A few months after the 2004 election I was placed under some pressure by journalistic colleagues, who said I should stop spending so much time criticizing the Bush administration and conservatives more generally. “The election settled some things,” I was told. In retrospect, however, it’s starting to look as if the 2004 election was movement conservatism’s last hurrah.
Republicans won a stunning victory in the 2002 midterm election by exploiting terrorism to the hilt. There’s every reason to believe that one reason Bush took us to war with Iraq was his desire to perpetuate war psychology combined with his expectation that victory in a splendid little war would be good for his reelection prospects. Indeed, Iraq probably did win Bush the 2004 election, even though the war was already going badly.
But the war did go badly—and that was not an accident. When Bush moved into the White House, movement conservatism finally found itself in control of all the levers of power—and quickly proved itself unable to govern. The movement’s politicization of everything, the way it values political loyalty above all else, creates a culture of cronyism and corruption that has pervaded everything the Bush administration does, from the failed reconstruction of Iraq to the hapless response to Hurricane Katrina. The multiple failures of the Bush administration are what happens when the government is run by a movement that is dedicated to policies that are against most Americans’ interests, and must try to compensate for that inherent weakness through deception, distraction, and the distribution of largesse to its supporters. And the nation’s rising contempt for Bush and his administration helped Democrats achieve a stunning victory in the 2006 midterm election.
One election does not make a trend. There are, however, deeper forces undermining the political tactics movement conservatives have used since Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California. Crucially, the American electorate is, to put it bluntly, becoming less white. Republican strategists try to draw a distinction between African Americans and the Hispanic and Asian voters who play a gradually growing role in elections—but as the debate over immigration showed, that’s not a distinction the white backlash voters the modern GOP depends on are prepared to make. A less crude factor is the progressive shift in Americans’ attitudes: Polling suggests that the electorate has moved significantly to the left on domestic issues since the 1990s, and race is a diminishing force in a nation that is, truly, becoming steadily less racist.
Movement conservatism still has money on its side, but that has never been enough in itself. Anything can happen in the 2008 election, but it looks like a reasonable guess that by 2009 America will have a Democratic president and a solidly Democratic Congress. Moreover, this new majority, if it emerges, will be much more ideologically cohesive than the Democratic majority of Bill Clinton’s first two years, which was an uneasy alliance between Northern liberals and conservative Southerners.
The question is, what should the new majority do? My answer is that it should, for the nation’s sake, pursue an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality—a new New Deal. The starting point for that program, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Social Security, should be universal health care, something every other advanced country already has. Before we can talk about how to get there, however, it’s helpful to take a good look at where we’ve been. That look—the story of the arc of modern American history—is the subject of the next eight chapters.
2 THE LONG GILDED AGE
Looking at the political economy of the United States before the New Deal from the vantage point of the Bush years is like looking at a sepia-toned photograph of your grandfather and realizing that he looked a lot like you—in fact, that in some ways you resemble your grandfather more than you resemble your father. Unfortunately the family features that seem to have reemerged in your face after skipping a generation are deeply unattractive.
Pre–New Deal America, like America in the early twenty-first century, was a land of vast inequality in wealth and power, in which a nominally democratic political system failed to represent the economic interests of the majority. Moreover the factors that let a wealthy elite dominate political life have recognizable counterparts today: the overwhelming financial disadvantage at which populist political candidates operated; the division of Americans with common economic interests along racial, ethnic, and religious lines; the uncritical acceptance of a conservative ideology that warned that any attempt to help the less fortunate would lead to economic disaster.
You might be tempted to say that I’m overstating the resemblance, that America today isn’t as unequal as it was before the New Deal. The numbers, however, say otherwise. As Table 1 shows, the concentration of income in the hands of a narrow elite today matches its concentration in the 1920s.
| Table 1. Share of High-Income Groups in Total Income, Excluding Capital Gains | ||
|---|---|---|
| Highest-income 10% | Highest-income 1% | |
| Average for 1920s | 43.6% | 17.3% |
| 2005 | 44.3% | 17.4% |
Source: Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (Feb. 2003), pp. 1–39. Updated data available at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/.
Now, it’s true that the oligarchic nature of pre–New Deal politics and the often bloody way the power of the state was used to protect property interests were more extreme than anything we see today. Meanwhile, though the inequality of income was no greater than it is now, the inequality of living conditions was much greater, because there were none of the social programs that now create a safety net, however imperfect, for the less fortunate. All the same, the family resemblance between then and now is both striking and disturbing.
Before I say more about that resemblance, however, I need a better name for the period I’ll be discussing than “pre–New Deal,” which defines the era only by what it wasn’t. Historians generally say that the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era around 1900, and they have a point. The cultural and political tone of the country shifted considerably around 1900. Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1901, was less reliably proplutocrat than his predecessors; the Food and Drug Administration was created in 1906; the income tax was reintroduced in 1913, together with a constitutional amendment that prevented the Supreme Court from declaring, as it had before, that it was unconstitutional. These changes, however, had little impact on either the inequality of income and wealth in America or the minimal role that the U.S. government played in mitigating the effects of that inequality. As best we can tell, America in the 1920s, although richer than it had been in the late nineteenth century, was very nearly as unequal, and very nearly as much under the thumb of a wealthy elite.