THE ASCENDANCY OF THE RIGHT

...In a crisis atmosphere, the initial public reaction is to hunker down and search for vigorous, decisive leadership...

...The result has been a dramatic improvement in the inflation rate—but at what a cost...

...By contrast, the overall real interest rates of 1982 and early 1983 had reached the highest levels in exactly 50 years...

...Among the many other marvels and portents of the Carter years, the near-collapse of the bond market in early 1980 reflected a fundamental truth about inflation: it distorts markets, creates disincentives for saving and inThe U.S...

...The underlying material causes are not so very different in the two countries, though the case of British capitalism is and long has been much more critical than that of American capitalism...

...Our task in what follows is to attempt to explain how it could be that, former Prime Minister Heath and others to the contrary, the "inhuman face of capitalism" has not only roared back into center-stage but is having a spectacularly successful political run...

...No one supposes that the French Socialists could win a national election in 1983...

...We are taxed too much...

...This pool of nonvoters has grown very steadily over the past generation, and overwhelmingly at the Democrats' expense...

...As the hackneyed phrase has it, this was no accident...

...Here too there were "lessons" to be learned from the Great Depression, and they were to be applied in order to keep politicians in office and maintain general support for the political system as a whole...

...Let us recall what was accepted as a matter of course not too many years ago...

...If he runs, as he probably will, Ronald Reagan is likely to be reelected next year...

...Tory policies in Britain have been no less confrontational, no less a negation of the postwar social-harmony tradition...

...But as always in a dynamic system of interaction, the actions of those in power will intersect with the hammerblows of contingency to produce a different balance of forces and, therefore, different political outcomes than any we can easily imagine today...

...Sky-high real rates of interest, the highest since 1933, worked to paralyze housing and other major markets and to hamstring American exports...

...Things were, of course, quite different in the United States, and not merely in matters of detail...

...The goal was to be achieved, as elsewhere in the West, by stimulating economic growth on a scale that was large enough to pay for the very expensive state called for by the public consensus...

...A civilian unemployment rate in excess of 10 percent, the highest since 1941, generates its usual human toll of destroyed dreams, suicides, family stress, deteriorating health standards, and multiplying home foreclosures...

...441...

...58, 62...

...All of this would seem to be remarkably at variance with the common right-wing argument that the recklessly lavish government spending of yesteryear fueled inflation and undermined saving and investment...

...Indeed, we needed to wait for the Reagan years and policies to have structural federal deficits so large as to threaten all the dangers rightwing publicists had proclaimed as liberal evils for years—and others besides...

...Ronald Reagan is widely perceived by the public as a Mensch...

...Democracy is in deficit...

...There is reason to think that Reagan is far more politically vulnerable on this issue than on any economic question...

...Such a course was hardly surprising...

...It intersects with the fundamental realities of geopolitics, the most important of which for most of this century has been the struggle between capitalist democracy (or democratic capitalism) and communism...

...Christian Democratic leader Helmut Kohl led 435 his party to a large victory in the March 1983 elections that followed...

...The politically organizable choices that exist in the United States are still limited to two...

...Yet Reagan was just such a candidate, and he won an easy victory in 1980...

...Reagan in office has pursued policies that have the direct effect of enriching the rich, impoverishing the poor, and inaugurating a second (and potentially lethal) phase of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and "world communism...

...It seems that the answer, in addition to national unemployment nearing 4 million, was wholesale devastation within Britain's manufacturing industry...

...The "collectivist consensus" was predicated on the immense power of organized labor on the one side and, on the other, on the willingness and capacity (both economic and psychological) of the traditional, deference-receiving, and largely secure ruling class to make accommodation to that power in order to preserve the legitimacy of the class state...

...It is for such reasons that the postwar American synthesis has been tagged as "interest-group liberalism" (in Theodore Lowi's words, in his book The End of Liberal434 ism) or "political capitalism" (my own...

...The capitalist business cycle was to be smoothed out through macroeconomic policy...

...In an electoral system where the left and center each win one-quarter of the vote while the right gains nearly half, an overwhelming landslide for the right in terms of parliamentary seats is a foregone conclusion...

...Here we must limit ourselves to asserting rather than "proving" that the collapse of the "collectivist consensus" in Britain led politically to the breakup of an opposition that was originally much more leftist and classbased than were the Democrats in this country...

...The economic crisis was chiefly marked by one of the great inflationary price revolutions 436 in modern world history, and by an economic dependence on raw-material suppliers who were no longer stable members of the imperial system...

