Download Political History beyond the Red-Blue Divide

Political History beyond the
Red-Blue Divide
Matthew D. Lassiter
In her provocative and timely essay Kim Phillips-Fein declares the historiography of
modern American conservatism to be “at a crossroads.” From the broader perspective of
U.S. political history, I would employ a different metaphor, that of a pendulum that has
swung too far in one direction. Academic historians have spent the past several decades
dismantling the myth of the liberal consensus in postwar American politics, exploring the
contradictions and limits of New Deal and Great Society policy making, and chronicling
the parallel rise of the New Right. In Alan Brinkley’s influential formulation, “taking
conservatism seriously” is now institutionalized as a guiding principle of U.S. political
history—a once necessary though now reflexive corrective to the consensus scholarship
that caricatured conservatives as paranoid extremists or ignored them altogether. But
in the understandable mission to explain the apparent earthquake caused by Ronald
Reagan’s election in 1980, the new political history has inadvertently replicated some of
the blind spots of the liberal consensus school that it supplanted, especially through a
linear declension/ascension narrative that has conflated the fate of the New Deal with the
political triumph of the New Right. A future generation of scholars might well critique
our reigning historiographical consensus for tendencies similar to those we identified in
our predecessors—that the interpretations of political history have tracked too closely to
the red-blue binaries of journalism and punditry; that the literature has taken the contradictions and fragmentation of liberalism as given but smoothed over similar weaknesses
and fissures within conservatism; that the recent pendulum swing has overstated the case
for a rightward shift in American politics by focusing too narrowly on partisan narratives
and specific election cycles rather than on the more complex dynamics of political
culture, political economy, and public policy.1
Phillips-Fein argues that the flourishing literature on conservatism allows us to reconsider how “our new understanding of the movement changes the way that we tell the
broader narrative of twentieth-century American history.” I would emphasize the inverse
as well, since the broader narrative exposes some of the ways the historiography of the
New Right has overreached. Phillips-Fein’s essay raises compelling questions about the
standard conceptualization and periodization of conservatism as a social and political
Matthew D. Lassiter is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan.
Readers may contact Lassiter at [email protected].
1
Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 98 (Dec. 2011),
esp. 723. Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, 99 (April 1994),
409–29, esp. 412.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jar412
© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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movement that mobilized against New Deal liberalism and ultimately came to power
through the election of Reagan. In her reinterpretation, conservatism constituted a
permanent and powerful force in U.S. politics throughout the twentieth century, even
during the period when the New Deal order appeared dominant, an insight reinforced
by scholars who have examined the role of corporations in shaping liberal policies and
constructing the midcentury consensus culture. If the postwar decades become “an era
characterized by contest and struggle all along,” then the same would logically apply to
the period since the 1970s, which Phillips-Fein portrays as a “moment of sustained
conflict rather than an era of conservatism triumphant.” I would push these persuasive
arguments even further, by more clearly distinguishing between what the conservatism
literature does and does not illuminate about the broader political history of modern
America. The most problematic tendency in New Right historiography is the employment of a teleological approach in which the tropes of the triumph of conservatism or the
rightward turn become the narrative climax of broader developments with more diverse
causes and consequences, such as the growth of the suburbs and the sun belt, the forces
of racial backlash and white privilege, public policies of economic deregulation, the wars
on crime and drugs, and the political culture of antitax individualism.2
Too many books identified with the new political history have adopted a telescoping
strategy in which almost anything that happened after about 1938 culminates in the
Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Periodization always shapes a book’s argument, whether
deliberately or not, so it distorts the postwar decades to narrate systematically episodes of
grassroots racial conflict, law-and-order policies, tax protests, family-values politics, labor
union setbacks, and corporate deregulation as shifts to the right in an all-roads-leadto-Reagan transformation. The 1980 election provided a useful if symbolic bookend for
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980,
which opened with the overly dramatic declaration that Reagan’s inauguration meant
“an epoch in the nation’s political history came to an end. The New Deal, as a dominant
order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances, died.”3 The subsequent literature too
often embraced rather than interrogated this formulation, which inspired many studies of
how the accomplishments and contradictions of postwar liberalism helped set the stage for
the New Right while paying much less attention to the reconstitution and resilience of
liberalism after the demise. As Phillips-Fein observes, the most exciting recent work on the
1970s suggests that Reagan’s election was less the culmination of a right turn in American
political culture than one of many consequences produced by fundamental transformations in the political economy of the nation and the world. What really destroyed the New Deal
order was the widespread discrediting of Keynesian economics during the long recession
of the 1970s, the bipartisan embrace of the financial sector and the deregulatory turn that
accelerated during the Carter administration, and liberalism’s subsequent failure to uphold
the promises of security and upward mobility at the heart of the postwar social contract.4
2
Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 736, 739, 741. On the role of corporations in midcentury liberalism,
see Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights
Movement (New York, 2008); and Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935
(New York, 1994).
