PERRY ANDERSON
The American political scene since 2000 is conventionally
depicted in high colour. For much native—not to speak of foreign—opinion, the
country has cartwheeled from brutish reaction under one ruler, presiding over
disaster at home and abroad, to the most inspiring hope of progress since the
New Deal under another, personifying all that is finest in the nation; to
others, a spectre not even American. For still others, the polarization of
opinion they represent is cause for despair, or alternatively comfort in the
awakening of hitherto marginalized identities to the threshold of a new
majority. The tints change by the light in which they are seen.
For a steadier view of US politics, line is more
reliable than colour. It is the parameters of the system of which its episodes
are features that require consideration. These compose a set of four
determinants. The first, and far the most fundamental, of these, is the
historical regime of accumulation in question, governing the returns on capital
and rate of growth of the economy.[1] The second are structural shifts in
the sociology of the electorate distributed between the two political parties.
The third are cultural mutations in the value-system at large within the
society. Fourth and last—the residual—are the aims of the active minorities in
the voter-base of each party. The political upshot at any given point of time
can be described, short-hand, as a resultant of this unequal quartet of forces
in motion.
What remains unchanging, on the other hand, is the
monochrome ideological universe in which the system is plunged: an
all-capitalist order, without a hint of social-democratic weakness or
independent political organization by labour. [2] The two parties that inhabit it,
Republican and Democratic, have exchanged social and regional bases more than
once since the Civil War, without either ever questioning the rule of capital.
Since the 1930s there has been a general, if not invariable, tendency for those
at the bottom of the income pyramid—should they cast a ballot, which large
numbers do not—to vote Democrat, and those at the top, Republican. Such
preferences reflect the policies by and large pursued by the two parties:
Democratic administrations have typically been more redistributive downwards
than Republican, in an alignment shadowing, without exactly reproducing,
divisions between left and right elsewhere. But these are rarely differences of
principle. A salient feature of the consensus on which the system rests is the
flexibility of relative positions it allows. Policies associated with one party
can migrate to the other, not infrequently assuming forms in the cross-over
more radical than they possessed in their original habitat. A glance at the
history of the past half-century is a reminder of these eddies within the
system.
1
Although it was some time before its character crystallized,
Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 famously opened a new era in American politics. The
Depression, marking the end of a regime of accumulation based on the gold
standard, high tariffs, low taxation and still early forms of mass production,
discredited the Republicans who had long dominated it. Under the shock of the
slump, popular pressures—above all, the labour strikes that began in 1934—drove
the Democratic Administration beyond its initial measures of financial
stabilization and emergency relief towards social reforms and infrastructural
programmes that consolidated its electoral base, while the shake-out of least
competitive capitals and corporate concentration continued. [3] When the sharp recession of 1937
struck, unemployment was soon back up at 12.5 per cent. What transformed the
New Deal into the watershed it became was the arrival of massive state demand
with rearmament. With the onset of a full war economy, from late 1941 onwards,
a new regime of accumulation came of age. The gold standard had gone. Taxation
was higher; deficits were no longer taboo; deposit insurance and banking
regulation were in place; corporations had concentrated; consumer demand had
expanded. These were conditions of the transformation. But the decisive change
came with the huge jump in state spending and intervention in the economy,
public expenditures soaring from 19 per cent to 47 per cent in two years, when
the country was mobilized for war and business returned to the seats of power
in Washington to run the industrial drive for victory. Firing technological
innovation and wiping out unemployment, the war-time boom delivered American
supremacy over the capitalist world after 1945, with an international economic
order to fit its requirements at Bretton Woods. The expansion unleashed by the
war economy rolled on for a quarter-century of high growth rates at home and
unchallenged hegemony abroad.
