CHAPTER 9

A Lasting Union

When it comes to balancing the forces of individualism and collectivism, we don’t need to guess at what works most effectively in America, despite our balkanized cultural geography. History offers a clear and consistent guide.

We are in aggregate one of the most individualistic political cultures on earth, the legacy of a revolution that was carried out at a time and place when the primary foe of liberty was a monarchical government, its primary beneficiary an enlightened aristocratic elite. Informed by John Locke, we put great faith in human capacity, innovation, and virtue, and remain vigilant against the rise of an overarching government that might deny us our individual potential. Socialism, which would place its trust in an all-knowing government of allegedly disinterested experts to control the economy and shape the social fabric, has always been a political nonstarter in America, whether one lives in community-minded Yankeedom or on the libertarian frontiers of Appalachia. Many liberal democracies have embraced social democracy to build capitalist-fueled welfare states that invariably top global rankings for wealth, happiness, and social trust; in aggregate, Americans have shown time and again that they don’t want such a system. In the midst of a world war, Woodrow Wilson enacted a collectivist agenda that featured the criminalization of dissent; with peace, this agenda was soundly repudiated for swerving into tyranny. Even at the height of the New Deal, FDR encountered cross-country resistance to direct government participation in the workings of a peacetime economy, be it through central economic planning or the hiring of large numbers of laborers to build public works. Lyndon Johnson’s experts made assurances that they had the knowledge to wage successful wars on poverty and North Vietnam; their failure to deliver on their promises brought down more than a presidential administration. There is an American consensus that government can’t solve all problems and should limit its reach to those areas where it can succeed. We are a practical people; we want results and have little patience for failure.

That said, we are not a libertarian federation. Outside the Deep South and pre-1980s Tidewater, there has never been sustained public support for laissez-faire economics, the Far West and Greater Appalachia having a populist streak that quickly bristles against the oligarchic results that follow when these policies are put into practice. Each time we have been down the laissez-faire road, the trip ended in disaster. Twice in a century, economic libertarianism nearly brought down the world economy, threatening liberal democracy itself. In 2011 and 2013, its champions threatened to bring it down again if their demands weren’t unconditionally met. They did so because their program lacked the political support to be enacted through nonauthoritarian channels. Decades of polling and voting have revealed that very few Americans actually want to return to the unfettered social Darwinism of the Gilded Age, as demonstrated by the election of Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and the rejection of Newt Gingrich’s revolutionaries in 1996 and George W. Bush’s congressional enablers in 2006. As we’ve seen, despite the propaganda efforts of FreedomWorks and other champions of laissez-faire, even the Tea Party grassroots activists of 2009–12 vigorously supported guaranteed old-age pensions and government-administered health insurance for the elderly. Unlike socialism, however, the laissez-faire agenda does have the committed support of one of our most powerful regional cultures, and some measure of rhetorical sympathy in others, which is why it continues to periodically gain a foothold on our political landscape.

So the American consensus lies in the territory between the unfettered capitalism of the late nineteenth century and turn-of-the-millennium West European social democratic states. If a politician or party leans too far in one direction or the other, Americans will vote them out of office. Somewhere within this space between Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” of 1910 and the national liberal consensus of 1965 lies an agenda that can again command a supermajority, that can again set the American Republic to the task the founders prescribed for it, the promotion of human happiness. Given the system of checks and balances that are embodied in our Constitution, it’s perhaps the only way that we can move forward to confront the challenges the twenty-first century will bring our world.

There are two reasons why the early twenty-first-century United States has found its governing institutions paralyzed, incapable of reliably performing such basic functions as passing budgets or approving the borrowing required to pay for those already passed.

The first, which should be abundantly clear to readers by now, is that we are not a nation-state in the European mold: a state governed by a particular nation with a distinct culture and values, like Germany, Austria, France, or Sweden. The United States is a federation comprised of several “nations” that share very little in terms of common ideals, goals, and views on the meaning of freedom. Throughout our history, our component regional cultures have fought with one another over whether freedom was to be understood only in terms of individual or “economic” liberty, or in terms of the promotion of the common good or the “freedom of the community.”

