Conservative trends across the country result not only from a middle-class taxpayers’ revolt but also from forces within the Democratic party that are hostile to any left-leaning tilt. An unexpected mainstay of these forces have been the procedural reformers, men and women often motivated by deeply felt and legitimate concerns: the abuse of executive power in Southeast Asia, Watergate, etc. Their work has led to a major alteration of the political landscape. A critical consequence, in the last decade, has been the placing of a disproportionate share of the cost of government upon the working and lower middle classes, which in turn is a key to antigovernment sentiment. While designed to curb the undemocratic exercise of power, recent procedural reforms of the legislative and political process—as opposed to social reform aimed at reducing economic inequities—have largely benefited a Republican approach to government. These reforms have encouraged a change in the Democratic presidential constituency from a collection of minorities comprising a left-leaning majority toward an essentially white, middle-class majority, leaving minorities with fewer points of leverage. Thus, at a time when Democrats control both the presidency and Congress, these measures have undermined the power of the Democratic party to formulate policy. They have tended to take the power and profits of the elective process away from party loyalists whose backgrounds approximated those of the voters themselves, and have turned them over to a middle-class elite. Of most significance has been the attack on the structural basis of the Democratic party.

One factor forcing the Democrats toward the left in the past has been that party and elected officials saw their constituency as a coalition of minorities. The major device for maintaining this coalition has been to grant favors to separate groups. Everybody got paid off. Until recently, the usual campaign strategy was to determine what it would take to get labor, blacks, Jews, big-city mayors, contractors with ties to local Democratic parties, etc. behind a candidate. Politics of this kind sent waves of poor Irish, Italians, and Poles through the network of city-hall patronage and ultimately into the middle class. Those same workers and their elected representatives used the municipal contracting system to give ethnic builders and developers enough of an edge to begin to compete with the WASP establishment.