April 27, 2016
Current Political Affairs
Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University
Current Political Affairs
Sean Wilentz
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University
Speaker, Sean Wilentz, and Introducer, John Cotton
Minutes of the 30th Meeting of the 74th Year
Sean Wilentz: George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton University; author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln”(2005), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: other books include “The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008” (2008) and “Bob Dylan in America” (2010).
President Owen Leach presided.
Julia Coale led the invocation.
Arthur Eschenlauer read the minutes.
Claire Jacobus announced the newly elected officers for 2016-2017:
President,Jock McFarlane; Vice President, Julia Coale; Secretary, Beryl McMillan; Treasurer, Miquelon Weyeneth; Recording Secretary, John Riganati; Audio-Visual, David Fulmer; Historian, Diana Crane; Hospitality, Tony Glockler; Membership, Bob Altman; Nominating, Claire Jacobus; Program, Stephen Schreiber; University Relations, Jotham Johnson; Venues, Ralph Widner; Website, Roland Miller; Ex Officio, Owen Leach.
Guests introduced were:
John Cotton by Stanley Katz
Oye Oluhtan, Membership Applicant, by Charles Clark
Jane Altman by Bob Altman
Connie Hassett by Nancy Beck
Joan Fleming by John Fleming
Bill Emglen by (?)
Fleur Chandler by Jay Chandler
Mr. Wilentz said it was great to be back after quite a while, and that now he really is a member of the Old Guard.
He began by saying that, after the previous day’s primaries, it looked as though the nominees for President will be Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump; the first time two New Yorkers have faced off since the election of 1944, adding that many Old Guard members may remember it, but few voted in it.
Mr. Wilentz said that instead of talking about what this meant in the present, he was going to speak as a historian, about “how we got to this odd situation.” And that it was hard to separate his own views from his historical analysis but that he would try to be an objective historian, talking about the major developments that brought us to this point.
He regarded this election as the most important, if not in our lifetime, (“the Old Guard lifetime”) then in the last 50 years. Over 150 years ago, Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and the crisis of slavery would only be passed when the house divided became all one thing, or all the other. Now, the long conflict over social equality, political democracy and the shape of American government that began during the Progressive Era, followed by the New Deal and the Great Society, is reaching its inescapable conclusion. If the Republicans win the Presidency in 2016, they will probably control both the Senate and the House, giving them almost unchecked control of the federal government along with their domination of a great majority of the state governments. They would control everything, also appointing Supreme Court justices for an unstoppable conservative majority for at least a generation.
If, however, it’s a Democrat, control of the Senate and gains in the House are almost certainly assured. And that would probably mean a long-lasting liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
“Between these two stark alternatives there is no middle ground,” he said. In 2016 the country “will become either one thing or the other.”
How did we arrive here? Two historical developments have driven politics for the last half century: The Republican Party was transformed by the conservative movement that began in the Reagan administration, and it has since pushed ever farther to the right: The Democratic Party, stunned by the conservative revolution, has struggled to reinvent itself, dividing between left-center (New Democrats) and a “left” descended from the antiwar and New Politics reformers of the 1960s. All while facing the increasingly formidable resources of the right.
Those shifts are responsible for the polarization and dysfunction that have riven the American government since the 1990s, but they began in 1968.
Amid that year’s turmoil, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy crushed liberal hopes and paved the way for the election of Richard M. Nixon.
Although, at the time, he seemed to represent a moderating force within the Republican Party, his triumph, in retrospect, set in motion what has proved to be the Republican Party’s continuing radicalization.
It’s easy to forget how much Richard Nixon changed Republican politics. Only four years before, in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and swept a liberal majority into Congress. Goldwater attracted to his cause extremist elements that arose out of a pro-business reaction to the New Deal and out of the very conservative McCarthyite anti-communism of the cold war. He courted, and won, the white segregationist vote in the South, inflamed with the Democrats’ embrace of the Civil Rights movement.
Johnson, in routing Goldwater, wanted to outdo the achievements of his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and create a Great Society. He would complete the unfinished business of the New Deal, as he saw it, on everything from health care reform to environmental conservation, while also waging, what he called, an unconditional war on poverty in America. Johnson claimed the mantle of Lincoln just as the Republican Party was rejecting its historical heritage and embraced a “Southern strategy” transforming it into the party that it has become today.
Johnson’s continued forceful pursuit of civil rights policies not only destroyed the Democrat’s age-old political base in the white South, it also alienated white urban ethnic voters in the North, and contributed to a severe backlash that brought large Republican gains in the 1966 midterm elections.
Then Johnson’s escalating military intervention in the Vietnam War badly split his party and ruined his presidency.
For a brief moment it seemed as if the Democratic challenger, Robert Kennedy, might reunite the liberal base and enable him to succeed Johnson, but his assassination ended that possibility.
So Wilentz believes that the basic divisions among Democrats that were evident in 1968, have persisted in one form or another right up to today’s primary campaigns between Clinton and Sanders.
The newly elected Nixon, far from a favorite of the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, was deeply suspect on the right, and his administration in several ways followed what had become a post-New Deal consensus on domestic affairs, especially on economic policy.
But Nixon also tried to reverse the 1960s, the reforms of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, with inflammatory, coded racial appeals in his efforts to slow the course of racial desegregation. He began a culture war (which we think of as something from the 1980s and ’90s). Republicans attacked Democrats as the party of ‘acid, amnesty and abortion,” with Vice President Spiro Agnew calling critics “an effete core of impudent snobs.” Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, bragged, “This country’s going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it.”
Nixon’s downfall -- his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- did not, however, bring about a resurgence of the Republicans’ once formative, moderate-to-liberal wing, personified by figures like Nelson A. Rockefeller.
The migration of the conservative, white South from the Democrats to the Republicans, coupled with Nixon’s appeals to the racial and cultural resentments of Middle Americans, had moved the political center of gravity inside the Republican Party sharply to the right.
The chief beneficiaries of Watergate inside the Republican Party turned out to be the party’s hard, conservative wing, which had never trusted Nixon, and they then rallied behind their new darling, the former California governor Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s two terms as President deepened the radicalization of the Republican Party; yet moderate establishment elements still commanded enough leverage in 1980 for Reagan to identify the defeated George H.W. Bush as his running mate.
As president, Reagan often spoke as an ideologue but occasionally governed as a pragmatist, whether it came to raising taxes, which he did 11 times, or pursuing nuclear arms agreements with the Soviets, to the outrage of many of his neo-conservative backers. On some issues, notably on immigration reform, Reagan’s positions were so liberal that in later years they would come to be regarded as perfidy. Today he would be considered by many a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.
Reaganism, for all its ideological fervor, also contained an element of bad faith. Even as the Reagan White House implemented its policies, cutting social spending, especially for the poor, resisting progress on civil rights and, above all, rolling back progressive tax rates, it always promised its base more than it could, or even intended, to deliver.
Under Reagan the gross federal debt tripled to $2.7 trillion from $900 billion, and the size of the government grew by 6.5 percent. Signature programs from the New Deal and the Great Society, such as Social Security and Medicare, were expanded. Reagan paid lip service to crusades like overturning Roe v. Wade, but in the words of one activist, his White House offered us, “a bunch of political trinkets.”
Further aggravating conservatives, Vice President Bush ran as Reagan’s successor in 1988, who, though a conservative at heart, remained an old-school patrician Republican. His pledge in his nomination speech, never to raise taxes, won him an ovation, but his promise in the same speech, to set forth a kinder, gentler nation, left conservatives cold.
