The Ascendancy of the Right
IN 1980 VOTERS IN THE UNITED STATES elected the most conservative president since Herbert Hoover. At the time, polls showed that only 11% of voters chose Reagan because he was a conservative;...
...While the Right congratulates itself on its prospective victory, the Democrats try to remind voters of the price that has been paid for the "recovery" and who has paid it...
...P.S...
...We'll send your friends a personalized gift card in time for the holidays...
...The use of soup kitchens and hunger centers is up dramatically, in some areas by as much as 500...
...Intelligent...
...Cuts in the Work Incentive Program and child care have increased female unemployment...
...Young People and Children: Child care programs have been cut by 21% since 1981 and twothirds of the states have cut back on services...
...4. Walter Dean Burnham, "Toward Confrontation...
...On this basis, Burnham argues that a "polarization" of social forces may be imminent, with the demands of these newly impoverished millions taking the form of "something as old-fashioned as social justice...
...Interest rates continue in excess of 10...
...A LL IS NOT HARMONIOUS WITHIN THE Reagan camp...
...ideological politics is the keystone to its coalition...
...Each time, the consolidation of the new project took time and struggle...
...Civil Liberties: The Administration has signed executive orders whose breadth and ambiguity have a potentially devastating effect on political opponents...
...Under this broad definition, "terrorism" could be interpreted to mean support for the Nicaraguan government or Salvadorean and Guatemalan rebels...
...Sharing Burnham's conclusion, he sees the result of this trend as the "downward mobility of large parts of the American middle class-in effect the collapse of the American Dream...
...Yet it is not a "pragmatic" regime...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Subcontracting Bell,, International Artists call U S. Sanctuary Movement - -- - f :i t...
...They were joined by voters born in the post-war baby boom, and by many labor unionists-the latter the keystone of Democratic success since the days of Roosevelt...
...RMPAre the Democrats Different .Are the Democrats Different...
...In each of these years, a particular party, expressing a newly forged coalition of both elite and mass elements, took control of the government and went on to define the parameters of political debate for a prolonged period into the future...
...This trend would continue to accelerate under a second Republican Administration...
...All present and former governmental employees with a high security clearance are now required to submit all speeches, essays and books for prior review...
...Although they approach the question from fundamentally different perspectives, Burnham and Phillips share a similar prognosis of what it will take to change the political panorama: first, an influx of new voters into the electorate and second, a coherent alternative project from the Left...
...Reagan won 50.7% of all votes cast to Carter's 41...
...It must necessarily and explicitly repeal the theory and practice of social harmony which underlay both...
...That tumultuous year brought Richard Nixon to the presidency, but his fall from power in 1973 ended talk of re-alignment...
...Each new project had its own vision of America, elaborated by its intellectuals and forged in political conflict...
...It has led the fight against abortion rights and has won restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortions for poor women...
...Jesse Helms...
...p.382...
...In 1984 it stands on the threshold of consolidating its rise to power...
...7. Ibid., p. 3 8 4 . 8. Sources for this section include Congressional Quarterly Almanac, Vols...
...The number of people below the poverty line rose 7.6% from 1980 to 1982, reaching 34.4 million-the highest figure since 1965...
...You want the news that reaches beyond the news stories...
...The Democrats hope to re-inspire the once potent New Deal coalition with the myth of "America, the land of opportunity...
...The foreign policy establishment is uncomfortable with the bellicose direction of foreign policy, especially over Central America...
...But economic analysts are certain that the recovery is strong enough to last until the November election...
...history on working-class economic and political gains...
...The Justice Department has authorized the FBI to investigate groups and individuals who merely advocate "criminal activity...
...Carter's total was only 1.4% higher than the popular vote won by Herbert Hoover in his abortive re-election bid in 1932...
...At a mass level, they worry about the gender gap, opposition to Central America policy, the durability of the recovery...
...Internationally, Burnham believes, a "minimum Reagan program" would include an increased arms buildup, continued confrontation with the Soviet Union and the possibility of moving from "merely developing 'star wars' technology to actually installing it in outer space...
