Still, the decision by the Charleston-based Confederate Heritage Trust to sponsor a “Secession Ball” in Charleston’s municipally-owned Gaillard Auditorium on Calhoun Street, featuring a 45-minute play and a dinner-dance which celebrates the adoption of South Carolina’s ordinance of secession from the Union on December 20, 1860, managed to poke a short and nationally-provocative stick into the hornet’s-nest of American race relations and American memory of the Civil War.

Plans for the December 20^th event had hardly been announced before the Charleston chapter of the NAACP registered its first protest against an event to honor the 150^th anniversary of a decision which brought down the landslide of Civil War on America and, with it, the deaths of 620,000 soldiers. “It’s disgusting and unbelievable they would have a gala celebration to honor a day that ended up causing so much suffering,” said Dot Scott, the president of the NAACP’s Charleston chapter. What was worse, it was suffering in the name of a Southern Confederacy whose most distinguishing feature was the enslavement of 3.9 million African-Americans. That led the South Carolina state president of the NAACP, Lonnie Randolph, to up the rhetorical ante by asking whether a celebration of the first step into that war wasn’t like celebrating the first memorandum for the Final Solution. “You couldn’t pay the folks in Charleston to hold a Holocaust gala, could you?” asked Randolph. Secession was “the greatest act of terrorism” in American history,” Randolph insisted. “But you know these are nothing but black people, so nobody pays them any attention.”

Well, not exactly any attention. Arguments over displays of the Confederate flag and other aspects of Southern Civil War history have been the stuff of political theater in the South for the last twenty-five years. And the responses from the Confederate Heritage Trust, and its parent organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, could have been lifted straight from an SCV play-book. First: it’s not about slavery, it’s about states’ rights. “We honor our ancestors for their bravery and tenacity protecting their homes from invasion,” said Michael Givens of the SCV. “What I’m doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law,” said Jeff Antley, the Secession Ball’s organizer. “It has nothing to do with slavery as far as I’m concerned,”

Well, perhaps not nothing, exactly. But that only paves the way to the second argument: it was about slavery, but not in an important way because slavery was dying out. “Everybody was getting rid of slavery around that time,” Michael Givens said (a statement which would have amazed Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth). If people want to point fingers at slavery, added Jeff Antley, they should point them at North and South alike. Which provides us with the third argument: Everyone is to blame for slavery, therefore no one is to blame. “Slavery is an abomination,” Antley admitted. But it’s “not just a Southern problem,” said Antley, “It’s an American problem.” Ergo, to stigmatize South Carolina and secession as pro-slavery “is just ignorance of history.” We shouldn’t be stigmatizing anyone.

This, of course, produced nothing but a snort of contempt from Lonnie Randolph. When Southerners bring up states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.” But contempt was promptly answered with indifference. “Any group that wants to call our ancestors terrorists and compare them to Nazi soldiers, we will not negotiate with,” replied Randy Burbage, vice president of the Confederate Heritage Trust. “We didn’t need to get their permission to put this thing on, or will we ever seek their permission. We do our thing, they’ll do their thing.”

And they did. On the evening of December 20^th, between 300 and 400 ticketholders, dressed to the Confederate nines in corsets, crinolines, waistcoats, top-hats and militia uniforms processed into Gaillard Auditorium for a “joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink.” The feature of the evening was a 45-minute play which re-enacted the signing of the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, punctuated by hisses and calls of “Impeach!” from the actors whenever Abraham Lincoln’s name was mentioned. Meanwhile, outside the Gaillard Auditorium, 120 protesters assembled, carrying electric candles in the growing dark, and singing “We Shall Overcome.” From there, they marched to the Morris Brown A.M.E. Church to hear Lonnie Randolph, who had already told the press that the Secession Ball would be nothing different from a celebration of 9/11, Adolph Hitler and Wounded Knee. “There is nothing to celebrate about killing a million people,” Randolph added. “South Carolina still lives under the rule of the Confederacy today.”

