Finding The Consensus
There has been an interesting ongoing conversation on several excellent blogs about Rick Perlstein’s great book “Before The Storm” in which everyone is discussing whether the American consensus still holds. The American consensus was the mainstream majority belief in liberalism that held that the government should actively expand “to new frontiers” to promote the welfare of its citizens. Perlstein's new book, which is supposed to come out next year, is apparently a further examination of how this consensus was unmade. I look forward to reading it because this is key to understanding why we liberals continue to be so gobsmacked by the success of the right wing.
I understood this consensus in a very simple and personal way. In 1964, back before whatever happened to Kansas happened, we lived in Wichita. My grade school had the parents all dress their children as Goldwater or Johnson kids on election day. I was the only Goldwater kid in the third grade. This surprised me a great deal because in my home Barry Goldwater was a God. That was the first time I realized that my family was outside the mainstream. Goldwater represented a kind of “conservatism” that was radically different than what a large majority of Americans believed, Republican and Democrat alike. I happened to be from a family that had long adhered to right wing politics, but most people didn’t.
Perlstein sees the unmaking of the consensus beginning that year when Barry Goldwater ran his quixotic campaign against Lyndon Johnson --- a campaign in which he also managed to get tens of thousands of people to pay admission to his speeches, where he filled Dodger Stadium with swooning, adoring crowds a la Dubya, and which created a strong base of grassroots conservatives who began to lay the groundwork for long term political action.
The blogospheric argument seems to hinge on the idea that because Goldwater was soundly defeated and his ideas didn’t result in immediate repudiation of liberalism that the consensus still holds. But political movements are not armed revolutions. The country doesn’t turn on a dime and a consensus doesn’t completely unravel overnight. When an attractive alternative presents itself and enough people become interested it can gain currency over time until it eventually becomes mainstream itself.
Here is the kind of talk that was considered so radical and beyond the pale in 1964 that Barry Goldwater was defeated 61 to 38 percent in the popular vote:
[Some] have long since seen through the spurious suggestion that federal aid comes "free." They know that the money comes out of their own pockets, and that it is returned to them minus a broker's fee taken by the federal bureaucracy. They know, too, that the power to decide how that money shall be spent is withdrawn from them and exercised by some planning board deep in the caverns of one of the federal agencies. They understand this represents a great and perhaps irreparable loss--not only in their wealth, but in their priceless liberty.
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The Constitution is what its authors intended it to be and said it was--not what the Supreme Court says it is. If we condone the practice of substituting our own intentions for those of the Constitution's framers, we reject, in effect, the principle of Constitutional Government: we endorse a rule of men, not of laws.
In order to achieve the widest possible distribution of political power, financial contributions to political campaigns should be made by individuals and individuals alone. I see no reason for labor unions--or corporations--to participate in politics. Both were created for economic purposes and their activities should be restricted accordingly.
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And let us, by all means, remember the nation's interest in reducing taxes and spending. The need for "economic growth" that we hear so much about these days will be achieved, not by the government harnessing the nation's economic forces, but by emancipating them. By reducing taxes and spending we will not only return to the individual the means with which he can assert his freedom and dignity, but also guarantee to the nation the economic strength that will always be its ultimate defense against foreign foes.
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A man may not immediately, or ever, comprehend the harm thus done to his character. Indeed, this is one of the great evils of Welfarism--that it transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it. There is no avoiding this damage to character under the Welfare State. Welfare programs cannot help but promote the idea that the government owes the benefits it confers on the individual.
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No nation at war, employing an exclusively defensive strategy, can hope to survive for long. Like the boxer who refuses to throw a punch, the defense-bound nation will be cut down sooner or later. As long as every encounter with the enemy is fought on his initiative, on grounds of his choosing and with weapons of his choosing, we shall keep on losing the Cold War.
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Is the perpetuation of an international debating forum, for its own sake, the primary objective of American policy? If so, there is much to be said for our past record of subordinating our national interest to that of the United Nations. If, on the other hand, our primary objective is victory over Communism, we will, as a matter of course, view such organizations as the UN as a possible means to that end. Once the question is asked--Does America's participation in the United Nations help or hinder her struggle against world Communism?--it becomes clear that our present commitment to the UN deserves re-examination.
