AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE 1980s
Burnham, Walter Dean
The United States is clearly in the midst of a "conservative revival." As usual in such cases of "mood shift," the revival is spearheaded by intellectuals—particularly those who cluster around...
...More than a century ago, Horace Greeley pointed to this fragility in his analysis of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant KnowNothings...
...This quasi-permanent bias is an inevitable by-product of hegemony in the cultural-ideological domain, particularly when—as in the United States—that hegemony is to all practical purposes uncontested...
...Declines in the participation rate depend crucially on what the majority party does or fails to do in order to mobilize the half of the electorate that now forms "the party of nonvoters...
...One is that inflation tends to rot the social order of capitalism in direct proportion to its magnitude...
...Insupportable ideological demands are placed on Americans as a whole, along with threatening Realpolitik demands, by the socalled Socialist bloc...
...It follows that a political system with no organized working-class left will be marked by heavy abstentions among the lower classes...
...As California real-estate owners found with Proposition 13, cutting back on the public sector can give immediate relief...
...An overwhelming majority of the population either supports or opposes a given valence issue...
...The latter in particular appears to confirm the acute misgivings among conservatives about American power and "national will...
...Sauve qui pew becomes the order of the day, the only principle of social intercourse...
...This displacement was not the work of a day: from beginning to end, the budgets from 1933-34 through 1941 classified all New Deal relief expenditures as temporary, and not until 1946 did Congress pass an Employment Act that made the federal government assume some formal responsibility for the elimination of mass unemployment...
...To this we now turn...
...The state and its managers took responsibility for permanent involvement in the workings of the economy, the development of a welfare "safety net" for the victims of the capitalist business cycle, and the creation of new organizations of countervailing power, such as the industrial unions in the CIO...
...For a provocative account of these and related issues, see also Edward R. Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978...
...It is not too difficult to see why...
...Well, the surplus did stop growing...
...This "liberal tradition" stacks the deck against the public sector in its domestic role, and it creates serious problems of legitimating that role in direct proportion as it expands...
...One of the regular dynamics of politics seems to be that as a party shrinks, the influence of its hard-core elements grows within it...
...3, pp...
...At the beginning of the 1980s, real discretionary income per worker had declined 9 percent since 1970 and 18 percent since 1973...
...The vacuum of power and policy created along the way is patently dangerous to the long-term survival of the American state and of capitalism itself...
...In this favorable environment, the corporate sector went into debt on a scale rarely if ever seen in our economic history...
...it also suggests that, if the international situation continues to deteriorate, something very akin to "war capitalism" is likely to emerge as our dominant survival strategy...
...Some recent studies, notably by Douglas Hibbs, have identified a clear class dimension affecting the public-policy choices governments have made in the recent past...
...The problem of authoritatively defining a collective national purpose becomes as intractable as it is necessary...
...In consequence, a generalized crisis of legitimacy develops while the surplus declines...
...As even the most cursory inspection of pre-1963 budgets will show, the public sector of Eisenhower's time looks as nearly "prehistoric" to us as Hoover's...
...2 Donald E. Stokes, "Spatial Models of Party Competition," in Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp...
...They come to the fore either when the leading position-issue cleavages have been severely eroded with the passage of time, or when (as in the mid-1850s) they have not yet been conclusively defined...
...Attempts to build coalitions by using backlash against minority outgroups are closely linked to "valence-issue" strategies...
...First, the 1945-70 period was optimal for the growth of oligopoly capitalism from its national bases into a full-fledged multinational stage...
...Moreover, at other electoral levels the Republican party had scarcely recovered from the near-record low to which it had fallen in 1974...
...They are reflected in part by the conservative intellectuals' rediscovery of the market, and a parallel rediscovery by other intellectuals of Marxist critiques of capitalism...
...There is a third but relatively weak option, depending on two large "ifs...
...How to explain this...
...Victory seems assured if the large majority under stress swings against blacks, Catholics, Communists, or other opportune targets...
...The reader at this point may justifiably say that even if all the foregoing is an accurate assessment, it still doesn't tell us very much about how a "conservative revival" will help the Republicans...
...As they wither, the fragmented pluralism this constitutional structure encourages keeps growing...
...By 1952, for example, Republicans had lost each of the preceding five presidential elections, defeated largely on the position-issue axis forged out of the Great Depression and the New Deal...
...Something of the sort also happened in the mid-1970s, as the Vietnam War receded into history and economic difficulties unprecedented since the Great Depression came into view...
...Dispersion was more extensively carried out in the United States than anywhere else in the Western world, and most completely in the rapidly growing Sunbelt regions...
...However messy this may be from a logical point of view, such an opinion structure is admirably suited to support a nonsocialist but interventionist state that deals in the currency of particularized benefits...
...The Ametican Constitution of 1787 was explicitly designed to prevent the emergence of an internally sovereign and accountable political power structure...