The political system formed under this regime, though it descended
from the New Deal, also differed from it. After the war the Democrats
maintained the electoral dominance they had secured in the thirties, when they
won first-time voters and second-generation immigrants, once-distant Protestant
workers and northern blacks, while keeping a tight grip on their historic
stronghold in the racist South. While the two parties divided control of the
White House evenly, from 1948 to 1968 each winning it three times, Congress
remained for nearly half a century a Democratic preserve; between 1932 and
1980, the Republicans took it just twice, for a pittance of four years. But the
underlying political configuration encompassed both parties. After 1937, when
the steel strike was broken and the economy slid back into recession, the
labour insurgency that had forced the most significant social reforms onto
Roosevelt’s agenda was spent. The Wagner Act allowed unionization to increase
up to the early fifties; but along with growth in membership came
bureaucratization and domestication of the AFL–CIO. In 1947, a majority in
both parties joined forces to repress militants and strikes with the
Taft–Hartley Act. [4]
Collective labour was one thing, to be curbed wherever it
risked becoming unruly. Atomized voters were another, to be courted so long as
the price could be afforded. If state spending as a proportion
of GDP was no longer at war-time levels, the long boom of the fifties
and sixties yielded rates of profit permitting regular wage gains for workers,
and tax revenues for continuing public works and social benefits, along with
large military budgets. But no regime of accumulation is static, and in due
course there was an inflexion. War-time planners in Washington had envisaged a
post-war world in which a dollar standard and free trade would deliver export
prosperity for US capital via economic recovery in Europe and Japan.
The extent of damage in former allies and enemies alike, and the over-riding
imperatives of the Cold War, forced this design out of shape. To save
capitalism abroad, pure free trade would have to be diluted, local rulers
allowed some start-up assistance and a measure of protection for their markets,
if they were not to sink back into depression. Recovery came, and as
anticipated, American profits with it. But since labour costs were lower
abroad, it was more rational for US capital to invest—where possible:
Europe rather than Japan—locally in production for local markets, typically at
higher rates of profit than available in domestic investment, rather than
export to them. With the great expansion of American multi-national
corporations overseas, organized labour was further weakened, not legislatively
but structurally, from the mid-fifties onwards.
Yet so long as the overall regime of accumulation held, the
calculus of party competition kept the parameters inherited from the New Deal
in place. Within them, Republican rulers were perfectly capable of outflanking
Democratic predecessors. Truman, whose Presidency was largely barren of
domestic legislative achievement, broke more strikes than Eisenhower, whose
Interstate Highway Act launched the biggest public-works programme since
the WPA. Anti-segregation activism and ghetto insurrections wrested the
Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty from LBJ, with a momentum that
outlasted him. It was Nixon, not Johnson, who oversaw the largest increase in
social entitlements and economic regulation of post-war history, and proposed
the most ambitious anti-poverty scheme, a guaranteed minimum income that no
capitalist country has yet instituted. At Congressional level, where in both
Houses the most rock-solid single bloc of Democrats was always from the South,
Republicans voted in larger numbers than Democrats for the civil-rights bills.
2
Across the advanced capitalist world, the post-war boom came
to an abrupt halt in the early seventies. Profitability declined, wages ceased
to rise, and stagflation set in. The common cause lay in the inter-capitalist
competition that had been intensifying since Germany and Japan, restored by
Washington as forward defences of the Free World, had re-entered the world
market in force, often with newer capital stock and superior corporate and
banking structures. [5]Forced to defend sunk capital that could
not readily be written off, American firms faced lower margins just as
unwelcome social spending and costly regulation were hitting a peak under a
Republican president. To cap everything, after cutting the link of the dollar
to gold, Nixon resorted to wage and price controls to throttle inflation. Faced
with this combination of economic crisis and political profligacy, capital—big
and small—sprang into action. The Business Roundtable was set up in 1972. By
the end of the decade the Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of
Independent Business had doubled their membership, and corporate lobbyists in
Washington multiplied over ten-fold; political action committees funded by
capital far outdistanced those of labour, and hard-hitting new think-tanks—the
American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute—were at
battle stations. [6] The breakdown of steady growth
generated a systematic mobilization against the post-war settlement.
Such was the setting in which the agenda of a new regime of
accumulation took shape. The neo-liberal order ahead would include deregulation
of markets, de-unionization of labour, decreases in taxation and deflation of
the money supply—in effect, a reversion towards norms of the original liberal
regime prior to the Depression, minus the gold standard and tariff protection.
