The State of Disunion: Regional Sources of Modern American Partisanship

6 A HOUSE DIVIDED: THE GEOGRAPHY OF PARTIES AND CONFLICT

CHAPTER 6 A HOUSE DIVIDED THE GEOGRAPHY OF PARTIES AND CONFLICT IN 1858, ABRAHAM LINCOLN famously described the country as “a house divided against itself.” The Civil War that began shortly thereafter was easily the period of the country’s greatest geographical strife. At the conclusion of the war, with the Union preserved and slavery abolished, the country was reborn in its “second founding.” Unsurprisingly, though, the impress that the “War Between the States” left on the party system was a distinct sectional cleavage between the two major parties. With the important exception of the New Deal era, that basic geographic divide of the party system endured. After the Civil War, the Democratic Party became, first and foremost, a southern institution, while the Republican Party emerged as the political machinery of the North. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the United States incorporated the Pacific Coast and the western interior, states’ loyalties quickly became a source of contest, creating a dynamic of alliance and division between the regions that continues to characterize American party politics. While the basic geographical divide has remained the same, the manifestation of the divide within the party-region linkage has changed over time—reversed itself, in fact—since the nineteenth century. The North is no longer Republican bedrock but the bastion, along with Pacific Coast states, of the Democrats, and the solidly Democratic South, along with the West, has moved steadily closer to be- coming solidly Republican. But the operative connection between region, national party building, and party conflict is still firmly intact. Fueling these geopolitics are the range of issues that have been disruptive since the founding: trade and economy, race and rights, morality and human nature, and the proper scope and size of the federal government. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 traced the connection between regions and national parties as it evolved in the postwar era in the arenas of trade, welfare, and abortion policy making. Mirroring overall trends evident in congressional voting records, bipartisan agreement characterized the three issues until the mid1970s , when voting in each area turned increasingly partisan. By the mid1990s , all three issues had become highly divisive.The rise in party conflict held true both for longstanding legislative issues such as welfare and trade, which had experienced decreasing partisanship in the first postwar decades, and for abortion, a new national issue in the 1970s, but one that became intensely partisan over time. The battles over trade, welfare, and abortion engaged diÅerent constituencies within the parties’ coalitions, presented party leaders with diÅerent political imperatives, and, on occasion, cut through the regional bases of the North, South, West, and Pacific Coast in slightly diÅerent ways. Each of the policies also performed diÅerent political functions for the parties, both across time and when compared with the other policy issues. What emerges from analysis of these varied elements is an integrative story of the demise of the New Deal Democratic regime, a geographic redistribution of the parties, and a growing battle for control of national government and resources that pits a southern-and-western-based Republican Party against a Democratic Party pushed to the urban North and the Pacific Coast. From the 1930s until the 1960s, trade liberalization served as a powerful tool with which New Deal Democratic leaders were able to unite the northern and southern halves of the party’s coalition. In the early 1960s, backed by a robust economy and free trade’s appeal as a device for fighting communism, President Kennedy not only maintained the New Deal interregional coalition with his trade policy but also secured the support of northern Republicans. Within a decade, however, regional economic changes generated divergent pressures. The northern industrial economy began to decline while the modernizing South and West became home to growing agribusiness, tourism, and high-tech and defense-related industries. Containment became a questionable international relations goal. While North and South had previously been in agreement on the importance of trade to Cold War ideology, in the lingering days of the 165 A HOUSE DIVIDED Vietnam conflict, they no longer agreed on the merits of a robust military state. Faced with these shifting regional fortunes and policy positions, Richard Nixon successfully executed an economic “southern strategy” by constructing a bipartisan free trade coalition that united the formerly protectionist Republican Party with southern Democrats. From that point forward, Republican promotion of...