...but denigration in the absence of a coherent alternative is not enough and likely to fail...

...It is very hard to see how that could occur within the Democratic party of today, or under the auspices of the "leadership" it will give us at San Francisco next year...

...In an age where presidents are elected who believe in "supply-side" economics —that is, in getting something for nothing (though in different ways from similar urges among top policy-makers in the past)— almost anything can happen...

...Yet the objectives in Britain and the United States were broadly the same: to avoid the horrors of the 1930s by maintaining free trade in the international market and, at home, economic growth and mass consumption...

...In a given order, the places where they can find them are normally very few—and still fewer in the United States...

...Moreover, the internal contradictions of the Reagan program are enormous...

...As for Senator Glenn, he hopes for nomination as a "Democratic Eisenhower," and—so far as one can tell from his voting record—he is not a great deal further to the left than the general was in his day...

...For the public would surely not stand for such policies, would it...

...These considerations intersect with a persistent finding of public-opinion data in both Britain and America during the 1980s...

...It might be described as "constrained socialism" in the European/Mediterranean rim, and as right-wing dictatorship punctuated by populist and Marxist insurgency in the less developed periphery, notably in the semideveloped countries of Latin America...

...My judgment is that these and other factors are likely to produce politico-economic crises on a hitherto unimaginable scale at some point in this decade, though probably after rather than before the 1984 elections...

...The only alternative, it seems, is to soldier on and—like Mr...

...As I pointed out in a Dissent essay ("American Politics in the 1980s," Winter 1980), under the degenerating economic conditions prevailing then, and now, any such struggle to expand defense rapidly would have to take on an immediate zero-sum character...

...2864...

...so is Mrs...

...In 1981 Reagan and his allies seized control of the public agenda, and debate over the agenda, through fundamental changes in fiscal, monetary, taxation, and foreign-military policy...

...They are also of the utmost importance in shaping the kinds of political elites that come to power in an era of dislocation...

...For the first time since World War II, the budget said that the warfare-welfare state had now become the welfare-warfare state...

...Such changes, when they occur, confound the conventional wisdom of the preceding era...

...It is equally obvious that 1980 was no ordinary election...

...Their vision leaves no room for the possibility that serious conflict—among social classes, for example— may have become a permanent feature of a capitalist political economy in decline...

...It is entirely characteristic of what is wrong with the Democratic leadership today that Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts—a man with a far more liberal voting record than Glenn—has seen fit to endorse him on just such "practical" grounds...

...for the center will not remain in alliance with a left that shifts further left under stress...

...Basic source: Economic Report of the President, various years...

...The rejection of Democrats went far beyond turning the hapless Jimmy Carter out of office...

...At this point, the manifest similarities come to an end...

...But the explosion of inflation thereafter wreaked substantial economic and psychological damage...

...It accelerated throughout the decade of the 1970s, reaching a crescendo at the very end...

...Consider the current situation...

...This analysis, it is hoped, casts some light on the remarkable ascendancy of the right in the 1980s and the equally remarkable paralysis of its opponents...

...It was also made possible by the uniquely privileged position of the United States and its economy, the chief real winners of World War II...

...Since 1973 the world capitalist economy has been undergoing a crisis unprecedented in half a century—"the second slump," as Ernest Mandel rightly calls it...

...It was the creation of an economy saturated with debt in the private sector that, along with other characteristics of the American economic system, was largely responsible for the latter...

...They are rooted in the serious and increasingly damaging crisis that has afflicted the capitalist world in general and, perhaps, Britain and the United States in particular...

...This was perfectly 438 suited to the zero-sum class struggle, which was proclaimed, not merely in the Reagan administration's budgets, but even more in the three-year tax cut that it pushed through Congress in 1981, and most of all in the way the Administration and the Federal Reserve waged war on inflation...

...Assuming that a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the politico-economic order is called for, it is singularly difficult to detect the sources for the psychological or cultural freedom needed to undertake it through a leftist model borrowed from pre-1917 circumstances...

...In both cases, commitment to a revitalizing ideology has been associated with leaders whose commitment gives them the moral resources to lead...

...In large part, this reflected the unparalleled public acceptance of capitalism as such and— paralleling this—the intense hold of old-time business values upon large parts of the American middle class...

...Nevertheless, while this is not exclusively a "Washington" issue, it is unlikely that it could supply the missing ingredient for Democratic victory in 1984, unless the geopolitical situation worsens substantially and the president is widely blamed for the deterioration...