But there would be two critical differences, in the position of industry and
the nature of the electorate. Manufacturing, just burgeoning into mass
production in the twenties, with fifty years of expansion ahead of it, would
from the eighties onwards contract relentlessly under the pressure of
lower-cost producers abroad, displacing capital into finance as the
command-centre of the economy, and yet more drastically eroding the position of
labour. At the same time voter expectations now precluded wholesale liquidation
of insolvent or inefficient enterprises: mass unemployment appeared
incompatible with stable capitalist rule. In most capitalist countries of the
period, analogous changes took hold. But in the absence of any significant traditions
critical of the over-riding prerogatives of private property and free
enterprise, and the structural erosion of the power of labour, in America they
acquired their purest form. The parameters of the political system shifted to
the right everywhere in the West, but nowhere so far and with so little
impediment as in the US.
At party level, after a high tide of progressive reform
under a Republican president, the backwash of political reaction came with a
Democrat in the White House, and an overwhelming Democratic majority—292–143 in
the House and 62–38 in the Senate—in Congress. Less state, more market was the
solution to the woes of the economy at the arrival of the bicentennial. The
keynotes of the Carter Administration were tight money and deregulation, to
weaken labour and strengthen business. In Congress, the Democrats lowered the
capital-gains tax and raised the payroll levy, while—in one vote after
another—rejecting reform of health care, indexation of the minimum wage,
consumer protection and improvement of electoral registration. At the Fed,
Volcker was entrusted with a hard deflation. Neo-liberalism was now in the
saddle. The short-term cost for Carter and his party was high, when the steep
interest rates that were Volcker’s cure for inflation provoked a severe
recession. The electorate was not grateful. But a larger problem lay in the
lack of an ideological message from the Democrats capable of embellishing the
turn in any terms less dour than the need for belt-tightening. Something more
alluring was needed.
Reagan’s victory in 1980, as decisive as Roosevelt’s in
1932, met the requirement. Neo-liberalism found its popular supplement in an
optimism of national reassertion and moralism of individual self-reliance,
laced—if not excessively—with faith in the Bible. [7] This was an ideological
encapsulation with which the Democrats were hard put to compete. Though they
had pioneered the neo-liberal turn, they were handicapped by identification
with the order that had preceded it, in which they had so long been the
dominant party. The Republicans, with no comparable difficulty of adjustment,
became the natural party of government in a political system whose centre of gravity
had shifted structurally to the right. The new regime of accumulation favoured
them.
3
Behind the shift in partisan ascendancy lay also
sociological changes. The first of these affected the white working class.
Hard-hat backlash against anti-war demonstrations and school bussing had
already produced a patriotic and racial vote for Wallace in 1968, and a greater
one for Nixon in 1972. But with real wages falling after 1972, and fiscal creep
biting into take-home pay, workers now also had fewer material reasons for
loyalty to the Democratic Party. Carter had abandoned them. Many abandoned him.
Reagan won a majority of them in 1980 and a much larger one in 1984. The second
change was the shift in population and wealth from the Northeast and Centre of
the country to the West and Southwest, where capital was newer and less
trammelled, urban patterns more dispersed, traditions of labour organization
weaker and frontier imaginaries stronger. There, in California, a revolt
against property taxes of home-owners financed by real-estate developers had
already passed Proposition 13, putting Carter’s Revenue Act of the same year in
the shade. For a century, no presidential candidate had ever come from the
region. Then from the same springboard came Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan.
Finally and most decisively, the South—always the most conservative part of the
country, which the memory of Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War had for a
century made a Democratic bastion—had started to become Republican in the
aftermath of Johnson’s conversion to civil rights. Its transfer as a regional
bloc from one party to the other, the largest single shift in the electorate
since Abolition, was gradual. [8]Thirty years later, when the South was
posting the fastest economic growth in the country, it would be close to total.