...Walter Dean Burnham, The Current Crisis in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 2 8 7 . 11...
...unemployment among black youths aged 18-19 is 42.7...
...Of 679 appointments to federal jobs requiring Senate confirmation, only 51 were women...
...Acceptable" unemployment seems now to stand at a permanent 7...
...Interesting in his dissent is Kevin Phillips, who calls himself a populist, neo-Marxian, conservative political analyst...
...Business Week, July 2, 1984...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...Just fill out the order card in this issue and mail today...
...Burnham, "Toward Confrontation...
...The Administration has revitalized the CIA and authorized a wide range of covert operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America...
...Kevin Phillips, Post-Conservative America (New York: Random House, 1982), pp...
...Each of the critical elections came at a moment when a new alliance of forces offered a fresh political project aimed at resolving a longstanding crisis...
...In power, their program has been based on neo-laissez faire economics, military supremacy, virulent anti-sovietism, militant imperialism and the preservation of traditional cultural values...
...6 N NOVEMBER, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY faces an uphill battle...
...Each had its own economic, political, social and cultural program, its own leaders and operatives...
...Workers and Organized Labor: The Reagan Administration has encouraged a massive assault on the rights won by unions since the 1930s...
...Its predictive value may be limited, but as a retrospective gauge it seems to measure watershed moments in U.S...
...Many U.S...
...It may also, Burnham suggests, provide a legal basis for "crackdowns on the political dissent that, I am reasonably convinced, will build up during the later 1980s...
...history, "a type of election in which there occurs a sharp and durable electoral re-alignment between parties...
...2" "Reagan's revolution is not finished," Burnham declares...
...The budget of the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety has been cut to the lowest level in its 12-year history...
...Ibid...
...3. See Alan Gartner, Colin Greer and Frank Riessman, eds., What Reagan is Doing to Us (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), a collection of essays on the subject...
...undertaken with only token resistance the most massive assault in U.S...
...The Left looks to black political gains in municipal elections and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to combat the consolidation of right-wing dominance...
...society...
...p HILLIPS, MEANWHILE, PREMISES HIS analysis-as do many conservative intellectuals-on the belief that "the United States and the world are in a period of enormous upheaval-a movement away from the old industrial phase of U.S...
...The notion of re-alignment, despite its mechanistic quality, is useful...
...Those socialists who did not become Democrats have divided, re-united and divided again over communism, anti-communism and Third World revolution...
...2" (emphasis in original...
...You want a say in that future...
...anti-labor, antiwomen, anti-minority and anti-environment...
...This holiday season, go beyond the news...
...military strategy to conservative evangelicals...
...5 The dominant thrust of the new Administration, Burnham projected correctly, would not be "old-conservative, or even Nixon/ Ford conservative...
...But what is true is that the number of well-paid working-class jobs is declining, and it will be very difficult for millions of people to sustain their previous middle-class way of life, made possible by Democratic programs...
...All is not rosy...
...economic and military power and the reaffirmation of traditional values...
...F OR MANY POLITICAL SCIENTISTS AND analysts, the 1980 election was a break in history...
...With a predominantly right-wing character, the Court would undoubtedly accelerate the recent trend in decisions favoring economic conservatism and a reduction of procedural protections in criminal prosecutions...
...domination after World War II and toward a post-industrial, high-technology era, both here and abroad, in which jobs have migrated from basic industries...
...One million people were removed from the food stamp program...
...Key to its durability was its ability to galvanize the support of the most powerful elements of the dominant class, mobilize a mass support base among the subaltern classes and thwart any challenge-whether from the elite or the masses-to the newly defined political and economic order...
...It is still too early to judge whether 1980 ushered in a new project capable of defining an entire era...
...in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Parry Coalitions in the 1980s (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1981), chapter 16, especially pp...
...historians and political scientists believe that there have been certain critical elections in U.S...
...9. Burnham, "The 1980 Earthquake," p.109...
...National Organization of Women...
...382-3...
