That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [136]
The Republican Party included people with fairly liberal social views who tended to be more conservative in economic terms than most Democrats. Most lived in the Northeast, and in the 1960s, as their ranks began to thin, they came to be known as “Rockefeller Republicans,” after New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. One of their number at the beginning of his political career was George H. W. Bush, who grew up in Connecticut, a son of Prescott Bush, a businessman who later served as a senator from Connecticut and belonged to the moderate wing of the Republican Party. (The other, more conservative wing had its center of gravity not in the South, as is the case today, but in the Midwest.) In George H. W. Bush’s two terms as a Republican congressman from Texas, he was such an enthusiastic proponent of Planned Parenthood, an organization in disfavor among most Republicans today, that he earned the nickname “Rubbers.”
In the days when both parties included both conservatives and liberals in large numbers, compromise was easier than it is today because each party contained factions sympathetic to the views of elements in the other one. Moreover, because these ideologically more diverse parties had to compromise within their own ranks just to arrive at positions on various issues that all party members could support, their positions were often not all that far apart, and they were accustomed to resolving differences.
What happened to change the situation, to create the ideologically pure parties we have today? Broad social changes over the last four decades played a big part. Ron Brownstein calls this “the great sorting out”—the migration of politicians into much more internally uniform camps of conservatives and liberals. Beginning in the 1960s, opposition to the civil rights movement, a movement that was embraced by the Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson, led Southern conservatives to defect to the Republican Party. A decade later the rise of social conservatism within that party, in connection with issues such as abortion, school prayer, feminism, and gay marriage, pushed Northern Republicans of moderate social views into the Democratic camp. The number and the proportion of liberals in the Democratic Party increased, as did the number and weight of conservatives among Republicans. Over time, centrist groups within the respective parties (such as the Democrats’ Democratic Leadership Council and the Republicans’ Ripon Society) all but disappeared. Liberals and conservatives tended to be the people most active in political affairs, and so exercised more influence in each party than in previous eras. The other party was increasingly viewed as the enemy and the rules of engagement were “take no prisoners.”
At the same time, at the politicians’ behest, the boundaries of congressional districts at the national level, and legislative districts at the state level, were redrawn so as to concentrate members of one party or the other and thereby make that district “safe” for either a Republican or a Democratic candidate. This practice, known as “gerrymandering,” is an old one. As Jeff Reichert, the director of the documentary film Gerrymandering, explained on NPR (November 11, 2010):
Redistricting is supposed to be just a benign kind of administrative practice that takes place every 10 years. We have to adjust the lines to account for population. The problems come in when you have political manipulation of the process. And the term comes from 1812. There was a governor of Massachusetts by the name of Elbridge Gerry who was in office, and his party decided to disadvantage the other party, and they drew a district that packed the members of the other party into that one place. And it looked to a political cartoonist of the day like a salamander. And so he said, it’s not a salamander, it’s actually a gerrymander.
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