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In his 1929 masterpiece, The Revolt of The Masses, Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote that political history is generated by "self-demanding minorities" -- people who make the assumptions upon which systems of logic are built. The new assumptions -- and the new logic -- are then gradually adopted by the passive majority. This doctrine has a direct bearing on the present state of America.
There is a rhythm to the country's political life: There are periods of relatively stable government -- some long, some brief -- based upon political assumptions that are accepted by the majority. Then, after the purposes of these periods have been accomplished or have become irrelevant to changing realities, the underlying assumptions collapse. What follows is a messy interregnum before the next self-demanding minority -- usually a political party -- creates a new set of assumptions on which a new period of stable government can begin.
At the moment, we are once again in a messy political interregnum. We've been here before. And we'll certainly survive. The character of the cycle and its duration depends, of course, on the relative strength or weakness of the major political parties.
Some observations about the parties help to explain their, and the country's, present predicament. First, and of greatest importance, American parties, unlike most of their European counterparts, are coalitions of several political tendencies and views. Since 1920, the Republicans have been generally conservative while the Democrats have been dominated by their progressive or liberal wing. Republican conservatives look upon the U.S. economy as an economic system which operates best when least tampered with by Washington. Liberal Democrats regard the country as a series of social problems which only government can solve. (Admittedly, these are broad definitions which must be qualified by exceptions and degrees of belief.)
Second, "conservative" and "liberal" are used here in their pragmatic rather than ideological sense. The classic conservatism of the modern Republican Party derives from its roots in laissez-faire economics and the conventional social beliefs and social outlook of its middle class and rural followers. Democratic liberalism had its origins in the New Deal, in the doctrine that was forged in President Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 campaign for re-election; it was a philosophic rationalization of the actions taken and policies instituted during his first four years of coping with depression-era crises.
How people form their political beliefs and orientation is not fully understood. But most followers of both major parties tend to be moderate -- adherents to moderation which includes not giving much of a damn at one end and engaging in political shouting matches at the other. Idealism -- visions of perfection -- rather than ideological dogmatism and insistence on the supremacy of theory over experience is the harmless streak of irrationality in American political belief. Pragmatic politics such as Republican conservatism and Democratic liberalism almost invariably argue about means to achieve a commonly agreed-upon end, not about the end itself.
Third and finally, the two major American political parties undergo periods of robust health alternating with times of weakness and exhaustion. Death, however, rarely results from the latter condition. Only one major party -- Henry Clay's Whigs -- has died since the establishment of the modern political system in the second quarter of the 19th century.
Usually, the health or sickness of American political parties depends on external forces -- the state of the economy, the mood of the public, unforeseen or badly prepared-for events. A party may be drained of strength and confidence by a perception among the voters that it cannot fulfill demands for needed change or improvement. As the 20th century draws to a close, the political system as a system still operates pretty much as it did in 1895; the changes are of dimension rather than basic structure. There are, to be sure, more voters -- women, minorities and those over age 18 who have been legally enfranchised.
But the content of the American presidential election system, its techniques and standards of popular judgment, would astonish political scholars of a century ago. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected by virtue of what people had heard about him -- a Whig who had switched to the new Republican Party, an opponent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the westward expansion of slavery, a moderate with a reputation for eloquence which became known nationally after his seven debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. It is interesting to speculate about Lincoln's chances of being elected president today when television would make it possible for almost the entire public to see and hear him. He was tall, angular, jug-eared, usually dressed in ill-fitting clothes and spoke in a squeaky voice. His principal means of public communication was elegant, ornate speeches which, if examined, are not at all susceptible to sound bites. His most famous public address, at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, was only 272 words long and it would have been difficult to extract a coherent 15-second excerpt for the evening TV news.
The complexity of national and international issues plus mass public anxiety have changed the relationship between the federal government and the people who elect its officers. A period of stability presided over by Ronald Reagan and -- for a while -- George Bush, has come to an end. The symptoms of interregnum -- that period between the collapse of one system of logic and its underlying assumptions, and the birth of a new logic -- are everywhere about us.
Both old-fashioned liberalism and old-fashioned conservatism have ceased to be relevant. They have been relegated to the Museum of Political Ideas That Once Worked But Don't Any More. The country has swung politically and culturally to the right. The American political mix no longer includes a left, though conservatives can now call their opponents "liberals," a word which has taken the place of "left-winger" as the ultimate expression of political scorn.
