| The Material Foundations of New Deal Liberalism-Rise and Fall
We begin with a brief overview from a conventional materialist perspective-how economic interests drove both the creation of the New Deal consensus, and then tore it apart. Economic liberalism thrived because it appeared politically necessary to a large segment of the capitalist ruling class in the wake of the Great Depression. Laissez-faire had been discredited, and while some segments of the ruling class were quite enamored with Hitler and Mussolini, the advent of WWII closed off that possibility, while the strength of the Soviet Union in surviving WWII indicated the long-term threat of a viable political-economic alternative. Therefore, the welfare state had tremendous political utility in the eyes of large-scale capitalists, who had the resources to pay a share of the costs, and pass most of that onto their customs. Thus, social insurance for their workers was economic insurance for them. And so long as this seemed like a good deal, a dominant segment of the capitalist class supported the grand bargain of the New Deal.
However, there were significant segments of the capitalist class that never went along with this, and it was among these other segments that conservative movement gestated while largely out of power. Not incidentally, the dominant New Deal governing coalition actually subsidized these dissident conservative elites in a variety of ways. One was through military spending that largely moved money, jobs and advanced technology away from the old industrial core, and out into the geographic periphery. (See The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America .) Another was through infrastructure spending that boosted the growth of businesses that often had little or no investment in the welfare state, aside from paying payroll takes. In particular, the growth of the Interstate highway system boosted the growth of dispersed cities and suburbs where businesses and relatively affluent residents set up shop, leaving behind older, more expensive to maintain cities and regions with more recent influxes of black and white southerners whose needs for social services were significantly higher than the populations they replaced. With these trends already well under way by the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement and Anti-War Movement of the 1960s then created conditions that made a rightwing presidential electoral coalition possible.
But it was not until the stagflation of the early 1970s, amid the first Oil Shocks that the dominant capitalist sectors that had originally bought into the New Deal bargain began to seriously question it, and look for ways to back out. This happened primarily on the labor front, via rollbacks, union-busting and deindustrialization, as Democratic control of the House significantly impeded more sweeping changes at the governmental level-although they were able to make major gains in reducing higher-income taxes and shifting tax burdens overall, by raising payroll taxes substantially after cutting income taxes in the early 1980s. Democratic control in the House resulted in an influx of corporate contributions to the Democratic Party, dividing its loyalties, and weakening ties to its core voting blocks. But this did not have a major electoral consequence until 1994.
Free Lunch Conservatism
All the above explains motivations-and, broadly stated, means as well. But it does not really explain how old-fashioned monopolistic capitalism made such a striking comeback, producing a rapid rise in economic polarization, which virtually halted a centuries-long history of each generation of Americans doing better economically than the generation before. These political developments were so transparently opposed to the common good, and yet were so readily normalized that they require special explanation in their own right-as well as being crucial to understand if we wish to reverse them, as it seems inarguable that a progressive politics must do.
For this, we require an explanation that brings us back to the main thrust of this diary series. The mechanism I propose was two-fold: First, traditional conservatism had utterly failed, and try as it might to re-present itself, people might buy it in the abstract, but when it came down to brass tacks, they were down with the New Deal, and broad government spending. A conservative ideology that was halfway reality-based could not appeal to people whose everyday experience told them that government had an important role to play, even if they longed for the freedom of the Wild West and wished it were not so. Still worse was a conservatism of austerity that promised people lots of hard work, with nothing much to show for it. For conservatism to succeed, it had to totally cut its reality-based ties, and remake itself in the image of liberalism, promising good times for all, a better tomorrow, morning in America. This was the beauty of supply-side economics, as sketched out in the earlier diary "The Big Lie And The Rightwing's Neo-Feudal Vision (A Supplement To The Political Duality Series)": it promised something for nothing: tax cuts would make tax revenues grow. Instead of the traditional conservative message of sacrifice and hard work, this free lunch conservatism leap-frogged over the most utopian promises that mainstream liberalism had ever made. Its promises were so excessive that they could only be compared to Communism.