Still, Bush also understood that to succeed he would have to win the support of an increasingly restive Republican base. And thanks to his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, he did just that, crushing Michael Dukakis with a combination of crypto red-baiting and Willie Horton.
This, however, would forge a strategy that would, in time (this year), consume the Republican Party. The establishment, stirring up the right-wing base, only frustrated and infuriated that base, inflaming it further and pushing it ever rightward.
An uneasy pork-rind patrician during the election, Bush showed his true colors in 1990 when addressing the fiscal mess he had inherited from Reagan by approving a budget deal that broke his “no new taxes” promise.
The decision branded Bush, to the hardliners, as a fraud. In Congress, a younger generation of conservatives, led by the firebrand Newt Gingrich, engineered a revolt within the party against Bush, the betrayer.
While Gingrich plotted, the job of bloodying Bush’s nose in the ’92 Republican primaries fell to Pat Buchanan, an old Nixon hand, and “paleo” or “stone-age conservative.” “There’s a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared at the Republican National Convention, much to the horror of the Bush campaign. “It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we will be one day as the Cold War itself.”
The face of the Republican Party seemed to be morphing from Reagan’s genial optimism to Buchanan’s fury. And the culture warriors who the leaders had been riling up for decades now, seemed primed to turn the G.O.P. into God’s Own Party.
That’s the Republicans; now the Democrats.
After the debacle of 1968, the national Democratic Party fragmented, leaving antiwar liberals, old-style New Dealers and even surviving elements of the old Jim Crow Southern wing of the party, to jockey for internal power. The antiwar liberals prevailed over the short run.
Four years later, George McGovern won the Democratic nomination on a forthright anti-Vietnam platform and ran a perfectly disastrous campaign, crushed by the incumbent, Nixon, in one of the greatest electoral landslides in United States history.
The Watergate scandal led to an uptick in Democratic fortunes in the 1974 midterms, and in 1976 Jimmy Carter narrowly won the presidency, in large measure by winning the votes of Southern African-Americans, newly enfranchised by the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.
But caught between the president’s ideals and the harsh realities of international affairs, and buffeted by recurring oil and energy crises at home, the Carter White House seemed overwhelmed.
The old divisions from 1968 resurfaced. Reopening those divisions, some of the party’s liberals supported the surviving Kennedy brother, Edward Kennedy, in his challenge to Carter’s renomination in 1980, resulting in a primary battle that proved divisive, destructive and demoralizing.
Other Democrats, like Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, the party’s presidential nominee in 1984, stuck with the establishment and stayed true to the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society verities, which were easily deflected by the conservative charmer, Ronald Reagan.
Progressives outside of electoral politics also faced enormous obstacles. Although the cultural fallout of the civil rights, women’s and gay rights movements were quietly and steadily transforming the ways Americans lived, the conservative ascendancy put those movements, at the time, on the defensive; from chagrin about the failed equal rights amendment in the ’70s, to outrage at Reagan’s indifference to the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the ’80s.
Finally Bill Clinton broke through in 1992 when a lingering recession drowned out the culture wars, when he defeated the damaged Bush.
Having risen through Arkansas politics during the Civil Rights years, Clinton championed the egalitarianism of the ’60s, but also understood the recent history that had hurt the party so badly. It was not simply about the distempers of the culture of race and religion. On the issues of economic equality and opportunity, many erstwhile white democrats believed the party had abandoned them.
Clinton would try to reconstruct liberal politics, whatever that now meant, without using the by now demonized word, “liberal.” by directing his reformism to the middle class and the aspiring middle class.
Clinton’s efforts to update liberalism predictably upset some constituencies inside the Democratic Party and again, the “division” came back. The Democrats saw the division exist in new forms. But if some on the left had reservations about Clinton’s policies, Republicans understood just how threatening his revised Liberalism was to their political prospects.
Some on the right, astonished that any Democrat could win the White House in the wake of Reagan, denounced Clinton as illegitimate. Others mobilized furiously to defeat Clinton’s health care reform plan. Destroying Clinton’s proposal, root and branch, had become imperative. (We recall “Harry and Louise.” And a health care plan that was indecipherable and 1,200 pages long.) It was a mess.
When it was abandoned, even before coming to a Congressional vote, Republican’s made the most of the situation. Gingrich, the House minority whip, nationalized the ’94 midterms by recruiting a crop of reliable, hard-line conservative candidates for the House, rallying them behind what he called “The Contract With America.”
Republicans were also ‘schooled’ with a memo that encouraged them to “speak like New,” and trashed liberal Democrats with defamatory words like “radical,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “decay” and “traitors.”
In November, the rapidly rightward-trending Republicans gained a majority of House seats for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich was now speaker and Clinton was reduced to reminding the nation of the presidency’s continued relevance.
Yet the Republican triumph, by accelerating the party’s radicalization, also carried the elements of Gingrich’s downfall four years later.
Clinton responded to the trouncing strategically by practicing triangulation, which many critics denigrated but was ordinarily known as “politics.” In July of ’95 he laid out a budget proposal that seized the mantel of fiscal responsibility which the Republicans had claimed for their own. And many liberals reacted with horror and reflexively denounced the president as a defector, a me-too Democrat, and worse.
They failed to notice that Clinton’s supposedly defeatist budget held the line on education investments and Medicare, which the Republicans wanted to throttle, while he aimed tax cuts at the middle class and not to the wealthy.
While Clinton was bobbing and weaving, Republicans began to look disturbingly extreme. Swirling around in the majority were freshly emboldened, virulent, even apocalyptic strains of extremist right-wing politics (i.e. G. Gordon Liddy, the militia movements, the Oklahoma City bombing).
Push came to shove in late 1995 when Clinton twice refused to approve a devastating Republican budget that, among other things, would have eviscerated Medicare and would have granted the wealthy large capital gains tax cuts. The Republicans, twice, shut down the federal government.
Clinton, standing his ground, was making two gambles, that no matter how much the right griped about big government, people still favored the numerous Federal services they received every day and would miss them if they were cut off, and that blame for the standstill would fall on the Republican Congress.
Clinton won both wagers when, as the second shutdown went into it’s fourth week, the Republicans backed down.
Republicans were, in turn, dismayed when Clinton trounced the establishment candidate, Senator Robert Dole, in the 1996 election. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Congressional Republican radicals, their numbers swelled by the newcomers elected in ’94, were particularly angry, and they concluded not that they had overreached with their shutdown and other obstructionist tactics but that their establishment leaders had betrayed them. Speaker Gingrich, once the firebrand, now the establishment, became their chief target.
In July of ’97, a plot was hatched by fed-up, high-ranking House Republicans. It was masterminded by Party Whip Tom Delay (a former exterminator, who called the Environmental Protection Agency the Gestapo) and included the House Majority Leader Dick Army (who called Hillary Clinton a Marxist), and John Boehner (who passed out checks from the tobacco lobby to Congressmen on the floor of the House), all of them plotting Gingrich’s ouster.
While Gingrich floundered, anti-Clinton forces on the right seized on a long-standing special prosecutor investigation that had produced insinuations and false but damaging headlines about a failed real estate investment in Arkansas called Whitewater. That would lead through many twists and turns (and partly because of pizza deliveries during the government shutdown) to Clinton’s impeachment in ’98.
In October of that year, Gingrich assured the Republican caucus that it would pick up, at a minimum, 6 to 30 seats in the midterm elections. Evidently neither Gingrich, nor virtually anyone else in Washington, had noticed that throughout the months of turmoil, Clinton’s favorability ratings in the opinion polls had never fallen below 60 percent. People disapproved of his behavior; they did not disapprove of his presidency.