...1 In his book, Post-Conservative America, Phillips foresees a post-conservative as well as a post-liberal era, with increasing instability and the danger of fascism...
...A full quarter of funds for bilingual education was removed...
...This was the lowest percentage since 1948, the second lowest of the 20th Century and the third lowest since the national party system was created in 1828...
...If anything were to happen to Reagan, Republican leaders worry about a major split between the party's traditional establishment wing, represented by George Bush, and the New Right, epitomized by Sen...
...Voter turnout was low: only 55% of the potential electorate voted...
...It has backed tax exemption for educational institutions which practice racial discrimination...
...Even if it should revive the economy, a political/ economic program of the Right risks what Walter Dean Burnham calls a "politics of confrontation...
...When Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, at the head of a right-wing coalition that had won significant support from traditional sectors of the Democratic Party, the words "critical election" and "re-alignment" were back in fashion...
...5. Burnham, "Toward Confrontation...
...in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, eds., The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 1 0 9 . 2. Burnham, "The 1980 Earthquake," p. 100...
...The current Administration has restricted access to information under the Freedom of Information Act and has required all government employees to sign a secrecy pledge...
...It shattered some important assumptions about the character of our voting coalitions and the conditions of the political parties," wrote David Broder, political correspondent for The Washington Post in 1981...
...ground forces in Lebanon and Grenada, losing more than 200 Marines in a single day in Beirut...
...You've found a sound understanding of Latin America in NACLA's REPORT ON THE AMERICAS...
...The poverty rate rose from 14% in 1981 to 15% in 1982...
...No Administration since John Kennedy's has been as self-confident...
...Its key constituencies are in the South and West, says Phillips, and "they have become the cutting edge of American Politics and the economy...
...New Right leaders complain that the Administration has refused to give them patronage jobs of sufficient influence and is generally "not conservative enough...
...If the Right cannot revive capitalism-and Phillips thinks it cannot-he predicts continued "short political cycles...
...The corporate community worries that Reagan's economic policies are contradictory and potentially disastrous, even as it celebrates a year-long recovery...
...Business Week reports that in the second quarter of 1984 corporate earnings are expected to show a gain of 25-30% over the same period last year...
...Among white youth, the figure is 18.3...
...Covering for you what they know best...
...It is an alarming picture...
...Arms control talks have ended...
...For in order to realize its purposes," he writes, "the Reagan coalition must not only repeal the Great Society and some parts of the New Deal...
...The Administration increasingly promotes the use of the "terrorist" label to stigmatize opponents of its policies, even though FBI Director William Webster has declared that the incidence of terrorist acts decreased in 1983...
...That, of course, is the secret to the success or failure of the Right's project- or, for that matter, any other...
...of Books...
...The Environment: President Reagan appointed two anti-environmentalists to the highest environmental posts in the federal government, and radically cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...Part of your present...
...Nonetheless, Reagan defeated Carter, an incumbent president, in a landslide...
...But what is certain is that the U.S...
...Burnham, "Toward Confrontation," p.386...
...The Old Left, orREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24c E 0 CO New York City, 1968 ganized around the U.S...
...It has promoted the MX missile and the use of nerve gas, deployed cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe and openly advocated the development of space war technology...
...Ronald Reagan was and is the charismatic prophet of the now-dominant Right...
...The dilemma is that the first may not be possible until the second has taken shape...
...Single-issue movements have struggled with difficulty to build broader, more sustained coalitions...
...XXXVII and XXXIX, 1983...
...and given U.S...
...Peace and Security: The Reagan Administration has planned a five-year, $1.7 trillion defense budget...
...The Reagan phenomenon has defied the conventional wisdom that celebrates pragmatists and considers ideologues inept...
...4 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 98427 27 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984Are the Deocr Ats Different...
...none since Lyndon Johnson's as succesful in projecting its program...
...7 "America is back, standing tall," boasts President Reagan, citing lowered inflation and unemployment, the restoration of U.S...
...Some say that 1800 marked the first re-alignment when the Jefferson Democrats took the presidency from the Federalists...
