Global Trend

Its the Values, Stupid

In recent years, Americans have been battered by Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the corporate excesses of Enron, Disney, and WorldCom.

Now, as the results of the 2004 Presidential election demonstrated, voters are outraged, and values are making a comeback.

In a poll taken on the day after the election, The Barna Research Group found that born-again Christians supported President George W. Bush by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin. In contrast, “non-born-again” voters supported Senator John Kerry by an almost identical 59 percent to 39 percent division. The difference was the rate of turnout for each segment.

Although the born-again Christians constitute just 38 percent of the national population, they represented 53 percent of the votes cast in the election. Barna’s researchers concluded that if the born-again public had shown up proportional to its population size ? that is, if they represented only 38 percent of those who voted ? Kerry, not Bush, would have won the election by three percentage points.

In particular, evangelicals made an impact that was out of proportion to their numbers. This is the segment of the “born-again” population that takes Biblical principles most seriously. They comprise a mere 7 percent of the voting-aged population. But so many of them flocked to the polls that they accounted for 11 percent of the votes in the national election. According to Barna Research,1 85 percent of those votes were cast for Bush. Meanwhile, non-evangelical born-again Christians, whose votes equaled 42 percent of the total, chose Bush by a smaller margin: 56 percent to 44 percent.

And, as we forecasted nearly a year ago, this made all the difference in crucial U.S. Senate races in Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and South Dakota. In Colorado, the Democrat winner campaigned as a moderate and did his best to distance himself from Kerry. The one new Democrat in the Senate who has genuine liberal credentials comes from the heavily Democrat state of Illinois, where the Republican primary winner dropped out because of a sex scandal. That leaves Bush with a true “working Senate majority,” which he lacked throughout his first term.

More significantly for us here at Trends, this election represents the completion of the latest iteration of a long-term cycle of realignment that’s as old as the country itself. And as we’ll discuss in the next segment, the fall-out from this election is going to have significant implications for many years to come by fueling certain other trends.

In a recent book titled What’s the Matter With Kansas?,2 Thomas Frank argues that Kansans ? and many other Americans ? have increasingly given higher priority to moral issues than to economic issues. This makes no sense to Frank. He apparently buys into the notion that people are simply short-term economic maximizers who don’t care about right and wrong, but only want the biggest short-term payoff to be hedonistically squandered. Frank misses the point because he and most of his fellow pundits don’t understand the bigger historical and demographic picture.

To appreciate what has just taken place, we need to look back over the nation’s electoral history. A quick perusal reveals that a significant realignment of political power has consistently taken place every 36 years throughout our history. And, these alignments have alternated between the victory of a pragmatist and an idealist who represented the mood of each era.

During this new era, no party really had the upper hand. The next 36 years witnessed a tug of war between the two parties in which the Congress and the Presidency were both firmly in the hands of the Democrat party for only six years and the Republicans for only two years. For the remaining 28 years, at least one house of Congress was held by the party not in the White House. That brings us to the just-completed 2004 election, 36 years after 1968. It represents the latest inflection point in our electoral cycle. And, the results were precisely as our model predicted: The idealist, President George W. Bush, defeated the pragmatic, Senator John F. Kerry, by a relatively narrow margin.

This produced a new electoral realignment based on ideology. That ideological realignment was reflected in the fact that, for 33 percent of Bush voters, “character” was the crucial factor. By “character,” these voters by and large meant the personification of Judeo-Christian values.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE 72-YEAR VALUES CYCLE IN AMERICA?

The 36-year cycle represents the two halves of a bigger 72-year cycle. The full 72-year electoral cycle is driven by the shifting ideals of the populace from generation to generation. The first half of each cycle (e.g., 1932-1967) reflects the adoption of a new dominant ethos (e.g., The New Deal) as embodied in the vision and values of the electoral winner who launches the era (e.g., FDR). The second half of the cycle (e.g., 1968-2003) reflects a compromise of the ideals that drove the first half of the cycle. This compromise lets society get the best out of those ideals, while avoiding their excesses (e.g., Nixon created the EPA and strengthened “affirmative action,” while appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court).

Why do our ideals change every 72 years or so? It’s because no vision of the world is so good that it can’t be overdone. To further understand what going to happen, we need to look back at history. There we find that the big ideals that launch the 72-year cycles (i.e., Washington’s U. S. Constitution, Lincoln’s abolition of slavery, FDR’s New Deal, or George W. Bush’s traditional Judeo-Christian values) begin to make their big impact when fervently adopted by about one-third of the populace. Then, over the next 36 years that “ideal” becomes the status quo. At that point, a “principled opposition” achieves the critical mass to begin to push back; that was true of Jackson’s “southern coalition” in 1824, McKinley’s business coalition in 1896, or Nixon’s “silent majority” in 1968.

The activist consensus that launches a new 36-year segment is formed as the worldview of a generation evolves over its lifespan. Any worldview is made up of the pervasive ideals, or values, that form the underpinning for how people perceive reality. Our worldview determines what we believe to be right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. This is crucial because few things in life can be objectively assessed on indisputable empirical data. And even those few things are a still interpreted through the lens provided by our worldview.

For instance, Marxism has been a failure everywhere it’s been tried and Capitalism has been a success nearly everywhere; yet a few Marxist-socialists still exist on most college campuses throughout the world. Their worldview will not permit them to reach what appears to be an objective conclusion.