When the Democrats actually gained five seats in the House and held their own in the Senate, Gingrich was finished. Days after the election, amid acrid recriminations, he resigned not simply the speakership, but also his seat in Congress.
Actual power in the Republican caucus immediately shifted to Gingrich’s right-wing rival, Tom Delay, who declared that Clinton was unfit for office because he lacked the correct “Biblical world-view.”
With Tom Delay as the driving force, the House Republicans ignored the judgment of the electorate and went ahead with Clinton’s impeachment, only to resolve in the Senate, as expected, acquitting the president.
In the end, the only person who actually lost his job was Newt Gingrich.
Back to the basic point, the rise and fall of Gingrich extended and strengthened what had become a spiraling, radicalizing pattern inside the Republican Party since the 1980’s.
First, a new conservative Republican leadership would promise to crush big government and the enemies of traditional morality and culture. Then those leaders proved, at best, inadequate to the task, or worse, would wind up being, like President George H.W. Bush, turncoats.
Even more dogmatic and confrontational individuals would take the disgraced leader’s place, further purging the Republican ranks of moderates and inflaming the angry Republican base. And when that leadership could not deliver on its promises, the new leaders were folded in disgrace, opening the way to a new cycle of radicalization.
On the Democratic side, Clinton had not just outlasted Gingrich and the Republicans, he had triumphed. He would leave office with the exceptional approval rating of 66 percent. Yet, not far beneath the surface, old divisions among the Democrats remained.
In the reelection campaign of 2000, Clinton’s anointed successor, Al Gore, wary about Clinton’s reputation after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, distanced himself from his own administration and achievements. An odd thing to do.
At least as important, the consumer advocate and gadfly, Ralph Nader, led a third-party effort, playing upon old misgivings on the left of the party. He claimed that there was no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, especially under Clinton. This drained a small, but vital portion of the Democratic vote, especially in Florida.
The old divisions remained.
The Democrats, of course, lost the election of 2000 by a single vote. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court elevated George W. Bush to the White House, five to four.
This was an event, in its audacity, that Wilentz thinks affirmed the radicalizing pattern on the right. And so the pattern continued; an ever-more radical Republican Party contending with a fragile Democratic Party.
George W. Bush undertook the presidency under intensely partisan terms, congenial to the party’s base. As a result, by early September, 2001, his approval ratings had dropped to a bare majority, 51 percent.
Suddenly, though, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 revived Bush’s White House. Bush’s image as a warrior president, especially after the American invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, sustained him through the election of 2004.
A chorus of Republicans crowed about a permanent Republican electoral majority in, what Bush’s political consigliere, Karl Rove, called “a rolling realignment.” The pundit, Fred Barnes, wrote, “Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades.”
All along, the administration found willing allies in the Republican Congress in subjecting the domestic agenda to political considerations. “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one” one senior appointee told a reporter after leaving his job in 2001 (John Dilulio).
In 2004 the Democratic nomination went to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a hero of the Vietnam War who would become a leader in the antiwar movement (The ’60s keep showing up in the patterns of both parties). Kerry, though, failed to respond quickly to underhanded attacks on his war record and his character.
And then Karl Rove stage-managed referendums in 11 key states to ban gay marriage, whipping up the right-wing base; the same old thing. Bush squeaked by to win the election in Ohio and the Republican Party increased its majorities in the House and Senate.
The Republican playbook still worked. But not for long.
In its second term, the Bush administration unraveled quickly. The war in Iraq went poorly, and then came the administration’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and from there the administration and the Republican Congress reeled from one disaster to another.
The midterm elections of 2006 handed the Democrats a 31 vote majority in the House and a single vote majority in the Senate.
But worse yet was to come for the Republicans and the Democrats and the country.
In 2006 a growing number of economists began warning that the nation’s prosperity had become too dependent on an irrationally inflated real estate market. The bubble soon burst and by August 2007 the Market’s were facing a crisis point, and we know what happened after that.
On October 3, after weeks of contentious debate, Congress, with a strong push from the White House, approved a $700 billion dollar bill to bail out the nation’s financial system and prevent a catastrophic economic collapse.
The political fallout from that bailout was immediate and devastating. And it led to a repetition of the same patterns of the previous 20 years.
The Republican leaders had once again failed their base miserably.
The Democrats, to no small degree because of the financial collapse, would elect Barack Obama.
The White House was supposed to be a Republican institution, and the new president was not only a Democrat, but an African-American Democrat with an ambitious political agenda. The Democrats had also substantially increased their majorities in the House and the Senate.
President Bush was departing office deeply unpopular, even on the right, where antigovernment hard-liners railed against the bailout of the financial sector. Here was the government “at it” again.
The Democrats, after healing the divisions of the 2008 campaign, looked like they were sitting pretty. The election of the first African-American to the White House heralded, without question, a major landmark in the continuing civil rights revolution and, some imagined, a cessation of the culture wars that had raged since the 1960s. The election of Obama appeared to affirm the dawn of a new liberal political era. The enlarged Democratic majority in the House was nearly identical to the one that greeted Clinton, and its majority in the Senate was substantial. But Obama was unprepared for what lay in store.
A relative newcomer in Washington, he had campaigned as something of an outsider, promising to end partisan gridlock by finding common ground across party lines. He thought he would be a postpartisan president. Convinced, as he had declared at the 2000 Democratic convention in the speech that made him famous, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America.” And yet on the very night of his swearing-in, January 20, 2009, as if mocking Obama’s naiveté, a band of Republican Congressional leaders of the post-Gingrich cohort met for several hours in a Washington steakhouse, joined by the original revolutionary, Gingrich himself, to plot Obama’s downfall. So much for common ground.
The first step would be to stop cold the President’s agenda in Congress. But uncompromising as they were, these latest Republican hotspurs did not see just how fiercely doctrinaire their right-wing resistance to Obama (that they would lead) would become, and would hoist them on their own petard.
One month after Obama’s inauguration, a business reporter’s calculated tirade on the CNBC Network against a newly announced financial aid program for bankrupt homeowners climaxed with a call for a Tea Party protest. And the rant touched off, via social media and a boost from the Fox News channel, a wildfire of right-wing organizing. In fact, various reports indicate that, early on, this new Tea Party phenomenon was if not wholly contrived then strongly guided and funded by some long-time major bankrollers of conservative activities, including the group, Americans for Prosperity, backed by the billionaires, Charles and David H. Koch.
Predominately white, male and over 40, the Tea Party movement was and is, wrongly perceived as an old-fashioned outburst of antigovernment fervor. Surveys of Tea Party adherents showed that, in fact, the Tea Party involved a nebulous swirl of resentments that, to some degree were tainted with racial antipathies, although not usually or specifically racist. There was a general anxiety inside the movement about precisely the kinds of change that Obama promised during the 2008 campaign, which the Tea Party faithful took as nothing less than eradicating the American way of life.
Inside the Tea Party, politicians of every stripe were despised. Every Democrat in general, of course, but also mainstream Republicans, who the Tea Party rebels deemed as spineless fakes who had proved incapable of defending decent Americans from parasitic big government.
And then there was the first African-American president, who many on the right thought was not an American at all, who had forged his birth certificate and was a Muslim, a charge whipped up most strenuously by one Donald J. Trump.
