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ОглавлениеAmerica’s Shattered Consensus
In the excited aftermath of the 2008 election, many pundits saw Barack Obama as a liberal messiah who would inaugurate a new era of liberal reform and cement a Democratic majority for decades to come. He was predicted to become a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or perhaps even an Abraham Lincoln for our time. The pundits were not alone in saying this: Obama himself said much the same thing.
These forecasts sounded grandiose at the time, and today, more than six years into the Obama presidency, they seem more than a little foolish. In contrast to 2008, Obama now looks less like a transformational president than like a typically embattled politician trying to keep his head above water against a mounting wave of opposition. Extravagant hopes have given way to a struggle for survival. Few still believe that Obama will lay the foundations for a new era of liberal governance. Some observers are pointing toward a more surprising outcome: that Obama, far from bringing about a renewal of liberalism, is actually presiding over its disintegration.
Whether or not that turns out to be so, it is clear in retrospect that President Obama and his supporters were kidding themselves in thinking that his election marked the start of a new era in American life. In fact, the reverse is true: Obama came to power near the end of an era, at a time when America’s postwar system was beginning to come apart under the weight of slowing economic growth, mounting debt, the rising costs of entitlement programs, and a widening polarization between the two main political parties. The consensus that sustained that system had been fraying for decades. A new president taking office in the midst of the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression might have tried to repair that consensus by seeking compromises to address the challenges of growth, debt, and entitlements. President Obama instead did something very nearly the opposite. Believing that he was elected to bring about “change,” he exploited a temporary partisan supermajority to push through an expensive new health-care program while doing little about the long-term problems that have the potential to bring down the nation’s tottering system of governance. He placed more burdens on the system when the urgent task at hand was to shore up its foundations.
One consequence of Obama’s tenure has been to fray the postwar consensus beyond the possibility of repair. There is no longer enough agreement in the American polity to address any of the nation’s systemic problems before they escalate to the point of crisis. When it comes, the next crisis—whether in the form of a recession, a stock market collapse, a terrorist attack, or some combination of the above—will force Americans across the board to adjust to a lower standard of living and the various levels of government to renegotiate the promises made to seniors, students, government employees, and the various individuals and groups that rely on public subsidies. Americans will then be compelled to organize a new system of governance on the remnants of the postwar order, one that can generate the kind of growth and dynamism to support the way of life to which they have become accustomed. Failing that, they will watch their country cease to be a high-functioning nation-state and world superpower.
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The aim of this book is to make sense of the rise and decline of America’s postwar political order. To a great degree, it is a tale of the rise and decline of the consensus that evolved in the 1940s and 1950s around the role of the federal government in maintaining full employment at home and containing communism and promoting freedom abroad. That consensus seemed so strong and durable during the 1950s that many historians and political analysts thought it was a permanent feature of American life. It came under heavy attack during the 1960s from student protest movements on the left and from the new conservative movement on the right. It held together, barely, during the Reagan and Clinton years in the 1980s and 1990s, but since then it has come apart altogether. This is evident in various arenas of American life, from politics to higher education and even the world of philanthropy. Parts II and III of this book examine the rise of the postwar dispensation and the centrifugal forces that developed against it in the 1960s, including the Kennedy “legend” that formed a counternarrative to the consensus view of American society.
A major theme of this book is that unsettled transitional periods of the kind we are now living through have happened before in American history—in the 1850s and 1860s, for example, and later in the 1930s and 1940s. In each period, an old order collapsed and a new one emerged out of an unprecedented crisis; and in each case, the resolution of the crisis opened up new possibilities for growth and reform. No particular consensus or set of political arrangements can be regarded as permanent in a dynamic country like the United States.