There is a certain mesmerizing quality in the self-defined sense of injury which accompanied the Secession Ball. And exponential victimhood of this sort is a feature likely to rise up in the tracks of any of the events scheduled to commemorate the American Civil War as we begin its Sesquicentennial year. This is, I suspect, a major reason why so little public activity in celebration of the Sesquicentennial is in planning, in contrast to the hoopla of the Civil War Centennial in 1961-65 – no national Sesquicentennial Commission this time, only seventeen state Sesquicentennial Commissions (and many of them with no budget). African-Americans feel so emotionally alienated from the Civil-War-According-to-the-SCV, and the neo-Confederates so suspicious of “politically correct” versions of the War, that politicians have simply preferred to give public observances of the Civil War’s 150^th a wide berth for fear of setting off uncharted minefields of racial anger. The Secession Ball and its NAACP descant , along with the feature stories about them in newspapers from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, are not going to make things any easier.

But perhaps it will go some way toward breaking the spell to point out to the Secession Ball-ers a few home truths from the mouths of the original secessionists themselves. South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, which was endorsed and signed unanimously by all 169 delegates to South Carolina’s secession convention in what became known as “Secession Hall” on Charleston’s Broad Street, makes no mention of slavery. In fact, it is only 158 words long, and makes no mention of any sort of cause, including “states’ rights.” But everyone who had not been living in caves in 1860 knew that secession was triggered by South Carolina’s anxiety to protect legalized slavery from meddling by the incoming administration of anti-slavery President-elect Abraham Lincoln. It made no difference that Lincoln had always protested that the federal government had no power to attack the legalized status of slavery in the states; his campaign against slavery was directed solely at preventing any further legalization in the western territories. But this was not enough to convince Southern slaveholders, and they were not shy about saying so:

• South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina: “On the 4^th day of March next, this party [the Republicans] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist.”
• Mississippi’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession: “In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”
• Georgia’s Declaration of Causes: “The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.”
• Texas’ A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede: “in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.”
• “The Argument is Exhausted–Stand by Your Arms!” Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, December 1, 1860:  “…no sentiment on earth–not even the new born glories of Christianity–ever gained ground with such rapidity as the rightfulness of African slavery.”
• Jefferson Davis, April 29, 1861: “The transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. …The people of the Confederate States, in their conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they were menaced required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the Federal Government which they had ratified in their several conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resuming all their rights as sovereign and Independent States and dissolved their connection with the other States of the Union.”
• William B. Campbell, former governor of Tennessee and nephew of a former governor of Virginia: “The great upheaving of the Southern States has been avowedly for the protection of negro slavery….”
• Clement Comer Clay, Alabama’s U.S. Senator, resigning his office after Alabama’s secession: “Must we consent to live under a Government which we believe will henceforth be controlled and administered by those who not only deny us justice and equality, and brand us as inferiours, bur whoso avowed principles and policy must destroy our domestic tranquillity, imperil the lives of our wives and children, degrade and dwarf, and ultimately destroy, our State? Must we live, by choice or compulsion, under the rule of those who present us the dire alternative of an’ irrepressible conflict’ with the Northern people, in defence of our altars and our fireside, or the manumission of our slaves, and the admission of them to social and political equality? No, sir, no! The freemen of Alabama have proclaimed to the world that they will not; and have proved their sincerity by seceding from the Union, and hazarding all the dangers and difficulties of a separate and independent station among the nations of the earth.”
• Edmund Ruffin, Virginia’s arch-secessionist, writing on the day of Lincoln’s election: “This is the day [which will] serve to show whether the southern states are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved—whether the institutions of negro slavery, on which the social & political existence of the south rests, is to be secured by our resistance, or to be abolished in a short time, as the certain result of our submission to Northern domination.”
• Keziah Brevard, South Carolina landowner and owner of 209 slaves, three days after Lincoln’s election: “I do pray if there is to be a crisis—that we all lay down our lives sooner than free our slaves in our midst.”
• Marilyn Culpeper, Trials and Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War: “I had rather every one of my children should be laid out on the cooling board than to have Yankees get my niggers.”