3
Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser, “Introduction,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed.
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, 1989), ix.
4
Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven,
2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York, 2010); Natasha
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A series of grassroots revolts by working-class and middle-class white voters certainly
weakened the Democratic party from the 1940s through the 1970s, but it is equally
important to distinguish narratives of the rise of conservatism from scholarship that
addresses broader shifts in public policy and political economy. In evaluating the contributions of the new urban/suburban history, Phillips-Fein portrays the sun belt suburbs as
“deeply hostile to New Deal liberalism” and concludes that people who identified as
homeowners “found themselves drawn to the small-government, free-market approach to
social policy embodied by the conservative movement.” This assessment reflects a
tendency within the literature to equate suburban political culture with the New Right of
Barry Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich, but the racial tensions within the New
Deal order and the political consequences of metropolitan development do not all converge
in the red-state map of presidential elections. It made sense for Lisa McGirr to structure
her case study of the New Right in Orange County, California, as a rise-of-Reagan narrative, but it is a misinterpretation to view her Suburban Warriors as a story about suburban
politics writ large rather than a focused account of conservative political mobilization.
Books such as Robert O. Self ’s American Babylon and my own work in The Silent Majority
look beyond electoral realignment and plotlines of right-left polarization to argue that the
politics and policies of “suburban secession” illuminate national and bipartisan/nonpartisan
defenses of racial privilege, class exclusion, and homeowner property rights. Phillips-Fein
accurately notes that conservative politics has flourished in affluent suburban communities as well as through the mobilization of corporate interest groups, but the same geographic and economic conditions also transformed the power base of modern liberalism
and produced the New Democratic agenda of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and even
Barack Obama.5
Recognizing the times and places in which liberalism and conservatism have
overlapped—such as the mobilization of business within both political parties, the obsessive pursuit of suburban swing voters by Republican and Democratic politicians alike, or
the projection of American power on the world stage—requires a reconsideration of the
polarization thesis that has animated the scholarship on the New Right. The historiographical mainstreaming of conservatism depended on reframing the 1960s as a polarized
decade—not just an era of radical social and political movements but a time when grassroots activists on the Right and the Left simultaneously mobilized against the liberal
center. Whereas consensus scholars once equated modernity with liberalism, Phillips-Fein
observes, “the idea that America is deeply divided politically and culturally is far more
widely accepted, both inside and outside of the academy.” There is no longer any dispute that
ideological conservatism has thrived amid the forces of modernity, but the polarization
thesis has evolved into a hegemonic framework in much of the recent political history, a
truism about red versus blue America that has marginalized historical inquiries into topics
marked more by consensus than by conflict. The red-blue binaries reflected in the national
maps of presidential election returns are a particularly crude way of dividing the country
Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill, 2007);
Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).