Sweeping victory at the polls on a platform of freeing
enterprise from government at home, and re-establishing American power and confidence
abroad, gave Reagan a mandate for a radical shift in what was possible to enact
in Washington. Without delay, he pushed through the most far-reaching overhaul
of the tax structure on record—lowering rates for all, but heavily weighted
towards the rich—and broke the first national strike that came his way, by the
air-traffic controllers’ union. These were highly popular moves, enjoying
bipartisan support and wide public approval. But though a great political
success, the tax-cuts were no remedy for the Volcker recession, and had to be
partly retracted, before another round followed in Reagan’s second term. But
neo-liberal recipes could no more be taken pure economically than
ideologically: in practice, a large dose of military Keynesianism was required
to keep growth going, as steep increases in defence expenditure primed demand,
generating annual deficits three times higher than under Carter. After 1985,
the shake-out of the Volcker recession and a lowering of the dollar, combined
with wage-repression and fiscal hand-outs, allowed manufacturing exports to
recover, restoring corporate profitability. Yet the performance of the American
economy did not substantially improve. The initially high dollar, attracting
foreign capital, accelerated the rise of the financial sector and widened the
trade deficit. Overall growth was less than in the seventies. By the end of the
Reagan era, its epilogue under the first Bush, the federal debt had tripled.
The underlying impasse of the long downturn had not been resolved.
4
The Democrats were meanwhile adjusting to the parameters of
the new order, as the Republicans had done to the old one. Within a year of
Reagan’s re-election in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Council was formed to
reposition the party in line with the requirements of the time—shedding
outdated commitments to public spending, labour or welfare dependents for a
‘new centrism’, champion of a leaner state at home and a more resolute one
abroad. By the turn of the nineties, mass movements of any kind—labour,
student, black, feminist, rainbow—had vanished from the scene. Picked by the
media as the most reassuring candidate from the DLC, Clinton took the
Presidency in 1992 on a split vote, Perot dividing the Republican electorate in
a recession year. Once in the White House, he took the opposite path to
Reagan—raising taxes to reduce the deficit, in the belief that bond markets
held the key to business confidence as the engine of growth. Welfare reform,
disciplining outlays to dependents, sent another strong signal to the markets
that this was a responsible Administration. The recession faded, the budget
went into surplus, and at the end of Clinton’s second term, the economy
expanded at a hectic clip.
But the boom was no healthier than Reagan’s, since the debt
expunged from the public accounts reappeared, vastly magnified, in private
accounts, household and corporate, in the wake of the financial deregulation
that became the signature drive of the Clinton Presidency. The repeal of
Glass–Steagall demolished New Deal separation of investment from retail
banking, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act lifted any restraint on
trades in over-the-counter derivatives. [9] With a return to the high dollar,
foreign capital flooded into the stock market, while profitability in
manufacturing declined once again. In the artificial flush of Clinton’s last
years, mortgage liabilities were stoked by lavish government loans,
corporations borrowed against their own share prices, speculation in hi-tech
start-ups exploded, and equities soared. Effectively, asset-price Keynesianism
had replaced fiscal-military Keynesianism, doping domestic demand enough to
return briefly to higher growth.
Behind this change lay an inflexion in the regime of
accumulation operative since the early eighties, comparable to that of the
mid-fifties in the antecedent regime. Once again, the change came from abroad.
This time it was the full-scale entry of China into the world market that
governed it—lowering labour costs dramatically across manufacturing; at once
widening and bank-rolling the American trade deficit;
propelling US assembly-lines out to China; fuelling fictive capital
at home. [10] The Reverse Plaza Accord of 1995 to
revalue the dollar proved the tipping-point, at once for outsourcing of
manufacturing to the PRC and insourcing of money for the stock and
real-estate bubbles of the end of the century. In contrast to the thirties and
eighties, but in this too like the fifties, the change was not primed by an
intellectual model, but presented on a plate by global conditions. Banks and
corporations, hedge funds and start-ups reaped the benefits of the planetary
expansion of the world-capitalist economy under American monetary domination,
extolled ex post facto as ‘globalization’, and ‘the great
moderation’. The inflexion was not a departure from the neo-liberal order as conceived
in Vienna, Chicago or Minnesota, but a deepening of it.