The liberalism that grew out of the New Deal was based on a Federal government whose spending policies turned America into a social democracy which taxed the affluent to finance massive work and relief programs. The intention was not, as is often charged, the re-distribution of American wealth. Government social programming continued after the Great Depression ended in 1941. Some of the policies, such as affirmative action, however virtuously intended, created social tensions. But the Federal government's revenues failed to keep pace with the growth in population and its needs. Programs were extended beyond the poor and unemployed. Social Security and its expensive companion, Medicare, for example, were created for everyone. Ultimately, 50 years of government spending for social programs began to strain the economy. An excess of regulation hampered commerce. While Reaganomics accelerated the deficit to its present, grotesque proportions, its origin lay in Lyndon Johnson's decision during the Vietnam War to spend for both guns and butter, a luxury the country simply couldn't afford. The logic built on the post-1932 Democratic Party assumptions had begun to collapse.
President Reagan's political hero was Calvin Coolidge and it is not difficult in retrospect to see traces of the 30th president's governing style and philosophy in the two terms of the 40th president. Coolidge was a firm believer in the old saw about the best government being the least government. He lacked depth and disliked detailed analyses of domestic conditions -- especially the economy.
Ronald Reagan was not a very good administrator, but in his belief in limited government, his boredom with analyses and gifts as a public relations man he resembled his idol. Like Coolidge, Reagan believed in (but didn't always practice) government frugality and tried to reduce the size of the federal establishment he had inherited. He, too, was pro-business.
In addition, Reagan, buoyed along on the helium of his immense charm and personal popularity, went in for doubtful economic theories -- the Laffer curve which purported to prove that if you cut taxes people will invest their additional income in industry, the economy will grow faster and the lost taxes will be more than compensated for. Cutting upper-bracket income taxes, he embarked upon the biggest peacetime military buildup in history. He talked about and tinkered with dismantling Great Society antipoverty programs though they never really succeeded; but they did bring on a major recession in order to reduce inflation. Reagan presents an interesting portrait in retrospect. He combined a nostalgia for the political simplicities of 1924 with sponsorship of untested futurist theories and gadgets, from "voodoo" economics to Star Wars. He left the economy in such a shambles that his successor, George Bush, never managed to clean up the damage.
President Clinton's election in 1992 was made possible by public demand for change. That demand, voluble and powerful, is, however, a poorly-defined force. It is mass exasperation with present conditions, not a mass insistence on some clearly thought-out alternative policy.
In 1994, Newt Gingrich, the new speaker of the House, appeared to believe that his "Contract With America" was a set of clearly understood concepts for change. But it wasn't. It was a vague political catechism with no more detail than the hokey prophecies of Nostradamus.
The Republicans now dominating Congress are by no means a coherent group. Gingrich is often looked upon as a right-winger, which he isn't. He's a brilliant, overly stimulated, long-winded, idea-loving, inconsistent mixture of conservatism, nostalgia and hyper-Cyber-groupie follower of Alvin Toffler -- which, The New Yorker claims, makes Gingrich a crypto Marxist. He is capable in the space of one day or even one sentence of uttering thundering balderdash and squirts of quite admirable common sense; he doesn't appear to suffer from an identity crisis. Gingrich presides over a House Republican Party that is front-loaded with some of the most bizarre political right-wingers to come along since Barry Goldwater abandoned ideology for much-deserved American political sainthood. This, of course, does not by any means include all House Republicans. Most, in fact, are hard-working moderates or true conservatives.
The major financial supporters of the Republicans are no longer big corporations. They are, in the words of a Wall Street Journal article published on February 9, 1995, "...a different money crowd -- younger, less establishment, more ideological and more willing to attempt a revolutionary change in government than the denizens of the Business Roundtable." Haley Barbour, the Republican National Chairman, says that his is now the party of small business, not big business. The small businessmen he and the Wall Street Journal are talking about hate government regulation, regarded the Clinton health plan as an assault on business and have bitter contempt for the traditional Fortune 500 companies that donate to both parties to guarantee access to all political leaders.
In addition to these forces burdening the GOP, there are Christian Coalition extremists on the right. They are estimated to be 1.5 million strong, organized in 1,200 chapters across the country. Their leader, Ralph Reed, announced on February 10 that "religious conservatives" would not support the 1996 Republican ticket unless both presidential and vice presidential candidates opposed abortion rights.
