An elephantine struggle

Just two years after seizing Congress, the Republican Party faces electoral disaster and may be torn in two. American politics has reached a turning point, says Godfrey Hodgson

In San Diego this week Senator Bob Dole will be hoping against hope that he can save not only his own campaign for the presidency, but the Republican Party itself.

That is a dramatic turnaround. Less than two years ago, the Republicans swept into power in both houses of Congress. Now the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, the successful general behind those 1994 victories, is in eclipse since the public decided he was too much of an extremist. Senator Dole is far behind in the opinion polls. There is widespread speculation that if President Clinton is re-elected in November as easily as now looks likely, the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party, as it likes to call itself, will split into two.

To foreigners, that may seem almost unimaginable. The two big parties have acquired an almost official status. The Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant are almost as much a part of American mythology as the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam.

Yet in America, as elsewhere, political parties, while tough, are not immortal. And the Republican Party came into existence 140 years ago in circumstances meaningless to modern voters.

The political parties in America, a country that embraces change and worships modernity, have their roots in the struggle over slavery last century. In the past 30 years, largely as a result of the "second emancipation" of the 1960s, the ideological foundations of both the big parties have been challenged. They are trying to preserve their unity in an age when their original basis in loyalties and interests means little to most Americans. Only the political class is interested in replacing those old quarrels with a new ideological divide between liberals and conservatives, and that, too, means little to many voters.

The Republican Party was born in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. It was created out of fragments of older parties shattered by the great crisis over slavery which was to erupt into civil war seven years later, The North won the Civil War, and so did the Republicans. For the next three generations, from 1865 until 1932, they were always the natural, usually the actual, party of government in Washington.

The Republican Party was the party of Americans of native stock, farmers and businessmen large and small, from the North-east and the Middle West. It was, above all, the Protestant party. Southern Democrats were Protestants, too, but they were bitterly divided from their Northern brethren by the memory of the War between the States (as Southerners called it), the emancipation of the slaves and the unforgiven experience of Reconstruction, when the South was ruled as an occupied country by northern "carpet-baggers".

The Republicans were slow to notice that the United States was filling up with immigrants, most of whom were not Protestants. Most were Catholics from Ireland, Germany, Italy and Poland, some were later Jews. They gravitated into the Democratic Party, which the Republicans called the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion".

In the 1920s, after losing the presidency in 1912 because of a split between progressives and conservatives, the Republicans returned to power. So it was their misfortune to control the White House when the Great Depression hit. It was a catastrophic event. The gross national product fell by a half. A quarter of the working population was unemployed. In 1933, even the banking system had broken down. Unfairly, but remorselessly, people blamed the Republicans.

The consequences of that identification have lasted a long time. It allowed a Democrat president, Franklin Roosevelt, to usher in his New Deal, backed by a grand Democratic political coalition between conservative Southerners and the northern working-class, and to set out to cure the Great Depression (without much success, in truth - it was the Second World War that did the job) by introducing an American version of European-style social democracy.

From 1933 until the 1960s, few Republicans dared to attack the Democrats' New Deal frontally. Only a minority of Republicans, mostly from the Middle and Far West, stuck defiantly to conservative principles.

That split between eastern and western, moderate and conservative Republicans came to a head in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Barry Goldwater, the champion of western conservatism, lost the election, but the conservatives won control of the Republican Party none the less. In 1968, under the semi-conservative Richard Nixon, they won the White House. Their return to power was interrupted by Watergate, but in 1980 they came back under a true conservative, Ronald Reagan.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the ancient quarrels in which the Republican Party was born had been forgotten. But they left one lasting legacy. The black political rebellion of the 1960s angered and disturbed many working- class voters who had always voted for the Democrats. By 1980 these "Reagan Democrats" were ready to vote for a conservative, even if he were a Republican.

In the South, meanwhile, another great block of Democrats was peeling away from the "Roosevelt coalition". Blacks - traditionally Republican supporters since that party won them freedom from slavery through the Civil War - began for the first time to vote in large numbers for the Democrats, who had passed the civil rights laws of the 1960s. The very fact that Southern state parties were attracting so many black voters made many whites there vote Republican, and gradually, in formerly one- party Democrat Southern states, Republicans began to take control. The consequences were momentous, for national and for Southern politics. Moderate Republicans in the North virtually disappeared. Conservative Republicans from the South tilted the balance of power inside the party to the right.

As late as the 1960s, there was no clear ideological split between the two great American parties. The Democrats were the party of the New Deal - but also of the conservative South. The Republicans might be more conservative on balance, but in big cities and suburbs they elected plenty of moderates.

Now two parties confront one another, each with a clear ideological identity. The Republicans have become unmistakably the conservative party. And the Democrats - even if President Clinton and his friends try to give themselves a centrist image and call themselves New Democrats - are still clearly identified with the defence of the liberal welfare state.

So why are the Republicans in trouble, perhaps even on the brink of a split? After all, surveys show that the majority of Americans think of themselves as conservatives.

One answer is that the conservative movement which gave Newt Gingrich his landslide less than two years ago is now deeply divided. The Republican elephant, once symbol of all that was sturdy and reliable in American life, has become a push-me, pull-you.

To defeat the hated liberals, libertarian conservatives who believed above all in free-market capitalism formed an alliance with "social" conservatives, believers in religion, the family and traditional values. It was always likely to prove an unwieldy alliance between two sets of often-clashing values. The present fierce conflict over abortion is one example.

Reagan made a mistake when he assumed that, just because people wanted to pay lower taxes, they would be happy with fewer government services. Gingrich made one when he interpreted widespread cynicism about politicians as support for his ultra-conservative Contract with America.

Still, to focus on conservative divisions and conservative mistakes may be to miss the point. Any system in which the Democrats can triumph in 1992, the Republicans in 1994, only for the Republicans to be faced with oblivion in 1996, is volatile to say the least.

In 1972, the political commentator David Broder wrote a thoughtful book called The Party's Over, in which he predicted the collapse of the two traditional parties. When the Republicans under Ronald Reagan won the White House, it was fashionable to say Broder had got it wrong: the Democratic Party was over, but not the Republicans. Now it is plain that both are in trouble.

One reason is television. Television in two forms rules American politics: paid TV advertising and unpaid TV reporting. In coming to rely too heavily on paid political ads, American politicians made a Faustian deal with the little screen. It was easier to keep track of a socially and geographically mobile population by abandoning organisation and relying on television advertising instead to communicate with the voters. Now three-quarters of the (exorbitant) cost of American election campaigns goes on increasingly negative advertising. In the past, it has proven highly effective. But now there are signs that the viewers are being turned off.

As for TV news, the broadcasters, once obsessed with politics, are losing interest because they think that the impatient new multichannel-surfing viewers are bored by politics and politicians. They are more interested in sport and infotainment. Serious political reporting is being pushed into ghetto slots outside prime time.

There is perhaps an even more fundamental reason. For 20 years Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals have slagged off government, portraying it as at best unable to tackle society's problems, at worst a threat to the liberty of the individual. Frightened Democratic politicians - like New Labour in Britain - have all but given up defending the usefulness of government intervention. It would hardly be surprising if the voters believed them. And if government is so bad, why should they take much interest in who runs it?

Interest in third-party candidates like Ross Perot is surprisingly high - not because the voters like their policies, but because they are mavericks who are seen to stand outside the established political set-up. There is a pervasive mood that sees politics as no more than a cynical game, which chooses office-holders but does not solve problems. That is why the crisis in party politics is a challenge not only for Bob Dole but for Bill Clinton, too.