“Incidentally, people of middle class origin were never excluded from political power in this country.”

I think is more about a seeming (emphasis seeming) nostalgia for a time when presidents were white. People hear things differently especially when the rhetoric is to take the country back from the first African-American president. One can argue that Howard Dean used the take out country back rhetoric too, but notice he never got to be president.

“If you are suggesting that Republicans can come back by marketing themselves specifically to blacks, Latinos, Asians and women,”

I’m not entirely sure what that means. Certainly I don’t think that Republicans should have an African-American platform, an Asian-American platform, etc. I do think Republicans are doing a terrible job of making themselves heard to large swaths of the population and haven’t had much to say to people who are already socialized into the center-right narrative.

Some people out there thought Romney was going to raise taxes on the middle-class. Another, probably much larger group heard Romney’s tax message as:

1. Cut taxes on somebody else.

2. XXX

3. A better life for you.

That is a problem that they can do better with.

“but the belief that the government ought to pull all of the important strings in the entire economy – to be the “Godfather” of the market (recall the logo of the Godfather books and movies – that’s how Obama sees himself and how he sold himself to voters), and what seems to approach actual celebration of dependency and dysfunction. ”

I don’t think that is a fair description of the beliefs of a substantial number of Obama voters who would be either hostile or uncomprehending of such an approach to government much less that Obama believed in it. And some who might agree with it (couched in less hostile terms – public-private partnerships to Win The Future) might be argued out of that position.

“white, middle-class/working-class voters, who are drifting away from the Republicans and back towards the Democrats or staying home.”

I dunno. Lots of things going on here. Young white voters really have different opinions on same sex marriage and many haven’t been socialized into any right-leaning narrative. Henry Olsen pointed out that working-class white weren’t given much to vote for by Romney. And for all that, the Republicans still did better among whites than they have in over twenty years.

Incidentally, people of middle class origin were never excluded from political power in this country. Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton all came from, at best, middle class backgrounds (those are just presidential examples). If younger Americans are unaware of this, it is partly because they are massively misinformed about the country’s history, and partly because social advancement is increasingly difficult for young people. The Left is at least as responsible as the Right for the latter change.

If you are suggesting that Republicans can come back by marketing themselves specifically to blacks, Latinos, Asians and women, I would respectfully suggest that you are indulging a pleasant fanatasy.

True, a person who is “ideologically unformed” does not go around reciting talking points he read in an E.J. Dionne column, but, by the same token, neither does that person aspire to live in the kind of country the US used to be (no, I’m not claiming there was ever a “golden age”). Since that kind of common ground no longer exists in the culture, you need a particular ideological orientation to have those kind of aspirations (this is a problem Reagan did not face). You eventually might be able to get through to some significant fraction of younger voters through better communication, but I doubt it would be a large enough number, for a long enough period of time, in a sufficient number of states, to effect a big change in the nation’s trajectory.

Well, I’m just an amateur at this sort of thing, so maybe my pessimism is unwarranted. Hope so.

1. I wouldn’t press that point too much. A lot of those Southern white Democrats who voted for Reagan in 1980 were cheering for Nixon’s wage and price controls in the early 1970s. There were a lot of ways that constituency could have gone (as National Review’s James Burnham pointed out at the time.) And Reagan also won in states like New York and New Jersey (not hotbeds of Dixiecratism.) I do think there are populations that Republicans can make gain among – though it will be very hard.

2. I just don’t see how this helped Reagan win votes in 1980 and 1984 or why he did unusually well (for a Republican) among union members (which I think was also the case in his California races.)

3. Definitely something there, but still a lot unexplained when it comes to how well Regan did among non-evangelical working-class and suburban (and young!) whites outside the South. A lot of our memories of the Reagan coalition is colored by the more Southern and evangelical Protestant coalition that reelected Bush in 2004.

Lucky break: The hostage crisis is hugely overrated in its impact on the 1980 general election. Check out Carter’s job approval ratings from mid-1979 to November 1980. You see an Omega formed by the public reaction to the hostage crisis as Carter’s job Approval goes up and then goes down to the pre-crisis levels. All the forces that were driving Carter’s job approval rating in 1979 were still there in 1980 along with a recession in the early part of the year. Carter was on track for exactly the kind of general election defeat he got prior to the hostage crisis. The main effect of the crisis was to help Carter hold off Ted Kennedy. I believe Austin Ranney made just that point right after the 1980 election. The invasion of Afghanistan probably did help as it moved public opinion (and Carter administration policy) closer to Regan’s views on matters like defense spending levels.

On the second set,

1.& 2. The Republicans are presently lost in this area (see above comment.) Utterly lost. That doesn’t mean it will stay that way. the right of the Republican party was just as lost in 1964. This is something they need to work on. I hope that amid the farce of the GOP House infighting, someone at the RNC is thinking these media messaging problems through. When the Republicans get better (which means recognizing their problems) they will do better within those two sectors.

