Slippery politics
Just two points in response to Rick. The first has to do with right and left as essential characteristics. The second addresses the claim that left and right are finally dispositional. These are not minor points, and in fact mulling them over a bit might help us toward a greater understanding the rise of the modern Right.
First: it may be that there are timeless qualities of left and right, but rarely if ever do they divide neatly in American politics. Time and again, principles of civic republicanism, liberalism, and democracy have been mobilized for ends that were liberating to some and repressive for others. And these liberating and repressive dynamics are deeply connected. In a country that is founded on black slavery and native genocide, and yet with fundamental commitments to freedom and equality, could it be otherwise? Jacksonian democracy linked white suffrage to native genocide. Populists linked opposition to monopolies to nativism and sometimes worse. The social gospel movement tied passionate devotion to equality and social welfare to intolerant piety. Progressive Era reformers sought to clean up political machines in part by disenfranchising immigrant voters in cities. I could go on here with too many more examples. In the case of modern conservatives, their success required a language of anti-elitism and freedom from control from above. And as has been the case in so many times past, this discourse was greatly aided by the legacy of white supremacy.
If conservatism remained what it had been in 1928, or 1937, or even 1960, it would never have come to dominate. Emergent racial contradictions from the New Deal helped bring segregationists together with northern conservatives over the 1940s and '50s in a way that began to split the Democrats regionally. But what was required was a strong populist element that allowed white working and middle class voters to see Republicans as something other than simply the party of the rich, or conservatives as backward-looking grouches. Wallace linked black folks to liberal elites in a rhetorical frame that made them both the enemies of hardworking, white producers. Goldwater strategists like Clif White paid attention, so did a young Kevin Phillips, and of course so did Nixon. But to really peel off these voters, Nixon had to court them by mixing conventional conservatism, liberalism, and white racial animus.
Second, it may be that left and right are dispositional, but one would have to know what qualities make up those dispositions to know if that is true. For instance, does leftism in its essence denote a commitment to the collective over the self? There are plenty of variants of what we would call right-wing authoritarianism, fascism, or just straight up nationalism that fall under that category. Conversely then, is a left disposition defined by antiauthoritarianism? Right wing libertarians are driven by just that impulse. Is it a belief in the fundamental diversity of cultures? Check out Edmund Burke's critique of British imperialism in India on that score.
I don't just mean to be pedantic although no doubt I sound that way. I do think that there is meaning in the terms left and right. But these terms are meaningful only in the context in which they are claimed and practiced, and are always open to re-association. That's what makes them slippery, and finally, it is what I think liberals missed about the rise of the Right happening under their noses. They assumed a fixedness of politics - that all of its elements would stay aligned. Thus when new cleavages emerged in the postwar era, such as civil rights and later feminism, anti-imperialism, gay rights, etc., liberals had no way to confront or manage the splits they engendered.
Our success both in figuring out how the right became dominant after 1968, and in figuring out how we can build a left opposition now requires not that we finally get an understanding of timeless political essences of left and right. Rather, it requires an understanding of how political hegemonies get built - or dismantled - under specific political circumstances.
Thanks again Rick for affording us the chance to discuss both your wonderful book as well as all the important questions it raises.
Comments (15)
Even when you're trying to be fair lefties always manage to cast losers as the good guys and winners as terminally flawed with selfishness and cruelty. There can only be one reason for such bias; you are the losers.
Which brings me to Einstein's 1931 conversation with Freud. Einstein was exploring the possibility of world peace. Freud was pessimistic. In his view there would always be a few strong men and lots of weak ones. The latter had no choice but to combine against the former if they wished to preserve their freedom, dignity, possessions.
Einstein agreed...and here we are.
May 30, 2008 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
I found both of assertions by Perlstein—that "left" and "right" are essentials and that people are "leftist" or "rightist" by disposition—to be remarkably wrongheaded and deeply calls into question any political analysis that could possibly arise from such views.
As Lowndes points out, there's innumerable examples in American history which confound any essential, coherent notion of left/right. And if this entire categorical system is not simple, essential, and fixed, but rather complex, descriptive, and dynamic, then the notion that people are born as leftists or rightists is necessarily invalid.
