Rush/Newt is a clear stylistic beginning, but I pin the start of the GOP's descent into degeneracy at the migration of segregationist Democrats to the GOP in the years after the '64 Civil Rights Act and '65 Voting Rights Act.
That seems reasonable to me. And then the racism/sexism stayed in kind of a steady state polite/dog-whistle limbo until the backlash to Obama unleashed Trump upon us.
I think this guy really just wanted to write about the election of 1992, and either he didn't have anything new to say about it, or he felt like you can't get traction in 2024 unless you can connect your topic to Trump.
And if you really just want to talk about 1992, that makes me suspect that you're right around 50 years old and you were just starting to pay attention then, and it was the first presidential election you voted on, and you kinda imprinted on it. NTTAWWT.
It was the first presidential election I voted in and I don't recall thinking it was a big deal.
Then why on earth did you write this book?!
Affectively, I did not like Bill Clinton. Or Edwards. That whole look and voice makes me feel like I'm being conned. But graduating into the economy Clinton made was a key help in my life.
I didn't vote until 1996. I think I liked Bill Clinton because I heard everyone repeat how likable he was, and I didn't have a strong opinion of my own either way, so I at least wanted to appear well-informed.
(I feel a little bad that two Geeblets will turn 18 a few weeks after a presidential election. Pokey in 2028, Rascal in 2032.)
I like Ganz a lot, his substack is excellent but I haven't read the book.
I think this guy really just wanted to write about the election of 1992, and either he didn't have anything new to say about it, or he felt like you can't get traction in 2024 unless you can connect your topic to Trump.
That sounds right.
In terms of key figures in the evolution of Republican politics I'd include Richard Viguerie
Though Goldwater lost, Viguerie gained knowledge of the direct-mail strategy and would later become expert in it. In early 1965 he went to the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives which by law had a record of every donor to a presidential campaign that gave over $50 which it made available for public inspection. Viguerie copied by longhand 12,500 donors that had given to Goldwater's 1964 campaign. This was the beginning of a grass-roots conservative mailing list that would continue to grow throughout Viguerie's career. Viguerie, holding that the mainstream news media was biased, later stated that this strategy allowed conservatism to bypass two obstacles, "Thanks to direct mail, conservatives -- and their candidates -- were able to become an independent, vibrant force, free of the fetters imposed by the Republican political hierarchy and the liberal media." With only $4,000 in savings he began his direct-mail company "Richard A. Viguerie Company, Inc."...
...
By June 1975 Viguere, who by then occupied four floors of building in Falls Church, Virginia in suburban Washington, D.C., had come to the attention of New York Magazine. He had hired 250 nonunion employees (with "Full benefits. Good pay.") to "tend slowly turning computer reels, collate and update some 250 mailing lists carrying approximately 10 million names, handle the paper flow, and, most important, create the letters which inspire householders to mail in all that money." At the time Viguerie told the magazine that 15% of his business was in straight political campaigning for candidates, 30% in ideological efforts (such as opposing gun control), and the rest in "health and welfare" matters (such as the "Help Hospitalized Veterans" campaign).
The article estimated that he would "dispatch some 50 million pieces of mail this year" and stated that "he is a phenomenal fund-raiser for conservative and/or populist causes and candidates. Viguerie is Godfather, Idea Man, And Savior to a gathering band of rightists eager to fund their dreams and vexations. ...the people who mail $25 million a year to his clients get riled up over school busing, guns, law and order, pornography, permissive education, and the cause of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, whom most of them love."[5] The magazine noted that at that point gearing up for the 1976 Presidential campaign he had "raised $3.5 million by direct mail for Wallace, [and] will hit $12 million by next spring".
9: Yeah, I liked him enough that I pre-ordered his book for my Kindle but now I can't upload it because my Kindle is in airplane mode until I finish reading several overdue library books. Meanwhile I'm not sure how I feel about Ganz anymore. It seems like he's constantly fighting someone on Twitter.
I didn't know that worked for library books. Thanks.
I think it can be valuable to dive deep into one particular area and tease out the precursors to trends that are stronger today, even if it's not unique. I also think you could call the early 90's a bit of an inflection point for right wingers going stupid-boulangist as their aesthetic and longing for a strongman like Trump, which then spread through transmitters like Limbaugh; certainly not the starting point of them being stupid-reactionary.