We have been able to function within the constraints of this system for long periods because one political formation or another has been able to assemble a regional supermajority sufficient to control the levers of federal power: a majority in the electoral college and House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof one in the Senate. This was the case during the Civil War, when a Yankee-led coalition had free rein in Congress, and again between 1877 and 1929, when laissez-faire-minded Republicans and conservative southern Democrats held sway. It was also the status quo during the national liberal period from 1932 to 1965, when progressive Democrats and Republicans built an active federal government. There were inklings of it in the early 1980s, when a new Dixie–Far West coalition put Reagan in the White House and brought a Republican-controlled Senate, but it was short-lived. In 2008, Democrats obtained control of all three bodies, leading many observers to write eulogies for the laissez-faire conservatives, only to see them seize the House in the very next election, propelled by a popular movement bearing a Deep Southern agenda. Looking back on the period since the collapse of the national liberal order, it’s clear that neither the Deep Southerners’ hierarchical libertarianism, nor the New Left’s social libertarianism, nor the Christian right’s social collectivism, nor the Dixie-led Democratic Leadership Council brand of triangulating neoliberalism is capable of building a governing supermajority.

Our cultural balkanization also helps account for why early twenty-first-century elections have become such suspenseful contests, decided by the shifting allegiances of a relatively minor number of voters from a small and recurring cohort of (mostly Midlander) battleground counties in a handful of swing states. Over the past half-century the regional blocs have remained stable. Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast have faced off against the Deep South, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West over civil rights, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the environmental and gay rights movements, health care and financial reform, and the last three presidential elections. (The exception: rapidly changing Tidewater, which became a “swing nation” from 2008.)

The northern alliance has been the champion of collective action for the common good, consistently favoring the maintenance of a strong central government, federal checks on corporate power, and the conservation of natural resources, regardless of which party was dominant in the region at any given time. (Recall that prior to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, the Republicans were the party of Yankeedom.) The presidents it has produced—John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Barack Obama—have all sought to better society through government programs, expanded civil rights protections, and environmental safeguards. All faced opposition from the Dixie-led nations even from within their own parties. With the southern takeover of the GOP, Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast have become overwhelmingly Democratic in recent years.

The other coalition has been led by the Deep South, whose oligarchy’s agenda has remained consistently laissez-faire and social Darwinist. Deep Southern leaders have fought to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible and a tax structure that pushes much of the financial burden onto those least able to afford it. In office, the Deep South’s leaders focus on cutting taxes for the rich, funneling massive subsidies to agribusiness and oil companies, rolling back labor and environmental initiatives, and creating “guest worker” programs and “right to work” laws to ensure a cheap, docile labor supply. Finding coalition partners for such an agenda hasn’t been easy, so the Deep South has had to rely on a common strain of libertarianism as the basis for an expedient alliance with the far more populist-minded people of Greater Appalachia and the Far West. Even Tidewater, which once shared hierarchical libertarian notions with the Deep South, has been rapidly transforming into more of a Midland culture as the expanding federal halos around Washington, D.C., and Hampton Roads, Virginia (home to the world’s largest naval base), have overcome vast stretches of the region. This “Dixie bloc” is much more vulnerable than its northern rivals, whose component nations have a far higher degree of cohesion.

Neither bloc, however, has the electoral power to maintain itself in office. Neither, on its own, holds an electoral college majority, or a filibuster-proof Senate one, or even a majority in the House without the temporary boost of radical partisan gerrymandering. Even as the U.S. population has generally shifted southward from Yankee and Midland states in recent decades, El Norte—not the “red coalition”—has digested many of the gains. As a result, both coalitions must woo the fickle “swing nations”—especially the Midlands—to win power.

