MIDDLE AMERICAN RADICALISM IN THE UNITED STATES , 1970 ---- 2000
We now turn to specific issues ---- trade and globalization, corporate practices and CEO salaries, the domination of politics by big money, anger at the rich and their consumption, the Federal Reserve Board, and the international financial agencies as well as Wall Street, speculation and insider practices----that voters and ideological activists have taken up in response to uncertain economic horizons. In contrast to other industrial countries, the United States had an especially prominent populist heritage; its stirrings have been a frequent electoral litmus.
Late in 1974, when Watergate was fresh in the U.S. psyche and unemployment was reaching post-Depression highs, Patrick Caddell---George McGovern's pollster in 1972 and Jimmy Carter's from 1976 to 1980---employed a survey using two-and-one-half - hour interviews to surface political beliefs and pathologies missed by more superficial inquiries. In his 1972 election samplings, 18 percent of Americans had been willing to back Wallace for president. By late 1974 that had doubled to 35 percent --- 18 percent wanting actually to elect him, 17 percent inclined to a protest vote. Voter ideology was churning. Many simultaneously favored radical socialistic economic solutions while taking a hard-line on cultural issues.
"The people smack in the middle --- the people who are the least ideological --- are the most volatile," Caddell argued. "Forty-one percent thought that the American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." "The middle class," he said, "is coming unhinged. 'Center extremism' is correct as a description."
These views quieted by 1976, remaining subdued until 1978, when inflation was rising, OPEC was on the cusp of another oil price increase, and the Carter administration had reopened Vietnam-era psychological wounds over U.S. global retreat through a pair of treaties to convey the Panama Canal to Panama. The measures' strong support by U.S. banks and corporations seeking Panamanian and Latin American goodwill for their regional operations became a side issue. One activist later recalled the charges that certain large banks were holding IOUs that could not be redeemed unless canal revenues became available to Panama. Conservative populist leader Richard Viguerie called the treaties "a bail-out of David Rockefeller" and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Liberals and corporation executives unacquainted with the dynamics of Middle American Radicalism found this opposition quaint and crude. However, as one historian of U.S. conservatism later noted, the New Right targeted treaty backers in 1978 and 1980. Of the 68 senators who had voted for ratification, 20 were denied renomination or reelection in those two years.
By 1980 the canal fight, the second OPEC oil price hike, surging inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis had heightened a climate that Walter Dean Burnham, a leading scholar of U.S. political realignments, put in a context involving the end of the 1945-65 "golden age" a crisis of the economy, empire, culture, and state, and a politics of a "middle class under stress." The immediate result was the election of Ronald Reagan by a coalition much like Richard Nixon's of 1972 ; most of the usual GOP electorate with a notable increment of white working-class, Northern ethnic, and Southern religious fundamentalists voters.
What Burnham found unnerving about the Reagan coalition----his thesis that the early-stage crisis of the American "empire" and regime was producing a "reactionary revitalization movement" ---rested on multiple foundations. Beyond the broad conservative revivalism, the United States of the sixties and seventies, like London in the 1890s and Weimar Germany in the 1920s, had a prominent and affluent intelligentsia deplored by many ordinary folk and regarded by some as a symptom of national decay. In the Britain of the 1890s, this mood, together with concern about the industrial threats of the United States and Germany, added to the John Bull nationalism and Boer War imperialism promulgated by the Conservatives, giving them their crowning election victory in 1900.
Indeed, the Republicans of the Nixon and Reagan eras, deploring radicals, the avant-garde, and troublesome minorities (blacks) whie praising the patriotism of Merle Haggard's ballad "Okie From Muskogee" and defending overseas military involvement , were more than a little like the British Conservative governments of the late Victorian years. These Conservatives had deploredBloody Sunday, Fabians, Oscar Wilde, the Decadence movement, and troublesome minorities (Irish) while praising Rudyard Kipling and defending overseas military involvement. Thestage of British disillusionment represented by economic radicalization came later.
In the United States of the Reagan era, the frustration so visible in1980 had cooled by the 1984 election, which Reagan won with 59 percent of the vote, closely replicating the Nixon coalition of 1972 (61 percent) . In 1986, however, a sharp regional downturn hit the agricultural and energy states,and the Republicans lost the Senate they had controlled since 1980. Frustration politics began regrouping after October 1987 when the stock market took its huge one-day drop. Through the summer of 1988 it looked like the Republican nominee, George Herbert Walker Bush, might lose the November presidential race.
Luckily for Bush, the Democratic nominee was Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a humorless Harvard intellectual disdainful of the Middle American Radical stream who by October was himself under fierce Republican cultural attack. Democratic strategists complained that , "They're running a class war against us, saying we're a bunch of Cambridge-Brookline eccentric literature professors. We've got to fight back and say they're the party of privilege, the party of the rich folks." Dukakis made some populist remarks in the final days,which helped him. but it was too late.Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, privately observed that Dukakis had missed the boat by failing, until the end, to develop the class issue and divide the haves and have-nots.
