Iowa Caucus: How did the establishment Democratic-Republican system lose control of the 2016 US presidential election?

Abraham Lincoln was the first President from the Republican Party. A liberal and a centrist, whose party believed in civic responsibility, individualism and a liberal reading of the constitution. Photograph: Statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The Iowa Caucus, tonight, will mark the true beginning of the 2016 US Presidential Race as the point at which there will finally be some real data. So far the Presidential campaign has been a strange and controversial affair, with much to be set straight by the nominations process in Iowa.

On the Democratic side, there is now a two-way race where the nomination had looked like being little more than a formal hurdle for Hillary Clinton  (Jacobs, 2015). That was until Bernie Sanders, Senator for Vermont and a self-described democratic socialist, entered the race.

Quietly at first, starting some fifty or sixty percentage points behind Clinton, Sander's campaign has gathered momentum as thousands have turned out to hear him speak (Roberts, 2015; Roberts, 2015{2}). While support for Sanders - beyond a few high-polling constituencies - has been doubted, he has nonetheless been developing into the Democrat's anti-establishment candidate (Silver, 2015; Karp, 2016).

On the Republican side, they too are experiencing an anti-establishment insurgency. With an initial list of more than a dozen candidates, the process of holding debates was complicated enough (Gabbatt, 2015). Yet Donald Trump's candidacy quickly turned the nomination race into something not far short of a farce.

The potential candidates have struggled for air time, even split across two debates in the shape of an undercard and a main contest (Taylor, 2015). As the so-called moderates have struggled, Trump has stood out as the loudest and clearest candidate - even if he has been repulsive and offensive (Lewis, 2015).

Trump represents the toxic stew that the Republican Party has become, with the extreme Religious Right seeming less offensive by comparison with Trump. So deeply have the Republicans become embroiled in acquiescing to their own loudest and most deeply partisan supporters that, as put by one of the early establishment favourites Jeb Bush, it might almost be necessary for a Republican to lose in the primaries in order to win the general election (Mishak, 2015).

For both parties, insurgent figures are upsetting what was supposed to be a slick machine. Yet the fact that the United States' Democratic-Republican establishment is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of the political system, as to be virtually unshakeable, seems to have invited this situation.

Various movements, unable to muscle in alongside those two elder statesmen, seem intent on seizing control of those parties themselves first as an entry point. The big question is, what opened the establishment's back door in the first place?

The Party of Lincoln

Photograph: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

From its founding, the Republican Party dominated American politics, right up until the New Deal coalitions of the 1930s. For most of that period Lincoln's party, in European terms, where Liberals. They stood for individualism, free markets, a constitutionalist stance consistent with the liberal belief in the rule of law, public education and were brought together as abolitionists, wishing to bring an end to slavery (Wheare, 1948). They also carried an interest in state action in the form of tariffs and public investment, inherited from their Federalists and Whig predecessors.

As a result, their members and supporters were a diverse group. From African-Americans, both free and liberated, to businessmen, small business owners and factory workers, to the white working class (Cornwell, 2016) - of a number of backgrounds including protestants and Germans who had come to the United States following the defeat of the radicals, republicans, suffragists and revolutionaries in Europe's Springtime of the Peoples uprising in 1848 (Rapport, 2008).

But the party of Abraham Lincoln were also centrists. Lincoln in particular believed deeply in civic virtues. His party leadership and Presidency were typical of those values, as he sought balance and compromise between progressive and conservative positions, between the popular will and individual rights, in order to hold together his party's divergent factions - ranging from radical abolitionists to constitutional conservatives.

Yet when Lincoln was murdered, only ten years after the founding of the party, the equilibrium was lost. The radicals sought to punish the South and pressed on with reconstruction, enforced by the military, while the conservatives sought a swift reconciliation. That internal divide came to an end with the diminishment of the radical faction due to corruption, splits, an economic depression and a disputed election that led to a tawdry compromise - ending reconstruction and abandoning the South, along with many freed former slaves.

The party then settled down to supporting business with high tariffs, encouragement for industrialisation and modernisation and investment in infrastructure like railroads. Yet the party was never far from the latest row between progressive and conservative factions - such as on prohibition, which drove less pietist Protestants out of the party, or Theodore Roosevelt leaving to found the Progressive Party, which proposed forward-thinking reforms like women's suffrage and comprehensive social security.