If an American political formation is to build a lasting supermajority, therefore, it will need to alter its philosophy and vision to win over one or more of either the swing regions or the more weakly aligned regions of the opposing camp. Again, history is a guide as to how this can be accomplished. Policy challenges are ever-changing, and the relative strength of the country’s nations have waxed and waned, but when it comes to the ideals each regional culture treasures, there has been remarkable continuity. By finding the common ground between the general characteristics of the aforementioned “zone of American consensus” and the particular characteristics of certain regional cultures, we can identify a set of political principles that can triumph.

Either political party can embrace the agenda that follows, or perhaps some group can beat the odds and build a viable new one to do so. At this writing, however, it’s hard to imagine the Republican Party doing so, for several reasons. First, it has become the de facto vehicle of the Deep Southern agenda and relies on the libertarian-leaning regions of the country for electoral support; abandoning the Deep South would mean abandoning the party’s base. Second, in recent decades the party has been completely purged of not only its national liberal wing (the one to which Dwight Eisenhower, Jacob Javits, and Harold Church belonged), but also its old establishment Yankee/Midlander one (the school of Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole). With the Tea Party takeover of great swaths of the party’s local- and state-level infrastructure, it’s hard to see the GOP being able to make the political sacrifices necessary to secure lasting power.

The Democrats, by contrast, have a considerable advantage. They could adopt this agenda without sacrificing any part of their current regional coalition: Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. El Norte already votes Democratic by default because the Republicans have made their party unwelcoming to nonwhites and immigrants; the agenda contains nothing that would change that. Meanwhile, the Democrats would likely consolidate control in the Midlands, win the defection of much of the Far West, and even make inroads in Greater Appalachia. The presidential election map might return to that of the 1950s, but with the colors reversed, the Democrats holding Ike’s supermajority, and the Republicans isolated in Adlai Stevenson’s old redoubts of the Deep South and parts of Greater Appalachia. If the Democrats captured hearts and minds in the Far West, the Senate would be theirs, what with each of those sparsely populated states represented by two of the chamber’s members. If they won Midlander hearts as well, they would have a lock on the House. If they overreached or disappointed, however, they and the country would quickly return right back to where they started.

Regardless of what political formation seizes the opportunity, here is how the program would work. The American Way, the set of political values shared by the vast majority of Americans and the American Nations, is about pursuing happiness through a free and fair competition between individuals and the ideas, output, and institutions they produce. If someone becomes fantastically rich through hard work or brilliant innovation, most Americans applaud him or her. If someone squanders his or her opportunities by greed, sloth, or indulgence, most Americans have little sympathy. Rightly or wrongly, we as a country have great faith that when individuals are left to pursue their ambitions, their aggregate actions will contribute to the creation and sustenance of a happy, healthy, and adaptable society, one responsive to change and inhospitable to the seeds of tyranny: ignorance, hopelessness, fear, and persecution. There are other ways to build a contented, thriving society—witness the pre-contact Algonquians or contemporary Scandinavia—but their paths to achieving that state are ones we will never follow.

Notice, though, that I have argued that this competitive society needs to be not only free, but fair. Indeed, we’ve learned by painful experience that these two values are linked: An unfair society quickly ceases to be a free one. Once formed, monopolistic firms will use their control of their market to (unfairly) crush competitors and their innovations. If left entirely unchecked, the winners of a Darwinian social struggle will seize control not just of a nation’s wealth, but of its government, courts, and internal security, becoming a hereditary oligarchy that (unfairly) prevents others from ever rising to challenge them. Both phenomena have happened time and again in both the United States and the wider world, from Standard Oil to Gazprom and the successful planter families of seventeenth-century Barbados and twentieth-century Guatemala. Free markets and free societies are not naturally occurring developments, like a mature forest. They’re more like successful gardens, the product of sustained nourishment, attention, and, yes, protection.

It’s through government that we protect our freedom, be it economic or civic. We use it to keep our external enemies at bay, of course, but also to ensure that our unending domestic competition remains fairly played. Our system requires a government that’s strong enough to act as our collective referee, to prevent a slide into corporate or plutocratic oligarchy by stopping “cheaters” and the accretion of hereditary privilege and by maintaining the conditions for free and fair competition. (That we can’t allow it to be so strong as to become itself a tyrannical force is obvious to most Americans, just as it was to the founders who built so many checks and balances into its blueprint.) The American Way isn’t a matter of handouts or a government hand up, or a plutocracy’s resources trickling down; it’s a matter of a supportive government having your back as you make your way up in the world or keeping your power in check if you’re one of the 0.1 percent who have reached the top.

