Our Divided Political Heart (37 page)

Thus did the interaction among Depression, the New Deal, and World War II create an ethic that endured for decades, shaping conservative as well as liberal presidencies. It was an ethic of community and solidarity that promoted individual mobility and expanded individual rights for African Americans and others that the New Deal had partly or wholly left out. Bound together by the experience of Depression and war, wrote Robert Reich, the country took a far different view of itself than it had in the Gilded Age or the 1920s. Society, he argued, “
was not seen as composed of
us
and
them
; it was the realm of
we
.”

The widespread embrace of a fundamentally communitarian view grew out of lived experience. “
The goals of reviving the economy and winning the war
, and the sacrifices implied in achieving them, were well understood and widely endorsed,” Reich wrote. “The public was motivated less by altruism than by its direct and palpable stake in the outcome of what were ineluctably
social
endeavors.”

It took extraordinary convulsions—the reactions to the civil rights movement and the 1960s counterculture, deep divisions bred by the Vietnam War, the cynicism that was a product of Watergate, the stagflation of the late 1970s that undercut confidence in Keynesian economics and bolstered the anti-tax movement—to disrupt a set of attitudes that were reinforced by the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s but had deep roots in our history and a rhetorical resonance even for politicians who were critical of so much of what the New Deal accomplished.

Eight decades after Roosevelt’s election, the New Deal’s programs—and subsequent initiatives that built on their achievements—remain among the most popular undertakings of government. That’s certainly true of
Social Security, and it’s also true of Medicare, added to FDR’s social insurance system by Lyndon B. Johnson. Republicans paid homage to these programs not only by failing to repeal them but also by making them more generous, as Richard Nixon did with Social Security and George W. Bush did with Medicare. Ronald Reagan, once a New Dealer himself, became an outspoken critic of Roosevelt’s program on the conservative speaking circuit in the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet as president, he shied away from taking on the New Deal, and even signed tax increases to make Social Security more secure.

His chosen successor, George H. W. Bush, could boast of two major domestic achievements, both of them consistent with the Long Consensus: the Americans with Disabilities Act, a historic expansion of the rights of the disabled, and amendments that strengthened the Clean Air Act, which allowed Bush to keep his promise to be “an environmental president” in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt. Bush also bravely faced up to the budget deficit not only by cutting spending but also by raising taxes, even in the face of his campaign pledge not to do so. Bush paid a high political price for this—so high that most members of his party have, ever since, been reluctant to support tax increases under any circumstances.

It’s equally notable that the most important legislative defeat George W. Bush suffered came when he proposed a partial privatization of social security that would have transformed part of the program into “personal” accounts. The idea never even came to a vote because so many in Bush’s own party were wary of the political costs of trying to enact it. Just as significant, Bush’s most daring domestic achievements expanded the federal government and built on New Deal and Great Society initiatives. The prescription drug program under Medicare, though structured in a way friendly to drug and insurance companies, added an essential benefit to the country’s most costly social insurance program. And his No Child Left Behind Act aggressively used the influence of federal funding of local schools—an initiative begun under Roosevelt during World War II and expanded by Lyndon Johnson through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—to promote standards and an assertive testing regime. The No Child Left Behind law was opposed by many conservatives precisely because it expanded
Washington’s power, and it was passed with support from leading liberals, including the late Edward M. Kennedy.

The New Deal regulatory state did come under attack in the 1970s and the 1980s, and a wave of deregulation in fields such as airlines and trucking—and, with catastrophic results, banking and securities—won support from some liberals. As noted earlier, the Clinton administration backed financial deregulation that helped destabilize the system a decade later.

Yet many of the core New Deal structures (the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) remained vital. They proved essential to President George H. W. Bush in resolving the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And the financial and securities regulation that FDR championed seemed more relevant than ever after 2008, when scandalously weak oversight led to the abuse of financial instruments and a dangerous adventurism by banks that the brain trusters of the New Deal had once tried to curb. The Dodd-Frank bill passed in 2010 sought to restore and renovate the supervision of the financial sector that the New Deal pioneered.

In theory, Keynesianism was displaced by the reemergence of pre-Keynesian economics in the form of monetarism and supply-side nostrums. Keynesian policies seemed powerless in the face of stagflation in the late 1970s. Yet Ronald Reagan’s own approach amounted to Keynesianism in heavy disguise. Reagan made the case for his tax cuts in 1981 on the basis of supply-side theory, which simply codified the economics of Calvin Coolidge. But the
effects
of Reagan’s policies were exactly as Keynes might have predicted: they pumped up the economy through deficit spending, much of it passing through the Pentagon. The Reagan Democrats, who never lost their affection for New Dealism, kept voting for Reagan in part because he left untouched many of the pillars of the state Roosevelt built, and because Reagan was not afraid to use some of Roosevelt’s ideas on the sly. Reaganism in practice fell well short of Reaganism in theory. The Tea Partiers who claim to be the true heirs of Reagan have paid more attention to his speeches from the 1950s and 1960s than to his choices as president in the 1980s. And, of course, Keynesian policies were essential around the world in keeping the Great Recession from becoming another depression.