Also a subscriber and liker of Ganz's essays and tweets. He said he doesn't think X/Twitter is particularly healthy for him & is quitting again in a few weeks, though he's said that before & returned. Haven't yet ordered the book.
The sharpest difference between 1992 and 2024 seems to be the number of people eager to announce that they will bring guns, and perhaps bombs, into the despised cities full of "them."
13.last he does have a very dyspeptic presence on twitter
I think it was Reagan who really represented the break with the past that gave us Trump. The guy made up all kinds of crazy shit and got away with it because the media learned to be afraid to call him out.
Nixon and HW Bush both felt constrained by a perceived need to at least appear to say things that corresponded to reality. Reagan and W Bush operated under no such constraints, and paved the way for Trump.
My first presidential election was Bush-Dukakis in '88. I was too young for the '86 elections by a couple of weeks. Also, NC kept raising the drinking age right as I would get close to it.
18: mmhmm. What was the first election you voted in?
20: 1980. That was a huge election, but I think 1984 was the one that institutionalized media deference to Republican story-telling.
I remember my uncle saying (maybe when Bush was re-elected?) that his dark moment of the soul was when Nixon was re-elected - how could the country elect a known crook with this track record? - and that's why he wasn't as plagued by W.'s re-election as I was. That uncle would have been born in the late 1940s, so would have been coming of voting age in the late 1960s. In fact, the voting age was probably 21 then, so I bet Nixon's re-election was his first election.
I'm just saying, I think the stages of political intelligence loosely go:
1. I'm not really paying too much attention.
2. I'm starting to pay attention and holy shit, things just got really dark, and I'm imprinting on this 4-8 year stretch as the turning point, because I can easily trace threads back to this point, but before that it's more academic for me.
||
NMM to Donald Sutherland. Incredible body of work. Damn.
|>
I'm not arguing with the facts of the article, I've seen a lot of the ideas in it elsewhere, but I'm baffled by it. This part in particular:
Through figures such as Buchanan and Duke, Ganz attempts to understand why and how right-wing extremism flourished in these years. "It was an era where America felt itself to be losing out," he writes: "losing its dominant place in the world, losing the basis of its security and wealth, and losing its sense of itself, as if a storm cloud rapidly gathered over the country and the national mood suddenly turned dour, gloomy, fearful, and angry. Americans were fed up."
America was losing out? The USSR dissolved in December 1991 and the writing was on the wall in 1989. Japan's economy was doing well through the 80s but its economy crashed in 1989 and 1990. Who was America losing out to? I literally can't come up with any answers to that, except for racist boogeymen. Which I guess is the answer to Duke, Buchanan, and Trump, but I feel like Chotiner should have pressed Ganz on it.
Who was America losing out to? I literally can't come up with any answers to that
The dark menace of college students protesting the WTO.
23 seems broadly correct for most people, but I think Ganz is younger than 3.2 suggests so it may not be what's going on here.
22: Oh yeah, 1972 was indeed a dark moment, but Nixon's criminality ended his presidency.
Rick Perlstein (recently discussed here) wrote a fine book called Nixonland that discusses the white paranoia that laid the groundwork for modern Republicanism.
25 I think that was when the right wing Republican narrative of national decline began to take hold despite all the facts cited above.
I put it on Reagan but Ganz is a young 'un.
I was a Senior in high school in 1992. I did vote in the 1994 midterms. People were sp shocked. I had a classmate whose uncle worked on the Hill. I don't think any Democrats thought that jobs with the House Majority could be lost.
In MA Kennedy defeated upshot Mitt Romney. I do remember the Senate election 2 years later. Bill Weld was a popular Republican Governor who had won because he was pro.choice against a pro-life Democrat. Kerry successfully nationalized that election.
I was 10 during the 1992 election and my parents were nominal Republicans, so I don't remember what I thought about politics then and wouldn't trust my memories if I did. I'm pretty sure I voted for Gore in 2000 and my dad voted for Bush but neither of us thought it mattered all that much. By 2012 he was claiming he didn't remember who he voted for in that election.
I am halfway in between Bostoniangirl and Cyrus. Not geographically though.
