Coalitions and the Making of Modern American Politics 2.0

8/3/2019 Coalitions and the Making of Modern American Politics 2.0

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Coalitions and the Making of Modern American Politics

The American political landscape has changed drastically since the election of John F.

Kennedy in 1960. Within those fifty years the global structural economy has transformed and the

Soviet Union so long the focus of American foreign policy has collapsed. None of these events,

however, has meant as much to American politics as the shift in political coalitions and the

subsequent rise of a powerful conservative movement. Once in power, this movement secured itself

through conscious policy choices; these choices have been supported, and indeed propagated,

through an ideology that can be called historical fundamentalism. 1 Only in the wake of the 2008

financial crisis has there been a serious challenge to this conservative faction a challenge that has

taken only tenuous steps, though meaningful ones, towards progress.

During the 1950s and the Eisenhower administration, many in the Republican Party

reconciled themselves with the New Deal and consensus based politics. By the 85 th Congress in

1957, nine Republican congressmen actually voted to the left of the median legislator. 2 A vocal

minority, however, stood well to the right of the political spectrum. They were led by Ohio Senator

Robert A. Taft; 3 his supporters, however, were continuously disappointed when they were repeatedly

rejected by the mainstream Republican Party. 4 Eventually, after the death of Senator Taft, a new

conservative figurehead was needed. Clarence Manion, a conservative activist who claimed the

Eisenhower administration was secretly influenced by leftwing communists, 5 began this process

in June 1959. 6 He attempted to draft the junior Senator from Arizona for the Republican

nomination in 1960: Barry Goldwater.

Though the nomination effort in 1960 failed, Manion, now joined by more activists like

Clifton White, created a nationwide network to wrest control of the Republican Party from the

Eastern establishment. When the two factions of the Republican Party met at the Republican

National Convention of 1964 in San Francisco, the result was a convention floor brawl broadcast

for the entire country to see. 7 When liberal Republicans like Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New


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coverage that whistle stop comebacks like Harry Trumans in 1948 became increasingly difficult.

Only the overwhelming support of organized labor, in the form of millions of dollars and thousands

of volunteers, narrowed the election. 17 The narrowness of the election, however, only somewhat

obscured the fact that the Democratic Party was now rudderless while the Republicans were united

behind a master political architect. 18

Nixon had returned from a political wasteland to lead a rejuvenated Republican Party. He

was moreover, by the definitions of the day, a conservative. 19 Yet there was a difference between

Barry Goldwaters movement and Richard Nixon, who had called Goldwaters candidacy a

tragedy until it was no longer politically expedient to do so. Whereas Goldwater wanted to destroy

his enemies he famously hauled Walter Reuther before a Congressional investigation Nixon

sought to co-opt them. 20 He spent much of his first term building what he called a New Majority

to replace the New Deal Coalition. 21 He especially sought to pry organized labor, which had almost

been his downfall in 1968, from its traditional allies in the Democratic Party. Though he was unable

to win over labor leaders like AFL CIO president George Meany, Nixons appeals to the Hard

Hat Rio ters and men like Peter Brennan, head of the New York building trades, helped immensely in securing the votes of rank and file union members. 22

Nixons political calculus was vindicated during the election of 1972. Not only did he crush

George McGovern, but he won 54% of the union vote as well. 23 Just under two years later, however,

Richard Nixon was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal; a crime which resulted in

the worst constitutional crisis since Reconstruction. 24 His resignation threw the reins of power in the

Republican Party to a conservative movement which had been waiting to return since Buckleys

speech in 1964. They were almost able to unseat an incumbent Republican president, Gerald Ford,

at the 1976 convention. 25 Four years later, they had their apotheosis.


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Ronald Reagan beat Democrat Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980 with 51% of the

popular vote and 489 to 49 in the Electoral College. 26 Carter had failed to reverse Nixons division

of the new and establishment liberals and suffered because of it. Reagan, however, made such

considerations irrelevant in the immediate future. Unlike Nixon, his administration was not content

to operate within the confines of the post war consensus in cooperation with its opponents.

