Is the U.S. on the cusp of a Sixth, or Seventh, political party system?

[KingOrfeo]

Since about 1967, American historians, by general consensus, have divided the political party system in the U.S. into periods, punctuated by realigning (presidential) elections:

First Party System: 1792-1824. Federalists (Adams, Hamilton; for strong national government and commercial interests) vs. Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson; decentralist, populist, agrarian). Encompasses the War of 1812.

1800 election: Rise of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans to dominance, power shift from New England to the South. Period encompasses the Louisiana Purchase.

Era of Good Feelings: 1817-1825. Democratic-Republican hegemony, Federalists reduced to isolated strongholds. Ended with the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824, which gave the presidency to John Quincy Adams of the National Republican faction.

1828 election: Andrew Jackson (having been balked four years previously) wins the presidency.

Second Party System: 1828-1854. Factions of the Democratic-Republicans in effect split into two parties, the Democrats (Jackson; populist, agrarian, hostile to a national bank) and the Whigs (Henry Clay; favored industry, modernization, a protective tariff, a national bank, federal funding for "internal improvements" such as canals, highways, railroads; ultimately split over the question whether to allow or forbid expansion of slavery to the territories). Period encompasses the Mexican-American War, acquisition of the West.

1860 election: Election of Lincoln, the first Republican POTUS; first presidential election to break down along purely sectional lines (Lincoln won without the electoral votes of a single slave state). Provoked the Civil War.

Third Party System: 1854 to the mid-1890s. Republicans (formed in 1854 out of Free-Soilers, "Conscience Whigs," and disaffected Democrats) vs. the Democrats. Encompassed the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, settlement of the West and the "end of the frontier" (i.e., the final end of the Indian nations as independent military powers). The Republicans evolve from a radical anti-racist party, to the party of the "free, white, working man," to the party of big-business interests.

1896 election: Republican McKinley defeated Democrat/Populist/"Silver Republican" nominee William Jennings Bryan. Defeat also of the economic-populist, pro-inflationary Free Silver movement.

Fourth Party System: 1896-1932: Republicans dominant, Democrats in minority. A prosperous period encompassing the Progressive Era, World War I, and the beginning of the Great Depression.

1932 election: Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover.

Fifth Party System: 1933 - ???. Democrats dominant. Rise of the New Deal Coalition. Encompasses the New Deal and World War II, and (at least) the beginning of the Cold War.

And there the consensus breaks down.

The party system model with its numbering and demarcation of the historical systems was introduced in 1967.[1] Much of the work published on the subject has been by political scientists explaining the events of their time as either the imminent breakup of the Fifth Party System, and the installation of a new one or that this transition took place some time ago.[2] However, no decisive electoral event, shifting both presidential and congressional control, has occurred since 1932.[3] This idea was particularly popular in the 1970s, specifying dates as early as 1960[4]

Other current writing on the Fifth Party System expresses admiration of its longevity: the first four systems lasted about 30 to 40 years each, which would have implied that the early twenty-first century should see a Sixth Party System.[4] It is also possible, as argued in (Jensen 1981) and elsewhere, that the party system has given way, not to a new party system, but to a period of dealignment in politics. Previous party systems ended with the dominant party losing two consecutive House elections by large margins, with a presidential election coinciding with or immediately following (in 1896) the second house election—decisive electoral evidence of political realignment. By this definition, consecutive Democratic victories in the Congressional elections of 2006 and 2008, in addition to the election of Barack Obama, imply that such a realignment may be underway. However this contradicts the presumption, or begs the question, of which party has been dominant in the period. The collapse of the two party system itself and its replacement with something else is generally not considered a possibility.

The elections of 1964, 1968, 1980, 1994 (Congressional), 2006 (Congressional), and 2008 all have been suggested as "realigning elections" by some historians.