Is it really the case that slavery was not the issue for the vast majority of Southerners? Listen to the South’s pre-eminent agricultural magazine, DeBow’s Review, in 1860:

the slaveholders of the South, so far from constituting numerically an insignificant portion of its people, as has been malignantly alleged, make up an aggregate, greater in relative proportion than the holders of any other species of property whatever, in any part of the world; and that of no other property can it be said, with equal truthfulness, that it is an interest of the Whole community. Whilst every other family in the States I have specially referred to, are slaveholders, but one family in every three and a half families in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, are holders of agricultural land; and, in European States, the proportion is almost indefinitely less. The proportion which the slaveholders of the South, bear to the entire population is greater than that of the owners of land or houses, agricultural stock, State, bank, or other corporation securities anywhere else.

Exactly how much more has to be said about the motives for secession? Yes, I know that Southerners cited all manner of other grievances as their reasons for fighting. But I am talking about the reasons for seceding, and those are pretty transparent to one overmastering motivation – the defence of human bondage.

Yet, if the Secession Ball falls off one side of the donkey, surely the NAACP has fallen off the other. Is it really the case that South Carolina still “lives under the rule of the Confederacy” – when one-third of its delegation in the House of Representatives is black…when five out of the 11 members of the Charleston City Council are black…when the number of black state legislators in South Carolina has gone from 13 in 1975 to 39 to-day — or that Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Joseph E. Johnston were monsters equivalent in character to Hitler and Mohammed Atta? Personally, for my own part, I feel more than a little regret that Lee, and Davis and a good baker’s-dozen of the Confederacy’s leaders were never put on trial for treason. The Union’s failure to do so played a large part in emboldening the defeated ex-Confederates to overturn the Civil War’s results and replace slavery with Jim Crow. But how long will it be before waving the white sheet undergoes the same loss of emotive power that Union veterans experienced from too-often waving the bloody shirt? Nor does waving the white sheet command quite the same response when it’s waved by black men in black berets and black leather jackets. The irony of the Shirley Sherrod imbroglio this past summer was not that Sherrod admitted deliberately to subjecting a white man to racial discrimination – in fact, it was nobility in Sherrod to have confessed to being tempted to do so, then checking herself and becoming the man’s advocate. The irony was the response of the NAACP audience to her original confession – applause and hoots of approval.

And yet, almost every time I have said something of this sort, some racial idiocy or some fresh racial hell crawls out of its pit to refute me, and to plunge us all once more in the dye-vat of racial polarization. I do not believe we can just ignore the injustices we perpetrate upon each other, or that every advance in racial reconciliation blots out every past horror in racial cruelty; but I do believe that as a nation we have come closer than any on earth to a self-conscious conquest of the instinctive human shunning of difference and to achieving a more perfect Union of every race; and I do believe that black and white Americans are more American than they are black or white; and so I do not want to see the Civil War Sesquicentennial lost as a “teachable moment” — on all hands. Perhaps if the Secession Ball had concluded with a statement of regret, or a promise to adjourn until January 1, 2013, so that the same participants could celebrate an Emancipation Ball…perhaps if Lonnie Randolph had simply turned his back on the Gaillard Auditorium instead of immediately reaching for Hitler, Nazis and the Holocaust as his all-purpose yardstick…perhaps if we all remembered

that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come…and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Perhaps then we might all be able to walk more humbly in the path of “malice toward none, with charity for all” and build “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

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The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to “retreat” to the ivory tower – but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

Because conservatism failed to capture the university, it failed to capture the next key fortress of the Left, which is the media, print and broadcast alike. Much as Americans routinely deplore the unapologetic left-list of the knowledge class, its unwearying capability for saturation bombing eventually erodes the intellectual power to resist. Sticks and stones do indeed hurt bones, but so do names – every Keith Olbermann sneer, every Paul Krugman screed, every sitcom episode in which hedonism suffers no penalty, is a chip at the certainty of the reader and beholder. Without a comparable response, the sheer volume of Left presuppositions carries the feeble flicker of resistance before it. But how could there be such a response when no conservatives owned the journalism schools?

