A Realigning Election?

Obama 332, Romney 206

With those numbers, it's hard to believe it now, but it was almost an article of faith some 20 years ago that the Republicans had what was called a "lock" on the Electoral College. Between Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide and Bill Clinton's win in 1992, only one Democrat (the unfortunate Jimmy carter) had managed to win a term in the White House (and only one term at that). And, for all intents and purposes, the Western states were solidly, predictably Republican in presidential elections during that period. Then, everything changed. Bill Clinton won in 1992 and was re-elected in 1996 (in spite of the Republicans having regained control of Congress in 1994). In fact, in the six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, the Democrats have won four of them - and won the popular vote in five out of the six! So much for the other party's "electoral lock."

The first and most obvious political science lesson here is that  things change. Realignments (in the classical 1936 sense of what political scientists call a "realigning election") are really recognizable as certain only in retrospect; and, of course, even genuine realignments are subject to eventual re-realignment the other way. The late 20th-century Republican "lock" on the electoral college (like the pre-1994 Democratic "lock" on the House of Representatives) was true - until it wasn't anymore. The 2008 election was widely seen as heralding another realignment - this time favoring the Democrats. That realignment seems to have been confirmed in 2012. And it will remain true - until (for whatever reason) it isn't anymore.

That said, it's that "whatever reason" that should be the focus of interest. In 1992, two things worked in the Democrats' favor - Ross Perot's 3rd-party candidacy and Bill Clinton. Not only is Bill Clinton perhaps the best and most popular politician of his generation, he also moved the party back from the ideological and identity-politics precipice to which George McGovern and his heirs had taken it. Once again, the Democratic Party was a Center-Left party, rather than a Left-Left party. And in a fair contest between a Center-Left party with a Center-Right party, the former will more likely emerge the winner.

But something else was also happening. As the Republican party moved more dramatically from being a Center-Right party to a Right-Right party, the Democrats were reverting to their earlier 20th-century status as the majority of the population's natural default party. Right at the time that the Republican Party was re-branding itself in the narrowest and most exclusivist terms, the composition of the electorate was changing forever. And the Democrats - as the broader and more inclusive party - became the prime beneficiaries.

Demography is not entirely destiny. As George W. Bush's successes with Latino voters illustrated, Latinos could conceivably have gone either way. Latinos could hypothetically have evolved (and may yet someday evolve) the way the so-called "Catholic Vote" has evolved - a group so diverse in socio-economic status as to be broadly representative of the larger electorate. Latinos could have become a group both parties would have to fight for, with whatever party doing best among them likely winning the election. Nothing like that is happening right now, of course. That's attributable in part to the Republicans' problematic position on immigration, but also because the core ideology of the new Republican Party has so little to offer to anyone who isn't a Wall Street financier or a business owner. (Even so, extreme Republican rhetoric on immigration will likely have long-term symbolic significance for Latinos - much as Republican legislative efforts at voter suppression in several states may tar the Republican brand long-term with the relevant constituencies).

So a real realignment has probably taken place. As with any such realignment, its strength lies in the evident fact that new voters, having entered the electorate identifying with one particular party, are likely to maintain that identificaiton - not necessarily for life (witness the aging, white, once-upon-a-time New Deal Democrats, who are now Republicans) but probably for several election cycles. 

The danger for the Democrats is equally evident. Just as internal forces within the Republican Party keep pushing it further rightward, internal forces in the Democratic Party may keep pushing it further leftward - especially on moral and cultural issues. To some extent, of course, that was what so undermined the New Deall coalition in the McGovern era, when the Democratic center in Washington could not control the the interest groups that constituted the party's base. Obviously, today's emerging electorate is younger and much more culturally liberal than the electorate of the 1970s and 1980s. So becoming a more Left-Left party is in the short term a winning strategy. In an era of dramatic economic and political change both at home and abroad, however, it is likely that other issues will dominate in the long-term. It was especially when the Democrats seemed to lose their way on those mainstream issues in the Carter era, when they were no longer perceived as the more trustworthy party on economic issues, that their majority evaporated. At present, the Democratis have regained the status not only of majority party but as the more trustowrthy party on economic issues. To remain the majority, being with younger and female voters on moral and cultural issues cannot - all by itself - substitute for that trust in the long-term.