These are the hallmarks of a tradition that has been with us since the founding of our country, and they are neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” Democratic nor Republican. “In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity,” Teddy Roosevelt said in his famous 1910 “New Nationalism” speech, a battle cry for fairness at a time, much like our own, in which oligarchic forces were ascendant. “One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War,” he told the audience, which included many Union veterans of that conflict, “and that is what we strive for now.”1

Herbert Hoover, no enemy of the free enterprise system, wrote a dozen years later during the Roaring Twenties:

Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes; that we shall stimulate effort of each individual to achievement . . . while he in turn must stand up to the emery wheel of competition. . . .

We have also learned that fair division can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant. . . . This guarding of our individualism against stratification insists . . . that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers’ places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom. . . . Otherwise our American fields of opportunity would have been clogged with long generations inheriting their fathers’ privileges without their fathers’ capacity for service.2

Eighty-nine years later, Barack Obama, a president well aligned with the old progressive Republican tradition, returned to the Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech to pay homage to the ideas therein. Roosevelt, he said,

understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest. . . . Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said . . . If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes—especially for the wealthy—our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. . . . But here’s the problem: it doesn’t work. It has never worked. . . . It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and in its future [and] . . . in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

In 2014, Michael Gerson, chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Peter Wehner, who also served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, laid out their “conservative vision of government”:

Conservatives believe not in equal results—a goal that leads to an excessive concentration of government power and to shared economic mediocrity—but in equality of opportunity. Government holds some responsibility for creating the ground for that equality of opportunity, which is not a natural condition. But government oversteps itself, creating corrosive resentments and economic havoc, when it tries to guarantee equality of results. . . .

If conservatives are rightly at odds with liberals on this point, however, many conservatives fail to see the extent to which equal opportunity itself, a central principle of our national self-understanding, is becoming harder to achieve. . . . Dysfunctional institutions routinely betray children and young adults. Children raised in communities of chaos and disorder—where schools are broken and the streets are violent and drug use is prevalent—face enormously difficult odds. . . . Tremendous effort and creative policy will be required to fix the institutions that can restore such communities and with them the level playing field of equal opportunity.3

Indeed, this doctrine of fairness, of equality of opportunity and intervention against oligarchy, can be traced in a line that stretches from Abraham Lincoln to Dwight D. Eisenhower. It calls on government to take a stronger role in ensuring fairness than Herbert Hoover was prepared to contemplate, but stops short of the technocratic overreach of FDR’s National Recovery Administration or Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. It virulently defends fairness for all individuals, and seeks to render irrelevant the group-based thinking that gave us affirmative action for whites (the slave system, Jim Crow, the pre-1964 New Deal) and, to make up for that failure, for nonwhites and women. Building a fair society after centuries of injustice may require proactive measures to address the problems to which it has given rise, but ultimately neither accords with the country’s ideals.

In the early twenty-first century, fairness must be reasserted as the central issue of our political discourse and made the central value of a new political coalition. It would be the foundation for championing individual achievement and investments in our shared institutions and resources that foster more of it. It would be unapologetic in seeking to protect the competitiveness and security of the market and the health of consumers, workers, and the environment. And, yes, it would return the tax code to a level at which the rich and ultra-rich pay a larger share of the burden of maintaining a civilization that has served them so well.