Without a secure position in the university and the media, conservatism had no way to explain itself. There was Fox News; there were conservative programs and conservative professors. But Fox is a soloist, trying to be heard above a chorus. And the programs and professors were of little interest to conservative strategists and donors who wanted a quick bang for their buck instead of the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Without those key installations, conservatives had no place – and sometimes no depth – with which to exegete a basic contradiction in Reagan-era conservative politics, which is the need to use government to dismantle government. Conservatives operated on the premise that what Americans want most is liberty – which is to say, that Americans in the 21st century inhabited the same world of values as the Founders of the 18th.

This was perhaps a mistake. The young people with whom I have worked and lived for the last thirty-two years want security from the demands of self-government, and so they fail in droves to vote or to run for office. (I recall one township council meeting where a visibly-frightened first-time attender confessed that she didn’t realize she was even allowed to speak, much less ask questions). They want security from public service, and so they dodge jury duty, recruit the poorest segments of the nation as their soldiers and behave as though on-campus recruiting was an intolerable threat to their future career path.

The conservative political movement never really learned how to play the game. We wanted too much control of too much territory, too fast; and like Napoleon in Russia, we conquered vast amounts of ground very quickly, only to realize too late that we had fallen, exhausted, just short of the pressure points that really counted. It’s a mistake we did not need to make, and it’s one we can start correcting now by plotting how to redirect our resources (which remain considerable) toward the capture of those pressure points.

Above all, it’s a mistake we had better not make, the next time around. If there is one.

But does the same thing hold true in politics?  There are many Republicans who, looking for a silver lining in November’s humiliating drubbing, are wondering if the election of Barack Obama really is some kind of Waterloo for the Republican party, heralding either (at worst) the shift of the United States from being a ‘center-right nation’ to a ‘center-left nation,’ or (at the mildest) the ungluing of the triumphant Reagan coalition of the 1980s. But there are others – most notably Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove — who are unruffled by 2008 and who predict that “the GOP comeback” is already in the making. So, how do Republicans usually win…and how do they usually lose…and how does it all compare with the election of 2008?

We have the luxury of taking a remarkably long view of this question. Although the Democratic party traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson and the critical election of 1800, the Democratic party as we know it today is as much the heir of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s as it is Jefferson. Similarly, the Republican party did not run its first candidate until 1856 and elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. But much of the Republican party was made up of stalwarts from the old Whig party (including Lincoln), who first organized themselves under Henry Clay in opposition to Jackson in the 1820s. Lincoln, as he often confessed, remained very much “an old Henry Clay Whig,” and a good many of the ideas which form the core of Republican thinking even to-day were shaped in the hands of the Whigs. Thus, the continuities in party history allow us to run our comparisons as far back as the 1820s.

When we do, the first thing we’ll notice is that since 1824, when Andrew Jackson staged his first run for the presidency, Democrats have won twenty presidential elections; Whigs and Republicans have won twenty-five. But when Democrats win, they only rarely do it the old-fashioned way, by a majority of voters. James Buchanan (1860), Grover Cleveland (1892), Woodrow Wilson (1912), and Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996) all slipped into the White House largely because votes which might otherwise have handed the presidency to a Republican opponent were split by third-party candidates who peeled off just enough of the Republican vote to allow the Democrat to sneak through. In 1892, General James Weaver and the newly-formed Populist party shaved just over a million votes away from Benjamin Harrison and ended up electing Cleveland; in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s ill-starred “Bull Moose” Progressives actually outpolled the regular Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, and allowed Woodrow Wilson to slide past them both. And in more recent memory, Ross Perot’s Reform party stripped just enough votes away from George H.W. Bush and from Bob Dole to guarantee the election and re-election of Bill Clinton.