...In the 1968 election campaign he commented, "I think Dick's going to be elected President but I think he's going to be a oneterm President...

...So does the pyramiding of short-term debt, particularly in relation to the liquid assets that might theoretically be required to pay it off...

...The runup to the 1984 campaign is already making it very clear that we need anticipate no major change in this respect...

...Similarly, in 1976 the United States ranked 18th out of 23 relatively industrially advanced countries in taxation as a share (just over 30 percent for all levels—federal, state, municipal—of government) of the national product...

...In both countries, surely, it would have been regarded as political suicide for an incumbent president or prime minister to wage war on inflation by launching depressionary policies...

...Yet Goldwater's overwhelming defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson seemed to confirm (as did the massive rejection of George McGovern in 1972) that there was a "mainstream," that it was capitalist and welfarist, and above all pragmatic-centrist...

...To be sure, these latter considerations might well impel anyone not committed to Ronald Reagan's geopolitical and economic recipes to vote for any opponent, whether clear or fuzzy, whether interested in programs or merely in the politics of personal imagery...

...We have President Eisenhower's word for it that he didn't expect the public to stand for such policies...

...Quite to the contrary: as Edward Tufte points out, he played the "political business cycle" game for all it was worth in 1972...

...As in Britain in 1979 and especially in 1983, and as in the United States in 1980, a great deal of this victory was won among working-class voters who had not previously supported conservatism...

...People in power, especially when they are ideologues, tend to go to extremes and, eventually, to crystallize effective oppositions against themselves by their own actions...

...But in fact for decades after World War II, the total public-sector accounts usually had been in balance and sometimes even showed a surplus—not only in the "golden 1950s" but as late as 1978 and 1979 too...

...In a crisis situation, the "center" fails to hold, and for a time the right becomes the only credible game in town...

...Yet a common pattern seems to be emerging...

...This pattern (and we must oversimplify it here) is one of ascendant conservatism in the core of the world capitalist "metropole...

...In the British crisis situation, on the other hand, the consequence of such stress has been the rupturing of the left and center into two warring and equal groups...

...It is nothing less than a "change of the macroeconomic regime," the sort of complex, major realignment that occurs only about every 50 years...

...As for West Germany, deepening economic stress eventually split the Socialist-Free Democratic coalition that had governed the country for more than a decade...

...It should not be extended in such a way as to suggest a foreclosure of the future...

...For the pervasive feeling in Europe and in America that Reagan is not to be trusted, a feeling that undergirds and explains the rise of the nuclear-freeze movement both in Europe and America, is in my view credible if not well founded...

...So it follows that when the ex-Radical Right in power declares a domestic and international class war, the Democratic leadership simply 439 cannot rise to the occasion by declaring war back...

...On the other side is a fundamentalist economic and imperial ideology associated with clarity and firmness of purpose, and a president determined to implement that ideology...

...Micawber—wait for something to turn up...

...Needless to say, Nixon did not declare all-out war on inflation...

...Someone has to be in charge of the store, and the most conspicuous fact in the pre-1979/1980 histories of both countries was that no one seemed to be in charge...

...Second, in the beginning was the idea...

...His trump card, he hopes, will be the support of the organized labor movement, which is in serious trouble and widely unpopular...

...Quite naturally, adherents of this traditional gospel repudiate "ideology...

...If the idea now in power fails to provide effective guidance for the state management of a political economy in deepening trouble, if it fails to provide a generally acceptable balance between capitalism and democracy, the ground will have been prepared for other ideas...

...One of its more interesting effects, as the table shows, is that it produced zero to negative real rates of return for investors across a long period of time...

...This is most unlikely to be a successful strategy in the 1980s at the crucial level of presidential elections, unless the economic crisis takes a really dramatic turn for the worse...

...To be sure, each advanced industrial country has its own history, balance of political forces, and modes of response to this crisis...

...They are widely perceived and respected as leaders who are firm, decisive, clean-cut in what they stand for and why, and unwilling to change course under the pressure of events...

...In the American case, there is no organized left to start with...

...2 But Eisenhower's 1968 assess' Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., "Public Concern about Inflation and Unemployment in the United States," in Robert E. Hall, ed., Inflation: Causes and Effects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 211, Edward Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp...

...EDS...

...This helps to account for the near-hysterical reactions of America's corporate and banking leaders to the economic and international upheavals that erupted in 1979 and '80...

...3 Interest rates: Arithmetic mean of rates on Aaa bonds, short-term commercial paper, the prime rate, and (since 1949) mortgage rates for new housing...

