Recent partisan politics is a mess of apparently contradictory evidence about American ideological appetites. The 1992 Democratic presidential campaign serves up nouvelle liberalism-less fat, light sauces, and lots of fresh ingredients in unusual, artistic combination. Voters swallow it but can’t keep it down for long. By 1994, national tastes appear to have changed completely, in favor of a tart, palate-cleansing conservatism that produces the first Republican Congress in almost half a century and renders the Democratic White House virtually irrelevant.
But in 1996 conservatism’s main course, a balanced budget, still sits ice cold and untouched on the plate. Most of this year’s Republican presidential field looks like yesterday’s pizza. And Bill Clinton’s reelection, a laughable prospect barely a year ago, no longer seems farfetched at all. So what can it all mean? What kind of politics do Americans really want?
Two crafty new books by three of journalism’s best and closest political observers address this question directly. The governing logic of the current American scene makes an era of renewed liberal activism inevitable and imminent, says one. No, something very close to the opposite is probably true, says the other.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. frames his argument with a bold prediction: “The United States is on the verge of a second Progressive Era.” They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $24.00) describes an American swing vote primarily motivated by the job-security anxieties of a globalized economy. Government’s ability to relieve the pressures of economic competition naturally declines as those pressures cross national boundaries. And frustrated by their politicians’ ever-weaker response to their concerns, voters have lately indulged a perfectly natural impulse to throw the bums out.
In 1992, the bums were a Republican presidential administration. In 1994, a Democratic Congress got the bum rap. But notwithstanding such apparently irreconcilable lurches back and forth, Dionne argues, “the politics of the anxious middle” now heavily favors a lasting Democratic revival. Republicans have locked themselves into celebration of “the radical, unregulated capitalism of the Gilded Age” and “the fiercest forms of unchecked competition.” And by ruling out the very possibility of government intervention against market-produced dislocations, laissez-faire Republicanism effectively turns its back on the Anxious Middle. The Anxious Middle is bound to return the favor.
Dionne writes a clear, lively prose and manages a respectful and balanced treatment of clearly opposed political philosophies while never once disguising his own preferences — no easy feat. He’s also a gifted analyst and explicator of abstract phenomena and ideas; the book includes insightful mini-essays on the personalized “meanness” of contemporary American politics, on the shifting role of the press, and on the legacy of thinkers and writers like Herbert Croly (on the Left) and Frank Meyer (on the Right). But Dionne is ultimately too comfortable in this world of social science. There is too little room in his philosophy for political reality — for people, events, and organizations, which he explicitly minimizes. The book runs its exercises around the evidence, not with it. How, exactly, will Dionne’s forecasted resurgence of Democratic progressivism occur in practice? He cannot really say.
He vows it will happen soon. Okay: What will it look like? It will look like the last Clinton campaign, with its delicately spun mix of economic populism, self-consciously “third way” investments in individual “opportunity, ” and conservative music on questions of crime, family, and foreign policy. But campaigning is one thing, and governing is another, as Dionne himself is quick to admit. And hasn’t governing Clintonism proved a miserable, unconvincing failure so far? Hasn’t it been reduced (if it was ever anything more than this) to an intricate rhetorical defense of the governmental status quo? No. “The problem with Clintonism was that, in the administration’s first two years at least, it was never really tried.”
It turns out Dionne means Clintonism was tried but got botched in the execution. “Clintonism could work only if all (or at least most) of its parts could be put in place at once: if welfare reform could be balanced by health care reform; if deficit reduction could be balanced by new investment programs; if relief for gays in the military could be balanced by tax relief for middle-income families with children; if freer trade . . .” If, if, if. This is asking an awful lot from any president and even more from his public. Dionne wants the modern presidency’s “one issue at a time” rule suspended. He wants voters to see ideological coherence in the resulting jumble of initiatives. And he wants Democrats outside the White House to behave themselves.
These congressional and interest-group Democrats are targets of the book’s harshest criticism. During the 103rd Congress, they too often fought with the White House and among themselves, dooming too many Clinton initiatives to an undeserved death and coloring those that survived with “reactionary liberalism.” Democrats en masse proved themselves “not ready for the renewal that the party required and the discipline that governing demanded.” True enough. So how will the Democrats solve their yawning problems of internal ideological and interest-group conflict and quickly retake control of the national agenda?