I would argue we are now at the beginning of the Seventh party system. The Fifth ended, and the Sixth began, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

This, I believe, is the essential narrative:

From 1933, the Democratic Party's dominance was based on the New Deal Coalition:

The New Deal coalition was the alignment of interest groups and voting blocs that supported the New Deal and voted for Democratic presidential candidates from 1932 until approximately 1968, which made the Democratic Party the majority party during that period, losing only to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a coalition that included the Democratic party, big city machines, labor unions, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), liberal farm groups, intellectuals, and the white South. The coalition fell apart in 1968, but it remains the model that party activists seek to replicate.[1]

Meanwhile: In 1952, the Republican Party was split between its Northeastern moderate faction, which supported Eisenhower, and its Midwestern conservative faction, represented by Senator Robert Taft. The essential difference between them was that the Eisenhower faction accepted the New Deal and the Taft faction did not and wanted to roll it back. Eisenhower got the nomination; but the Taft faction was resurgent in the 1964 Goldwater campaign -- which lost, but which kick-started the modern Conservative Movement. You can read the story in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein.

In the social, cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s, the Democrats finally and solidly established themselves as the party of civil rights. Henceforth they would get practically all the black vote, despite the Pubs' history as the "Party of Lincoln," but could no longer rely on the "Solid South." When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he remarked, "We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation."

Nixon, really a moderate "Rockefeller Republican" like Eisenhower, was mainly interested in foreign policy, which he regarded as a POTUS' real job. Civil rights was a domestic issue. By habit and personality Nixon was a racist of the most vulgar sort, but he really had no emotional investment on either side of the civil rights struggle. But he readily seized the opportunity to position himself against it and win the votes of white social conservatives, especially in the South. This was the Southern Strategy. He defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in a three-way race with white Southern independent George Wallace. In 1972, Nixon won every Southern state that had gone for Wallace in '68. You can read the story in Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, also by Perlstein.

On the Dem side, the New Deal coalition was broken up by the ascendancy of the New Politics faction represented by George McGovern. This alienated conservative white Southerners, as well as white urban Catholic working-class "ethnics." The Dems' traditional class-based politics were abandoned for "identity politics," defined by the interests of "communities" -- African-Americans, Latinos, women/feminists, gays, etc. The Democratic Party became an "hourglass" coalition of '60s counterculturalists and intellectuals, affluent liberals, and poor and working-poor nonwhites -- with declining white middle-class and working-class support.

The end of Nixon's career in Watergate did not end the "Southern Strategy." Over the course of the 1970s, the GOP rebuilt itself around "movement conservatism" (the Taft-Goldwater faction) and made massive inroads among conservative white Southerners. There was, in fact, a massive exchange of constituencies between the Democratic and Republican parties, many liberal or "Rockefeller Republicans" switching over to the Dems. For the first time in modern history, the Democrats and Republicans became truly ideological parties -- each still a broad big-tent coalition of viewpoints and interests, to be sure, but on either side of a definite "liberal-conservative" dividing line. So it remains to this day.

This culminated in the realigning election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, establishing the Sixth Party System, Republicans/conservatives dominant. During this period there was only one Dem POTUS, Clinton; and, like Eisenhower and Nixon, he succeeded only by largely accommodating to the dominant party's views and narrative.

CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

 

[KingOrfeo]

OP CONTINUED

This was the period in which the Republican Party was dominated by "movement conservatism," as described in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of "conservative" offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are "adverse to rapid change" and "moderate, avoiding extremes." Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. "Conservatism" -- no less than its foes "liberalism" or "communitarianism" -- has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future."

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in "schemes and speculations" like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right -- unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots -- on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

During this period, however, cultural, generational, and demographic changes continued. Gradually, American liberals grew to outnumber conservatives. See The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. See also the Pew Research Center for the People & Press study of "Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007"; and the Center for American Progress Study, "State of American Political Ideology, 2009".

The geographic division today between Dems and Pubs, liberals and conservatives, is not North-South, East-West, or Coasts-Heartland, but City-Countryside. The supposed "red-state-blue-state-divide" oversimplifies the picture. See this map, which breaks the vote down by county, and shades along a spectrum from solid red to purple to solid blue. In Ruy and Teixeiras' terms, the cities and exurbs are "ideopolises."

These trends reached a tipping-point and culminated in the election of Obama in 2008 and what I believe is the beginning of the Seventh Party System. For the foreseeable future, the Democrats/liberals will be dominant. Now, as we have seen in the "tea party" protests and "town hall" meetings, the Pubs/conservatives certainly are not going away. There might even be another Pub POTUS or two in the coming era -- but only of a moderate, Eisenhower/Nixon sort.

