I have finished reading my advance copy of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic. I am confident that when I make up my list of most important books of 2016 that it will be included. Unfortunately, it does not go on sale for another three months.
Levin attempts to interpret extended periods of economic, cultural, and political history in terms of broad themes. Given that such an effort takes huge risks (of which he is aware), I think he does a very creditable job. But these sorts of high-level analyses are always subject to quibbling over details.
One such detail concerns Lyndon Johnsons’ Great Society. Levin–and he is hardly alone in this–sees the legislation of 1965 as a natural product or capstone of an era in which the Federal government took on increasing responsibilities.
I want to push back and to stress the idiosyncratic and accidental nature of the Great Society legislation.
1. Johnson never succeeded in selling his program to the public. The public’s attitude toward the Great Society was predominantly scornful and cynical. Grace Slick, before she became the lead singer for Jefferson Airplane, was in a band called The Great Society. It was not an homage.
2. The left had very mixed feelings about Johnson. Many northern liberals were put off by his southern accent. They were still in mourning over Kennedy and many were put off by Johnson’s lack of the Kennedy charm and grace. Also, by 1965, Vietnam was cutting deeply into his support among liberals, particularly younger ones. And there seemed to be a disconnect between the term Great Society and the urban unrest that was starting to erupt. Rather than wishing to share in the glory of the Great Society, many liberals saw it as an exercise in Johnson’s ego and parliamentary wiles.
3. What made the Great Society possible was the landslide victory that Democrats won in 1964. In that sense, we owe the Great Society to Barry Goldwater. His nomination shattered the Republican Party. In today’s terms, think of an effect on the Republican establishment somewhere between a Cruz nomination and a Trump nomination. Moderate Republican voters stayed away in droves in 1964, and in those days coattail effects were much stronger. As a result, the disaster of 1964 decimated Republicans up and down the ballot. There are those on the right who like to romanticize the Goldwater insurgency by saying that it “paved the way for Reagan.” What it actually paved the way for was Democratic control of Congress that remained well entrenched into the Reagan era and beyond. It was the class of 1964 that passed the Great Society programs and that made them impossible to repeal even when Republicans re-took the Presidency.
It can be difficult to predict the consequences of one’s preferred candidate winning a nomination or an election. That is one reason to agree with Tyler Cowen that you should be careful what you wish for.
“What made the Great Society possible was the landslide victory that Democrats won in 1964. In that sense, we owe the Great Society to Barry Goldwater.”
Those two statements are contradictory. We owe the “Great Society” programs to the stupidity and hubris of the modern left. Claiming it’s the fault of Goldwater and Goldwater Republicans is as absurd as saying “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.”
Defending my right to complain is the only reason I vote!
Depends on what one means by “owe”. You may even say Goldwaterites were not morally responsible, but, if by “owe” one means that one thing brought about the other, then yes, by shattering the Republican Party electoral support, the Goldwater rebels paved the way for the Great Society. If it brings to mind lessons Republicans still refuse to learn, it is so at their peril … and everyone else’s. To be fair, if the Great Society reforms were so unpopular today as modern-day Goldwaterites would like them to be — or sometimes even pretend they are–, by the Reagan Administration, Republicans would already have mustered enough support to repeal them. Goldwater’s disaster probably only sped things up a little .
A less depressing analysis…In 1964 Republicans had nothing at stake, being already a small if not pointlessly small minority in both the House and the Senate. The specter of either a Trump or a Hillary presidency should compel every moderate to do what he/she can to ensure that keeping Paul Ryan and even Mitch Mc Connel remain as foils — and they would certainly be foils to either Clinton or Trump. Trump does not even need to pivot Left on most of the issues that galvanize the Democrats “War on…” except for the vaunted Latino backlash. All in all, if the race emerges as a likely Trump loss, it may not panic more fringe Democrats to vote, it will bring Trump supporters who should be co-opted to vote down-ticket Republican, and result (net-net) in enough down ticket votes for Republicans than for Democrats to hold the status quo. This would be especially so since congressional Democrats will be running on revolution — which a Democrat sweep would bring — but Republicans will sell stability.
The problem with broad explanations like Levin’s is not quibbles about details, but rather the intrinsic complexity of the forces involved. There are always many explanations, each seemingly plausible, for historical outcomes.