Over the next four years, a fierce three-sided struggle involving the White House, the Republican congressional leadership and the aroused Tea Party base, sharpened the polarizing “pattern” of the previous three decades.
Less than a month after his inauguration, over nearly unanimous Republican opposition, Obama got through an economic stimulus package. In 2010 he signed the Dodd-Frank Act, the most sweeping legislation on financial regulation since the reforms of the New Deal era. And in that same year, after a prolonged battle with Congress, Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, the grandest piece of social legislation since Johnson’s Great Society.
When the Republicans affixed the word “Obamacare” to the Affordable Care Act, support for the Tea Party spiked. In the 2010 congressional primaries, Tea Party-backed conservancies toppled establishment Republican candidates. And in an electoral surge, reminiscent of the Gingrich-led Contract With America campaign, Republicans picked up, along with six seats in the Senate, an astounding 63 seats in the House, regaining the majority it had lost in 2006.
“Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” Senator Mitch McConnell said two days after the election, “
The pattern continues.
The new Congress brought to the fore a fresh crop of Republican leaders who came from the same people who had begun plotting against Obama on Inauguration Day 2009, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.
Having dubbed themselves the “Young Guns,” they were palpably uncomfortable with the new speaker of the House, John Boehner. A mediocre politician with a gift for longevity, Boehner was the last man standing from the Gingrich revolution, when he became the face of the dwindling Republican establishment, challenged by a younger generation of more radical party members.
From the start, the Young Guns made it clear that they would try to force the administration’s hand by manufacturing the controversy over the Federal Debt Limit. By completely misrepresenting the Debt Limit, or Debt Ceiling, as a virtuous restriction on Federal spending, Republicans cast themselves to the party’s base as fighting the good fight for fiscal righteousness (rather than party cynicism). It was a threat made to the White House; undisguised blackmail. Unless the administration agreed to gut Obamacare, Congress would send the nation’s finances careening over the cliff.
Early in 2001, the emboldened Republican House threatened to shut down the government, as Gingrich had done in ’95, and forced a last-minute deal in which Obama would receive $79 billion less in discretionary spending than he had wanted.
Over the next few months, Boehner and Obama would enter into negotiations in, what the president called, a grand bargain on the budget, only to see the talks repeatedly fall apart when the speaker would balk at a compromise, having grown so fearful of a backlash from Tea Party members in the House.
Amid this 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Obama apparently abandoned his illusions about post partisanship. And Republicans were dumbfounded when he won reelection by five million votes, while Democrats dominated the overall vote total in both the House and Senate elections. As a result of gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures, however, Republicans retained control of the House.
Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, struggled mightily with his party’s inner conflicts. Another scion of the establishment, Romney had been a moderate governor of Massachusetts and he ended the race for the nomination as the well-funded front runner.
By the time he secured the nomination, though, Romney had been compelled to adopt extreme positions, popular in Tea Party circles but fatal in the general election, including selecting, as his running mate, Paul Ryan, a proud acolyte of the right-wing cult heroine, Ayn Rand.
After Romney’s defeat, neither Speaker Boehner, nor Mitch McConnell could break the Republican absolutists, who repeatedly threatened shutting down the government or forcing a Federal fiscal default if their demands were not met.
During the weeks after Obama’s reelection, dogmatic hard-liners brought the nation back to the brink of the fiscal cliff. Ten months later, almost continuously skirmishing with the White House and with another fiscal crisis looming, House Republicans called for the defunding of Obamacare and forced a two-week government shutdown.
Voters blamed Republicans for the latest shutdown fiasco, but the conservative base blamed Boehner and McConnell and the rest of the party leadership for backing down once more.
Persistent pressure inside the House Republican caucus opened an additional political front with the Benghazi investigations, imputing that the White House and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had lied about the murders of four Americans in Libya. The Tea Party radicals compelled Speaker Boehner to appoint a House Committee on Benghazi, which ended in a repeat of the Whitewater investigation.
Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner was losing his grip. Over the summer, congressional conservatives, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, delivered their latest threat to shut down the government, this time over defunding Planned Parenthood. In late September, Boehner, weary of the intramural savaging, resigned as speaker and gave up his House seat, reprising Gingrich’s departure more than 15 years earlier.
The speakership fell to Paul Ryan, who for all of his Ayn Rand credentials had to work very hard to bring the endorsement of the far right, so-called Freedom Caucus. He was thought of as a “squish,” as “establishment.”
And so we have before us the 2016 election.
After decades of ever-intensifying radicalization, the Republican voting base, of which three quarters recently identified themselves as Tea Party supporters, evangelical or religiously observant, was ill disposed to accept an establishment figure of any kind. This resulted in the continuing, bizarre primary season where antipolitician candidates, like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, dominate the polls most of the time.
Since Trump took off in June/July there’s been only one point when he hasn’t led the field (Ben Carson caught him for about a day and a half, leading by two-tenths of a percent and then crashed).
The closest thing to the establishment candidate to emerge was that scourge of the establishment, Ted Cruz. And it seems now almost certain that Trump will emerge the victor.
Trump is interesting (and not just because of his hair). Trump, with his trade stance and his quasi-liberal views on social issues will prove something of a maverick. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
But no matter. He will be the candidate of a party transformed since Nixon’s nomination 48 years before the 2016 contest, a party now irrevocably bound by a series of inflamed reactionary impulses, expressed as not only hateful of the American government and a desire to paralyze it but also in fear and loathing for the new modern and diverse American society that’s emerging all around us.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have had to fight through, once again, their own persisting divisions.
At one level, the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders can be read as the latest installment of the battles that began in 1968, that reappeared in the fight between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy in 1980, appeared in a different shape in the misgivings of Bill Clinton, culminating in the Nader campaign, and that showed up in the 2008 primary battle between Clinton and Obama. That’s one way to look at it.
But in another sense, these two Democratic candidates represent two roads out of the 1960’s. Hillary Clinton who, after all, cut her political teeth in 1972, organizing alongside her future husband on behalf of George McGovern, of all people, followed one of the hardest possible political paths for a liberal Democrat, especially a young liberal Democrat, advancing the egalitarian principles of the 1960’s in barely desegregated Arkansas, then moving into national power, with her husband, in the wake of the Reagan revolution.
Hers has necessarily been a progressive politics of intense pragmatism.
Bernie Sanders took a more radical temperament into the far more friendly state of Vermont, rose to become the mayor of Burlington, where he would go about trying to approximate establishing socialism in one city, while building a base that would send him to Congress and then the Senate.
These two very different, but quintessentially 1960’s experiences, revive the ancient struggles, and although Clinton is now the certain victor for the nomination, that story is far from over.
And so we’ve arrived at what Wilentz described as “a house divided.” The crisis facing the United States today is not the same as it was in 1860, but there are similarities. The mistakes of the coming election, if not the same as in Lincoln’s time, are high enough.
Over the past 50 years, the Republican Party has, by fits and starts, eliminated virtually all traces of moderation and moved more and more to the right, well beyond where Goldwater, let alone Nixon, once stood. By the 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination, that radicalization has intensified to the point where, what had been the party establishment, has become so hollowed out, that it was ripe for a hostile takeover by Donald Trump.
And the more radical the Republicans have become, the more apparent is the gulf that separates the two political parties.
Remember in 1964, the motto, “A Choice, Not an Echo,” the title of a pro-Goldwater tract in that polarizing election.
Wilentz said he believes the 2016 election presents the starkest choice since then, indeed, the starkest choice in living memory, but now with literally everything at stake.
The country will, as Lincoln said, “will become either all one thing, or all the other.”