It's worth noting some other aspects of reality-denial that surfaced at this time. Racism suddenly vanished overnight, along with any sense that the conservatives who had fiercely defended it were in any sense morally lacking. (Indeed, the fact that black people remained poor even after racism had vanished seemed to indicate that conservatives had been right all along-there was something morally wrong with the great mass of black people, and liberals were doing them no favors by pretending otherwise.) Furthermore, by discovering the cause of fighting abortion, conservatives staked a claim to the new Civil Rights Movement. Vietnam was not tragic betrayal of ideals, a genocidal war of domination, marked by countless atrocities, fought for no good reason, and built on an elaborate foundation of lies. It was a noble crusade, one that we had actually won, in fact, before the treasonous liberals in the media and the Democratic Congress stole it from us. And as for the environment, trees were a leading cause of pollution.
In all these ways and more, by cutting its reality-based ties, rightwing movement conservatism positioned itself for a dynamic of magical thinking, much like the rightwing movements of early 20th Century Europe. Such a dynamic holds tremendous advantages over reality-based politics, simply because it is able to promise so much more-miracles both economic and spiritual. The arguments for such a magical politics cannot be made in the same mundane reality-based way that one argues for realist politics. One cannot discuss the Pentagon Papers, for example. One must talk about Rambo instead, with his poignant question, "This time, will they let us win?" One cannot study the sociology and economics of poverty. One must tell stories of non-existent "welfare queens." Nor can one realistically face the insanity of nuclear brinksmanship, and preparing to "win" a nuclear war. Instead, one must tell fairy tales about a Star Wars missile shield, like a giant Superdome protecting the entire country.
All these problems that conservatism could not face and solve were to some degree insoluble because the world is simply too complicated for its Level 3 solutions. It could neither grasp nor abide the Level 4 solutions of liberalism, but it could step in aggressively when liberalism faltered, either because a changing Level 4 world always throws up set-backs from time to time, or because the world was becoming even more complex-a post-modern Level 5 world. And when it stepped in because liberalism faltered, it stepped in with simplistic stories, about turning back to the good old days, and moving forward at the same time.
Above and beyond the material problems that liberals faced-problems sketched out in the section above-they now faced a serious dilemma, although they did not realize it at the time. Conservatives were talking utter bunk, but efforts to point this out were only marginally effective. Democrats did well in the 1982 mid-term elections, when the economy was in shambles, but by 1984, Reagan won a landslide re-election, while Walter Mondale abandoned his historical identity as a liberal champion, and campaigned on raising taxes to close the enormous deficits that supply-side fantasy had created.
The situation now was one of virtually complete role-reversal. Instead of conservatives being defenders of the status quo, grounded in institutions that elaborately validated their worldview, liberals were. Instead of those institutions being based on faith and authority (the Church, the King, feudal relations of lord and vassal, etc.), they were based on science and reason (social and physical science shaping and informing both social policy and technological initiatives, democratic institutions mediating the exercise of power, deliberations based on rational argument, albeit within boundaries set by power relations, etc.)
In a recent comment, texas dem wrote:
One way to look at it is that Democrats today are believers in the system that Democrats and a big chunk of the Republicans at the time put together in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The entire post-New Deal, Eisenhower era concept of government is one that the Dems and GOP then accepted. (This is borrowing heavily from Perlstein's Unmaking of the American Consensus, of course.) This conservative movement didn't accept it, they slowly purged the GOP of the oldline types that did, and now the GOP is 95% composed of people who literally want to destroy the concept of government that was developed back then. The important contrast is that Dems don't. So they play within the rules of that system, they don't exploit its weaknesses, they don't act in ways that might undermine it, and they generally keep their behavior constrained within a lot of the common understandings that used to constrain both sides.
I agree 100%. But this is really only the teeniest tip of an ice shelf, not a mere iceberg. As Ron Suskind's famous quotation reminds us, the Bush Administration, as the vanguard of this movement has nothing but contempt for "the reality-based community," which, in effect is to say, the entire tradition of the modern West with roots in the Italian Renaissance and even Roman law. 1215 and all that.
