THE REGIME IS IN ITS YOUTH:

Regime change (Christopher Shea, 11/23/2003, Boston Globe)

MOVE OVER POLLSTERS, pundits, and other political psychics. Over the last few years, a "little-discussed theory of the American presidency" has had "startling, if unnoticed, success as a crystal ball," Swarthmore political scientist Rick Valelly argued last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The theory, he said, has predicted Clinton's impeachment, the Bush tax cut, and even the war on Iraq.

Valelly was talking about a theory laid out by Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek in his 1993 book The Politics Presidents Make. [...]

Skowronek's theory rejects the pendulum metaphor in favor of a sequence of political creation, decline, and reconstruction. Only a few presidents, he argues, get to set an agenda that lasts for decades, and they are those who come into office when the nation has hit some kind of dead end: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan. They "repudiate" the old order and set up a new "regime."

Successive presidents from the same party will try to build on their predecessor's vision (as Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson built on Roosevelt's and the two Bushes built on Reagan's). But it gets harder and harder to do this with each new chief executive. Success breeds factionalization. Late-arriving presidents are apt to start "muscle-flexing" foreign wars, like Vietnam, to prove the continued potency of their political vision and consolidate their party's support.

Finally, every regime dies. The last president it coughs up gets treated by history as a loser (unjustly, Skowronek thinks): James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter (who arrived long after the New Deal). They muddle through until the way is cleared for a new Great Repudiator.

Of course, there are wild cards: presidents like Nixon (a Republican in a basically Democratic era) or Clinton (vice versa). As these chief executives follow their pragmatic paths, they get vilified, even by their own party, as slippery, calculating, and mongrel -- and suffer brutal personal attacks.

How well does this theory account for George W. Bush? For all his talk of bipartisanship, he's a Republican trying to build on the Reagan legacy, which explains his aggressive tax cuts. And Iraq is a "classic muscle-flexing war," Skowronek says.

One surprise is the absence of internal division within today's Republican party, which ought to be splintering by now. "There are two explanations," Skowronek offers. "One is that this Republican Party really is a new animal in American history, that is, a nationally organized, ideologically homogeneous party.... No regional differences or Main Street/Wall Street rifts." In that case, Reagan's regime might be proving even more robust than FDR's. The other is that 9/11 delayed the inevitable intra-party fits -- over fiscal discipline or gay marriage, say -- which may yet emerge in a Bush second term.

If the theory has some validity--and it would seem to--we wouldn't expect to see fissures in the Reaganesque regime for several more decades. As other scholars have noted, the typical American regime tends to last about 70 years.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 23, 2003 12:47 PM