...In America and elsewhere too, this transition was accompanied by dramatic declines in the rate of profit, multiplication of corporate and individual debt to unprecedentedly high (and dangerous) levels, and by a constantly accelerating rise in interest rates...

...Perhaps the chief difference was that for nearly a generation after the war American proconsumption policy was oriented far more than British policy toward stimulating major private-sector transactions—opening up the mass-housing market through modifying credit and tax policies, for example—than through large-scale state regulatory and income-transfer interventions...

...And again, it should be stressed that—the special Southern case apart—a very large fraction of this nonvoting group did vote not so very long ago...

...With corporations and individuals "borrowed up" to the limit, profitability and productivity in deep decline, and investor returns zero or negative in real terms, one of the advanced capitalist World's lowest tax rates became an "intolerable burden...

...They intersect with the vital constitutional fact that the United States executive branch functions so very differently from the "governments" of Great Britain and other countries...

...His margin will probably not be of the colossal proportions of Margaret Thatcher's 1983 victory in Britain, but it will be sufficient...

...The first was that the long-term deterioration of American economic performance had accelerated, reaching a crisis stage that seemed to threaten the very future of the system itself...

...The second is a vast pool of nonvoters 4 nearly half of the citizenry in presidential years...

...These singularities should never be dismissed—among other things, they strongly condition the timing and character of the political response...

...The government, bowing to the inexorable constraints of the international "politics of power," shifted course toward restrictive domestic policies to keep the franc from collapse, thereby prompting an explosive reaction...

...Let us turn to two major continental European countries, France and West Germany...

...This crisis first became visible, not with the oil crisis in 197374, but with the Vietcong's Tet offensive of 1968 and the economic downturn that followed in 1969...

...Mondale, Carter's vice-president, seeks to pursue the traditional agendas of interest-group liberalism and presents himself as the "fair" and humane alternative to Ronald Reagan...

...The series has been made possible by a grant from the Joyce Mertz-Robert Gilmore Foundation, to which we express our gratitude...

...What are the "lessons," if any, in all this...

...Since domestic government spending is far more controversial in America's capitalist political culture than imperial expenditures had been (at least until Vietnam came along), this was a sure recipe for an eruption of major political conflict over allocations...

...The underlying material causes of the surge to the right are not difficult to ascertain...

...the more so the more rapidly top elites sought to expand the Pentagon's claim on national resources...

...Economy: Selected Major Indicators, 1929-1982 r or nfinancial Corporations: Chan_ e Un - R t 3 ' otal Government Sec Period Profit Rate' (0/0) Liquidity 2 (Ratio) Consumer Price Index (%) ployment Rate (0/0) Nominal (%) "Real" , (h) (all levels) as % of GNP Receipts Expendi- Surplus/ tures Deficit 1929 8.9 0.667 0 3.2 5.4 5.4 10.9 10.0 +0.9 1933 -3.1 0.654 -5.3 24.9 2.9 8.2 16.7 19.2 -2.5 1934-1939 8.2 0.432 1.2 18.2 1.8 0.6 16.5 18.9 -2.4 1947-1955 20.2 0.470 2.4 4.2 2.6 0.3 24.5 23.4 +1.1 1956-1968 15.7 0.977 2.0 5.0 4.6 2.5 27.4 27.8 -0.4 1969-1973 10.3 1.757 5.0 5.0 7.3 2.2 30.8 31.1 -0.3 1974-1979 9.9 1.972 8.5 6.8 8.7 0.2 31.3 32.5 -1.2 1977-1980 (Carter years) 10.1 2.105 9.6 6.5 10.1 0.5 31.5 32.1 -0.6 1980-1982 7.7 2.337 10.0 8.1 14.1 4.1 32.0 34.0 -2.0 1982 6.4 2.425 6.1 9.7 13.7 7.6 31.7 35.4 -3.7 1 There are a large number of ways to measure profit rates...

...Two-thirds of these Americans would have voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 had they seen any reason to exert themselves to do so...

...it is also a cultural system...

...But no matter: in the June 1983 election, Mrs...

...437 vestment in productive enterprise and, in a myriad of ways, rots the social order of capitalism...

...I would posit three very simple ones...

...for this makes any attempt to "demonize" him all the more difficult...

...At a more fundamental level, this enormous skew in the balance of organized political forces exists because capitalism is not just an economic system or a political economy...

...The measure here is the percentage of pretax profits of the net capital stock of nonfinancial corporations...

