I hope you can take the time to read this. The historical analysis is truly excellent, and the piece only falters a bit when the author begins to get into the rhetoric of the politics of today. All in all, I think the conclusions are right on.


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/ ... 642/547515

The End of the Reagan Era
by DHinMI
Sun Jul 06, 2008 at 07:29:41 PM PDT

What makes a political era? In trying to understand any particular political era, it's necessary to understand the previous era, its duration, its characteristics, what brought it in to being, what stresses led to its demise. In trying to figure out our politics since the late sixties, and definitely since the early eighties, few books have been as helpful to me as a collection of essays published in 1989 by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980. In their introductory essay, Fraser and Gerstle laid out the premise underlying their investigation of a political order:



The New Deal voting coalition was anchored by Southern white protestants and Northern Catholics and Jews. Membership in labor unions, then as now, made one far more likely to vote Democratic. Unlike now, however, where the percentage of workers represented by a union is barely over 10%, by the mid-1950's union members were almost 35% of the workforce. Within a short time Black voters, previously loyal to the party of Lincoln, shifted allegiance to the Democrats (although they were disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South).

After the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression—which lasted throughout the thirties, and didn't fully lift until the country mobilized for war starting in about 1940—Roosevelt, Truman and the New Dealers in Congress used tax policy to largely ameliorate the worst in wealth and income disparities. Increased unionization led to wage pattern bargaining, where union contracts raised wages for all workers in that particular sector. In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman calls the 20 year period of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, when the ultra-wealthy became the merely wealthy and the middle class expanded to include the majority of Americans—even if it included few minorities—the Great Compression.

The US didn't follow the path of almost every industrialized nation and create a social democratic welfare state. But after the Kennedy assassination and the huge 1964 Democratic landslide, the Johnson administration pushed through the Great Society initiatives, including Medicare, to go with New Deal and post-WWII measures like Social Security, the G.I. Bill and FHA loans to further expand and extend the partial welfare state.

Johnson also, of course, finally brought the government to grant full franchise and citizenship to Black Americans by passing the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts. These ended the Jim Crow system in the South. But providing paths for African Americans to join the mainstream of American society, according to Fraser and Gerstle, contributed to the stresses that led to the end of the New Deal order:



As suggested in the previous paragraph, the era of the New Deal was a period of great change in American family relationships. From the extended families of agrarian America that prevailed until roughly the end of WWI, through the ascendancy of the nuclear family as the American norm, to the burgeoning of feminism and the increased integration of women in to the workforce, and therefore the end of the stay-at-home mom as the American norm, many mores and beliefs about family and gender profoundly changed. As with any profound social change, it created political tensions and divides. Much of the conflict in American politics from the late 1960's nearly up to the present has been over social and cultural issues, most rooted in the changes wrought by feminism and racial integration.

Johnson predicted that signing the Civil Rights Act would mean that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation. In presidential politics, he was correct, and below the Presidential level, what had been the "solid south" became the geographic base of the Republican party. In the North, where the frontiers of racial integration and accommodation were populated by African-Americans and mostly ethnic Catholics in the urban areas and inner-ring suburbs, issues like school busing and the riots of the late sixties were used deftly by Republicans to pry apart the New Deal coalition and create "Reagan Democrats." Crime and welfare, associated as they were with African-Americans in the minds of many of these voters, became proxies for race.

On cultural issues, probably nothing cut through the New Deal coalition more traumatically than abortion. But it wasn't just abortion, or more fringe issues like prayer in schools. The Democratic Party itself became tarred with the charge of elitism, which was, since Wallace, associated with pointed-headed intellectuals, judges and bureaucrats telling people—especially men—what they could and couldn't do. Many of the cultural issues became proxy battles over feminism, and liberals and the Democratic party became associated with traits generally thought to be effete, or to take the root word further, feminine.

Reagan came along and put a sunny sheen over the anger of the right. The working class, since the oil shocks of the 1970's and the destruction of core industries like mining, textiles, heavy manufacturing and basic steel, had been pummeled economically. But the damage had been mitigated by the relatively untouched New Deal social welfare system, just recently expanded by Johnson. Reagan fought Carter through a close election, and by convincing enough voters that he wasn't crazy, surged to a ten point win.