This larger tradition, although it involves Level 4 thinking, can well be experienced like an extended Level 3 community, which is precisely what liberals and Democrats have done. Although movement conservaives (and with them, the entire Republican Party) have repeatedly violated the norms of this extended historical community, liberals and Democrats have been largely helpless to respond, in part because they deeply believe in those norms, and do not wish to damage them further, but in part because they are operating as Level 3 selves who are ontologically embedded in those norms, and are simply incapable of standing outside of them, recognizing how they have been broken, and crafting a Level 4 fix.
I would like to draw a parallel here. In his book, In Over Our Heads, Kegan presents a series of vignettes illustrating conflicts and confusions between levels. The most vivid one-for me at least-involved a teenager vowing to return from a party by their curfew, and then, naturally, failing to do so. Kegan's point is that the teenager's failure was not in staying out late. Rather, it was in making what is, for Level 2, an unkeepable promise. For Level 2, point of view is subject, not object. It is simply impossible for a Level 2 teenager to internalize their parents' point of view if it conflicts with theirs. At the moment of promising-assuming good faith, of course-there is no conflict, and hence, no problem. But neither is there the capacity to foresee future conflict, at which point the parents' point of view goes out the window.
Something similar is going on with Democrats when they "refuse" to play Constitutional hardball by voting down Bush's Supreme Court appointees, or even to exercise their undoubted Constitutional power of the purse to end the Iraq War by defunding it. Some of them really are refusing to take these steps. But some are so embedded in a Level 3 consciousness (itself partly constructed of our customary governmental order) that they are simply not capable of conceiving anything else. This does not excuse them, any more than Kegan's analysis excuses the teenager of breaking curfew. But it does strongly suggest a radically different approach to solving this poblem will be necessary.
Theres is much more that needs saying. But this is so fundamental, that I want to let it sink in, while I work on organizing the rest, except for this...
Coda
In his comment, Texas Dem continued:
In this way, the Democrats are literally conservative; they like the old order that they created enough to conserve, protect, and retain it. They care about its health. They act carefully within it, so as not to damage it. Democrats would never imagine pulling shit like the nuclear option, because it would damage the institution of the Senate, damage comity, further politicise the judiciary by allowing the appointment of more radical judges who could only muster 50 votes, etc. The nuclear option is bad for the system of government that Democrats built, so they'd never ever even think of doing it, much less try to execute it as Frist did. But modern Republicans are concerned with pulling down the old order and erecting their own, so smashing the opposition and smashing the old barriers of systemic restraint are both good for them.
This is it precisely. And in fact, if we can create sufficient space outside of Level 3 consciousness to make this case it is a powerful way of reaching ordinary conservatives (the sort who largely support social spending, for example). For the fact is that this is nothing new at all. For centuries now, liberals have been creating new institutions whose purpose is two-fold-on one hand, to extend the realm of human freedom, and on the other to preserve social order and stability, which is, of course, an utter necessity if abstract freedoms are to be realized in everyday life.
This was the case centuries ago with the practice of religious tolerance, and its legal protections. The lack of religious tolerance had been traditional under the feudal unity of church and state. It was taken for granted that such unity was absolutely necessary in order to ensure social harmony. But with the Reformation this tradition lead to a century of bloody warfare that decimated Europe. Religious tolerance began as an utter necessity to preserve the peace. Without it, no one was secure to practice their religion. With it, the traditional aim of ensuring social harmony was restored-albeit via a new form. Because disruptive changes like the Reformation are inevitable, Level 4 liberal responses like religious tolerance are actually conservative, reducing social strife and tensions, and preserving social order and stability. This is a point of extreme importance that could help us build bridges to reasonable conservatives, and start the work of detoxifying the many millions who have been poisoned by movement conservatism.
But first, of course, we need to address the major overhaul needed among the Dems.
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