The Conscience of a Liberal

10 THE NEW POLITICS OF EQUALITY

The Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm election came as a shock to many, even though it had been telegraphed by polls well in advance. Many analysts had invested themselves emotionally and professionally in the idea of over whelming Republican political superiority. I have a whole shelf of books from 2005 and 2006 explaining, in sorrow, triumph, or simply awe, how the superior organization of the GOP, the enthusiasm of its supporters, its advantage in money, its ownership of the national security issue, and—by some accounts—its ability to rig elections made it invincible. Believing that Republicans had a lock on power, some couldn’t believe what the polls were saying—namely, that the American people had had enough.

Even after the election results were in, there was a visible reluctance to acknowledge fully what had happened. For months after the vote many news analyses asserted one of two things: that it was only a narrow victory for the Democrats, and/or that the Democrats who won did so by being conservative. The first claim was just false, the second mostly so.

The new Democratic margin in the House of Representatives wasn’t narrow. In fact, it was wider than any Republican majority during the GOP’s twelve-year reign. The new Democratic majority in the Senate was paper thin, but achieving even that starting from a five-seat deficit was something of a miracle, because only a third of the Senate is elected at a time. As it was, Democrats and independents allied with the Democrats won twenty-four of the thirty-three Senate seats at stake. The Democrats also took six governorships, and gained control of eight state legislative chambers.

The claim that Democrats won by becoming conservative is only slightly less false. Some of the new faces in Congress were Democrats who won in relatively conservative districts, and were themselves a bit more conservative than the average Democrat. But it remained true that every Democrat was to the left of every Republican, so that the shift in control drastically tilted the political balance to the left.[1] And the truly relevant comparison is between the Democratic majority now and the Democratic majority in 1993–94, the last time the party was in control. By any measure the new majority, which doesn’t depend on a wing of conservative Southern Democrats, is far more liberal. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, made headlines by becoming the first woman to hold the position—but she is also the most progressive Speaker ever.

But what did the Democratic victory and the leftward shift in Congress mean? Was it an aberrational event, a consequence of the special ineptitude of the Bush administration? Or was it a sign of fundamental political realignment?

Nobody can be completely sure. In this chapter, however, I’ll make the case for believing that the 2006 election wasn’t an aberration, that the U.S. public is actually ready for something different—a new politics of equality. But the emergence of this new politics isn’t a foregone conclusion. It will happen only if liberal politicians seize the opportunity.

“In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?” asked Gallup in June 2007. Only 24 percent were satisfied, compared with 74 percent unsatisfied. As I write this in the summer of 2007, Americans are very unhappy about the country’s direction.

A lot of that has to with the quagmire in Iraq. But what’s remarkable is how little the national mood seems to have been lifted by what looks, at first glance, like a pretty good economy. Gross domestic product has been rising for almost six years; the unemployment rate is only 4.5 percent, comparable to its levels in the late nineties; the stock market has been hitting new highs. Yet when Gallup asked, “How would you rate economic conditions in this country?” only about a third of the respondents answered “Excellent” or “Good.” The proportion was twice as high in the late nineties.

Conservatives, looking for someone to blame, complain that the media aren’t reporting the good news about the economy—just as they aren’t reporting the good news about Iraq. More seriously, ill-feeling about the war probably bleeds into the public’s views on other matters. Still, it’s worth noting that consumer confidence in 1968—the year of the Tet offensive, huge antiwar protests, and, as I documented in chapter 5, a pervasive sense that things were falling apart—was much higher than it is in the summer of 2007.[2] This suggests that there are limits on the extent to which dismay about other aspects of the national situation can color perceptions of how the economy is doing, which in turn suggests that public unhappiness with the economy isn’t just a projection of bad feelings about the war. And there’s one more crucial point: It actually makes perfect sense for most people to be unhappy about the state of the economy. Due to rising inequality, good performance in overall numbers like GDP hasn’t translated into gains for ordinary workers.