25: I thought the problem was the opposite - the lack of an enemy that would give us a purpose and, more importantly, give us a reason not to take the fight amongst ourselves too seriously.
Actually 35 is wrong. During the Cold War the fight amongst ourselves was very serious for those who believed that liberals were Communists in disguise.
A third party presidential candidate getting 19% of the vote was genuinely a big outlier of 1992, regardless of whom it helped. The closest precedent was George Wallace getting 14% in 1968, and before that you have to go 1924 or 1912 for anything similar.
35, 36: Ganz gets at what I am trying and failing to say --
The story in my book is partly about the end of the Cold War and the ideological structure that it gave to American politics. The end of the Cold War unleashed this kind of panoply of nationalisms. I see that in the United States, where there is a sense of fragmentation, and abroad, where blocs that were held together by some kind of larger ideological orientation began to break down, and new modes of organization came up, usually along national and ethnic lines. There's a lot of similar interest among these groups.
Of course it's nothing that hasn't been said a 1000 times before.
37: Yes, it was genuinely weird, since it was hard to say what Perot stood for other than a general dissatifaction with the 2-party system.
In 96 I voted in the Republican primary for Dole, because I didn't want Buchanan to be the nominee.
In 2000 I was really angry at Gore for saying we could not have universal healthcare and voted for Bradley in the primary. I believe I voted for Nader on the presidential line in the general which was dumb. I stand by refusing to vote for DiFi in California in 2000 because of her views on the war on drugs.
Having Gray Davis as a governor was also really depressing.
In a lot of ways things are more dire now, but the Democratic options were so meh back then.
Did Bob Dole appear in a viagra commercial with Brittney Spears? I may have invented that.
I remember. He was in a Pepsi commercial with Spears and a viagra commercial with Archer Daniels Midland.
14: I learned the trick to go into airplane mode to keep overdue library books here, but I forget from who.
At the time the story was that a politician would be so shameless. In retrospect what seems odd is that a politician was non-controversial and popular enough that a brand would choose him to be in their commercials.
40: Were you CalifornianGirl before Unfogged?
44: My benchmark for how things have changed is the movie "Dave" from 1993. Nowadays it would be impossible to make a sweet, sincere movie about a regular guy overcoming the machinations of cynical politicians.
The weirdest thing about the 1992 election was that America very throoughly changed its mind about the parties in the months before the election, and the change was permanent. The electoral vote score in the previous three elections was R489 - D49, R525-D13, and R426 -D111, respectively, and Dems lost the popular vote by at least 7 million. By January 1992, HW Bush had a 90% or so approval rating, and had "won" both the Kuwait War and the Cold War. All the big names on the D side decided to sit the year out since they had no chance (Cuomo, Bradley, i forget who the others were), leaving a field consisting of an adulterous Arkansas govrenor, and Paul Tsongas, a senator mostly known for having cancer, which owuld kill him within five yeas. Clinton didn't think he had a chance either, he just wanted to position himself for 1996, becasue he thought he'd match up well against Dan Quayle. Clinton won D370 - R168, more than double the Democratic electoral total in the previous three elections combined, and won the popular vote by over 5 million. Starting in 1992, Dermocrasts have won the popular vote 6 out of 7 times, and never fell below 227 electoral votes.
An article that doesn't mention any of this kind of misses the point.
The 538 polling average now has Biden with a tenth of a percent more support than Trump. In a democracy, he would be ahead.
Clinton didn't think he had a chance either, he just wanted to position himself for 1996, becasue he thought he'd match up well against Dan Quayle.
I don't remember ever reading that. Did he say that?
I don't know what he said, but everyone I knew back then assumed that Gore stayed out because 1992 was unwinnable.
50: That was the conventional wisdom at the time, except that I don't think anybody in 1992 thought Dan Quayle was a plausible Republican nominee in '96.
I think Cuomo was pretty clear that he didn't run because he didn't think a Democrat had a chance. I'm not sure what Clinton said about all of that.
Yeah, I remember that no one thought that a Democrat would have a chance in 1992. But I think Clinton believed that he could win, partly because I don't think he would have thought that losing in 1992 would set him up well to win in 1996.
