bemusedbibliophile:

Well into the 2010s, American political elites of both parties shared a common vision. They remained gripped by a cold-war imagination that saw the ascendancy of American liberalism not as a unique confluence of events generated by the combination of the Depression, war, and Soviet competition, but rather as the country’s natural and permanent progression. Men like John McCain and Obama believed so deeply in this story because they had worked and suffered for it, and it had given their lives a larger meaning. And for periods in American life, if one kept to the proper circles, it could actually feel true: wealth was indeed generated, excluded groups were included, and threatening adversaries were defeated.

The problem turned out to be that neither the ideals nor the institutions were up to the challenges to come. Structural economic problems had been mounting for decades, and new problems had been created in the meantime. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were international adventures larger than any since the Vietnam war. The global financial crisis underscored the precariousness of middle- and working-class economic security and exposed the scale of the divide between haves and have-nots. As the country reeled from near-economic collapse, the carceral state’s generational effects on poor and black communities led to mass protest and social rebellion. The years 2014–16 saw more civil unrest than any time since the early 1970s.

Apparently unrelated, each of these crises was the result of policies based in core cold-war assumptions: the moral value of American interventionism, the faith in market liberalism, and the presumption that American institutions were bending toward racial equality, simply in need of small-scale reforms. The policies that had set the nation down these paths had been enacted precisely because they fit so well within the cold-war frame. And as political elites responded, the dominance of that frame led them back to the same old cold-war toolkit: more intervention (Libya, Syria, Yemen), more marketized social services (Obamacare), more minor racial adjustments (body cameras, sensitivity training).

The size of these crises would have made them difficult to contain under any circumstances. But political leaders confronted another new reality: the growing intractability of the American constitutional structure. Starting in the years immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union, then accelerating with the election of the first black president in 2008, American political decision-making became defined by paralysis. Even if political elites had had the creative imagination to pursue large-scale change—as the New Dealers did before the cold-war consensus took hold—it now became impossible for reforms of almost any kind to make their way through governing institutions short of a supermajority.¹

In the 1990s, encomiums to the Constitution were taken for granted. It was commonplace for scholars and commentators, drawing on arguments that flourished at the beginning of the cold war, to praise James Madison and Alexander Hamilton for devising the very features in the US Constitution that promoted deadlock. According to this conventional wisdom, checks and balances warded off tyranny: by limiting the power of any single political actor, they ensured that one did not need a society of “angels” for democracy to function.

But as pre-cold-war reformers understood, American political institutions actually require precisely the opposite to work: a near-angelic degree of social cohesion (if not agreement on political ends) among empowered elites. The cold-war order had in fact been forged on two related facts. The first was an organized working class that helped deliver the supermajorities needed to defeat barriers to mass democracy in the 1930s, and then mustered enough electoral strength in the decades that followed to expand, or at least protect, the social safety net their efforts had secured. Just as essential, the confrontation with the Soviet Union fostered cohesion among political elites in ways that produced the conditions for compromise, most dramatically evidenced during the period of 1960s civil rights legislation. When the Republican senator Everett Dirksen helped break the Southern filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, declaring, “The time has come for equality of opportunity. . . . It will not be stayed or denied,” he was speaking the same liberal universalist language as Lyndon Johnson and was motivated, regardless of the partisan divide, by much the same vision of the country and its global mission.

With working-class organizations weakened, it has become hard to see how any political coalition can elect a supermajority capable of overcoming the Constitution’s roadblocks. At the same time, the US’s enemies, from marginal global players like North Korea to weak nonstate actors like al Qaeda or ISIS, hardly present an existential competitor in the style of the USSR. There are no longer external incentives for elite agreement. Instead, a combination of intense party polarization and the profound influence of money have left the legislative branch constitutively unable to confront fundamental social issues. And as Obama’s post-2010 time in office made clear, even the ever-more-powerful executive branch is limited when it comes to reshaping domestic policy.

The dysfunction is not a matter of our institutions alone. When the Bushes and Clintons of the world reached political power, what it meant to be American had a very specific content. Politicians knew what homilies they had to repeat to be taken seriously by party gatekeepers and thus rise to prominence. They had to defend Constitution and country, and to see in the founding principles a basic commitment to universal equality. They had to embrace free enterprise as the greatest economic system on earth. They had to speak glowingly about American exceptionalism and the country’s global responsibilities. Every one of these views remained seriously contested within sections of the public, on both the right and the left. Members of the white citizens’ councils in the South did not simply stop believing in white nationalism. Similarly, the radical political activism of the 1960s and ’70s, which challenged the combined evils of white supremacy, capitalism, and militarism, did not simply evaporate with the resignation of Nixon. These threatening ideas were suppressed, often through force by the state, and they were disavowed—even if still expressed under cover of “dog whistles”—by the two main political parties. There may have been popular constituencies for beliefs that fell outside the polite consensus, but those constituencies had no explicit home in establishment politics.

But with more than two decades having passed since the cold war, and the republic’s basic institutions paralyzed, the country was overdue for a reckoning. In the Republican Party, the candidates of the old center-right, like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, were dispatched with ease. In the Democratic Party, Clinton ran as an old-fashioned cold warrior, with a flag-waving party convention that looked, and at times even sounded, like what Nixon or Reagan might have offered, embracing the national security establishment and repeating the truisms of the postwar order (“We are great because we are good”). This strategy won Clinton the most votes, from her party and the general voting public, but the center of political gravity nevertheless shifted elsewhere. On the left, those who championed Sanders and rallied to social movements have not hesitated to critique capitalism, defend socialism, reject the national security state and hyper-incarceration, and call for both a dismantling of the banks and an end to racial and class inequality on a structural level. On the right, new life has been breathed into perhaps the most powerful pre-cold-war ideological position in American history: the long-standing combination of anti-elitism, economic populism, and white nationalism, stretching in various permutations from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to Tom Watson, Father Coughlin, and George Wallace.

The differences between Trump’s and Wallace’s political trajectories are instructive. In 1972, Wallace’s third attempt to claim the Democratic nomination was derailed by an assassination attempt. But his failure overall was also due to coordinated efforts within the party to deny him the nomination. A significant part of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 primary strategy involved running popular local surrogates against Wallace in the states where Wallace ran. In 2016, no analogous effort was mobilized against Trump. Part of the reason was that in the 1960s and ’70s, elites still appreciated the power of overt white supremacy. Four decades later, the leadership in both parties simply could not believe that their invocations of “American values” would fail to blunt the appeal of an old man who trafficked in explicit racism and misogyny, and who embodied elements of the past long assumed to have been politically vanquished. But Trump’s success was in part due to his advanced age. Raised in the early days of the cold war, he gave voice to the sentiments and vitriol of a previous era when white nationalism was active enough that it had to be aggressively tamped down. This might also explain why Trump’s parallel figure on the left was also a septuagenarian. In his youth, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League, a group that originated in the Progressive-era Socialist Party. He came of age with a politics that predates the cold war—perhaps this, and their rise outside the party process for culling nonestablishment voices, are the two men’s only real similarities.

Aziz Rana, “Goodbye Cold War,” n+1 (Winter 2018) (x)

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