The current disconnect between overall economic growth and the fortunes of typical Americans is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented in modern U.S. history. Inequality was high during the Long Gilded Age, but because inequality was stable, most workers saw their standard of living improve steadily as the economy grew. Growth in the great postwar boom that ended in 1973 was broadly shared. Even after inequality began rising at the end of the 1970s, a growing economy continued to translate into gains for almost everyone. Thus inequality was rising in the 1980s, but the expansion of the economy from 1982 onward was still strong enough to let Reagan declare “Morning in America” in 1984, and to get the first George Bush elected in 1988. Inequality continued to rise during the 1990s, but there was still a dramatic improvement in public sentiment as the economy recovered from the 1990–92 slump.

Now, however, the stagnation of wages and median income in the face of overall economic expansion has become so clear that public perceptions of how the economy is doing no longer seem linked to standard measures of economic performance. That is, the years since 2001 have been Bill Gates walking into a bar: The average has gone up, but that means nothing to most people. Or to be less metaphorical, corporate profits have soared—they’re now at their highest level, as a percentage of GDP, since 1929—and so have incomes at the top of the scale. But the wages of most workers have barely kept up with inflation. Add in a growing sense of insecurity, especially because of the crumbling health insurance system (of which much more in chapter 11), and it’s perfectly reasonable for most people to feel pessimistic about the economic situation.

Polls also suggest that the public both understands the role of growing inequality and supports government action to do something about it. A massive Pew survey of trends in public opinion found that the fractions of the public agreeing that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer, that the government has a responsibility to help those in need, that everyone should be guaranteed enough to eat and a place to live, have all risen to levels not seen since the early 1990s.[3] All this suggests that there’s an opportunity for a major push toward policies that address inequality and/or economic insecurity.

The fact that polling numbers today resemble those from the early 1990s may raise some warning flags. After all, economic discontent got Bill Clinton elected in 1992, but when he tried to push through health care reform—which, as I’ll argue at length in chapter 11, has to be the centerpiece of any progressive reform agenda—he failed utterly. This legislative defeat was followed by electoral defeat, in the 1994 rout that put Republicans in control of Congress. This raises the question of whether history will repeat itself.

There are, however, several reasons to think that it won’t, or at least doesn’t have to.

The first is that Clinton’s failure on health care looks, even in retrospect, far from inevitable. Better leadership, better communication with Capitol Hill and the public, and Clinton might well have been able to go into 1994 with a major domestic policy achievement under his belt. Even after the initial Clinton push had run aground, a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans offered a compromise that would have covered 85 percent of the uninsured, but Hillary Clinton rejected their overtures.

A more fundamental point is that today’s economic discontent is much less likely to be replaced by other concerns than that of the early 1990s. Americans were depressed about the economy in 1992 in large part because the economy as a whole was depressed, with an unemployment rate well over 7 percent. Once the economy recovered, the economic issue lost much of its force. Among other things, as more people got jobs with health care benefits, pressure for health care reform faded away. (There was also a secondary reason for declining concern: For much of the 1990s HMOs seemed to be containing costs. Again, more on this in chapter 11.) Today, however, people are worried about their finances and the state of the economy even after years of fairly good economic growth, with the unemployment rate not far off historic lows. It seems likely that demands that the government do something for working Americans will grow more, not less, intense.

Meanwhile, something else has changed: both long-term trends in American society and recent events have damaged the ability of movement conservatives to change the subject, to mask the reality that they are on the side of the privileged by turning the nation’s attention to other issues. One major source of that change is the way Bush has damaged the right’s credibility on national security.

As Chris Hedges documented in his 2002 book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, even the Argentine junta of the early 1980s, a government that presided over hyperinflation and economic collapse, became briefly popular when it started a senseless war with Britain by invading the Falkland Islands.[4] George W. Bush’s extremely high approval ratings after 9/11 reflected the same rally-around-the-flag effect: Governments always get an initial boost in public support when they go to war, no matter how incompetent and corrupt the government and no matter how foolish the war.

Still, it’s doubtful that a Democratic president would have received as big a political boost as Bush did. During the Reagan and Bush I years, Republicans had solidified a reputation as being stronger then Democrats on national security. Never mind the question of whether that reputation ever had any justification; the point is that 9/11 fitted in with a preexisting script. Questions about whether Bush had ignored warnings about the threat were brushed aside. Initial success in Afghanistan was treated as a huge achievement for the Bush administration, as if tipping the balance of power in a third-World civil war were the equivalent of D-day. Minor details like Osama bin Laden’s escape from the mountains of Tora Bora were ignored.

