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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The American History Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics Since 1968 is an insightful consideration of the events people, and policy debates that have shaped and continue to influence, even control, the current political era.
- Rejects conventional wisdom that the dominant force shaping recent American politics in the last half century has been the "rise of the Right"
- Considers the achievements and frustrations of each administration, from Nixon to Obama, in its assessment of contemporary U.S. politics
- Features authorship by an expert scholar in the field who takes a thematic rather than a partisan approach to recent American politics
- Offers a concise, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date synthesis of the literature in the field and concludes with a comprehensive bibliographical essay, an aid to student research
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Seitenzahl: 624
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: 1968—The Endof an Era
1 The Politics of Cynicism, 1968–1974
The Shaping of a New Majority
Conservatism as Reform
The Politics of War and Détente
Watergate and Its Aftermath
2 The Futility of Moderation, 1974–1976
The Politics of Forgiveness
President as Political Prisoner
Détente Derailed
3 Dashed Hopes, 1976–1980
Fractured Majority
Threading the Needle
The Abandonment of Idealism
4 Dogma and (More) Disappointment, 1980–1988
The Rise of the Right
Reaganomics
Culture Wars and Party Politics
Reagan’s World
5 Squandering the Inheritance, 1988–1992
Succession by Hardball
The Bills Come Due
New World (Dis)Order
6 The Deepening Divide, 1992–2000
The Illusion of Liberal Revival
The Politics of Triangulation
Quest for a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy
Crises of the Clinton Presidency
7 The Politics of Polarization, 2000–2008
Ultimate Deadlock:
Bush v. Gore
The Politics of Anti-terrorism
Imagined Mandate
The Politics of Certitude
8 The Politics of Red and Blue, since 2008
The Politics of Hope
Government by Dysfunction
The Politics of Trench Warfare
Conclusion: Deadlock and Disillusionment
Bibliographical Essay
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 01
Figure 1.1 Nixon’s “Palace Guard,” H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John R. Ehrlichman. In April 1973, both would be fired, along with White House counsel John Dean, due to fallout from the Watergate scandal.
Figure 1.2 Richard Nixon leaving Washington immediately after becoming the only American president to resign from office.
Chapter 02
Figure 2.1 Facing an emboldened post-Watergate Congress controlled by Democrats, Gerald Ford had little choice but to try to control policy through frequent exercise of his veto power. A 1975 Herblock Cartoon,
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Aiming to end the “imperial presidency,” Jimmy Carter rejected many of the trappings of office. As shown here, in early 1977 he delivered a televised “fireside chat” to the nation, informally attired in a cardigan sweater, asking Americans to reduce energy use by turning down their home thermostats. National Archives and Records Administration, 173549
Figure 3.2 President Carter, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin at the Camp David presidential retreat in March 1979, forging a framework for peace.
Chapter 04
Figure 4.1 Ronald Reagan’s swearing-in, January 20, 1981. The sweeping victory of the Reagan–Bush ticket in 1980 seemed to usher in a new period of conservative dominance in American politics.
Figure 4.2 Reagan forged a strong personal relationship with reform-minded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that produced historic arms reduction agreements at a succession of summit meetings. The two leaders are shown here at the breakthrough Reykjavik, Iceland, summit in October 1986.
Figure 4.3 Oliver North, one of the major perpetrators of the secret arms-for-hostages deal known as the Iran-Contra scandal, testifying before the special congressional committee investigating the matter.
Chapter 05
Figure 5.1 The first President George Bush was well served by a strong national security team, but his “right-hand man” throughout his administration was Secretary of State James Baker, shown here with Bush conferring at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Plenary in November 1990. George Bush Presidential Library and Museum
Chapter 06
Figure 6.1 Bill and Hillary Clinton were the first couple to occupy the White House where the First Lady was a true partner in policy-making. Her most controversial role occurred in the first year of Clinton’s presidency, when she headed a White House task force charged to develop a sweeping health-care plan that never became law.