Politically, Clintonism appeared to have made Democratic
rule competitive with Republican under conditions at the outset less favourable
to it: not only speeding up financialization of the economy, while restoring
budgetary balance, but transmitting a glow of prosperity to the modest as well
as the opulent. In 1996 bankers and voters alike gave thumbs up to the
President for a second term, Clinton raising more money than Dole on Wall
Street, and taking thirty-one states and close to half the electorate: not a
triumph on Reagan’s scale, but healthy enough, with a promisingly wide gender
gap—11 per cent—as pledge for the party’s future. Ideologically, the discourse
of a Third Way reconciling economic freedom with social cohesion, fortunes for
the rich and side-payments for the poor, had superior appeal in a post-Cold War
period when uncontested American primacy, with the disappearance of the Evil
Empire, made national self-assertion less pressing an issue in popular
sensibility. By every standard measure, another Democratic success should have
followed.
Clinton’s fellations in the White House, however, cost the
party the election of 2000. The contingency of a sexual bavure let
the Republicans back in by an infinitesimal margin. Yet it so happened that a
victory won by such a chance crystallized a value-division of increasing
intensity. Since the sixties, a more or less bohemian counter-culture had
developed in the US, rejecting conventional mores and beliefs. Radicalized
by opposition to the war in Vietnam, it had served as a convenient target for
Nixon to rally a silent majority of law-abiding patriots to his cause. With the
fading of war in Indochina as an issue, depoliticization of this area set in.
From the late seventies onwards, much of what was once a counter-culture
migrated into a less rigidly regimented, vaguely bien-pensant sector
of mainstream bourgeois life itself, where market forces normalized flouting of
traditional taboos into profitable forms of repressive de-sublimation. [11]This mutation, of which Clinton could be
taken as a tawdry emblem, catalysed a vehement reaction in the ranks of
low-denomination religion, pitting no longer a ‘silent’ but a ‘moral’
majority—in reality another minority, of evangelicals—against godless
subversion of right living. Self-conceived as conservative, these groups became
over time shock troops of Republican electoral mobilization, propelling
contrary forces—sympathy for LGBT would be a short-hand today—into
the Democratic camp. Here, it is widely believed, lay one root of an increasing
polarization of the political system. [12]
5
In 2000 Bush was a beneficiary of this tension. But his
campaign was moderate in tone and its success was not due to any overt appeal
to religious zeal: capture of independent voters, not turn-out of the already
committed, gave him the White House. By 2004, this had changed: his
three-million-vote victory came in good part from all-out mobilization by the
evangelical base the Republican Party could now rely on. But between the base
of the party and its high command there remained a significant distance. Belying
its reputation as a regime of the radical right, the Bush Presidency was in
general domestically pragmatic, not reversing but adapting to the inflexion of
neo-liberal accumulation—and legitimation—bequeathed by Clinton. Confronted
with the same economic difficulties as his two predecessors—at inauguration, a
business-cycle recession; throughout, the intractable pressures of the long
downturn—Bush presided over a combination of the fiscal giveaways and military
Keynesianism of the first with the asset-price Keynesianism of the second:
public deficits triple the size of Reagan’s, and a mortgage spree on top of
Clinton’s, taking housing debt to $11 trillion at a time when
the GDP of the country was around $14 trillion. Three tax-cuts
exceeded Reagan’s record in size, if not quite in the extent—pronounced
enough—of their tilt towards wealth. Bankruptcy laws were tightened to favour
creditors. An aggressive bid to privatize parts of Social Security, an idea
already floated by Clinton, came to nothing. With bipartisan support, civil
liberties were cut back and defence expenditures doubled.