BTW, from what I can find, the Democrats held majorities in the House and Senate during most Congressional sessions after the onset of the Great Depression. For example, Dems held a 64-36 majority in the Senate and 262-175 in the House for the 1961-63 session. Don’t blame Goldwater.
What Arnold seems to be referring to is stretch goals, kind of like how Obama squeaked the barely legal (actually not legal) Obamacare through. Again, I liken this to when a sports team will front-load their teams to try to squeak through to a championship, like how the Panthers went to the Super Bowl early on by stacking the team with veterans, but then took 20 years to get back.
If going from a tiny majority to a larger majority “moved the overton window” and the marginal legislative voter, you can squeak in legislation that really shouldn’t pass at equilibrium but can be really hard to undo.
Rich,
To some degree, that only strengthens Arnold’s point. If Republicans were already in a position of weakness in the early ’60’s, nominating someone who was at least perceived as being solidly to the right of the average voter was probably not a sound electoral strategy.
But on the other hand, if you aren’t going to be able to accomplish anything anyway, then perhaps the best strategy is to go for an educational firebrand candidate. So, I can see both sides on this one. I can guarantee I won’t be quoting Mitt Romney in 40 years. Even the jokes won’t be funny anymore.
Maybe, but seeing your opponents pass a wide-ranging expensive set of policies like the Great Society is a high price to pay for running an “educational candidate” which the media just smears as an unhinged, dangerous extremist, anyway. Of course, that assumes Arnold is correct when he says Goldwater’s landslide defeat paved the way for the Great Society and there’d have been a much different political landscape in the mid sixties if Republicans had played it safe and nominated a more moderate candidate. I simply don’t know enough to say whether that’s accurate or inaccurate.
The alternative in 1964 was Nelson Rockefeller (a liberal Republican). In 1968, Nixon won and was re-elected resoundingly in 1972. Nixon was considered to be right-wing, but allowed the establishment of the EPA and OSHA, which continue to haunt us to this day.
Republicans had congress and the presidency under Bush. Accomplished nothing.
Republicans have botched supreme court appointments before, so there i no guarantee a Rubio selected stooge would be reliably conservative (on anything other the maintaining Citizens United).
If you nominate a cuck candidate everyone will feel he’s all nice and like the idea of voting for him *in theory*. However, most whites will stay home on election day and you end up with a high 40s but still still narrow loss just like with Mitt Romney or John McCain. Losing respectably is all the establishment GOP has to offer, and when they happen into a win they don’t do anything with it. They’re just leftists who want the top marginal tax rate to stay low with zero meaningful differences besides that.
Bush to Obama would be him just ignoring terrorism (the great recession) and ramming through social security reform (Obamacare).
Now that you mention it…
Medicare Part D?
It is utterly baffling to consider what GWB spent his political capital on.
Another perspective – and one with great relevance today – was that something like the Great Society portfolio of economic programs was practically inevitable and it was just a matter of time before something like them arose under somebody in the post-New-Deal structure, as indeed happened in practically every other ‘mixed economy’ social democracy.
Democracy is always susceptible to clientelism. The American system has been moving in a direction in which the dispensing of this patronage has evolved from crude and obvious mechanisms to subtler and stronger ones in which vote-buying redistribution can be achieved under the cover of political narratives that exploit the language of virtuous social principles. This is furthermore enabled by tapping into the huge amount of new surplus made available by technological innovation and economic growth.
What holds clientalism back in a democracy? That is, there is an obvious incentive for politicians to get into a Red Queen’s Race in their generosity with public money and special legal privileges to win vote banks of the poor, the old, the public employees, women, minorities, etc. What are the countervailing forces?
Well, for one there are the limits of economic production, fiscal sustainability, and borrowing capacity. Greece and Venezuela seem to have hit that wall, but from here to Venezuela is a lot of ruin. It helps being a much wealthier and more productive country with a lot more surplus to go around.
But there is also the fact that to pay Paul you must rob Peter, and all the Peters of the world will put up some resistance. The effectiveness of that resistance in the long run depends on the role of money in politics and the number of people in the taxed class. Or, if not ‘taxed’ in monetary terms, those that are suffering a downgrade in their social status.
