Republican Rule: Not 30 Years, But 40

On the liberal side, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, we are now accustomed to sentences beginning with the phrase, "After thirty years of Republican rule...". I have done it myself. Many times. And it is convenient enough to see in the Reagan administration the beginning of our descent into a society bereft of reforms inaugurated with the period of the New Deal. The reality is that the political pendulum began to swing to the right with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and has never really changed direction in the ensuing years--in spite of the election of two Democratic presidents. In so many ways, 1968 more than earned its designation as "the year the world ended."

By the end of the Johnson administration, the cultural aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam and what we euphemistically call the Civil Rights movement had so thrown the American landscape into near anarchy that even Walter Lippman, the revered liberal lion of journalism, was calling for a Nixon victory and the restoration of "law and order." Racial polarization transformed Southern Dixiecrats into Southern Republicans who would gradually gain more and more power. In the North, the white working class increasingly distanced itself from the Democratic Party until their ultimate transformation into Reagan Democrats, and they have never gone back.

Nixon's counter-revolution, though mild when compared to what would be initiated during the Reagan era, was nevertheless odious enough, in combination with his overt and covert conduct of the war in Vietnam, to make him the victim of an expiatory exercise that is subsumed under the label of Watergate. After Nixon was forced out of the White House, Gerald Ford, Nixon's Vice-President, became president and Nelson Rockefeller was placed a heartbeat from the oval office. Ford was essentially a caretaker president. A trusted apparatchik of the nation's permanent government who had served on the Warren Commission investigating the murder of President Kennedy, Ford, who probably knew as many of our state secrets as any man alive, was portrayed in the media as a pipe-smoking, comfortable figure who provided comic relief by stumbling off airplanes. Just folks. Non-threatening. The tarnish of the Nixon administration never quite wore off Ford though, particularly when he pardoned his erstwhile superior early on in his administration. That decision no doubt played a role in opening the door to a switch to the Democratic Party in the figure of a truly unique American politician, a part-time peanut farmer from Georgia, a president the country felt comfortable calling "Jimmy."

James Earl Carter, Jr. was not your typical peanut farmer, however. Governor of his state, a naval officer, a nuclear physicist and a Southern Baptist minister, during his candidacy he had his hair coiffed into a Kennedy-esque forelock that he often brushed aside with one finger, campaigned on a platform of what amounted to moral rearmament, and defeated Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford. His was not a happy time in office, however. Carter's tendency to Protestant preachiness did not help an administration plagued by high interest rates, Americans taken hostage in Iran, an energy crisis that saw long lines of drivers waiting to fill their gas tanks, and his own televised pleas to have us all turn off our lights and electrical appliances. Depressing. We will look more closely at the man and his presidency later, a man whose beatification now rests on his association with Habitat for Humanity, his criticism of Israeli imposed apartheid in the occupied Palestinian lands and an alleged penchant for refreshing candor.

Americans like full gas tanks and well-lit homes. And thus the unthinkable occurred. In the presidential election of 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in his run for a second term and became president of the United States. It is with Reagan's taking office that most current accounts date the beginning of the true counter-revolution, the gradual, seemingly inexorable destruction, one by one, of the gains made by working class Americans through the greater part of the twentieth century. Exorcise those images of UAW workers battling police and being shot down, of kids in the CCC, artists in the WPA, bank regulations, the struggle for social security. Regulations were torn up, often by the very individuals appointed to the various commissions to execute those regulations. The demise of the union movement that began with Reagan's firing striking air-traffic controllers continues its downward slide to this day. White Protestant Southerners and White Catholic Northerners made an unholy alliance motivated largely by racial fears (when not actual racial hatred) and decided to barter their hard-won gains for a tacit agreement that their prerogatives, nebulous and ill-defined as they have been and still are, would not be traded away. By 1968, in another expiatory exercise, a commission was formed to look into the causes of the race riots that had destroyed literally thousands of American cities. Famously, (though currently seemingly forgotten), the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, or Kerner Report, found that:

"Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—-separate and unequal."