This book seeks to articulate a successful political philosophy from which policies would organically flow, rather than propose the policies themselves, in part because the latter become quickly dated. However, in broad terms, here are some of the policies a new doctrine of fairness might argue for from the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In the current climate, shifting tax policies to require greater contributions from the wealthy is maligned as “redistributive,” whereas adjustments in the other direction—through a so-called flat tax, for instance—are championed as “fair.” All taxes are redistributive, of course, but those that divert some resources from the wealthy to provide physical and social infrastructure used by everyone are fair as well. The laissez-faire approach of the radical libertarians does not ensure equality of opportunity, because through no fault of their own people come into this world from radically unequal starting points. Left to its own, such a society turns into an oligarchy, because inherited advantages tend to accrete over time. Neoconservative political scientist Francis Fukuyama described the conundrum in his two-volume, multimillennia history of the state:

Elites tend to get more entrenched because they can use their wealth, power, and social status to get access to the government, and to use the power of the state to protect themselves and their children. This process will continue until nonelites succeed in mobilizing politically to reverse it or otherwise protect themselves. . . . As in the case of redistribution, the trick is to prevent the overrepresentation of elites without punishing them for their ability to generate wealth.4

Liberal economist Paul Krugman presented statistics showing that the worst-performing eighth graders of 1988 from the wealthiest fifth of families—the “Rich Dumb Kids”—had a higher chance of graduating from college than the best-performing eighth graders from the poorest fifth. “What this tells us is that the idea that we have anything close to an equality of opportunity is clearly a fantasy,” he wrote. “It would be closer to the truth . . . to say that in modern America, class—inherited class—usually trumps talent.”5

Maintaining equality of opportunity requires rechanneling wealth—especially inherited wealth—back into institutions that level the playing field for those born without advantages: early childhood education, health insurance coverage, food assistance for poor families, and support for our public schools, community colleges, and universities, to be sure, but also the parks, libraries, recreational facilities, highways, and transportation systems that foster civic and individual well-being. In 2012, this principle inspired the world’s third-richest man, Warren Buffett, to call on Congress to enact a minimum tax on the very rich: 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million (to include dividends and capital gains) and 35 percent above that. “A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours,” he counseled, having previously noted that he paid taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. Meanwhile, the taxes paid by the highest income bracket—which in 2013 started at $450,000 a year for married couples—have plummeted, falling from 92 percent in 1952 to 70 percent in 1965 to 50 percent in 1986 to 39.6 percent in 2013; given that the economy remained thriving in the 1950s and 1960s, there’s clearly some room to maneuver. The inheritance tax, which currently exempts the first $5.4 million in value per individual and $10.8 million for a married couple, stands at 40 percent, but is under attack from laissez-faire Republicans nonetheless; at a minimum, one would want to retain a tax that serves as a barrier to the creation and maintenance of a hereditary aristocracy.6

In the regulatory realm, the goal would be primarily defensive: to protect the accomplishments of the twentieth century from those who would have us return to the Gilded Age. One should always seek to make regulations more efficient, so long as they accomplish their goals, but the goals themselves should remain sacrosanct: conserving the nation’s patrimony, protecting human health and the stability of the ecological systems that sustain us, and maintaining competitive marketplaces by preventing abusive and monopolistic business practices. Some outdated regulations were done away with during the period between 1980 and 2008 (few pine for the days of the Ma Bell telephone monopolies), but so were some that served important functions in maintaining fairness, like the Glass-Steagall Act and the campaign finance controls overturned by the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision. Restoring a number of these would be both prudent and popular.

Investments in schools and the like would help keep the playing field even. There are others one would make for the reasons Lincoln would counsel: because they promote the happiness of the people but cannot be easily or effectively provided by the private sector. These would include increased investment in basic scientific research, because our innovation-driven economy depends on it, and because it has a high return on investment. Each dollar spent by the National Institutes of Health, for instance, typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within the year. The $24 billion Apollo program put men on the Moon, but it also created over fifteen hundred commercial spin-offs that improved the quality of life and created entire industrial sectors, from solar panels and heart monitors to advanced insulation, quartz timepieces, and cordless drills. Similarly, investment in vital national infrastructure—bridges, tunnels, highways, airports, harbors, fast and high-speed railway lines, water treatment plants, and modern electrical grids—supports both our economy and our social fabric.