Once in office, Reagan commenced a counter-revolution against the New Deal, but the visible attacks tended to be mostly in the context of welfare and the like, which for most voters elicited notions of race rather than hostility toward regulation of the economy or government intervention to mitigate the harshness of unfettered and unregulated markets. Attacks on regulation and the welfare state that weren't seen as disproportionately benefiting African-Americans largely went underground. Through the Reagan era, even up through George W. Bush's campaign in 2004, the Republicans stuck mostly to social and cultural issues, or to taxes. Taxes were another proxy for race, as many swing voters felt their taxes were too high, and felt their tax dollars were being squandered on welfare payments to people who refused to work or on supposedly exorbitant foreign aid to people overseas. But publicly the Republicans largely avoided frontal assaults on the New Deal.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the opening up of China, fears of war faded from the consciousness of voters. This lessened red-baiting, but it also removed the last inhibition preventing what in the 90's became known as the politics of personal destruction. Led by Newt Gingrich, the notion that politics stops at the ocean's shore ended, and everything, including previous off-limits aspects of a politician's personal life, was grounds for attack.

By 2000, most Americans were deeply disillusioned with this petty and nasty politics, but times were generally good. After the huge Republican win in 1994, Republican lost seats in Congress the next three elections. Other than a two-year period during the Eisenhower administration—an administration at peace with the New Deal—Democrats had held the presidency or at least one chamber of Congress for seventy years. The ineptness, hostility toward sound governance and corruption of the GOP had not been fully exposed to the American public; only the Gingrich-led government shutdown of 1995 hinted to casual observers the true intentions of the new mainstream of the radicalized Republican party. Much of Johnson's Great Society had been gutted, but the main legislative pillars of the New Deal, such as social security, after the scares 1981-1983 and 1995, had been left mostly intact. And as often happens when things are good, frivolities like how many times one of the candidates sighed during the debate became a big issue.

Al Gore, his sighs and his supposed exaggerations were savaged in the media. Nevertheless, he won the popular vote, almost certainly won the electoral vote, and was kept out of the White House only by the intervention of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. And Democrats won several upsets in the Senate, leading to a tie broken only by the vote of VP Dick Cheney.

As I've previously argued (here, here and here), I believe we are on the verge of a transforming election. But just as one can argue whether the end of a political era ended in 1968 or was interrupted until 1980 because of Watergate, one could argue that the end of the Reagan era began in 2000 but was interrupted the next year by the terrorist attacks on 9-11. Ruy Texeira and John Judis were already refining their argument for The Emerging Democratic Majority, showing that demographic changes and long-term voting patterns presaged an end to the Reagan era. But 9-11 and the environment of fear exploited by the Republicans prevented GOP losses in 2002. Even then, however, the GOP Congressional gains in 2002 and 2004 (after Texas redistricting) were consistent with the changes in apportionment, with more districts drawn to be pro-Republican accounting for the GOP gains.

Then in 2005 George Bush and the GOP were exposed. Bush tried to mount an overt assault on Social Security, precipitating the decline in his standing that continues today. The disastrous response to Katrina shamed most Americans. And the war in Iraq finally was seen as another disaster made by Bush and the GOP. Democrats went on in 2006 to big wins, and all indications are that we could be on the verge of more big wins this November.

Now many Americans, including many who grew up in families lifted in to the middle class by the New Deal, feel intense economic pain. By historical standards unemployment is not particularly high. But other than a few years in the late 1990's, earnings adjusted for inflation have fallen steadily since 1973. Some of that loss in earnings and wealth was made up for with low and easy credit and skyrocketing home values, and home owners spent against their increased equity. But now, as people's home values plummet, foreclosures mount, credit is unavailable, and wages continue to decline, there's nothing to soften the economic blows to working families, even including many which in the past would have been considered comfortably in the upper middle class.

As the wage and wealth hits accumulate, Americans' economic health is being attacked from other directions. Secure pensions are no longer a given, and 401K accounts have been devastated by the recent crash in the stock market. Health care costs continue to rise faster than inflation, and the number of uninsured Americans continues to grow. And the costs of going to college or having children are too great to bear for many younger Americans.

The long period of doing nothing to address Americans' addiction to gas guzzlers, combined with instability (and most likely price manipulation) in the petroleum markets, has created yet another economic stress on Americans. As in the 1930's, when everything in politics was dominated by the effort to subdue the depression, in coming years, almost all the major policy problems faced by America—our foreign policy, the price and availability of food in the US and the food demands in developing countries, our declining manufacturing base, our balance of payments to foreign nations, wage and income inequality, environmental and climate changes, construction, the "financialization" of the American economy—will be connected to energy and climate change.

