MOVED (via Tom Morin):

Moving Right? Bush's Decline and American Conservatism (David Plotke, Summer 2006, Dissent)

Two decades ago the success of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher provoked parallel discussions in the United States and Britain about whether major political shifts had occurred in the two countries. Analysts who mainly saw continuity beneath the conservative fireworks argued with those who thought that a real break was occurring. In Britain these discussions were especially lively on the left. Figures such as Stuart Hall, Martin Jacques, and Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau emphasized the extent of political shifts at both the elite and popular levels. In the United States, Reagan’s second election made it hard to argue that Democratic commitments still framed American politics. People who emphasized the extent of a rightward shift argued with those who stressed political disorder and left fragmentation.

In Britain the advocates of novelty, disruption, and a new kind of rightward shift clearly had the better of the argument. The result was a complicated process of rethinking on the left that became one source of Tony Blair’s political success. In the United States, the results have been less clear. To some extent this is because the discussion has often been squeezed into the old framework of “political realignment”—meaning short, thorough, and dramatic reversals of political commitments that produce durable new configurations. Measured by the high standards of the realignment literature, the changes of the late 1960s and early 1980s do not add up to another in this alleged history of epochal shifts (in which the New Deal and 1930s remain the exemplary case).

Outside the terms of the realignment debate, however, it is clear that politics in the United States shifted substantially to the right in the late 1960s and early 1980s. If Bush has not produced a similar shift, one cannot use that absence to prove that there is a deep and strong pro-Democratic majority just waiting to be unearthed. This latter message, which is both hopeful and confused, underlies several recent works about national politics. These combine a vigorous and useful anti-Republican polemic with the argument that Republican domination is in some sense artificial, created either by people’s misrecognition of their economic interests or by institutional mechanisms that inflate and sustain Republican electoral prospects beyond what the public really wants.

A better starting point would be to see Bush as another conservative president in a now lengthy sequence. He has not changed the political world that he found when he came into office, save in one major area. Yet he has benefited from prior changes that provide a framework for Republican electoral success, especially at the presidential level. This success is the big political story of the last four decades. It is true to such an extent that one can describe national politics as defined by the following rule: To be elected president, you should be a conservative Republican (Nixon twice, Reagan twice, Bush père, Bush fils twice). You have a limited chance of being elected if you are a center-right (Carter) or centrist Democrat (Clinton twice). You cannot be elected president if you are a liberal Democrat.

This new reality is more important than whether political shifts of the late 1960s and 1980s replicate those of the 1930s (they don’t). It is easy to understand why anti-Republican writers would want to argue that Republican domination is thin, unnatural, or procedurally dubious. Pushing such arguments too hard risks making their proponents appear to have been sleepwalking through the last several decades—when the spectrum of successful presidential campaigns runs from Reagan to Clinton, with Nixon or Bush père more or less in the center. [...]

(Social) Spending. Bush is certainly to the right of the median voter/citizen here, even though the median voter, again, is to the right in comparative terms. Bush has not been successful in moving things further his way, especially with regard to Social Security. If there has been movement it has been away from Bush, for two reasons. One, Bush has provided no solutions to the big problems in health care, and this opens the way for proposals that would involve a larger government role and more spending. Two, the Hurricane Katrina disaster seems to have persuaded more than a few critics of “big government” that limited government has its limits.

In public opinion there is tension between a strong desire for low taxes and a modest willingness to increase social spending. Some Republicans, it is charged, see endless tax cuts and a large deficit as a means of managing this tension by making it impossible to increase spending significantly. This might constrain the initial choices of a new Democratic administration: it is hard to imagine a splashy first six months with ambitious and expensive programs. Over time, though, the constraints are not so severe. Although the deficits (now and through the rest of the decade) are vast in dollar terms, they are not huge relative to a large and growing economy. In percentage terms, current deficits are smaller than the deficits of the Reagan years of the mid-1980s.[4]
In 1983–1986 the federal budget deficit was about 5 percent of gross domestic product. In 2003–2005 it was about 3 percent. The dollar figures are much larger in the later years, but GDP in 2005 was roughly three times its 1985 size.

The policy effects of the Bush deficits are more directly about growth than about spending. Growth has been substantial for most of the last two decades. If it continues at a decent pace, modest tax increases and spending restraint for a brief period would probably be enough to open space for serious discussion of new policies that might entail spending increases. Thus, in a mainly economic sense, Bush’s policies are not permanent barriers to a reform politics. They do limit any new Democratic administration in this way: policies that threaten growth will make reform unlikely. Given growth, new social programs should be up for serious consideration soon after the next election—if those programs are politically attractive and appear to be reasonably efficient. On balance, Bush’s tax cuts may not be as much of an obstacle to innovative reform as the widespread suspicion that even where problems need serious government attention, Democratic policies are unlikely to be effective.

Especially in this area W is a genuine radical, while Ronald Reagan was defender of the New Deal status quo, as befit a child of the Depression. While it is true that SS privatization will have to wait until the next presidency, Mr. Bush has put in place education vouchers, HSAs, retirement reform, civil service out-sourcing and reform, the Faith-Based Initiative, etc., all of which represent a Thrd Way revolution that meshes with the Clinton/Gingrich Welfare Reform. The unprecedented electoral and economic success of Bill Clinton, the class of '94, and George W. Bushg pretty much guarantees that this revolution will continue and that, as we see in Britain today, the two major parties will merely vie for recognition that they're the ones to lead that revolution.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2006 5:04 PM