Numerous studies have found that such spending more than pays for itself, often generating two dollars in economic activity for every dollar spent. At the same time, one would seek not to invest in ventures that actually damage the country, like purchasing shockingly expensive and strategically inappropriate weapons systems the Pentagon itself doesn’t want or providing subsidies to oil companies at a time when they are generating the highest profits in the history of the world. Oil industry subsidies—mostly in the form of tax breaks—come to nearly $5 billion a year, which represents the entire budget of the National Cancer Institute. Former representative Barney Frank, longtime chair of the House Budget Committee, estimated that something on the order of $1 trillion could be saved over ten years by dropping one of our three methods (missiles, bombers, and submarines) of delivering nuclear weapons on Doomsday and reducing our count of overseas bases. This would go a long way toward paying down the budget deficit run up by past supply-side administrations or providing proper care for soldiers injured serving the country in previous wars.7

Americans are practical-minded people. They may want government to have a limited scope of action, but they want it to function well in those areas where it operates. The doctrine of fairness gives it a clear mission that is consistent with the fundamental values of a supermajority of our regional cultures.

The reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 prompted a vigorous debate among Democrats about the best path forward to rebuild a regional governing coalition. Since the emergence of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the early 1990s, Democrats had sought to make themselves more competitive in the South by becoming more like the Republicans of the era: amenable to deregulating business and banking or scaling back social benefits for the poor; supportive of global trade agreements; and emphasizing individual responsibility. While these tactics enabled a Greater Appalachian native son, Bill Clinton, to narrowly capture and retain the White House in the 1990s, they also saw the collapse of the party’s control of Congress and, in 2000, the humiliating loss of every single Dixie state save Florida by Clinton’s successor and fellow Greater Appalachian, Al Gore. Instead of holding ground in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Tidewater, the DLC era resulted in the rapid consolidation of Republican control there. Instead of drawing the wide center of the American electorate to their camp, the party’s pro-business policies drove white working-class voters from their coalition, endangering the party’s competitiveness in the key swing states of the Midlands. Given a choice between a Republican Party and a Republican Party Lite, most voters had decided to opt for the real thing. The DLC strategy had failed electorally, certainly, but by increasing inequality, vigorously supporting the disastrous war in Iraq, and creating the conditions for the financial meltdown of 2008, it had also failed to provide for the greater happiness of the people.

In the aftermath of 2004, when New Democrat John Kerry resoundingly lost “the South,” the Far West, and the presidential election to George W. Bush, many Democratic strategists began calling on the party to return to its national liberal roots and embrace policies that actually help, rather than harm, working- and middle-class voters. These critics noted that when they ran candidates who did just that, the party had made gains in “red” areas of the country, because they were able to drive a wedge between socially conservative voters and the laissez-faire agenda of the early twenty-first-century GOP. “New Democrats, backed by huge corporate contributions, say that the party must reduce corporate regulation and embrace a free-trade policy that is wiping out local economies throughout the heartland,” progressive operative David Sirota wrote in a widely discussed essay. “Yet these centrists get slaughtered at the ballot box, and their counterparts—the progressive economic populists—are racking up wins and relegating the DLC argument to the scrap heap.”8

Proponents of this “back to national liberalism” point of view quickly broke into two camps. One, typified by University of Maryland, Baltimore County, political scientist Thomas Schaller, argued that the party should forget “the South” altogether, turning its attention instead to the regions I call the Far West and El Norte, where the fairness doctrine comports with underlying regional values. It’s also a region that’s socially libertarian, rather than socially conservative, wanting the government to leave alone not only gun ownership but also other arguably private social issues. “So, if a Democratic candidate approaches a Midwestern or western voter and says, ‘Hey, I support the Second Amendment,’ that voter may reply, ‘Great, let’s hear what you have to say about taxes, health care and education,’” Schaller wrote. “If a Democratic candidate says the same thing to a southern voter, the response is more likely to be, ‘Great, but what are your views on abortion, teaching evolution in schools, or civil unions?’”9