But like that of the Democratic Administration before it, at
home the neo-liberalism of the Republican regime was compensatory in design,
requiring its ideological supplement. Sub-prime mortgages, manna for packagers
and bankers presented as help to the disadvantaged, were a typical inheritance
from Clinton. But however large these would loom economically, they required a
social agenda alongside them. Bush had been elected on a slogan of
compassionate conservatism, and in office paid his respects to it. The No Child
Left Behind Act increased federal spending on education more than any
government since the War on Poverty. The Medicare Prescription Bill—in the
words of a Democratic observer, ‘a massive expansion of the entitlement
state’—was the largest extension of health care since the time of Johnson. Even
immigration reform, to regularize the position of illegal entrants and tighten
employer use of them, though blocked by opposition in Congress—principally but
not exclusively from his own party—was attempted by Bush. In the wake of
mega-scandals left by financial deregulation—Enron, WorldCom—the Sarbanes–Oxley
bill instituted weak checks on corporate fraud, rather than actively enabling
it as Rubin and Summers had done. The overall social record was not one of
die-hard reaction.
Macro-economically, the direction was set at the Federal
Reserve, where Greenspan backed the new round of tax-cuts as a stimulus to
growth, lowered interest rates repeatedly to sustain equity prices, and
encouraged the spread of sub-primes. But the financial bubble created in the
nineties could not be extended forever. In the autumn of 2008, the reckoning
came on Bush’s watch. Amid general panic at the collapse at Lehman, a meltdown
of the banking system was averted only through emergency purchase by the
Treasury of $400 billion of assets at risk on Wall Street. The debacle, an
end-product of the Clinton era, ensured the rout of McCain a few weeks later.
6
Democratic victory at the polls, however, was more than a
reflex of the crash. It corresponded to a gradual sea-change in the sociology
of the electorate, under way since the nineties and long predicted to alter the
balance of partisan forces in times to come. The hard-hats won by Nixon and
Reagan had shrunk: between 1980 and 2010, the proportion of whites without
college education dropped from 70 to 40 per cent. The size of the non-white
electorate—black, brown and yellow—had doubled since Clinton had won it in
1992, from 13 to 26 per cent. Since then, no Republican has won a majority of
its fastest-growing segment, Hispanics. Most important of all, women had
started voting in greater numbers than men in the eighties, and from the
nineties onwards, not only has a large majority invariably voted Democratic,
but their turn-out has increased disproportionately. In 2008, some ten million
more women cast a ballot than men. To these demographic dividends were added
the gradually cumulative effects of cultural deregulation, as marriage rates
tumbled and professions of faith declined. In the fifties, over 90 per cent of
American voters under thirty were married; today, less than 30 per cent.
Married couples now form only 45 per cent of households, those with children
just 20 per cent. More than a quarter of the population no longer describes
itself as Christian. [13]
Such corset-loosening—compatible, of course, with any amount
of market-friendly conformism—has gone furthest in the two groups historically
most affected by the domestication of the counter-culture, youth and wealthy
professionals, each now a key Democratic vote-bank. Crucially, it has also
wrenched apart the Sunbelt: California, the most populous state in the nation,
becoming overwhelmingly Democratic in the mid-nineties, just as the South
became overwhelmingly Republican. The net effect of these changes has been to
replace what was once something like class politics with what is now closer to
identity politics, as the basis of coalition-formation and electoral
mobilization. In the process, traditional income determinations have been
losing their salience, or warping into their opposite. [14] Emblematically, in 2008 a majority
of white voters living on less than $50,000 a year voted for McCain, a majority
earning over $200,000 a year for Obama. Four years later, eight out of the ten
richest counties in the country voted for Obama. In every one of these cradles
of plutocracy, his margin of victory was greater than the national average. [15]
Financial crisis, demographic change, socio-cultural
permutation: at the dusk of the Bush Presidency, all favoured the Democrats. To
these the candidate added his own symbolic charge. Obama won the nomination in
2008 because the Democratic Party—for which, like the Republican,
first-past-the-post rules, inherited from a pre-modern English oligarchy, form
an untouchable system of political closure in the public arena—had for the
first time mandated proportional representation in all of its primaries. Had
traditional winner-takes-all rules applied, Clinton’s wife, scooping the pool
in seven out of ten of the largest state delegations, [16] would have won the nomination with
ease. In the event, the rule-change produced the perfect candidate for the
hour: not only younger, cooler and more eloquent, but magnetic for the
minorities on which victory depended. Image, which in a politics of the
spectacle always matters more than reality, normally requires projection. But
here, in the perception of colour, it was literal, allowing edifying legend (an
autobiography under contract before even graduation) to develop around reality
with unusual speed and ease.