Reagan who had started his political career as Goldwater stump man would crush what was left

of the establishment New Dealers. 27

Reagans respo nse to a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, a union

which had endorsed his candidacy, set the tone in industrial and labor relations for the rest of the

1980s.28 By breaking the PATCO strike, Reagan signaled a return to the type of strike breaking and

union busting not seen since 1919. Stacking the NLRB with management friendly members

effectively eliminated any recourse to the Federal government and undermined any new organizing

drives as well as the process of collective bargaining. 29 Destroying the traditional source of

Democratic campaign contributions and volunteers ensured that Reagans policies of deregulation

and tax cutting would dominate political discourse for the next twenty five years. The policy choices that defined the Reagan administration did indeed have significant

traction. Even in the face of fall out from Savings and Loan deregulation and rising inequality from

unbalanced tax cuts, the faith of supply side economics, as David Stockman, Director of the Office

of Management and Budget called it, marched on. 30 Even into the second Clinton administration,

deregulation carried broad, bi partisan appeal. The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, a Depression

Era piece of financial regulation, passed congress with wide support and was signed by President

Clinton in 1999. 31 In addition to continued deregulation, even the tax readjustments that occurred

under both Clinton and Bush Sr. failed to stanch the rising inequality between the wealthiest

Americans and the rest. 32 Any progress was lost to George W. Bushs 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.


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Much of the continued support for Reagan era policies and the conservative movement has

come from what historian Jill Lepore calls historical fundamentalism; this doctrine combines

constitutional originalism, an assumption that the Founding Fathers could make sense of modern

politics, and ideology sometimes religion, sometimes libertarianism. 33 When applied to the policy

of deregulation, historical fundamentalists see business regulations as analogous to the Tea and

Stamp Acts of the American revolutionary period; unsurprisingly, the same arguments are used

against new taxes. This view of history has spread across the country through institutions like Pat

Robertsons Regent University. It received a serious boost in the public sphere when the Texas

School Board adopted a new history curriculum complete with defense of McCarthyism. 34

The greatest challenge to these beliefs, indeed to the Reagan legacy, came from the financial

and economic collapse of 2007-2008 which helped elect Barack Obama. Obamas election has so far

resulted in a version of national healthcare, the Lily Ledbetter Act, the repeal of the discriminatory

policy of Dont Ask Dont Tell, and recently a nuclear disarmament treaty. 35 Liberals, labor, civil

rights activists, and peace protesters have all seen the beginnings of reform once again. Yet the

Obama administration has still taken cautious steps in reversing years of tax cuts and deregulation.Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both veterans of the deregulatory Clinton administrations

Treasury Department, have been key economic advisors to President Obama. 36 Allowing the Bush

tax cuts to expire has also been compromised away for two years.

The Obama administration has, however, to its credit, passed more progressive legislation

than any other administration in the past three decades. It behooves one to remember that neither

was the New Deal Coalition formed overnight nor the Great Society built in a day.


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1 Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Partys Revolution and the Battle over American History ,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15-16.2 Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2007), 75. 3

Rick Perlstein , Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, (New York: Nation Books, 2001), 10; ibid, 48.4

Ibid.5 Ibid, 10.6 Ibid, 48.7 Ibid, 382-848 Ibid, 391.9 Ibid, 393.10 Ibid, 472.11 Ibid, 472-73.12 Ibid, 513.13 Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 111.14 Ibid, 116.15 Ibid, 206; ibid, 328-29.16 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 389-90.17 White, Making of the President 1968, 426-27. 18 Jefferson Cowie, Stayin Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class , (New York: The New Press, 2010), 138-39.19 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 390.20 Ibid, 38-39.21 Cowie, Stayin Alive, 138-39.22 Ibid, 135-37.23 Ibid, 161.24 Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 1625 Ibid.26 Ibid, 124.27 Ibid, 132.28 Ibid, 277.29 Ibid.30 Ibid, 145.31 Jonathan Alter, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 316.32 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer And

Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 18; ibid, 23.33 Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes, 15-16.34 Ibid, 13.35 Alter, The Promise, 428; ibid 112.36 Ibid, 28.


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Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class . New York: TheNew Press, 2010.

Hacker, Jacob S. and Paul Pierson. Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the RichRicher And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Lepore, Jill. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Partys Revolution and the Battle over AmericanHistory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,New York: Nation Books, 2001.

White, Theodore H. The Making of the President 1968. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

Wilentz, Sean, The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008, New York: HarperCollins Publishers,2008.

Coalitions and the Making of Modern American Politics 2.0

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