Indeed, Schaller took his suggestion one step further, advising “economic populists” not just to ignore “the South” but to actively run against it. In his 2006 treatise, Whistling Past Dixie, however, it became clear that what he was really talking about running against was the Deep South. In developing his argument, he spends several pages describing South Carolina’s track record of having “opposed or defied almost every beneficent social and political change in American history,” racking up a “constitutional-historical . . . rap sheet: first to overturn a provincial government during the revolutionary period; last to abandon the Atlantic slave trade; first to call for nullifying the Constitution’s federal authority; first to secede from the Union; last to abolish the white primary; first to litigate against the integration of public schools and challenge the Voting Rights Act. Whenever America finds itself at some social or political crossroads and in need of direction, perhaps the best thing to do is ask, ‘What would South Carolina do?’ And then do the opposite.”10

Other observers have cautioned against writing off the South, suggesting that doing so would be squandering a historic opportunity. Bob Moser, chief political reporter for The Nation, argued that a fairness doctrine–like platform could “translate the South’s economic populist tradition into a forward-looking, class-based politics with broad appeal to blacks and whites alike.” In Blue Dixie, published in 2008, he maintained that “a multiracial, post–religious right generation of Southerners has begun to emerge, with precious little patience for the politics of the past,” that could be joined with “millions of middle- and working-class boomers who have lived through too many false economic dawns to keep believing the same old lines and by millions of laid-off and forgotten industrial workers.” This new force, Moser argued, could be harnessed by candidates who “reasserted economic fairness as the central moral issue of politics.”11

Revealingly, though, Moser’s evidence for the efficacy of such an approach came almost entirely from Greater Appalachia, the only part of Dixie that has actually had an “economic populist tradition.” He cited the Democratic fairness doctrine success stories of the first decade of the twenty-first century: Jim Webb, cultural champion of the Scots-Irish, who won a razor-thin upset victory in 2006 to represent Virginia in the U.S. Senate by making inroads into that state’s Appalachian vote; John Yarmuth, who ousted an incumbent five-term congresswoman in a liberal northern Kentucky district; Larry Kissell, who took down a freshman Republican in 2008 to represent an Appalachian-dominated House district in North Carolina; and Heath Shuler, a Christian conservative who campaigned on economic and environmental “Mountain Values” to win a highland Appalachian seat in North Carolina. Moser followed Webb across Virginia as he articulated an economic populist message. “The natural base of the Democratic party, working-class folks, looked at both parties back in the ’80s and saw they weren’t going to get any help on economic issues,” the candidate told him. “If we can get a number of these people to come back to the Democratic Party based on economic populism and fairness, rather than the way they’ve been maneuvered on issues like flag burning, God, guts, guns, gays—if they can be reached out to with respect, and in terms of fundamental fairness, I think a lot of them will come back to the Democratic Party.” Webb found he could make gains in Appalachia by doing just that, although the core of his support came from the D.C. suburbs and other parts of rapidly changing Tidewater. In the Deep South, however, economic populists weren’t winning any victories.12

The reality is that Schaller is correct not about “the South” but about the Deep South: It’s a region whose values any supermajority-seeking party should run against. The Deep South’s tradition of hierarchical libertarianism is profoundly un-American, being authoritarian in governance, oligarchic in economics, retrograde in human rights. At the same time, Moser’s points are correct not in regard to “the South” but for Greater Appalachia: There is a strong populist and antioligarchic component to the culture that will respond to the doctrine of fairness, especially when conveyed by a social conservative.

Today, Appalachia and the Deep South are bonded together by a shared Protestant religious heritage that focuses on individual salvation in the next world and discourages efforts to perfect the current one. But in the realms of economics and power, Greater Appalachia is also a culture that prizes personal freedom and resents domination by outsiders, which is why it has had a near monopoly as the source of southern populists (LBJ, Ross Perot, Sam Rayburn, Mike Huckabee, Jim Webb) and pro-business liberals (Cordell Hull, Bill Clinton, Al Gore). There are opportunities to make inroads into states dominated by Greater Appalachia—Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, or Tennessee—slowly transforming them from solid “red” partners of the Deep South to uncertain red-leaning ones. Small gains at the margins in places like south-central Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, or southern Missouri might tip the balance of an entire state in a presidential, gubernatorial, or Senate race. Because Tidewater is so rapidly changing, Virginia is already becoming a “blue” state, and the fairness doctrine could do the same for North Carolina, further eroding the “solid South.”

