Conservative Democrat
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In American politics, Conservative Democrat is a term referring to a member of the Democratic Party who holds some conservative political views.
Conservative Democrats of the twenty-first century are similar to their progressive Republican counterparts, in that both became political minorities after their respective political parties underwent a major political realignment starting in 1964. Prior to 1964, both parties had their liberal, moderate, and conservative wings, each of them equally influential in both parties. During this period, conservative Democrats formed the Democratic half of the Conservative Coalition. After 1964, the conservative wing assumed a greater presence in the Republican Party, although it did not become the mainstay of the party until the nomination of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, has included both liberal and middle-of-the-road wings. This political realignment was mostly complete by 1980. After 1980, the Republicans became a mostly right-wing party, with conservative leaders such as Sam Brownback and Wayne Allard, while the Democrats became a mostly left-wing party, with liberal leaders such as Edward M. Kennedy and Jerry Brown. However, both parties have a notable centrist wing, with moderates such as Bill Clinton and Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic Party, and moderates such as Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in the Republican Party.
Since 1994, conservative Democrats have been organized in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Blue Dog Democrats. Another coalition of moderate Democrats within the United States Senate is the Democratic Leadership Council, which promotes centrist political views but is sometimes also referred to as being conservative. Bill Clinton was a prominent product of the Democratic Leadership Council and went on to two terms as a comparatively moderate Democratic president.
[edit] History
Conservative views and factions within the Democratic Party have a long history, and still exert an influence on the party today:
[edit] 1800-1860: From Jefferson to Jackson to the Civil War
The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 marked the first electoral victory of the Democratic-Republican Party over the Federalist Party. Jefferson ran on a platform in support of small landholders and decentralized government, against the Federalist platform which supported a coalition of big business and big government. The Federalist Party disappeared shortly after.
Andrew Jackson marked the beginning of the Democratic Party as we know it today. The Democratic-Republican Party split during the Jackson administration, with the opposition to Jackson becoming the short-lived National Republican Party and later the United States Whig Party; Jackson's supporters dropped the "Republican" part of the name and became the Democratic Party. Andrew Jackson is notable as the first U.S. President to be elected from the frontier rather than from the East Coast.
The Democratic Party split along regional lines for the first time in 1860, over slavery. This split between southern and northern factions led to a brand new party, the Republican Party (created in 1854 from the remnants of the by-then-defunct Whig Party and the American Party) and its candidate Abraham Lincoln being elected. The American Civil War followed shortly thereafter.
[edit] 1876-1932: The 'Solid South'
See main article: Solid South.
The phrase "Solid South" describes the reliable electoral support of the U.S. Southern states for Democratic Party candidates for almost a century after the Reconstruction era. Except for 1928, when Catholic candidate Al Smith ran on the Democratic ticket, Democrats won heavily in the South in every Presidential election from 1876 until 1948 (and even in 1928, the divided South provided most of Smith's electoral votes). The Democratic dominance originated in many Southerners' animosity towards the Republican Party's role in the Civil War and the Reconstruction.
[edit] 1874-1896: The rise of agrarian populism
The United States Populist Party, United States Greenback Party, and the Agrarianism movement are often cited as the first truly left-wing political movements within the United States. Nonetheless, while they emphasized economic issues that were radical by the political standards of the time, they are relatively conservative by today's standards. Historian Richard Hofstadter has taken the view that the Populist and Agrarian movements were essentially right-wing and reactionary movements, left-wing economic issues notwithstanding. Hofstadter's views are not universally shared among historians.
Because of the political dominance of one party or the other in many states, the real political races during this period would often be within the party primary. Indeed, in many southern states, there was hardly any Republican Party at all, and the serious candidates of both the conservative and liberal kind were all Democrats. For example, in the southern states the race might be between a populist left-wing Democrat and a conservative Democrat in the primary, while in regions of the country such as the Midwest or New England in which the Republican Party was dominant, the race might be decided in the primary between a progressive Republican and a conservative Republican.
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination by adopting many of the Populist Party's proposals as his own.
[edit] 1932-1948: FDR and the New Deal coalition
See main article: New Deal coalition.
The 1932 election brought about a major realignment in political party affiliation, and is widely considered to be a realigning election. Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to forge a coalition of labor unions, liberals, African Americans, and southern whites. These disparate voting blocs together formed a majority of voters and handed the Democratic Party seven victories out of nine presidential elections, as well as control of both houses of Congress during much of this time. In many ways, it was the American civil rights movement that ultimately heralded the demise of the coalition.