...Thatcher's new "Ironsides" Conservatives won an overwhelming victory over an opposition nearly equally divided between the Labour party's remnants and the new Social Democratic-Liberal alliance...

...Then, in 1979, Thatcher and her new "team" defeated a divided and exhausted Labour administration...

...When people in crisis seek coherence, program, ideas linked with action, they go where they can find them...

...By the same token, the existence of a Communist "pole" in world politics, coupled with the emergence of a claimant Third World, has "sectionalized," internationally, the politics of class struggle in a way that totally confounds Marx's predictions...

...And, carrying the list no further, in the second quarter of 1983 (the period of "recovery" from this induced depression), business failures ran at a rate exceeding 100 per 10,000, the highest level since 1933...

...4 "Real" interest rates: The nominal-rate mean interest rate minus year-on-year changes (averaged) in the consumer price index...

...For in the latter years, state and local surpluses were more than enough to offset the federal deficit...

...And unlike the other 22 countries, we had an empire to run on these proceeds...

...Welfare spending and transfer payments to individuals rapidly increased while defense and other imperial expenditures declined almost enough to compensate for those increases...

...Social-barmony commitments made in an earlier period had become insupportable...

...Desperate conditions in agriculture have prompted sheriffs' sales and ensuing disorders reminiscent of the 1930s...

...It is also noteworthy that the upward surge in price levels was quite visible before the twin oil shocks of 1973-74 and 1979 hit the economy...

...I think he's really going to fight inflation, and that will kill him politically...

...They are...

...ment illuminated the hold of political capitalism's "conventional wisdom" at its apogee...

...In any case, it will not be possible for the public to keep blaming Jimmy Carter forever when things go wrong...

...This consensus was linked to the rise of the Labour party and the sophisticated response developed by progressive Tory leaders, most of them either members of the traditional British ruling elite or—like that transitional figure Edward Heath—thoroughly assimilated to its postwar outlook...

...And this brings us to my last point, perhaps more a hope than a "lesson": it always seems darkest before the dawn...

...As elsewhere in the West, the chief goal in Britain was shaped by the memory —highly selective, to be sure—of the Great Depression and the "lessons" it had taught...

...As far as we can untangle the situation, there were two issues underlying the rhetoric of 1980...

...What remains, then, is a political vacuum that begins somewhere not far left (and sociologically downward) from the core bases of Reagan's support and continues all the way across the spectrum...

...But this analysis must assume that such ultimate horror will be avoided, that Americans and the rest of humanity have a future, and that it is therefore worth the effort to analyze these things...

...The two frontrunners for the Democratic nomination most likely are Walter Mondale and John Glenn...

...Capital-stock data through 1979 are contained in Survey of Current Business, February 1981, pp...

...One is the centrist social-harmony alternative that more or less guarantees fuzzy, ineffective, and indecisive leadership...

...Once again, the intellect in politics remains the servant of the various passions and interests, not their master...

...In Britain, an intraparty revolt elevated Margaret Thatcher to power as leader of the Conservative party not long after it had lost the October 1974 election...

...It corresponded, in the first place, to the most deepseated political values shared by American elites and much of the American public— values persistently hostile to any internally sovereign state of the European type...

...In the mid-19th century, American politics became dominated by sectionalism: white Southerners, regardless of any conflicts they might have among themselves, lined up en masse against most white Northerners...

...But, it should be added, the idea becomes prophecy armed, and therefore politically decisive, only when it is linked to passion, a commitment to and organization of concrete social groups, and when it reflects underlying reality...

...The arguments for the one or the other are the usual empirical ones—to defeat Reagan by attempting to preempt the center of a rightwardshifting "mainstream...

...By the same token, and for many of the same reasons, Jimmy Carter retains an astonishingly intense unpopularity among respondents...

...Beginning with American defeat in Vietnam, the imperial crisis culminated in African, Iranian, and Central American revolutions, multiplying disorders in the Middle East, and a manifest increase of Soviet military power relative to America's...

...These were the themes proclaimed by right-wing publicists and tax revolters as the 1970s came to a close...

...the first is an "opposition" consisting of an amorphous collection of interest groups whose leadership drifts increasingly to the right in the search for a "mainstream...

...First, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king...

...In France, Francois Mitterrand's Socialists swept into office in 1981—largely because of pent-up grievances among a public that had been ruled by conservatives for a quarter-century...

...In the spring of 1983, her ruthlessly constricting policies prompted Business Week to run scathing articles entitled "What Hath Thatcher Wrought...