In the Far West, the dividends of a fairness doctrine could be dramatic, potentially tipping many mountain states out of the laissez-faire camp. In both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama, an outsider who spent nearly his entire adult life in Yankeedom, was able to defeat Republican rivals campaigning on a Dixie-bloc platform in Colorado and Nevada, and in 2008 nearly captured Montana as well. In the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, Democrats won governors’ races in Wyoming, Montana, and Arizona and Senate seats in Montana, Nevada, Colorado, both Dakotas, and Nebraska. Democrats have come to dominate the state legislatures of Nevada and Colorado and regularly hold one chamber in Montana. Gains in the Far West could also increase Democratic control in Oregon, Washington, and California, where the party currently relies on Left Coast sections for support.

From any perspective, the current Deep Southern–led “red” bloc is vulnerable. Tidewater has already left the coalition, Appalachia is potentially disloyal, and the Far West is susceptible to wooing. If fairness doctrine advocates were to campaign in these regions on promises to bring rogue bankers, mortgage lenders, mining interests, health insurers, seed companies, and monopolistic food processors to heel, they would have wide appeal; in egalitarian libertarian regions like Appalachia and the Far West, regulation can be sold as a matter of justice, the closing of tax loopholes a matter of fairness. Calls for new government programs are unlikely to win many hearts and minds in these two regions, but regulating to improve the efficiency and fairness of both the government and the marketplace can.

Simultaneously, such a strategy would also consolidate control over the two major “swing regions” of the national election map. In El Norte, Hispanics have reasserted political control after more than a century of subjugation. The Dixie agenda has always been unpopular there, while the Tea Party movement in the region has served as a vehicle for whites’ fears that they are losing “their” country to Hispanic Americans and Mexican and Latin American immigration. (“Immigration attitudes are an important predictor of Tea Party movement support in the West,” a 2011 study of polling data by two Sam Houston State University political scientists found, as were “economic issues related to minority relations.”) So long as “blue bloc” political leaders continue to champion cultural inclusiveness—which the Dixie bloc does not—they can count on political and electoral support from this fast-growing region. The Hispanic population is expected to triple between 2010 and 2050—accounting for most of the nation’s overall growth—and much of it is predicted to take place in El Norte. This will result in a commensurate decrease in radical libertarian influence in the legislatures and congressional delegations of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico.13

The fairness doctrine would also rally the long-neglected white working and lower middle classes of the Midlands back to the “blue” camp, potentially turning this swing region into a solid member of the coalition. Midlanders are communitarian, not libertarian, in their outlook, with a strong commitment to fairness and a relatively tolerant social outlook; combine that perspective with an economic agenda that isn’t explicitly hostile to the Rust Belt economy, and you have a strong standing here. The people of the Midlands also generally want their communities left alone so they can get on with their lives, but in the midst of a crisis they can be counted on to defend the federal union from authoritarianism, bigotry, or dismemberment. The region was generally apathetic about the Tea Party movement, providing just two members of its sixty-person House caucus in the high-water year of 2011. But were Republicans to actually execute the Deep South’s agenda—slashing Social Security, Medicare, and federal spending on public education—Midlanders would rally to their northern neighbors.

In summary, a political movement championing the fairness doctrine could capture a reliable majority in seven of our nine major regional cultures—Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, El Norte, the Far West, and the Left Coast—together comprising nearly two-thirds of the population of the United States and guaranteeing an even larger proportion of the electoral college and Senate. It would also enable marginal—and possibly significant—gains in Greater Appalachia, essentially isolating the laissez-faire camp in the Deep South. It would be, in short, the basis for a governing supermajority capable of moving the country forward over the undoubtedly spirited objections of its most authoritarian region.