THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
Wrong, Dennis H.
Democratic societies with universal suffrage and competing political parties experience a cyclical alternation of periods dominated by protest from the Left and retrenchment by the Right. The...
...THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS 51 old even in most of the stable, "advanced" constitutional democracies of the West...
...Communist dictatorships appeal, at least outside their borders, to supporters of the demands of the Left, although, since my primary concern is with the politics of democracies, the problem of how to classify nondemocratic regimes that claim legitimacy 46 through an identification with the Left can be safely put aside...
...or, at least, forward in a given direction—if a unilinear trend is exhibited...
...This recurrent sequence of events is the rhythm, or the "dialectic," of politically directed change in a democracy...
...It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still further, upon •.vhich their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself...
...the Right regroups while conflicts between moderates and radicals on the Left become more acute...
...Political democracy makes actual the eternal Left in time and history...
...Although American political history has often been regarded as uniquely "consensual" and free of ideological conflict, it fits rather neatly into a pattern of oscillation between periods in which demands from the Left dominate, and those given over to periods of reaction...
...The periodization of American politics into successive Left and Right eras was presented at length by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in a 1939 article, "Tides of American Politics," revised and expanded in his 1949 book Paths to the Present,4 which attracted a good deal of attention at the time...
...THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS 53 of the Left, which has so repeatedly and tragically underestimated the strength of national loyalties in this century...
...The author writes: "This—the 'artificial dialectic'—is Generalissimo Stalin's most original invention, his major contribution to the art of government...
...THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS 55...
...In the past, Marxists in particular have been predisposed to deny the autonomy and irreducibility of such "subcultural" cleavages, although their domination of the political life of a large number of countries is by now fully clear...
...The task of the Left is always Sisyphean...
...the retrenchment of the Right during a period in opposition...
...The voice of the people need not be sanctified as the voice of God, but democracy requires that it at least be heard and taken into account...
...Also, their significance has certainly increased since the 1930s...
...World War I divided the American Left...
...Thus even after the win9 0. Utis, "Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government," Foreign Affairs, 30 (January 1952): 197-214...
...2) But Left parties and movements succeed in mobilizing a large enough proportion of their potential constituency to become leading opposition parties, sometimes displacing older parties as in the rise of Labour at the expense of the Liberals in Britain...
...Modern nationalism is itself, of course, a product of democratic ideology, born in the wake of the French and American Revolutions...
...284-304...
...Out of the experience of the disorder and violence of European mass politics in this century, Albert Camus observed: "Heads must roll, and blood must flow like rivers in the streets, merely to bring about a minor amendment to the Constitution...
...The Left calls for a "popular front" against "repression" and incipient "fascism...
...The progressive era is usually seen as beginning with Theodore Roosevelt's accession to the presidency in 1901 and ending with American entrance into World War I, or, at least, with Wilson's congressional losses 4 Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp...
...The tactic of Left militants is to attack the entire political system as part of a repressive "Establishment" moving toward "fascism," and the most plausible evidence for this is found in the efforts of militants on the Right to brand their customary political opponents as Communist sympathizers, or dangerous radicals encouraging disrespect for law, insurrectionary violence, treason, or all three...
...77-92...
...The Right lays claim to the symbols of legitimacy identified with the past of the nation, indeed with its very existence in a world of competing nation-states, an existence usually achieved by wars of conquest or revolts against foreign domination which usually, though not in the United States, antedated the creation of democratic institutions and the extension of the franchise...
...For a description of the rhythm, however accurate, explains nothing whatsoever: in the language of logicians, the rhythm is an explanandum rather than an explanans—an effect of underlying causes rather than a causal agency itself...
...Its strength has been habitually underestimated by the Left, even within the Left's own constituency of the deprived and oppressed...
...Obviously, these sparse definitions raise all sorts of problems if they are applied to the rich diversity of past and present political movements...
...and the discontent of the Left's electoral constituency is temporarily appeased by the limited gains, actual or symbolic, that have been won...
...One can nevertheless abstract out of the welter of the democratic political experience a discernible rhythm—or dialectic—of Left/Right conflict, which represents at least one major theme of their politics...
...Even prisoners have learned to love their bars, and most of us feel nostalgic about the places and people of our childhood no 2 Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), p. 207...
...The Left, of course, is itself invariably divided into reformist and radical wings, and 5 Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp...