Respectfully submitted,
Christopher Coucill
President Owen Leach presided.
Julia Coale led the invocation.
Arthur Eschenlauer read the minutes.
Claire Jacobus announced the newly elected officers for 2016-2017:
President,Jock McFarlane; Vice President, Julia Coale; Secretary, Beryl McMillan; Treasurer, Miquelon Weyeneth; Recording Secretary, John Riganati; Audio-Visual, David Fulmer; Historian, Diana Crane; Hospitality, Tony Glockler; Membership, Bob Altman; Nominating, Claire Jacobus; Program, Stephen Schreiber; University Relations, Jotham Johnson; Venues, Ralph Widner; Website, Roland Miller; Ex Officio, Owen Leach.
Guests introduced were:
John Cotton by Stanley Katz
Oye Oluhtan, Membership Applicant, by Charles Clark
Jane Altman by Bob Altman
Connie Hassett by Nancy Beck
Joan Fleming by John Fleming
Bill Emglen by (?)
Fleur Chandler by Jay Chandler
Mr. Wilentz said it was great to be back after quite a while, and that now he really is a member of the Old Guard.
He began by saying that, after the previous day’s primaries, it looked as though the nominees for President will be Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump; the first time two New Yorkers have faced off since the election of 1944, adding that many Old Guard members may remember it, but few voted in it.
Mr. Wilentz said that instead of talking about what this meant in the present, he was going to speak as a historian, about “how we got to this odd situation.” And that it was hard to separate his own views from his historical analysis but that he would try to be an objective historian, talking about the major developments that brought us to this point.
He regarded this election as the most important, if not in our lifetime, (“the Old Guard lifetime”) then in the last 50 years. Over 150 years ago, Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and the crisis of slavery would only be passed when the house divided became all one thing, or all the other. Now, the long conflict over social equality, political democracy and the shape of American government that began during the Progressive Era, followed by the New Deal and the Great Society, is reaching its inescapable conclusion. If the Republicans win the Presidency in 2016, they will probably control both the Senate and the House, giving them almost unchecked control of the federal government along with their domination of a great majority of the state governments. They would control everything, also appointing Supreme Court justices for an unstoppable conservative majority for at least a generation.
If, however, it’s a Democrat, control of the Senate and gains in the House are almost certainly assured. And that would probably mean a long-lasting liberal majority on the Supreme Court.
“Between these two stark alternatives there is no middle ground,” he said. In 2016 the country “will become either one thing or the other.”
How did we arrive here? Two historical developments have driven politics for the last half century: The Republican Party was transformed by the conservative movement that began in the Reagan administration, and it has since pushed ever farther to the right: The Democratic Party, stunned by the conservative revolution, has struggled to reinvent itself, dividing between left-center (New Democrats) and a “left” descended from the antiwar and New Politics reformers of the 1960s. All while facing the increasingly formidable resources of the right.
Those shifts are responsible for the polarization and dysfunction that have riven the American government since the 1990s, but they began in 1968.
Amid that year’s turmoil, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy crushed liberal hopes and paved the way for the election of Richard M. Nixon.
Although, at the time, he seemed to represent a moderating force within the Republican Party, his triumph, in retrospect, set in motion what has proved to be the Republican Party’s continuing radicalization.
It’s easy to forget how much Richard Nixon changed Republican politics. Only four years before, in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and swept a liberal majority into Congress. Goldwater attracted to his cause extremist elements that arose out of a pro-business reaction to the New Deal and out of the very conservative McCarthyite anti-communism of the cold war. He courted, and won, the white segregationist vote in the South, inflamed with the Democrats’ embrace of the Civil Rights movement.
Johnson, in routing Goldwater, wanted to outdo the achievements of his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and create a Great Society. He would complete the unfinished business of the New Deal, as he saw it, on everything from health care reform to environmental conservation, while also waging, what he called, an unconditional war on poverty in America. Johnson claimed the mantle of Lincoln just as the Republican Party was rejecting its historical heritage and embraced a “Southern strategy” transforming it into the party that it has become today.
Johnson’s continued forceful pursuit of civil rights policies not only destroyed the Democrat’s age-old political base in the white South, it also alienated white urban ethnic voters in the North, and contributed to a severe backlash that brought large Republican gains in the 1966 midterm elections.
Then Johnson’s escalating military intervention in the Vietnam War badly split his party and ruined his presidency.
For a brief moment it seemed as if the Democratic challenger, Robert Kennedy, might reunite the liberal base and enable him to succeed Johnson, but his assassination ended that possibility.
So Wilentz believes that the basic divisions among Democrats that were evident in 1968, have persisted in one form or another right up to today’s primary campaigns between Clinton and Sanders.
The newly elected Nixon, far from a favorite of the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, was deeply suspect on the right, and his administration in several ways followed what had become a post-New Deal consensus on domestic affairs, especially on economic policy.
But Nixon also tried to reverse the 1960s, the reforms of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, with inflammatory, coded racial appeals in his efforts to slow the course of racial desegregation. He began a culture war (which we think of as something from the 1980s and ’90s). Republicans attacked Democrats as the party of ‘acid, amnesty and abortion,” with Vice President Spiro Agnew calling critics “an effete core of impudent snobs.” Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, bragged, “This country’s going so far to the right that you won’t recognize it.”
Nixon’s downfall -- his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- did not, however, bring about a resurgence of the Republicans’ once formative, moderate-to-liberal wing, personified by figures like Nelson A. Rockefeller.
The migration of the conservative, white South from the Democrats to the Republicans, coupled with Nixon’s appeals to the racial and cultural resentments of Middle Americans, had moved the political center of gravity inside the Republican Party sharply to the right.
The chief beneficiaries of Watergate inside the Republican Party turned out to be the party’s hard, conservative wing, which had never trusted Nixon, and they then rallied behind their new darling, the former California governor Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s two terms as President deepened the radicalization of the Republican Party; yet moderate establishment elements still commanded enough leverage in 1980 for Reagan to identify the defeated George H.W. Bush as his running mate.
As president, Reagan often spoke as an ideologue but occasionally governed as a pragmatist, whether it came to raising taxes, which he did 11 times, or pursuing nuclear arms agreements with the Soviets, to the outrage of many of his neo-conservative backers. On some issues, notably on immigration reform, Reagan’s positions were so liberal that in later years they would come to be regarded as perfidy. Today he would be considered by many a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.
Reaganism, for all its ideological fervor, also contained an element of bad faith. Even as the Reagan White House implemented its policies, cutting social spending, especially for the poor, resisting progress on civil rights and, above all, rolling back progressive tax rates, it always promised its base more than it could, or even intended, to deliver.
Under Reagan the gross federal debt tripled to $2.7 trillion from $900 billion, and the size of the government grew by 6.5 percent. Signature programs from the New Deal and the Great Society, such as Social Security and Medicare, were expanded. Reagan paid lip service to crusades like overturning Roe v. Wade, but in the words of one activist, his White House offered us, “a bunch of political trinkets.”
Further aggravating conservatives, Vice President Bush ran as Reagan’s successor in 1988, who, though a conservative at heart, remained an old-school patrician Republican. His pledge in his nomination speech, never to raise taxes, won him an ovation, but his promise in the same speech, to set forth a kinder, gentler nation, left conservatives cold.
Still, Bush also understood that to succeed he would have to win the support of an increasingly restive Republican base. And thanks to his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, he did just that, crushing Michael Dukakis with a combination of crypto red-baiting and Willie Horton.