Widows

In our society, one of the surest predictors of poverty is being a divorced wife or a child of divorced parents. In most societies (including our own before Social Security and Medicare), widowhood potentially exposes a widowed wife and her children to the danger of poverty. Of course, there have always been rich widows. Typically, however, a widow would have been dependent on her family. If her family had little or no accumulated wealth – if her husband had been an ordinary wage laborer, for example – then the widow would have had to depend on other relatives or on the wider community. That was why the Early Church maintained an Order of Widows – to provide for their needs and to enable them in turn to contribute to the life of the larger community. For all these reasons, therefore, widows have often served as a suitable shorthand symbol for poverty and dependence. Hence, the two widows we just heard about today. 

The 1^st widow, the pagan widow of Zarephath who provided hospitality to the prophet Elijah [1 Kings 17:10-16], was obviously poor – so much so that she told Elijah that she and her son were about to eat their last meal and then die. Generosity, however, often correlates inversely with one’s means. Despite her poverty, the widow provided hospitality to this prophet of a foreign God, and was well rewarded in return.

The widow in today’s Gospel got no immediate reward in the context of the Gospel account [Mark 12:38-44]. Her role in the story seems mainly to highlight the contrast between her poverty and the more affluent pilgrims who were donating much larger sums to the Temple. The point is not that their donations were not of value or not appreciated or that they were somehow insincere in their donations. The point is rather that, being prosperous, they could easily afford it, at no great cost to their quality of life (as we might say today). The widow, however, contributed to the Temple out of her limited, meager means – revealing the generosity of her spirit and the seriousness of her commitment to what the Temple represented in her community.

Perhaps few messages may seem more culturally challenging than the stories of those long-ago and far-away widows - and their counter-cultural (let alone counter-intuitive) message about being focused on something other than oneself and on one’s own individual needs, about not letting oneself and one’s all-important private world get in the way of one’s obligations to others and one’s connection with the larger human community. Ours is a society in which reality is increasingly subjective, in which the Individual has become the center of meaning and value, reducing family, community, and society to at-best secondary realities. Even churches sometimes seem more like clubs where like-minded or similarly situated individuals can feel good about themselves together.

It is often suggested that prosperity and religion do not coexist well together. The decline of religion in much of the developed world today is sometimes cited as confirmation of that claim. Right now, of course, we are all conscious of the economic stresses that same developed world is undergoing, but the fact remains that we have all been culturally conditioned by affluence. So we are forever being tempted to privilege what is individual and private and personal over what is common and shared and bigger than ourselves. Jesus’ words are a repeated challenge to us all to rediscover what generosity actually means, what it means to be connected with one another in a larger community, and what commitment to one another and such a community actually requires of us.

Jesus’ words are a challenge but also a lifelong invitation to what we can become – not just now but forever.

 

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 11, 2012.

 

Mother and Head

Today the Church commemorates the Dedication - on this date in 324 - of the Papal Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, the Pope's "cathedral" as Bishop of Rome, and hence (as the inscription says) Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput ("Mother and head of all the Churches of the City and the World"). It is the oldest (and hence highest-ranking) of the major papal basilicas and one of the seven "pilgrimage" churches of Rome. The reliquary above the papal Altar contains the heads of SS. Peter and Paul.

The Basilica gets its name from the Laterani family, whose palace originally occupied the site. When in the 4^th century, the Emperor Constantine built the church – not in the center of what was still a very pagan city, but at the city's edge - the neighboring Lateran Palace became the papal residence. The whole complex functioned as the center of Christian life in Rome - until the Popes moved to Avignon, France, in the 14th century. When the popes returned to Rome in 1377, the Vatican replaced the Lateran as the Pope’s principal residence. Still, up until the Kingdom of Italy put an end to papal rule in Rome in 1870, it remained customary to impart the Papal Blessing, Urbi et Orbi (“To the City and to the World)” from the Lateran on the feast of the Ascension, and also on the occasion of the enthronement of a new Pope.