But even when Democrats do win by the numbers, the numbers are rarely very large. James K. Polk squeaked past Henry Clay by 39,000 votes in 1844. Grover Cleveland won his first term as president in 1884 by beating James G. Blaine by less than 26,000 votes. Woodrow Wilson won his second term in 1916 over Charles Evans Hughes by less than 600,000 votes – or, by a margin of 49.39% to Hughes’ 48.36%. And closer to the present, John F. Kennedy (in 1960) and Jimmy Carter (in 1976) won popular majorities, but only by very thin wafers – Kennedy won just 50.08% of the popular vote against Richard Nixon’s 49.91%, while Carter eked out a meager 51.05% majority of the popular vote over Gerald Ford’s 48.94%. Since the days of Andrew Jackson, only two Democratic candidates have enjoyed what we might call “blow-out” majorities at presidential election-time: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

By contrast, when Republicans win, they usually do it in nine-league boots. Ulysses Grant, whatever his failings as a president, was as formidable a candidate as he had been a general, and crushed his Democratic opponents twice. William McKinley, as well, twice battered the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, by 52.2% in 1896 and 53% in 1900, while his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, minced the hapless Alton Parker in 1904 by 60%. Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge erased his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, with 65% of the vote – despite a strong third-party showing from Republican Progressive Robert M. La Follette. Other Republican crushers have included Richard Nixon (victorious over George McGovern in 1972 with 61.6% of the vote), Ronald Reagan (59% of the popular vote in 1984), and the father of all Republican candidates, Abraham Lincoln (beating Democratic challenger George McClellan in 1864 with 55% of the vote).

Only twice in the last century has a Republican candidate benefited from divided houses among the opposition – in 1968, when George Wallace siphoned off 10 million votes which might have gone to Hubert Humphrey and opened the door to victory for Richard Nixon, and in 2000, when Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the sorely-needed electoral votes of Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico. (Had these states’ Nader-voters gone to Gore, and their 16 electoral votes gone to Gore rather than to George W. Bush, Gore would have won the electoral college as well as a popular majority; if just New Mexico or Iowa had gone Democratic, Gore would have won, while even little New Hampshire, if it had gone Democratic all by itself, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives).

But, if Republicans are so routinely successful at summoning up big majorities when they win, why do they ever lose? Because lose they obviously do. In part, Republicans have lost through bad timing – Herbert Hoover had the misfortune to be elected one year before the great stock market crash of 1929, and though many of his policies for coping with the onset of the Great Depression differed little from Franklin Roosevelt’s, Hoover was the man on the bridge at the time of the crash, and politically speaking, he went down with the ship. Jimmy Carter might never have been more than a small-time Southern governor had it not been for Chappaquiddick and Watergate. George H.W. Bush, who looked unstoppable after the first Gulf War in 1991, turned unelectable when a recession settled over the country in 1992.

But even then, Republican defeat has occurred less because Democratic candidates succeeded in convincing more people to vote for them, and more because Republican voters have stayed at home, unconvinced by their party’s candidate to vote at all because the regular nominee was too colorless. The key figure here is not the rival percentages within the total number of votes cast, but the number of votes cast as a percentage of the voting population. The first trace of this pattern occurred as early as 1840, when the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, was elected in a race which saw 80.2% of eligible voters marching to the polls; four years before, when the Democrat Martin Van Buren won the presidency, voter participation was only 57.8%. Grover Cleveland’s victory over James G. Blaine in 1884 co-incided with a slump in actual vs. eligible voters from 79.4% (in 1880) to 77.5% in the 1884 contest. When Woodrow Wilson won his first election in 1912, he did so, not only in the face of a splintered Republican party but a downturn in the percentage of eligible voters casting ballots, from 65.4% in 1908 to 58.8% in 1912. In 1948, when Harry Truman defeated a supposedly invincible Thomas Dewey, 53% of the eligible voters turned out – and Dewey lost. Four years later, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson, the percentage of actual voters leapt up to 63.3% — and Eisenhower won. In 1972, when Nixon steam-rolled George McGovern, the percentage of actual voters out of the eligible voting population was 55.2%; when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter four years later, the voting percentage likewise dipped, to 53.5%. In 1984, when Reagan mopped-up Walter Mondale, 54% of the eligible population voted; in 1996, when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton the invisible spoiler alongside Ross Perot was the dip in the percentage of actual voters to 49%.

