Republicans have held the presidency for 40 years since Truman; Democrats for 32. That’s an advantage, but not domination, especially considering that Eisenhower had a Republican Senate and House for two years, but then the Senate was blue until 1980 and the House until 1994.

I suppose I'm looking at this from the 90s End Of History perspective, when it was closer to 28 GOP to 20 Dems, with Dems watching their House majority whittled away year after year for three decades, until the big 1994 collapse. The Obama-Era has signaled something of a reversal, particularly in the post-Trump Era as college educated whites defect from the GOP.

While the U.S. had opposed communism prior to WWII, the last, best chance of going in another direction was at the end of a long war where you had the USSR as an ally, labor was as organized as it ever was, all sorts of colonized nations had serious national liberation movements, and before the national security state really became entrenched. This anti-communism bled into the domestic sphere, leading to the hollowing out of organized labor and social programs, and eventually the rise of neoliberalism in the 70s. Democrats talking about their conservative credentials is just one symptom of this shift.

That gets to the direction of the country. I'm not sure it explains why Democrats (who were never shy about being anti-Communist in word or deed) consistently got pillared as the Leftist party in rhetoric. Or why we've seen something of a reversal under Trump, with Dems taking up Red Scare politics and turning it on the GOP in kind.

I wonder if this is a product of White Flight in the 80s and 90s. Is being anti-Communist just code for hating brown people? Is that something which has become harder and harder to sell in a country that's grown unseasonably tan over time?