Christopher Baylor provides an important revisionist perspective on changes in the American party system. How did the party of Lincoln become the party that opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965? How did the party of William Jennings Bryan, the fiery evangelical opponent of teaching evolution in schools and the Democratic standard bearer in 1896, 1900, and 1908, become the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” (the slogan used against Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972). If top-down, elite-led (candidate-centered) change has become the conventional wisdom, Baylor makes the case that groups pave the way for elite moves. By the time Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson took positions on opposite sides of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, groups had already changed the parties.
Baylor asserts “the critical first step in party change is for groups to form a viable coalition committed to a common agenda they want the party to adopt. … Groups, not politicians, are the most important force for transforming parties” (5). And they do so by taking control of the nomination process. According to this way of thinking, Johnson and Goldwater were merely the inevitable results of decades of group organizing. Who is “First to the Party?” By conducting “a deep historical investigation” of several groups (17), Baylor reveals that groups are first.
While First to the Party makes a very general claim about the origins of change in the American party system, the investigation focuses on key groups involved in two, relatively recent, changes in the party system— “civil rights and cultural conservatism” (17). The groups examined for the party transformation on civil rights are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The groups credited with laying the groundwork for party transformation on cultural conservatism are a collection of primarily evangelical organizations collectively known as the Christian Right. Anyone with interest in these important political transformations will benefit from Baylor's retelling of events from the perspective of the groups involved. Perhaps the “black-blue coalition” (45), the phrase describing the coalition between civil rights organizations and unions, is well known to some, but Baylor surely breaks new ground with his description of the origins of the coalition—if not by being the first to identify the connection between civil rights organizations and organized labor as an important first step in this party transformation. He also credits the coalition with setting the transformation into motion decades before Johnson and Goldwater.
Baylor highlights events in the 1940s in which the CIO and NAACP played a role, and he is critical of Carmines and Stimson's focus on events several decades later (Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics, Princeton, 1989)—at least insofar as the 1940s happened first. More importantly, Baylor draws a theoretical distinction between top-down models of partisan change a la Downs (“An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy,” Journal of Political Economy vol. 65, no. 2), Aldrich (Why Parties?: The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America, Chicago, 1995), and Carmines and Stimson and his groups-first model of partisan change. I am not certain this work trumps others for having identified things that happened first (surely someone, somewhere, is already working on something that predates the NAACP-CIO alliance), but I am certain that our understanding of the forces that created the current partisan alignment around the issue of how best to address racial inequality is enhanced by shining light into less examined areas of the historical transformation.
I found much that was new (at least to me) in Baylor's distinctive take on the history surrounding political transformation around civil rights issues, and likewise, I found much that was new in his careful analysis of the formation and rise of the Christian Right in American politics. Chapter 6 begins the narrative with a discussion of what conservative Christians were doing before the organizations that came to be known as the “Christian Right” came into existence. Chapter 7 discusses the formation of those organizations and Chapter 8 assesses the intellectual origins of the political positions of the Christian Right. All to say, there is a wealth of background information regarding the formation of the coalition before getting into the specific history of how the Christian Right transformed the Republican Party's positions on cultural conservatism (Chapters 9, 10, and 11). The story of the rise of the Christian Right has been told many times in the religion and politics literature, but Baylor's interviews and use of archival material adds a new nuance to the story—no small feat when it comes to history as well-trod as the forming period for the Christian Right.
Having convinced me of the importance of civil rights as a—perhaps the—driving force behind recent changes in partisan coalitions in the United States in the first half of the book, I found it jarring to turn to another issue—abortion—as the driving force in the second half of the book (both halves cover a similar period of recent political history). Baylor does consider the history of conservative Christians on civil rights in some passages but asserts that civil rights are not the driving force for them. For example, Baylor describes the Carter/Reagan differences regarding IRS investigations into parochial schools’ tax-exempt status as having little to do with racial segregation.
By 1981, there were an estimated one thousand religious schools starting each year affected by the tax issue, proliferating in the wake of mandated public school desegregation. Though few had explicit policies in favor of segregation, minorities were poorly represented in such religious schools and the IRS threatened to take away their tax exemptions until they could prove they did not discriminate. … Though parents may have been more racially motivated than religiously motivated, most fundamentalists had publicly distanced themselves from segregation by the late 1960s. The New Right framed the IRS proposal as a federal assault on their religious enclaves, not forced integration. (126)
To my way of reading it, Baylor mostly confirms the conventional wisdom that sees conservative Christians as largely inactive prior to Roe v. Wade and sees their political awakening as a function of issues outside the realm of civil rights, such as opposition to abortion. This view of the history of the Christian Right is certainly consistent with the movement's descriptions of its motivations and is little contested, but Randall Balmer and a handful of others offer a starkly different take—documenting a very well organized political effort to resist federal school desegregation and connections between the leaders of that effort and the leaders of organizations that later focus on other issues once it became clear that defense of segregated schools was futile (see Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, New York, 2006).
Otherwise, the second half of the book lays out another very fine investigation into a series of events consistent with Baylor's thesis that groups move first and do so by controlling the nomination process. I commend First to the Party to students of parties and elections, especially those with a historical bent, and I am confident Baylor's work will contribute to the revival of interest in the role of groups in democratic politics.