In the normal course of events, the national security issue would gradually have receded in political salience, much as it did after the first Gulf War. But Bush and those around him found a way to keep the war psychology going. We have a fairly clear picture of how the Bush administration sold America on war with Iraq: cherry-picked intelligence, insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq with 9/11, and so on. What’s less clear is why the administration wanted to attack a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. It seems almost certain, however, that the perceived domestic political advantages of a splendid little war played an important role in the decision to invade. The now infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op, with Bush’s staged landing on an aircraft carrier, was, to a large extent, what the war was all about. And the war worked to Bush’s advantage for a surprisingly long time. In spite of the failure to find WMD and the rising U.S. death toll, it took more than two years into the war before a majority of Americans began consistently telling pollsters that invading Iraq was a mistake.

At this point, however, public disgust with the Iraq War has become the central fact of American politics. That could be just a short-term phenomenon; the question for this book is whether the Iraq debacle will have a longer-term influence in changing the political landscape. I think it will.

Ideally the public will conclude from the debacle that if you want to win a war, don’t hire a movement conservative. Hire a liberal, or at least an Eisenhower-type Republican. Failure in Iraq may have been inevitable, but whatever slim chances of success the United States might have had were dissipated by errors that were inherent to movement conservatism. In particular the Bush administration’s overoptimism and its attempt to fight a war on the cheap, with minimal numbers of ground troops, flowed naturally from its commitment to cutting taxes. A frank admission that war is a risky, expensive business would have prompted calls for shared sacrifice; remember, taxes on the rich went up and inequality declined during both world wars. But the Bush administration planned to use the war to further its inequality-enhancing domestic agenda. The script called for a blitzkrieg, a victory parade, and then another round of tax cuts. This required assuming that everything would be easy, and dismissing warnings from military experts that it probably wouldn’t work out that way.

Beyond that, the cronyism that is an essential part of movement conservatism played a key role in the failure of Iraqi reconstruction. Key jobs were given to inexperienced partisan loyalists. Shoddy work by politically connected contractors, like the construction of a new police training center in which excrement drips from the ceiling, went unpunished.[5] And outright corruption flourished. These failures weren’t accidental: The systematic use of political power to hand out favors to partisan allies is part of the glue holding movement conservatism together. To have run the Iraq War with efficiency and honesty, the way FDR ran World War II, would have meant behaving at least a little bit like the New Deal—and that would have been anathema to the people in charge.

Ideally, as I said, the public should come out of this experience understanding that movement conservatives can’t actually defend the country. At the very least the Iraq experience should neutralize for a long time to come the ability of conservatives to win elections by striking belligerent poses and talking tough. Voters will remember where that got us under Bush—that the tough-talking, pose-striking leader misled the nation into an unnecessary and disastrous war. And if they don’t remember, liberals can remind them. So it should be quite a while before another movement conservative can do what Bush did in 2002 and 2004: use national security to distract the public from the fundamentally elitist, antipopulist nature of his policies.

That said, movement conservatives have repeatedly won elections even in years when the public wasn’t focused on national security. The most important, sustained source of this electoral strength has been race—the ability to win over a subset of white voters by catering, at least implicitly, to their fear of blacks. That source of electoral strength hasn’t gone away. There is, however, good reason to believe that the race issue is gradually losing its force.

In 2002 Ruy Texeira and John Judis published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book intended to emulate Kevin Phillips’s prescient 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Like Phillips they argued from demographic trends, which they claimed were running in the Democrats’ favor. The Republican victories in 2002 and 2004 made their thesis look all wrong, but the 2006 election gave it new life. In a 2007 article Texeira and Judis argued that “this election signals the end of a fleeting Republican revival, prompted by the Bush administration’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the return to political and demographic trends that were leading to a Democratic and center-left majority in the United States.”[6] That’s not too far from my own view. But my version is blunter and cruder than theirs. I’d say that the politics of white backlash, which have been integral to the success of movement conservatism, are losing effectiveness for two reasons: America is becoming less white, and many (but not all) whites are becoming less racist.