Maybe they won’t have to, Dionne implies; voters may just give them the ball by default, in a revolt against the new Republican Gilded Age. The new conservatism, he writes, in a rare lapse of decency, sees “no fundamental difference between free government and dictatorship.” The only good government-according to the GOP, according to Dionne — is no government. And in an age in which most American voters want at least some vigorous government, the reins of power will be turned over to the only party prepared to provide it.
For all the elegance and nuance of Dionne’s argument, this is, at bottom, a cartoon. Republicans are not the anarchists he imagines. Voters do not see them that way. And the central question of American politics is not “yes or no?” to government in toto, but rather (as always) a more modest “more or less?”
After all, Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein helpfully remind us, congressional Republicans aren’t contemplating the elimination of Social Security or Medicare, “the cornerstones of the American social welfare state.” However ambitiously, they seek only to limit post-New Deal laws and regulation, not to abolish them. The (at this point moribund) Republican budget would shrink government spending from 22 to 19 percent of gross national product by 2002. In the early 1930s, the same figure was as low as 8 percent.
Balz and Brownstein, national political correspondents at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, respectively, have produced the best survey of post-1992 partisan politics yet written. Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival (Little, Brown, 424 pages, $24.95) has a great many interesting things to say about the thinking now going on in and around the Democratic and Republican parties. “Ideas matter in American politics,” the authors insist. But, contra Dionne, “results matter more.” And it is their meticulous attention to political resuits suits — and how those results have been achieved — that makes the Balz and Brownstein prediction the more convincing one.
In America today there has been fashioned a “broad social consensus toward restraining the role of government,” they write. “Of all the electoral possibilities that can be imagined for the next few years, the least likely is Democrats receiving a mandate to enlarge the scope of federal intervention in American life. Indeed, the momentum behind the drive to limit government is so powerful that it is unlikely to entirely stall no matter which party is in power… In the near term, nothing is likely to entirely reverse the course set in 1994 toward a smaller government.”
In this telling, then, the aberrant election was 1992, not 1994. Even in victory, Bill Clinton failed to expand his party’s base of support in any significant way; in swing counties and with key demographic groups, the authors report, Clinton managed only to match Michael Dukakis’s 1988 numbers, and nothing more. What mattered in 1992, most of all, was the thorough dissolution of the Republican message and coalition, under the twin pressures of a failed Bush presidency and Ross Perot.
In two short years, that battered Republican vote-getting capacity has been painstakingly repaired under the philosophical banner of “limited government,” as Balz and Brownstein exhaustively document. The Republican coalition, which now commands a solid working electoral majority across the country, is reasonably coherent and self-policing. And it is unlikely to rupture, they report.
A few pieces of this story have already been told in greater detail elsewhere. Still, there is a great deal of wonderful original reporting in the book. President Clinton is captured in the back of a limousine late in 1994, in full-scale denial, wondering at the “intense partisanship of the congressional Republican leadership, and the fact that they got away with it, that they haven’t been punished for it in public perception.” Newt Gingrich worries over the inclusion of social issues in his Contract with America: “If I put school prayer in, just think of the kind of column A1 Hunt will write. He’ll call the Contract a religious Right agenda.” Clinton consultant Dick Morris tells White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to call him “Charlie,” after Farah Fawcett’s mysterious boss on that bimbo private-detective TV show from the 1970s.
Particularly well wrought are the book’s extended analyses of partisan realignment in the South and of the Washington interest-group lobbyists and conservative policy activists who function in symbiosis with congressional Republicans. (The latter chapter briefly men- tions this writer, whom the authors interviewed during their research.)
But Balz and Brownstein’s true accomplishment is weaving the web of recent partisan history into a comprehensive, comprehensible, interconnected whole. The book’s final judgments are far from rosy about the Republican party per se. There are no guarantees about any particular electoral result in the future, they caution Republicans. Post-New Deal politics is still “unsettled.” The disenchantment of independents is real, and it may bubble up to interrupt the more “natural” processes of two-party politics at any time. Economic worries in certain sectors of the middle class are real, too; more than 4 in 10 American men with only a high school education personally suffered income declines in the 1980s. And the GOP’s philosophical disinclination to intervene in the market to address such problems may complicate the party’s effort to consolidate ts recent successes. Against that background (and a weak Republican challenger), Bill Clinton may still be reelected.
Limited-government Republicanism may also, of course, eventually proceed further than most voters are prepared to follow, which then (and only then) would produce a genuinely “progressive” backlash. Still and all, “the conservative insurgency is likely to continue growing for some time before that reckoning,” the authors conclude.
In the meantime, E.J. Dionne, God bless him, could not be more wrong.
By David Tell