Because the terms “New Deal” and “liberalism” are so often heard together, and because the New Deal did indeed accomplish a great deal, what is most easily forgotten is the fundamental moderation of Roosevelt’s approach. He did not abolish capitalism; he regulated it. He did not wipe out inequality; he tempered it. He attacked the “economic royalists,” but the wealthy survived and prospered in the Roosevelt years. He created many bureaus and agencies, but his largest accomplishment was not building up government as such but rather using government to alter the balance of influence in society and empower new groups: workers, by making it easier for them to organize unions; recent immigrants, by making them a powerful component of a new political coalition; the rural poor, by bringing them the liberation of electric power; famers, by freeing them from tyrannical gyrations in agricultural prices; and southerners, by bringing them into the nation’s economic mainstream through large-scale federal investment.

Consider that the main effect of the New Deal was not to create a large class of would-be socialists dependent upon government but rather to build a nation of property owners who could buy homes, save securely, and invest with reasonable confidence that the stocks they purchased were not fraudulent. Such was the impact of the Federal Housing Authority, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Perhaps the best single description of the New Deal’s impact came from onetime neoconservative intellectual Mark Lilla, who called it “a great act of civic inclusion.” Roosevelt was an effective large-
d
Democrat because he proved to be a passionate small-
r
republican.

This, even more than the particulars of New Deal programs, explains the durability of the Long Consensus. New Dealism, like Progressivism and Populism before it, was rooted in America’s tradition of balance, and no one understood this better than Roosevelt himself.

In the most philosophical speech of his first campaign, delivered at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 1932, he brought together the two sides of the American political heart. He argued that true American individualism was of a moderate, not radical, sort, tempered by our obligations to each other:

Every man has a right to his own property
; which means a right to be assured, to the fullest extent attainable, in the safety of his savings. By no other means can men carry the burdens of those parts of life which, in the nature of things, afford no chance of labor; childhood, sickness, old age. In all thought of property, this right is paramount; all other property rights must yield to it. If, in accord with this principle, we must restrict the operations of the speculator, the manipulator, even the financier, I believe we must accept the restriction as needful,
not to hamper individualism but to protect it.
[emphasis added]

Long before the Great Recession, when financial institutions received government bailouts to ensure their survival and then complained about government interference in the face of reforms aimed at preventing a repeat of the abuses just past, Roosevelt was aware of the inconsistency—one might say hypocrisy—in the uses of anti-government rhetoric. But he made his case gently:

The same man who tells you that he does not want to see the government interfere
in business—and he means it, and has plenty of good reasons for saying so—is the first to go to Washington and ask the government for a prohibitory tariff on his product. When things get just bad enough—as they did two years ago—he will go with equal speed to the United States government and ask for a loan; and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation is the outcome of it. Each group has sought protection from the government for its own special interest, without realizing that the function of government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

Always, there was Roosevelt’s emphasis on balance:

We know that individual liberty and individual happiness
mean nothing unless both are ordered in the sense that one man’s meat is
not another man’s poison. We know that the old “rights of personal competency”—the right to read, to think, to speak, to choose and live a mode of life—must be respected at all hazards. We know that liberty to do anything which deprives others of those elemental rights is outside the protection of any compact; and
that government in this regard is the maintenance of a balance
, within which every individual may have a place if he will take it; in which every individual may find safety if he wishes it; in which every individual may attain such power as his ability permits, consistent with his assuming the accompanying responsibility. [emphasis added]

Roosevelt’s ideas will continue to have resonance because they are consistent with our quest, from the very beginning of the republic, to achieve individual liberty rooted in a thriving sense of community and mutual obligation. That is why the Long Consensus is still relevant and requires an urgent defense in the face of efforts to dismantle its achievements.

The Long Consensus, of course, faced challenges from the beginning. Taft’s resistance in 1912 proved ineffectual. The opposition in the 1920s was stronger, and then collapsed in the face of the popular demands for national action that the Great Depression called forth. Many of the ideas the Tea Party and its allies are putting forward now arose first in opposition to the New Deal. They did not begin to gather broad support until
National Review
’s journalistic and intellectual efforts in the 1950s, the Goldwater campaign’s political exertions in the 1960s, and the tax revolt in the 1970s. Opponents of the Long Consensus continued to gain strength in the lead-up to Ronald Reagan’s election and during the Reagan era itself. And they won an especially powerful foothold in the Supreme Court as conservatives steadily moved the country toward a pre–New Deal jurisprudence.

But only after the turmoil of the Bush presidency, the economic calamity of the Great Recession, and the rise of Barack Obama did the challenge to the Long Consensus reach full force. With nearly complete control of the Republican Party and hegemony within the conservative movement, radical individualism is as close to triumph as it has been at any point since the Gilded Age. Whether it will succeed or fail is now the central question in American politics.

When he announced his ill-fated presidential candidacy in August 2011, Rick Perry, in a single sentence, brought to life the stakes in our national argument at this moment in our history. “
I’ll work every day
,” he declared, “to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

That same month, Mitt Romney, in theory the Republicans’ least ideological contender, delivered a memorable and revealing line at the Iowa State Fair when someone in the crowd shouted out a demand to increase taxes on corporations. Romney smiled and gave a reply more heartfelt than was typical of a candidate whose comments were so proudly disciplined.

His proclamation heard round the political world? “
Corporations are people, my friend
.”

Romney’s language echoed the legal point that the Gilded Age Supreme Court had made and on which the
Citizens United
decision was built. But that wasn’t his purpose. He was presenting a simple argument that “everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.” Yet his comment went viral because it seemed to go to the heart of the divide in the nation—and perhaps also to Romney’s identity as a corporate conservative. For many, endowing corporations with the same standing as actual human beings (and often with additional privileges) was precisely what ailed the country.