Tag: Princeton University Press

AirTalk’s weekly political roundtable recaps the major headlines you might’ve missed in politics news over the weekend and looks ahead to the week to come. Here are the headlines what we’re following this week: DOJ says Mueller report will be public by mid-April Trump’s response Trump, Schiff war of words Schiff asked to step down as House Intel Chair How media covered Muller report collusion allegations 2020 Democratic candidates Biden accused of inappropriate kiss Beto officially kicks off 2020 campaign Buttigeig says he raised $7 million in first quarter for 2020 bid Trump threatens to close U.S.-Mexico border Trump admin wants ACA repealed in full Latest on unrest in Venezuela, Russian involvement Guests: Lynn Vavreck, professor of political science at UCLA and author of several books, including “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Election & the Battle for the Meaning of America” (Princeton University Press, October 2018) ; she tweets @vavreck Sean T. Walsh, Republican political analyst and partner at Wilson Walsh Consulting in San Francisco; he is a former adviser to California Governors Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger and a former White House staffer for Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush

In 1938, an ambitious young Texas congressman named Lyndon Johnson voted for a bill called the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the minimum wage. This was the famous “solid South” of the mid-20th century, after all. In the 1930s, the region supported economically progressive legislation, but by the 1940s, much of the South had soured on the New Deal. “Even though there was no partisan competition in the South, there was intraparty competition,” Caughey says, noting that “once members of Congress were elected, they would divide in ways that aligned either with the Democrats or Republicans nationally.” But while other interpretations of the Democratic Party in the South at the time depict it as being controlled by elites who ignored the masses, Caughey contends that Southern politicians backed away from their party’s program because voters would not have kept electing them otherwise. “A lot of Democratic Party primary contests in the South were often on the kinds of issues that divided Democrats and Republicans nationally, about the role of government, how high taxes should be, and other classic New Deal issues,” Caughey says. Of course, as Caughey details in the book, any discussion about public opinion in the South in this era comes with a huge qualification: Segregation prevented almost all African-Americans from voting, so the public opinion that swayed politicians was strictly white public opinion. “The distinctive regime in the South for most of the first part of the 20th century featured both disenfranchisement and a lack of party competition.” The issue of racial relations, Caughey notes, also strongly informs the South’s reversal regarding the New Deal. In the 1930s, much of the South supported the New Deal in large part because it brought jobs and infrastructure to what was the country’s most economically lagging region. The other was its even more famous flip away from the Democrats after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — signed by, yes, President Lyndon Johnson — to the point where the region is now heavily controlled by the Republican Party. The current dynamics, Caughey writes, still “exhibit an extraordinary degree of ideological and partisan polarization by race.” For his part, Caughey adds, he would like the book to open up avenues for further research about conditions of one-party domination in politics, something he affirms in the book’s conclusion: “My hope is the questions raised in this book will spur other scholars to pursue a broader research agenda on representation and democracy in one-party settings around the world.”