KINDER'S COMMENTARY: THE `SUN AND MOON' THEORIES OF U.S. POLITICS

Some scholars of history and politics have proposed the "sun and moon" theories of the waxing and waning fortunes of America's political parties. According to this theory, America's parties go through phases in which one party ("the sun") can be said to be dominant, while the other ("the moon") "orbits" around the dominant, or "sun." To continue the metaphor, the "sun" party is dominant both electorally and as the fount of the most compelling ideas, while the "moon" party reflects light from the "sun," as most of the action and compelling debate occurs within the "sun" party.

Thus during the ascendancy of the New Deal coalition so brilliantly fashioned and managed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party replaced the Republican Party that had so dominated America from Abraham Lincoln to FDR. (The 72 years between Lincoln's election as the first Republican president in 1860 and FDR's 1932 landslide saw only two Democratic presidents -- Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.) In the cataclysm of the Great Depression this seven-decade period of Republican dominance gave way to Democratic dominance in the New Deal majority that held sway in American politics for more than 36 years.

By 1968 that New Deal coalition had begun to creak and groan under the stresses of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson's bloated and costly Great Society and the open racial conflict and urban riots of that decade. That was the year Richard Nixon, like Wilson before him and Bill Clinton after, became a minority president with 43 percent of the vote. Recall: Eight years earlier Nixon had narrowly lost to John Kennedy at a time when the Democrats were still incontestably the "sun" to the GOP's "moon."

Neither Nixon's 1968 victory nor his 1972 landslide (61 percent, 49 states) fully presaged the sea-change to arrive later as the parties switched their "sun" and "moon" status. Absent a Great Depression-like cataclysm, Nixon's 1972 blow-out of a hapless George McGovern was a lonely landslide in which Democrats actually gained Senate seats. Democrats held onto control of both houses of Congress, majorities of state legislatures, most governors and local offices for years. Until, that is, the 1980s. It was then, with the ascendancy of the incomparable Ronald Reagan, that the Republican Party began clearly to emerge as the "sun" to the Democrats' "moon."

One more historical point: It is quite possible for a brilliant or wildly popular politician from the "moon" party to win the White House during his opposition party's dominance. Thus war hero Dwight Eisenhower could win twice while his Republican Party was clearly the "moon." A telling fact is that Eisenhower didn't ever challenge the fundamental premise of the still-dominant New Deal coalition. Had he done so, he would have worked to repeal much of the pro-labor legislation previous Democratic Congresses had passed, or pushed for repeal of, say, Social Security. The shrewd Ike did no such thing, of course. Had he done so he would have lost badly.

Likewise for Bill Clinton, incomparably the most brilliantly nimble politician of the era. Clinton could win twice while Republicans are the natural majority party, not by confronting the governing majority conservative consensus, but by accommodating himself to it in lots of little ways, and a few big ones.

A dead giveaway in discerning which party is the "sun" is to ask yourself which is home to the most interesting debates of the day. During the long New Deal ascendancy, for instance, a revolution occurred in the role Americans envisioned for government to play in their lives. Republican conservatives ("the moon") spent the time grumbling, whining, moaning and complaining, all to little effect. Americans had become comfortable, not just with FDR's appealing personality, but with his prescriptions for a more activist government. A revolution was being consolidated, and Republicans were largely grumbling spectators to all the action occurring within the dominant Democratic Party.

On the shoals of the Great Inflation of the 1970s, the pathetic Jimmy Carter presidency and the crank Iranian mullah who humiliated him for 444 days, the long-dominant Democratic Party began moving into eclipse. In this analysis, it has been ever since.

Next: How one debate illustrates today's "sun" and "moon."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.