PLAYING POSSUM:

Liberals look to recapture White House (Michael Lind, December 26 2002, Financial Times)

During the New Deal era of the 1930s to the 1960s, liberals had a coherent view of national identity, the economy and foreign policy. The US was a melting-pot nation with a welfare-capitalist economy opposed to the expansion of the axis powers and the communist bloc. This New Deal consensus unravelled in the 1960s as a result of controversies over racial integration and the Vietnam war. For more than three decades, no new "grand narrative" has been able to unite the centre-left in the US.

In the realm of national identity, most influential black and Latino activists reject the ideal of a colour-blind American melting-pot, preferring instead a vision of the US as a Yugoslav-style federation of several "nationalities", with compensatory privileges for non-whites. Libertarians on the left condemn even reasonable anti-terrorist measures and after September 11 2001 liberal intellectuals in the US debated whether public displays of patriotism were fascistic.

In addition to ceding American patriotism to the right, liberals have been unable to agree on an economic philosophy. The robust state capitalism of the 1930s - symbolised by hydroelectric power plants and interstate highways - gave way between the 1940s and the 1970s to a technocratic Keynesianism that identified liberalism with macroeconomic management and social welfare programmes.

This Keynesian orthodoxy broke down in the 1970s. Since then, liberal economic thought has been divided among neo-Keynesians, industrial- policy advocates and neoliberals, who are almost indistinguishable from free-market conservatives. The fact that these bickering factions tend to agree only on preserving welfare-state programmes is another godsend to the right, which can claim that liberals focus on the redistribution of income and wealth while conservatives have a plan for economic growth in the form of tax cuts.

In foreign policy, the centre-left shows similar fissures. A small but vocal minority of Democratic policymakers supports the militant unilateralism of the Bush administration. But the majority of American liberals is divided between traditional liberal internationalism and a powerful strain of anti-military isolationism that is particularly strong among black people and in parts of New England and the Midwest.

All this disunity means that the return of the Democrats to power would not necessarily mean a liberal renaissance. A cohesive conservative minority could enter into opportunistic alliances with different Democratic factions on different issues, in order to create a de facto "conservative coalition" such as the alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats that dominated Congress in the 1950s.

It took decades for American liberalism to dig itself into this hole. It will take a long time to climb out - no matter which party wins the White House and Congress in 2004.

The problem for conservatism is that it has basically squandered the crisis of liberalism by not cutting the size government. Tax cuts, breaking the labor movement, the peace dividend (from ending the Cold War), and free trade can only carry us so far and then the enormity of national wealth being consumed by government is going to drag us back to ground. In the media/intellectual--and, therefore, the public--mind we've been in a period of "conservative" economics for about twenty years (since the election of Ronald Reagan) but in that time government's share of GDP, once you correct for the drastically lowered percentage of federal dollars we're spending on defense and the lower interest payments produced by falling interest rates, has hardly shrunk at all. So, when the crunch comes it will be blamed on the measures that conservatives took, the half measures that is, rather than on the big one they shied away from, their failure to bite the bullet and slash and burn the social welfare state.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2002 7:09 PM