The political economy of American capitalism has evolved in distinct chapters, not in cycles or in an orderly sequence as Marxists or developmental theorists would have it. Part I elaborates on this theme, especially in “America’s Fourth Revolution.” The United States has had three such chapters in its history: (1) the Jefferson-Jackson era stretching from 1800 to 1860, when slavery and related territorial issues broke the prevailing consensus apart; (2) the capitalist-industrial era running from the end of the Civil War to 1930, when the regime collapsed in the midst of the Great Depression; and (3) the postwar welfare state that took shape in the 1930s and 1940s and extends to the present, but is now in the process of breaking up. Each of these regimes accomplished something important for the United States; each period lasted roughly a lifetime; and each was organized by a dominant political party: the Democrats in the antebellum era, the Republicans in the industrial era, and the Democrats again in the postwar era. The first two regimes fell under vastly different circumstances: the sectional conflict was a crisis of America’s constitutional system, while the Great Depression was a crisis of capitalism.
The postwar order emerged out of the twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and it represented something new in the unfolding history of American democracy. In terms of prosperity and world influence, this era was probably the most successful period in America’s national history. The postwar consensus took some time and political effort to construct. In 1932 there was no consensus in the United States around the programs and ideas that would eventually shape the New Deal, and in 1940 the nation was sharply divided between interventionists who wanted to assist Great Britain in the European war and isolationists who wanted no part of any such entanglement. Yet by 1950 a bipartisan consensus had been hammered into shape, one that assigned the national government responsibility for maintaining full employment and for policing the world in the interests of democracy, trade, and national security. It was a signal political achievement in view of the resistance that had been built up through the nineteenth century against large government establishments and American involvement in foreign disputes. Moreover, there have been continuous efforts coming from both left and right to alter, redefine, or undermine the consensus.
John Maynard Keynes was the theoretical architect of America’s postwar political economy, as elaborated in Part I. Keynes argued in several important works published in the 1920s and 1930s that the old order of nineteenth-century capitalism had been destroyed both by the Great War of 1914–1918 and by the evolution of capitalism from a system organized around small producers and local markets to one increasingly dominated by large corporations and labor unions. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his controversial attack on the Treaty of Versailles, he first broached the idea that the capitalist order needed to be placed on new political and intellectual foundations. Later, during the Great Depression, he worked out the theoretical argument for government to take a leading role in stabilizing the market economy with the aims of full employment and maximum output. His General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, with its policy prescriptions for a managed economy, is probably the most influential work of economics published in the twentieth century, at least in the Anglo-American world.
The Keynesian system involved a significant revision in the relationship between the state and the market, as the state assumed a steering function over the economy never envisioned by the eighteenth-century founders of the liberal order. A state that commands sufficient resources to stabilize consumer demand and investor behavior stands in sharp contrast to the classical liberal state that preceded it. This new kind of state is an elemental part of the postwar regime, a point whose implications are examined in the chapter titled “The Keynesian Revolution in Political Economy,” which also argues that the Keynesian era itself is now approaching an end.
The unfolding of the postwar era has entailed various surprises, perhaps chief among them the revival of nineteenth-century free-market ideas in the 1980s and beyond as a challenge to the Keynesian order. It would be wrong to suggest that the “age of Keynes” ended in the 1980s. The consensus surrounding the Keynesian regime has been badly weakened but not broken, and the financial crisis of 2008 provided a new occasion for the application of Keynesian policies.
Thomas Piketty’s recent work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has called attention to the surprising return of inequality in European and North American countries. While Piketty argues that inequality is somehow intrinsic to the capitalist order, the chapter titled “American Capitalism and the Inequality Crisis” suggests that it is linked more closely to specific elements of the postwar regime, especially in the expansion of global markets and the explosion of asset prices. From 1980 to 2012, the value of world stock markets increased from $2 trillion to more than $50 trillion, an unprecedented development that was bound to produce more inequality as one of its side effects. Even if one thinks inequality is a bad thing, the stock market boom has had beneficial consequences in the areas of innovation and productivity that far outweigh this particular downside. When the stock market contracts again, as it inevitably will, the inequality “crisis” is likely to deflate along with it.