...He traces the development of this shift through the Barry Goldwater and George Wallace campaigns and-to some extent-the Nixon presidency, into the Reagan Administration...
...military base, and supported the anti-Sandinista contras...
...What did develop was a reaction to the demands for change in the 1960s and 1970s: a powerful and well-organized movement of the Right which tapped historically reactionary trends within U.S...
...Female workers comprise 70% of the lowest ranks of federal employees, 25% of the middle ranks and 6% of the highest ranks...
...Wall Street may fret about the permanence of the economic recovery, and the international debt crisis is a quarterly specter that threatens economic chaos...
...A new Administration would try to reduce the deficit, probably by taxing consumption in the form of a value-added tax or national sales tax, and would actively promote a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution...
...The political impact of this right-wing populism in a situation of downward mobility, Phillips speculates, "is that the poorer minorities, such as the blacks, tilt toward the left and the middle class [Burnham's "middle-class working class," one surmises] moves to the right...
...A dedicated core of ideologues has taken control of the Republican Party and led it to victory...
...The black movement, the movement for sexual equality and the peace movement have yet to present a unified political agenda...
...38% said that "it was time for a change...
...Elsewhere, and notably in Post-Conservative America, he pinpoints the New Right as its most organized current manifestation...
...Eighteen sixty marked the beginning of the Civil War and the formation of the Republican Party...
...Reagan would almost certainly have the opportunity to appoint five conservatives to the Supreme Court...
...none since Franklin Roosevelt's as determined to change the face of America...
...Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, August 15, 1981...
...Friends who care about where we've gone in 1984 will appreciate the thought throughout 1985...
...a multiplicity of parties . . . supra-party coalitions" and the increasing use of plebiscitary devices such as the initiative and the referendum...
...Their populism has been mixed with a middleclass outlook that causes them to lean more in a conservative and Republican direction," Phillips notes in the New York Review of Books exchange...
...It has turned Honduras into a U.S...
...only 22.6% chose Jimmy Carter...
...Before that came 1896, the culmination of prolonged conflict between farmers and populists on one side and corporate capitalist interests on the other...
...Black unemployment is 17...
...Downplaying the importance of human rights, it has restored military aid to dictators in Guatemala, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay...
...6. Ibid...
...As Walter Dean Burnham noted, Carter's successor "was not just another Republican...
...Reagan's opposition outside the Democratic Party is also on the defensive...
...8 * The Economy: Corporate profits are up...
...Give the important gift, a subscription to REPORT ON THE AMERICAS...
...Communist Party, has never recovered from the witch hunts of the 1950s, the revelations about Stalinism, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and its incapacity to act as an independent force...
...Ibid., pp.129-131...
...Under this definition, criminal activity could include the advocacy of civil disobedience...
...Ibid., p.115...
...Ibid...
...Using the vast powers of government and the presence of members and supporters of the Reagan Coalition within the institutions of civil society, the Administration has defined the terms of political debate...
...He has speeded up the leasing of federal lands to coal companies, permanently closed the Federal Waste recycling plant, granted oil companies extensive rights to the outer continental shelf, opposed a program to curb acid rain and relaxed REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26anti-pollution regulation...
...Nonetheless, the Reagan Administration has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to govern and to shape political, economic and cultural debate...
...Finally, President Reagan has appointed an arch-conservative to the Supreme Court...
...So the song went almost two decades ago, when a new politics of the Left seemed in the offing...
...Liberal intellectuals either cling to outmoded strategies or transform themselves into "neoliberals" and "neoconservatives...
...In the social sphere, such a Court would probably overrule the 1973 abortion decision, Roe vs...
...It has used U.S...
...OT ALL ANALYSTS SUBSCRIBE TO THIS notion of Republican re-alignment...
...Eighteen twenty-eight saw the end of Federalist and East Coast dominance and the initial participation of frontier forces in the apparatus of government...
...THE ASCENDANCY OF THE RIGHT 1. Walter Dean Burnham, "The 1980 Earthquake: Realignment, Reaction or What...
...Something is happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear...