By “white” I actually mean “non-Hispanic white,” and the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, from 6.4 percent of the total in 1980 to 12.5 percent in 2000, is the main reason America’s ethnic composition is changing. The Asian population is also growing rapidly, albeit from a lower base: Asians were 1.5 percent of the population in 1980, but 3.8 percent in 2000. Both ethnic groups are growing mainly because of immigration, although Hispanics also have a high birth rate.

The immediate political effect of immigration is, as I pointed out in the discussion of the Long Gilded Age, to disenfranchise low-paid workers, effectively shifting the political balance to the right. When low-wage immigrants make up a large part of the work force, those who have the most to gain from policies that promote equality don’t vote, while those who have the most to lose do. If that were the whole story, the changing ethnic mix of the U.S. population would simply be the by-product of a process that helps conservatives and hurts liberals. But it’s not the whole story. The new immigrants are nonwhite—or at least are perceived by many native-born whites as nonwhite, which is all that matters. And the interaction of that fact with the politics of race in America creates a dynamic that, I’d argue, ultimately deprives movement conservatism of its most potent political weapon.

To understand this dynamic one must first recognize that immigration is a deeply divisive issue for the coalition that supports movement conservatism. Business interests are pro-immigration because they like an abundant, cheap labor force. But voters who can be swayed by the race issue, and have been crucial to the movement’s success, also tend to be strongly nativist. John Judis has described the profile of Republican anti-immigration voters:

The result is bitter division within the movement over immigration policy. And this has a further consequence: The obvious reality that an important wing of the modern Republican Party is bitterly anti-immigrant pushes nonwhite immigrants into the arms of the Democratic Party. This has already happened in California: Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor, won an upset victory in 1994 by making illegal immigration the center of his campaign. In the years that followed, however, California’s growing Hispanic population responded by becoming overwhelmingly Democratic, turning the state’s politics in a sharply liberal direction. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as governor changed little: Schwarzenegger quickly learned that to be effective he had to govern as a modern version of an Eisenhower Republican, so much so that, like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (who recently declared himself an independent), he’s often described as being a de facto Democrat.

In other words, the political success of movement conservatism depends on appealing to whites who resent blacks. But it’s difficult to be antiblack without also being anti-immigrant. And because the rapidly growing number of immigrants makes them an increasingly potent political force, the race issue, which has been a powerful asset for movement conservatives in the past, may gradually be turning into a liability.

Republicans have sought to contain this problem by keeping immigrants and their descendants disenfranchised as long as possible. Some of the bogus voter fraud cases described in chapter 9 were aimed at Hispanics rather than blacks. In 2003, when Justice Department lawyers unanimously concluded that the infamous Texas redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act, they emphasized the way it diluted Hispanic voting influence. (The lawyers were, of course, overruled by political appointees, and the plan went through, leading to a five-seat Republican gain in Congress.) Yet the redistricting didn’t keep Democrats from sweeping to control of the House in 2006, and it’s hard to see such actions, reprehensible as they are, as more than a delaying tactic.

Beyond the blunt, crude fact that America is getting less white, there’s a more uplifting reason to believe that the political exploitation of race may be losing its force: As a nation we’ve become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of marriages between whites and blacks, while 54 percent disapproved. As late as 1991 only a plurality of 48 percent approved. By 2002, however, 65 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages; by June 2007, that was up to 77 percent.

This may not seem directly relevant to politics. After all, nobody is proposing to reinstate the laws that once existed against interracial marriage. But the ability of the right to exploit racial tension has little to do with actual policies, and a lot to do with tapping into primal emotions. If those primal emotions are losing their intensity—and they are—the strategy loses its force.

