Traditional Politics or the Politics of Tradition

In the beginning there was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And it was good. But its political fallout was bad. The liberal Democrats who had crafted the legislation and identified their party with its spirit and implications had alienated white southerners and embarked on a path that would eventually distance them from other voters as well. Within two decades the Republican party would occupy a political mainstream abandoned by Democrats, whose leftward route had left them carrying a millstone: special interest groups, whose rights had come to define the party's agenda and its image. From 1968 through 1988 the Republican party lost only one presidential election, entering the 1990s having fractured a once-powerful Democratic coalition. Stripped of its texture, detail, and complexity, this is the essence of the gospel of late-twentieth-century American presidential politics according to Thomas and Mary Edsall. The tale comes with a lesson as well, a message to Democrats that winning will require a dramatic shift back into the mainstream. Unless the Democratic party can reconnect with the values of its traditional electorate, shedding its image as the party of race, rights, and taxes, its presidential candidates will continue to lose. The benefit of hindsight could structure a review of Chain Reaction in terms of how the prescriptive and predictive implications of their argument played out in the 1992 election. Bill Clinton's strategists, if not the candidate himself, read this book, and its analysis is consistent with a considerable portion of their strategy. Or, one might debate the political issues at stake here. What seems most appropriate to this journal, however, is to assess the historical analysis, exploring the implications of the ways in which the authors have constructed historical questions, used key concepts, and framed a particular narrative. The relationship between the book's evidence, narrative, and argument raise

Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law