Figure 6.2 One of the most resilient public figures of his—or any other—generation, Bill Clinton survived impeachment and left office two years later with a higher than 60 percent approval rating. Here, Clinton supporters are shown demonstrating against impeachment in December 1998.
Chapter 07
Figure 7.1 President Bush rallied the nation after the horrendous attack on the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 by visiting the site and speaking to the firefighters and other rescue workers within days of the attack.
Figure 7.2 George W. Bush relied inordinately on his influential advisors, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and—to a lesser extent—his second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. Here, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are shown participating in a video conference with Bush while he was in Iraq in June 2006.
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1 At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, keynote speaker Barack Obama, at that time a candidate for U.S. senator, galvanized the convention with a moving speech emphasizing the need for national unity. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he declared, “there’s the United States of America.”
Figure 8.2 Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 built on voting trends that had begun to harden by 2000. The Democrats dominated the increasingly dependable “blue states” on both coasts and in the populous Great Lakes region, while the broad swath of Republican “red states” in the South and interior Midwest seemed an expansion and solidification of trends resulting from Nixon’s 1968 Southern strategy. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/map/historic.html#2000. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/map/historic.html#2012
Conclusion
Figure C.1 In February 2014, the Pew Research Center published a graph showing survey results on public trust in government from 1958 to 2014. Despite obvious “rally points” related to Reagan’s election, the triumphant Gulf War, the booming economy of the late 1990s, and the aftermath of 9/11, the long-term trajectory in public trust has clearly been downward. Given the bitterness of partisan conflict in the second decade of the new century, it is hard to see how trust in government can easily be restored. Public Trust in Government: 1958–2014 http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-government/. Pew Research Center
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Bartlett, Irving H. The American Mind in The Mid-Nineteenth Century, 2d ed.
Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2d ed.
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV
Borden, Morton Parties and Politics in the Early Republic, 1789–1815
Carpenter, Roger M. "Times Are Altered with Us": American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic
Carter, Paul A. The Twenties in America, 2d ed.
Cherny, Robert W. American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900
Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal, 3d ed.
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Ferling, John Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women in Antebellum Reform
Griffin, C. S. The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860
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Deadlock and Disillusionment
American Politics since 1968
Gary W. Reichard
This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc
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Cover image: Getty/Juanmonino
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1
Nixon’s “Palace Guard,” H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John R. Ehrlichman
Figure 1.2
Richard Nixon leaving Washington immediately after becoming the only American president to resign from office
Figure 2.1
Cartoon of Gerald Ford
Figure 3.1
Jimmy Carter delivering a televised “fireside chat” to appeal to viewers to reduce energy use
Figure 3.2
President Carter, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin at the Camp David presidential retreat in March 1979
Figure 4.1
Ronald Reagan’s swearing-in, January 20, 1981
Figure 4.2
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the breakthrough Reykjavik, Iceland, summit in October 1986
Figure 4.3
Oliver North testifying before the special congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal
Figure 5.1
President George Bush with Secretary of State James Baker conferring at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Plenary in November 1990
Figure 6.1
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton
Figure 6.2
Clinton supporters demonstrating against Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House in December 1998
Figure 7.1
George W. Bush rallies the nation after 9/11 by visiting the World Trade Center site within days of the attack
Figure 7.2
George W. Bush’s influential advisors, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, in a video conference in 2006
Figure 8.1
Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
Figure 8.2
Maps showing the distribution of Democratic and Republican support across U.S. states, 2000 and 2012
Figure C.1
Graph showing public trust in government, 1958–2014
Preface
Like many books, this one took a long time—more than a decade—from conceptualization to completion. From the start, however, the working title and thesis remained unchanged. That the title Deadlock and Disillusionment still seems apt confirms that the interpretation that led me to propose this book to my then-publisher, Harlan Davidson, has held up over the succeeding ten years and more. Readers will judge for themselves whether they share my view, of course—but this belief has sustained me during the course of this long project.