The New Deal Coalition

What must have seemed like a clear run to the Presidency, has become for Hillary Clinton a complicated game of placating popular discontent from her position within the establishment. Photograph: Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at UW-Milwaukee by WisPolitics (License) (Cropped)

The Great Depression brought the era of Republican dominance to an end. It also signalled the beginning of a dramatic shift for the Democrats. Over the next thirty years the party would go from being dominated by deeply conservative, nationalist and sectarian - to outright segregationist - forces in the South, to the new home for all progressives, from liberals and centrists to social democrats and trade unionists.

In order to provide a positive and interventionist response to the Great Depression, Franklin D Roosevelt assembled a grand coalition that combined the Democrats' core support - white, southern and conservative and including many extreme nationalists, with whom the New Deal did not rest easily (The Economist, 2013) - with many groups. At the heart of it all, though, where the working class (The Economist, 2011).

Roosevelt, by reaching across political boundaries, started a shift that opened up the possibility of the Democrats reaching new voters which broke the party out of their dependence upon their narrow conservative base (Jenkins, 2003). That in turn would make the Civil Rights Act feasible, as the Democrats could afford to alienate and effectively cast out the toxic political support of the white, racist, Southern Democrats.

Embracing the role of a progressive party is, however, not without its drawbacks. It comes with high expectations. And like elsewhere in the world, mainstream progressives, like the social democrats in Europe, have often faced criticism for being too tight with the establishment and too slow to bring about reform.

While part of that is surely the logjam that is the American political establishment, there is plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democrat's failure to argue for a better alternative for America (Jones, 2016). Those disappointments lead to disaffection, which can lead to anti-establishment movements.

As a big tent, with little alternative for those seeking change, all of those hopes and all of that energy is funnelled through the Democratic Party. So when a candidate like Bernie Sanders emerges to give those frustrations a candidate and a voice, the traditional party hierarchy has to start trembling - as happened with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership, where the establishment backed candidates struggled to inspire with their calls for practical politics in the face of a hopeful and optimistic message from an insurgent candidate to enthused supporters.

Much as Corbyn's opposition were seen as the heirs of the New Labour establishment, Hillary Clinton, as the partner of a former President, a long time Senator and Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, is undoubtedly - despite being a woman - seen as a member of the establishment (The Guardian, 2016). Finding a way over that hurdle will likely come to dominate her Presidential campaign.

The Southern Strategy

The struggling campaign of the so-called moderate Jeb Bush is symptomatic of a Republican Party hijacked by narrow, hard right interests. Photograph: Former Governor Jeb Bush speaking with supporters at a town hall meeting at the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa by Gage Skidmore (License) (Cropped)

The success of the Democrats in shaking off, with affirmative action, the chain around their necks that was a history of association with slavery, segregation and the suppression of rights, would become the roots of the problems for the Republicans today.

Seeking short term political advantage, the Republicans sought to appeal to those voters and interests who felt they had been abandoned by the Democrats over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Nichols, 2014). The Republicans isolated, alienated and drove out most of their remaining liberals to open themselves up to be the party of reaction.

That move has, after a century of the conservative faction attempting to assert its control, instead left the Republican Party as little more than a hollowed out shell. When the Republicans sought to pander to extreme, southern Christian Nationalists, welcoming them into the party in leadership positions, they killed off what little was left of the legacy of the Party of Lincoln.

Conservatives, in their short sighted pursuit of electoral gains, allowed the Religious Right, Christian Nationalists, to hijack the party in the long term, using the party's credibility and colours to promote their extreme causes. That extremism has begotten extremism, stoking up anger and division - only for candidates to then have to satisfy it later for the right to stay in office - driving the party ever further to the Right (Frum, 2011).

The result has been moderates, who are not really that moderate, struggling to even get a hearing at debates. Jeb Bush, for example. His immigration policy has shades of his moderate father's call to bring people out of the shadows, to stop making it illegal for decent people to work hard within the law or to have their children educated (Bush & Bolick, 2013; Lee, 2015).

But so-called moderates like Bush, or Marco Rubio, are outflanked and forced into a race to the bottom by candidates like Ted Cruz, a member of the Religious Right who has called for a bombardment of the Middle East (The Economist, 2016), or Carly Fiorina, who with no political experience and a questioned business acumen has compared herself to Margaret Thatcher (Lewis, 2015). All this does is force Republican candidates to put the narrow interests of party before the broader ones of the country.

That approach didn't work for Mitt Romney. As Barack Obama's challenger in the re-election year of 2012, Romney won soundly amongst the conservative and Evangelical Christian base of the modern Republican Party (Rove, 2015). Yet his narrow focus on helping the wealthy over the rest, his focus upon the party base over the country, dropped him short of the line (Scheiber, 2012).

