The Absurd Report

I don’t want to sound too optimistic, but it appears that, in a year when the Democrats were supposed to make their triumphant re-entry into Presidential politics, we may be witnessing the final demise of the New Deal.

The Pennsylvania primary was a clincher. Obama has two constituencies — African Americans and college-educated liberals. They’re both passionate bloc voters and will turn out in droves. But their numbers are limited. They’ll give Obama Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Mississippi, Illinois, and maybe California and Oregon, but that will be about it.

Hillary’s votes come from the Democrats’ other constituency — blue-collar workers, Catholics, and people without a college education. Catholics rejected Obama by 70 percent. That’s scary. Catholics have been a core constituency for the Democrats since the days of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. If they drift over to the Republicans — as they were doing under Ronald Reagan –there’s very little left in the Democrats’ portfolio.
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The New Deal was hatched in academia and among left-wingers who had made pilgrimages to the Soviet Union. But they had the people on their side. The Republicans had messed things up hideously and there wasn’t any reason not to try something new. Herbert Hoover caved to the Republican Midwest-and-manufacturing coalition to pass Smoot-Hawley and what could have been just a bad downturn became the Great Depression.

Even though they were united against the Republicans and Big Business, however, the Roosevelt Coalition was a hodgepodge of conflicting constituencies. There was the blue-collar working class, much bigger in those days, and the natural adversary of Big Business. There were Catholic immigrants, always wedded to urban Democratic machines. (Only four years before, Al Smith had become the first Catholic to be nominated for President.) Then there was the “Solid South.” It was still fighting the Civil War. The most conservative region of the country, the South still voted Democratic to get back at Abraham Lincoln. African Americans, on the other hand, were Republicans at the time, but that didn’t help much because Jim Crow laws kept them from voting.