While the Republican Party is beginning to have fist fights with itself soon after the 1994 victory, the Democrats are exhausted, bewildered by their leader and frequently exasperated with him. It appears at times that they and the party have no leader at all. The exhaustion is intellectual. Old-fashioned, New Deal liberalism, like old-fashioned Coolidge/Reagan conservatism, is moribund. Lyndon Johnson was the last of the Democratic presidents to follow the tradition of FDR. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act and the War on Poverty were pushed through Congress by Johnson and sold to the country with classic Roosevelt-like bravado. They were also the last large major flourishes of programmatic Democratic government.
Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal Treaty and Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement were indisputably important credits -- but, unbeknown to him and everybody else, Democratic liberalism was even then on its deathbed and the age of Republican control of the White House was soon to begin. (It is worth noting that Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 with only 50.1 percent of the vote.) History had used up the great doctrine that the Democrats presented to it in the New Deal -- and they have not found anything to replace it.
The political party which occupies the White House is indivisible from, and largely judged by, its president. It was mass public dissatisfaction -- the bulk of it economic -- which elected Bill Clinton in 1992. An amiable man in public, an Arkansas attorney general and governor and a President genuinely determined to do good (in an age when cynicism sneers at "do-gooders"), Clinton is, nonetheless, one of the most enigmatic presidents of modern times. He is a study in massive indecision and cursed with a short attention span. According to many of those he calls upon to advise him, Clinton listens, asks intelligent questions, agrees -- and then goes off on a course dictated by his own compulsions, doubts or second thoughts.
His administration, which one liberal Washington think-tank chief says is better than the president who leads it, has had more triumphs than the press and public credit it with: major reductions in the deficit, piloting the NAFTA and GATT treaties through Congress, reducing the federal government's roster by 100,000 jobs, increasing the maximum tax credit for families with incomes under $25,300, and creating a National Service Program under which students perform community service in return for college tuition. The lines of command, communication and coordination in the White House have improved since Leon Panetta took over as chief of staff last year. But there are still embarrassing, party-splitting bloopers like the fight over the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as surgeon-general and the retreat from nomination of general Michael P.C. Carns as director of the CIA. Clinton reached out to former Republican sage David Gergen for advice and quickly lost interest in him.
Psychoanalyzing presidents or any other political figure on the evidence of his or her public acts and policies is a fruitless business. The point is that Clinton is a man of such mystery and unpredictability that the net effect thus far is a weak presidency and, consequently, a weak Democratic Party. There are still many in the band of power groupies known in Washington as "political observers" who believe the president will be re-elected in 1996. Or, to put it another way, the compromise candidate of a self-shredded Republican Party will lose to him. There is some talk of putting up an alternate presidential candidate at the Democratic convention in 1996, such as Vice President Al Gore. But only one Democratic president, Franklin Pierce in 1856, has ever been refused renomination by his party. Such an act now would be a televised bloodletting that would keep the party that tried it out of power for years.
These, then, are the symptoms of a classic interregnum: The Democratic Party, led by a weak, baffling president, is exhausted, bereft of acceptable new ideas for dealing with the issues of greatest concern to the public. The rest of 1995 and the pre-election months of 1996 are likely to reveal a Republican Party riven by fissures. The solid, moderate conservatism represented by the likes of Senators Robert Dole and Richard Lugar will come under increasing assaults from House members who practice the politics of resentment -- by Gingrich, a one-man Republican juggernaut, the entrepreneurial tigers of small business and a Christian Right that is postured to destroy the GOP to enforce its own agenda. The Republicans, thus, could become frustrated in their attempts at policy-formation by the two worst toxins of American party politics: ideology and such unreconcilable moral issues as abortion.
The last political interregnum, post-1929, was far worse because the country was in far worse condition than it is today. Running as a fiscal conservative in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was flexible and imaginative enough once in office to produce a new, workable liberalism that addressed the challenges of the time. The longest interregnum was between 1837, when Andrew Jackson left the White House, and 1861 when Lincoln became president. During those 24 years, there were eight presidents -- none for more than one term -- and a rising, unreconcilable moral issue -- slavery. A great man had to lead the country through a dreadful war to resolve it.
The present intellectual wasteland, littered with the decaying stumps of political ideas that have outlived their usefulness, is actually a potential orchard. But it will take a new, moderate idea to begin a new period of growth and stability. Some self-demanding American minority is, we can be sure, at work on a new set of assumptions. Ortega Y Gasset will be proved right once again.
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