3. I’m not sure I would stake the future of the Democratic party on the success of Democratic governance in that state – which I fear may become a cautionary example. Though California example is important for what happens to the Republican party that fails to market itself to rising population groups.

4. Prior to this election, younger voters were more pro-life than their immediate elders. The total incompetence and lack of interest of the Republican party (and allied groups) in making an argument (other than the odd idiotic act of theodicy) seems to have reversed that trend. I think that is a winnable issue. I don’t think the marijuana issue is a problem for the Republicans.

5. I’m not fan of American Exceptionalist rhetoric, but I think Ross Douthat had some good arguments about why the US is not going to adopt the full policy aparat of Scandinavian countries and why it probably wouldn’t work out so well if we did (though that doesn’t mean there aren’t distinct policies we should adopt. http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/21/can-we-be-sweden/

Whatever happens, America will, for better and worse, be very different from Denmark (or whoever) in policy and political culture. I just don’t know what those differences will be.

These are people to whom the Republicans have never spoken in any comprehensible way. Ideological positioning as such can’t do much here. Scott Brown is no better off with these voters than Todd Akin. He seems like he is more attractive to “swing-votes” but these were (white, older) swing-voters who voted for Reagan in 1984 and Bill Weld in 1990. Policy positions can help, but only if they are communicated effectively and only if they are relevant to people’s lives.

And a word about communicating. the center-right is just lost. The obviously lost think something like “Well, surely they heard about the Tea Party rally on the Hannity show. What more can we do? the country has turned into a bunch of takers, etc. ” The less obviously (but just as) lost think “Well, I gave Karl Rove one million dollars to run thirty ads against cap and trade. What can we do? The country has turned into a bunch of takers etc.

“The American people had voted — and for the second time! — for someone who had based his appeal to them on a promise to stand in loco parentis to a childlike people…”
–djf

Oh, djf, it’s worse than Roger Kimball supposes! Remember the Pony-Tailed Guy at the faux townhall style presidential debate in 1992? I do. That ups the count to 4 times the American people went loco for a candidate who’d be their daddy-president.

I think that’s a spot-on analysis. Unpacking the Reagan wave, I believe he rode three major social trends, plus got a lucky break:

1. The great Dixiecrat realignment, kicked off by Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act (“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come”), but solidified by the detoxification of the Republican brand in the South by Goldwater and Reagan.

2. The simultaneous rise of East Asian manufacturing and structured finance (the Honda Civic launched in 1972, Drexel Burnham in 1973), which created an enormous shift in political power from labor to capital.

3. The rise of evangelical political activism (as exemplified by the Moral Majority), in reaction to progressive victories in the culture wars (notably, Roe).

The lucky break was the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, in two respects. First, there was the humiliation of the hostage crisis, and particularly the failure of Operation Eagle Claw (aka “Desert One”). Secondly, there was the economic effects of the oil supply shock caused by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war three months before the election.

As I look at the current landscape for anything out there from which a similar wave might be constructed, I’m coming up empty (although, in fairness, that’s really your job). However, I do observe the following:

1. In the consumer technology / new media sector (a key economic driver for the next twenty years), the Republican brand is nearly a complete writeoff. Look at this, it’s astonishing:

http://peninsulapress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Screen-Shot-2012-11-06-at-8.54.45-PM.png

2. Amongst the Millennial Generation (an increasingly important electoral demographic), Republicans are at an 18% to 45% party-ID disadvantage to Democrats.

3. California, the 1970′s launching pad of the Reagan Revolution and the Howard Jarvis tax revolt, has just elected a Democratic supermajority to the state legislature. Historically, there is a tendency for California political trends to spread nationwide, sooner or later.

4. Progressives have won the culture wars. Hot-button topics that were political suicide just a decade ago–gay marriage, pot legalization–are now mainstream.

5. Broad trends are working against American exceptionalism. Demographic: kids these days have no memory of the post-war American colossus, only a couple morally-ambiguous failed wars. Technological: the Internet has shrunk the world dramatically; the Gangnam Style phenomenon would have been incomprehensible to the foot-soldiers of the Reagan Revolution. Economic: 30 years of Chicago School nostrums have resulted in declining real wages for most workers, culminating in a spectacular near-depression (and most people aren’t buying the story that the economic collapse was caused by liberals forcing the banks to lend money to Black people).

This last trend, the decline of exceptionalism, I think may prove to be the most influential over the next 20 years. Amongst leading developed economies, American politics and policy currently is an extreme right-wing outlier. Consider that, of the major Western European powers, the UK has the most right-wing social, economic, and foreign policy. Yet the Conservative Party in the UK has social, economic, and foreign policy that is to the left of the Obama administration. Mainstream Democratic Party politics in the U.S. is already very much to the right, by the measure of nearly every industrialized democracy on the planet.

If Americans ever start looking around at how other societies work, they may start thinking about how it is, for example, that the heavily-taxed, heavily-regulated Danes are the happiest people on the planet.

In any case, I look forward with interest to seeing your counter-trends.