As Sam Tanenhaus, author of the new book The Death of Conservatism, noted in this recent Newsweek interview:

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead.
Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The consensus forged by Buckley in the 1960s gained strength through two decisive acts: first, Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society, and made sure when he did it to secure the support of conservative Republicans like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Sen. John Tower. This pulled the movement toward the center. Second: Buckley saw that the civil disturbances of the late 1960s (in particular urban riots and increasingly militant anti-Vietnam protests) posed a challenge to social harmonies preferred by genuine conservatives and genuine liberals alike. When the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called on liberals to join with conservatives in upholding "the politics of stability," Buckley replied that he was ready to help. He placed the values of "civil society" (in Burke's term) above those of his own movement or the GOP.

Today we see very little evidence of this. In his classic The Future of American Politics (1952), the political journalist Samuel Lubell said that our two-party system in fact consists of periods of alternating one-party rule—there is a majority "sun" party and a minority "moon" party. "It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out," Lubell wrote. Thus, in the 1980s, Republicans grasped (and Democrats did not) that new entrepreneurial energies had been unleashed, and also that the Cold War could be brought to a conclusion through strong foreign policy. This was the Republicans' "sun" period. The reverse is happening today. The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh's stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.

Is there an analogous historical moment? Conservatives argue that this is 1965 and that a renaissance is at hand.
I disagree. Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—"socialist," "fascist"—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and "Old Right" made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.

Now and for the foreseeable future, the GOP is the "moon party." The Democratic Party is the "sun party" and all the important issues of the day will be threshed out within its ranks.

Counterarguments?

 

[rosco rathbone]

Good science lesson. Just finished Nixonland last month and the Goldwater book is on order.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Good science lesson. Just finished Nixonland last month and the Goldwater book is on order.

For a good and (compared to the above) brief treatment of the conservative movement's more recent history, try Up from Conservatism (1996), by Michael Lind.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Counterarguments?

Will the AFC or the NFC win the Super Bowl?

 

[rosco rathbone]

For a good and (compared to the above) brief treatment of the conservative movement's more recent history, try Up from Conservatism (1996), by Michael Lind.

Pretty sure I read that one already. My retention is nil.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Pretty sure I read that one already. My retention is nil.

Perhaps your brain is instinctively rejecting useless information.

It's a not-uncommon mental defense mechanism.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Will the AFC or the NFC win the Super Bowl?

NFC!! How can you even ask, you dumbass traitor?!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Perhaps your brain is instinctively rejecting useless information.

It's a not-uncommon mental defense mechanism.

Oh, believe me, nothing Lind has ever written comes under the heading of "useless information." (By the standards of political and historical analysis, that is.)

For instance, see this recent article: "Intellectual Conservatism, RIP." (Thread-relevant.)

On Sept. 18, Irving Kristol died. On Feb. 27, 2008, William F. Buckley Jr. passed away. Kristol was known as "the godfather of neoconservatism," while Buckley was the founder of the "movement conservatism" of Goldwater and Reagan. The intellectual conservatism that they, in different ways, sought to foster had passed from the scene before they did.

I was a friend of Bill Buckley and an employee of Irving Kristol for several years in the early 1990s, as executive editor of the National Interest, the foreign policy journal published by Kristol and brilliantly edited by Owen Harries. A neoconservative of the older, Democratic school, I broke with the right in the early 1990s and warned about where right-wing radicals were taking the country in my book "Up From Conservatism." The train wreck I predicted occurred during the Bush years, and the postmortems have begun. One is Sam Tanenhaus' indispensable and just-published study "The Death of Conservatism." Another is found in a May 10 blog post by Richard Posner: "My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising ... By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party."

Historians of intellectual conservatism often claim that it consisted of three intellectual movements: the movement conservatism centered on Buckley's National Review, libertarianism and neoconservatism. I am not so sure that the first two qualify as intellectual movements. In the 1950s and 1960s National Review featured some brilliant mavericks like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall and Russell Kirk, but for most of its subsequent history it was simply a partisan opinion journal. As for the libertarian intellectual movement, isn't that a contradiction in terms? How intellectual can a movement be, if it reflexively answers "the market!" to every question of domestic and foreign policy, before the question is even asked?

