Consider that the GOP’s best performance in recent years among voters with postgraduate degrees, the heart of the mass upper class, came in the 2002 midterms, when they backed Republican congressional candidates by 51 percent to 45 percent. Had the GOP gone wobbly on abortion or suddenly embraced gay marriage? Of course not: It was the difference between the two parties on national security, suddenly reasserting itself after a decade of abeyance, that made all the difference.  ~Ross and Reihan

It’s an interesting detail and one I wasn’t familiar with, but for one thing I’m not sure that there was as much significant difference here as Ross and Reihan claim.  The differences between the parties on national security were emphasised even more sharply in 2004 (e.g., Howard Dean’s candidacy) and still more in 2006 (e.g., Jim Webb et al.), but most voters (and certainly a much larger majority of post-graduates) found the national security vision of the GOP to be unattractive.  Emphasising differences makes sense, but if it requires one party to go fairly crazy in order for it to make the necessary distinctions it may not be desirable for both party and country.  For that matter, to the extent that there was significant difference between the parties on national security it revolved around the all-together disastrous plan to invade Iraq, but even here the leadership of the opposition very deliberately caved in to sided with the administration.  In any case, I’m not sure that the 2002 campaign offers a desirable or practicable model for the future, since it requires the extremely unusual circumstances of an immediate post-9/11 climate, heavy doses of jingoism and preparation for an unnecessary war.  What this detail from the 2002 midterms tells me is that in an unusually nationalistic mood all segments of the population are more likely to vote for the more robustly nationalist party, and the political pressure in such an extraordinary moment is such that the opposition party feels compelled to imitate the majority by having its leadership throw in its lot with the President’s policies.

Arguably, what has alienated the managers and professionals and caused suburbanite flight to the Democrats is the demonstration of unbelievable incompetence in the prosecution of the war as much as the war itself, but it’s not clear that the two can be usefully separated.  Viewed another way, the devil-may-care approach to postwar occupation and reconstruction is the flip side of the GOP’s more sanguine attitude towards exposure to risk, which is also related to the “economic optimism” that Ross has recently discussed in relation to the Gramm gaffe.  Republican leaders are themselves fairly insulated from economic insecurity, which is what causes the Gramms of the world to whine about national whining.  What these leaders are even more oblivious to is that globalisation has started to create economic anxiety among professionals and managers, just as it has been doing for working-class voters for years and years.  Economic anxiety is related to the desire to shield oneself and one’s family from significant risks, and the inability of Republicans to speak the language of voters who are experiencing this anxiety is directly related to their preference for policies that increase exposure to risk.  That suggests that there may be another way to look at those 2002 results: in the fairly alarmist post-9/11 months of 2002, the party that seemed most capable or willing to reduce exposure to the risk of catastrophic attack prevailed, but in subsequent years this same party has failed to understand and respond to other forms of insecurity and has monomaniacally fixated on antiterrorism as the only kind of security it can talk about with even minimal coherence. 

There is another aspect to this issue that came to mind when I first read the passage quoted above.  In Grand New Party, Ross and Reihan describe the rise of the mass upper-middle class and the resulting cultural polarisation in the country, and they have a particularly astute observation here:

The more that elites kept patriotism at arm’s length and treated national pride with a sophisticate’s tolerance, the more the breach was filled by Sean Hannity-style jingoists.

However, if my interpretation of the ’02 elections is right, it seems as if Ross and Reihan are arguing that one way to win over the heart of the upper-middle class is to engage in jingoism and demagoguery on national security as the GOP did in 2002.  That does not seem to add up.  Fortunately, their actual policy proposals for winning over the upper-middle class are entirely domestic and are far removed from the spirit of ’02.