5
Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 731; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton, 2001). Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003);
Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006). On “suburban
secession,” see Kevin M. Kruse White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005). On
suburban liberalism, see John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York, 2002); and
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into partisan, ideological, and regional camps, given the winner-take-all nature of the
electoral college and the incapability of the American two-party system to represent the
policy preferences of many citizens. The new political history has had difficulty accounting
for the large group of voters in the middle (and on the sidelines) of American politics, the
ordinary people who are not committed activists, are not particularly ideological, and do
not self-identify as warriors on one side or the other of a national divide.6
For scholars who are as interested in public policy outcomes as in the supposed decline
of liberalism or the supposed rise of conservatism, this leads toward different ways of
thinking about political history beyond the emphasis on critical elections and partisan
realignment. On many of the most important policy debates since the 1960s, a supermajority of the public could be found on one side, suggesting not polarization but something approaching a popular consensus—at least among white working-class and
middle-class voters. Substantial majorities of white Americans opposed civil rights reforms
such as fair-housing legislation, busing for school integration, and race-based affirmative
action; supported police crackdowns against antiwar protesters in Chicago in 1968 and at
Kent State University in 1970; and expressed concern about high taxes, environmental
degradation, and the breakdown of the nuclear family during the 1970s. In California,
approximately three-fourths of white suburban voters supported repeal of the Rumford
Fair Housing Act in 1964, endorsed the property tax revolt in 1978, and backed the
extremely punitive “Three Strikes and You’re Out” referendum in 1994. Although the
racial backlash school generally portrays law and order as a Republican wedge issue,
Bill Clinton made the three-strikes plan the template for his tough-on-crime policies
during the 1990s, and federal prisons added significantly more inmates during the Clinton
years than during the Reagan administration. For more than three decades, the bipartisan
escalation of the government’s wars on crime and drugs has proceeded with little dissent
in Washington, D.C., or in the state capitals, which might help explain why political
historians have largely neglected this topic even though the United States now has a
higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world. For varied reasons ranging
from public opinion to interest group influence to institutional structures, similar levels
of bipartisan support have shaped other public policies as well, from the “third rail”
programs of Social Security and Medicare to Washington’s corporatist enthusiasm for free
trade and economic deregulation.7
This leads to a final point about how the broader themes of twentieth-century U.S.
history might recast the literature on conservatism, which often has emphasized the
contradictions or inconsistencies of a movement that mobilized to defend the free market
from the interventionist liberal state but refuses to acknowledge that government
programs have furthered New Right causes and subsidized conservative interest groups.
Phillips-Fein points out that conservative ideologues have long used the power of the state to
achieve their political ends, but she also repeatedly identifies conservatism with “a laissez-faire
approach to economics,” “a political movement that promotes free-market individualism,”
a commitment to “small government and the free market.” These formulations suggest
Lily D. Geismer, “Don’t Blame Us: Grassroots Liberalism in Massachusetts, 1960–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Michigan, 2010).
6
Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 743.
7
On the overlapping racial projects of liberalism and conservatism, see Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial
Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley, 2010); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison
and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Eng., 2006); Heather Ann Thompson,
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that the phrase “free market” describes a principled ideological position, if not a concrete
reality. It seems more useful to evaluate the rhetoric of “anti-government” and “free
enterprise” conservatism as a political and cultural construct, a discursive fiction wielded
as a form of power in the struggle to shape the nation’s political culture and its political
economy. Conservative politicians and interest groups, just like their liberal counterparts,
have pushed for “big government” intervention through state subsidies and regulations
when it suited their material interests and ideological agendas, and for “small government”
and deregulation when it did not.8
Political history is always shaped by the scholarly response to the present, as Phillips-Fein
stresses in her excellent essay. My outlook as a political historian has been informed as
much by the relentless centrism of the New Democrats as by the alleged triumph of the
New Right, as much by an interest in public policy formation as in electoral outcomes. In
my view, untangling the dilemmas of our own time will require paying much less attention to the free-market mantras of the Tea Party movement or the conventional wisdom
of a red-blue national schism, and spending more time exploring questions such as how
the $700 billion bipartisan bailout of Wall Street in 2008 illuminates the socialization of
risk for major corporations and the privatization of risk for ordinary households, an underlying feature of modern American politics.9
“Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,”
Journal of American History, 97 (Dec. 2010), 703–34.
8
Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 727, 731.
9
Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Security and the Decline of the American Dream (New
York, 2008).