...There will be work enough for anyone who feels the call to undertake it...
...In many respects, this change was far greater in both its impact and implications than the New Deal had been...
...and, last but by no means least, Jimmy Carter's position as the most conservative Democrat to sit in the White House since Grover Cleveland...
...If the contemporary American state is under such widespread attack, one important reason is that it is the kind of state it is...
...Add to these signs of change another and far weightier one: the crisis in international relations unleashed by the seizure of the American embassy in Iran, reinforced by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...Congressional Republicans have been successful in thwarting efforts to liberalize electoral law and reduce procedural barriers surrounding the ballot box...
...But we find instead the "conservative revival," which represents the best structurally based hope the Republicans have had in many decades...
...In such situations of threat, people who regard themselves and are regarded by others as "haves" (no matter how illusory the perception may be) will unite on this issue, while they divide on everything else...
...This becomes increasingly obvious to the public, especially to the unorganized "great middle" sectors, as more and more groups organize and get their pieces of the public pie...
...But the local public sector is much more accessible to such revolts than the national...
...Similarly, the whole 1980 election campaign will deal with foreign-policy and imperialdefense issues to a degree that scarcely could have been imagined before November 4, 1979...
...Throughout the advanced industrial-capitalist world, "growthmanship" and the construction of expensive welfare states became the twin pillars of postwar public policy...
...This was not good news for Republicans...
...The cost of basic necessities had risen 110 percent from 1970 and 80 percent from 1973...
...A further consideration of the problem is thus in order, beginning with two obvious facts...
...Increases in American productivity fell to the lowest in the capitalist world, were even lower than those in Britain...
...5 See the analysis of the 1981 budget in the New York Times, January 20, 1980, Sec...
...8 Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., "Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy," American Political Science Review, Vol...
...The full-fledged claimant state we know today was a still later creation, of the 1960s and not of the 1930s...
...These must soon dissolve its compact organization, distract its councils, "And, like the baseless fabric of a vision,/ Leave not a wrack behind...
...On the ideological plane, there still is no room for a coherent socialist opposition to the liberal individualism that has always dominated American political culture...
...6 Household and corporate debt stood close to, if not above, the record highs of 1974...
...Of course, the quest for social harmony was pursued very differently during the boom of the 1960s than it had been 40 years earlier: in the meantime, the interventionist state of political capitalism had come into being...
...The contradictions here are obvious...
...Going wherever profit would be greatest, their operations in time led to a fateful compromising of essential national interests in the states of their origin— see the most obvious example in the energyautomotive sectors, where by 1980 the United States had become dependent on external sources for half of its oil supply...
...All this has a long history in American politics...
...A rediscovery of the economic market's virtues comes to seem, under these conditions, both appropriate and nearly inevitable...
...It ended with the seizure of American embassy personnel by Iranian revolutionaries and with Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, following a long period of growth in the U.S.S.R.'s military capacity...
...First, there is the immense growth of the state since the Great Depression...
...The ramifications of these changes have been exceptionally far-reaching...
...This sort of dead end at least suggests that some sort of socialist (or at least laborite) alternative vision of our human potential might possibly be seriously organized...
...The national scene now was dominated by the malfunctioning of the economy and by such issues left over from Watergate as Ford's pardon of Nixon...
...American leadership has done little or nothing to arrest this development, much less reverse it even after the embargo-OPEC-price crisis of 197374...
...But it is hard to imagine how runaway increases in the social-security levy, rapid and heavy increases in defense spending, high inflation, possibly substantial increases in unemployment, and persistent declines in the mass standard of living can be sustained indefinitely without producing a political explosion...
...Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 276...
...He can and will, so far as possible, preempt issues that his primary opponents and the Republicans might use in their efforts to unseat him...
...Well-known examples include the Native Americans of the 1840s and 1850s, the Klan, Prohibition, and Catholic issues of the 1920s and, in part, the Great Red Scares that followed American participation in both World Wars...
...Both the capital-accumulation needs of the regime at the top and the personal survival needs of a dominantly middle-class voting population now point toward disentitlement as the order of the day...
...Yet, without protection, vitally important sectors of the domestic American economy were seriously undermined by the late 1970s...
...Similarly, the Nixon-Agnew campaigns of '68 and '72 hammered with great success at a variety of outgroup and negative-valence themes...
...that the active electorate will thus be significantly more middle-class than the population at large...
...Sociologically, this decline in post-1960 participation levels has been particularly concentrated among working-class Americans who already vote least...
...After 1932 both the dominant political ideology and the activities of government were sweepingly changed, though both remained well within our Lockean-liberal "tradition...
...Its leaders can and do have freedom to wander widely over the policy landscape...
...Thus, by 1976, blue-collar and service workers constituted only 48.5 percent of the active electorate, but fully three-quarters of the "party of nonvoters...
