by PERRY ANDERSON
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. [1] 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. [2] 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.
1
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. [3] 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. [4]
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