Changing Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment

320 Pages·2006·2.5 MB·English

by  Jerry F. Hough

CHANGING PARTY COALITIONS

C P C :
HANGING ARTY OALITIONS
THE MYSTERY OF THE
RED STATE–BLUE STATE ALIGNMENT
Jerry F. Hough
Agathon
New York
© 2006 by Agathon Press, an imprint of Algora Publishing
All Rights Reserved
www.algora.com
No portion of this book (beyond what is permitted by
Sections 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976)
may be reproduced by any process, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the
express written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data —
Hough, Jerry F., 1935-
Changing party coalitions: the mystery of the red state-blue state
alignment / Jerry F. Hough.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87586-407-5 (trade paper : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-87586-407-4 (trade paper : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-87586-408-2 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-87586-408-2 (hard cover : alk. paper)
[etc.]
1. Party affiliation—United States. I. Title.
JK2271.H68 2006
324.273'11—dc22
2005032549
Printed in the United States
PREFACE
The book is not a distillation of the conventional wisdom on American
politics and history. I have a very unusual perspective for a scholar writing about
the evolution of the American political system. From the mid-1950s until the
mid-1990s I was known as a specialist on comparative government, first of all, on
the Soviet Union. I abandoned teaching and research on Russia in the late 1990s,
and I have only taught the courses on the US Presidency at Duke University
since then. This book essentially expands on what I have been teaching.
The change in the focus of my research and teaching did not, however,
change the basic questions that I have worked on since the mid-1950s: the
relationship of long term economic development and political institutions. This
was the central question about the Soviet Union at the time of Joseph Stalin's
death in 1953 when I was a college undergraduate, and it was always the focus of
my work on the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
The goal of my recent work has been to look at the American experience in
order better to understand the way that states, markets, and democracies
develop and the way in which effective and stable ones can be created and
maintained. The American experience is not incorporated in the theories of
comparative politics and nation-building because it has been too encased in
mythology. The taboos were created to help solve the North-South conflict and
the antagonistic relationship of European-American “races.” Now that these
problems have been solved, it is time to break the taboos.
My interest in American politics and history did not begin in the 1990s. My
first memory of public events was hearing the news of the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, when I was a six-year-old in Bremerton, Washington, the great naval
port on the West Coast. I saw the submarine nets on the ferry trips to Seattle,
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Changing Party Coalitions
and I saw the ships come in from the Pacific wars for repairs. My father, a
machinist foreman, moved to an experimental rocket base in the California
desert where he remained until his retirement.
My parents came from Asheville, North Carolina, and we often drove
across the country to visit relatives. The opening pages of this book on the old
South do not come primarily from research. My parents were also typical
representatives of the ethnic groups found in western North Carolina, my father
coming from German-American roots and my mother Scotch-Irish ones. All of
this combined to give me an intense interest in American history.
The courses I currently teach at Duke on the US Presidency are not the first
that I have taught on the United States. At the University of Illinois, I taught in
freshman courses that centered on the US in comparative perspective. At the
University of Toronto, all my courses dealt with the Soviet-American-Canadian
comparison. At Duke University in the 1970s I taught courses on American
political participation, as well as the Soviet Union.
In addition, however, I was a very active participant in the American
debates on Soviet-American relations beginning in the 1960s and continuing
through the 1990s. As such, I developed a very keen sense of which aspects of the
American foreign policy process could not be discussed at the time. Republican
Presidents, after all, always improved relations with the Soviet Union, and
Democratic Presidents always had severe conflict with that country. Even
though the rhetoric of the two parties made this seem almost a chance
occurrence, this was not the case.
It became clear that the conflicts between Britain and Germany affected
the two largest ethnic groups in America — my ethnic groups, the British-
Americans and the German-Americans — as deeply as policy toward Cuba
affects the Cuban-Americans in recent decades. I came to understand the crucial
role of European-American ethnicity in US policy toward Europe. I came to
understand that the consistent pro-détente position of the Republican Party, the
party of the Northern British-American and German-American Protestants,
came from the party's need to hold its coalition together. This all led me to look
at earlier stages of American history to see where and how this coalition
originated.