...Presidential victories have come and gone, but support in the electorate for a Republican selfidentification has fallen from nearly twofifths in 1940 (only 4 points behind the Democrats) to little more than one-fifth (about 20 points behind) in the late 1970s...
...1 and 14...
...In the end they could not prevent the election of Jimmy Carter or even his capture of all but one of the exConfederate states...
...So what, fundamentally, will change in and around the electoral arena...
...Whatever the long-term consequences, in the short term this international upheaval reinforces our domestic "conservative revival...
...the string of victories by very conservative Republicans in Southern and Western Senate elections...
...True, participation rates in this group are more than 50 percent lower than among their West German counterparts...
...So will many in the congressional Democratic party...
...Nor did the Eisenhower era and the politics of Nixon's 1968 and '72 campaigns make up for this institutional ill-adaptation to the modern political order...
...Such a blocked context would seem to require of people who do not owe allegiance to the "conservative revival" that they pay more rather than less attention to what is going on in the 1980 election and its successors...
...these days it is present in most Western political economies...
...During the heyday of laissez-faire, this took such forms as Herbert Hoover's classically misplaced prediction of 1928 about chickens in pots and cars in garages—all, of course, to be provided by a beneficent private sector under cheerful Republican guidance...
...One can hardly conclude a discussion of the postboom situation and its effects on our 157 domestic politics without reference to the so fundamentally changed international situation...
...This becomes even more important for our rulers as they contemplate the military spending a Cold War II would entail...
...It is a mark of the times that only those on the right seem to have become aware that this is so, and to draw the appropriate conclusions (for them) as to the future ordering of politics...
...2 He spoke of "position issues" and "valence issues...
...Democratic presidents from John Kennedy to Jimmy Carter choose from the same pool of "serious men" that Republicans have tapped to manage the most pressing problems of the American elite, notoriously in the foreign-policy arena...
...If the surplus stops growing—even more, if it disappears— retrenchment is as practically inevitable as it becomes politically hazardous for those in office...
...For in the absence of an organizable socialist critique of political capitalism, the operational code of American politics can only fluctuate between neo-laissez-faire and the "entitlement"-oriented welfare state...
...It becomes widely, and not inaccurately, perceived as being both feeble and oppressive at the same time...
...James Madison quite properly referred to it as "our feudal constitution...
...If you seek a monument to the truth of this statement, look around you...
...But it has now become irrepressible...
...This and other signs of deep crisis involve important changes in the arena of conflict that may well reopen the question, "Who needs Republicans anyway...
...Arrayed against each other were the country's "backward" primary-producer areas in the South and West, and the "advanced" industrial heartland, the Northeastern and near-Midwestern Metropole...
...It lasted as long as the Republicans could command majority support on the main position-issue sets of the day...
...the supposedly emergent Republicans of 1968 became the submergent Republicans of 1974...
...CLOSELY LINKED WITH the rise in consumer spending and expectations is the increasingly difficult relationship between debt and saving...
...population base...
...Political capitalism was further consolidated when, with the suicide of Europe in World War II, a polar international confrontation—both in ideology and in Realpolitik—saw the launching of the Cold War and the creation of the American (quasi-) empire...
...More generally, inflation stimulates an ever-more bitter struggle among organized fragments of the population to use whatever market power or political clout they have to shove the burden of declining real income onto others...
...This is not just an American problem...
...Operationally they are liberals, just as regularly "voting" for specific programs that require government spending—particularly those from which they expect to benefit personally...
...To the extent that these expenditures go up without major cuts elsewhere, the danger of hyperinflation becomes more real than during the Korean or Vietnam wars...
...No matter that this closed circle is still closed, no matter that these "serious men" have made a disastrous mess of things: you do not need Republicans in office to keep the circle closed and the range of policy choices narrowed...
...They narrow seriously organizable alternatives in domestic politics—very much as, in 1896, the Democrats with their free-silver campaign united and rallied against themselves overwhelming majorities of voters in the industrial Northeast...
...They also have more reason to concentrate their attention on the course of the "conservative revival" in both the ideological and operational spheres, and to shape their own actions accordingly...
...The realignment failed to realign...
...They were quite sufficient to elect Richard Nixon twice, to give George Wallace his brief moment, and to rupture the Democratic party...
...in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occurs...
...Yet, theirs is essentially a passive role...
...We may not be far from a description of actual conditions in the United States today...
...9 Nor can the abysmal turnouts of the 1970s be discounted by the enfranchisement of the 18- to 20-year-old age group in 1971...
...A new, interventionist political capitalism was born...
...but, while the future ought not to be foreclosed, such an eventuality seems remote...
...Antonio Gramsci once observed that "the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born...
...Largescale sacrifices from the American people are already being called for and are almost certainly on the way...