While the libertarians' two axis system is naive and somewhat contrived to validate their beliefs, it is, at least, less naive and simplistic than the conventional one axis left/right dichotomy. Serious political analysts should take a cue from this example and consider that large-scale political affiliations are coalitions of groups of people with intersecting core interests and, thus, they should be trying to discover what principles cause those smaller groupings to occur.
I've long wondered why political scientists aren't using sophisticated statistical analysis coupled with large scale polling of attitudes about positions on a large number of specific issues to discover these correlations. The let/right distinction as we know it today in the US is the most abstracted, least informative way of understanding how people group together because they have similar political beliefs. It's not just the least informative, it's often misleading.
If it were the case that left equated to progressive which equated to "likes change" and right equated to conservative which equated to "likes tradition/resists change", then I'd agree that people are one way or the other by disposition. Most people either prefer change in problem solving or prefer tradition in problem. Unfortunately, it's not the case that being a leftist reduces to preferring change and being a rightist reduces to preferring tradition. There's a strong correlation there, but do people really believe that were the US to have a Scandinavian-style social welfare system and related that everyone currently on the "left" here in the US would still prefer change? Or would they prefer the status quo?
Similarly, it's tempting to think that "left" equates to empathy for others, especially the weak, sick, and poor while "right" equates to a lack of empathy to such and a tendency to be judgmental. Again, there's strong correlation. But many of the people on the "right" in the US today are among the religious right and, although you won't know it reading most progressive blogs, a good portion of those people are motivated by the Christian values which are strongly empathic for the most disadvantaged. (My sister, for example, is an evangelical and identifies more with the right than the left...yet her major concern in her ministry is with social justice.)
It seems to me that, again taking a page from the libertarians (though it pains me to say so, as most of them seem to me to be, frankly, nuts), that you cannot begin to understand politics in the US without disentangling cultural values from economic values. The US has always been, and continues to be, economically rightist compared to the rest of the world. But in many ways it has been culturally leftist, often leading the world in some cases (and not others, to be sure).
Furthermore, and especially when analyzing the right from a leftist perspective, it's very important to understand that A) both sides tend to label things/people as their opposites when there is disagreement, whether or not the disagreement actually represents agreement with the opposite political coalition; and B) political affiliations are perhaps most deeply about economic preferences and beliefs and therefore the left/right dichotomy tends to over-represent the economic factor while under-representing the cultural and other factors (such as, say, style of government).
People in the US are very entrepreneurial and therefore identify much more closely with business owners than do people in, say, Europe. Americans are therefore typically much less sympathetic to unions. Does that make Americans essentially rightist? Not by itself, it doesn't.
I don't pretend to know why the right has gotten so powerful over the last thirty-five years. If I had to come up with an explanation in these sorts of essentialist terms (rather than historical contingency), then I'd say it's because Americans represent an off mix of two conflicting traits. The first is that Americans are idealistic and optimistic. The second is that Americans are not very empathic and are also political traditionalists. The former has led to a great deal of change, culturally and politically, with regard to a huge number of things related to individual liberty. That's been a lot of cultural liberalism. But Americans aren't that sympathetic to leftist economic programs that are concerned with class-based social justice. And Americans are resistant to large political change. They are made nervous by change, even when they embrace it as a result of their idealism and optimism.
This results in a pendulum effect.
Part of the rise of the GOP dominance over the last thirty-five years is because Americans have become entrenched in the ways in which they are comfortably "rightist"...economically, militarily, the antipathy to social justice programs. They are entrenched partly as a result of having to accomodate a great deal of change that they've embraced because of their idealism and optimism, such civil rights, gay rights, free speech, sexual liberation, women's rights, and all things similar. It's not that the cultural liberalism is one sort of people (the left) and economic conservatism is a different sort of people (the right), it's that most Americans represent in themselves this mix. We hear most from the activist at the extremes who don't seem to be in this (what looks like a) conflict. But they aren't most people. The American center aren't a large group of people who take the middle road on all positions, they're a large group of people who take some leftist positions and some rightist positions. Until analysts understand this, they're not going to be able to understand the shifting balance of power between the so-called "left" and the "right".
