EVENT
Jeff Danziger
c/o the New York Times.
The picture doesn’t have much to do with the gyst of this post. Perhaps a tangential relevance.
For many years now a number of friends and family have been talking about the decline of the U.S., how our golden era is past. Depending on who you ask, several time periods are up for “golden era”:
- The turn-of-the-century through the 1920s, when we emerged as a world power, stablized a gold standard, and built an economic empire around the world. (Of course, this was also when the Ku Klux Klan gained dominance, not only in the South, but in much of the Midwest and West, and Jim Crow laws were expanded and extended each year).
- World War II when we fought some of three genocidal and destructive regimes to a standstill, and then were well-poised as a world superpower to lead the West in the cold war. (Of course, this was also when one of our most beloved presidents signed an executive order transplanting hundreds of thousands of people to camps in the middle of nowhere; meanwhile our rhetorical actions against the Soviet Union not only created fertile ground for the Red Scare to grow, but increased our own hegemony in the fifties).
- The 1960s when the Civil Rights and Womens Liberation movements made their most strident victories. (Of course, the movers and shakers on these admirable fronts also misled the public consistantly with regard to an unwinnable war with its own impressive battery of ethical and foreign relations compromises).
- Even, in a limited sense the 1990s, when consistant and sane economic policies combined with radical technological growth to bring about widespread prosperity. (Of course, this very prosperity helped to incubate the social conservatism that overcame all branches of American government just a few years later, while our domestic prosperity was largely circumscribed by globalization in in which standards of living in the developing world, while improving on the whole, were increasing removed from our own.
My point could be, I suppose, that a “golden age” isn’t really that… that the term “golden age” is erroneous. Rather, I think that any period of time is contentious and complex (and we can take another step and say the most fascinating people are contentious and complex). I posted about a week ago that I would love to have dinner with LBJ. It’s perhaps because his Great Society is so sweeping and noble in its vision, and so encompassing in its ambitious for this nation that I find it profoundly moving. However, this is also a man who compromised the communications between the government and citizenry quite possibly as much as our current president has (is there really such a cedibility difference between the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and authorization for war in Iraq based on WMDs?), and whose deception (I think we must fairly admit) was much more dangerous and insidious, if perhaps less surface-sleazy, than Nixon’s.
Again, I’m not hating on LBJ… or even Nixon. I will hate on W. Bush, but then, he’s the only one of the three I’ve really seen up close.
I still haven’t gotten to the fundamental point of this rant. In work for the last half year I’ve been editing a series of books on the last century of American policy, and while these books have their own perspective, I cannot help but contrast the very predictability of broad trends in American politics with what seems the short-sightedness of people when considering the future.
Most of the people I know have strong negative feelings not only for President Bush, but for his administration, his appointees, the congress he’s worked with, his policies, and perhaps most of all, the attitudes he has encouraged and engendered in the people he governs. This is appropriate; he has brought about many terrible things: the Military Commissions Act; routine Geneva Convention violations; a catastrophic lack of budgetary insight; a weird hybrid of cultural isolationism and global ambition.
What is perhaps inappropriate is firstly our surprise, and secondly our despair.
With regard to our surprise:
We shouldn’t be surprised because the national mood consistently begins turning before the symptoms of its change become conspicuous.
I’ve been saying for at least three years that a Bush administration has been inevitable ever since Reagan. To clarify, it might not have been the addled chimp-faced zealot we’ve come to hate so intimately. Perhaps it would have been Buchanan, or Gingrich, or someone else. But a president/administration radically conservative by all of our standards had been a near-future certainty ever since Reagan completed his tenure.
Reagan’s presidency galvanized the far right and gave them a more visible and “credible” position in the political conversation as a whole, and just as importantly, Reaganomics was sufficiently incompatible with the traditional Republican emphasis on fiscal restraint that the party started to be weigh towards social conservatism. Moreover, Reagan’s severely spotty record as a president was eventually considered a great success, because the Soviet Union conveniently fell and his staff masterfully excelled at giving a scandal a pretty face.
If we look to the role of Reagan’s successors, they may have adjusted the direction of the dialogue, but were not in the end decisive.
Bush Sr. was a moderate Republican… it is possible that if his tenure had been more successful and his personality more electric (as Reagan’s had been), he might have arrested the drift to the right.
