Our Divided Political Heart (2 page)

In the course of this story, I often link our responses to community and individualism with our attitudes toward government and its limits. It’s thus important to make clear that I don’t believe that “government” is the same thing as “community.” But contemporary politics has been shaped by two forces that link our responses to both.

First, our country has witnessed the rise of a radical form of individualism that simultaneously denigrates the role of government and the importance most Americans attach to the quest for community. Critics see both as antithetical to the strivings of free individuals who ought to be as
unencumbered as possible by civic duties and social obligations. This extreme individualism sees the “common good” not as a worthy objective but as a manipulative slogan disguising a lust for power by government bureaucrats and the ideological ambitions of left-wing utopians. This view has transformed both American conservatism and the Republican Party.

Second, the American tradition of balancing community and individualism necessarily leads to a balance between government and the private sphere. At the heart of the American idea—common to Jefferson and Hamilton, to Clay and Jackson, to Lincoln and both Roosevelts—is the view that
in a democracy, government is not the realm of “them” but of “us.”
In a constitutional and democratic republic, government’s power is not used as it would be in a dictatorship or a monarchy—as an instrument that is nearly always oppressive and inevitably invoked on behalf of the few. In our history, government has far more frequently been a liberating force that operated on behalf of the many. This has been true not just since the New Deal but also from the beginning of our national experiment.

The intervention of democratic government has often been necessary to protect individuals from concentrated private power. It is government’s failure to live up to this duty that gave rise to the anti–Wall Street protests. Here again, a commitment to balance has been essential: Americans mistrust excesses of power, in both government and the private sphere. Over time, we constructed a system of countervailing power that used government to check private abuses of authority even as we limited government’s capacity to dominate the nation’s life. We also nurtured vigorous collective forces outside the state in what we commonly call the “third sector” or “civil society.” These independent groups are another expression of the American commitment to community. They impressed Tocqueville and continue to strike outsiders as an essential characteristic of our country. At times these forces work with the government and the market. At other times they check the power of one, the other, or both.

There is thus an essential and in some ways paradoxical ambiguity about the relationship between community and government. Government has often been challenged by outside groups rooted in communities and speaking in their name. But because of the democratic character of our system, government also regularly serves as the primary instrument through
which the community interest expresses itself. In the American system, private initiative and public enterprise complement each other. This is something that both late nineteenth-century Populists and early twentieth-century Progressives understood well.

The Populists and the Progressives laid the foundation for what I call the Long Consensus. It is a view of public life that created what we came to call, with pride, the American Century. It wrote the social contract for shared prosperity. In the hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1901, government grew—but so did individual liberty. The state assumed new roles, but individual opportunities expanded. New regulations protected the air and the water, the integrity of food and drugs, the safety of workplaces and consumer products—and American capitalism flourished. Workers organized into unions that advanced the interests of those who depended on their labor, not capital, for their livelihoods. In doing so, labor organizations strengthened a more social form of capitalism based on widespread property ownership and upward mobility. Previously excluded groups were steadily brought into the larger American community to share the economy’s bounty and the responsibilities of self-government. The United States continued to welcome newcomers and created the most diverse democracy in the world. G. K. Chesterton observed that the United States sought to make a nation
“literally out of any old nation that comes along”
—and it succeeded.

In the century of the Long Consensus, the United States became the most powerful nation on earth, its influence enhanced not only (or even primarily) by its advanced weaponry and the martial courage of its men and women in uniform, but also by its economic might, its democratic norms, its cultural creativity, and a moral and intellectual vibrancy that is the product of our constant struggle to preserve liberty while building and rebuilding community. A nation whose intellectual inheritance includes biblical religion and the Enlightenment, the individualism of Ben Franklin and Walt Whitman, the state-building of Hamilton and Clay, the traditionalism of John Adams, the skepticism toward central authority of Jefferson, and the radicalism of Tom Paine is bound to produce a lively life of the mind. Out of this creative conflict arose the balance of the American system and the achievements of the Long Consensus.

American politics is now roiled because the Long Consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in its century-long history. The assault comes largely from an individualistic right that has long been part of American politics but began gathering new influence in response to the failures of the Bush administration and the rise of Obama. After Obama’s inauguration, it became the most energetic force in the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

But the Long Consensus also fell into difficulty because many Americans outside the ranks of the Tea Party and the right concluded that government was no longer the realm of “us” but was, in fact, under the control of “them.” The rise of Occupy Wall Street was powered by a sense that government served the interests of the wealthiest Americans—and those of the banks and the financial institutions—rather than the needs of the remaining “99 percent” of the citizenry. The bailout of the financial system, however necessary it was to preventing a crash, was not accompanied by comparably sweeping measures to ease the burden of the downturn on those facing foreclosure, on underwater mortgage holders, on Americans thrown out of work, or on those with falling incomes.
“I bailed out a bank”
, read one sign carried by an Occupy Wall Street protestor, “and all I got was a new debit card charge.” Many Americans who did not join the boisterous protests around the nation nonetheless shared the sense of grievance and injustice the protesters were expressing.

Smaller businesses found themselves starved for credit. Inequalities that grew even in the good times became more glaring in a time of deep trouble. As the journalist and scholar Alexander Stille observed, “
The United States has gone from being
a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.” Careful studies by the Congressional Budget Office and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development underscored his point.