In the almost unbelievably short twelve-year period since the report had been issued, the transformation into two societies was realized. Once thriving American cities like Newark, New Jersey, cities that were by European standards just babies that had only begun to grow in the 1920s, were now, a mere forty years later, abandoned wholesale by their former white citizens. White flight transformed the American landscape into two sectors--white suburbs with their sprawling tract housing, malls and parking lots, and abandoned "inner cities" inhabited by black and brown citizens living beyond the protective moats of remnant silk-stocking enclaves. The phenomenon was not restricted to the nation's smaller cities. Detroit was left in ruins, and, for a while, in the 1970s, it seemed even New York, the vaunted capital of world finance (and some would say, the world) looked as if it would crumble into decay.

In spite of being a mean-spirited, Byzantinely complex man who seemed to have equal distaste for redwood trees, college students, unions and commies, Ronald Reagan truly earned his title of "great communicator" and the resultant sainthood bestowed upon him by American conservatives. Schooled as a film actor in "B" movies, he went on to host a television show in which he served as spokesman and lobbyist for General Electric ("Progress is our most important product."). To a national constituency thirsting, hungering, for reassurance that the life style that had prevailed concurrent with his reign as television host in the 1950s (the golden age of the American Dream) could somehow be restored, his message was loud and clear. Stick with me and I will dispatch the commies, the students, the urban rioters, the unions and all that socialist legislation that gave us the time of troubles we have endured. It may cost you a little, but I will make it worth your while.

As it turned out, fate and the inexorable wheels of economic change were on Reagan's side. For many, it was never really about race--it was about the class struggle. That class struggle obviously had its manifestations outside of the United States as well. The world economy had evolved to a juncture that saw the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev across the Atlantic, in their realms just as pressed as Reagan was here to save their kingdoms via counter-insurgencies. By the time Thatcher had torn up the social contract in Great Britain and perestroika and glasnost had run their course in the USSR, Ronald Reagan, conveniently addled by Alzheimer's during inquiries into his role in the blatantly unconstitutional Iran-Contra capers, could comfortably witness the handing over of power to his Vice-President, George Bush.

No one was truly prepared for the demise of the Soviet Union, least of all, it seems, the one-time CIA operative who occupied the Oval Office during those historic events. (With the possible exception of one writer for a show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In whose running skit called "News of the Future" announced in 1969 that the Soviet Union would collapse in twenty years, thereby not only calling the event, but the exact year, 1989.) Like his former boss, George Bush should have been impeached for his participation in Iran-Contra, but even with the passing of over a decade, the country was wary of being subjected to another period of self-flagellation and so allowed Bill Casey to take a (metaphoric?) cyanide capsule and Oliver North to don his Marine uniform and manhandle the U.S. congress during the Iran-Contra hearings to make the whole debacle disappear. So adamant were the American voters to see the emperor's clothing that they elected the rather peculiar Bush president. At the first opportunity, however, (and he offered it up on a silver platter by reneging on his "read my lips" promise not to raise taxes), they turned him out of office rather than tolerate him for a second term.

So anxious were the voters to put Bush behind them that they nominated and elected an Arkansas governor and striver named William Jefferson Clinton, popularly known, in the Southern fashion, as just plain Bill. So anxious were they to put Bush behind them that the voters turned a blind eye to leading indicators of his character such as the revelation of an affair with a woman named Jennifer Flowers and a laughable response to a query about his use of marijuana that had him smoking the weed, but not inhaling. (Later to gain entry to Bartlett's with the truly memorable, "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.") A Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar who had evaded the draft during the war in Vietnam and thus the first president in a long time who had never been in uniform, Bill's idol was John F. Kennedy--for reasons that would only later become obvious. Just as fortune protects the working girl and presidents like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton was the recipient of another turn of fate that, (after a slightly rocky start in which he proposed that gays be allowed to openly serve in the military, his first lady's ill-starred run at inaugurating national health insurance and an inconveniently timed recession), saw one of the greatest "bubbles" in our financial history. Although the standard of living of most Americans was still in decline, the eight years of the Clinton presidency are viewed as a period of great prosperity. The man who would be labeled "the first Black president," and, at the same time seemed to have deftly co-opted enough of the Republican programme to survive the likes of Newt Gingrich and his "Contract with America," might have gone on to take action on what he described as the three leading issues in American life, namely, race, education and the restoration of American railways, a formidable trio. (He had apparently been scared off the health care issue.) Unfortunately, a White House intern ended the Clinton version of Camelot. The Monica Lewinsky scandal illustrated the fact that enough time had passed since Watergate for the previously unthinkable descent into another impeachment episode. (Strictly speaking, there was overwhelming evidence that presidents Reagan and Bush should have been impeached earlier and a wide consensus that Bush's son should also have been a candidate for that fate. Add Nixon and Clinton who actually were impeached, add Johnson's being forced out, and we have quite a run of presidents since 1963.) Then, too, Republicans relished the idea of showing that Democrats could also be impeached.