The historic coincidence of this feast's falling in November fits well with November's over-arching liturgical theme of the communion of saints. The solemnities of All Saints and All Souls on November 1 and 2 and the liturgy's annual eschatological emphasis highlight the temporal dimension of the communion of the saints - uniting us, past and present, across the limits of time. Today's feast focuses us on the spatial dimension of the communion of saints - uniting us, across space, "from the rising of the sun to its setting." As one universal Church, we are a communion of communities - local Churches organized and united around their Bishop, through whom they are united across space with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, through whom we are also all united across time back to Peter.

In the 19th century, American Catholic convert Isaac Hecker - having himself experienced the divided and fragmented character of much of American religion - readily recognized and appreciated the importance of an authoritative center of unity in the Church, as the divinely sanctioned providential alternative to such division and fragmentation.  For Hecker, “the test of our being directed by the Holy Spirit, and not by our fancies and prejudices, is our filial obedience to the divine external authority of the Church" and "The measure of our love for the Holy Spirit is the measure of our obedience to the authority of the Church.” [“The Safeguards of the Paulist," The Paulist Vocation, pp. 141-142]

The visible unity of the Church across space and time which the ministry of Peter and his successors both effects and signifies seems especially relevant in our even more religiously fragmented century, in which the Church is constantly being challenged not just to proclaim its authoritative answers but also to incarnate a communal experience of the Body of Christ in the world, which responds to the deeper questions of people’s souls, both outside and inside the Church.

 

The Day After

It's done! The election is finally over - and much more decisively than some scenarios had predicted. While the political alignment in Congress hasn't changed much, overall it represents a real victory for President Obama and the Democratic Party. So what now?

In policy terms, it means the major accomplishments of the 1st Obama Administration - the Affordable Care Act, Wall-Street reform - remain securely in place. Those hurdles having been passed, the time may have come to tackle tax reform and immigration. Whether Congress (with the House still in Republican hands) can rise to the occasion remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" might motivate some important moves. The Bush-era, deficit-increasing tax cuts will expire automatically on January 1, and "sequestration" will radically cut both discretionary domestic and defense spending. Buoyed by re-election, the President might be able to remain firm and face down congressional Republicans on these issues.

In political terms, each party presumably has lessons to learn from the election. Losing is usually a greater incentive to learning than winning. So the immediate focus will probably be on the lessons the Republicans need to take away from their significant defeat. In a time of widespread economic distress, the Republicans nominated someone whose life and career personified the economic class that caused the problem in the first place - and whose proposed solution is to align the system even more narrowly in the interests of that class. That probably wasn't the most fortuitous choice of candidate for this year. Perhaps a more "man of the people" candidate (e.g., Chris Christie?) might have been able to do better. But the Republicans' problem went well beyond their choice of candidate. At heart, one suspects, Romney is really not very ideological, and is more of  a pragmatic, problem-solver - who happened to be the candidate of a very ideological party. If the Republican Party were still the party of, say, Romney's father, perhaps he would have felt more free to make a more convincing case to the electorate. To win the nomination, however, he had embraced a whole set of extreme positions - on the auto bailout, on immigration, on healthcare, on taxes, etc. For the Republican Party to become a competitive national party again, it will have to have come up with something serious to offer to the majority of the population that aren't business owners.

Perhaps the most obvious challenge for the Republicans, however, is the population itself. Romney was largely the choice of a shrinking component of the electorate - older and whiter (mainly male) voters. Obama won almost everyone else. If younger voters are settling into the Democratic Party, they are likely to remain Democrats, and it will take a lot for Republicans to dislodge them. And, of course, Obama won some 70% of the Latino vote. Yet, as recently as George W. Bush, who carried 44% of the Latino vote in 2004, it was possible to imagine the Republicans being competitive among Latino voters. The disrespect and hostility towards immigrants that has become Republican orthodoxy has paralyzed the party's ability to reach out to the largest growing ethnic group. The Republicans' problem is clear. The solution somewhat less so.

