It feels like the end of an era. The dollar and the geopolitical economic system that has backed it up since Nixon is in free fall, commodity prices are skyrocketing, and all we know about the current economic crisis is that we know nothing. Obama has redefined politicking, with every contrived scandal from madrassas to Bittergate falling flat. The pundits, highly-paid consultants, and sound-bite spin doctors, once masters of the political universe, are fading into ineffectuality and irrelevance. The old system is dead.
I am not a historian. I took few history classes in college, and in the ones that I did I focused on Byzantine history, not American (nor do I wear a flag lapel pin....). Thus, my historical thinking has not really been rigorously trained, nor have any theories of mine been exposed to the harsh light of questioning. I have not been vetted, so to speak.
This might be the first part of a series. In the next part I will try to put together a political economy of the various party systems in U.S. history, and maybe how they match up with generational cycles. If I feel like it. Anyway, more after the fold....
For the purposes of this diary I’m going to assume that the Fifth Party System ended and the Sixth started in 1968 with the Democratic convention; I’ll be happy to debate this with you in the comments if you disagree. At that convention, the New Deal coalition cracked spectacularly and never recovered. Southern whites left en masse for the Republican Party, and the rump of the coalition fought itself in almost every primary since then.
The New Deal coalition was always a strange beast; I can’t imagine pre-Civil Rights Southern whites (including Klan members) and African-Americans from the North ever being good political bedfellows. But it worked, because the promise of New Deal economics was strong enough glue to hold even those two groups together.
Richard Nixon was a sea change in Republican politics. Throughout the New Deal era, Republicans from Robert Taft to Barry Goldwater had been the party of limited government, though with a strong undercurrent of nationalism, exemplified by Joe McCarthy. The party was deeply split between the Rockefeller moderates and the Goldwater faction, much like the Democrats to this day. But even moderates like Eisenhower, who accepted the New Deal and created a massive public project like the Interstate highway system, genuinely distrusted the Federal behemoth and left us with dark warnings about the military-industrial complex and the imperial presidency.
Nixon had no such qualms about Federal power. In his presidency all the elements of the overarching political and economic structure of the next forty years would come together: a Presidency above the law, able to defy Congress and fight secret wars; an ascendant upper class; government policy driven by corporate interests; the abandonment of Bretton Woods and the adoption of the de facto petroleum-backed dollar; the twin deficits; the maturation of TV and the birth of the sound bite; and a militaristic nationalism that blended McCarthyism with anti-Civil Rights traditionalism. I don’t think that Richard Nixon had any idea he was creating a political system as strong as he did: he seems more like a power-hungry and vengeful political opportunist, though quite clever and creative. It took Ronald Reagan to bring those elements together into a ruling coalition and dominant ideology of an era, and George W. Bush to bring them to their logical conclusion.
Reagan put the swaggering, made-for-TV capstone on the edifice that Nixon had built. As an actor, he knew better than most politicians how to manipulate television, the dominant medium of the Sixth Party System. It’s no surprise that Bush and the recent crop of GOP candidates have tried to imitate him: he is the template for the era. Made-for-TV wars, tax cuts for the rich, massive deficits: while Reagan seemed to get away with these things, Bush seems to be paying the piper, but still mechanistically continues these beyond any semblance of reason or independent thought. He and Cheney are slaves to the machine improvised by Nixon and perfected by Reagan.
While across-the-board tax cuts and supply-side economics may have seemed refreshing in 1980, they were already stale in 2000. While the invasions of Granada, Libya, and Panama were immoral and probably illegal, nothing lasting really came of them and they are pretty much forgotten today. While Lebanon was a tragedy, it pales in comparison to the highly televised results of Shock and Awe. While Nixon narrowly avoided impeachment for his political crimes, Reagan got away with Iran-Contra, and Bush codified his as the "Unitary Executive".
But why? Why did the media that hounded Nixon give Reagan a free pass and fawn over Bush? Because of corporate collusion. Nixon’s pro-corporate policies paid their dividends to Reagan, who was able to mobilize corporate power in a way that Carter and Ford could not, and put a façade of national unity and an appearance of dynamism over the very real problems the country was facing. Again, Bush carried this to its logical conclusion, with the telecommunications companies putting loyalty to the person of the Republican Chief Executive over and above following the law.
Nixon, at the fluid and flexible beginning of this era, engaged China and the Soviet Union in Détente, although he had run in 1968 as a cold warrior. Reagan, as a cold warrior, demonized the Soviet Union while continuing to build trade relations with China. Bush attempted to revive the Reagan-McCarthy ‘Evil Empire’ in the incongruous body of Islamic terrorism, like a mad scientist pumping a stitched-together corpse with high-voltage electricity.
Late 20th century American splendor can be an appealingly romantic picture. The possibility of attaining upper-class American wealth has brought over countless immigrants and kept large chunks of the native-born population bought in to an increasingly more fantastic American Dream. Others could be brought into the tent with the simple and ancient appeal to nationalism: One American Nation, with citizens and corporations obeying their Commander-in-Chief, and all of them obeying the same God. However, this picture was never quite as strong as the New Deal’s promise, explaining the weak Republican dominance of this era (like from 1860 to 1896) in contrast to the strong Democratic dominance of the New Deal era.
I think Karl Rove saw this and tried to repeat William McKinley’s realignment and the Spanish-American war, with an imperial twist. Someone should have told Karl that you can’t repeat the past.
But this era is at an end. Television dominance of news and electoral politics is over, and we are what it is being replaced with. We have seen the future, and it is Howard Dean. His internet- and organization-based campaign style was taken up four years later by Barack Obama, who is now running a winning primary campaign with it, and looks likely to win the general election. Even if he doesn’t, that campaign style will in 2012. Politics has been revolutionized. Now what about the rest of the system?
The oil-backed dollar is history. Our deficit-fueled economy is hanging by a thread. The zombie of terrorism keeps falling flat as a legitimate primary objective of foreign policy, and so on. You know about all that’s been wrong with this country since 1968 and all that’s been getting worse. What will we replace it with?