That leaves neoconservatism. But in its origins neoconservatism was a movement of the center-left, not of the right. Here is Nathan Glazer, co-editor with Irving Kristol of the Public Interest, in that magazine's final issue in spring 2005, recalling the origins of the journal in the 1960s: "All of us had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I would wager (?) that most of the original stalwarts of The Public Interest, editors and regular contributors, continued to vote for Democratic presidential candidates all the way to the present. Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal and indeed the major programs of Johnson's Great Society ... Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the 'neo' before 'conservative.'"

The "neoconservatism" of the 1990s, defined by support for the invasion of Iraq and centered on Rupert Murdoch's magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by Irving's son William Kristol, had little to do with the original impulse, as Glazer points out: "There is very little overlap between those who promoted the neoconservatism of the 1970s and those committed to its latter day manifestation." While Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz set aside any differences with the Republican right by the 1990s, other first-generation neocons like Glazer and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained true to their New Deal/Great Society principles. Several of them told me over the years that they thought of themselves as "paleoliberals," not "neoconservatives," a term that was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington and embraced as a badge of honor by Irving Kristol.

In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Society liberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left of the era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnson liberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism and should be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70s neoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left, however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to their beloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. Ultimately Milton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to America than the carnival freaks of the counterculture.

But the early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual. (One of its bibles was Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book!") Like today's right, the '70s left favored theatrical protest over discussion and debate. The prophets of the Age of Aquarius and the "population explosion" were every bit as apocalyptic as Glenn Beck. And just as today's right-wing radicals play at Boston Tea Parties, so Abbie Hoffman dressed up as Uncle Sam. The teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.

Boomer nostalgia to the contrary, in the case of practically every domestic issue disputed by the counterculture and the original neoconservatives the mainstream progressive position today is that of the neoconservatives of the '70s. While the neoconservatives of the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s exaggerated Soviet power, the kind of muscular liberal internationalism that Pat Moynihan defended against the left in the 1970s and against Reaganite unilateralism in the 1980s is today's progressive grand strategy. Neoconservatives like Moynihan were denounced as racists in the 1970s for saying the same things about the importance of law and order and functioning families that Clinton and Obama have been able to say without controversy. The original neoconservatives like Moynihan and Glazer sought to help the black and Latino poor by means of universal, race-neutral programs instead of race-based affirmative action, which, they warned, would spark a white backlash to the benefit of conservatives. They were right about the political potency and longevity of that backlash, too, even though today's progressives still refuse to admit it.

The enduring legacy of the original neoconservatives is less a matter of policy positions than a particular intellectual style. David Hume defined the essayist as a messenger from the realm of learning to the realm of conversation. Between the late '60s and the mid-'80s, the public intellectuals of the neoconservative movement shuttled between the two realms, writing essays with academic rigor and journalistic clarity for the general educated public in Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, and the two quarterlies that Irving Kristol founded, the Public Interest and the National Interest. Here are a few of the essays in the inaugural issue of the Public Interest in fall 1965: Daniel Patrick Moynihan on "The Professionalization of Reform"; Robert M. Solow, "Technology and Unemployment"; Jacques Barzun, "Art--by act-of-Congress"; Nathan Glazer, "Paradoxes of American Poverty"; Daniel Bell, "The Study of the Future." The journal in its ecumenical first issue included Robert L. Heilbroner from the left and Robert A. Nisbet from the right. If you were interested in the scintillant collision of philosophy, politics and policy, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. In an era as inhospitable as our own to the essay as a form, it is encouraging to see an attempt by conservatives to revive the Public Interest under the name of National Affairs. The influence of the neoconservative style of informed debate is evident as well in the flourishing new liberal quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

In the 1950s, Irving Kristol, with the British poet Stephen Spender, had co-edited Encounter. In my view Encounter was the best magazine in the English language ever (sorry, Addison and Steele). Here is an anthology of the best of Encounter, including essays and poems by W.H.. Auden and Daniel Bell and Isaiah Berlin and short stories by Nadine Gordimer and Edmund Wilson. There was a scandal in 1965 when it was revealed that this transatlantic journal of ideas was secretly funded as part of the cold war of ideas by the CIA (both Spender and Kristol claimed to have been deceived). Never was CIA money better spent.