The ebbing of racism doesn’t translate into an immediate political revolution. The deep South, in particular, will probably remain strongly Republican for some time to come. But the Southern strategy is literally fraying at the edges: Border states, a category that now includes Virginia, are becoming increasingly competitive for Democrats. In fact the upset victory of James Webb over George Allen in the 2006 Virginia Senate race was a perfect illustration of the way old-fashioned racism can interact with immigration in a way that undermines movement conservatives. Many people thought so highly of the political talent exhibited by Allen, a California yuppie who had reinvented himself as a Southern good old boy, that they believed he had a good chance of becoming the next Republican presidential nominee. But then came the Macaca incident: Allen began taunting S. R. Sidharth, a dark-skinned aide to Webb who is American born but of Indian ancestry, with what turned out to be an obscure racial epithet. The incident, caught on video (as everything is these days) was enough to put Webb over the top.

The importance of the shifting politics of race is almost impossible to overstate. Movement conservatism as a powerful political force is unique to the United States. The principal reason movement conservatives have been able to flourish here, while people with comparable ideas are relegated to the political fringe in Canada and Europe, is the racial tension that is the legacy of slavery. Ease some of that tension, or more accurately increase the political price Republicans pay for trying to exploit it, and America becomes less distinctive, more like other Western democracies where support for the welfare state and policies to limit inequality is much stronger.

Possibly the most stunning part of that Pew report on long-term trends in attitudes was the section on social and “values” issues. It’s startling to realize how intolerant America was, not that long ago, and how much attitudes have changed. For example, in 1987 more than half of respondents believed that schools should have the right to fire homosexual teachers, and 43 percent believed that AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior. By 2007 those numbers were down to 28 and 23 percent, respectively. Or take the question of women’s role in society: In 1987 only 29 percent completely disagreed with the proposition that women should return to their traditional roles, but by 2007 that was up to 51 percent.

The extent of the change in attitudes is impressive. The political implications are less clear. As I explained in chapter 9, political scientists are skeptical about the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” thesis: crunching the numbers, they find little evidence that religious and social issues, as opposed to race, have actually led a large number of working-class whites to vote against their economic interests. “Values voters” seem to be decisive only in close races. Nonetheless, to the extent that social and religious intolerance has been exploited by movement conservatives, the scope for that kind of exploitation is clearly diminishing.

Furthermore there are hints of a dynamic on social and religious issues that in some ways resembles the dynamic on race: As the country becomes more tolerant the dependence of the Republican Party on an intolerant base puts it increasingly out of step with the majority. The case in point is Kansas itself, where a number of prominent Republicans became Democrats after the 2004 election in protest over the local GOP’s dominance by the religious right. “I got tired of theological debates over whether Charles Darwin was right,” declared the former state Republican chairman as he switched parties. The Kansas Republican Party has responded by demanding that members sign a seriously creepy, vaguely Maoist-sounding “unity pledge,” in which they declare, “I will, at no point in my political or personal future, find cause to transfer my Party loyalty.”[8] At the time of writing, Kansas has a Democratic governor, and Democrats hold two of its four House seats.

Americans are worried about an economy that leaves most of them behind, even in supposedly good times. They’ve become less susceptible to the politics of distraction—appeals to racial and social intolerance, fearmongering on national security. For all these reasons it seems probable that movement conservatism’s moment has passed.

Liberals need, however, to stand for more than simply not being as bad as the people who have been running America lately. Think again of the New Deal: The failure of conservative governance made it more or less inevitable that Democrats would win the 1932 election, but it was by no means certain that the victor would leave a lasting legacy. What made the New Deal’s influence so enduring was the fact that FDR provided answers to inequality and economic insecurity. These included, first and foremost, the institutions of the American welfare state—above all, Social Security. As we’ve seen, the New Deal was also remarkably successful at flattening the U.S. income distribution, without adverse effects on economic growth.

Now we’re once again a nation disgusted by conservative governance. It’s not 1932 all over again, but the odds are pretty good that Democrats—and relatively liberal Democrats, at that—will soon hold both Congress and the White House. The question is whether the new majority will accomplish anything lasting.

They should be able to do it. Liberals today have one big advantage over liberals seventy-five years ago: They know what to do, on at least one important issue. In the next chapter I’ll explain the overwhelming case for completing the New Deal by providing Americans with something citizens of every other advanced country already have: guaranteed universal health care.