This, however, would forge a strategy that would, in time (this year), consume the Republican Party. The establishment, stirring up the right-wing base, only frustrated and infuriated that base, inflaming it further and pushing it ever rightward.
An uneasy pork-rind patrician during the election, Bush showed his true colors in 1990 when addressing the fiscal mess he had inherited from Reagan by approving a budget deal that broke his “no new taxes” promise.
The decision branded Bush, to the hardliners, as a fraud. In Congress, a younger generation of conservatives, led by the firebrand Newt Gingrich, engineered a revolt within the party against Bush, the betrayer.
While Gingrich plotted, the job of bloodying Bush’s nose in the ’92 Republican primaries fell to Pat Buchanan, an old Nixon hand, and “paleo” or “stone-age conservative.” “There’s a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared at the Republican National Convention, much to the horror of the Bush campaign. “It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we will be one day as the Cold War itself.”
The face of the Republican Party seemed to be morphing from Reagan’s genial optimism to Buchanan’s fury. And the culture warriors who the leaders had been riling up for decades now, seemed primed to turn the G.O.P. into God’s Own Party.
That’s the Republicans; now the Democrats.
After the debacle of 1968, the national Democratic Party fragmented, leaving antiwar liberals, old-style New Dealers and even surviving elements of the old Jim Crow Southern wing of the party, to jockey for internal power. The antiwar liberals prevailed over the short run.
Four years later, George McGovern won the Democratic nomination on a forthright anti-Vietnam platform and ran a perfectly disastrous campaign, crushed by the incumbent, Nixon, in one of the greatest electoral landslides in United States history.
The Watergate scandal led to an uptick in Democratic fortunes in the 1974 midterms, and in 1976 Jimmy Carter narrowly won the presidency, in large measure by winning the votes of Southern African-Americans, newly enfranchised by the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.
But caught between the president’s ideals and the harsh realities of international affairs, and buffeted by recurring oil and energy crises at home, the Carter White House seemed overwhelmed.
The old divisions from 1968 resurfaced. Reopening those divisions, some of the party’s liberals supported the surviving Kennedy brother, Edward Kennedy, in his challenge to Carter’s renomination in 1980, resulting in a primary battle that proved divisive, destructive and demoralizing.
Other Democrats, like Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, the party’s presidential nominee in 1984, stuck with the establishment and stayed true to the ideals of the New Deal and Great Society verities, which were easily deflected by the conservative charmer, Ronald Reagan.
Progressives outside of electoral politics also faced enormous obstacles. Although the cultural fallout of the civil rights, women’s and gay rights movements were quietly and steadily transforming the ways Americans lived, the conservative ascendancy put those movements, at the time, on the defensive; from chagrin about the failed equal rights amendment in the ’70s, to outrage at Reagan’s indifference to the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the ’80s.
Finally Bill Clinton broke through in 1992 when a lingering recession drowned out the culture wars, when he defeated the damaged Bush.
Having risen through Arkansas politics during the Civil Rights years, Clinton championed the egalitarianism of the ’60s, but also understood the recent history that had hurt the party so badly. It was not simply about the distempers of the culture of race and religion. On the issues of economic equality and opportunity, many erstwhile white democrats believed the party had abandoned them.
Clinton would try to reconstruct liberal politics, whatever that now meant, without using the by now demonized word, “liberal.” by directing his reformism to the middle class and the aspiring middle class.
Clinton’s efforts to update liberalism predictably upset some constituencies inside the Democratic Party and again, the “division” came back. The Democrats saw the division exist in new forms. But if some on the left had reservations about Clinton’s policies, Republicans understood just how threatening his revised Liberalism was to their political prospects.
Some on the right, astonished that any Democrat could win the White House in the wake of Reagan, denounced Clinton as illegitimate. Others mobilized furiously to defeat Clinton’s health care reform plan. Destroying Clinton’s proposal, root and branch, had become imperative. (We recall “Harry and Louise.” And a health care plan that was indecipherable and 1,200 pages long.) It was a mess.
When it was abandoned, even before coming to a Congressional vote, Republican’s made the most of the situation. Gingrich, the House minority whip, nationalized the ’94 midterms by recruiting a crop of reliable, hard-line conservative candidates for the House, rallying them behind what he called “The Contract With America.”
Republicans were also ‘schooled’ with a memo that encouraged them to “speak like New,” and trashed liberal Democrats with defamatory words like “radical,” “sick,” “pathetic,” “decay” and “traitors.”
In November, the rapidly rightward-trending Republicans gained a majority of House seats for the first time in 40 years. Gingrich was now speaker and Clinton was reduced to reminding the nation of the presidency’s continued relevance.
Yet the Republican triumph, by accelerating the party’s radicalization, also carried the elements of Gingrich’s downfall four years later.
Clinton responded to the trouncing strategically by practicing triangulation, which many critics denigrated but was ordinarily known as “politics.” In July of ’95 he laid out a budget proposal that seized the mantel of fiscal responsibility which the Republicans had claimed for their own. And many liberals reacted with horror and reflexively denounced the president as a defector, a me-too Democrat, and worse.
They failed to notice that Clinton’s supposedly defeatist budget held the line on education investments and Medicare, which the Republicans wanted to throttle, while he aimed tax cuts at the middle class and not to the wealthy.
While Clinton was bobbing and weaving, Republicans began to look disturbingly extreme. Swirling around in the majority were freshly emboldened, virulent, even apocalyptic strains of extremist right-wing politics (i.e. G. Gordon Liddy, the militia movements, the Oklahoma City bombing).
Push came to shove in late 1995 when Clinton twice refused to approve a devastating Republican budget that, among other things, would have eviscerated Medicare and would have granted the wealthy large capital gains tax cuts. The Republicans, twice, shut down the federal government.
Clinton, standing his ground, was making two gambles, that no matter how much the right griped about big government, people still favored the numerous Federal services they received every day and would miss them if they were cut off, and that blame for the standstill would fall on the Republican Congress.
Clinton won both wagers when, as the second shutdown went into it’s fourth week, the Republicans backed down.
Republicans were, in turn, dismayed when Clinton trounced the establishment candidate, Senator Robert Dole, in the 1996 election. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Congressional Republican radicals, their numbers swelled by the newcomers elected in ’94, were particularly angry, and they concluded not that they had overreached with their shutdown and other obstructionist tactics but that their establishment leaders had betrayed them. Speaker Gingrich, once the firebrand, now the establishment, became their chief target.
In July of ’97, a plot was hatched by fed-up, high-ranking House Republicans. It was masterminded by Party Whip Tom Delay (a former exterminator, who called the Environmental Protection Agency the Gestapo) and included the House Majority Leader Dick Army (who called Hillary Clinton a Marxist), and John Boehner (who passed out checks from the tobacco lobby to Congressmen on the floor of the House), all of them plotting Gingrich’s ouster.
While Gingrich floundered, anti-Clinton forces on the right seized on a long-standing special prosecutor investigation that had produced insinuations and false but damaging headlines about a failed real estate investment in Arkansas called Whitewater. That would lead through many twists and turns (and partly because of pizza deliveries during the government shutdown) to Clinton’s impeachment in ’98.
In October of that year, Gingrich assured the Republican caucus that it would pick up, at a minimum, 6 to 30 seats in the midterm elections. Evidently neither Gingrich, nor virtually anyone else in Washington, had noticed that throughout the months of turmoil, Clinton’s favorability ratings in the opinion polls had never fallen below 60 percent. People disapproved of his behavior; they did not disapprove of his presidency.
