MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — The house that Ronald Reagan built is in danger of collapsing.
The coalition of fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, anti-tax activists and social conservatives that rallied behind Reagan in 1980 and has defined the Republican Party ever since is coming apart at the seams heading into the 2008 election.
All the men running for the party's presidential nomination invoke Reagan's name repeatedly. But all of them offend at least one wing of the party enough that they'd find it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to pull the disparate elements of the old coalition together.
"It's gone," said Ed Rollins, who worked on Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign and now chairs the campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
"The Reagan coalition is pretty much gone," added Karen Spencer, a Republican strategist in California who watched the Reagan phenomenon firsthand when her father served as Reagan's chief political strategist. "It's been 28 years. Maybe it is time for a change."
According to Wikipedia, the Reagan coalition was a political alignment of the Reagan Democrats into the GOP. The Reagan Democrats were "mostly white, socially conservative blue-collar workers, who lived in the Northeast, and were attracted to Reagan's social conservatism on issues such as abortion, and to his hawkish foreign policy." The Reagan Democrats saw Ronald Reagan as a champion of their own middle-class aspiration, and values, while viewing the Democratic Party as a party working for the benefit of the poor, African-Americans, the unemployed, and other political pressure groups. The McClatchy article notes:
It's important to remember that the rise of the Reagan coalition wasn't just an embrace of him, but a repudiation of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, as well as the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party.
There are probably three issues that defined the Democratic Party, and President Jimmy Carter, during the 1970s. The first issue was that the Democratic Party was weak on foreign policy and defense issues, stemming from the anti-war wing of the party and its opposition of the Vietnam War. Given the Reagan Democrats hawkishness on foreign policy, they probably would have been repulsed by the clashes between the anti-war protesters and police during the 1968 Democratic convention. This issue was further compounded by President Carter's inability to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis through both diplomatic and military means.
The second issue would be economics. During the 1970s, the United States would be gripped in a period of high inflation, stagnating wage growth, and a recession. This was a period of stagflation. While I would say that much of this stagnant economic grown could be blamed on the "guns and butter" approach of spending on both the Vietnam War and welfare programs during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the blame of the deteriorating economic condition in the U.S. was placed squarely on Carter. The Reagan Democrats saw their middle-class lifestyle being eroded during the Carter administration, just as Carter was unable to resolve serious foreign policy issues as the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the energy crisis. The complex problems the Carter administration faced, provided Reagan with that famous question he asked to the nation, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" The Reagan Democrats responded by voting The Gipper into office.
The third issue that brought the Reagan Democrats into the GOP would be social issues. The Reagan Democrats were socially conservative, living during the Me Decade of the 1970s, This was a period of great social change in the United States, with the rise of the Sexual Revolution, the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment, gay liberation and the Gay Rights Movement, and Roe v. Wade, It was a time when the Reagan Democrats probably believed that the established institutions of marriage, family, and even trust in one's government, was eroding before their eyes (even as this trust was broken during the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration). What is more, the Reagan Democrats perceived the Democratic Party as being favorable to the social changes taking place within the United States at the expense of the destruction of the established institutions. Ronald Reagan tapped into this Reagan Democrat anger with his own optimistic personality, giving a message to the Reagan Democrats that they could do better. Again, the Reagan Democrats approved of The Gipper's optimism, and voted him into office.
I don't think you will ever see another coalition in the GOP with the power that the Reagan coalition had over the past 28 years. The Reagan Democrats saw their own beliefs and political views being ignored by the Democratic Party. They saw the anti-war wing take over the Democratic Party, creating what they may have believed was a malaise within the U.S. military. They saw stagflation erode their own economic future, and blamed the Democrats for ignoring their economic plight for that of the poor, or minority class. They finally saw great social change take place in the U.S. during the 1970s, and grew angry that the Democratic Party would embrace such a change instead of clinging to the standard institutions that the Reagan Democrats believed in. In a sense, the Reagan Democrats felt they have been disenfranchised within the Democratic Party during the 1970s, and thus bolted to Ronald Reagan when they were given the chance.
The problem for today is that the issues of the Iraq war, the U.S. debt, the tax cuts and the supply-sided economics philosophy have come from the Republican Party and the legacy of Ronald Reagan. We have a Republican Party that is being fractured into different political groups--the Evangelical Religious Right who have staked their own anger on the social issues of abortion, gay rights, and school prayer. The corporatist and anti-tax groups demand even more tax cuts for the uber-rich. The southern states' Republicans support the GOP due to the anti-immigration and opposition to government programs supporting minorities. And the Reagan Democrats? How long are they going to support a GOP that has brought us into a disastrous war in Iraq, increased the federal debt, and have created economic policies that have widened the gap between the rich and poor, while their own middle-class lifestyle is being squeezed? The Reagan Democrats have only to blame themselves for continuing to vote for the Reagan legacy with their voting George W. Bush into office. At the same time, the Republican Party is to be blamed for instigating their own class war against the middle-class for the uber-rich. They are all reaping the bitter fruit they have sown when they elected Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.
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