May 30, 2008 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
It would seem that a large scale survey of personal positions on a number of significant issues and personal characteristics could be subject to factor analysis, and if there is an innate predisposition to left/right, or if such a continuum even exists, then the factor analysis should pick it up.
The analysis is an easy one. I can only assume that it has been done, probably numerous times, and failed to ever give any coherent results. Such research would be almost unpublishable, since research that does not show any result is essentially unpublishable.
Without actually seeing such research, and assuming that it has been done, the lack of published results would support the conclusion that the linear dichotomy of left/right does not actually exist. Then the only information we have is logical analysis. The inability that Lowndes finds in defining a real meaning for left right seems quite rational.
May 30, 2008 8:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I may be misunderstanding you, but it seems you're conflating elements of American history with systemic components of the American project. For instance, you write, "In a country founded on black slavery and native genocide..." But these tragic historical elements were not foundational building blocks of the nation. Could we have become a functioning democracy without slavery? And if the Indian Wars had never occurred? Well... yes. Was the country created to advance slavery and persecute Native Americans? No.. These are two of the most regrettable and horrific chapters of this country's past, but they were adjuncts to the establishment of the nation, not charter essentials.
And, other than through Jackson himself, how were white suffrage and Indian genocide linked by Jacksonian democracy? Jackson was popular with voters in the 1820s because he represented an alternative to bureaucratic and financial status quo, not because he promised to massacre the Cree and death-march the Cherokee cross-country to Oklahoma.
Much of the contradictory nature of political initiative left and right in this country have to do with specific conditions - and conditional horse-trading - than with dire weaknesses in our founding framework.
May 30, 2008 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
What this leaves out is that the westward push, and the concomitant Indian Wars, were fundamental in creating a sense of shared identity and a common project among the colonists, through a messianic quest, tinged with the rhetoric of a paternalistic, civilizing mission. In many ways the encounter with American Indians provided the bedrock for the "American Project," which arose out of a set of diverse communities established by colonists who came from different backgrounds.
May 30, 2008 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed - up to a point. But I think the conquests of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion had more to do with practical livlihood and land ownership on the part of individual settlers. Messianic quests and paternalistic missions are terms for casting political and financial ventures in noble rainment, but it's almost universally true that any endeavor anywhere is fueled mostly by the prospect of improving the personal; self-interest is a powerful motivator. For defining myths to survive, they must deliver on their promises. For better or worse, I wonder if anything is more substantial to American self-regard and nature than the Industrial Revolution...
May 30, 2008 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interestingly, there is, and has been, a ton of just this type of research done in the EU and among European social scientists. While we have here in the US no shortage of polling on a wide variety of issues, we seem loathe to allow the results to upset our clean, comfortable two-axis schema.
That said, I think Joe's dead right. An essentialist/dispositional view seems to work only when one looks at a narrow set of circumstances, or a small time-frame. A broader, more historically elongated view on the other hand, explodes the sense of consistency and immutability that lends credence to an essentialist understanding of political identities. While certain dispositions, such as a unique valorization of entrepreneurship, are fundamental to American politics and history at all its stages, that makes it no less a contingent fact, and as we can see, these dispositions can be employed politically by both right and left.
May 30, 2008 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's Friday and I can't thank kmellis and especially, Joseph Loundes enough for the time they've put into this discussion of Perlstein's work.
CultCrit! LitCrit! PoliCrit! In the absence of analyzing historical contingency, there's only so far you can go with "theory" -- and I'm not sure it's very far.
The '60s were special. For whatever reason(s) the country's elite decided it was time to try and end racism, sexism, and poverty. It was a revolution led by the "vanguard of the people" but a vanguard unwilling to shoot the people who are stuck in their old ways. And the counterrevolutionaries are always there to welcome the masses back home.
Lenin, thou should'st have been living at that hour -- :-).
May 30, 2008 6:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great. Like there weren't enough bodies to bury that century...