...nor must New Left student movements of the '60s be considered "really" rightist because their members were disproportionately drawn from upper-middle-class backgrounds...
...Moreover, it is highly likely that in recent decades the rhythm has accelerated as a result of the increasing saturation of modern populations by the mass media...
...In the '60s, however, the failure and unpopularity of the Vietnam War revived American radicalism and discredited the Cold War...
...Theories of American exceptionalism, on the one hand, and some Marxist analyses, on the other, have unduly minimized this fact...
...241-261...
...3 But the resistance offered by the Right—as organized minority power, as inarticulate mass sentiment, as metaphysical reflection of the human condition—produces the oscillating pattern I have called the rhythm of democratic politics...
...But this very fact has served to enhance its appeal in opposition to the class and antielitist populist appeals 1o The Prince, chap...
...But the "ideological" demands of idealists, visionaries, "extremists," prophets, and seers are also part of the democratic political process— sources of "input," as some political scientists would gracelessly say...
...World War II, on the other hand, was fought against nations seen as the very incarnation of the values most bitterly opposed by the Left and did not therefore displace New Deal liberalism and its radical allies...
...the Russian Revolution not only further divided it but gave impetus to the period of postwar reaction and repression that ended the Progressive era...
...Sometimes they emerge as the first and largest organized mass parties confronting electoral or governmental coalitions of smaller parties of the Right, as on the European continent...
...This is the existential root of conservatism— of the "eternal Right...
...Machiavelli gave the most general answer long before the establishment of democratic institutions: It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things...
...Committed neither in principle nor pragmatically to the world as it is, defined rather by its "project" in the Sartrean sense, the Left is inherently prone to bitter internal struggles over which ends, means, and agencies advance or hinder that project...
...it rather reflects a pattern of change that is inherent in the working of a democratic political system in a class-divided society...
...it has recently been described more accurately and renamed the "iron law of decadence" by Theodore Lowi...
...Once, however, parties of the Left have been organized, or the lower classes have been successfully mobilized by older parties, some crisis such as an economic depression, defeat in war, or a split in the ranks of the Right is bound to give the parties of the Left the opportunity to win office, whether on their own or as part of a coalition...
...See also Mannheim, Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp...
...Political leaders, in office or out, frequently talk one way and act another, or follow inconsistent policies whatever their rhetoric...
...The Cold War and Korea, fought against an enemy laying total claim to the ideological heritage of the Left, not only delegitimated the American Left but almost completely obliterated its radical wing...
...Democratic politics legitimizes demands for reform and, introduced into societies that remain highly unequal and create new inequalities in the course of their economic and technological growth, is therefore incurably ideological...
...Citing Hegel's famous "owl of Minerva" metaphor, Karl Mannheim defined conservatism as traditionalism become conscious of itself and wrote: "Goaded on by opposing theories, conservative mentality discovers its idea only ex post facto...
...War has often in this sense been "the health of the state," in Randolph Bourne's famous dictum...
...An explanation of the rhythm of democratic politics must necessarily be historically specific, because party politics under conditions of mass suffrage are less than a century 7 In Retrospect: The History of a Historian (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 108...
...By giving a voice to the voiceless, mobilizing the apathetic, and organizing the unorganized it introduces planned and directed social change as a principle of historical movement...
...The Right then returns to office after successfully persuading a sizable segment of the Left's regular following that a conservative government will not wipe out these gains...
...It has often been the fate of the Left parties to come to power at a time of such acute crisis for the entire society that they are forced to concentrate on improvised shortrun policies to restore or maintain internal peace, with the result that their long-range goals of social reconstruction have to be shelved or severely modified, inspiring accusations of "class betrayal" from their more militant followers...
...14 Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp...
...Yet it may be possible to formulate explanatory generalizations that transcend the historical uniqueness of particular nations...
...But failure to resolve the crisis that brought the party to office, or the passing of the crisis whether or not the government's measures are given credit for this...
...See also Lowi's earlier book, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969...
...Richard Rovere, one of the more astute observers of American politics, remarked in 1970 that "the Europeanization of American politics proceeds...
...Since 1968, however, reaction or "backlash" against the black, student, and peace movements has been a salient theme of our politics, exploited by George Wallace's candidacy in the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns, and very closely identified with the Vice-President and the Attorney-General who were the most publicized figures of the first Nixon administration...