I wonder if part of the problem was not with the fundamentals pointing against a Democrat winning, but rather that the Persian Gulf War and HW's brief soar in popularity happened to be just when people like Cuomo were making their decision to run.
54 I think that's right. You'd had to have committed with your internal network by the summer of 1991, when HW would have looked really unbeatable.
My first time voting was in 1976. Carter beat Ford 297-240. I voted in California, which Ford won. If you think of 1972, 1980 and 1984 -- these were the elections where I started paying real attention and later started working as a low level volunteer -- it's pretty easy to see why plenty of us oldsters don't take Democratic victories for granted, notwithstanding the more recent trend.
Carter-Ford is my earliest memory of being aware of electoral politics. I was in the 2nd grade and kids were being sent with buttons pinned to their backpacks.
I can remember Carter-Reagan, but not Carter-Ford.
I can remember Kotter vs the Sweat Hogs.
The first presidential election I was aware of was 1992. First one I voted in was 2004.
He went to work for the Bush administration and everyone took "up your nose with a rubber hose" as inspiration.
Who can forget Secretary of State Alexander Horshack's "I am in control here" after Reagan was shot?
The first one I was aware if was Reagan/Mondale. I was in the 4th grade. For 2-3 weeks after we all ran around the playground screaming that the world was going to end in a nuclear war, because Reagan had won.
I have a memory of watching the election returns in 1972, but I didn't know anything about politics then. Watergate was my introduction to politics. My first vote in a presidential election was for Mondale in 1984.
65 Watergate was mine too, mostly because my mom would watch the hearings and it preempted the Flinstones or something so my hatred of Nixon runs deep.
my strongest ganz opinion is my god get this dude an editor!
i will now read thie comments, just had to get this off my chest.
54 is correct. The one minor thing 48 gets wrong (it's otherwise very good) is that Bush wasn't actually very popular by Jan 92. The Gulf War spike was huge but brief. In March 91 he had net approval of 81%. Net!! By January 92 it was minus 1%. But that's probably too late if you're wondering whether to run against him.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/george-bush-public-approval
The scale and significance of the 1994 wipeout are hard to overstate. The Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Eisenhower administration, when the sitting president had been all of six years old. (And from 1931 to 1995 Republicans had controlled the House for four years out of 64.)
Among state governors, Republicans had a net gain of 11, which is just huge, and some of those gains ushered in new eras of dominance. Idaho and Texas have not elected a Democratic governor since; Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming have had one Democrat each. States in the northeast where Republicans gained the governorship (NY, PA, RI) have been competitive since. (Rhode Island only just started having four-year governor's terms in 1994; they had been two-year terms since 1912, and one-year terms prior to that.)
In the Senate, Republicans gained 9 seats; party changes soon after the election by Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Richard Shelby turned that into a net plus of 11, and a swing from 57-43 D to 56-44 R. Yikes! Four of those look to be essentially permanent switches, as no Democrat in the 30 years since has held either of the Tennessee seats or the seats from Alabama and Oklahoma.
(Total tangent: Tennessee has a US Representative named Andy Ogles IV (does he, now), who came up through the conservative gravy train; he entered Congress after working as head of the Laffer Center. There's a whole center devoted to drawing curves on napkins, who knew? Anyway, wikipedia notes his college GPA (a smarm-meister's C) and that he thinks the 2020 presidential election was stolen.)
I had thought that the 1994 House elections wiped out southern Democrats, but I see that isn't quite true. Still, a net gain of 54 is huge, in the range of ten times the typical fluctuation. I can't quickly find how many party switchers there were, but anecdatally there were a bunch, and the wikipedia for Blue Dog organizer Jimmy Hayes lists about half a dozen right there. Electorally, what it does look like is the beginning of the end of Democrats winning seats from white rural districts. It's a good thing that Chicagoland has more representatives than Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and most of Iowa combined, but jeez, actual prairie populism is as dead as people with personal memories of the Great Depression.
In fine Unfogged tradition, I have read neither the article nor the book, but it sure looks like 1994 is the hinge election more than 1992.
