AaronFreedman.com

It’s amazing how coming of age in this political climate can change you. As someone whose earliest political memories are Monica Lewinsky and Florida 2000, it can be amazing for me to see that the way politics works now, with the inctedible polarity of the Democrat and Republican parties, was not always the case. In 1936, F.D.R. won the electoral college, 523-8. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won every single state except Minnesota. These two men could not be more different, whether it be in demeanors, personal history, or politics, yet they both won in landslide elections, capturing many of the same voting demographics (want to learn more about thee FDR-Regan phenomenon? Buy my dad’s book, The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right, now available from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com). But somewhere, somehow, something changed. Instead of trying to research and explain it myself, I’ll let New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks do the talking:

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Basically, what Mr. Brooks just said is that the Democrats gained a strong base of Ivy League, coastal types, prompting the Republicans to do the opposite and distance themselves for the coastal intellectuals by becoming the party of the midwest and deep south (though the latter may have more to do more with LBJ). So, what was the result of this political evolution of the GOP? Brooks, again:

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

…

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

The signs of this radicalization of the Republican party have never shown more clearly than in this election. Recently, two moderate Republicans of very different positions announced their support for Senator Barack Obama: Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell. Buckley, the son of conservative author and pundit William F. Buckley and Washington satire author of Thank You For Smoking, announced his support for Obama, which subsequently resulted in him resigning for his father’s magazine, the National Review, on Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, saying:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

When Powell announced his support for Obama on Meet the Press yesterday (video link here), he similarly remarked that, “As gifted as [John McCain] is, he is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda, with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it. But I think we need a generational change.”

Buckley, and more importantly Powell, moving their support over to Obama is the climax of an American political paradigm shift that has been in the works since Reagan. The truth is, intellectual, moderate Republicans, once a staple of the party, have been increasingly sensing that they are living in an environment hostile to their beliefs, and need to jump ship before they are forced out by their former colleagues. It’s no coincidence that both Buckley and Powell described Obama as being new and different from other Democrats — he is also part of the paradigm shift of how the sacrifice of the South made by the Democratic Party in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will finally be returned to them in the form of a new leader, one who will break through the tight grip of the Republicans and reclaim voters who never should have left the Democrats in the first place. Yes, I know this sounds little messiah-esque, but the point still stands that Obama will be the man who brings together the left and right, north and south, Joe Sixpack and coastal conehead. So what can the Republicans do about this? Well, it’s too late. What started with Reagan will soon end with Obama, and it’ll take another thirty years for the Republicans to ever get their intellectual, moderate base back and become popular again.