May 30, 2008 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: In many ways the encounter with American Indians provided the bedrock for the "American Project," which arose out of a set of diverse communities established by colonists who came from different backgrounds.
Still, westward expansion could have occured with far less brutality and outright genocide toward the native peoples. For an example of which possibility look north, to Canada. Yes, the Canadians were not always nice to their natives, but there was no Canadian Trail of Tears.
May 31, 2008 8:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Umm we started as 13 colonies and ended as fifty states. Don't know how that gets to NOT be foundational. One of the grievances against England was their blocking the westward expansion.
As to slavery, our being a democracy may not have depended on it, because we were not particularly democratic through much of our history. (Some would argue we still are not. ) But our existence did depend on it. The colonies that were to become America had tobacco, and sugar grown by slaves at the core of their economy. The Northern colonies that did not have huge slave filled plantations depended on raw material from them, and on profits from transporting slave themselves. The triangle trade and all that.
Without slavery or genocide whatever countries were in the geographical space we current occupy would not be called the United States of America. It would consist of multiple nations, possibly with an alternate Mexico that would still have Texas, California and other parts to the Southwest. Our constitution would be different. Our culture would be fundamentally different; it is shaped by slavery and the Indian wars in a million different way. Any counterfactual on these issues is fundamentally different, probably a lot more different from today's U.S. that a Canada that has been heavily influenced by the U.S. presences (and often threat) on their border. Dude, how is that not fundamental, not foundational?
May 31, 2008 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
The vast agricultural capacity of the New World would have been exploited regardless of whether or not slavery existed. To propose the early American economy was dependent upon slavery is to say that those early cash crops - flax, sugar, tobacco, and, especially, cotton - couldn't have been planted, grown and harvested without slaves. Of course they could. The institution of slavery was intended to maintain a centralized economy controlled by a tiny elite of plantation owners; it was not the exclusive means of crop yield south of the Mason-Dixon. Producing crops with paid labor would have changed the face of Southern culture - and American history - but not its status as a world-class agricultural dynamo; commercialization of natural resources is the issue of climate and soil, design and effort - not solely the dynamics of labor force.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the profound weaknesses of the slave system were apparent. For any system, if an unpaid labor force produces its goods - who will buy those goods? The South's economy was dependent utterly upon exporting everything it produced, and the benefits of that economy were enjoyed by only a few. (A hard lesson, incidently, learned by Stalin's Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century.) In the North, however, the Industrial Revolution transformed the region into an economic powerhouse. Once the South's largest export market, Britain, accessed alternative resources of cotton and sugar in its growing overseas empire, the South's economy plummeted, and it became a backward, sleepy nest of envy and discontent. This, more than anything else, sparked the Civil War of the 1860s.
Slavery and the violent subjection of Native Americans were tragedies of American history - not components of the American charter and system. The idea that the nation was founded on slavery and genocide is absurd. Yes, we are products of our history, and our culture is influenced by these atrocities. But it is not dominated by them. We are also the issue of other history, and many other factors - millions of them.
June 2, 2008 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Instead of the linear polarity of Left and Right, perhaps a better model to illustrate movement overlaps would be a Venn diagram. Thank you for acknowledging the shadow side of American social progress.
May 31, 2008 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am very sorry to say that this entire conversation reminds me of one unforgettable speech:
May 31, 2008 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
The ideas surrounding what is progressive and what is reactionary today when compared to say the 50's is profoundly more complex by the sheer number of "new" issues confronting citizens. Like information overload, there is political overload too as people must absorb social change at an accelerated rate. And coming from "below" is a generation that seems almost beyond history, a sort of post-historical generation. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing. They face a complicated world with simple desires --making a living, having a house, paying for school. Generally they do not hold as many reactionary attitudes as their parents --racial intolerance by example. not to say that racism doesn't exist, but the overthrow of its institutions is one of the great accomplishments by progressives in the last 50 some odd years.
Perhaps this generation will be wise in what they don't know. A fresh start of sorts.
June 1, 2008 3:59 AM | Reply | Permalink