The 2016 Election

Bernie Sanders is the heir of the Democrat's shift to embrace progressive politics through the 1930s and 1960s, and of modern progressive discontent with the establishment. Photograph: Bernie Sanders speaking at Hec Edmundson Pavillion in Seattle by Tiffany Von Arnim (License) (Cropped)

The Republican Party have turned a long way from the civic republicanism of their origins and it has helped fan political extremism - which looks likely to leave the established order in American politics weak and threatened. Not least from Donald Trump who looks likely to leave the Republican Party in the dirt just soon as he's done with them, having levered the party apart in the process.

In the Democrat camp, Clinton is hard pressed by the popular support for Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the only candidate in the race standing for a truly progressive alternative, earnestly wanting to create a more just, more equal America, in a country which is not open to such ideas. That is worthy of tremendous admiration. Yet it will also no doubt frighten the hard right.

For Clinton to top the polls in Iowa would be business as usual, crisis averted for the establishment. Likewise if a moderate candidate is able to step up for the Republicans. For a progressive alternative to break through the establishment, and get past hard right partisanship, would be a tough ask. As elsewhere around the world, the Presidential race looks like ultimately being a struggle between the establishment and an insurgent far right.

References

Ben Jacobs' 'Hillary Clinton turns up the heat as Iowa takes on general election feel: While Martin O’Malley runs a traditional caucus campaign, frontrunners Clinton and Bernie Sanders seem more focused on fighting the Republicans first'; in The Guardian; 18 July 2015.

Dan Roberts' 'Bernie Sanders sees poll surge after series of record-breaking appearances'; in The Guardian; 2 July 2015.

Dan Roberts' 'The outsider: how Bernie Sanders is winning over Democratic voters'; in The Guardian; 11 September 2015{2}.

Nate Silver's 'Bernie Sanders Could Win Iowa And New Hampshire. Then Lose Everywhere Else'; on FiveThirtyEight; 8 July 2015.

Matt Karp's 'The Bernie Coalition: In Iowa and New Hampshire, Barack Obama won over high-income liberals. Bernie Sanders’ campaign points in a different direction'; in Jacobin Magazine; 28 January 2016.

Adam Gabbatt's 'So, 16 Republican candidates walk into a presidential nomination contest... Expecting a punchline? We don’t have one – but we do have a list of 16 things you could do with those striving to be the 2016 Republican presidential nominee'; in The Guardian; 21 July 2015.

Jessica Taylor's 'In 'Happy Hour' Debate, Candidates Struggle To Break Through'; from NPR; 6 August 2015.

Paul Lewis' 'Republican debate: Trump was garbled, incoherent - but dominant'; in The Guardian; 7 August 2015.

Michael J Mishak's 'Jeb Bush’s ‘Lose the Primary to Win the General’ Could Just Mean ‘Lose the Primary’'; in the National Journal; 15 June 2015.

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'Hillary Clinton seeks to stem Bernie Sanders surge with economy speech - Speech at New York’s New School to criticize Wall Street effect on middle class - 1.6 million-strong American Federation of Teachers endorses her campaign'; in The Guardian; 11 July 2015.

John Nichols' 'When the Republicans Really Were the Party of Lincoln: What happened to the party that fifty years ago played such a vital role in passing the Civil Rights Act?'; in The Nation; 2 July 2014.

David Frum's 'When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?'; in New York Magazine; 20 November 2011.

Jeb Bush & Clint Bolick's 'Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution'; Simon & Schuster; 2013.

Esther Yu-Hsi Lee's 'You Will Not Believe How Reagan Talked About Immigration During The 1980 GOP Presidential Debate'; in Think Progress; 6 August 2015.

'America’s presidential primaries: The brawl begins - Marvel at the jaw-dropping spectacle. Then worry. American politics has taken a dangerous turn'; in The Economist; 30 January 2016.

Paul Lewis' 'Carly Fiorina stands apart in lesser-known Republican debate field: Former Hewlett Packard CEO is the only candidate to land blows against frontrunner Donald Trump and saw a spike in Google searches during the debate'; in The Guardian; 6 August 2015.

Karl Rove's 'The Myth of the Stay-at-Home Republicans: There were three million fewer voters in 2012 than in 2008, but they weren’t conservatives'; in the Wall Street Journal; 1 April 2015.

Noam Scheiber's 'Romney Had a Chance to Beat Obama, and He Blew It'; in The New Republic; 7 November 2012.