‘Irritable Centrism’

A few weeks ago there was another event that reminded me about the irritable center. It was the proposal by New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. I would argue that the bloc that ultimately forced Spitzer to reverse himself and withdraw the proposal wasn't the die-hard anti-immigrant faction, though this certainly exists in New York, as everywhere else. The group that mattered was a large faction in the middle who knew which way the country was moving on immigration, wasn't calling for mass deportations, but simply didn't want the issue imposed on them in an especially unsettling way.
 
There are pockets of irritable centrism in every corner of America, but it has a geographical base: the older middle-class and upper-class suburbs that ring every one of the nation's major cities. They are the pivotal force in American politics right now, at both the state and federal levels. They are edgy and easy to offend, and anyone who offends them does it at grave electoral risk.

Recent election returns from these suburban counties tell a pretty dramatic story. One version of it has played out in northern Virginia, in the area around Washington D.C., where I have lived for the past 30 years. There was a time when Arlington, my home county, was competitive between the two parties, but Republicans had little reason to worry about that because Fairfax County, more than five times larger, was a solid GOP bastion. In the early years of this decade Fairfax began to work loose from its Republican moorings, but even this was cause for only modest alarm, because statewide GOP candidates could still count on the fast-growing outer suburban counties, Loudoun and Prince William.

Those days are over as well. Next month the Virginia Senate will convene for its regular legislative session, and it will be under Democratic majority control for the first time in more than a decade. The reason, to oversimplify only a little, is that the bottom fell out of the Republican vote in all of the northern Virginia suburbs, from close-in Arlington to the farthest corners of Loudoun and Prince William. Next year Fairfax County, still the biggest jurisdiction by far, with more than a million residents, will send a legislative delegation to Richmond with 14 Democrats and three Republicans in the house of delegates, and eight Democrats and one Republican in the state senate.

There are rough parallels to that story taking place all over metropolitan America these days. There is, for example, Kansas—still as reliably Republican a state as exists in the country in national elections, but one that has elected a Democratic governor, Kathleen G. Sebelius, twice in a row. What's interesting is not so much how she has won but where she has won.

Johnson County, the affluent suburban jurisdiction across the river from Kansas City, Mo., long represented the soul of Kansas Republicanism. In 1986, in a hard-fought gubernatorial election decided by barely 30,000 votes, Johnson County provided the Republican nominee with his entire margin of victory. Two decades later Democrat Sebelius carried Johnson with 62 percent of the vote—well above her percentage in the state as a whole. On the same day Sebelius recorded those surprising figures, Democrat Bill Ritter won a landslide victory for governor in neighboring Colorado in virtually the same manner, overwhelming his Republican opponent in the suburban Denver territory that traditionally made up the core of Republican strength, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties.

One almost has to be blind not to notice what Virginia, Kansas and Colorado have in common: in all three the Republican Party has become a militant voice of social and religious conservatism on issues that include immigration, abortion and gay rights but stretch far beyond them. The precincts of affluent suburbia have simply refused to buy this agenda—even at the cost of abandoning deeply felt historical loyalties.