Roosevelt's successful program for alleviating the Great Depression, collectively known as the New Deal, emphasized only economic issues, and thus was compatible with the views of those who supported the New Deal programs but were otherwise conservative. This included the Southern Democrats, who were an important part of FDR's New Deal coalition.
[edit] Political anomalies during the Great Depression
See main articles: Share Our Wealth, Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, EPIC movement, and Critics of the New Deal.
During the Roosevelt administration, several radical populist proposals which went beyond what Roosevelt was willing to advocate gained in popularity. It is notable that all four of the main promoters of these proposals, Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, Francis Townsend, and Upton Sinclair, were originally strong New Deal supporters but turned against Roosevelt because they believed the New Deal programs didn't go far enough. Like the New Deal programs, these populist proposals were based entirely on single economic reforms, but did not take a position on any other issue and were therefore compatible with those holding otherwise conservative views. Some historians today believe that the primary base of support for the proposals of Coughlin, Long, Townsend, and Sinclair was conservative middle class whites who saw their economic status slipping away during the Depression.
A different source of conservative Democratic dissent against the New Deal came from a group of journalists who considered themselves classical liberals and Democrats of the old school, and were opposed to big government programs on principle; these included Albert Jay Nock and John T. Flynn, whose views later became influential in the libertarian movement.
[edit] 1946-1964: The Vital Center and the End of Ideology
Following World War II, a political position took hold within both major parties in which centrism was held to be the ideal political orientation, allowing for moderate liberal and conservative wings in both parties, but not for ultraliberal or ultraconservative wings. Rigid ideology was held to be bad; ideologies even further left or right than those were extremism and outside of the realm of acceptable social discourse.
This position is closely associated with authors such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (The Vital Center), Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology), Eric Hoffer (The True Believer), and Richard Hofstadter. While not a conservative ideology per se within the Democratic Party, this viewpoint was a centrist ideology which held the party back from adopting positions considered "too liberal" during the postwar period. Leftist critics argue that this viewpoint incorrectly or unfairly lumped in movements for social justice on the left with extremism of the right as both being equally extreme, and reinforced the rise of McCarthyism during the Cold War.
Conversely, it also held the party to increasing commitment to ending segregationism and Jim Crow, and disengaging itself from its segregationist wing, held to be too far right for the new centrist consensus. This led to a conservative backlash by southern Democrats during the same period:
[edit] 1948-1968: Segregationist backlash
See main articles: Dixiecrat, T. Coleman Andrews, Harry F. Byrd, George Wallace, and American Independent Party.
The proclamation by President Harry Truman and Senator Hubert Humphrey of support for a Negro civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform of 1948 led to a walkout of 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama. These southern delegations nominated their own "States Rights Democratic Party" (aka Dixiecrat) nominees with Senator Strom Thurmond leading the ticket (Thurmond would later switch in 1964 to the Republicans). The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket.
Similar breakaway Southern Democratic candidates running on states rights and segregationist platforms would continue in 1956 (T. Coleman Andrews), and 1960 (Harry F. Byrd). None would be as successful as the American Independent Party campaign of George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, in 1968. Wallace had briefly run in the Democratic primaries of 1964 against Lyndon Johnson, but dropped out of the race early. In 1968, he formed the new American Independent Party and received 13.5% of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes, carrying several southern states. The AIP would run Presidential candidates in several other elections including conservative Southern Democrats (Lester Maddox in 1976 and John Rarick in 1980), but none of them did nearly as well as Wallace. The AIP was upstaged by the newly-adopted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party after 1968. The Republicans sought to exploit the racial divisions that the Democratic party leadership had left behind.
[edit] 1976-1980: Jimmy Carter
See main article: Jimmy Carter
When Carter entered the Democratic Party Presidential primaries in 1976, he at first was considered to have little chance against nationally better-known politicians. However, the Watergate scandal was still fresh in the voters' minds, and so his position as an outsider distant from Washington, DC became an asset. He ran an effective campaign, did well in debates, and won his party's nomination and then the election, receiving 50.1% of the popular vote. The centerpiece of his campaign platform was government reorganization. Carter was the first candidate from the Deep South to be elected president since Reconstruction.
Jimmy Carter was a born-again Christian and a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. While the Republican Party began to pursue a strategy of wooing born-again Christians as a voting bloc after 1980, led by activists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, in 1976 the evangelical Christian vote went largely to Carter. Carter combined conservative fiscal policies, conservative social views, with more moderate views on peace and ecology, making for a rare combination in the history of American Presidents.
