Despite disorder, Dems get things done

By STEVEN CONN
HISTORY NEWS SERVICE
It was during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term that Will Rogers joked: "I am a member of no organized political party -- I am Democrat."
As the dust of this momentous midterm election settles, that joke has been resurrected -- mostly by people much less funny than Rogers -- to describe the dilemma of the incoming Democratic majorities in both congressional houses. After all, many of the new Democratic members of Congress seem to sit to the right of the Democratic leadership on a whole host of issues. How can these Democrats govern, puzzles the punditocracy, since they are clearly so riven and disorganized?
The implicit answer, at least in much media analysis, is: they can't. The new Democratic majority is simply too fragile to bear the weight of its own internal contradictions. This conclusion has become an orthodoxy in the press.
But this consensus seems willfully to ignore the history of Congress across much of the 20th century. Will Rogers said that his party wasn't organized; he didn't say that it was ineffective.
Messy coalitions
Between 1932 and 1994 Congress was ruled by Democrats except for a few years in the middle '40s, early '50s, and the Senate in the '80s, and the Democrats who controlled those Congresses were always messy, unwieldy coalitions. As president, Roosevelt fashioned a Democratic majority that included labor unions, the elderly, urban ethnics, blacks and white Southern conservatives. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Far from being the bastion of liberal special interest groups, as the party has been caricatured by so many commentators, the Democrats in Congress were usually led by their conservatives and pragmatists. More often than not, since 1932, the Democratic House speakers came from places like Alabama and Texas, and the longest serving (1961-1977) Democratic Senate majority leader was Mike Mansfield from that hardly left-wing stronghold of Montana. In other words, Democrats have always managed to balance their congressional leadership ideologically.
Yet this motley assortment of Democratic politicians managed to work together enough to create the New Deal, including the Social Security program; fight and win the Second World War; pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts; and get man to the moon. Those Congresses managed to advance the nation's agenda in historic ways.
Meanwhile, over this same period, the Republican Party looked remarkably stagnant. In his 1936 speech accepting the nomination to run for a second term, FDR called the opposition "economic royalists." And so the party has largely remained. The only significant demographic the party has added are white Southern conservatives and evangelicals, many of whom finally did leave the Democratic Party.
GOP inclusion efforts fail
Otherwise the Republican Party's attempts to create its own "big tent" have faltered. George Bush was supposed to make the GOP a Hispanic-friendly place. In this last election Hispanics voted more than 70 percent for Democratic candidates.
During the 20th century congressional Democrats may have governed effectively not despite, but precisely because of, their heterogeneity. Democracy, after all, is a process whereby people with many agendas come together to define a common good. It is a process that involves compromise, deal-making and operating pragmatically rather than ideologically. Given their intra-party experiences, Democrats simply have more practice doing all this than Republicans do.
During their 12 years in power, on the other hand, congressional Republicans could not play well with others. They governed only from their political base, relying on the very wealthy and the evangelicals for their support. They equated compromise with weakness, and set out to destroy personally those who offered other ideas. Their legacy is a bitterly divided nation. That bitterness came home to roost Nov. 7.
Indeed, Republicans don't even seem to be able to play nicely with each other. Moderate Republicans were marginalized and humiliated, and former administration figures who disagreed with White House policy were vilified in public.
Congressional deadlock is a real possibility for the incoming Congress. If that's the case, however, I suspect it will be largely because of Republican intransigence and not because of internal disagreements within the Democratic Party. Democratic diversity has been the party's great strength since 1932.
Steven Conn is a professor in the history department at Ohio State University and a writer for the History News Service. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services