When the Democrats actually gained five seats in the House and held their own in the Senate, Gingrich was finished. Days after the election, amid acrid recriminations, he resigned not simply the speakership, but also his seat in Congress.
Actual power in the Republican caucus immediately shifted to Gingrich’s right-wing rival, Tom Delay, who declared that Clinton was unfit for office because he lacked the correct “Biblical world-view.”
With Tom Delay as the driving force, the House Republicans ignored the judgment of the electorate and went ahead with Clinton’s impeachment, only to resolve in the Senate, as expected, acquitting the president.
In the end, the only person who actually lost his job was Newt Gingrich.
Back to the basic point, the rise and fall of Gingrich extended and strengthened what had become a spiraling, radicalizing pattern inside the Republican Party since the 1980’s.
First, a new conservative Republican leadership would promise to crush big government and the enemies of traditional morality and culture. Then those leaders proved, at best, inadequate to the task, or worse, would wind up being, like President George H.W. Bush, turncoats.
Even more dogmatic and confrontational individuals would take the disgraced leader’s place, further purging the Republican ranks of moderates and inflaming the angry Republican base. And when that leadership could not deliver on its promises, the new leaders were folded in disgrace, opening the way to a new cycle of radicalization.
On the Democratic side, Clinton had not just outlasted Gingrich and the Republicans, he had triumphed. He would leave office with the exceptional approval rating of 66 percent. Yet, not far beneath the surface, old divisions among the Democrats remained.
In the reelection campaign of 2000, Clinton’s anointed successor, Al Gore, wary about Clinton’s reputation after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, distanced himself from his own administration and achievements. An odd thing to do.
At least as important, the consumer advocate and gadfly, Ralph Nader, led a third-party effort, playing upon old misgivings on the left of the party. He claimed that there was no real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, especially under Clinton. This drained a small, but vital portion of the Democratic vote, especially in Florida.
The old divisions remained.
The Democrats, of course, lost the election of 2000 by a single vote. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court elevated George W. Bush to the White House, five to four.
This was an event, in its audacity, that Wilentz thinks affirmed the radicalizing pattern on the right. And so the pattern continued; an ever-more radical Republican Party contending with a fragile Democratic Party.
George W. Bush undertook the presidency under intensely partisan terms, congenial to the party’s base. As a result, by early September, 2001, his approval ratings had dropped to a bare majority, 51 percent.
Suddenly, though, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 revived Bush’s White House. Bush’s image as a warrior president, especially after the American invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, sustained him through the election of 2004.
A chorus of Republicans crowed about a permanent Republican electoral majority in, what Bush’s political consigliere, Karl Rove, called “a rolling realignment.” The pundit, Fred Barnes, wrote, “Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades.”
All along, the administration found willing allies in the Republican Congress in subjecting the domestic agenda to political considerations. “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one” one senior appointee told a reporter after leaving his job in 2001 (John Dilulio).
In 2004 the Democratic nomination went to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a hero of the Vietnam War who would become a leader in the antiwar movement (The ’60s keep showing up in the patterns of both parties). Kerry, though, failed to respond quickly to underhanded attacks on his war record and his character.
And then Karl Rove stage-managed referendums in 11 key states to ban gay marriage, whipping up the right-wing base; the same old thing. Bush squeaked by to win the election in Ohio and the Republican Party increased its majorities in the House and Senate.
The Republican playbook still worked. But not for long.
In its second term, the Bush administration unraveled quickly. The war in Iraq went poorly, and then came the administration’s bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and from there the administration and the Republican Congress reeled from one disaster to another.
The midterm elections of 2006 handed the Democrats a 31 vote majority in the House and a single vote majority in the Senate.
But worse yet was to come for the Republicans and the Democrats and the country.
In 2006 a growing number of economists began warning that the nation’s prosperity had become too dependent on an irrationally inflated real estate market. The bubble soon burst and by August 2007 the Market’s were facing a crisis point, and we know what happened after that.
On October 3, after weeks of contentious debate, Congress, with a strong push from the White House, approved a $700 billion dollar bill to bail out the nation’s financial system and prevent a catastrophic economic collapse.
The political fallout from that bailout was immediate and devastating. And it led to a repetition of the same patterns of the previous 20 years.
The Republican leaders had once again failed their base miserably.
The Democrats, to no small degree because of the financial collapse, would elect Barack Obama.
The White House was supposed to be a Republican institution, and the new president was not only a Democrat, but an African-American Democrat with an ambitious political agenda. The Democrats had also substantially increased their majorities in the House and the Senate.
President Bush was departing office deeply unpopular, even on the right, where antigovernment hard-liners railed against the bailout of the financial sector. Here was the government “at it” again.
The Democrats, after healing the divisions of the 2008 campaign, looked like they were sitting pretty. The election of the first African-American to the White House heralded, without question, a major landmark in the continuing civil rights revolution and, some imagined, a cessation of the culture wars that had raged since the 1960s. The election of Obama appeared to affirm the dawn of a new liberal political era. The enlarged Democratic majority in the House was nearly identical to the one that greeted Clinton, and its majority in the Senate was substantial. But Obama was unprepared for what lay in store.
A relative newcomer in Washington, he had campaigned as something of an outsider, promising to end partisan gridlock by finding common ground across party lines. He thought he would be a postpartisan president. Convinced, as he had declared at the 2000 Democratic convention in the speech that made him famous, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America.” And yet on the very night of his swearing-in, January 20, 2009, as if mocking Obama’s naiveté, a band of Republican Congressional leaders of the post-Gingrich cohort met for several hours in a Washington steakhouse, joined by the original revolutionary, Gingrich himself, to plot Obama’s downfall. So much for common ground.
The first step would be to stop cold the President’s agenda in Congress. But uncompromising as they were, these latest Republican hotspurs did not see just how fiercely doctrinaire their right-wing resistance to Obama (that they would lead) would become, and would hoist them on their own petard.
One month after Obama’s inauguration, a business reporter’s calculated tirade on the CNBC Network against a newly announced financial aid program for bankrupt homeowners climaxed with a call for a Tea Party protest. And the rant touched off, via social media and a boost from the Fox News channel, a wildfire of right-wing organizing. In fact, various reports indicate that, early on, this new Tea Party phenomenon was if not wholly contrived then strongly guided and funded by some long-time major bankrollers of conservative activities, including the group, Americans for Prosperity, backed by the billionaires, Charles and David H. Koch.
Predominately white, male and over 40, the Tea Party movement was and is, wrongly perceived as an old-fashioned outburst of antigovernment fervor. Surveys of Tea Party adherents showed that, in fact, the Tea Party involved a nebulous swirl of resentments that, to some degree were tainted with racial antipathies, although not usually or specifically racist. There was a general anxiety inside the movement about precisely the kinds of change that Obama promised during the 2008 campaign, which the Tea Party faithful took as nothing less than eradicating the American way of life.
Inside the Tea Party, politicians of every stripe were despised. Every Democrat in general, of course, but also mainstream Republicans, who the Tea Party rebels deemed as spineless fakes who had proved incapable of defending decent Americans from parasitic big government.
And then there was the first African-American president, who many on the right thought was not an American at all, who had forged his birth certificate and was a Muslim, a charge whipped up most strenuously by one Donald J. Trump.
Over the next four years, a fierce three-sided struggle involving the White House, the Republican congressional leadership and the aroused Tea Party base, sharpened the polarizing “pattern” of the previous three decades.
