Reagan Democrats. He opines:
The near total collapse of the American auto industry in the Upper Midwest means that conservatives can finally stop their search for those working-class Reagan Democrats. In part because of the free-market revolution that Reagan inspired and presided over, the Reagan Democrats are now either retired and living in Florida or on public assistance.
Whatever happens next with GM and Chrysler, we are looking at further deindustrialization and depopulation for the Great Lakes states. And absent thoughtful reform on the part of conservatives to alter the course of these communities, this phenomenon will only further harden Democrat sympathies in the region.
The last 30 years have not been kind to the Upper Midwest, and its voters are increasingly unkind to Republicans. In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the state of Michigan, along with Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Those states gave Reagan 123 electoral votes. In 2008, Barack Obama won all of those states, but they gave him only 100 electoral votes.
Clay goes on to note how the the Reagan Revolution did win the Reagan Dems over, but even despite some successes, left them behind. His example is my hometown of Flint, Michigan:
In spite of their decreasing electoral significance, Republicans cannot afford to ignore these communities. The Northeast and Pacific Coast are long gone. The Mountain West is trending leftward, and the last election showed that Republicans will have their hands full even in the once Solid South.
Reclaiming some ground around the Great Lakes is essential to a Republican revival, but the sympathies of these Great Lakes communities lie increasingly with the Democrats. Consider Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan. Conceding that Moore is a congenitally dishonest person, his 1989 film Roger & Me did capture the impact of deindustrialization on this one local community. In 1960 the city’s population peaked at almost 200,000. Local GM employment hit a high of 80,000 in 1978. Today, the city’s population is roughly 110,000. And following the 2006 round of GM buyouts, only 8,000 GM workers remained in Flint.
Conservatives should not be afraid to acknowledge that for all of its successes, the Reagan Revolution left Flint and many other post-industrial communities behind.
Instead, however, conservative sentiment is too often a combination of satisfaction that the UAW finally got what was coming to it and belief that citizens in these towns are free to vote with their feet if they are not satisfied with their station.
Republicans don’t have to try to prop up GM and Chrysler, but they do have to do something for the many who will lose their jobs, be it money for retraining, or increased unemployment benefits for the newly unemployed. There needs to be a domestic policy answer to help people in Michigan and other states that have been hard hit by the woes in the auto industry.
So, why haven’t conservatives come up with any ideas? I think part of the problem is that the GOP has become to see conservatism as more of a lifestyle than a guiding ideology. It has become a place that welcomes those who fit into the movement and ignores those that don’t fit. In this case, since conservatives don’t like unions, they see the workers at GM, Ford and Chrysler as getting what was coming to them. Conservatism has gone from being interested in governing to being interested in being countercultural, in not fitting in or as David Frum notes, it is more interested in protest than in politics. As David Frum goes on to say:
We saw a country divided in two, red states and blue, NASCAR vs. NPR, real America against the phonies in the cities. A movement that had begun as an intellectual one now scornfully pooh-poohed the need for people in government to know anything much at all. But expertise does matter, and the neglect of expertise leads to mismanagement and failure — as we saw in Iraq, in Katrina and in the disregard of warning signals from the financial market. It was under a supposedly pro-market administration that the United States suffered the worst market failure of the post-war era, and that should have sobered us. Instead, we rallied to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.
Disregarding evidence and expertise, we shrugged off warnings of environmental problems. One consequence: In 1988, the elder George Bush beat Michael Dukakis among voters with four-year degrees by 25 points. In 2008, Barack Obama won the BA and BSc vote, the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Conservatives stopped taking governance seriously — and so Americans ceased to trust conservatives in government.
What has happened is that we stopped caring about getting votes and winning elections. What is happening is that there is some cache of being seen as out of touch, culturally alienated. The Republican party has become a support group for conservative culture, a place of safety in world that doesn’t seem to friendly. While such a role for a GOP might offer safety and succor, it basically assures the GOP to be consigned to a minority party for a very long time.
As a Republican, I totally understand the notion of free markets and support it. I understand that the Big Three were slow to change and become more nimble in the marketplace and should suffer some consequences for that. I think unions aren’t all bad, but they have done a lot to bog down the Big Three against their foreign competitors. I am not against seeing the Big Three face bankruptcy.
But I am also the son of two retired autoworkers. I might disagree with them on politics, but I respect their hard work. They went to work in pain, to make sure I had a good life. My dad worked for General Motors for almost 40 years and my mother for 25. It’s hard work and their bodies show it. As their son, I can’t tell them that they are on their own. I have to offer them and the many like them something more for their years of hard work.
If the GOP wants to be a winning party, it has to offer something to these workers. They can be pro-worker with out being pro-union. They have to be. Cheering the free market and telling these workers to drop dead is the way to ensuring the GOP’s downfall.
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12 Responses to “How the GOP Killed the Reagan Democrats”
Excellent article. It is hard to understand the vitriol directed at autoworkers. Some of seems to be self-serving–after all if GM fails, that allows VW in Tennessee, for example, to capture market share. But, economic drivers don't usually create the sense of hatred that conservatives project when they talk about “breaking the unions.” Do they really intend to wall off Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and let those behind the walls get by on food stamps when they've always supported themselves proudly?
So, why haven’t conservatives come up with any ideas? I think part of the problem is that the GOP has become to see conservatism as more of a lifestyle than a guiding ideology.