...To speak of a society as complex as this one as "two-class," Burnham acknowledges, overstates the case...
...Ibid., p.99...
...22 million others now receive reduced benefits...
...Reagan budget cuts swelled the ranks of the poor by 2% while the recession added 5.6...
...history has moved "away from a fundamentally left-tilting political impetus to an increasingly right-tilting political impetus...
...17...
...Right, through the Reagan Administration, has every intention of bringing about a lasting change in the face of political life in this country...
...Aspirations for social justice and international peace repeatedly surface in new campaigns, but barely transcend the level of spontaneous protest...
...Thirty-six years seems the magic interval between these re-alignments, and 1932 brought the most recent...
...It began by destroying the air traffic controllers' union (PATCO...
...It has purged the U.S...
...shaping your future...
...Post-convention polls showed a marginal improvement at best...
...If you're not a subscriber, give yourself a gift...
...They have drawn on a variety of elements in U.S...
...Re-election would allow him to appoint as many as five more...
...Women: The Reagan Administration is the chief opponent of passage of the Equal Rights Amendment...
...For at least another five to ten years, I think that we will see that the conservative-to-rightist tone of the major populist movement of our recent times will continue...
...The Administration's politics have been supple, well-packaged and brilliantly paced...
...The Elderly and the Poor: Health programs have been cut 25% and Aid to Health Professionals by $1 billion...
...Don't forget to enclose $18 per gift subscription...
...Its key elements include the tax revolt, the revolt against federal and state governmental power, and "the opposition to what we could call, I suppose, the Manhattan, Harvard, Beverly Hills culture...
...From U.S...
...It has filled the Department of Labor with anti-union corporate executives and left many positions unfilled...
...ECENTLY, BOTH PHILLIPS AND BURNham discussed their views in a forum sponsored by the Institute for National Strategy, an exchange that was re-printed by The New York Review REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28ONE GIFT THAT GOES BEYOND THE NEWS '. ElSalvador 1984 Latin America...
...it is right-wing, and is deeply informed and guided by a comprehensive ideological program...
...The most recent was in 1932 during the crisis of the Great Depression...
...Phillips, however, suggests that changing political attitudes may modify the direction of any protest engendered by downward mobility...
...The Elections and After," New York Review of Books, August 16, 1984, pp.33-38...
...12 Further, neither pollsters nor politicians expected the size of Reagan's victory, or the dramatic Republican victory in the Senate, which included the defeat of several of the most prestigious liberal Democrats, like Frank Church and George McGovern...
...The principal domestic purpose of a second Reagan Administration, he speculates, will be to re-organize the government "to make sure that nothing like the Great Society programs can happen again...
...A number of previous re-alignments (some observers identify four, others five) have each marked the beginning of a new party system...
...The self-styled "vanguard" political parties of the 1970s were never more than sects or, at worst, cults...
...Burnham, "The 1980 Earthquake," p. 1 0 2 . 12...
...Ibid., p.223...
...Ignoring the pundits, the Reagan Administration implemented the most radically conservative program in living memory: pro-business, pro-defense, pro-nuclear and militantly imperial...
...Some of the most conspicuous figures surrounding [Reagan] in the executive, in Congress and outside government are people who have had continuous and close links to what we used to call not so long ago the 'Radical Right'," noted MIT political science professor Walter Dean Burnham in 1981...
...We've given you the best outside writers: Allan Nairn, Dan Hallin, Anne Nelson, John Dinges...
...But behind the myth making is a program without a bold vision...
...The largest party in the United States--the party of the non-voter-won with 45%.' The pundits concluded that Reagan's election could not-and should not-be interpreted as a mandate for a radical shift to the Right...
...Jewish, Hispanic and Catholic voters, long considered a backbone of the Democratic Party's electoral coalition, all registered increases in the Republican column...
...The buoyant economy and Reagan's capacity to project himself as the masterful, wise leader make Mondale's chance of victory a high-odds bet...
...In April 1984, Reagan signed a secret executive order authorizing increased intelligence collection by the FBI and the formation of FBI paramilitary counterterrorist teams...
