The Fall of the House of U.S.: Prologue and Part I

The Long Twentieth Century Ends in America

Prologue

As I considered “structure, agency and contingency” in terms of what Biden might do next and how we got to the point where the main candidate standing against a surging authoritarianism is very evidently not the person who ought to be in that role, my thinking opened up.

The more I thought about the ‘structure’ part as I brooded over the weekend about the election and about the Supreme Court’s arms-wide embrace of authoritarian power, the less important Biden’s physical and mental incapacity seemed to me. The deeper questions loomed bigger and bigger. The portion of the political class that is tied to the Democratic Party, as well as the never-Trump rump of the old GOP, is facing a very real prospect of blacklisting, organized harassment, confiscation of assets, imprisonment or worse if Trump takes power. In some sense, they should have understood that these stakes were in play as early as the 1990s: people like Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove were all leading indicators that the GOP had considered how to maintain a working coalition that would be able to regularly contend for power in a democracy where power moved between political parties and had decided instead to go for broke, to keep a narrower version of its base happy and work to make it impossible for any other coalition to hold power in much of the country.

The inability to see that, or feel threatened by it, is only the first of a multitude of structural conditions. Biden is only the seal atop a Pandora’s box of weak Presidential standard-bearers for the Democratic Party. Mondale was the last and most feeble of the tribunes of the New Deal to run. From that point on, the Democrats have all been meritocratic and technocratic managers, running on the premise that they were the best to run. Most of them have been weak campaigners, with the exception of Obama. (Do not be telling me about Bill Clinton’s alleged charisma, because that means you’ve forgotten he lost the popular vote twice.) All of them have governed unevenly at best, mostly pursuing a queasy mix of prophylactic militarism, deregulation, Keynesian stimulus, culture-war lite, and sustained administrative competency and continuity. None of them have seemed to have a sense of their underlying electoral coalition beyond what professionals told them during active campaign seasons. I don’t think that’s somehow a remarkably coincidental set of personal shortcomings. For the most part, from Dukakis to Biden, they were admirable public servants, intelligent and capable, and with the exception of Bill Clinton, ethical and responsible in their personal conduct. Their short-sightedness and limited aspiration was shared by tens of thousands of Americans like them.

Their moment, our moment, is ending this November. Even if Biden—or Harris or someone else—wins, the shape of American politics and the society that both produces that politics and is shaped by it—will be different. Even if the Democratic candidate wins and somehow carries the Senate and House, they will likely fail to do what they need to do in order to rewrite their political fundamentals going forward, and it will be their last gasp. The Democratic political class will fail in part because their fractious, diverging coalition will continue to keep them from seeing the new order of the 21st Century.

If they lose, the fundamentals will be rewritten right now in catastrophe, in blood, in failure.

It takes a long view to see what is right now on our doorstep. Here and perhaps elsewhere as well.

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Part One

Historians struggle sometimes to prevent a radical collapse of the entire past into the present once we open the door to emphasizing continuities or insisting that the present moment has deep roots. In the context of this American present, it is very tempting to pick an iconic moment: the quick growth of trading outposts into agricultural settlements expanded through military power and alliances throughout North America, the establishment of the slave-based plantation complex in the southern American colonies. the Revolution and the creation of the Constitution, Jacksonian populism, the Civil War, Reconstruction. That’s all in the mix, to be sure, though perhaps most powerfully as a set of touchstones for more contemporaneous kinds of culture war rather than for what those moments set in motion in deep structural ways.

But the post-1945 coalition that supported liberal and progressive politicians, mostly though not exclusively in the Democratic Party, is a 20th Century history in substantial measure. So that is where I will remain in this series.

The understory of that coalition doesn’t begin with a single foundational development or event. In the early 20th Century, the parts were not assembled in any kind of political whole. Sometimes quite the opposite. Nor was it initially tied to the Democratic Party of the early 20th Century, quite the opposite until 1928 and beyond.

What are the deep stories that are the beginnings of what is now ending?

It’s a cliche, but the much-vaunted “closure of the frontier” first observed by Frederick Jackson Turner did matter. From that point on, Americans unhappy with established socioeconomic hierarchies, closed systems of political contestation, fully allocated land seized from conquered societies, and fixed cultural traditions couldn’t relocate to territory yet to be invaded in the hope of getting rich and making a social world more to their liking. There would still be imperial militarism in plenitude in the decades to come, but not the kind of empire that absorbed territories into its national being. On occasion, the restless energies that had fueled migration and conquest would attach themselves to notions of a “civilizing mission” or to Cold War ideas about development, modernization and American hegemony. In other cases, they might underlie progressive desires to remake American society itself for the better, whether that was about industrial efficiency, mass education or social reform.

At the start of the long 20th Century, at the same moment that the frontier was closing, American industrialization within a globalized economy had also produced a settled urban middle-class across much of the territory of the United States. They drew their wealth from different industries, from different kinds of capture of governmental investment (most prominently in supporting the building of rail networks). Some of these locally wealthy businesspeople and professionals were in what are now large towns and small cities. In many cases, they and their immediate descendants left a long time ago, with the houses and neighborhoods they built becoming part of the infrastructure of later deindustrialization. But the material culture they favored lingered in the American imagination, and the way they fused together civic virtue, paternalism, social reform, a belief in public goods especially education, and a reliance on policing to maintain order and social distance, all fused into the postwar liberal-progressive coalition.