How much of a role did the stay-at-home Republicans play in the defeat of John McCain? A good deal more of a role than “Obamania” played among the eagerly-heralded freshet of new college-age and black Democratic voters. When the numbers were tallied up, the actual increases in new Democratic voters among young people and blacks were surprisingly minimal. In the first place, although voter turnout in 2008 increased from 122 million to 127 million in 2004, that increase was short stuff compared to the increase – some 20 million – who showed up at the polls in 2004 over 2000. The number of black voters in 2008 nudged up, but only slightly, from 11% of voters in 2004 to 13%; and the under-30 vote moved upwards, but only marginally (less than 1%). The significant number was the fall in turnout by Republicans. In Ohio, the election’s bellwether state, Obama outscored McCain by 51% to 47%. But Obama’s majority was not a product of more or newer voters (in fact, he tallied only 45,000 more than John Kerry in 2004). It was because 275,000 Ohio voters who had voted for George W. Bush failed to vote for McCain, as overall voter participation in Ohio dropped 13% below the predicted level of 80%. “There seems only one plausible explanation,” concluded Michael Massing, “Many Republicans stayed home on election day.” The same trend prevailed nationally. While more minority and under-30 voters turned out in 2008, “this increase was offset by a drop of several million in the number of white voters.” They saw nothing to vote for, and they stayed home.

So here’s the moral of the story. The Obama victory falls pretty squarely in the middle of the spectrum of Democratic presidential victories – it was not a fluke, but it was not the hinge of fate, either. In the long historical view, we really have been a ‘center-right nation,’ and that works to the long-term advantage of Republicans. There has been, and remains, a broad reservoir of American political conviction which resonates much more with the message of the Republicans than the Democrats. But Republicans can lose by taking that advantage for granted — by running candidates for the presidency who cannot connect policy agendas with the ground-level ideology of the party, who cannot make a room spontaneously explode with enthusiasm, and who cannot, when they prick the electorate, make them bleed. These are the candidates the ‘center-right’ Republican nation will simply fold their hands and sigh over. The party of Lincoln can do a lot better. And when it does, it wins.

Allen C. Guelzo (Gettysburg College) normally writes about Abraham Lincoln. He was induced to write this for David Frum only by the most unstoppable forms of persuasion.

It’s always possible to win a battle and lose a campaign. Or to win the battle in such a way that the victor ends up so badly hurt, or so narrowly in charge, that in the long run it scarcely counts as a victory. Think of Bunker Hill. Think of the Alamo.
But does the same thing hold true in politics? There are many Republicans who, looking for a silver lining in November’s humiliating drubbing, are wondering if the election of Barack Obama really is some kind of Waterloo for the Republican party, heralding either (at worst) the shift of the United States from being a ‘center-right nation’ to a ‘center-left nation,’ or (at the mildest) the ungluing of the triumphant Reagan coalition of the 1980s. But there are others – most notably Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove — who are unruffled by 2008 and who predict that “the GOP comeback” is already in the making. So, how do Republicans usually win…and how do they usually lose…and how does it all compare with the election of 2008?

We have the luxury of taking a remarkably long view of this question. Although the Democratic party traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson and the critical election of 1800, the Democratic party as we know it today is as much the heir of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s as it is Jefferson. Similarly, the Republican party did not run its first candidate until 1856 and elected its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. But much of the Republican party was made up of stalwarts from the old Whig party (including Lincoln), who first organized themselves under Henry Clay in opposition to Jackson in the 1820s. Lincoln, as he often confessed, remained very much “an old Henry Clay Whig,” and a good many of the ideas which form the core of Republican thinking even to-day were shaped in the hands of the Whigs. Thus, the continuities in party history allow us to run our comparisons as far back as the 1820s.