For permitting me the luxury of this long gestation period—while I was diverted by successive administrative assignments, briefly retired, unretired, and have since been diverted again—I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my friend and editor, Andrew Davidson. It was Andrew who encouraged me when I suggested to him the idea of a “current political history” title for the American History series, to which I had earlier contributed a volume on mid-twentieth-century politics—and he stuck with me through years when surely he must have entertained doubts that the new volume would ever see the light of day. Thanks, Andrew, for your faith in my good intentions—and for your good-natured encouragement along the way. I hope you will feel at least somewhat repaid by the fact that the series, now part of John Wiley & Sons, again has a “current political history” volume.
I want to thank also four professionals whose help was invaluable in developing my manuscript into this finished work: Wiley senior project editor Julia Kirk and Emma Brown, who assisted with permissions for the images used herein; Wiley editorial assistant Maddie Koufogazos, for her great help in the later stages of the book’s production, and Janet Moth, a first-rate copy-editor.
I also extend heartfelt thanks to two fine historians who took time to read the manuscript and who offered very helpful comments that allowed me to improve it. Clayton Koppes of Oberlin College, my longtime friend, read most of this book in an earlier draft and offered numerous helpful suggestions as to both content and organization. It helped that these suggestions were couched tactfully so as not to break my spirit as I worked toward completion of the project. Bill Chafe of Duke University generously agreed to serve as a reviewer of the near-final product for Wiley and he, too, offered excellent suggestions to strengthen the final product. I appreciate his careful reading of the work, as well as his willingness to allow me to acknowledge him in this public way. I apologize to both of these scholars for not taking all of their suggestions, but I hope they will recognize the specific ways in which their ideas made the book better. For any remaining weaknesses, of course, I accept full responsibility.
Finally, I want to thank my life partner and best friend, Oswaldo Pena, for his unflagging support for this project as I gave endless weekends and evenings to its completion—especially in its final stages. I might somehow have gotten to the end of the project without his unflagging support, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.
Gary W. ReichardStaten Island, NYJuly 2015
Introduction: 1968—The End of an Era
Nineteen-sixty-eight was truly an annus horribilis in American history. Most distressing and disconcerting for the nation, two major political figures lionized by their supporters as the best hopes for achieving racial and social justice were gunned down within the short space of two months. The reverberations were drastic. The sniper shooting of 39-year-old civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April fanned a frenzy of frustration in heavily black urban communities across the country, producing riots in more than a hundred major cities that left thirty-nine dead and caused more than $50 million-worth of damage in already blighted neighborhoods. Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in a Los Angeles hotel on the very night of his narrow victory in the California Democratic primary seemed to deal a final, dispiriting blow to millions of Americans—especially young, idealistic anti-war protesters and impoverished African Americans and Hispanics. While not producing the level of violence that King’s death had, RFK’s killing seemed to end any chance that the ever-deepening divisions and climate of escalating violence in the United States could be resolved by peaceful political means. Together, these senseless killings signaled the emptiness of political promise and an end to harmony and civility in American society. A mere two-and-a-half months after Kennedy’s assassination, the bloody riots that accompanied the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago provided confirmation that American politics—indeed, American society—would never be the same.
Despair and disillusionment were manifest throughout American society in 1968. Polls showed deep pessimism across the electorate where questions of the nation’s political future were concerned. At least for the previous generation and a half, since the advent of the New Deal—and largely because of it—Americans had grown comfortable in their faith that any social divisions or policy disagreements in the public sphere could be worked out via the ballot box. Voters could—and did—express their pleasure or displeasure for the governing party and then, with a mandate established at the polls, politicians could usually be trusted to work together and often across party lines to advance the public interest in directions that the majority of voters had endorsed. With the exception of the few years during which political and social harmony were riven by the stridency of McCarthyism, by and large those entrusted with the reins of power in Washington, D.C., including the leaders in both houses of Congress, had worked to find ways to compromise policy differences in the public interest, rather than concentrating on those differences.
