Rick Perlstein: Pundits have always been desperate to claim the arrival of permanent majorities in American politics, as if present trends somehow would go on forever—though the gaps between the parties in our first-past-the-post electoral system aren’t actually that great, even in the elections we call landslides. After the 1964 election, in which the Democrat Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, pundits had this knee-jerk, reductive reaction. “How could the Republicans think,” they said, “that the party has a future with this thing called conservatism when the census just showed that America is now an overwhelmingly urban country? Everyone knows that conservatism is the ideology of backwards, rural people.” It turned out the census was counting as urban any place over 2,500 people in population, and so conservatism lived on across much of America.
A Republican named Richard Nixon took office in the very next election. While he was reelected in a landslide as dramatic as the one that happened in 1964, the Watergate scandal, which forced Nixon to resign in disgrace, made it seem like Democrats would again rule politics for a very long time. But Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter just a few years afterwards, and then came the Democrat Bill Clinton, whose presidency in some ways accepted the conservative principles of Reagan’s America: the virtues of the free market, the need for law and order, restrictive immigration policies. The historian Sean Wilentz, in his book of the same name, dates the “Age of Reagan” all the way to 2008.
Barack Obama became America’s first black president in 2008, carried into office because of his generational political talents, widespread frustration with unending war in the Middle East post-9/11, and a severe economic meltdown in the year leading up to the election. He won reelection in 2012, even though Republicans were confident that Mitt Romney would triumph. After Obama’s second victory, Democrats said, “How could the GOP think they have a future with this thing called conservatism when America is becoming a ‘majority-minority’ nation? Everyone knows conservatism is the ideology of white people.” Jonathan Chait, for instance, wrote, “the modern GOP . . . is staring down its own demographic extinction,” and concluded that this was why conservatism was suddenly becoming so nasty, as if this were a one-time thing.
Of course, as a historian, I wrote against this idea right away and have continued to do so. For one thing, pundits write the predictability of backlash out of the story: the feeling of dispossession is highly mobilizing for conservative ideology. But there was also this notion that somehow partisan identification is something written into ethnic groups’ DNA.