Republicans reserved for Clinton a kind of hatred that can only emerge between close relatives. They hated the man, hated him with a transcendency that overcame any overarching, grinding wheels of economics and history. In the end, young readers of the New York Times were treated to transcripts that spelled out in almost unspeakably lurid terms what the meaning of "is" was. Rather than spare the nation so humiliating and endless a preoccupation with his sexual infantilism and resign, Bill and his bride pointed to conservative conspiracies to "get" the two of them and braved it out. By the time his feckless Vice-President, Al Gore, ran for office, the country had had enough of Bill and anything and anyone associated with Bill.

Now, we can't entirely blame Clinton for Al Gore's not having won enough votes to preclude a right wing Supreme Court's coup d'etat that left him out of office in spite of his having won the election. The Democratic brain trust had done its best to insure that Bush, Jr. would ascend to the White House. Running Gore with a Jewish candidate for Vice-President almost guaranteed defeat in the Southern states. Gore did not carry his own state. Ironically, one tactic that seemed to have backfired was the candidate's distancing himself from Clinton. In all efforts that he was allowed, Clinton proved himself a formidable campaigner, always his strength, but Gore took the moral high ground in this as he would later in doing the gentlemanly thing and not insisting on a recount in Florida (as well as in other states where voting irregularities had been glaring).

For a wannabe cowboy from Texas whose dream job was to become baseball commissioner when he grew up, a drug and alcohol abusing rich kid from Yale who was a constant disappointment to his Connecticut Yankee father, who took a glamour job flying jets in the reserve during the war in Vietnam, George Bush, Jr. surprisingly turned out to be a credit to his Harvard Law school training in his debates with Al Gore. He more than held his own, particularly in one debate when the ever-awkward Gore seemed to want to intimidate him by invading his private space. And, after the slime through which the nation had been pulled, the zeitgeist seemed to favor a man who was now a born again Christian who when asked, "Who is your hero?", could, with a reasonably straight face, (although flushed with a poker player's look of triumph), utter, "Jesus Christ."

For most liberal and left wing observers, the conservative plan, particularly since the Reagan administration, seemed to be to dig America into so deep a hole that even if the worst were to occur, and we were to see a Democrat come to office with the agenda of instituting a counter-reformation, putting regulations back in place, repairing the country's health and social services, its infrastructure, its regressive tax codes that created the greatest gap between the rich and not just the poor but everyone else in the nation's history, it would be just plain impossible. Few even on the left could have predicted just how deep that hole could get until George, Jr. came to office. Nor would many have predicted that not just our Bill of Rights, but rights going back to the Magna Carta would be fed into his administration's paper shredders.

There had been preliminary episodes of what the historian Chalmers Johnson labeled "blowback" before the events of September 11, 2001. Blowback was a term used to define attacks on U.S. interests that were in effect responses to actions taken by our government that were only secret to the American people, and obviously not to the victims of those actions. Never before, however, had that blowback occurred on American territory. For the American people it was a surprise attack carried out in broad daylight, a crystal clear autumn day that brought devastation to New York and to Washington. With Americans now rallying around the "homeland," the Bush administration launched into two wars and created a garganutan security apparatus thatdid not blush from including torture and the demise of habeus corpus.