...Second, the two are now so interpenetrated that neither politicians nor scholars can any longer profitably deal with them in isolation...
...They will require legitimation...
...Political capitalism was created out of the necessity to do both, following the collapse in 1929 of 152 corporate self-regulation...
...Once, very long ago, the Republican party 150 enjoyed clear dominance...
...The growing "conservative revival" is no less fueled by permanent inflation of socially damaging proportions—an inflation virtually inevitable so long as the forces that simultaneously promote economic decay and an elective political feudalism continue to exist...
...Out of these changes emerged the modal publicopinion structure described by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in 1967...
...The American economy is now a "debt economy," with the burdens of carrying this debt rising sharply since the death of the boom in the early 1970s...
...But dismantling the welfare state—even placing it at zero real growth for any length of time—would involve speeding up the impoverishment of the poor and even of significant parts of the middle classes...
...But, since 1960, turnout (outside of the very special case of the South in the aftermath of voting-rights legislation) has sharply plummeted from the relatively mediocre levels of the 1940-60 period...
...So do arguments and policies favoring capital accumulation over consumption and a conversion of as much as possible of the domestic public sector's activity to a pay-as-you-go 158 (and pay-as-and-if-you-can-afford-it) basis...
...Even at the far lower inflation rate that prevails in the United States today, inflation coupled with declining real income prompts an increasingly desperate and widespread search by the middle classes for ways out...
...Operationally, the public sector's interventions for the sake of maintaining social harmony tend cumulatively to produce their opposite...
...This brings us to another major legacy of the Great Boom of 1945-70...
...Kristol has made an interesting effort to evade the point in his essay "The Worst Is Yet to Come," Wall Street Journal, November 26, 1979...
...156 WE NOW TURN TO the matter of electoral participation, since its dynamics give additional support to the "conservative revival...
...The invasion has served as an admirable accelerator for these misgivings...
...0 For the decay of the American empire's economic and international foundations returns us squarely to the dilemma so visible in the 1930s 159 and forgotten during the postwar boom...
...In the short term, the Republican candidate of 1980 may or may not succeed by tapping public reactions to high inflation and the Administration's ineptitude abroad...
...The inflation rate reached double-digits, and as the 1980s begin there is little or no relief in sight...
...Some years ago Donald E. Stokes, then of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, identified two major types of issues in campaigns...
...It is trivial to show that even if they were altogether excluded from that base in computing turnout rates, this would increase the nominal turnout rate by less than 2 percent...
...For declines in the general level of wellbeing must occur so long as these forces predominate...
...The "uncontrollable" share of Carter's 1981 budget now stands at 76 percent.5 154 Forgotten along the way—because it was assumed that skilled Keynesian economists could "fine-tune" the economy while the interventionist state guaranteed eternal growth—was the bottom line...
...There is, therefore, an even deeper conflict, when ultimate push comes to ultimate shove, between capitalism and democracy—made deeper, if possible, by the feudalized governmental machinery through which democratic impulses are processed in the United States...
...We may be left for the foreseeable future with an ongoing, increasingly sterile debate between laissezfaire conservatives and "statist" liberals...
...With time, this process gave rise to the famous "urban crisis...
...Suburbanization spread on a massive scale...
...Promises could only be kept on condition that the boom did continue forever...
...We have already considered the options generally available to the leaders of a minority party and dismissed two...
...Political executives, legislators, and judges have every incentive to go into business for themselves and for their clients...
...The federal government continues insistently to pursue "tax creep" fiscal strategies to keep its own entitlement structure more or less intact—ensuring that these efforts at relief will be redoubled in the years immediately ahead...
...Throughout this century participation among the American lower classes has been significantly lower than in virtually all other Western polities...
...Granted the electoral incentives, it is politically almost impossible to "disentitle" any significant part of the population...
...Equally insupportable material demands are being made on Americans as a whole by the Third World "southern" nations in the ongoing northsouth dialogue, and especially by the OPEC cartel...
...Bell's argument is close to, and partially follows, that presented a generation earlier by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942, 1947, 1950...
...Yet, there is a curious impermanence to such movements...
...Assuming sufficient economic growth, the surplus thus generated could achieve military superiority over the Soviets, pay for the welfare state, and lead to rising affluence in the private sector and, moreoever, do all these good things at the same time...
...In the 1930s, the state came to be seen as an indispensable vehicle for national economic salvation...
...Carried to its logical extreme under conditions of hyperinflation, this can lead to truly Hobbesian social conflicts, a war of all against all such as historians of the Weimar period have described in vivid detail...
...After all, the interests of the top elite as they perceive them will be protected well enough anyway—and perhaps all the better with Democrats running the transfer-payment state they believe in, and thus promoting social peace at the bottom of the system...
...19 M ost notably, so far, in Samuel P. Huntington's essay, "The Democratic Distemper," in Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol, eds., The American Commonwealth 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp...