...But recall that Camus' heroic exemplar of the human condition was Sisyphus...
...This is easily read as a despairing or cynical rejection of political effort...
...If these stories are true, Roosevelt and Kennedy would seem to have understood the cyclical pattern in far too mechanical a fashion that is vulnerable to Nisbet's strictures...
...Moreover, as Robert Nisbet has cogently argued, neither nations, continents, nor even units as large as civilizations can be treated as isolated, self-contained "systems" obeying their own internal laws...
...98-101...
...Nor was there an identifiable "Right": conservative ideologies and organizations emerged only in response to the challenge of the Left...
...As organized groups become frozen in defense of their own internal structure, the stasis of Lowi's "interest-group pluralism" threatens...
...But there is an "eternal Left" too, as deeply rooted in the human condition as the eternal Right even if it only became a conscious political tendency after the Enlightenment...
...13 Mill's tone reflects the relatively serene and civil politics of Britain in the Victorian age when the franchise was still restricted...
...The dialectic of the extremes reflects an effort, conscious or unconscious, to short-circuit the "normal" pattern of alternating periods of protest and stabilization with its built-in tendency toward a glacially slow "leftward drift...
...But there is a curious continuity between a technocratic outlook favoring a "pragmatic" politics engaged in by the representatives of established organizations and the implicit pragmatism of such conservatives as Oakeshott, who fear rational abstractions and universal principles and affirm instead their trust in the implicit truths of "experience...
...190-191...
...splits between the party's or government's radical and moderate reformist wings once the minimum 52 DENNIS H. WRONG program has been passed...
...Militants of both Right and Left are disposed to conclude with Machiavelli that Thus it comes about that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed...
...Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him halfheartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.10 The contemporary social scientist would doubtless put it in different and far less elegant language, but his conclusion would be much the same as Machiavelli's...
...In Schlesinger's words, "a more appropriate figure than the pendulum is the spiral, in which the alternation proceeds at successively higher levels...
...Without them, the professional politicians would have little to bargain about and strike compromises over...
...They are then able to carry out reforms that constitute at least their minimum program...
...One must always ask, "What makes the wheels go around...
...But to disclose such a pattern in historical events is not to explain why it prevails, or how transitions from one stage to the next come about...
...I am much indebted to Aron's brilliant discussion...
...His son, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., revived and updated his father's thesis in the late 1950s to argue that the '60s were destined to be a period of reform and innovation favorable to the liberal wing of the Democratic party, in which he himself was an active figure...
...Yet the potential electoral constituency of the Left in modern democracies is larger than that of the Right—"God must love the poor people for he made so many of them," Lincoln once remarked...
...Such efforts to predict the exact duration of periods of the cyclical or spiral rhythm, while they possess a dangerous fascination, do not increase our understanding of it...
...Their anti-ideological animus seems very remote indeed from classical conservatism with its religious piety and preference for faith over reason, its aura of knights and ladies and agrarian life—and, for that matter, from the free market of 19thcentury capitalism...
...In this century, if we carry Schlesinger's periodization up to the present and modify it very slightly, there are five distinct periods...
...Nevertheless, by coming to office the Left party wins a kind of legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate that it previously lacked and it is usually able to carry out at least a part of its minimum program...
...Democratic conservatives, or "moderates," frequently reject "ideological politics" in favor of a "pragmatic politics" based on bargaining, compromise, and consensus on the rules of political competition...
...But unlike the mechanical force of the sun's gravity, the effort and will of men and women on the Left are •what keep the system of democratic politics in motion...
...The notion that politics conform to such cyclical periodicity is scarcely a new one: it is implicit in the most commonplace language of political journalism, which regularly uses such metaphors as "swing of the pendulum," "rising and ebbing tides," or "waxing and waning" forces, to describe events...
...The achievements of politics are often symbolic ones—which is not to minimize their significance...
...Lowi mentions the civil rights movement of the early '60s as an example of such a social movement outside of the established parties and interest organizations (p...
...The last years of the Weimar Republic are, of course, the classic example of such a confrontation...
...Their suspicion of those on both the Left and the Right who out of impatience with the stately rhythm of democratic politics wish to fracture it by making a forward "leap to socialism" or a restoration -of an idealized status quo ante is surely well-founded...
