Sixteen years ago last August, I sat in the office of the Washington State Democratic Party Chairman.  I tried to tell him that the Democrats were under assault by the far right and things were looking pretty grim for the 1994 mid-term elections.  He assured me everything was under control.  Four months later, the Republicans gained a majority in Congress and Tom Foley became the first Speaker of the House to lose an election since 1862.  This year the exact same scenario played out identically.  Can anyone on the losing side honestly say they did not see it coming?
 
For the last thirty years or so, the two major parties have been very consistent in the general strategies they each employ for mobilizing voters at elections.  The Democrats pursue a Centrist strategy based on persuading the “marginal voter.”  The Republicans pursue wedge issue voters under the rubric of the “Big Tent.” 
 
Both of these strategies are a response to the massive and permanent change in voter demographics resulting from the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s.  Civil rights were a real game changer in American politics.   By 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan was the last act in the long, slow realignment and was marked by a massive migration across the aisles of politicians changing parties.  By the late 1980s, the dust had pretty much settled down and the two major parties had settled into a new and uneasy homeostasis.
 
The Republicans have a strategy based on building a base of voters with shared conservative cultural values without any real reference to economic or foreign policy.  Initially, when the “Reagan Revolution” was happening, this meant welcoming conservative voters who were leaving the Democratic party, often split off by “wedge issues” meant to divide conservative from liberal Democrats.  The first instance was described as “Reagan Democrats,” which is to say the mostly blue-collar (and in many cases, union) voters who opted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. 
 
The Reagan Democrats are essentially the same phenomenon as the “hardhats” who supported Richard Nixon, the white anti-bussing activists in South Boston who rallied around Louise Day Hicks, the gun control opponents who protested the passage of the Brady Bill, the anti-abortion zealots, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, the people who were outraged by the passage of the Panama Canal treaty, the agitators for draconian immigration controls and most recently, the Tea Party activists who came to political prominence by opposing health care reform.  All of these different issues play to the same core constituency:  the Middle American Radicals (MARs) described by Donald I. Warren in his 1976 study, “The Radical Center:  Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation.”
 
MARs are middle and upper-middle class Americans who have profited from the power and privilege that accrues to mostly white, mostly Anglo-Saxon, mostly Protestant Americans who comprised the core demographic of “middle America” prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.  They are reactionary, rather than radically transformative, in their politics.  They are very susceptible to emotional appeals to their fears, even if the political actions based on these fears are ineffective as policy.  They live an economic life that is slightly above-average, but their fear of economic insecurity is more pronounced than other Americans farther down the economy. 
 
By creating a galaxy of wedge issues, the Republicans have also created a large number of special interest groups playing on those issues.  The political strategy meant to bring all of these interests together has become known as “The Big Tent.”  The initial rationale for the Big Tent strategy was the Republicans needed to accommodate the migration of MARs voters resulting from the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts.  Once it had exhausted the pool of voters changing parties, the Big Tent strategy turned to the extreme right.  So what was originally a means of rationalizing the electoral realignment of the Reagan presidency then became the means of moving the party itself further to the right. 
 
During the transition following Reagan’s election, the Democrats were trying to hold together a coalition dating back to the New Deal while the Republicans were actively trying to anchor their party in their new-found voting strength in the South and among blue-collar whites.  The dynamics of these efforts hinged on political philosophies tailored to cloak the interests that form the core of each party. 
 
The Democrats, acting through the Democratic Leadership Council, ultimately opted for a philosophy of Centrism.  The basic notion of Centrism is that political beliefs are expressed as a bell curve with a “vital center” and marginal extremes.  Centrism is inherently bipartisan and assumes that the mass of Republicans is more similar to the mass of Democrats than they are to the margins of either party:  the numbers out on the fringes are small enough to be without power or influence.  It’s basically how they wished the long-vanished New Deal coalition had worked.  The “marginal voters” Centrism seeks to recapture are the same demographic as the union members who deserted the party and then paid the ultimate price in the erosion of union strength.  They are the same people the Republicans imagined as “Reagan Democrats.”
 
In terms of election strategy, Centrism assumes most of the political power resides in the “marginal voter” near the center of the political spectrum.  These are supposed to be voters who drift back and forth between the two parties.  According to Centrist theory about marginal voters, if Democrats pitch their appeal exactly halfway between the Republican and Democratic voters, they will harvest enough votes to win elections.  
 
The marginal voter strategy essentially grants political initiative to the Republicans.  The Republicans have everything to gain and nothing to lose by moving the political discourse ever farther from a national consensus.  Indeed, they now appear to have no choice other than reaching farther and farther to the right.  The essential difference between the two strategies is the Republicans are wooing voters who will vote Republican or not at all, and Democrats are wooing voters estranged from both parties.  It’s a formula for rightward drift away from any sort of national consensus.
 
 
Neither party’s strategy—marginal voters nor Big Tent—has any recognizable policy initiatives attached to it other than a loose bipartisan consensus on upward wealth transfer and a centralized command economy for the military sector of the economy.  Politics have become tactics devoid of strategy.  This was sharply outlined by the political mailings we saw in the recent election: not an issue or a principle to be seen, just a generalized squirming for temporary advantage.
 
Forty years of wedge-issue politics have polarized Congress to levels not seen since the end of the Civil War.  Ultimately, macroeconomics will decide the future of the nation, not the political agendas of charlatans playing musical chairs in the nation’s capital.