How should the Democrats’ 2006 recapture of Congress be interpreted in the context of the broader trends in American politics over the last decades? In what follows, I will examine the development of the two parties against the background of underlying shifts in the balance of class forces in America, to read the conjuncture of 2006 against the deeper structural movements of the American polity—from the labour struggles of the 1930s and construction of the New Deal Democrats, through the Great Society reforms of the postwar boom, to the political paradigms of the capitalist offensive with the onset of the long downturn. Within this framework, I will argue that the rise of the Republican right, building from bases in an expanding, non-unionized South, has introduced a new dynamic into us politics that aims to push the pro-corporate agenda beyond anything even Reagan had contemplated.

The results themselves have already received much scrutiny. Broadly speaking, the basis for the Democrats’ victory in the 2006 mid-terms lay in swings of 4–6 per cent in their favour among nearly every category of the electorate, plus a highly significant 14 per cent swing among Latinos.footnote¹ This enabled the Democrats to increase their House delegation from 201 to 233 seats, with the Republicans dropping from 232 to 202. In the Senate, the dp won six new seats, to move from 45 to 51 (including two independents), while gop seats fell from 55 to 49.

Though some have hailed a new thrust toward social reform,footnote² it is generally acknowledged that the vote represented a repudiation of the Bush Administration’s record rather than a surge of positive support for the Democrats. Throughout October 2006, American tv screens were dominated by images of increasing mayhem and communal strife in Mesopotamia, with sixteen intelligence agencies reporting that the war was fuelling terrorism, not reducing it. In addition, corruption exposés and sex scandals laid bare the hypocrisy of the Republican-fundamentalist charade; Katrina remained a running sore; ‘homeland security’, like Iraq reconstruction, was sold to the highest bidder—against a background of poor jobs performance, real-wage stagnation, and dwindling pensions and health insurance. But it is of course America’s failure in Iraq that has made this such an exceptional electoral conjuncture.footnote³

Since 9/11, Karl Rove’s strategy has been to portray first Afghanistan and then Iraq as the central arenas in the ‘war on terror’, in order to win the popular support the Bush Administration needed for the implementation of its pro-business agenda, which could not have prevailed electorally on its own. Rove was successful in 2002 and 2004, when worry about national security outweighed mounting opposition to the war. The swing votes of married women with children, the so-called ‘security moms’, had favoured the Republicans by, respectively, 53 and 56 per cent. But by 2006, the moms were supporting the Democrats by a 12-point margin, 50 per cent to 38 per cent. Fifty-seven per cent of Americans (against 35 per cent) now felt that the Iraq war had failed to make the country more secure. Herein lies the nub of the 2006 election.footnote⁴

Nevertheless, the Republicans have held their own to a remarkable extent. Their base turned out in force, with white evangelicals increasing their share of the total vote from 23 to 24 per cent, while the figure for those attending church at least once a week rose from 41 to 45 per cent, albeit on a significantly smaller overall turnout.footnote⁵ In their southern heartland the Republicans retained all their House seats save for two in the Miami area—which in socio-political terms barely counts as the South—and one in North Carolina, where former pro-football star Heath Shuler ousted John Taylor.footnote⁶ More serious was the narrow defeat of Virginia Senator George Allen, a party leader and standard-bearer of the right, by a Reagan-era Navy Secretary, James Webb; but since the seat was lost by such a slender margin, following an unusually gaffe-prone campaign, the broader significance for the Republicans is moot. Overall, Rove must be comforted by the degree to which the Republicans retained their popular following, despite the debacle of Iraq and with the Administration having forced through a raft of blatantly pro-business legislation.footnote⁷ In 2000 Bush ran as a ‘compassionate conservative’, and the Republicans won 48 per cent of the House total popular vote. By 2006, compassion had been entirely abandoned, yet the Republicans still garnered 46 per cent. In 2000, 36 per cent of those voting had described themselves as Republicans; in 2006, 35 per cent still did.footnote⁸

Passive beneficiaries of the fallout from Iraq, the Democrats had run a national campaign without a discernible programme—and this entirely by design.footnote⁹ Their strategy, under the direction of Rahm Emanuel, head of the party’s Congressional Campaign Committee, was to field hand-picked centrist and conservative candidates in the most marginal districts, focusing entirely on the Bush Administration’s failings.footnote¹⁰ As a result, their newly elected members of Congress will largely serve to strengthen the right wing of the party, which longs for nothing more than a return to the glory years of Bill Clinton, when balanced budgets and neoliberalism were the order of the day, Lincoln’s Bedroom was always occupied and triangulation was the highest principle.

As much as anyone, Emanuel exemplifies today’s Democratic Party and is likely to be among those setting its future direction. A top political operative under Clinton, he has played a leading role in the ‘modernizing’ Democratic Leadership Council, formed in 1984 to adapt the Party to the Reagan era. The dlc-New Democrats’ aim is to expand their access to business, to the white vote and to the South—the assumption being that traditional black and working-class Democrat constituencies will have nowhere else to go. This means support for stepped-up military spending and us imperial ventures, advocacy of tax breaks and other pro-business policies, and the termination of any remaining socially redistributive commitments to the labour movement and black organizations. The dlc now have sixty representatives in the House, over a quarter of the Democrats’ total roll. In addition, the Party’s ultra-conservative Blue Dog caucus now has 44 representatives, up by seven since 2004. Formed in 1994 by right-wing congressional Democrats, particularly—but not solely—from the South, to counter what they saw as a left-wing Party majority, the group lean to conservatism not just on ‘social issues’ like abortion and gun control, but also on economic policy. ‘Pro-growth’ and committed to ‘fiscal responsibility’, many Blue Dogs voted in favour of the Bush Administration’s most socially regressive measures. On the eight major pieces of legislation that divided the Democrat and Republican majorities in the 2004–5 session of Congress, 45 per cent of Blue Dog votes backed the Republicans.footnote¹¹