Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006
From: Jerry Hough (jhough@duke.edu)
Subject: New book[: Changing Party Coalitions: The Strange Red-State Alignment]
I have been teaching about the US Presidency for seven years, especially on the foreign policy strategy of Presidents over time. The first book from this work has now been published: Changing Party Coalitions: The Strange Red-State Alignment.
For students of US-Soviet relations, by far the most interesting point in the book is the argument that European-American ethnic groups, then called races, were as important in American policy to Europe as Cuban-Americans are in policy to Cuba. With British-Americans and German-Americans comprising over half the US population and with their countries at war, the Republicans, the party of the two in the North, had to be the party of detente to relieve the terrible tensions in their basic coalition. They really were the party of the reunification of Germany.
Since the issue was too sensitive to discuss openly, it could only be discussed in codewords. The facts of geography made debates and policy toward the Soviet Union a perfect surrogate, and most of the issues in American policy debates about the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1950 really did not concern the Soviet Union, but how to deal with Germany. I will be writing a good deal on the details of these debates and policy differences in the next few years.
The theme of the book is that the transformation of the European-American "races" into "whites" and the end of the North-South conflict destroyed the base of the old party coalitions and that we still have not found a good alternative.