Or maybe it's because there are no good answers? How do you avoid propping up an industry that is going to fail regardless of what you do, while somehow shielding the employees from the fall when it comes?
As their son, I can’t tell them that they are on their own. I have to offer them and the many like them something more for their years of hard work.
Maybe you should offer them your help, you're their son after all.
If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic…
Good article.
From the beginning of the auto crisis, I thought the GOP should have taken the following position:
Not one taxpayer dime should go to the companies or unions. Guaranteeing their warranties would be OK to give them a fighting chance. Normal bankruptcy would be the best way to handle the companies. The government should be reasonably generous in supporting the displaced workers: unemployment compensation, retraining, relocation, maybe health insurance.
This approach would have avoided rewards to those who caused the problem: the companies and the unions.
We may end up there anyhow, but only after putting many billions down a rat hole.
JayDickB- I pretty much agree except that that's not a permanent solution. The sheer number of workers affected and the percentage of the communities that would be thrown into unemployment make it pretty much impossible to just treat the problem as a 'retraining' one. I think it's going to take a great deal of ingenuity to figure out where to reroute those workers- and I'd like to see the state/local governments and the business communities step up with ideas. They're the ones who would know what is possible based on the resources and infrastructure.
Another factor is history. The key to the Reagan Democrats was their white working class identity, which many in the industrial Midwest felt was under attack by both the beginnings of deindustrialization and the burgeoning welfare state that gave “hard-earned tax dollars” to mostly black “welfare cheats.” Much of this appeal in places like Macomb County, Michigan was unsubtly based in racial appeals – opposition to court-ordered busing, affirmative action, “quotas”, welfare, crime, housing decay. Warren, Michigan is the whitest city in America, followed closely behind by nearby Livonia, Michigan – both of which surround heavily black Detroit. The politics of race went a long way toward driving the 1980 election; remember, the great crime wave peaked in 1980, only to recede a bit before exploding again with crack in 1986.
What happened since then? The politics of race lost steam – at least as a sustainable force – in the Midwest. Welfare reform effectively killed the GOP's anti-government message among white working class voters who loved big government for themselves. NAFTA accelerated the deindustrialization of the Midwest, where local Democrats took far more protectionist positions than the Clintonian national party. And the younger generation. further removed from the turmoil of 1960s-era Detroit, just didn't fixate on race (or other cultural issues). Without a natural cultural tie – this region is relatively un-evangelical and less conservative Catholic than it once was – upper Midwest voters stuck to Democratic class appeals more than Republican cultural appeals. David Bonior speaks to Michigan voters much better than does Dick DeVos. Barack Obama won Macomb County.
I would like the writer of this article to tell me why the autoworkers in Michigan are more important than the plumbers here in Florida. Why are the autoworkers in Michigan more important than the electricians in Arizona.
My friend, with his wife and new son, lost his job as a plumber. A family memeber lost his job in Arizona. Where is their bailouts. Why is the Michigan autoworkers job so much more important than these jobs. If you are going to bail them out then you should bail out the Plumbers here in Florida and Electricians in Arizona. While you are at it why not bail out the secretaries in Texas.
Please Please Please explain to me why the Michigan Autoworkers are more important than everyone else.
BigJim, what in the world makes you think that we are only talking about the autoworkers in Michigan? While much of what has been written in this thread focuses on that area since that's where the original writer is from there are two auto plants in the Kansas City area and another two in St. Louis. There are plants in other states as well that would be devastated by the collapse of the Big 3, both their own and parts plants of other companies. In fact, the main article itself is asking a question larger than one dealing only with the current state of the auto industry and “bailouts”. The collapse of the auto industry is only the latest wave of economic bad news that has affected what was once the core of the American middle class, the hard working blue collar laborer. The point is that the Republican Party has largely decided to ignore those matters that are of concern to a class of Americans they once did well with, and those matters are economic. They concern the failure of a dream, that if you worked hard and did what was right you would have a comfortable middle class existence and a good retirement. This dream is collapsing around a large number of people who have worked hard for years and they aren't happy when they see nothing but a shrug and “That's the free market.” or hear themselves being blamed by some politicians.
After years of pro-social engineering and being vicious anti-business, the rust belt is probably getting what it deserves. Michigan has a well earned reputation as being anti-business and stuck in supporting past winners instead of producing new ones. Michigan was openly hostile to new business and was more interested in using the government to pick winners instead of creating conditions where there can be more winners. Maybe Michigan should have thought in the long term instead of the short term. Just as California is getting what it deserves to teach it a lesson about hubris and not thinking long term, Michigan is getting the same.
When the governor of California went on television after the Supreme Court ruled in the Grutter decision and was giddy about the idea of using the government to discriminate and using the government to conduct social engineering, everyone should have realized how clueless the political class in Michigan was.
My point Jim, and I appreciate your response, is you cannot bail everyone out. You can bad mouth the Republicans all you want(I am an Independant) but the fact is you simply cannot bail everyone out.
Obama is bailing out the Auto Industry people, that is a fact. How the writer of this article can use this point to bash the insignificant minority party is beyond me. It is simply partisan bashing as far as I am concerned.
What good would any plan the Republicans come up with do. It will never get passed. I have seen their vague budget plan and it has no chance. The republicans got what they deserved in the elections plain and simple. Let it rest.
This stuff simply is a distraction form our new Presidents 1 trillion dollar per year budget deficit and contiuous bailouts of some banks and the Auto Industry.
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