...movement toward equality in the distribution of material satisfactions, status, and/or power, or as the demand for restoration of a (usually idealized) status quo ante in which greater inequality prevailed...
...Since the Left as an established and permanent political tendency came into being at the time of the French Revolution, the "Right" is best defined residually as resistance, on whatever grounds, to any further 1 For a useful recent critique, see Giovanni Sartori, "From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology," in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp...
...How does this rhythm manifest itself and what is its source...
...Popular elections based on universal suffrage give decisive weight to the one political resource with which the lower classes are amply endowed —numbers...
...The rhythm or cycle is rather one of the kinds of issues that dominate political debate, and often intellectual and cultural life as well...
...Sometimes they partially transform an older, heterogeneous, and factionalized party into a vehicle for the demands of newly mobilized lower-class groups, as in the United States...
...Political democracy based on universal suffrage was itself originally a demand of the Left introduced into previously authoritarian and hierarchical social orders...
...and a constant factor—what George Bernard Shaw called "the damned wantlessness of the poor"—all result in electoral defeat or the "co-optation" of prominent leaders before the Left party has done more than institute "incremental," or "token," reforms...
...50 DENNIS H. WRONG the shifting balance of unity and conflict achieved by its factions constitutes another dialectic within the larger dialectic of Left and Right...
...Thus Peronism in the 1940s and '50s was not necessarily a leftist movement because its main following was among industrial workers...
...Nowadays a "new" generation seems to come along every five years or so...
...In his autobiography, published in 1963 just two years before his death, Schlesinger reported that Franklin D. Roosevelt's adviser, David Niles, once told him that FDR was influenced in his decision to run for reelection in 1944 by Schlesinger's calculation that liberalism would remain dominant until 1948 (based on his figure of a 16.5 years' average duration of each phase of the cycle) . 7 Schlesinger also mentioned a preelection column by James Reston in 1960 maintaining that John F. Kennedy "based his campaign on the assumption," derived from Schlesinger's "theory," that a turn to the Left was in the offing within a year or two...
...But my concern here is solely with the latter...
...Obviously, the Right is also usually divided between militants and moderates, reactionaries and conservatives, although such divisions have not, I think, played as important a role in the United States as in some European countries...
...The elder Schlesinger divided American history into 11 periods of alternating Right and Left ascendancy—he used the labels "conservative" and "liberal"—from 1765 to 1947, each one averaging 16.5 years with very slight deviations around the mean, except in the period from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century...
...2 Since most societies through most of history have been traditionalist, claiming their legitimacy from continuity with the past rather than from a vision of the future, classical conservatives, viewing the world sub specie aeternitas, have dismissed the outlook of the Left as the expression of Enlightenment naivete over the perfectability of man, as presumptuous intervention in the workings of "providential forces" (Burke), or as an attempt, necessarily tyrannical in its outcome, to destroy "organically" evolved societies and rebuild them according to an imposed design...
...The existence of such a drift alarms and enrages militants of the Right...
...in the case of the Left, to accelerate and complete it...
...Disappointment is always likely over the "wantlessness" and fickleness —often sourly labeled "false consciousness" —of the suffering and oppressed the Left seeks to serve...
...The Left is often proclaimed to be obsolete as a result of the very establishment of political democracy, since the voice of the people at any given time so rarely fully affirms the aspirations of the Left...
...The Social Democracy in the first and last years of the Weimar Republic is the classic case...
...Michels called this the "iron law of oligarchy...
...The Right party, in an effort to enhance or consolidate its appeal to the constituency of the Left, may adopt new hybrid, apparently contradictory, names or slogans designed to suggest that it has outgrown past hostility to Left policies now in effect, such as "Tory Socialism," "Progressive Conservatism," "Christian Democracy," or "Moderate Republicanism"— this last a label favored by President Eisenhower shortly after his first election...
...Wars, international crises, and the issues of foreign policy to which they give rise can therefore neither be ignored as shaping agents of the domestic political process nor invoked as dei ex machina to account for internal political shifts...
...Perhaps there isalso a rhythm in the development over time of ethnic or religious struggles, a rhythm intersecting or The Politics of Disorder (New York: Basic Books, 1971), pp...
...A few years later the "radicalization" of large segments of college youth and intellectuals in response to the Vietnam War created a mood of leftwing insurgency on a variety of fronts...