...7 For a full discussion, see Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976...
...More remotely, this huge "hole" in the active electorate is largely the artifact of uncontested hegemony and its effects on political consciousness...
...If so, then the initiative in political discourse and action will continue to move toward the neo-laissez-faire pole...
...Not very much will change, unless or until the survival needs of the dominant mode of production require it...
...Given their incapacity to develop a credible political formula appropriate to an age of retrenchment, their success in curbing the entitlement state would inevitably, sooner rather than later, produce an electoral reaction in favor of the Democrats...
...Were the currency stabilized, both would be required under present and immediately foreseeable economic conditions...
...We may well expect the reinstitution of the draft on both economic-cost and geopolitical grounds, and very large "catchup" expenditures on the military...
...To a much greater extent than almost anyone realizes, the United States, dependent on external sources for half its oil, has lost the capacity to pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy this side of a nuclear war...
...Naturally, much public policy during the Great Boom was oriented toward promoting consumption and, at best, failing to encourage the saving from which capital accumulation is largely derived...
...If expectations of privately generated affluence were sharply raised by the Great Boom, still more were expectations involving the public sector's cornucopia-like output...
...as indeed has already happened with John Connolly—significantly, on the Republican side...
...After all, more than 50 million government checks are at stake...
...Symptoms include the California tax revolts of 1978 and 1980 (Proposition 13 and "Jarvis II," an initiative aimed at cutting the state income tax...
...That persistent liberal utopia, "the end of ideology," seemed at last on the verge of realization...
...In 1978, for example, turnout for the gubernatorial election in New York State reached a 150-year low, 38.5 percent of the potential electorate, even lower than it had been in the gubernatorial election of 1810 when nearly three-fifths of the potentially eligible population was disfranchised for failure to meet a property qualification...
...To repeat, conservatives profit from this huge participation skew in a variety of ways, but theirs is not the active role in creating it...
...but schoolchildren do not vote, and the poor don't vote in anything approximating their true numbers...
...It also promoted evereasier credit terms for consumers so that inventory could be profitably moved...
...72-78...
...This could happen if there was so large a withdrawal of lowerclass elements from the voting population that the remaining, more affluent fragment could be won by traditional conservative appeals...
...3 Greeley's forecast was right on the money...
...They were created and have been sustained by acute memories of the role that protectionism has played in wrecking the international economic and political order during the 1930s...
...q 160...
...71, pp...
...We do not have space here to describe all that happens when a hugely increased load of demand and output is processed through such a power centrifuge, but merely for a few brief propositions...
...Above all, the addition of huge supplemental defense expenditures to the present budget structure, with all its "uncontrollables," will also trouble a much more problematic American economy...
...Republicans projected themselves to the electorate as the "modernizing party," the party of progress and affluence, and their Democratic opponents as backward-looking, not competent to manage the affairs of a modern state, and "responsible" for the Depression of 1893-97...
...Things did not work out that way...
...So the promises are kept, but the people who do the promising have the unique power under the Constitution to regulate the value of the units of account used to fulfill those promises...
...Conservatives are the least likely people to attempt a rigorous inquest as to how this fatal dependence was created, by whom, and for whose benefit...
...9-38...
...Such a crisis is not likely to be resolved within the framework of that regime, nor, a fortiori, within the traditional Republican/ Democratic choice structure...
...Not only does this suggest that the "guns-versus-butter" stage may be reached surprisingly soon...
...170-74...
...Perhaps so...
...The disruptive forces Phillips identified were real enough...
...Both foreign-policy and social-issue questions declined to the lowest level of intensity in public attitudes since 1948, perhaps even earlier...
...It is not the first time in recent years that such speculations have arisen...
...This involved a radical dispersion of urban populations and industry, made possible solely by the existence of cheap private transportation and cheap, apparently limitless energy...
...One might think that this dismal situation would produce some leftish reaction against an economy that, after all, has not lost its capitalist character...
...It stopped especially after the revolution in the world political economy that was initiated with the oil embargo and OPEC price control in 1973-74...
...For many years, the conservatives of this conservative party operated on the assumption that there was a "silent conservative majority" out there—somewhere—just waiting for a choice rather than an echo: a theory conclusively disproved in 1964 for reasons clear enough to public-opinion specialists...
...and they do...
...Sophisticated Trilateralism has migrated from the Rockefeller Republicans to a Democratic administration headed by Jimmy Carter...
...But the realignment of values, expectations, and political parties was striking enough, even in the early years...
...q Notes 1 Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969...
...Ford was the first incumbent president to be defeated since Herbert Hoover in 1932...
...Scarcely a year after he wrote it, the KnowNothing party had disintegrated as a national force, ruptured by the massive cleavage over slavery that ran right through both its organization and American politics as a whole...
...Confronting the issues, the candidates, and voter attitudes of 1976, one might well have though oneself in a different country from the America of 1968 or 1972...