Irving Kristol; his wife, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb; and many of their friends and allies had begun on the anti-communist left, battling Stalinists in the U.S. and Europe on the intellectual front of the Cold War. Because Soviet-controlled communists in Western democracies set up cultural and intellectual front groups to battle for public opinion, the anti-Stalinist left decided to fight fire with fire by setting up its own network of front groups and publications, often funded, as in the case of Encounter, by the CIA. This kind of Leninist popular-front strategy, using little magazines, committees and manifestos like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Project for a New American Century, was the organizational contribution of the neoconservatives in the 1990s to their creationist and libertarian allies in the Republican right. But by the time Kristol fils had succeeded Kristol pere as the new godfather of neoconservatism, most of the public intellectuals of the first generation like Moynihan, Bell and Glazer had distanced themselves from Neoconservatism 2.0.

The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s. A robust new liberalism, if there is to be one in the aftermath of the opportunistic triangulations of Clinton and Obama, cannot leapfrog back to the Progressives or New Dealers, but must begin closer to home, with the early neoconservatives, who had learned from the failures and mistakes as well as the successes of the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.

 

[rosco rathbone]

But the early neoconservatives were right to defend mainstream liberalism against countercultural radicalism. Like today's right, the '60s and '70s left was emotional, expressivist and anti-intellectual. (One of its bibles was Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book!") Like today's right, the '70s left favored theatrical protest over discussion and debate. The prophets of the Age of Aquarius and the "population explosion" were every bit as apocalyptic as Glenn Beck. And just as today's right-wing radicals play at Boston Tea Parties, so Abbie Hoffman dressed up as Uncle Sam. The teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.

This meme, that today is 1968 with the parties reversed, has been popping up lately.

 

[Byron In Exile]

This meme, that today is 1968 with the parties reversed, has been popping up lately.

There has to be an "opposition" that the disaffected can channel their angst and donations into, even if it's impotent.

That allows the steam to vent and prevents an explosion.

 

[KingOrfeo]

There has to be an "opposition" that the disaffected can channel their angst and donations into, even if it's impotent.

That allows the steam to vent and prevents an explosion.

It also fosters the illusion that a real explosion/revolution is imminent -- at least, it did in 1968.

But I favor Tanenhaus' conclusion that the time we're now living in, in partisan-political terms, bears a closer resemblance to 1933.

 

[Byron In Exile]

It also fosters the illusion that a real explosion/revolution is imminent -- at least, it did in 1968.

That's inherent in the steam-venting process.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Good read:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/22/beck/index.html

 

[KingOrfeo]

Come to think of it, maybe the Sixth Party System really began in 1972. It seems counterintuitive to treat an election as a "realigning" one if the incumbent is re-elected, but, consider: That was the year in which:

(1) The Democratic Party definitely swung over to left-liberalism, the New Politics and identity politics -- in the process alienating millions of white middle-class and working-class voters; and

(2) The Wallace voters of 1968, mostly former Democrats, swung over to Nixon and the GOP -- and stayed there.

And from then to 2008, only two Dems, Carter and Clinton, won presidential elections, and they were the most conservative Dems to hold the White House since Grover Cleveland.

It also seems to fit in better with the historic pattern of an American party system lasting approximately 40 years (although that is a very rough guide and there's no obvious law of nature why it should be so -- unless you buy into generational-cycle theories, like that of Strauss and Howe). 1932-1972 (Fifth Party System), 40 years. 1972-2008 (Sixth Party System), 36 years.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Good science lesson. Just finished Nixonland last month and the Goldwater book is on order.

The most surprising thing I learned from Nixonland -- and it's quite incredible and I've never read it in any other period history, but Perlstein documents it pretty well -- is that Nixon, in early 1968, before he was even POTUS, used his influence to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks from behind the scenes, just so the Vietnam War would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November.

It makes all the other misdeeds of his career, heaped all together, seem trivial by comparison.

 

[rosco rathbone]

The most surprising thing I learned from Nixonland -- and it's quite incredible and I've never read it in any other period history, but Perlstein documents it pretty well -- is that Nixon, in early 1968, before he was even POTUS, used his influence to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks from behind the scenes, just so the Vietnam War would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November.

It makes all the other misdeeds of his career, heaped all together, seem trivial by comparison.

That book was so great. Of all the books I've read that explain the rise of the right, that's the best.