...The Left began to recapture some political initiative with the civil rights movement in the South in the late '50s, shortly followed by the rhetoric of the New Frontier and the resounding electoral repudiation of a militant right-wing presidential candidate in 1964...
...Yet they embody the most common, minimal understanding of the Left/ Right distinction...
...But surely foreign wars differ in the ideological significance they possess for domestic currents of opinion...
...The Cold War, Korea, Republican victories, and the years of McCarthyism to which these events contributed gave a conservative cast to the '50s...
...For the formal, i.e., the legal and constitutional, redistribution of power achieved by universal suffrage to have any consequences in reducing social inequalities, a long period of political mobilization of the lower classes had to take place, a process that is scarcely complete even today in many countries, including the United States...
...in the case of a cyclical motion, or, "What propels mankind upward and onward...
...But even in less critical situations, this dialectic is visible at We periphery rather than at the center of the political arena and often seems to be gaining momentum through the enlistment of growing numbers of partisans on each side...
...14 The Left might well attribute to political democracy as an ironic motto Galileo's famous aside when forced to recant his belief in the Copernican theory: eppur si muove—"and yet it still moves...
...q 13 Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 168...
...I shall try to summarize schematically the elements of such an explanation...
...and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have actual experience of it...
...The classic Marxist conception of the movement of history has also been described as a spiral, combining a cyclical with a developmental or unilinear motion...
...The classic Left demand is to realize for all men the French revolutionary slogan of "liberte, egalite, fraternite...
...I shall use "Left" to refer to programmatic demands for planned or enacted social change toward a more equal distribution of economic benefits, social status, and power, or, in unpropitious times, to the defense of an existing, achieved degree of equality against advocates of increased inequality...
...Once this insight enters general awareness, the social world is demystified and classical conservative veneration of a fixed social order sanctified by the past loses meaning...
...Men feel "alienated" precisely because they know that theirs is a man-made world of arbitrary, makeshift social arrangements which they THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS 47 can imagine it otherwise...
...The major political philosopher of democracy, John Stuart Mill, recognized this when he wrote of his brief period of service in the House of Commons: If . . . there were any intermediate course which had a claim to a trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be called extreme was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more moderate experiment...
...National leaders of the Right have sometimes engaged in foreign adventurism and even embarked upon limited expansionist wars in order to overcome internal tensions generated by the domestic class struggle...
...It falls far short of realizing either the far-reaching hopes of the advocates or the apocalyptic fears of the opponents of universal suffrage in the 19th century...
...matter how unhappy it may have been...
...p. 210...
...Metaphors of pendular or tidal movements are misleading when applied to the cyclical rhythm of politics...
...But the crisis passes or is resolved...
...ning of full citizenship rights, including the right to vote, by groups previously subject to legal discrimination, "conservative government," in Woodrow Wilson's words, "is in the saddle most of the time...
...In the first place, the Right possesses a massive advantage with respect to other political resources—wealth, education, social status, traditional legitimacy—and is able to throw these into the balance in election campaigns as well as employing them on an enormous scale to influence government policy between elections...
...Totalitarian dictatorships undertake "great leaps forward" that are succeeded by periods of relaxed discipline in which "a hundred flowers" are encouraged to bloom...
...The vision of the Left derives from the Vichean insight that man makes his own history, or "socially constructs his reality," in today's fashionable sociological parlance...
...Thus parties of the Right tend to wave the flag, to nominate generals who stand "above politics" as candidates for office, and to invoke the need for national unity, in contrast to the divisive appeals of the Left...
...The end of ideology would mean the end of the Left as a political force and the end of democracy itself— either by the restoration or creation of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime, or by the achievement of utopia...
...No one who has read Robert Nisbet's brilliant book Social Change and History can retain any illusions on this score...
...That it may become at least a permanent sideshow of American politics is one implication of the notion of the Europeanization of American politics to which I previously referred...
...All men, including men of the Left, cannot help forming emotional attachments to what has the inestimable advantage and power of actually existing...
...In any case, whatever truth there may have been in the past to the view that American politics reflected the historical peculiarities of American origins and destiny—the doctrine of American "exceptionalism" as it has sometimes been called —the idea has increasingly lost plausibility...
...The actual role of the Left is usually the undramatic one, as Barrington Moore, Jr., has recently defined it, of keeping "radical fire" under liberal reforms...