Less than a month after his inauguration, over nearly unanimous Republican opposition, Obama got through an economic stimulus package. In 2010 he signed the Dodd-Frank Act, the most sweeping legislation on financial regulation since the reforms of the New Deal era. And in that same year, after a prolonged battle with Congress, Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, the grandest piece of social legislation since Johnson’s Great Society.
When the Republicans affixed the word “Obamacare” to the Affordable Care Act, support for the Tea Party spiked. In the 2010 congressional primaries, Tea Party-backed conservancies toppled establishment Republican candidates. And in an electoral surge, reminiscent of the Gingrich-led Contract With America campaign, Republicans picked up, along with six seats in the Senate, an astounding 63 seats in the House, regaining the majority it had lost in 2006.
“Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” Senator Mitch McConnell said two days after the election, “
The pattern continues.
The new Congress brought to the fore a fresh crop of Republican leaders who came from the same people who had begun plotting against Obama on Inauguration Day 2009, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.
Having dubbed themselves the “Young Guns,” they were palpably uncomfortable with the new speaker of the House, John Boehner. A mediocre politician with a gift for longevity, Boehner was the last man standing from the Gingrich revolution, when he became the face of the dwindling Republican establishment, challenged by a younger generation of more radical party members.
From the start, the Young Guns made it clear that they would try to force the administration’s hand by manufacturing the controversy over the Federal Debt Limit. By completely misrepresenting the Debt Limit, or Debt Ceiling, as a virtuous restriction on Federal spending, Republicans cast themselves to the party’s base as fighting the good fight for fiscal righteousness (rather than party cynicism). It was a threat made to the White House; undisguised blackmail. Unless the administration agreed to gut Obamacare, Congress would send the nation’s finances careening over the cliff.
Early in 2001, the emboldened Republican House threatened to shut down the government, as Gingrich had done in ’95, and forced a last-minute deal in which Obama would receive $79 billion less in discretionary spending than he had wanted.
Over the next few months, Boehner and Obama would enter into negotiations in, what the president called, a grand bargain on the budget, only to see the talks repeatedly fall apart when the speaker would balk at a compromise, having grown so fearful of a backlash from Tea Party members in the House.
Amid this 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Obama apparently abandoned his illusions about post partisanship. And Republicans were dumbfounded when he won reelection by five million votes, while Democrats dominated the overall vote total in both the House and Senate elections. As a result of gerrymandering by Republican-controlled state legislatures, however, Republicans retained control of the House.
Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, struggled mightily with his party’s inner conflicts. Another scion of the establishment, Romney had been a moderate governor of Massachusetts and he ended the race for the nomination as the well-funded front runner.
By the time he secured the nomination, though, Romney had been compelled to adopt extreme positions, popular in Tea Party circles but fatal in the general election, including selecting, as his running mate, Paul Ryan, a proud acolyte of the right-wing cult heroine, Ayn Rand.
After Romney’s defeat, neither Speaker Boehner, nor Mitch McConnell could break the Republican absolutists, who repeatedly threatened shutting down the government or forcing a Federal fiscal default if their demands were not met.
During the weeks after Obama’s reelection, dogmatic hard-liners brought the nation back to the brink of the fiscal cliff. Ten months later, almost continuously skirmishing with the White House and with another fiscal crisis looming, House Republicans called for the defunding of Obamacare and forced a two-week government shutdown.
Voters blamed Republicans for the latest shutdown fiasco, but the conservative base blamed Boehner and McConnell and the rest of the party leadership for backing down once more.
Persistent pressure inside the House Republican caucus opened an additional political front with the Benghazi investigations, imputing that the White House and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had lied about the murders of four Americans in Libya. The Tea Party radicals compelled Speaker Boehner to appoint a House Committee on Benghazi, which ended in a repeat of the Whitewater investigation.
Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner was losing his grip. Over the summer, congressional conservatives, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, delivered their latest threat to shut down the government, this time over defunding Planned Parenthood. In late September, Boehner, weary of the intramural savaging, resigned as speaker and gave up his House seat, reprising Gingrich’s departure more than 15 years earlier.
The speakership fell to Paul Ryan, who for all of his Ayn Rand credentials had to work very hard to bring the endorsement of the far right, so-called Freedom Caucus. He was thought of as a “squish,” as “establishment.”
And so we have before us the 2016 election.
After decades of ever-intensifying radicalization, the Republican voting base, of which three quarters recently identified themselves as Tea Party supporters, evangelical or religiously observant, was ill disposed to accept an establishment figure of any kind. This resulted in the continuing, bizarre primary season where antipolitician candidates, like Donald Trump and Ben Carson, dominate the polls most of the time.
Since Trump took off in June/July there’s been only one point when he hasn’t led the field (Ben Carson caught him for about a day and a half, leading by two-tenths of a percent and then crashed).
The closest thing to the establishment candidate to emerge was that scourge of the establishment, Ted Cruz. And it seems now almost certain that Trump will emerge the victor.
Trump is interesting (and not just because of his hair). Trump, with his trade stance and his quasi-liberal views on social issues will prove something of a maverick. It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
But no matter. He will be the candidate of a party transformed since Nixon’s nomination 48 years before the 2016 contest, a party now irrevocably bound by a series of inflamed reactionary impulses, expressed as not only hateful of the American government and a desire to paralyze it but also in fear and loathing for the new modern and diverse American society that’s emerging all around us.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have had to fight through, once again, their own persisting divisions.
At one level, the race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders can be read as the latest installment of the battles that began in 1968, that reappeared in the fight between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy in 1980, appeared in a different shape in the misgivings of Bill Clinton, culminating in the Nader campaign, and that showed up in the 2008 primary battle between Clinton and Obama. That’s one way to look at it.
But in another sense, these two Democratic candidates represent two roads out of the 1960’s. Hillary Clinton who, after all, cut her political teeth in 1972, organizing alongside her future husband on behalf of George McGovern, of all people, followed one of the hardest possible political paths for a liberal Democrat, especially a young liberal Democrat, advancing the egalitarian principles of the 1960’s in barely desegregated Arkansas, then moving into national power, with her husband, in the wake of the Reagan revolution.
Hers has necessarily been a progressive politics of intense pragmatism.
Bernie Sanders took a more radical temperament into the far more friendly state of Vermont, rose to become the mayor of Burlington, where he would go about trying to approximate establishing socialism in one city, while building a base that would send him to Congress and then the Senate.
These two very different, but quintessentially 1960’s experiences, revive the ancient struggles, and although Clinton is now the certain victor for the nomination, that story is far from over.
And so we’ve arrived at what Wilentz described as “a house divided.” The crisis facing the United States today is not the same as it was in 1860, but there are similarities. The mistakes of the coming election, if not the same as in Lincoln’s time, are high enough.
Over the past 50 years, the Republican Party has, by fits and starts, eliminated virtually all traces of moderation and moved more and more to the right, well beyond where Goldwater, let alone Nixon, once stood. By the 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination, that radicalization has intensified to the point where, what had been the party establishment, has become so hollowed out, that it was ripe for a hostile takeover by Donald Trump.
And the more radical the Republicans have become, the more apparent is the gulf that separates the two political parties.
Remember in 1964, the motto, “A Choice, Not an Echo,” the title of a pro-Goldwater tract in that polarizing election.
Wilentz said he believes the 2016 election presents the starkest choice since then, indeed, the starkest choice in living memory, but now with literally everything at stake.
The country will, as Lincoln said, “will become either all one thing, or all the other.”
Respectfully submitted,
Christopher Coucill