Personification of national triumph over race prejudice,
vindication of the American dream of success possible for all, devout yet
moderate reconciler of divisions, bearer of hope to the disregarded and
afflicted, Obama could serve as a hold for any number of uplifting popular
identifications. Remote from any ghetto, his actual background and
trajectory—like McCain, product of one of the overseas outposts of
turn-of-the-century US imperialism (Panama, Hawaii); tutelary
grandmother, first female vice-president of a bank in the country; educated at
one of America’s top private schools (Punahou is worth around $1 billion);
passage through Columbia and Harvard—could only be irrelevant to these. Once
invested with the authority of office, looks and aplomb have generated a
celebrity ruler—colour relaying style to yield a JFK for a
multi-cultural age, attracting much the same kind of engouement in
the local intelligentsia and its counterparts abroad. In the electorate at
large, colour remains more divisive, but its equations have altered. There, in
the net partisan balance, a racism that is still widespread, if now largely
unspoken, has moved from being a surreptitious asset to a clear-cut liability.
Among voters, the prospect of the first only half-white President attracted
less hostility than a vision of the first half-black one aroused enthusiasm.
The bearing of colour, critical in delivering victory to
Obama at the polls, has been minimal on his record in office. One out of five
male blacks has continued to know incarceration under his rule, without a word
from the White House on their fate. The indices of black unemployment and
poverty have not budged. The business of the Democratic Administration has lain
elsewhere. Its first concern was necessarily containment of the financial
crisis: the banks had been bailed out under Bush, but in the wake of the crash
the economy was in free fall. To check the drop, an emergency stimulus of $800
billion—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—was rushed through, of which
tax cuts were once again the largest single component (37 per cent). But this
time assorted expenditure on infrastructure, research, energy and social needs
made up nearly half the total (45 per cent), for a package hailed by its
admirers as a ‘New New Deal’. [17] Reform of health care, at which
Clinton had stumbled, was the next priority. With the backing of the insurance
industry and the AMA, and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in
Congress, Obama could now pass an Affordable Care Act seeking to make health
coverage universal, and reduce costs enough to pay for itself. To avert further
financial mayhem, the Dodd–Frank Bill multiplied new agencies for the oversight
of Wall Street, and duties for the existing agencies. To maintain vigilance
against terrorism, the Administration extended wire-tapping without warrants
under the Patriot Act. Last but not least, the military budget, running at $629
billion when Bush left office, rose yet further under Obama, to $707 billion by
2012. The public debt, $10.7 trillion in 2008, had jumped to nearly $16
trillion by the end of his first term.
7
How little the parameters of the political system had
shifted with the reversion to Democratic tenure of the White House can be seen
by the degree of continuity in the agendas of the Bush and Obama presidencies.
Both rulers, like Reagan before them, took office in a recession and responded
with tax-cuts to goose the economy. Both presided over weak measures to rein in
financial excesses. Both extended health-care benefits to gain social support.
Both increased federal funding on education. Both sought reform of immigration.
Both hiked military spending, and curbed civil liberties. Both escalated the
deficit. The principal difference has lain in the size and direction of the
side-payments each partisan variant has made, within a framework set by the
joint requirements of business confidence and voter appeasement, in conditions
of deteriorating economic performance. Under the Republican Administration, the
ideological supplement sustaining the regime became a hyperbolic nationalism,
powering the strike-back against 9/11, and covering a fiscal tilt to the rich.
By 2008, the length and outcome of successive overseas expeditions had
exhausted this formula, clearing the space for a Democratic alternative
somewhat closer to Bush’s original appeal, what in the local idiom might be
called ‘compassionate liberalism’, covering an increase in public expenditure
and a fiscal tilt towards the less well-off.
