Campbell Public Affairs Institute

CAMPBELL PUBLIC AFFAIRS INSTITUTE Commentaries on the American Presidency May, 2004 The 2004 Election: A Watershed Moment David H. Bennett All presidential elections are colored by partisan rhetoric. The stakes are so high for so many that candidates and party activists—no matter what the year or what the Meredith Professor of History state of the union—insist that victory for their side is essential to insure the future. But this campaign year is different. There is bitterness in the air that is unmatched The Maxwell School of in modern history. Syracuse University It is not a byproduct the quadrennial struggle for office. It is the result of deep, unbridgeable ideological disagreements over domestic policy that have been years [email protected] in the making. It is the result of a wrenching dispute over a starkly different direc- tion for American foreign and military policy put in motion by the incumbent administration. And it is the result of the extraordinary tone of personal animus injected into presidential politics in the 1990’s that now leads many on both sides of the party line to view the other candidate with poisonous contempt. This time, the partisan rhetoric is truly passionate and the outcome of this election will be a watershed moment in political history. THE ASSAULT ON ACTIVIST GOVERNMENT The debate about domestic policy and the agenda of the present White House stretches back through the Great Society programs of the sixties to the New Deal of the thirties and beyond. George W. Bush and his team set out to continue and vastly expand the work of the Reagan years, in which the assault on those activist presidential governments of the past had begun. The goal of Team Bush: dismantle, paralyze or privatize governmental programs or agencies established by the hated “reform” administrations, appoint youthful judges who would use the courts—for decades to come—as instruments of conservative ideology, reshape the tax code to reward those at the top while simultaneously shrinking revenues and thus starving social policies central to the vision of the despised reformers of the twentieth century. With no mandate after the bizarre election outcome of 2000, the “compassionate Campbell Public Affairs Institute conservative” candidate—-now a minority president polling over a half-million The Maxwell School of Syracuse University votes less than his rival—confounded analysts by rejecting moderation and coali- 306 Eggers Hall tion-building to aggressively pursue this assault on the programs of the past. Syracuse, New York 13244 315-443-9707/ Fax 315-443-9734 It was in the Progressive Era after the turn of the twentieth century that the first http://www.campbellinstitute.org activist presidents of the modern era attempted to use government—-as their cham- pions put it—to “adjust capitalism to democracy.” The industrial revolution had transformed America into the economic colossus that would own the future but it had produced a great concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few and of the very few. But the initiatives of the first powerful presidents of modern history to establish a Federal Trade Commission to police excesses by corporate giants, a Federal Reserve System to check the power of great private bankers, tariff and anti-trust legislation to ensure competition, were mild indeed and contained no real social agenda. It took the Great Depression to provide the setting for a resurgent age of reform but also for the emergence of true presidential government. Responding to an economic collapse creating a crisis unmatched since the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal vastly expanded that regulatory agenda first introduced by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. (There would be the SEC, FCC, NLRB, CAA and more.) It established the government as employ- er of last resort through a series of massive relief agencies. It created the most enduring piece of the contemporary “safety net” in Social Security. It supported strong labor legislation and gave judicial appointments to those who would not block activist programs. (In addition, the GI Bill, created in the war years, would demonstrate anew the impact and popularity of a big government program.) Roosevelt was loathed by conservatives. They believed, with Herbert Hoover, that he was weakening the individual- ist ethos at the very heart of the “American Dream” by allowing free citizens to become dependent on “big daddy” government. “We are dealing with the intangibles of life and ideals,” was Hoover’s response. But so popular was the Roosevelt Revolution that the triumphant liberalism of the thirties would not be seriously challenged until the eighties. The Republican Party abandoned the Hooverian conservatives in 1940. With the exception of Barry Goldwater’s dis- astrously unsuccessful effort in 1964, it would not offer a presidential candidate promising to repeal the New Deal for decades to come. It is true that Democrats Harry Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy—-despite domestic programs with Roosevelt-like names (Fair Deal, New Frontier)—would be unsuccessful in addressing the civil rights, health and education items on the “hidden agenda” left over from the New Deal. But there was no repealing what had been put in place and the opposition party did not try. Robert Taft, the true conservative “Mr. Republican,” was given a mon- ument on Capitol Hill by his party but not the nomination in 1952: that went to Dwight Eisenhower, the product of the eastern, “liberal” wing of his party. Ike was a “modern Republican” who certainly would not offer activist government—save for the Interstate Highway initiative—but would not try to gut New Deal programs. But what was accomplished on LBJ’s watch was a concluding chapter in the construction of an activist presidential agenda that would infuriate ideological opponents and become the battle ground for White House struggles to come. In the sixties, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society would build on them. He effectively used the huge “working majority” in Congress made possible by his crushing victory over Goldwater. This had been the byproduct not only of the failed conservative appeal of his rival, but of a resurgent economy, the triumphant passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and of the memories of the fallen JFK. Now the president who “knew the deck on Capital Hill” presided over a spectacular legislative run of victories for activist government. He would put his stamp on the future and provide many more targets for attack by the present Bush team. There would be Medicare and Medicaid, the education titles, a series of environmental acts, and new regulatory agencies calling for protection of workers and consumer safety. There was funding for the arts, public broad- casting, mass transportation, and public housing. There were the varied initiatives that were part of the War on Poverty. And, of course, there was the continuation of the civil rights effort with the Voting Rights bill of 1965. Some of the Great Society programs were failures, some failed because they were never truly funded, but many became popular, enduring “entitlements” and—-along with others—changed the face of America. 2 Certainly, this run of victories was cut short as the nation and its president sank into the abyss of Vietnam and what that war meant to America at home as well as abroad. But what was accomplished on LBJ’s watch was a concluding chapter in the construction of an activist presidential agenda that would infuriate ideological opponents and become the battle ground for White House struggles to come, peaking now in election 2004. But such struggles would not really begin until the eighties. And what made possible the assault from the right on a seemingly triumphant liberalism was a complicated matter. Vietnam played a role, but as we all know, there was much more. The social upheavals of the sixties were a byproduct of cultural change, post-war prosperity and a dramatic moment in history. (Surely, most were unconnected to presidential government, although activist politics had an impact of some of them.) The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the student movement, the anti-war movement and the liberationist themes affecting other groups (Gay Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans) transformed the social landscape. Yet their very presence would be used by opponents of liberal activism in years to come. It would be one of “projects” of that growing number of right-wing think tanks, journals, television outlets, and talk radio hosts emerging in the seventies, eighties and nineties to link these social movements of the sixties to the liberal political dominance of the time. Conservative ideologues would point to a decline of “traditional family values” as the product of the allegedly corrupting influence of these social movements and of political “liberalism.” If drug use was up, divorce rates climbing, birth rates among the unmarried rising, crime menacing urban communities it must be because of these movements of the sixties with their insidious impact on American life, movements that had been fostered, in some way, by liberal politicians and their programs. There had to be another factor at work to give the right-wing its opportunity. It would be the shattering economic and military defeats of the seventies. Of course, all of this was largely nonsense. Many participants in those movements had reviled “big government” even as they had “big business,” others had railed against Johnson as war maker. Neither the members of the “student movement” or the cultural rebels of the “Woodstock Nation” were fans of the Great Society; most had contempt for liberal politics. Certainly the crime, drug and divorce rates in the late seventies had their own complex causes and were not the product of social activism during the decade of upheaval.

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