Structurally, this political generation had been marked by orderly and civil transfers of power and a palpable sense of accountability to the public on the part of presidents and most members of Congress. Despite much gnashing of teeth among political scientists at mid-century about the lack of “a responsible party system,” in fact one party or the other had held simultaneous control of both the executive and legislative branches for twenty-eight of the thirty-six years following FDR’s victory in 1932. All of this—accountability, stability, public confidence in the political system, and the apparent valuing of the public interest over partisan self-interest (not to mention basic civility in the political arena)—was to change after 1968. Increasingly, the disillusionment of American voters would be obvious in their unwillingness to provide real mandates for either party. In the forty-eight-year period beginning in 1968, single-party control over the executive and legislative branches became a rare exception: in only twelve of those years were the White House and Congress controlled by the same party (the Democrats in 1977–1981, 1993–1995, and 2009–2011 and the Republicans only from 2003 to 2007). In other words, in nearly 70 percent of the twenty-three elections during this long era, the voting public consciously opted for divided—and, it could be argued, irresponsible—government. How could it not be expected that deadlock (or “gridlock,” as the media more often labeled it) would be the hallmark of American politics in these years?
Other forces contributed to deadlock, as well. As several political scientists have demonstrated, party polarization, both in the electorate and in Congress, steadily intensified beginning in the early 1970s. Accompanying this trend, perhaps as a side effect of a decline of civility in American society as a whole, was a loss of “comity” in government. This was most noticeable in Congress, where traditions of respectful language and procedures had helped to maintain positive relations across party lines. All of these changes greatly reduced chances for compromise on matters of policy. The resulting inaction in turn reinforced public disillusionment with politics and government, generally. Relations between the executive and legislative branches also frayed noticeably. Beginning with the “credibility gap” that opened up under Lyndon Johnson and worsened under Richard Nixon, culminating in battles over war powers, impoundment of appropriated funds, and—ultimately—impeachment, Congress stiffened its resistance to any further strengthening of the presidency. This institutional rivalry, too, served to slow down the wheels of government.
Most of all, however, such deadlock was the result of purposeful, continual imposition by voters of “checks and balances” to limit either party’s potential to govern effectively. At the same time, unrealistic as it might have been in the circumstances, the public continued to yearn for dramatic change—for a new era. Such yearning manifested itself repeatedly in presidential elections. Hopefulness for a major political turnaround was redolent in the presidential campaign themes of the era, from Nixon’s “Bring Us Together Again” in 1968 to Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” in 2008. This recurrent tension—the voters’ almost wistful searching for dramatic, meaningful political change, followed regularly (and usually quickly) by a knee-jerk correction of course that made it impossible for either party to “go too far”—was to produce four decades and more of deadlock and disillusionment in American politics. Whether this longstanding gridlock will one day pass or represents an irreversible negative transformation in American politics remains an open question.
1The Politics of Cynicism, 1968–1974
As 1968 dawned, no one could have predicted the political landscape that would prevail little more than a year later. President Lyndon Johnson, widely regarded as a political maestro and the recipient of landslide endorsement by the voters four years earlier, would be in lonely exile in Texas on his Johnson City ranch. Former Alabama governor George Wallace, reviled by most of the public in the early 1960s for his clenched-teeth refusal to bow to civil rights advances whose time had come, would loom as a future presidential possibility based on his strong showing as a third-party candidate in November’s presidential election. Most significantly, Richard Nixon, who six years earlier had angrily announced his exit from politics, would occupy the White House. The Democrats would still control both houses of Congress, largely through inertia; but in truth, the party would lie in tatters as a result of the epic intra-party battles inside and outside the Chicago convention hall in which Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination as the Democrats’ standard-bearer in August. Finally, thanks to the inroads made by both Nixon and Wallace during the bitterly contested presidential campaign, the Solid Democratic South, which had prevailed for so many decades, would no longer be reliably Democratic.
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