Finally, there's a sense with many Americans that there's something seriously wrong in America. All the polls show it. The young have been voting Democratic for the last three elections, and young voters appear ready to vote in much higher numbers this November than in any election since the vote was extended to 18 year olds in 1972, maybe in higher numbers than ever seen. Black voters, driven by the candidacy of Barack Obama, appear ready to vote in record numbers. Latinos continue to grow as a percentage of the vote, and continue to become more solidly Democratic. But the greatest movement may be among working class and middle class voters no longer motivated to vote on issues of race, social change or cultural issues, but instead motivated by the inequities of wealth that have reopened during the Reagan era.

According to NYT Reporter Steven Greenhouse, author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,



We have reached the point where we have unsustainable energy policy, and unsustainable foreign and military policy, an unsustainable fiscal policy, and, as many Americans now feel personally, economic inequities that aren't sustainable if we wish to maintain the broad middle class created by the New Deal order. We've reached the end of the Reagan era, and are on the cusp of something new, hopefully better, and characterized by a bold, vigorous, creative Democratic party with which people bond as they did with the Democratic party of the New Deal era.

Is this the shitty part you were refering to? Anyone who'd write "bold, vigorous, creative Democratic party" should head straight to rehab. Don't waste time putting down the pipe. Just get to rehab. They'll take the pipe away from you once you get there.

Thanks. That all you got on comments? I thought by mentioning these parts in my preface that we might actually discuss the GOOD parts of the piece, but if you want to spend a thread nitpicking the worst paragraphs, enjoy, I won't be participating.

So, could Obama single handedly end both the Clinton and the Reagan era? *hmm*

I am not confident in the least that Obama can change anything in one term. And if that is the case, there are certainly no guarantees that he will be around for another four years following that.

It's not about Obama. It's bigger than Obama, and it's been coming a lot longer than Obama has been running for President. He's just going to be the person in the position at the time. At best, he may be able to transform the larger forces into a long-lasting electoral majority that enacts changes over a generation or two (like the New Deal Era), or he may fail to accomplish many things, or make changes that have a negative impact on society, in which case the next era may only last a decade or so.

The historical analysis is pretty good. The article sucks when it looks into the future and pronounces the Reagan era is over. The current Reagan era hangover may last a term or two longer.

Well put. Though I have to err on the pessimistic side when it comes to the politics of change in the two nearly-identical parties we have opposing each other. Though he will most likely not be receiving my vote, I too am curious and interested in the presidency of Obama. I have a belief that the election may not be close, but that remains to be seen.

While I feel myself at times believing that the old era is over, and this man may be able to change America for the better, I also know of the enormous roadblocks of bureaucracy and philosophy that stand solidly in his way.

As I have aged, I have actively sought my own place in the world, and have taken an appreciation for little to no input from the government on my life and my choices. I think many on this board would agree with those sentiments, be it taxation, whom we can marry, and what we can take/eat/read/see/consume. This move towards individualism is in stark contrast to that which I see in the government today, regardless of party. If Obama can usher in an era in which "America the People" are more important than "America the Government" or "America the Nation", then by all means Godspeed. The exception is that I heard this sort of rhetoric from Reagan during the 1980s, and with the collection of presidents who have followed in his wake, the government only increased in size and the individual was tossed aside. Maybe my principles and beliefs are outdated, and that individualism is a failed philosophy in a nation as large and diverse as ours. Maybe I am just plain wrong and slightly crazy (I am sure few would argue that here as well). But the way I see it, both the New Deal and Reagan eras were damaging to America and damaging to the individual one way or another. Perhaps something more drastic or revolutionary is in order. If that proves to be the case, I am not sure Obama, or anyone else from the two major parties can provide such motivation for true change.

interesting article. i don't think that there is any doubt that this election is unlike any in recent memory. there are issues at stake in november larger than lapel pins and wesley clark, which, for the most part, people seem to realize. both candidates have staked out markedly different positions on the majority of issues. pundits seem to dismiss the notion that this election features two sides of the same coin. no, they say, this election is different.