...Our free-trade policies form an integral part of imperial economic management...
...3 Tribune (Whig) Almanac for 1856 (New York, 1855), P. 7. 4 Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967...
...In a no-growth situation, capital accumulation can be pursued only at the expense of consumption, both private and public...
...Needless to say, it was particularly bad news for those conservatives who had hoped to build a new Republican majority on such flimsy and ephemeral foundations as those provided by "valence" or social-issue politics...
...Kevin Phillips, arguing this thesis, traced the roots of this supposed counterrevolution to a white lower-middle and working-class backlash against the Great Society and its nonwhite beneficiaries, disagreeable Vietnam War protesters, even more disagreeable and largely affluent college students, and, perhaps most disagreeable of all, conspicuous members of the counterculture.' This new Republican majority, then, would be created from the "silent majority's" rejection of these outgroups, coupled with Southern conservatism, patriotism, and racism...
...Finally, the minority party can be propelled into majority status when a sharp crisis suddenly discloses how much the foundations of the domestic and international order have been changing and how irrelevant divisions over older position issues have become...
...As usual in such cases of "mood shift," the revival is spearheaded by intellectuals—particularly those who cluster around the Committee on the Present Danger and Public Interest...
...This boom was largely fueled by immense increases in consumer spending, and in the mass expectations of an affluent, middle-class living style...
...two are of particular interest here...
...The probable consequences of this decay in the American empire's control over international economic and political life now are visible...
...If and when it becomes necessary to impose World War II-style gasoline rationing, we will rapidly learn that the population is much less efficiently distributed than it was in 1941, and that public transportation will be 153 far less capable of absorbing the load than it was in '41...
...Still, they have formed the only historical route through which so sweeping a reorganization of the electoral market has occurred...
...The immense growth of competition between European and Japanese firms and domestic American corporations for consumer markets, especially within the United States, presents problems of comparable difficulty...
...An enormous, worldwide boom—unprecedented in both length and magnitude—unfolded from 1945 until about 1970...
...Yet, far more formidable problems surfaced when the energy crisis hit in the mid1970s...
...This point is now clearly understood by those intellectual conservatives who go virtually as far as they dare in their proposals to curb what John Adams, in simpler times, once called "the democratical element...
...But the foregoing analysis raises the lively prospect that we may at last be reaching such a condition...
...This psychology often takes extreme forms in the "go-go" years before the end—from the mad stock-market speculations of 1928-29 to the rushes into securities and real-estate speculation that marked the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...The victims, at all levels, will be the poor and other dependent populations, particularly schoolchildren...
...The incentive for this was obvious: at all costs, the tremendous social conflicts and deadly international anarchy that erupted in the 1930s had to be avoided if the system was to survive...
...The traditional partisan channels connecting rulers and ruled, across the great fault lines at the center known as "separation of powers," decay...
...Uncontested hegemony is not easily overthrown...
...If a model of the state's "proper" role based on the conditions of 1936 no longer seems adequate to the difficulties we now face, the 1886 variety seems even less suitable so long as a relatively free electoral market continues to exist...
...The rapid pace of socioeconomic change produces serious individual and group stress that, under the right circumstances and with skilled leadership, can provide intensely combustible materials for electoral warfare...
...If the Republicans today enjoy the identified support of little more than one-fifth of the electorate, there are very good reasons for this...
...These issues centered on a sectional cleavage over modernization under , industrial-capitalist auspices, though much else of importance was going on as well...
...It is also in such eras that the state's leaders are likely to attempt to "complete" their task of promoting social harmony among the mass of the population...
...If these minority-party entrepreneurs can find a way to link the majority party to the "wrong" (i.e., unpopular) side of a significant valence (or "social") issue, the prospects of victory are much enhanced...
...Among other things, the organization of world politics since the Bolshevik Revolution has served to displace the struggle between such alternatives onto the international arena...
...This class differential, not surprisingly, was notably reduced during and for some time after the New Deal realignment of the 1930s...
...This solution would be near-perfect from the state's point of view were it not for certain unfortunate consequences of inflation...
...The upheaval in the Middle East has resulted in Jimmy Carter's being born yet once again, so far as the Russians are concerned...
...It is one thesis of my present essay that the historic conditions for the success of that synthesis have expired...
...In '78 it was, of course, lowest of all in New York City...
...Decisively confirmed in the realigning election of 1896, this dominance lasted with little interruption until 1932...
...And this virtually ensures that the public sector, much more than the private, will be widely held responsible for increasing discomfort—and for two reasons, ideological and operational...
...The thought occurs that the Republican party might capitalize on the situation, and perhaps even displace the Democrats as the majority party...
...The post-1960 decline and its concentration among the lower classes of American society are thus real enough...
