Volume 33, Number 7 · April 24, 1986
Republican America
By Thomas Byrne Edsall
The Party Goes On: The Persistence of the Two-Party System in the United States
by Xandra Kayden, by Eddie Mahe Jr.
Basic Books, 240 pp., $17.95
In the 1984 presidential election, the Republican party played its trump card—the power to combine, throughout the country, the votes of the well-to-do with solid blocks of middle-class and workingclass whites. For the first time in fifty-four years, this alliance extended beyond a presidential voting majority and produced a sustained surge in the numbers of voters who identified themselves as favoring the GOP, ending two generations of Democratic domination of the electorate. The current ascendancy of the Republican party has become the vehicle for a double-edged revolution in American politics: a shift in the balance of national power from the Northeast to the South and West, and a shift in strength from a diverse collection of voters who knew or remembered deprivation—the remnants of the New Deal coalition—to an alliance of voters dominated by the nation's economic elite. The United States is in the midst of a political upheaval as significant as those of the 1890s and the 1930s.
Review, 3609 words
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