but it's not. it's two status-quo, pro-establishment, pro-state demagogues who seem more eager to discuss how they will use the gov't to bail us out of this mortgage mess, or how long they'll keep troops on foreign soil. what will really be different four years from now? will gov't be smaller, a less invasive presence in your day-to-day activities? will the gov't and the welfare/warfare state cease to antagonize you in your personal activities? that is what is so disappointing about this election. there is the real opportunity to discuss issues of weight - the role of the federal reserve, the (de)merits of a belligerent foreign policy, whether gov't has in fact improved the lives of the lowest class, etc. but, for whatever reason, few people seem interested in discussing the merits of government on the whole.

i've long argued that progressives and libertarians have much in common. they both see as ideal a society that maximizes both socio-economic mobility and personal freedoms, allowing the individual to conduct themselves as they see fit (so long as no one else is harmed). it's just the means over which we quibble. progressives get the right answers to the wrong questions. so when the author extols the virtues of the new deal...


...he completely undermines what had to that point been reasonable analysis. the new deal crushed any prospect of recovery and made the depression as protracted as it was. draconian regulation, tax hikes, price floors, and subsidization forced employers to pay much, much more for workers than they would have otherwise, contributing to the ungodly unemployment rates.


this is spot on. the author, though, seems to be implicitly urging the gov't to do something, anything. but they can't do anything that wouldn't make things worse than they already are. there is no shortcut to prosperity. again, right answer, wrong question.

This makes me want to reread Fareed Zakaira's Post-American World again.

Very astute, thodoks. Thank you.

Good article. I think the last paragraph is a bit over-the-top optimistic, but with everything I read about the future, including from myself, completely and utterly pessimistic, maybe this isn't a bad thing.

I think its interesting that he chose 1980 as the year of the shift away from the New Deal era. In my mind, the real year where politics in this country shifted, and are just now ready to shift back, is 1968. Before '68 this nation was as liberal and left-leaning as it ever has been. And as the author correctly describes, fears of riots, extremists (who almost always were so far to the left they were off the page) pushed the common citizen towards the right, or at least the center initially. So Nixon wins on a platform of safety and security for the middle class, winning former Democrats who felt things were spinning out of control, while winning southerners who viewed his platform as a euphamism for race. While Nixon wasn't a conservative, or very much right of center, I firmly believe the major shift occured then. By 1972, he won re-election, losing one state I believe, in complete destruction of Walter Mondale and the left. Jimmy Carter won a fluke election in '76 merely because Ford was an awful candidate; Ford lost more than Carter won. I think much of the Reagan Revolution is an exaggeration. The base was there and ready for him. He simply brought the nation with him a bit further to the right, turning against unpopular portions of New Deal policies. I think it may be more accurate to say that in 1969 the New Deal era was breathing its' last gasps of air; by 1980 it was finally buried.

I was considering saying a similar thing by bringing up a recent discussion I had. The argument was that the period of presidencies taking place from 1868-1900 (Grant through McKinley) and 1968-2008 (Nixon to Bush) were very similar. Of particular note was his comparison of Grover Cleveland (the only Democrat elected in that period) to Bill Clinton (the only two-term Democrat elected in that period, and as you said, the Carter election could be construed as a fluke).

Not so much of a "fluke" as a direct product of Watergate. The author alluded to this in the piece, that 1968 was when the shift really began, interrupted by Watergate, and that it was only delayed until 1980 when Reagan solidified right's voting bloc for a generation.

Worth reading.

This part also really stuck out to me for some reason.

So if this analysis is wrong, what was responsible for the undeniable increase in relative size of the middle class from the 1940's to 1960's?

I couldn't give you a definitive answer, but given the number of things that have changed, and the intrinsic randomness of economic cycles, it's a bit absurd to pick one and, without any evidence beyond modest correlation, declare it as the cause. But I'd be more inclined to believe that it had more to do with advances in technology than anything else.

How about veteran's benefits that were given out after WWII? I wonder how big of a role that played.

i don't know that it was just one thing. WWII, sound money, keynesian economics (this period, after all, marked the "boom" portion of keynesian boom/bust policies). i've seen it written that much of the growth of the middle class can be attributed not to any socio-economic ascendancy of the lower and middle classes, but to the ratcheting down of the upper classes. tax rates, at their lowest, were anywhere between 4.4% and 22.2% on the lowest income brackets, and, at their highest, were anywhere between 70% and 94% on the highest income brackets during these 20+ years. here, let me show it to you. at no time before or since have taxes been higher than at this point. for my money, the seeds of stagflation that bloomed in the 70s were sown during this period.

perhaps a better question would be: how remarkable could the recovery and expansion have been without 90% tax rates and keynesian policies?