...and that there will be, comparatively, a tendency for the electoral market and public policy to reflect a higher tolerance of unemployment and a lower tolerance of inflation than if the lower classes organized and participated...
...For unlike the situation in the last Cold War, this additional expenditure on arms will have to be added to the top of a budget, now well over $600 billion, threequarters of which is locked into domestic "uncontrollable" expenditures...
...It has been the first principle of the "liberal tradition in America" to deny the existence of any such conflict...
...This is particularly true of the enormous transfer of wealth to the OPEC countries, akin to the reparations exacted from Germany by the Allies after 1919, but of vastly greater magnitude...
...There were more than enough problem areas, intensified by the boom's very existence—and these, like the plight of ghetto blacks, were now to receive "solutions" not only for domestic political reasons but sometimes for imperial ones as well...
...Back in the late 1960s, conservative intellectuals and politicians briefly thought they had discovered an "emerging Republican majority," arising from an imminent realignment...
...This was required by the deterioration of American economic supremacy in the non-Communist world...
...And, if blacks have a generally lower turnout rate than whites, this too is overwhelmingly a matter of class...
...It continues still...
...The secret of achieving sustained capitalist growth, increasing social harmony and a relatively stable order in the world seemed to have been found...
...In the last analysis, what we have been describing is a chronic but now escalating crisis of rule—a crisis, therefore, in the foundations of the constitutional regime that now exists in the United States...
...The state is primarily in business to promote capital accumulation and to maintain social harmony and legitimacy...
...Academic intellectuals now generally—if perhaps too easily—write off the GOP as representing only a parochial, 151 declining-sector plus new-money brand of capitalist politics...
...It is also highly undesirable from the government's own perspective to have a situation in which, at the private-sector level, there would be actual, visible, and widespread pay cuts...
...Such events have been quite rare in American history...
...These estimates are taken from the recent account of the problem of declining real income in Business Week, January 28, 1980, pp...
...If the substructure of politics is to some extent dominated by class polarity, and if the basic issues of most campaigns are economic, then it would be possible for conservatives to score gains even without basic change with regard to the underlying position issues...
...These objectives were achieved with spectacular success...
...Kristol attempts this by restating the classic Cold War synthesis: democracy based on an everexpanding economic pie, capitalism, and a militarized response to external challenge...
...Profitable capital accumulation once again becomes visible as a key problem in capitalist economics, and in the 1970s it was joined by a dramatic slump in industrial productivity...
...As we shall see, some such disappearance has been going on during the past two decades...
...1467-87 (1977...
...Both upheavals are linked to the utter dependence of the industrial-capitalist world on Persian Gulf oil...
...Without a constantly growing surplus, the modern welfare state cannot be supported at levels that the public has been taught to expect...
...Thus, if we inquire into the prospects for such a reorganization in the foreseeable future, we must attempt to evaluate changes in collective and individual existence whose effects could sweep away the accepted order of political capitalism and replace it with something else...
...Their successful 1952 strategy centered around their choice of a widely esteemed, essentially nonpartisan war hero and their skillful employment of such "valence issues" as "Korea, Communism, and corruption...
...American voters are arrayed not on one attitudinal dimension but two: ideological and operational...
...The hard-core Republicans are very, very conservative...
...Accordingly, its intrusions and still more its mistakes will be much less tolerated than will those of any part of the private sector— except, perhaps, in the case of the oil companies...
...Obviously, as inflation has become a much more acute problem than it was when these studies were conducted, a different set of findings might well exist...
...The persistent Republican problem has been that its elites have never been able as a whole to accept this post-laissez-faire dispensation...
...The draft will be more widely resisted than it was during the Korean War...
...In some respects, the multinational corporations may be said to have created the first true world economic market...
...But they will profit nevertheless, at least in the short term...
...Afficionados of the federal budget know that for all practical purposes a large part of it is out of anyone's reach on a year-to-year basis...
...the adoption by two dozen state legislatures of a constitutional-amendment proposal requiring balanced federal budgets...
...A return to Smoot-Hawley tariff schedules would probably create comparable devastation, particularly in Japan and West Germany...
...In early 1980 both these events are "swamping" the election campaign, scrambling all kinds of political calculations that seemed valid as late as November 1979...
...Writing in 1855, when the KnowNothing party seemed to be taking everything by storm, Greeley observed: It would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as an anti-Cholera or anti-PotatoRot party, and unlikely long to abide the necessary attrition of real and vital difference of opinion among its members with respect to the great questions of foreign and domestic policy which practically divide the country...
...But it is peculiarly exacerbated in the United States...
...This boom, of course, had its own contradictions...
...Laissez-faire and the Republican majority perished in the flames of an even worse economic disaster...
...It also seems that people are much more quiescent when their real disposable income declines while nominal income increases than they would be if they received pay cuts totaling, say, the 18 percent by which discretionary income has declined from 1973 to 1980...