...We have learned only too well that they may respond to this alienation with frenzied efforts to remystify the world, to press the genie back into the bottle, rather than by embracing the challenge to try to create the now possible free and egalitarian community envisioned by the Left...
...Before the Enlightenment a "Left" in the modern sense of a vision of a more egalitarian future society to be created by organized political effort did not exist...
...Schlesinger recognized this in his cyclical account of American politics, but his own explanations of the cycle were brief and vague, scarcely going beyond the assertion of inevitable "changes in mass psychology" resulting from boredom or disappointment with the prevailing phase of the cycle...
...21-22 in the Modern Library Edition (New York: Random House, 1940...
...An analyst of Stalin's rule has written of the "artificial dialectic" imposed by the dictator on Soviet society, where rigorous demands for total ideological conformity and the use of terror to deter even the mildest dissent abruptly alternated with periods of greater permissiveness or "thaw...
...The mentality that led to Watergate fed off the mood of backlash...
...Schlesinger denied that there was "a correlation between foreign wars and the mass drift of sentiments," maintaining that "these conflicts have taken place about equally in conservative and liberal periods, sometimes coming at the start, sometimes at the end and sometimes midway...
...The more subtle conservative thinkers, from Burke to Michael Oakeshott, have repudiated efforts to construct a conservative ideology, recognizing that the strength of conservatism lies in the emotional attachment of mortal men to the world as they have known it, in an only apparently irrational conviction that "what is, is right," which actually implies the unspoken major premise that it is right because it is...
...In emphasizing the broad content of political demands, they avoid the difficulties raised by classifying political groups as Left or Right according to their social base—whether they are supported by or direct their appeals to the victims or the beneficiaries of the existing distribution of rewards and privileges...
...apace...
...the spirit of the Left seeks to reactivate not only itelf but the very power of majoritarian democracy through those nascent rather than fully organized groups we call "social movements...
...the character of peoples varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion...
...1) The political mobilization of the previously disenfranchised lower classes is a long and slow process, still incomplete in many of the major Western democracies, as indicated by higher-middle- and upper-class as against working-class rates of voting, higher working- and lower-class support for parties of the Right than of upper- and middleclass support for parties of the Left, and the occasional survival of formal and informal barriers to voting imposed on some low-status groups, such as blacks in the American South...
...If events ensure that sooner or later reformist parties of the Left will come to office, and if the return to office of conservative parties is partly conditional on their leaving untouched the popular reforms carried out by Left administrations, then there is an unmistakable "leftward drift" inherent in the functioning over time of democratic politics...
...77-80...
...How does the Right counter this demographic superiority of their opponents...
...54 DENNIS H. WRONG tional values and calls for a closing of ranks against the fomenters of public disorder...
...The decline in the momentum of the New Deal is often dated from Democratic losses in the midterm elections of 1938, but World War II prolonged and partially revived the ideological climate of the '30s...
...Someone has remarked that 1948 was the last year of the '30s...
...theory," and their belief in the virtues of competition—although he also acknowledged the existence of a similar rhythm in the Western European democracies...
...156-168...
...In European countries, though not in the United States, it was the central issue around which new working-class and socialist parties organized in the closing decades of the 19th century...
...At the level of rhetoric and public demonstrations, this kind of ultimatist ideological politics was fairly visible in the United States during the late '60s...
...the naturalness of conservative emotions is too often facilely dismissed as indoctrination by the ruling class (these days as "brainwashing by the mass media"), or, more pretentiously, as "false consciousness," a term that carries a heavy burden of responsibility not merely for ideological delusions but for actual political crimes...
...3) The return of the Right, however, is conditional on its persuading the electorate that it will not "turn the clock back" on the reforms achieved by the Left...
...Utis," which means "nobody" in classical Greek, was a pseudonym here adopted by Isaiah Berlin...
...Neither recurrent cycles, unilinear evolution, nor a spiral course combining them amount to self-sufficient, self-explaining "laws" of change...
...The cyclical rhythm is not the effect of a mysterious cosmic law...
...In trying to account for the cyclical rhythm, Schlesinger also referred to alleged peculiarities of the American people, such as their preference for "empiricism" rather than "preconceived 6 Ibid., pp...