Alinsky figured out 45 years ago that the ultimate success of this approach hinged on finding a way to make the entire middle class into a client. But his timing was as bad as it could be, because the mid 70’s were at the absolute zenith of income equality, tax burdens were broadly distributed, and there was no way to make the middle class both Peter and Paul.
But the historical trend reversed – I’d argue mainly due to technological factors – and we’ve been heading increasingly towards an Average is Over world ever since.
And so now Alinsky’s dream can be fulfilled and the middle class can be bought with Robin Hood ‘spread the wealth’ tactics. The ownership of the means of the production and the right to the dividends are increasingly concentrated in superrich superstars, and meanwhile costs related to education, health care, and housing are rising faster than wager and so pushing a growing portion of working class and lower-middle class people into economically struggling circumstances.
As a result, there is no remaining market for the “anti-clientalist conservatism” of the post-war era of Everyman because the economic equilibrium no longer automatically rewards most people exercising bourgeois norms with satisfactory levels of material welfare and social status.
The only remaining hope for an opposition party is a return to a neo-spoils system and to offer a competing clientalism to its own constituency. That is, one side gets Peters, and the other side get Pauls, and politics reduces to a zeru-sum game about arguing about which group gets how large a slice of the money taken from the rich. That is, it looks like the Armed Services fighting each other for bigger shares of the overall military budget.
You might call it ‘clientalist conservatism’, which is the natural extension of what some people are calling ‘reform conservatism’ these days. It’s been clear to me for a while that the Republican party has been making a rough and intermittent (and reluctant!) transition to this new normal, and this election cycle is revealing this year to be the one in which the old dam finally broke.
Since the vote-banks can’t divide easily on class, they must divide on life circumstances that make one either eligible for a special government benefit or disqualified from it. And that means that the two clientalist parties will seek to use the lure of these benefits as incentives that will (1) encourage individual behavior, (2) to bring about the circumstances, (3) that create the personal interests and preferences, (4) that are characteristic of a loyal client of the party.
So, consider the infamous marriage gap. Republicans know that married folks with kids tend to vote for more conservative causes, and Democrats know that never-married singles tend to vote liberal.
So maybe Democrats adjust labor market regulation and the welfare and tax systems to make it much, much easier to live as an independent single woman, so that, on statistical average, they have more loyal client voters. The Democrats will do this in under the cover of, “social justice, anti-discrimination, and equality.”
Meanwhile, Republicans could manipulate the EITC number to hand out huge wage subsidies but only to married people with kids, along with large child tax credits and other giveaways that make it much easier to live on one income in a nuclear family. Some people have even suggested giving social security pension credits and GI-bill-like scholarships to housewives so they don’t feel pressured to work on their careers instead of raising kids at home. That will create more traditional family units, and also more Republican voters. The Republicans will do this under the cover of, ‘helping struggling families and encouraging marriage.”
And each election becomes a viscous struggle to try to nudge the last cycle’s cease-fire compromise in the direction of Republican or Democrat clients. If you think America is bifurcating and reciprocal political animosity and tension is at a high level now, then just wait a few years.
A good comment, as usual, but a couple quibbles:
1. It isn’t all technological changes pushing middle class people into the loving arms of Saul Alinsky’s disciples. Government interventions in housing, education, and healthcare have made all three more expensive, in some cases vastly so, which unfortunately, only seems to increase demands for transfers from Peter to Paul to pay for them. Or from Paul Sr. to Paul Jr., in the case of education, and then from Jr. back to Sr. in the case of healthcare. Glenn Reynolds’ line about “turning us all into beggars because they’re easier to please” has at least a ring of truth to it, unfortunately. The basic playbook seems to be to complain about market outcomes, use that as a pretext to intervene in the market to affect those outcomes, break it completely, then shout “the market is broken!” and assume the task of doling out cash to pay for services that used to be readily available for everyone. Call it client farming.
2. That said, I’d be careful about using this Peter/Paul frame to explain too much. There are a lot of people on the left and right who vote the way they do for cultural rather than economic reasons: militant pro-lifers, for example, various minorities that conservatives have badly alienated over the years, etc.
1. My vision of the future is indeed that the political parties will divide up the middle class into two groups of ‘beggars’ fighting each other for a bigger slice of the pie. And I agree that government interventions in the big three sectors have made things worse than they would otherwise be, but that the trend of prices increasing faster than wages would still be happening had those policies remained static, or even without them. And it’s the policy-indifferent trend, and the forces behind it, that matters.