Speaking of professionalization, that’s another important part of the story. Professionalization was a move to mobilize the power of the state to recognize and certify people with particular educational credentials as the only ones qualified to do some jobs. That dovetailed with but was not identical to a mid-century push by post-Wagner Act Unions to establish that certain tasks could only be undertaken by union-certified technicians. In some ways professionalization was anti-union, in that it defined professionals not just as the only people licensed to do certain kinds of work but actually de-emphasized the labor involved in that work. Professionalization was a project to intensify already-existing histories of respect and deference, and to standardize them as the numbers of professionals grew larger and the institutions that they worked with and were paid by became widely distributed presences across the national territory—and also to amplify the sense of professionals as people with an especially important civic role.

Theodore Roosevelt in some ways is as important a conceptual forerunner of the post-1945 liberal-progressive coalition as his cousin FDR. Together, they established that the federal government—indeed, all levels of government—had a regulatory responsibility to restrain large businesses and then in FDR’s case, also provided a popular and successful template for a modest from of American social democracy. Even after the Democratic leadership thoroughly moved on from the New Deal after 1980, their electoral coalition retained a kind of hermeneutic template of Teddy’s progressivism and FDR’s social-democratic institution-making. Some of the coalition might have shared the leadership’s lack of enthusiasm for continuing New Deal infrastructure, but the New Deal was still a kind of hindbrain sense of virtuous possibility and motivation.

Whether the New Deal actually ended the Great Depression in any sense or not—a subject that is still in contention—it did dovetail neatly into post-1945 prosperity in the United States and informed a causal narrative (false or otherwise) of what enabled that prosperity. Even though that prosperity was unevenly distributed—white men were its overwhelming beneficiaries—the sense that the world could be prosperous, that a broad middle-class could form and envelop much of American society, and that a big, powerful and highly present federal government with global responsibilities was the guarantor of that prosperity stayed in the common sense of the Democratic coalition even after neoliberal policy and political leadership unraveled the reality of that prosperity. That there had been—however briefly—an American world where a Republican President (Eisenhower and even to some extent Nixon) and Democratic rivals fundamentally agreed on that much was an important imaginary to draw upon until it became as remote to contemporary experience as debates over silver vs. gold became. “Freedom from want” was never quite the Rockwell painting, but it got close enough to make a powerful impression on the deep imaginary of the liberal-progressive coalition.

The opening up of cultural life, which very importantly happened first with high culture, with the loosening of obscenity laws so that it became possible to legally read D.H. Lawrence and Ulysses, and only later to watch I Am Curious, Yellow, became an ongoing imperative for much of the Democratic coalition, until it was complicatedly fractured in recent years by competing visions located within identity politics. It was an important part of civic virtue that kept liberals and progressives aligned with one another for a long time, a sense that this was an ongoing work that required constantly pushing forward to the next hurdle of censorship or suppression, and it aligned itself with a kind of sense of cultivation and self-making that could be about consuming culture or it could be about having new experiences.

The Democratic self at the height of its political and social influence was in a larger sense attached to mobility, plasticity, novelty, carrying all of that out of the earlier 20th Century into a political economy that was more capaciously supportive of that way of thinking. Democrats for a very long time connected themselves to the sense that they were the people who’d gone somewhere else looking for freedom and possibility: left for the better life, found the better people, escaped the petty oppressions of religion, racism and close-mindedness. This was always narrated as I decided, as a story of prudential agency and fulfillment. The political other was the self that stayed home (or was kept there). This sense of mobility became more capaciously empowered by postwar globalization—now the well-meaning liberal was as much in Paris, Saigon, Dar es Salaam, Mumbai, Santiago—but it also began to shut down with neoliberalism in the sense that mobility became a commandment rather than a choice.

The liberal-progressive coalition also became connected to mobility into the United States. The openly racist strictures on immigration loosened, and postwar American posterity began to beckon to the whole world. The people who came from everywhere, legally and illegally, were not necessarily Democrats, far from it—many of them were foundational to postwar Republicanism and still are. But their children and children’s children came to see it differently as they were slotted into the American racial imaginary and forgot the strictures that their parents were looking to escape. White Christian nationalists today have given this history the ugly label of “replacement” but it might fairly be called renewal—a continuation of the ongoing process of the simultaneous reproduction and transformation of American life as new groups of people arrive here. But what Democrats did embrace—and others bitterly rejected—is that this renewal was now and ought to remain global. The growing inability of post-1980 Republicans to embrace the social and economic conservatism of new arrivals pushed them one way; the growing inability of the Democrats to reconcile border security and outsourcing with affection for cosmopolitan streams of immigration has pushed them another. But for a short, happy while, these were not so much in tension and that moment stuck in the coalition’s imagination.

The Democratic Party was the fierce enemy of the expansion of civil rights until, very suddenly, it wasn’t—but that move tied the party’s coalition to a sense that it was always and fundamentally about safeguarding the socioeconomic freedom of its members. Sometimes because the coalition was the people who were claiming the freedom that was their due, making American democracy a real thing perhaps for the first time ever, and sometimes as noblesse oblige, as (once again) civic virtue. Eventually all the histories of struggle that began in the early 20th Century—some of which scarcely understood themselves in those terms at the start—flowed into the Democratic coalition, became its lifeblood. But the party itself never became the most steadfast guardian of those entrusted energies—it was at first too soon, too fast, to be asking for change and then eventually it was all done, move along—not the least because of all the things the coalition became, this was the commitment that was the most redistributive and the most restlessly distributed in terms of going everywhere, pushing on everything.

These are stories that start in different places, go in different directions, and have lasted for different durations, but they all co-mingled in the Democratic coalition’s vision of political power and social action. The contradictions and failures of that comingling and the inability to reckon with the antagonism of institutions and rival social coalitions have reached a terminal point. So the next question will be: how did that happen, exactly?