When we do, the first thing we’ll notice is that since 1824, when Andrew Jackson staged his first run for the presidency, Democrats have won twenty presidential elections; Whigs and Republicans have won twenty-five. But when Democrats win, they only rarely do it the old-fashioned way, by a majority of voters. James Buchanan (1860), Grover Cleveland (1892), Woodrow Wilson (1912), and Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996) all slipped into the White House largely because votes which might otherwise have handed the presidency to a Republican opponent were split by third-party candidates who peeled off just enough of the Republican vote to allow the Democrat to sneak through. In 1892, General James Weaver and the newly-formed Populist party shaved just over a million votes away from Benjamin Harrison and ended up electing Cleveland; in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s ill-starred “Bull Moose” Progressives actually outpolled the regular Republican nominee, William Howard Taft, and allowed Woodrow Wilson to slide past them both. And in more recent memory, Ross Perot’s Reform party stripped just enough votes away from George H.W. Bush and from Bob Dole to guarantee the election and re-election of Bill Clinton.
But even when Democrats do win by the numbers, the numbers are rarely very large. James K. Polk squeaked past Henry Clay by 39,000 votes in 1844. Grover Cleveland won his first term as president in 1884 by beating James G. Blaine by less than 26,000 votes. Woodrow Wilson won his second term in 1916 over Charles Evans Hughes by less than 600,000 votes – or, by a margin of 49.39% to Hughes’ 48.36%. And closer to the present, John F. Kennedy (in 1960) and Jimmy Carter (in 1976) won popular majorities, but only by very thin wafers – Kennedy won just 50.08% of the popular vote against Richard Nixon’s 49.91%, while Carter eked out a meager 51.05% majority of the popular vote over Gerald Ford’s 48.94%. Since the days of Andrew Jackson, only two Democratic candidates have enjoyed what we might call “blow-out” majorities at presidential election-time: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

By contrast, when Republicans win, they usually do it in nine-league boots. Ulysses Grant, whatever his failings as a president, was as formidable a candidate as he had been a general, and crushed his Democratic opponents twice. William McKinley, as well, twice battered the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, by 52.2% in 1896 and 53% in 1900, while his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, minced the hapless Alton Parker in 1904 by 60%. Even the taciturn Calvin Coolidge erased his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, with 65% of the vote – despite a strong third-party showing from Republican Progressive Robert M. La Follette. Other Republican crushers have included Richard Nixon (victorious over George McGovern in 1972 with 61.6% of the vote), Ronald Reagan (59% of the popular vote in 1984), and the father of all Republican candidates, Abraham Lincoln (beating Democratic challenger George McClellan in 1864 with 55% of the vote).
Only twice in the last century has a Republican candidate benefited from divided houses among the opposition – in 1968, when George Wallace siphoned off 10 million votes which might have gone to Hubert Humphrey and opened the door to victory for Richard Nixon, and in 2000, when Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the sorely-needed electoral votes of Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico. (Had these states’ Nader-voters gone to Gore, and their 16 electoral votes gone to Gore rather than to George W. Bush, Gore would have won the electoral college as well as a popular majority; if just New Mexico or Iowa had gone Democratic, Gore would have won, while even little New Hampshire, if it had gone Democratic all by itself, would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives).

But, if Republicans are so routinely successful at summoning up big majorities when they win, why do they ever lose? Because lose they obviously do. In part, Republicans have lost through bad timing – Herbert Hoover had the misfortune to be elected one year before the great stock market crash of 1929, and though many of his policies for coping with the onset of the Great Depression differed little from Franklin Roosevelt’s, Hoover was the man on the bridge at the time of the crash, and politically speaking, he went down with the ship. Jimmy Carter might never have been more than a small-time Southern governor had it not been for Chappaquiddick and Watergate. George H.W. Bush, who looked unstoppable after the first Gulf War in 1991, turned unelectable when a recession settled over the country in 1992.

