Losing which left?

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Enough comments have followed my previous post on the results of the election to warrant a new entry.

I'm always skeptical of predictions that any party in the American electoral system is going to lose the fringe if it moves towards the center. The problem is that, in the last four elections, the Democratic party moved first and unilaterally, which allowed, and maybe even forced, the Republicans to go further to the right. The center wasn't captured; it was simply conceded. Barring a major political realignment, median voter dynamics is a kind of prisoner's dilemma, and those who move first have no assurance that the others will act as they expect.

Read more!But, in any case, don't think that a move to the right would lose Democrats the "safe states", as Andrew says. It may lose them some funding and a lot of enthusiasm, but as long as the other option is repugnant enough, liberal Democrats don't have anywhere to go. They could stay home and just not vote, but the prospect of an Alan Keyes representing them in the Senate is likely to keep bringing them to the polls, even if they hold their noses while voting for a conservative Democrat. The Socialists who stayed away from the polls in the first round of the last French presidential election did show up to vote in the second round, not for Jacques Chirac but against LePen. Many of them actually wore clothespins on their nose as they cast their ballot. After all, the candidate who, not too many years prior, had complained of the foul odors coming from immigrants' apartments was the one running against the neo-fascist.

The argument about losing the safe states also disregards the difference between federal and state parties. In true-blue states, liberal Democrats are likely to maintain control. And in those states the ideological center of gravity is likely to stay put. Urban-dominated states like Illinois, New Jersey and the New England states breed moderate Republicans. Think of the long line of Rockefeller Republicans that held the Illinois governorship for 35 years. When we think of moderate Republicans, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (R-ME) come to mind, and Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) and Arlen Specter R-PA). The apparent oddities (Rick Santorum R-PA, for instance) are easy to understand: Pennsylvania, as James Carville said, is "Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between". Just look at the county vote.

At the national level, however, Democratic concessions on "values" will shift the gravity-center of politics further to the right. The Republicans need to differentiate themselves from the Democrats, and a right-leaning Democratic party structurally requires them to go further in that direction. If that's the case, the Democrats will not avoid the fate of becoming a "regional party." They'll be more conservative, but remain clustered in the coasts and urban areas. The Republicans, of course, are a regional party already: their region is the Midwest mountain states and the Old Confederacy. (As Charley Daniels sang, "The South's gonna do it again!") And they're likely to keep it. The North South corridor that runs from Montana and North Dakota down to through Oklahoma is losing population. It is less likely to sprout liberal-breeding cities in the near or far future.

That's why I doubt that a shift to the left will hurt Democrats too much. Will the empty ideological space in the center even ease the pressure on Republicans and cause them to neglect the religious base? That might open a window for Rockefeller Republicans to climb back into the GOP. But if it's going to be dome, it best be done quickly. The loss in a mid-term election will not be disastrous; true-blue states will return Democrats to the Senate. But to try this in a presidential election year would be McGovern all over again.