This short biographical survey is important for two reasons. First, it helps
to explain why, besides my comparative background and political experience,
this book has a very atypical different perspective. My ethnicity and Southern
roots not only created a sensitivity to the conflicts between the North and the
South and those between the British-Americans and German-Americans in the
20th century, but also removed any of the psychological awkwardness that those
of different backgrounds might have in breaking the taboos on these subjects. I
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Preface
have no desire to offend the memory of my father and mother or their traditions.
I firmly believe that I have not done so.
The second reason for the biographical introduction is to make clear that I
would have a hopeless task in trying to acknowledge the debts I have incurred.
There are too many crucial ones over too long a period.
I do have confident memories about certain early debts. They obviously
include my parents, but also my key early professors. Those in my first American
history course in the 1951-1952 academic year were the great specialist on the
Western movement, Frederick Merk, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (I may be the
only person alive who still thinks of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., now 88 years old, as
a young whippersnapper.) Stalin died during my first class on the Soviet Union.
It was taught by Merle Fainsod, a great Americanist and a great specialist on the
Soviet Union who became the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation.
Perhaps my greatest debt at Harvard is to William Yandell Elliott, who was
given the task of being my tutor in my junior and senior year and who supervised
my honors thesis on American policy toward the Soviet Union from 1940 to
1946. At that time Elliott was a close adviser to Vice President Richard Nixon
and the dissertation supervisor of Henry Kissinger — and, as such, had a key
unrecognized role in bringing the two together. I learned about the problems of
nuclear deterrence from Elliott five years before Kissinger was to make the
arguments in public. But most of all Elliott delighted in teaching a young boy
from the California desert the insider's perspective on how Washington politics
really worked.
Others also come to mind. Talcott Parsons and Barrington Moore infused
Soviet studies at Harvard with a developmental perspective. I took courses from
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, and was the
teaching assistant for Marshall Shulman, who was to become the adviser on the
Soviet Union to Cyrus Vance, Carter's Secretary of State. Never was I a more
confident — or accurate — forecaster than on the problems Carter would have
in his foreign policy when he gave both of my former professors a key role in his
Administration. Yet, I learned an enormous amount from the conflicting
perspectives of the two. There are many others from whom I have, no doubt,
stolen many ideas, but without remembering which ones.
It seems to me wrong to mention any of the thousands and thousands of
scholars, government officials, and students with whom I have had contact both
directly and through their writing in subsequent years. The network of
influences has simply been too great and too complex for me to trust memories.
To mention some whom I absolutely know deserve thanks would be to fail to
mention others whose impact has faded in my memory and who rightly would
be offended. Perhaps other students will forgive me, however, if I do express my
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Changing Party Coalitions
thanks to the large number of Duke students who took my courses on the
presidency, served as guinea pigs while I learned, and gave me ideas and
corrected mistakes in ways they never knew.
I also would like to mention several persons who had an enormous impact
through their institutional as well as intellectual position: H. Gordon Skilling,
who brought me to Toronto; James David Barber, who brought me to Duke and
whose courses on the presidency I now teach; John Steinbruner, who was
responsible for my 20 extremely fruitful years at the Brookings Institution.
Personal debts are also too numerous to mention. It would, however, be
wrong not to thank Jean Marshall Crawford, who has taught me much about
politics and especially the women's movement over nearly twenty years.
Similarly, the sociologist Susan Goodrich Lehmann was my chief collaborator on
public opinion surveys in the Soviet Union in the 1990s and greatly broadened
my perspective on a number of issues. She also was extremely kind in giving the
manuscript a close editorial review and in helping with the tables.
The archive work that underlies this book is more extensive than indicated
in the footnotes and bibliography, and it would not have been possible without
countless archivists. I have never met a uniformly more helpful group of people.
Finally, I would like to thank Andrea Sengstacken for her patience as she
edited the manuscript at Algora Publishing.
It is customary to absolve any whose help is acknowledged from any
mistakes. That is probably wrong, for some people who were either mentioned
or thanked generally undoubtedly contributed to my errors as well as my
insights. But, of course, it is my poor judgment that led me to retain erroneous
analyses and to fail to respond properly to those who had it right and tried to
correct me.
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