...The second issue, which is closely linked to the first, was that if the aggregate public-sector "take" had not changed very much over nearly a generation, the internal composition of expenditures had changed very radically, especially following America's withdrawal from Vietnam...

...In Edward Heath's formulation, the objective was to present the "human face of capitalism" to an electorate keenly aware from its own past experience that capitalism also had a very different face...

...Now to the United States...

...The American welfarist consensus had, in some respects, always been more fragile than its European counterparts seemed to be...

...The striking decline in the rate of corporate profit-more than half from the 1956-68 period to the early 1980s-explains much about business pressure for tax relief...

...And indeed, how could the party of Jimmy Carter, Joseph Califano, Felix Rohatyn, John Glenn, and Walter Mondale ever do any such thing...

...The shift from welfarist consensus to neolaissezfaire rightist dominance in the United States and in Britain has historical importance...

...Since the quest for "ideas" on the Democratic side has thus far been a failure, the general party consensus appears to be that the 1984 campaign should blast away on the theme that Ronald Reagan and his team are "unfair...

...What we find instead are two phenomena more or less unique to the Western world and intimately interconnected...

...Mitterrand and his colleagues are learning that it is just as difficult to pursue "socialism in one country" as Trotsky always said it would be—especially if the socialism is to remain democratic...

...It intersects with the very natural desire of most people, most of the time, to maintain a traditional system and way of life, rather than overthrow them...

...The most deeply worrisome feature of the whole situation is the growing threat of a major war between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Thus Reagan was prefigured by Barry Goldwater's capture of the Republican nomination as early as 1964, more than a decade before similar developments on the right in Britain and at the apogee of the Great Boom...

...In America, the hegemony of this culture is uncontested...

...It took the Reagan years to show what really unbalanced budgets look like, made up as they are of vast imperial rearmament and heavy tax cuts for the wealthy...

...Shades of 1924 —or even 1931...

...But Mitterrand's regime very rapidly found that in the "banker's world" of international free trade, it could not succeed in going it alone with reflationary policies...

...An elaboration of the bases for this judgment must await another essay...

...But again, no matter...

...The major proximate issues, of course, turned on differences over cutting the state budget...

...Glenn himself has almost nothing visible to offer except his status as a hero and the fact that he is not Ronald Reagan...

...well-developed "collectivist consensus," in Samuel H. Beer's phrase, emerged out of the Second World War...

...But again, no matter...

...It is one of the fascinations of American politics— and deeply revealing of the true position of the Democratic party in the American political system—that, in modern times, its elites have never made any committed effort (except regarding the civil-rights laws) to reach this natural clientele...

...More than that: any substantial rebuilding of the imperial expenditure machinery would inevitably result in a massive increase in the GNP share of the public sector, unless the large-scale policy changes of the post-1970 budgetary era were more or less completely reversed...

...The table below gives a concise inventory of major developments in the American economy over the past 50 years, excluding the period of the Second World War...

...Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher share a vital political asset...

...As we know all too well, this was (and is) both a geopolitical and a geoeconomic crisis...

...In this arena, most Americans across the class spectrum—and even most Britons—recognize themselves as "haves," with a great deal to lose, rather than as "havenots...

...Within the context of the American cultural scene, it helps Ronald Reagan very considerably that he is relaxed, at ease with people, and "folksy" in manner...

...That agenda as thus defined will dominate both government and "opposition," such as it is, for the rest of this decade...

...2 Liquidity: Short-term debt divided by liquid assets of the nonfinancial corporate sector...

...The Democratic party, as currently constituted, in fact is incapable of embracing any political formula other than that of social harmony...

...Moreover, growth in this share over the preceding decade had been trivial— far less than three percent...

...It is obvious that Ronald Reagan is the most ideological president to sit in the White House in modern times, if not ever...

...440 In politics, as in the natural sciences, nature appears to abhor a vacuum...

...In Britain, a With this article we continue a series on Problems of Democracy in Advanced Industrial Countries...

...Rising ratio = more "leverage...

...Of all the pieces of conventional wisdom beloved by votingbehavior specialists, one of the most cherished was that any major-party candidate seen to be ideologically further away from these centrist, pragmatic voters than his opponent would lose their support...

...Primary source: Federal Reserve Board, Flow of Funds Accounts, 1945/49-1979 and updates...

...As debt saturation was also more than visible in the individualconsumer sector after the late 1960s, one can hardly be surprised at the tax revolts that developed in California, Massachusetts, and elsewhere by 1980...