Remember, prices of real estate are reaching for the sky in the central economic or political hubs of almost every country in the world, regardless of the huge variety of local zoning and development rules. Again, sure, these rules make things worse, and making the rules better could make the short-term situation better (and there will be big winners and losers as a result of such a change) but the tenebrous long-term situation is driven by the forces behind the trend, and these will still inevitably stress budgets to the limits of affordability, and won’t be helped any these one-shot reforms.
2. I think that those ‘cultural reasons’ will fade in importance, and, if anything, become mere badges and ways to signal tribal membership but without any genuine political significance. The culture war is over and the progressives won a decisive victory against traditionalist social conservatives, and we are presently observing the mopping-up operations. You may be pleased or saddened by that result depending on your perspective – and might does not make right – but it’s a fact. A lot of people are in denial about this. The once mighty force of religion in American politics was reduced to impotence and must now try to survive an era of increasingly overt persecution.
As far as ethnic categories go, I think so long as one lives in a highly diverse and multicultural nation and the government takes race into consideration in any matter of major social importance that it is completely typical of these more primitive clientalist political arrangements to evolve in the direction of sorting for racial homogeneity.
That’s sad. Various ideological projects throughout American history have endeavored to enhance social cohesion and unity by bootstrapping fictive ideological narratives of ‘nationhood’ that would encourage people to think of themselves primarily as citizens of a country dedicated to certain values or ‘propositions’ instead of in terms of their class, biology, or identity.
The neoconservatives in particular tried to reconstruct traditional conservatism along these ideological lines as a set of identity-transcending ideas about social arrangements and the proper role of the state. The libertarians have their own transcendent ideology.
However these forms of transcendent ideology are too transcendent. They cannot make a convincing case for why there should be government programs that are purposefully to designed to benefit one group of people (i.e. their own voters) at the expense of another (i.e. the other party’s voters). Best they can do is try to help out ‘families’ and continue hoping that the people in families receiving these benefits tend to disproportionately vote for the party.
But in this way progressivism is unique and has a special competitive advantage because of its emphasis on equality of results and willingness to use the government to intervene to achieve it.
It can claim to be a transcendent ideology and at the same time tell its ethnic and identity-group clients that disparities in life outcomes are caused by oppression and that correcting these unfair evils requires leveling which just so happens to take the form of government payments and preferences that disproportionately benefit these groups. That is, it can rationalize treating citizens differently in order to achieve social justice. The other ideologies can’t do that, they claim neutrality and prize uniform treatment and non-intervention.
Unfortunately that probably means a much more racially-conscious politics in our future on all sides.
Excellent. The feeling of inevitability of the economic programs occurred to me as well. However the rest I cant claim. We are indeed at a cross roads and it will be interesting to see where the boundary between clients is drawn.
“congress and the presidency under Bush. Accomplished nothing.”
Bush cut taxes and started wars. That is what GOP big donors wanted yesterday and still want today.
They also passed Medicare Part D. Which at first seems like a giveaway to the older white voters that supported them, but its main goal was a giveaway to big pharma by making government price negotiation illegal and heavily subsidizing expensive drugs.
People are amazed its cost has grown slower then expected, but that is only the patent cliff (which stops after this year). Meanwhile, all the new Sovaldi type drugs coming to market (which BTW mostly treats an STD gays gave to each other) are going to blow out budgets and eliminate the premium subsidy that went into the pocket of your average senior.
So a government program to pay big pharma tons of money to treat gays and blacks against disease states they give to themselves through promiscuous sex and other behavior caused ailments. And something that ultimately won’t be worth anything to average white people paying for their own generics who would be better off paying cash once the premium subsidy is gone.
Small government conservatism? Why oh why don’t people support this crew.
The Democrats lost 47 House seats in the 1966 midterms, almost as many seats as they gained in ’58. It was their first loss of seats since 1950. The Republicans then added 7 Senate seats in the ’68 election. So, no, the ’64 landslide didn’t crush the Republican party.
Is this analogous to Obama pushing through Obamacare and then losing the Congress?
It seems that everything I read, regardless of whether it is conservative, libertarian, or slightly left of center (I don’t read anything full hog progressive or neocon), 1964 appears to be the year that America fundamentally changed.