In terms of governance, 1994 was also a hinge, with Gingrich bringing a lot of power back into the Speaker's office, and without the countervailing force of the old committee barons. He also brought a much greater willingness to play budget games. I knew people who worked on the Hill before and after. Before, it was a point of honor to get your committee's appropriations through on schedule. After, honor didn't matter, and some key players preferred an omnibus bill and a last-minute scramble. Considering that "regular order" only came into being with anti-Nixon reforms from 1974, we've had a deliberately broken system 10 years longer than we had a theoretically working one. As folks have noted above, Gingrich also nationalized elections, setting the stage for today's social media Republicans who prefer cameras and clicks to actual committees and such.
1994 was the first election I followed by internet; Gopher and WAIS ftw. It was not a happy evening.
Gingrich also mainstreamed implicit calls for violence.
I can't quickly find how many party switchers there were, but anecdatally there were a bunch, and the wikipedia for Blue Dog organizer Jimmy Hayes lists about half a dozen right there
Per some thread years ago from Kevin Kruse, the Southern realignment was more from up-and-coming politicians with establishment support going Republican than already accomplished politicians switching parties - Strom Thurmond was an outlier, but a lot of other segregationist Southern Dems in the 60's saw their ex-staffers start getting elected as Republicans.
Then (this is me filling in from some book) by the early 90s a lot of Southern Dem Representatives were right around retiring age, and the bleak landscape in 1994 prompted a lot of them to choose retirement then. So a lot of the switch showed itself in congressional delegations in 1994, but it had been a long time coming.
70: I miss the days of implicit calls for violence.
The 1976 map: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1976_US_Presidential_election_by_congressional_district.svg
69 Yeah, 1994 was awful.
74: That's a different world! New England Republicans are not extinct. Orange county is very R. Tennessee is all blue except the Unionist bits up in East Tennessee. All of Arkansas, huge swathes of Oklahoma and Texas all go for the Democrats.
But also, half a century is kinda a long time.
75: Not yet half a century ago. Not that I'm counting or anything.
Speaking of violence, today I was out and I saw a guy with a badge reading "Violent Crime Squad" on his belt but no uniform. He had cuffs, but I couldn't see a gun.
That shows how serious he is. Handcuffs are a much more violent way to kill someone.
This is an interesting take on the Ganz book by a legit academic expert.
Haven't listened to it yet, but Ganz is the guest on the most recent Know Your Enemy podcast episode.
Late, but this is unintentionally interesting:
I had thought that the 1994 House elections wiped out southern Democrats, but I see that isn't quite true. Still, a net gain of 54 is huge, in the range of ten times the typical fluctuation.
It's easy to neglect how unusually static the House of Representatives (and the Senate) are, compared to legislatures in other countries.
I'm sitting in the UK, which is about to go from Conservatives +80 to Labour +something vast like 200. Now, that's going to be an unusually big result, but in a "normal" election you're often looking at a net gain of a hundred seats or more, out of 650.
2019: 85.
2017: 17.
2015: 66.
2010:144.
2005:101.
2001:12.
1997: 200.
1992: 81.
1987: 42.
1983: 101.
There have been only two elections since 1960 in which the net change in the US House has been more than 50 seats. (True, there are fewer seats.) The senate is trickier because of the staggered elections, but you can see it's still pretty unchanging.
If you live in a district with an open seat or one that is potentially flippable, you get campaigned at bigly.
State political control of House districts obviously pushes toward "stability" (gerrymandering), but that doesn't particularly explain greater stability in the Senate.
Senate seats flipped / net change by year:
2022: 1 / 1
2020: 4 / 3
2018: 6 / 2
2016: 2 / 2
2014: 9 / 9
2012: 4 / 2
2010: 6 / 6
I guess if you triple that to account for staggered seats, the 2014 result extrapolated onto the House of Commons is a 175-seat swing.
86: ah, I was looking at it differently. There isn't a six-year Senate election cycle that has a swing comparable to the 100-seat swings that the UK parliament sees on a regular basis.
Yes, the Democrats in 2013 had 53 and then after the election they had 44. But, put another way, in 2013 the Democrats had 53 and after a full election cycle they had, in 2019... 45. Over a full election cycle there was a net change of 8% of seats. The equivalent would be a UK general election that produced a net change of 52 seats. So an unusually big change in Senate terms is a fairly boring election in Westminster terms.
Right, there can be as much swing on a per-seat basis, presumably because states cannot be gerrymandered, but that's counteracted in practice by the staggering.
