Waiting for a Landslide - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...waiting-for-a-landslide.html
compromise realignment politics majority transformative election
shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 11
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realignments in American politics are usually punctuated by transformative elections, in which the old order suddenly gives way and a new majority emerges in its place.
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One reason American policy-making has become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable” — in the words of the downgrade that Standard & Poor’s handed to the United States on Friday night — is the enduring influence of V. O. Key’s theory, and the seductive dream of realignment that it conjured up.
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This “realignment theory” was embraced by many scholars because it fit the historical record so well. Every 30 to 40 years, it seemed, the American political order had decisively turned over: in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans trounced John Adams’s Federalists; in 1828, when the Democratic-Republicans split into the Democrats and the Whigs; and then on down through Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory, William McKinley’s 1896 consolidation of a Republican majority, and the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.
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there’s no guarantee that such a majority will be established in time to walk the country backward from the fiscal cliff. And in the meantime, our leaders have a responsibility that transcends their ideological differences: the responsibility to work with one another to keep the country solvent.