We now turn to specific issues ---- trade and globalization, corporate practices and CEO salaries, the domination of politics by big money, anger at the rich and their consumption, the Federal Reserve Board, and the international financial agencies as well as Wall Street, speculation and insider practices----that voters and ideological activists have taken up in response to uncertain economic horizons. In contrast to other industrial countries, the United States had an especially prominent populist heritage; its stirrings have been a frequent electoral litmus.
Late in 1974, when Watergate was fresh in the U.S. psyche and unemployment was reaching post-Depression highs, Patrick Caddell---George McGovern's pollster in 1972 and Jimmy Carter's from 1976 to 1980---employed a survey using two-and-one-half - hour interviews to surface political beliefs and pathologies missed by more superficial inquiries. In his 1972 election samplings, 18 percent of Americans had been willing to back Wallace for president. By late 1974 that had doubled to 35 percent --- 18 percent wanting actually to elect him, 17 percent inclined to a protest vote. Voter ideology was churning. Many simultaneously favored radical socialistic economic solutions while taking a hard-line on cultural issues.
"The people smack in the middle --- the people who are the least ideological --- are the most volatile," Caddell argued. "Forty-one percent thought that the American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." "The middle class," he said, "is coming unhinged. 'Center extremism' is correct as a description."
These views quieted by 1976, remaining subdued until 1978, when inflation was rising, OPEC was on the cusp of another oil price increase, and the Carter administration had reopened Vietnam-era psychological wounds over U.S. global retreat through a pair of treaties to convey the Panama Canal to Panama. The measures' strong support by U.S. banks and corporations seeking Panamanian and Latin American goodwill for their regional operations became a side issue. One activist later recalled the charges that certain large banks were holding IOUs that could not be redeemed unless canal revenues became available to Panama. Conservative populist leader Richard Viguerie called the treaties "a bail-out of David Rockefeller" and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
Liberals and corporation executives unacquainted with the dynamics of Middle American Radicalism found this opposition quaint and crude. However, as one historian of U.S. conservatism later noted, the New Right targeted treaty backers in 1978 and 1980. Of the 68 senators who had voted for ratification, 20 were denied renomination or reelection in those two years.
By 1980 the canal fight, the second OPEC oil price hike, surging inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis had heightened a climate that Walter Dean Burnham, a leading scholar of U.S. political realignments, put in a context involving the end of the 1945-65 "golden age" a crisis of the economy, empire, culture, and state, and a politics of a "middle class under stress." The immediate result was the election of Ronald Reagan by a coalition much like Richard Nixon's of 1972 ; most of the usual GOP electorate with a notable increment of white working-class, Northern ethnic, and Southern religious fundamentalists voters.
What Burnham found unnerving about the Reagan coalition----his thesis that the early-stage crisis of the American "empire" and regime was producing a "reactionary revitalization movement" ---rested on multiple foundations. Beyond the broad conservative revivalism, the United States of the sixties and seventies, like London in the 1890s and Weimar Germany in the 1920s, had a prominent and affluent intelligentsia deplored by many ordinary folk and regarded by some as a symptom of national decay. In the Britain of the 1890s, this mood, together with concern about the industrial threats of the United States and Germany, added to the John Bull nationalism and Boer War imperialism promulgated by the Conservatives, giving them their crowning election victory in 1900.
Indeed, the Republicans of the Nixon and Reagan eras, deploring radicals, the avant-garde, and troublesome minorities (blacks) whie praising the patriotism of Merle Haggard's ballad "Okie From Muskogee" and defending overseas military involvement , were more than a little like the British Conservative governments of the late Victorian years. These Conservatives had deploredBloody Sunday, Fabians, Oscar Wilde, the Decadence movement, and troublesome minorities (Irish) while praising Rudyard Kipling and defending overseas military involvement. Thestage of British disillusionment represented by economic radicalization came later.
In the United States of the Reagan era, the frustration so visible in1980 had cooled by the 1984 election, which Reagan won with 59 percent of the vote, closely replicating the Nixon coalition of 1972 (61 percent) . In 1986, however, a sharp regional downturn hit the agricultural and energy states,and the Republicans lost the Senate they had controlled since 1980. Frustration politics began regrouping after October 1987 when the stock market took its huge one-day drop. Through the summer of 1988 it looked like the Republican nominee, George Herbert Walker Bush, might lose the November presidential race.
Luckily for Bush, the Democratic nominee was Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a humorless Harvard intellectual disdainful of the Middle American Radical stream who by October was himself under fierce Republican cultural attack. Democratic strategists complained that , "They're running a class war against us, saying we're a bunch of Cambridge-Brookline eccentric literature professors. We've got to fight back and say they're the party of privilege, the party of the rich folks." Dukakis made some populist remarks in the final days,which helped him. but it was too late.Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, privately observed that Dukakis had missed the boat by failing, until the end, to develop the class issue and divide the haves and have-nots.
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