...Domestically, such external pressures notoriously tend to weld a "coalition of the whole...
...we can discuss only some of the more important ones here...
...It can, for example, seriously compromise the pursuit of capitalaccumulation strategies by diverting funds from investment in securities and speculation in Krugerrands, and by even further discouraging savings and encouraging immediate consumption...
...These mandated expenditures, apart from servicing the national debt, are overwhelmingly in the domestic social-harmony and transfer-payment segments...
...Even so, we suspect that if a "conservative revival" were to occur under more acute inflationary pressure, the quite extreme class skew in the electoral market would maximize the chances for this revival to prevail...
...Valence-issue" politics can lead to ad hoc victory but—as the political economics of the Nixon years demonstrated—to no fundamental changes...
...These "uncontrollables" formed 65 percent of the whole budget a decade ago, in Nixon's time...
...Not surprisingly, substantial parts of the American business elite and the affluent upper middle classes have recently been taking their political business elsewhere...
...Similarly, there are excellent reasons why a conservative minority party cannot simply lift itself up by its bootstraps and come forth with a set of position issues so compelling that a general political breakthrough ensues...
...There is an obvious implication in all this: the American Lockean-liberal tradition, as capable in the past of unexpected revitalizations as the capitalism it supports, may at last have run out of historically creative options...
...Even without the necessity for rationing, the cost of transportation in so dispersed an environment will constitute a drag on overall economic performance far outweighing its counterparts in Japan or Western Europe—the more so as American fuel prices converge with those in Europe and in Japan...
...After all, the absence of organizable oppositions in American politics has meant that the Democratic party is a remarkably protean beast...
...Jimmy Carter is not only the latest example, but one of the purest...
...Geographically, participation has fallen especially severely in metropolitan areas, and most of all in their cores...
...Yet, at no time did they fundamentally change the voters' underlying attitudes—whether one looks at the distribution of party identification, stances on economic questions, or propensity to vote for Democrats elsewhere on the ticket, even in the Nixon landslide of 1972...
...Proximately, it is what the supposed representatives of non-middle-class Americans, the Democratic party and the trade unions, have done and especially what they have failed to do that has made the larger contribution...
...Both will probably have unsuspected price tags...
...There is inevitable conflict between accumulation and legitimation strategies, visible precisely to the extent that surplus does not grow...
...The population is immensely heterogeneous by comparative standards...
...But the 1970s began with the unilateral American abrogation of key features of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary agreement...
...Position issues," Stokes said, are distinguished by the existence of two more or less clearly defined sides...
...Finally, and most important, the inflationary "solution" permits the government to enjoy the benefits of "tax creep," as increases in nominal income push people into higher income-tax brackets...
...UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, such reflections would have looked much more plausible than they do now...
...But this age cohort added only between 6-8 percent to the U.S...
...The task, one would suppose, is to find a way out that liberates rather than destroy man's capacity for self-realization not only as an individual but as a social being...
...As this process continues in the 1980s, and it will, we can expect protectionist, national-capitalist candidacies to emerge...
...One important aspect of booms is "boom psychology": the longer they last, the more people assume that they have become eternal and act accordingly...
...The "cultural contradictions of capitalism"—its persistent tendency to corrode general-interest bonds and to emphasize 155 short-run personal gain—become the core of an explicitly political problem...
...Ideologically they are predominantly conservative, regularly producing large majorities against "Big Government...
...9 For a fuller discussion of this problem see my essay "The Appearance and Disappearance of the American Voter," in Richard Rose, ed., Political Participation (London: Sage, 1980, forthcoming...
...After '63, new programs initiated the major redesigning and extension of such old ones as Social Security, and new claimants produced "entitlements" in a flow so powerful that it continued unabated right through the Republican presidential era of 1969-77...
...in the 1980s, it is seen as a central part of the problem...
...8 Two broad conclusions are relevant here...
...The boom and the Cold War were inseparably linked to America's ascendancy, and both created and maintained American quasi-sovereignty in an essentially Hobbesian international arena...
...They are, as it were, "luxury products" in electoral politics...
...Thus, there was a fundamental change in the volume and, to a large extent, the very nature of domestic public-sector activities after the death of John F. Kennedy in 1963...
...First, both the domestic and world systems are dynamic and historically contingent, not static and eternally defined...
...on the other 149 hand, what makes "valence issues" so useful to politicians of a minority party is precisely that they do not have two sides...
...Finally, we find a public sector that really does share some features with feudal regimes...
...First, the greater the strength of the organized left in the electoral market, the larger the postwar growth in the welfare state has tended to be, though somewhat less so in the United States than .elsewhere...
...Second, opinion data reveal that working-class people are more worried about losing their jobs than about inflation, while worry about inflation is much stronger among middle-class people...
Vol. 27 • April 1980 • No. 2