Government itself had become the object of scorn on the left, although the reasons for its discontent were very different from those advanced by conservatives. The breakdown and dismantling of government regulation of the financial industry was one of the major causes of the Great Recession, and this was a case of the Long Consensus failing on its own terms. It was a failure in which Democrats, as the principal defenders
of the Long Consensus, were complicit. If the strongest initial expressions of political outrage in the Obama years came from those who insisted that government was too powerful, there lay beneath this discontent another form of anger to which the anti–Wall Street protests gave vocal expression. It targeted not government’s power, but the failure to use this power as a countervailing force against financial excess and the influence of the wealthy. Worse still, many came to believe that government had used the public’s money to strengthen and subsidize the already privileged.

Obama clearly saw his task as restoring support for the core principles behind the American balance and the Long Consensus. Yet he alternated between offering reassurance to Wall Street (in order to get markets moving again) and rhetorical salvos against the economically privileged (to win back those who had concluded he was “soft on Wall Street”). The prominence in the Obama circle of advisors and campaign donors with strong Wall Street ties increased the skepticism among Americans who believed he was too close to those who had caused the nation’s problems. Yet his efforts to strengthen Wall Street regulation, to increase taxes on the wealthy, and to critique economic inequality brought forth opposition and even rage from large parts of the financial sector.

Having satisfied neither side, Obama moved steadily toward tougher rhetoric against the world of finance around the moment the Wall Street protests began. He concluded that, as an aide put it in the late fall of 2011, “
there is surging sentiment out there among voters
that the economy is weighted toward the wealthy.” It was a perception that might usefully have come to him earlier, though as the experience of Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated, it often takes a mass movement to push a president further down the path he has tentatively chosen.

Because the loss of trust in government is not simply an ideological matter and extends beyond the political right, I pay particular attention in what follows to the importance of the Populist strain in the American Progressive tradition and the collapse of any controls over the campaign finance system, typified by the Supreme Court’s
Citizens United
decision in 2010. It will be difficult to restore public faith in government’s capacity to serve as an honest broker as long as large amounts of unregulated cash, often from undisclosed sources, continue to flow into the campaigns of both
parties. And liberals will be unable to speak to legitimate popular discontent if they forget the essential role played by American Populism in building support for the Long Consensus. This seemed to dawn gradually on Obama as the battles over his presidency became more ferocious. Before there was Progressivism, a New Deal, or a Great Society, there was Populism. As I will be showing, many liberals have been too eager to embrace historical critiques of Populism that emphasized its more extreme expressions. As a result, they have been insufficiently alive to Populism’s deeply democratic character and its roots in America’s oldest traditions of republicanism and self-rule. By failing to appreciate Populism’s contribution to their own achievements, liberals opened the way for right-wing movements keen on seizing the populist banner. The Tea Party is foremost among them, claiming to speak in the name of populism even as it seeks to sweep aside so many of the reforms for which the original Populists fought.

Our current political struggles make sense only if we understand them in light of the debate over whether we should nurture and refashion the Long Consensus or choose instead to cast it away. This struggle has created a fundamental divide over the most basic questions: Is democratic government primarily constructive or destructive? Does it protect and expand our freedoms, or does it undermine them? Can public action make the private economy work better, or are all attempts to alter the market’s course doomed to failure? Do government’s efforts to widen opportunities and lessen inequality enhance individual achievement or promote dependency?

Those who disagree on such core questions come to believe that their opponents are bent on pursuing policies that would undermine all they cherish. In such circumstances, compromise becomes not a desirable expedient but “almost treasonous,” to use the phrase made briefly famous by Texas governor Rick Perry in remarks about the Federal Reserve. If everything that matters is at stake, then taking enormous risks with the country’s well-being, as House Republicans did in the debt ceiling battle, is no longer out of bounds. Rather, pushing the system to its limits—and beyond—becomes a form of patriotism. When your adversary’s goals are
deemed to be dishonorable, it’s better to court chaos, win the fight, and pick up the pieces later.

Because Democrats broadly defend the Long Consensus while Republicans, in their current incarnation, seek to overturn it, the parties are no longer equally distant from the political center. We are in a moment of asymmetric polarization. Since Democrats believe in both government and the private marketplace, they are, by their very nature, always more ready to compromise. On the other side, Republicans (again, given their current preoccupations) believe that compromise will set back their larger project of putting an end to a set of arrangements they no longer believe in.

Obama was slow to acknowledge that his talk of bringing the two parties together was out of sync with the way the parties array themselves now. There was certainly nothing remotely radical about Obama’s own proposals. Virtually everyone agreed that the economy needed a strong stimulus at the moment Obama took office—and Obama’s own proposals, as many of his aides later conceded, turned out to be smaller than the moment required. His financial reforms, embodied in the Dodd-Frank bill, were serious but relatively mild. And many of Obama’s initiatives, even the controversial health insurance reform that Republicans scorned as “Obamacare,” were drawn from ideas once favored by moderate and even conservative Republicans, notably former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, whose health plan in his state was a model for the 2010 reform.

But these programs, again including Romney’s, were the product of a Republican Party that existed before it was taken over by a new sensibility linking radical individualism with a loathing for government that would shock Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and even Mr. Conservative himself, Robert A. Taft.

In the fall of 2011, the president woke up to the danger he faces. He began to draw sharper lines against those who believe, as he put it “
that the only thing we can do
to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”