...society but never cemented the protagonists into an organized, coherent Left...
...The Gallup Poll reported that the combined total of "very favorable" responses to both candidates was the lowest in the poll's history...
...He describes this as "a shift of the populist attitude," and argues that this powerful force in U.S...
...It has appointed-in the words of AFLCIO President Lane Kirkland--"advocates of the most narrow, retrograde employer interests" to the National Labor Relations Board...
...Four billion dollars was slashed from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and another $1.5 billion from the school lunch program...
...Minorities: President Reagan has reversed the trend of the last 20 years to increase minority appointments to responsible government positions...
...The political and cultural battles of the 1960s and early 1970s transformed U.S...
...That, as we all know, never happened...
...political culture: traditional and nouveaux anti-New Deal capitalist, jingoist and promilitary, regional and populist...
...logically, then, many establishment political scientists have been waiting since 1968 for another shift of comparable magnitude...
...Many argue that the 1980 election was a vote against Jimmy Carter, neither a vote for Ronald Reagan nor a conservative mandate...
...Phillips doubts that Reagan will ultimately be able to satisfy the demands of late-20th Century America and believes that, instead of a new alignment of forces around the Republicans, there will be a "de-alignment" and increasing fragmentation of the political system...
...Trotskyism has split repeatedly in an endless competition to see who can be the furthest left...
...history...
...In the face of the highest unemployment since the Great Depression, the Administration has slashed unemployment compensation by $3.1 billion...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 25Are the Democrats Different...
...W AS THE SHIFT TO REAGAN SIMPLY A rejection of Carter or something more fundamental...
...No president since Calvin Coolidge had done less to hide his beliefs or ideology before being elected...
...Commission on Civil Rights-like so many other agenciesof those committed to civil rights enforcement and replaced them with Reagan supporters...
...For this is first and foremost an ideological regime...
...It has driven both liberal and left opponents onto the defensive...
...Wade...
...Before the Democratic convention, Walter Mondale trailed Reagan by 19 percentage points...
...We've given you thoughtful, in-depth writing by our in-house team of experts: Deborah Huntington, Robert Armstrong, George Black, Janet Shenk...
...Twenty eight percent of potential voters favored Ronald Reagan...
...According to the National Organization of Women, 2.5 million women have fallen below the poverty line since Reagan took power...
...2 2 3 - 2 3 3 . 19...
...While State Unemployment Office, Dearborn, Michigan, 1981 the Reagan Administration sought tuition tax credits for children in private schools, it introduced a means test in the student loan program which limited educational opportunities for children of poor and working families...
...Concerned...
...But] whether we 'creep' toward re-alignment or 'de-align' depends on whether the new Republican economics can deliver a healthier economy," Phillips goes on to observe...
...3 Many professed liberals and moderates moved toward Reagan, as did Southern voters...
...Repeated economic recessions have encouraged the "general shift of the United States toward a roughly two-class society and toward policies that increasingly bear the pattern of regional triage-the writing off, among other things, of the older industrial regions of the North...
...Mondale himself describes it as "the new realism...
...His Administration led the fight against affirmative action and bussing...
...The Public Eye, Summer 1984...
...Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980 was the culmination of this two decade-long reconstruction of the American Right...
...He concludes, "It is in any case very hard for me to see how consensus of the sort that Reagan and his friends might like to produce could survive the bursts of adversity that may possibly be coming-and the polarization which I think is almost certainly coming-without resorting to some sort of repression...
...corporate interests their freest rein since before the New Deal...
...It has replaced seasoned and knowledgeable State Department diplomats with Cold War ideologues...
...Taxes on incomes over $50,000 have been reduced, and the number of millionaires has risen by 50%, to 8,203 persons...
...And although it inveighs against the "bloat" of the federal government, it has vastly increased the power of the national security bureaucracy and-through executive order--extended its potential for suppressing opposition...
...WHAT HAVE THE CONSESEQUENCES been of four years of the Reagan Administration...
Vol. 18 • September 1984 • No. 5
