The American political scene since 2000 is conventionally depicted in high colour. For much native—not to speak of foreign—opinion, the country has cartwheeled from brutish reaction under one ruler, presiding over disaster at home and abroad, to the most inspiring hope of progress since the New Deal under another, personifying all that is finest in the nation; to others, a spectre not even American. For still others, the polarization of opinion they represent is cause for despair, or alternatively comfort in the awakening of hitherto marginalized identities to the threshold of a new majority. The tints change by the light in which they are seen.
For a steadier view of us politics, line is more reliable than colour. It is the parameters of the system of which its episodes are features that require consideration. These compose a set of four determinants. The first, and far the most fundamental, of these, is the historical regime of accumulation in question, governing the returns on capital and rate of growth of the economy.footnote1 The second are structural shifts in the sociology of the electorate distributed between the two political parties. The third are cultural mutations in the value-system at large within the society. Fourth and last—the residual—are the aims of the active minorities in the voter-base of each party. The political upshot at any given point of time can be described, short-hand, as a resultant of this unequal quartet of forces in motion.
What remains unchanging, on the other hand, is the monochrome ideological universe in which the system is plunged: an all-capitalist order, without a hint of social-democratic weakness or independent political organization by labour.footnote2 The two parties that inhabit it, Republican and Democratic, have exchanged social and regional bases more than once since the Civil War, without either ever questioning the rule of capital. Since the 1930s there has been a general, if not invariable, tendency for those at the bottom of the income pyramid—should they cast a ballot, which large numbers do not—to vote Democrat, and those at the top, Republican. Such preferences reflect the policies by and large pursued by the two parties: Democratic administrations have typically been more redistributive downwards than Republican, in an alignment shadowing, without exactly reproducing, divisions between left and right elsewhere. But these are rarely differences of principle. A salient feature of the consensus on which the system rests is the flexibility of relative positions it allows. Policies associated with one party can migrate to the other, not infrequently assuming forms in the cross-over more radical than they possessed in their original habitat. A glance at the history of the past half-century is a reminder of these eddies within the system.
Although it was some time before its character crystallized, Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 famously opened a new era in American politics. The Depression, marking the end of a regime of accumulation based on the gold standard, high tariffs, low taxation and still early forms of mass production, discredited the Republicans who had long dominated it. Under the shock of the slump, popular pressures—above all, the labour strikes that began in 1934—drove the Democratic Administration beyond its initial measures of financial stabilization and emergency relief towards social reforms and infrastructural programmes that consolidated its electoral base, while the shake-out of least competitive capitals and corporate concentration continued.footnote3 When the sharp recession of 1937 struck, unemployment was soon back up at 12.5 per cent. What transformed the New Deal into the watershed it became was the arrival of massive state demand with rearmament. With the onset of a full war economy, from late 1941 onwards, a new regime of accumulation came of age. The gold standard had gone. Taxation was higher; deficits were no longer taboo; deposit insurance and banking regulation were in place; corporations had concentrated; consumer demand had expanded. These were conditions of the transformation. But the decisive change came with the huge jump in state spending and intervention in the economy, public expenditures soaring from 19 per cent to 47 per cent in two years, when the country was mobilized for war and business returned to the seats of power in Washington to run the industrial drive for victory. Firing technological innovation and wiping out unemployment, the war-time boom delivered American supremacy over the capitalist world after 1945, with an international economic order to fit its requirements at Bretton Woods. The expansion unleashed by the war economy rolled on for a quarter-century of high growth rates at home and unchallenged hegemony abroad.
The political system formed under this regime, though it descended from the New Deal, also differed from it. After the war the Democrats maintained the electoral dominance they had secured in the thirties, when they won first-time voters and second-generation immigrants, once-distant Protestant workers and northern blacks, while keeping a tight grip on their historic stronghold in the racist South. While the two parties divided control of the White House evenly, from 1948 to 1968 each winning it three times, Congress remained for nearly half a century a Democratic preserve; between 1932 and 1980, the Republicans took it just twice, for a pittance of four years. But the underlying political configuration encompassed both parties. After 1937, when the steel strike was broken and the economy slid back into recession, the labour insurgency that had forced the most significant social reforms onto Roosevelt’s agenda was spent. The Wagner Act allowed unionization to increase up to the early fifties; but along with growth in membership came bureaucratization and domestication of the afl–cio. In 1947, a majority in both parties joined forces to repress militants and strikes with the Taft–Hartley Act.footnote4
Collective labour was one thing, to be curbed wherever it risked becoming unruly. Atomized voters were another, to be courted so long as the price could be afforded. If state spending as a proportion of gdp was no longer at war-time levels, the long boom of the fifties and sixties yielded rates of profit permitting regular wage gains for workers, and tax revenues for continuing public works and social benefits, along with large military budgets. But no regime of accumulation is static, and in due course there was an inflexion. War-time planners in Washington had envisaged a post-war world in which a dollar standard and free trade would deliver export prosperity for us capital via economic recovery in Europe and Japan. The extent of damage in former allies and enemies alike, and the over-riding imperatives of the Cold War, forced this design out of shape. To save capitalism abroad, pure free trade would have to be diluted, local rulers allowed some start-up assistance and a measure of protection for their markets, if they were not to sink back into depression. Recovery came, and as anticipated, American profits with it. But since labour costs were lower abroad, it was more rational for us capital to invest—where possible: Europe rather than Japan—locally in production for local markets, typically at higher rates of profit than available in domestic investment, rather than export to them. With the great expansion of American multi-national corporations overseas, organized labour was further weakened, not legislatively but structurally, from the mid-fifties onwards.
Yet so long as the overall regime of accumulation held, the calculus of party competition kept the parameters inherited from the New Deal in place. Within them, Republican rulers were perfectly capable of outflanking Democratic predecessors. Truman, whose Presidency was largely barren of domestic legislative achievement, broke more strikes than Eisenhower, whose Interstate Highway Act launched the biggest public-works programme since the wpa. Anti-segregation activism and ghetto insurrections wrested the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty from lbj, with a momentum that outlasted him. It was Nixon, not Johnson, who oversaw the largest increase in social entitlements and economic regulation of post-war history, and proposed the most ambitious anti-poverty scheme, a guaranteed minimum income that no capitalist country has yet instituted. At Congressional level, where in both Houses the most rock-solid single bloc of Democrats was always from the South, Republicans voted in larger numbers than Democrats for the civil-rights bills.