While trillions were being spent on or foreign wars, all borrowed money, unregulated financial institutions created trillions more in so-called derivatives, with some estimates putting the total figure at 500 trillion dollars, roughly every penny in wealth all Americans would create in the next thirty-five years. By the time this house of cards would collapse in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bush administration had already been deemed to have gone too far. With lack of respect for the constitution, two unpopular, unwinnable wars, the nation viewed abroad as a pariah state, wiser heads prevailed. The first sign of a change in direction came with the institution of the Iraq War Commission, staffed with the usual representatives of the nation's permanent government, (e.g.. Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, shotgun riders and trouble-shooters on seemingly permanent standby) one of whom was selected to replace Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and still serves in that capacity under the Obama administration. Bush, and the neoconservative "cabal" around him, were effectively reined in. Few ducks have ever been lamer than Georgie in the closing months of his administration.

It is too early to reach a definitive characterization of our current president, Barack Obama, but a look back at the years since 1968 teaches us to be cautious about a Democrat's ascendancy to the White House translating into any fundamental change in policy. The fact is that the two Democratic presidents who have held office since 1968, prior to the Obama presidency, departed little from the policies of their Republican counterparts and, in fact, made significant contributions to moving the country farther to the right. It was Jimmy Carter who encouraged the "secret" war in Afghanistan that gave us Muslim fanatics armed with stinger missiles; it was he who chose to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. No Republican was a more zealous cold warrior, and we live in the aftermath of decisions made by the pious preacher from Georgia. In spite of the fact that Carter attained a certain fame for a Playboy magazine interview in which he confessed that he'd "committed adultery in my heart many times" while his party cohort Bill Clinton showed fewer inhibitions, both men have in common their having followed in both their domestic and foreign policies a philosophy that makes them nearly indistinguishable from their brothers in the Republican Party. Clinton intervened militarily in both the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq; he ended "welfare as we knew it;" he deregulated the banking industry, and, (in a policy that conservatives have now disingenouously seized upon as having been the sole or major cause of the 2008 collapse), encouraged the proliferation of sub-prime mortgages without appropriate oversight. From1968 through 2008, a total of forty years, we have had twelve years of Democratic rule which saw no interruption in the overall thrust of American foreign policy.

This is not to argue that there are no differences at all in the ways that Democratic and Republican administrations behave. The Republican Party, once associated with fiscal conservatism, has more recently been bent on spending the nation into deeper and deeper debt in a pincer movement of promoting cuts in social programs while cutting taxes and spending with abandon on their own pet projects such as wars and trillions in defense so as to leave the larder empty, devoid of resources to devote to evil socialist ideas such as free public schools, affordable health care and public housing. The two wars we are fighting, even the flooding in New Orleans have created opportunities that seem to jump out of the pages of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. The war in Iraq saw the proliferation of an all-volunteer army supported by a host of private companies including extremely profitable corporate mercenary armies employed to supplement the shortfall created by the absence of a draft.

If there were those who thought that the conservative response to the near collapse of the financial system they were most responsible for creating was to be repentance or remorse, they were soon disappointed. Nope. Not our fault. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did it. Clinton and his henchman HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo were responsible. By urging banks to cease their long term policy of red-lining minority communities and, faced with Republican sabotage of affordable housing bills, making it possible for members of those communities to buy their own homes, they had nearly brought on a global depression. This argument is so patently disingenuous, so ignores the billionaires created by the derivative and hedge fund phenomenon, so conveniently manages to blame the victims that to linger on it for long tempts madness. Yet, linger on it we do via the affinity group of Southern conservatives and such offspring as the Tea Party thugs who take from the crisis the message that its cause was too much regulation and not enough private enterprise, problems they seek to remedy in the 2010 elections.

Of course, we now have a man in the White House who speaks truth to power. Will he change the course that our ship of state has been on since 1968? Well, he not only kept on Bush's Defense Secretary, he also kept on Bush's Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, though it should be said that both men were in effect drafted out of permanent government, sometimes known--at least metaphorically--as the Northeastern Establishment. Others followed. There was Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Paul Volcker as well. Does this mean that the sunbelt/bible belt conservative era brought in with Californian Richard Nixon is coming to an end? Judging by the fevered, frenzied and fanatical response of the American right through its Tea Party surrogates, one could certainly conclude that they believe that is possible. If that is the good news, it is slim good news indeed, for the crisis here in the U.S. and in the world at large seems at a dangerous crossroad.