THE COMING DEMOCRATIC DOMINANCE

Long before George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election, his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, was predicting to reporters that a Bush victory would produce a historic political realignment. This new Republican majority would resemble the one William McKinley built roughly one century ago. "I look at this time as 1896, the time where we saw the rise of William McKinley and his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt," Rove declared. "That was the last time we had a shift in political paradigm." Just as McKinley exploited America's shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy to build his majority, Bush would exploit America's "transformational" shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy to build his. Bush would be the candidate and the president of the "new economy."

In Rove's mind, September 11 has reinforced the parallel: Bush's war on terrorism is the political equivalent of McKinley's Spanish-American War. As U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone wrote in February, Rove "looks back to William McKinley, who was elected with 51 percent of the vote in 1896 but whose successful war and domestic policies built that up to a solid majority for years ahead." And the current financial scandals are merely a bump along that inevitable road. The scandals, Rove told NBC's Tim Russert on July 13, are a "business problem ... not a political scandal" and will not affect the underlying movement toward a new Republican majority.

Rove is half right. He's correct that we are in a transformational political era that displays marked similarities to 1896. And he is correct that this era will produce a majority party that dominates American politics for years to come. It just won't be the GOP. To the contrary, ever since the collapse of the Reagan conservative majority, which enjoyed its final triumph in November 1994, American politics has been turning slowly, but inexorably, toward a new Democratic majority. It was evident in Al Gore's popular-vote victory in 2000 (made more significant by the overhang of the Bill Clinton scandals and Gore's ineptitude as a campaigner) and in Bush's and the Republicans' sinking fortunes in the first two-thirds of 2001. It was obscured by the patriotic rush of support for Bush after September 11, which to some extent carried over to the Republican Party as a whole. But it has resurfaced in recent months as Americans have turned their attention back to the economy and domestic policy and away from the war on terrorism. Far from being a temporary distraction from a long-term shift toward the GOP, popular anger at the business scandals and the plummeting Dow heralds the resumption of a long-term shift toward the Democrats.

If this emerging Democratic majority has eluded many observers, perhaps it is because it differs substantially from the New Deal Democratic coalition that dominated American politics from 1932 to 1968. Today the Democrats are increasingly a party of professionals, women, and minorities rather than of blue-collar workers. They are based in postindustrial metropolitan areas rather than in the small-town South and the Rust Belt North. And they are a party of the progressive center rather than the Great Society left or the laissez-faire right. The new Democratic Party's true historical antecedent is, ironically, that same progressive Republican Party of the early twentieth century that Rove identifies with the Bush Republicans. It, and not Bush's GOP, will oversee America's postindustrial transition because it, and not Bush's GOP, embodies the demographic and cultural changes that this new America will bring.