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The evolution of the postwar regime has found expression in various aspects of national life—for example, in assumptions about capitalism, the American economy, and the role of government in the marketplace; in the development of the major political parties; in the changing definitions of liberalism and conservatism; in the interpretation of pivotal events and the assessment of influential personalities; and in the life and operation of important professions and institutions, such as law, philanthropy, book and magazine publishing, and higher education.
After nearly every national election, there is a new debate as to whether one of the dominant ideologies in American life is expiring. During the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative pundits asserted that “liberalism is dead!” Following the election of 2008, several loud voices on the left proclaimed the “death of conservatism.” These were mostly ill-informed forecasts, as argued in Part II, primarily because liberalism and conservatism are woven into the postwar regime as two sides of the contest over the role of the state in the marketplace. Each side has built up a vast infrastructure of supporting institutions, interest groups, think tanks, television networks, newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, the nation has divided into more and more polarized doctrinal groups—into a conservative nation and a liberal nation. It is true that one or both of these doctrines could disappear, but only as part of a process that involves the collapse of the postwar regime itself, in much the same way that the secession movement disappeared with the Civil War, and laissez-faire capitalism with the Great Depression.
This polarization is also apparent in other institutions of American life—for example, in philanthropy, a field that is usually thought to be purely charitable in nature and thus nonpolitical. The chapter “Investing in Conservative Ideas” describes how liberal philanthropy first evolved in the United States in the 1960s under the leadership of the Ford Foundation and several other large New York institutions. These foundations invented the concept of “advocacy” philanthropy, through which they funded groups in different fields that lobbied, filed lawsuits, and staged protests in behalf of liberal policies. This strategy proved so effective that several conservative foundations followed suit in the 1970s to fund their own mix of advocacy groups, magazines, and university programs. Though the liberal foundations have had far more money at their disposal, the conservative philanthropies have fought them to a draw in promoting their particular philosophy of government and economics.
A somewhat different iteration of this process has played out in higher education, where the liberal-left has seized nearly total control, to the point that conservatives are hard to find on major college faculties. As I argue in “The Left University,” the American university evolved roughly in tandem with American liberalism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Progressives invented a public or political purpose for higher education when they argued that professors and university-trained researchers could staff government bureaus and regulatory bodies as neutral experts to act in the public interest. The university, it was argued, would stand above and outside politics, in contrast to economic groups like corporations and labor unions. Liberals in this way gradually took control of higher education under the conceit that their research agenda was neutral or objective in matters of politics and policy. Later, in response to the activism of the 1960s, university faculties embraced the new doctrines of feminism, environmentalism, group rights, diversity, and cultural change, at exactly the same moment as liberals outside the academy began to embrace them. It was not long thereafter when liberals came to dominate the Democratic Party. By the late 1970s, the politics of the American university looked very much like those of the national Democratic Party.
Naturally, conservatives and Republicans are about as welcome in that academic setting as they would be at a Democratic national convention. In response, they set up their own intellectual institutions to provide an outlet for their views and to counter the influence of the academy. Here, as in other areas of national life, the opposing sides in the national debate have retreated into their respective subcultures.
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Shattered Consensus outlines the lineaments of the postwar consensus and the gradual process by which it has come apart. It does not endeavor to specify when or how the current regime will fall or what will replace it. Rather, it only suggests that a certain degree of consensus is required in order for a polity to meet its major challenges and argues that such a consensus no longer exists in the United States. That being so, the problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a “fourth revolution” or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.
This forecast of a “fourth revolution” in the years ahead does not mean that Americans should be hoarding gold or stockpiling canned food. The end of the postwar regime need not bring about the end of America. On the contrary, it could open a dynamic new chapter in the American story. The journey is likely to be difficult, but Americans are obliged to remain optimistic even as they contemplate impending upheavals. The United States has survived such upheavals in the past, and a case could be made that the nation has grown and prospered as a result. It could do so again.