Carter's electoral sweep of the southern states in 1976 (except Virginia) was the first time a Democrat (excluding the third-party campaigns of George Wallace and Harry Byrd) had swept the South since 1956, and would not be repeated again. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton would win some southern states, but otherwise the South turned solidly Republican after 1976.
[edit] 1980-1988: The Boll Weevils of the Reagan era
See main article: Boll weevil (politics).
After 1968, with desegregation a settled issue, the Republican Party began a strategy of trying to win conservative Southerners away from the Democrats and into the Republican Party. Nonetheless, a bloc of conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, remained in the United States Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These included Democratic House members as conservative as Larry McDonald, who was also a leader in the John Birch Society. During the administration of Ronald Reagan, the term "boll weevils" was applied to this bloc of conservative Democrats, who consistently voted in favor of tax cuts, increases in military spending, and deregulation favored by the Reagan administration.
"Boll weevils" was sometimes used as a political epithet by Democratic Party leaders, implying that the boll weevils were unreliable on key votes or not team players. Most of the boll weevils eventually retired from office, or in the case of some such as Senators Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby, switched parties and joined the Republicans. Since 1988 the term "boll weevils" has fallen out of favor.
[edit] Political anomalies during the 1980s and 1990s
In 1980, a political unknown named Lyndon LaRouche entered the New Hampshire Democratic Primary and polled 2% of the vote, coming in fourth place. He and his political movement were largely ignored until 1984, when he became something of a curiosity by paying for half-hour political ads proclaiming Walter Mondale a Soviet agent, and 1986, when two followers of his won upset victories in Democratic primaries for statewide races in Illinois. After the media began to pay attention, LaRouche was promptly labeled an ultraconservative Democrat by some, and a nut by others, primarily due to the overlap of some of his views with those of the Reagan administration. Others disputed the label and noted LaRouche's background as a Marxist/Trotskyist during the 1960s, the cultish nature of his movement, conspiracism in his analysis, and alliances with the anti-Semitic Willis Carto. After a closer look it appeared that LaRouche was anything but a conservative Democrat, and the media began to refer to him as a radical and an extremist rather than a conservative.
The brief rise and terminal fall of LaRouche aside, some Democratic leaders during the 1980s did turn toward conservative views, albeit very different from the previous incarnations of southern Democrats. In 1988, Joe Lieberman defeated Republican U.S. Senate incumbent Lowell Weicker of Connecticut by running to the right of Weicker and receiving the endorsements of the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association. Colorado governor Richard Lamm and former Minnesota Senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy both took up immigration reduction as an issue. Lamm wrote a fictional novel, 1988, about a third party Presidential candidate and former Democrat running as a progressive conservative, and Lamm himself would go on to unsuccessfully seek the nomination of the Reform Party in 1996. McCarthy began to give speeches in the late 1980s naming the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Election Commission as the three biggest threats to liberty in the United States.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., known during the 1950s and 1960s as a champion of "Vital Center" ideology and the policies of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, wrote a 1992 book, The Disuniting of America critical of multiculturalism. Jerry Brown, meanwhile, would adopt the flat tax as a core issue during the 1992 Democratic primaries. Bill Clinton, the winner of the 1992 Democratic nomination, ran as a New Democrat and a member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, distancing himself from the party's liberal wing.
[edit] Current trend
The Conservative Democratic movement has received a recent rebirth in party structure. During the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic Party ran Conservative Democrats for a majority of at-risk republican seats. [1] The Blue Dog Democrats gained nine seats during the election. [2] The New Democrats had support from 27 of the 40 Democratic candidates running for at-risk Republican seats. [3] The majority of newly elected Democratic candidates elected during the 2006 election had center-right political leanings. [4]
[edit] Conservative Democrats today
[edit] The Blue Dog Coalition and the DLC
See main articles: Blue Dog Democrats, New Democrats.
In 1994, conservative Democrats within the U.S. House of Representatives organized themselves into the Blue Dog Democrats, in response to the Republican victories at the polls that November. The explanation was that the Blue Dogs felt the party had moved so far left that it had "choked them blue." The name is a reference to an earlier term, Yellow dog Democrat (typically, a southerner who would vote for a Democrat even if a "yellow dog" were the Democratic candidate) and also to the "blue dog" paintings of a Louisiana artist.
Neither the Blue Dog Coalition nor the Democratic Leadership Council are considered as conservative as the earlier Dixiecrat and Boll Weevil incarnations of conservative Democrats.