But even then, Republican defeat has occurred less because Democratic candidates succeeded in convincing more people to vote for them, and more because Republican voters have stayed at home, unconvinced by their party’s candidate to vote at all because the regular nominee was too colorless. The key figure here is not the rival percentages within the total number of votes cast, but the number of votes cast as a percentage of the voting population. The first trace of this pattern occurred as early as 1840, when the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, was elected in a race which saw 80.2% of eligible voters marching to the polls; four years before, when the Democrat Martin Van Buren won the presidency, voter participation was only 57.8%. Grover Cleveland’s victory over James G. Blaine in 1884 co-incided with a slump in actual vs. eligible voters from 79.4% (in 1880) to 77.5% in the 1884 contest. When Woodrow Wilson won his first election in 1912, he did so, not only in the face of a splintered Republican party but a downturn in the percentage of eligible voters casting ballots, from 65.4% in 1908 to 58.8% in 1912. In 1948, when Harry Truman defeated a supposedly invincible Thomas Dewey, 53% of the eligible voters turned out – and Dewey lost. Four years later, when Dwight Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson, the percentage of actual voters leapt up to 63.3% — and Eisenhower won. In 1972, when Nixon steam-rolled George McGovern, the percentage of actual voters out of the eligible voting population was 55.2%; when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter four years later, the voting percentage likewise dipped, to 53.5%. In 1984, when Reagan mopped-up Walter Mondale, 54% of the eligible population voted; in 1996, when Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton the invisible spoiler alongside Ross Perot was the dip in the percentage of actual voters to 49%.

How much of a role did the stay-at-home Republicans play in the defeat of John McCain? A good deal more of a role than “Obamania” played among the eagerly-heralded freshet of new college-age and black Democratic voters. When the numbers were tallied up, the actual increases in new Democratic voters among young people and blacks were surprisingly minimal. In the first place, although voter turnout in 2008 increased from 122 million to 127 million in 2004, that increase was short stuff compared to the increase – some 20 million – who showed up at the polls in 2004 over 2000. The number of black voters in 2008 nudged up, but only slightly, from 11% of voters in 2004 to 13%; and the under-30 vote moved upwards, but only marginally (less than 1%). The significant number was the fall in turnout by Republicans. In Ohio, the election’s bellwether state, Obama outscored McCain by 51% to 47%. But Obama’s majority was not a product of more or newer voters (in fact, he tallied only 45,000 more than John Kerry in 2004). It was because 275,000 Ohio voters who had voted for George W. Bush failed to vote for McCain, as overall voter participation in Ohio dropped 13% below the predicted level of 80%. “There seems only one plausible explanation,” concluded Michael Massing, “Many Republicans stayed home on election day.” The same trend prevailed nationally. While more minority and under-30 voters turned out in 2008, “this increase was offset by a drop of several million in the number of white voters.” They saw nothing to vote for, and they stayed home.

So here’s the moral of the story. The Obama victory falls pretty squarely in the middle of the spectrum of Democratic presidential victories – it was not a fluke, but it was not the hinge of fate, either. In the long historical view, we really have been a ‘center-right nation,’ and that works to the long-term advantage of Republicans. There has been, and remains, a broad reservoir of American political conviction which resonates much more with the message of the Republicans than the Democrats. But Republicans can lose by taking that advantage for granted — by running candidates for the presidency who cannot connect policy agendas with the ground-level ideology of the party, who cannot make a room spontaneously explode with enthusiasm, and who cannot, when they prick the electorate, make them bleed. These are the candidates the ‘center-right’ Republican nation will simply fold their hands and sigh over. The party of Lincoln can do a lot better. And when it does, it wins.

Allen C. Guelzo (Gettysburg College) normally writes about Abraham Lincoln. He was induced to write this for David Frum only by the most unstoppable forms of persuasion.

Sources:
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Pt. 2 (Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1071-1073
The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2008 (New York: World Almanac Books, 2008), 530-544
Chris Cillizza, “5 Myths About an Election of Epic Proportions,” Washington Post (November 16, 2008)
Michael Massing, “Obama: In the Divided Heartland,” New York Review of Books (December 18, 2008)
Dick Morris, “Sarah Palin Saved GOP from Landslide Defeat,” The Hill.com (November 11, 2008)
Karl Rove, “How the GOP Should Prepare for a Comeback,” Wall Street Journal (December 11, 2008)