...In periods of acute national crisis and distress, a "dialectic of the extremes," to use a phrase of Raymond Aron's, 12 in which each side violently confronts the other, often enough in the streets, may take center stage and threaten the survival of democratic institutions themselves...
...240-262...
...The conception of a Left/Right continuum along which parties, movements, regimes, and ideologies can be located has often been justly criticized,' yet some such conception seems indispensable and invariably creeps back in hidden guise when the conventional categories are repudiated...
...5 They are parts of a large international or supracivilization environment that interpenetrates them...
...For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor...
...12 The Century of Total War (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), pp...
...a Ibid., pp...
...The Right reaffirms tradi11 Ibid., p. 22...
...Segments of both Right and Left, in short, are attracted by violent revolutionary or counterrevolutionary shortcuts: in the case of the Right, to arrest and even reverse the leftward drift...
...The periodicity of Left and Right in democratic political life is not necessarily equivalent to an alternation of parties in power, nor of governments actually pursuing more or less egalitarian or conservative policies...
...If the division between Left and Right is the most enduring focus of political conflict, it is nevertheless often obscured by ethnic, religious, and racial cleavages within particular polities...
...Nor need the actual structure of a party or regime determine its classification as Left or Right: parties of the Left may be led and controlled by tiny, self-perpetuating elites, while parties of the Right may be organized in a loose, decentralized, "populistic" manner...
...But the fact that responsibility for the Vietnam disaster rested on a liberal Democratic administration created a split on the Left that permitted Nixon's victory in 1968...
...In confronting the electorate, however, the most regular and reliable strategy of the Right is to appeal to nationalist sentiment...
...The period from 1918 until Franklin D. Roosevelt's election in 1932, or, perhaps, until the stock-market crash in 1929, was a period of war-inspired patriotism, postwar reaction (the "Red Scare"), return to "normalcy" under Harding and Coolidge, and complacent prosperity...
...Movement toward its goals is at best asymptotic...
...The Right calls for a government of "national unity" that will not hesitate to suspend constitutional liberties and suppress the opposition parties, while the Left succumbs to a mood of revolutionary impatience, or "utopian greed...
...However, all firmly established groups, including parties of the Left, become committed defensively to their own continued survival within a system that has permitted them to develop and even flourish...
...Old issues bitterly contested in the past by the parties suddenly become obsolescent and periods of "Butskellism," or even Grand Coalitions between the rivals, become the order of the day, isolating and infuriating the more militant partisans on each side who may break away and create splinter or "ginger" groups within legislatures, or "extraparliamentary opposition" movements outside...
...Nor is this rhythm the sole, or even always the major, substance of democratic politics...
...9 But an explanation of the rhythm of democratic politics must necessarily be specific to constitutional mass democracies...
...THE RHYTHM OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS 49 in 1918...
...For the pattern has not been one of a mere repetitive oscillation between fixed points...
...Furthermore, it is at least worth observing in passing that there is some evidence of a similar periodicity in nondemocratic states...
...for...
...Despotic rulers of absolutist monarchies have often been followed by rulers more responsive to pressures from below...
...Parties of the Left, on the other hand, have traditionally been isolationist in the United States, internationalist and anti-imperialist on the European continent, and Little Englanders in Britain...
...See pp...
...And so it is necessary to order things so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force...
...Sooner or later the Left party wins office, often as a result of a severe economic crisis or the impact of a war (especially a lost one) that discredits an existing government...
...In general, the ideological coloration of the perceived national enemy has complicated the impact of wars on the Left/Right dialectic...
...Schlesinger's inferences or "predictions" for the years ahead have been borne out to a surprising degree...
...Contemporary technocrats, of course, are committed to the planned application of scientific knowledge...
...48 DENNIS H. WRONG superimposed upon that of Left/Right conflict...
...Wars often appear to mark the beginning or the end of the intensification of particular phases of the cycle...
...3-61...
...Why do parties of the Left become so pallidly reformist and achieve so little in the way of fundamental "structural change" in the direction of their egalitarian ideals...
...its slowness and the many oounterpressures to which it is subject disillusions and radicalizes utopians of the Left, who then dismiss parliament as a "talking-shop," the major parties as "Tweedledum" and "Tweedledee," and "the system" itself as a fraud in professing to offer opportunities for change...
...The institutionalization of the Left in democratic politics initiates a long-term movement toward realization of the goals of the Left, a movement inherent in the workings of political democracy...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