[edit] Single-issue caucuses
The Democratic Party has a number of single-issue caucuses within the party which promote a conservative position on the issues in question although they support a liberal view on other issues compatible with the Democratic platform. These include Democrats for Life (anti-abortion), the Democratic Freedom Caucus (libertarianism), and Amendment II Democrats (pro-gun rights) [1].
[edit] Zell Miller
U.S. Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat from Georgia, became increasingly critical of his party after September 11, 2001, citing disagreements with the presence of anti-war views within the party. His voting record underwent a rightward drift during this period on all issues and after 2002, Miller voted consistently with the Republicans in the Senate.
This culminated in Miller giving a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention endorsing George W. Bush and denouncing his own party. Zell Miller is the author of the book A National Party No More which outlines his views. Many conservative Democrats have disavowed his actions.
[edit] Differing views of conservative Democrats
Some see conservative Democrats as usually centrist, moderate, and considered a bit more reasonable than the die-hard partisan politicians who often enter into the legislative fray. Conservative Democrats believe in social programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid). Some want all Americans to have health care coverage and guaranteed pensions, and are vehemently opposed to the idea of privatizing any of these institutions. They are usually religious and almost always Christian. Their ideas about marriage, abortion, and, to an extent, the death penalty, are sometimes more compatible with the Republican way of thinking. This viewpoint is supported by the Pew Research Center and their study "Beyond Red Vs. Blue" [2]. This study identifies Conservative Democrats as one of three core Democratic Party constituencies (the other two being Liberals and Disadvantaged Democrats). Conservative Democrats are distinguishable by staunch liberal views on economic issues (a populist orientation setting them apart from conservative Republicans and explaining their continued allegiance to the Democratic Party), with their moderate to conservative views on other issues:
- "Religious orientation and conservative views set this group apart from other Democratic-leaning groups on many social and political issues. Conservative Democrats' views are moderate with respect to key policy issues such as foreign policy, regulation of the environment and the role of government in providing a social safety net...Less extreme on moral beliefs than core Republican groups, but most oppose gay marriage and the acceptance of homosexuality, and support a more active role for government in protecting morality. No more conservative than the national average on other social issues such as abortion and stem-cell research. They overwhelmingly oppose The War in Iraq, and are vehemently opposed to President Bush's foreign policy as a whole. But views of America's overall foreign policy are mixed..."
According to the Pew Research Center study, Conservative Democrats are 15% of registered voters in the U.S., voted for Kerry over Bush by a 65%-14% margin in 2004, and were identified in past Pew Research Center studies as New Dealers rather than Conservative Democrats, making this group of voters the ideological heirs to FDR's New Deal coalition and the "Vital Center" ideology of the 1950s.
The term Democrats In Name Only has been applied to conservative Democrats by some on the left wing of the party.
[edit] Conservative endorsements of Democratic candidates
During the 2004 election, several high-profile conservative writers endorsed the Presidential campaign of John Kerry, arguing that the Bush Administration was pursuing policies which were anything but conservative. Among the most notable of these endorsements came from Andrew Sullivan and Paul Craig Roberts, while a series of editorials in Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine made a conservative case for several candidates, including both Kerry and Ralph Nader, but stopped short of an actual endorsement.
[edit] Hillary Clinton's purported positioning herself as a conservative
Some claim that "The Media" have raised the possibility that Hillary Clinton, by giving speeches in which she said she wants to see the number of US abortions reduced and have better enforcement of US immigration laws, was trying to portray herself as a conservative Democrat so as to prepare for a 2008 presidential campaign. However there appears to be little factual basis for such a claim.
[edit] References
- American Conservative magazine, November 8, 2004 [3]
- Bell, Daniel: The End of Ideology (ISBN 0-674-00426-4)
- Brinkley, Alan: Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression (ISBN 0-394-71628-0)
- Carter, Dan: The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (ISBN 0-8071-2597-0)
- Frederickson, Kari: The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South (ISBN 0-8078-4910-3)
- Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform (ISBN 0-394-70095-3)
- Hofstadter, Richard: The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (ISBN 0-679-72315-3)
- McCarthy, Eugene: A Colony of the World: The United States Today (ISBN 0-7818-0236-9)
- Miller, Zell: A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat (ISBN 0-9745376-1-6)
- Perlstein, Rick: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (ISBN 0-8090-2858-1)
- Pew Research Center study, "Beyond Red Vs. Blue" [4]
- Schlesinger, Arthur: The Disuniting of America (ISBN 0-393-31854-0)
- Schlesinger, Arthur: The Vital Center (ISBN 0-306-80323-2)