Clinton, on the other hand, did inspire the same levels of love and hate as Reagan, but significantly, while Reagan moved his party to the right, so did Clinton. If Clinton’s agenda had been more successful across-the-board, he might have changed the course of events. If say, his Health Care Initiatives had passed, or if he had shrugged off Monica Lewinski as effectively as Reagan shrugged off Iran-Contra. Instead, his successes were mainly economic, and did nothing to dampen the sense of unity and momentum among social conservatives, and in fact, he spread Democratic votes between classic liberals and centrists just as social conservatives finished their consolidation of the Republican party.
We can fault Bush Sr. and Clinton for not halting a process in motion, but ultimately, we must thank Reagan for W.
Who do we thank for Reagan?
Carter? Ford? Nixon? LBJ? The seventies?
It’s a more difficult question. Carter was certainly elected as a response to a combination of his three predecessors… LBJ compromised his own initiatives through his massive deception and bungling of Vietnam. Nixon managed to mess up his own career even more with his paranoid fanangling. Ford, who as far as I can tell seemed especially insubstantial as a president, shot himself in the foot (which he then tripped over) by pardoning Nixon then fooling around with the economy.
For more-or-less this whole time, Congress was dominated by the Democratic party in general, and by liberal Democrats in particular. But if Carter was a no-confidence vote in government, a hard-line populist stance was itself compromised by his administration being at perpetual loggerheads with Congress, and even his own party.
What I suspect this means is that Reagan was swept into office very much by positioning himself for a large group of fiscally weird and socially conversative voters… people who love god and hate taxes and don’t understand the economy. But he moreover capitalized (with actor’s finesse no less) on the perceived ineptitude of a whole decade of presidents.
This trend combined to make another victim: progressive liberalism. Because if Reagan’s election was an ouster of a centrist Democrat, the public didn’t forget that Carter was a Democrat, and Democrats ran Congress. The balance of political power was unable to decisively and satisfactorily resolve any of the issues that had been left hanging at the end of the sixties. The Vietnam War had ended, but everyone felt awful about it. The Cold War dragged on. Stagflation: Good Grief. In many peoples’ minds (though I strongly disagree) civil and womens’ rights were taken care of and a done deal. It was easy to cast liberalism – “bleeding hearts” – as motivated to excess, corruption, ineptitude, and a lack of understanding for their constitutents.
It is fair to note, just as with the Bush Sr. and Clinton administration, these developments were broad social movements, and maybe there was little that could have been done to arrest them. At the same time, even if a solution had been available, progressives did not show the empathy, perspective, or flexibility to adapt. Therefore, we have a national cohort of progressive and Democratic politicans to collectively thank for the Reagan Administration.
I am a progressive by most peoples’ standards. So this ought to be pretty depressing.
I said, though, that despair is inappropriate.
I would say that the whole cariage of the Democratic party has been defensive, and as informed by progressives, thereby a little defeatest, and that’s what make despair not only erroneous, but actively inappropriate.
But I ought to be able to make a case that there is an error.
As I said, the excesses of the Bush Administration have many parallels to those of Johnson and Nixon. The Rodriguez revelations this week suggest Nixon’s plumbery, and the handing of Iraq is too comparable to Vietnam to warrant further discussion here.
Likewise, just as left dominated government for a few decades on top before crumbling under their own weight, the right is going through the same motions today. Political thought moves like a pendulum, and it’s not going to be irrevocably stopped now. In fact, common sense should tell us that a meaningful, non cosmetic shift to the left is as inevitable now as the ascent of a W. Bush and a Reagan was in the mid-seventies. Already we have seen fruit from this in the new Congress. In fact, the most useful speculation maybe be how we can utilize the momentum for the best; to not take it for granted, but as an opportunity to genuinely reach out and have the political impact of the New Deal, of the Great Society, of a practically conceived and plausibly attainable better future.
Don’t assume that things won’t change.
They will change.
This is assured, and we’ll probably all be surprised.
Moreover, don’t convince yourself that some halcyon perfection is now lost and behind us.
Such arguments are necessarily compromised and contradictory, inherently subjective, and never firmly established until centuries after the fact.
Do what you can, and enjoy the fruit that it bears you.
END OF POST.