What about the Church?  In the aftermath of the French Revolution, some saw the best path for the Church in an alliance with the Old Regime and remained enthusiastic supporters of Restoration politics in 19th-century Europe. By the latter part of the century, however, that path hadn't succeeded, and an alternative path was obviously required. Pope Leo XIII encouraged French Catholics to make their peace with the French Republic, so that they could focus on other priorities. (The issue was not whether preferring the Old Regime was a good or bad political choice, but whether it was a religiously necessary choice).

As was the case in Europe after the French Revolution, there are real challenges facing the Church in this increasingly secular culture - and serious threats to religious liberty from the secular cultural elite (e.g., the HHS Mandate, which hopefully will be overturned in the courts). As citizens, Catholics, of course, are all over the map in their political preferences - and that is probably all to the good. A problem arises, however, when political preferences are interpreted as religiously necessary preferences. In discerning a path to re-evangelize American society and guarantee religious liberty, it is important not to politicize religion, not to act as if the path is to be found in alliance with a particular political party. Whatever the path to re-evangelizing American society and preserving religious liberty, it is not likely to be by identifying the Church with support for regressive tax policies, opposition to universal health care, or hostility to immigrants (who just happen to be the growing group in the Catholic Church in the US).

God and Neighbor

Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today.

Take to heart! History attests how faithfully the Jewish People have followed this command of the Lord for all these thousands of years – in good times and in bad, in prosperity and in poverty, through centuries of persecution almost to the point of extermination.

So certainly there was nothing surprising in Jesus’ answer to the scribe’s question. Of all the 613 commandments, there was really little doubt as to which should count as the first of all.

The scribe had only asked Jesus which was the first of all the commandments. But, without being asked, Jesus added another: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Both were taken from the Torah – the first from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, the second from the book of Leviticus. So neither commandment was new or unfamiliar to the scribe or anyone else in the audience. The novelty, if there was one, was in the way Jesus joined the two together. In doing so, Jesus expressed in words one of the implications of what God had done in joining together God and humanity in Jesus himself. In Jesus, God has joined us where we are, on our own turf, so to speak. In Jesus, God himself has become our neighbor. So we cannot possibly loved God and be unwilling to love our neighbor.

This seems like an especially fitting Gospel for this 1^st Sunday in November, when our attention is especially being called to our responsibilities as citizens. Political choices – whom or what party to vote for, who should benefit from tax policies, what to spend on and what not to spend on – all such choices are ultimately moral choices that express what we value, whom we care about enough to include and whom we’re willing to leave left out, and what kind of nation we want to be. We make such choices all the time, of course, but seldom so dramatically as on Election Day.

The weather has dominated the news in much of the country this past week and in our national media. Of course, we talk about the weather and complain about it all the time. One reason for that is that it is something we really can’t control and the effects of which we all share in. At best, most of the time, we comfort ourselves by taking shelter from nature's fury. Hurricane Sandy and the many other major storms that increasingly characterize this time of climate change, have reminded us how ephemeral our shelters are, how fleeting the profits we prize so much, how vulnerable the structures we rely upon, how interconnected and dependent we are on one another, how helpless and defenseless we are alone, how desperately we need government to keep us together and marshal our common resources for the common good.

A young person once asked me: Why study about Jesus? He’s dead, after all! Now, as a former political scientist and as a lover of history, I really do believe it is worth it to study the past – even (indeed especially) about people who are dead. But, more important than that, as a Christian, I believe Jesus is not dead but alive! That said,  I also recognize that the only way that most people are ever going to believe that Jesus is alive is if the community that calls itself Christian really means what it says – when it says that Jesus is alive – and communicates that message by taking seriously Jesus’ joining of the 2 Great Commandments.

Today’s Gospel reminds us that the shared challenge of citizenship is to consider the totality of one’s life – not just private life but our entire involvement in world we are part of – consider the totality of one’s life in the terms defined for us by the 2 Great Commandments, uniting our relationship with God and our relationship with one another.

Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 4, 2012.