By Steven Hayward
Friday, August 07, 2015
Political polarization has become the chief topic—indeed,
a near obsession—with the chattering class and “good government” types. Survey
data and common-sense perception certainly testify to deep political and
cultural divisions among Americans, which contribute to political gridlock in
Washington and in many state capitals.
But is there anything really new about our polarization?
Are we more sharply or deeply divided than we were, say, in 1968, when student
protestors virtually hounded Lyndon Johnson out of office with “Hey, hey,
LBJ—how many kids did you kill today?”
The most maddening aspect of the polarization debate is
the hidden presumption of liberalism’s right to rule. Authors such as Norm
Ornstein and Thomas Mann attribute most of the polarization in Washington to
the Republican Party, which they and other observers argue has become too
extreme. This will come as news to grassroots conservatives, who overwhelmingly
believe that Republicans in the capital haven’t been nearly extreme enough in opposing
President Obama’s governmental gigantism.
It’s an implausible case, as there is little in
conservative ideology today that you can’t find in Barry Goldwater’s
“Conscience of a Conservative” or in Ronald Reagan’s famous “Time for Choosing”
speech of 50 years ago. The difference today is that Republicans have won some
landslide elections and lately a majority in Congress, and this galls liberals,
whose real answer to polarization is conservatism’s unconditional surrender.
Stop Standing In Our Way
You can understand why liberals have their noses out of
joint. They ran the country with minimal conservative opposition from the New
Deal era to the late 1960s. A doctrine of “consensus liberalism” prevailed in
the heady years right after World War II, when America and its liberal
establishment felt able to command the future through a progression of
incremental reforms.
But the liberal establishment started coming apart in the
1960s, assailed first by the New Left—which wanted, according to one of its
slogans, to “murder liberalism in its official robes”—and then by a rising
conservative movement. Liberals tried to write off Reagan in the 1980s and Newt
Gingrich in the 1990s as aberrations; the triumphal election of Barack Obama in
2008 seemed to set the world back on its proper course.
But it hasn’t worked according to plan: Barack Obama’s
signature initiative—Obamacare—is an unpopular fiasco, and while he is
advancing liberal policy on many fronts with the political equivalent of Ohio
State football’s old ground game (“three yards and a cloud of dust”), the gap
between liberalism’s soaring ambitions and its current distemper is palpable.
And those yucky Republicans are somehow at their highest watermark in
Washington and in statehouses in 75 years.
From Keynes to Picketty—and Beyond
Liberals never seem to reflect on their own failures and
weaknesses, and as such, today’s liberal narrative about polarization is
superficial—when it isn’t appalling. Fortunately, James Piereson offers a
balanced and substantive counter-narrative in “Shattered Consensus: The Rise
and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order.” Piereson, author of a
previous classic, “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution,” which traced the
overlooked political effects of JFK’s assassination, now explains how a range
of factors—from economics and culture to political ideology and
education—helped bring an end to liberal dominance.
He begins with a supple re-examination of Keynesianism.
In Piereson’s hands, John Maynard Keynes’s economic theories are more
variegated than is commonly understood. Although the British economist did seek
to undermine core doctrines of limited government, “Keynes was not a ‘big
spender’ or an advocate of expensive welfare programs,” Piereson points out.
But crude Keynesianism was too convenient a doctrine for big-spending
liberalism to resist, and despite its demonstrated failures, it remains
perennially attractive to liberals. And Keynesianism has found new life for
progressives in the issue of income inequality and in a new treatise: Thomas
Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century.”
As a successor to Keynes’s “General Theory of
Employment,” Piketty’s book could have been called “A General Theory of
Punitive Liberalism”—“punitive liberalism” being a term that Piereson coined in
his previous book and which he returns to here. As the self-confidence of
liberalism has slowly but inexorably waned since the 1960s, it has become
sullen, decaying into a cabal of grasping interests—public-employee unions, government-benefit
client groups, enclaves of educators in the university-industrial complex, and
so forth. The older idea of progress, broadly understood, has yielded to
“progressivism,” which seeks forced equality and higher taxes.
For liberals, these are dispiriting days, especially
considering the hopes they held for Obama’s presidency. “The Obama years,”
Piereson concludes, “are destined to be recalled as a time of wasted
opportunity and stagnation for the American economy.”
The Fourth American Revolution
Meanwhile, conservatives have made advances, especially
in midterm elections, but they’re far from triumphant. Reviewing the
conservative balance sheet, Piereson observes: “Few will be persuaded to
embrace conservatism only on the grounds that it promote private
social-security accounts or caps on liability awards. In the end, the struggle
to shape the future must be fought out on a wider front of culture and morals
as well as politics.”
Piereson offers a synoptic account of what he suggests is
America’s coming “fourth revolution” (the first three being the party clash of
1800, the Civil War, and the Great Depression). Liberalism’s unraveling and the
incomplete replacement of the liberal consensus with a conservative one means
that we’re living in an unstable time, which will eventually result in some
far-reaching changes in our constitutional order.
Is this instability dangerous? Is a Greek-style financial
crisis in our future, as liberalism fails to “make payroll,” so to speak, as
we’re seeing now in Illinois and elsewhere? Piereson is guardedly optimistic:
“This forecast of a ‘fourth revolution’ in the years ahead does not mean that
Americans should be hoarding gold or stockpiling canned food. The end of the
postwar regime need not bring about the end of America. On the contrary, it
could open a dynamic new chapter in the American story.” But “the journey is
likely to be difficult.”
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