It’s crucial to note that when a new worldview reaches critical mass (i.e., about 30% of the population embraces it strongly) a new 72-year cycle is launched. That’s where we are now with respect to the resurgence of traditional Judeo-Christian values. This growing embrace of traditional Judeo-Christian values is reflected not only on surveys of religious belief such as Barna’s, but in polls of political identification. For example, in a mid-2004 Gallop Poll, 38% of respondents identified themselves as conservative, 43% identified themselves as moderate, and only 19% identified themselves as liberal.

This shift in worldview from liberal to conservative is ultimately resulting in a political realignment because one’s emerging worldview needs to be reconciled with traditional party definitions. Looking ahead a few years, the worldview fault line between the religious and the secular is becoming at least as significant today as that between laissez-faire capitalism and the welfare state in the 1930s.

Looking objectively at the data, it seems unlikely the most religious ethnic group in the U. S., African-Americans, will remain unified for the long-term within the political party that has aligned itself by default with secularism (i.e., the Democrats).

Looking ahead, those who don’t like the new direction of the country should take heart in the likelihood that, in 2040, a secularist movement will succeed in halting the Judeo-Christian tide without totally reversing it. However, those who don’t want wait 40+ years to live in a more secular country than America in the 1990s, might want to consider immigrating to Sweden or The Netherlands. Otherwise, you’re likely to have to wait a very long time.

George Washington, the great idealist, was chosen in 1788 and his term began in 1789. Thirty-six years later, in 1824, John Quincy Adams, another idealist, faced the pragmatist General Andrew Jackson. Jackson won the popular vote and the electoral vote, but since neither had a majority because of minor candidates, the election was settled by the House of Representatives. The House selected Adams but, in the rematch of 1828, Jackson validated his win four years earlier and went on to set the policies that dominated the next several decades.

Thirty-six years later, in 1860, the idealist Abraham Lincoln faced the pragmatic Stephen Douglas. The split over the issue of slavery and the nation’s economic priorities was so deep that a bitter Civil War ensued. But, from that war, Lincoln’s vision of America emerged triumphant.

Then, in 1896, the idealist William Jennings Bryan lost to the pragmatist William McKinley. McKinley’s strong pro-business, free market philosophy prevailed throughout the subsequent 36 years. Republican occupancy of the White House was only interrupted when William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt split the Republican vote in 1912, and that permitted the election of Woodrow Wilson.

That era came to an end with the election of 1932, in which the pragmatic Herbert Hoover was defeated by the idealistic Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s victory depended on combining the “solid Democrat south” with the industrial labor vote in the north.

In response to the Great Depression, Roosevelt ushered in The New Deal, which redefined the relationship between business, the citizens, and the government. The New Deal framework set the tone for the next 36 years, and reached its pinnacle in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. During this period, the Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House for 24 years while the Republicans only controlled both for two years: 1953 and 1954.

The New Deal era began to fade with the pivotal realignment in the election of 1968. The country, torn by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, faced the choice between the idealistic Hubert Humphrey and the pragmatic Richard Nixon.

As the 36-year model would anticipate, the election went narrowly to Nixon. In the process, the “solid Democrat south” that had emerged from the Civil War shifted into the Republican column for at least the next 36 years.

So what does this all mean? Admittedly, politics is a tricky game where long-range forecasts often disappoint. For example, few people would have expected John Quincy Adams to lose the popular and electoral vote in 1824 and still become President. The same could be said of George W. Bush, who prevailed in 2000 despite losing the popular vote. But with that caveat, we offer four forecasts for your consideration:

Social conservatives can be expected to hold the balance of power in the coming decades. This outcome will be driven by demographic trends ? including the aging of the population, the mass migration to the South, and the influx of socially conservative Hispanic immigrants.

Republicans are likely to control both houses of Congress, with only brief interruptions, for the next three decades. This assumes there will be no major economic catastrophe coming in the wake of the 21st century boom discussed in Trend #1. The biggest risk to this forecast will probably come in 2012. This bodes well for those with pro-business, free-market priorities.

The Presidency of the United States is also likely to remain in Republican hands for most of the period. There may be one or two exceptions, which would be similar to the administrations of Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And, like those three presidents, we expect that any Democrat administration between now and 2040 will merely represent an opportunistic response by the weaker party, rather than a decisive reversal for the stronger party.

As always, the Federal Judiciary, with its lifetime appointments, will lag the other branches of government in responding to the realignment of popular ideology. That’s why FDR and his successors had to spend decades transforming a conservative court appointed by generations of Republicans into the liberal court of the 1960s. Similarly, we expect Bush and his successors to take most of this decade to transform a court defined by the post-Johnson tug-of-war between Democrats and Republicans into a consistently conservative court. But, more immediately, Bush will have a freer hand than in his first term to appoint judges to existing and near-term District and Appellate vacancies. Senate Republicans, emboldened by the 2004 election results, are expected to use a take-no-prisoners parliamentary strategy to resolve any attempted filibusters of Judicial nominees.

References List :
1. For information on The Barna Groups post-election research, visit their website at:www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdates2. Whats the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank is published by Metropolitan Books. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Thomas Frank. All rights reserved.