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We must realize that the captive peoples are our friends and potential allies-not their rulers. A truly offensive-minded strategy would recognize that the captive peoples are our strongest weapon in the war against Communism, and would encourage them to overthrow their captors.
There can be no doubt that Goldwater’s ideas are now mainstream. And there can be no doubt that what was once a national consensus that the government’s purpose was to deliver for its citizens is no longer operative. Instead we have a puny incrementalism that passes for liberalism, like the useless and expensive pharmaceutical company hand-out bill for which Democrats get “credit” merely because it is an expansion of government. If giving old people something that is considered a standard part of any insurance plan is considered to be a big liberal achievement then I think we can safely say that liberalism has lost its vision.
(Please don’t write me e-mails telling me all about how Bush is a fiscal disaster and that he’s expanded the government. I know he is. And I realize that Goldwater himself is turning in his grave. He did, at least, have integrity. I’m talking about what people believe not what the addicted-to-bullshit Republicans are actually doing.)
Like many of my generation, I adopted the politics of many of my peers and became a typical 70’s liberal. I thought for many years that my father’s politics were so completely out of fashion that they were entirely irrelevant. Even Reagan seemed to me to be an anomaly. As a Californian I understood his appeal and attributed it to personality and fame, counting on what I assumed to be the American consensus to mitigate the worst of his excesses until we could get a real president again.
I finally relinquished that illusion somewhere around 1990 when I had a discussion with a bright young woman who hated her job and liked to while away a few minutes chatting at the water cooler. She said that she’d been watching the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour the night before and had heard an economist who really seemed to get it. I asked what she meant by that and she said that his explanations had the ring of common sense to her, that he just sounded right. The economist was Milton Friedman.
I realized then that the default view had changed. Milton Friedman "just had the ring of common sense" to this woman not because she was a dyed in the wool conservative (she was a Democrat) but because Friedman’s views had become easily recognized as mainstream to those who weren’t conversant with the academic economic arguments. The American consensus had been in every way the opposite of Milton Friedman’s economic theories. He is a free market evangelist in the most extreme sense and yet this liberal Democrat thought he was talking sense.
So, here we are today with a re-elected Republican president, a radical Republican congress, a moderate to flaming right wing Supreme Court and we are actually trying to pretend that the American liberal consensus still exists. I have made this error myself. I clung to the idea that it exists because the Republicans are forced to use phony rhetoric to convince people that they really care about the average American and because people don’t want to lose what they already have. But I should have realized that the day the music finally died was the day that a Democratic president with a Democratic congress proposed a market based national health care plan.
The difference between Republicans and Democrats isn't about who cares more for the people. All politicians say they care about the people and the people are always justifiably skeptical. The difference between us is how we believe the good of the people is best achieved and liberals have a fundamentally different philosophy than the Republicans. Government is our preferred method to advance progressive ideals. Capitalism cannot substitute for a democratic government that answers to all the people. The invisible hand doesn’t give a shit if children starve or old people have to work until they are eighty or if half the country has to work at slave wages to support the other half. Only government can guarantee its citizens the equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe that progress toward that end requires that the government be active and engaged in delivering those things.
We are at parity, politically speaking, but liberalism is clinging by its fingernails to a vague definition of itself as a collection of policies favoring light regulation, balanced budgets, the last vestiges of the New Deal and certain individual rights. The American conservative consensus is not far away if we continue to abdicate our responsibility to forcefully articulate the role of government in a meaningful and understandable way and convey in no uncertain terms the danger to average Americans when they put their faith in free market evangelism and phony appeals to patriotism and religion. Laundry lists cannot substitute for inspiration.
There is no consensus right now about anything. In fact, we are engaged in a bloodless civil war. But the terms of the debate are being set by people who were not so long ago considered so outside the mainstream that they were nuts. We need to get back in the game with big ideas. I suspect that the ghost of the American consensus still wanders the country and that it won’t take much to bring it back to life. It is, after all, the consensus that oversaw the greatest period of economic and social progress in this country’s history.
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