Since the mid-1970s when the ruling class took its decisive turn toward neoliberalism and the employers launched their three-decade-long offensive against organized labor and the broader working class, the Republican Party was their chosen vehicle for delivering, enforcing, and building a social base for these policies. After largely accomplishing its goals, the GOP has come up against the limits of its strategy.

The conservative program—tax cuts for the richest Americans, cutting government spending on programs that benefit working Americans, and exposing more government policies to “market forces”—largely succeeded in becoming orthodoxy. So much so that, in ending “welfare as we know it” and financing a prison-building boom, Democrat Bill Clinton helped to finish what Reagan and his ideological supporters started.

Yet this has left conservatives with fewer targets like “welfare” on which to focus public discontent, while at the same time, creating a backlash against the wreckage the Right has created. The simple truth is that the majority of people have not benefited from any of these conservative policies. In fact, ordinary Americans’ lives have worsened as they try to cope with declining living standards, the loss of government social benefits, declining value of their homes, and so on. The clear public perception that Bush has been a president for the rich, coupled with the increasing economic precariousness reinforced by the bipartisan consensus, has discredited neoliberal nostrums.

This opinion is part of a larger shift in consciousness that has remained largely unnoticed. While Republican politicians (and Democrats who want to mimic them) use rhetoric that appeals to a 1950s image of the U.S., in reality, the U.S. is a far more tolerant and less paranoid country than it was in the 1950s. With the partial exception of a slight rightward shift on attitudes toward abortion in the late 1990s, the majority of white workers—the supposed inhabitants of “Bush country” and “red state America”—are more tolerant on their social issue stands and more liberal on economic issues than they were two decades ago. And ordinary whites certainly hold more liberal attitudes regarding government economic policy than do wealthier whites, a disproportionately Republican voting base.³ Despite Republican success in using cultural conservative “wedge issues”—successful largely because Democrats cave in on them—the genuine Kulturkampf that leading figures of the Christian Right want to impose on the nation is anathema to the majority of Americans.

A more tolerant social climate draws also from the emergence into adulthood of the largest birth cohort since the postwar “baby boom”—people born in 1990 who are turning eighteen this year. This group, and those born in the 1980s, has grown up in a more multicultural and sexually tolerant society than their parents. Politically, they have known nothing but Bush/Clinton neoliberalism, which has certainly not improved their or their families’ lives. Given these observations, it should come as no surprise that this age group is the most liberal and most pro-Democratic voting bloc in the electorate. It was the only age group to support Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 election. Today, it also appears to be the age group most attracted to Barack Obama’s candidacy in the Democratic Party.

With Bush ending his term as the most unpopular president this side of Richard Nixon on the eve of his resignation, the notion that his administration would usher in a new generation of conservative Republican rule seems laughable today. Instead, large majorities of the population associate Bush and the Republicans with disastrous policies (Iraq), incompetence (Katrina), scandal (too numerous to list) and cronyism (Halliburton, et al.). The boost that 9/11 gave to Bush and the Right temporarily slowed, but did not stop, the longer-term trends that appear to be unraveling the old GOP coalition.

Facing these headwinds, the GOP machine looks rusty as it heads toward November. The Republican primaries have exhibited all of the GOP’s contradictions, with various candidates representing different parts of the Republican voting base, and with none of them really exciting conservative America. Super Tuesday gave a decisive lead to a candidate, Senator John McCain, who much of the GOP “base” of conservative evangelical Christians dislikes and distrusts. While conservatives will no doubt rally to him—and he will pander to them—this outcome is indicative of the larger problems the Republicans face. The flood of corporate money to the Democrats is a vote of no confidence in the GOP, as it is currently constituted, to be the main vehicle for Corporate America’s policies today. The ruling class of the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated economy is no longer willing to invest millions in a party whose candidates have to kowtow to people who want to use the government to promote belief in creationism. This doesn’t mean that the GOP or the institutional Right is finished. It just means that they will have to reinvent themselves to become a more viable option for the ruling class again.

On the Democratic side, Super Tuesday delivered a more muddled outcome, with Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama almost equally dividing the primary vote between them. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has racked up a primary winning streak that has put him ahead in the race for delegates to the August Democratic convention in Denver. When the ISR went to press, Clinton was hunkering down, trying to win the March primaries in Ohio and Texas and the April primary in Pennsylvania. Wins in these large states would recapture the momentum for her. Even Republican pollster Bill McInturff, no friend of the Clintons, recognized that it is a mistake to count her out. “The Obama wave is unlike anything I have seen during my career. It would have totally swamped any traditional candidate,” McInturff told the Wall Street Journal. “The fact that Clinton is still standing and breaking even is actually a remarkable statement about how unique a candidate she is and what an exceptionally strong candidate.”⁴

As the primary season unfolded, Clinton positioned herself as the candidate of the Democratic establishment, winning support and endorsements from a majority of Democratic institutions (i.e., the major lobbying groups and unions) and from elected politicians. Obama, on the other hand, has excited much of the Democratic “base” as measured by large turnouts at elections and in mass rallies. Yet this is not a case of one establishment candidate versus the “insurgent.” In fact, Obama is well wired into all the main Democratic institutional networks, which is the main factor that explains his viability as a challenger to Clinton. Election atmospherics—and the very real hopes that millions are placing in Obama—aside, the support for Obama from inside the Democratic hierarchy is based on a calculation that he, rather than Clinton, would be a better bet to win in November. If Obama establishes a solid lead over Clinton, it would not be surprising to see institutional support for Clinton crack, with increasing numbers of Democratic leaders and fundraisers going over to Obama.

“If Obama continues to win...the whole raison d’etre for her campaign falls apart [i.e., that she’s the “inevitable” nominee who will win in November] and we’ll see people running from her campaign like rats on a ship,” Democratic strategist Jim Duffy told the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier.⁵

Despite the endorsements of Obama from liberal organizations like Moveon.org, the Mexican American Political Association, or chapters of the Progressive Democrats of America, Obama is not cut from different cloth than Clinton. In fact, according to Federal Election Commission data tabulated by the Center for Responsive Politics, Clinton and Obama run first and second among Democrats and Republicans in contributions from the following industries: commercial banks, computers/Internet, education, health professionals, pharmaceuticals, and television and film. Clinton and Obama were nearly tied in contributions received from hedge funds and private equity firms.

Obama’s main appeal over Clinton among liberals stems from his opposition to the war in Iraq. But no one should doubt that he comes fully vetted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. According to Laurence Shoup’s very useful article:

Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers include 13 current CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] members and one former member. These include two former National Security Advisers, an Air Force chief of staff, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, an Assistant Secretary of State, and a National Security Council Director for Europe. One of Obama’s advisers, a former CFR director and President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, explained his support by stating that it was only Obama who could “grasp the historical moment,” set a new direction, and address the “fundamental historical misjudgment” of the Iraq war. Furthermore, Obama “understands, even personalizes, the historical quest for diversity and dignity.” Clinton, in contrast, would, in Brzezinski’s view, take the country “back to what we had eight years ago.”⁶