perry anderson - homeland nlr31501

7/30/2019 Perry Anderson - Homeland NLR31501

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new left review 81 may june 2013 5

perry anderson

HOMELAND

The american political scene since 2000 is convention-ally depicted in high colour. For much nativenot to speak o oreignopinion, the country has cartwheeled rom brutishreaction under one ruler, presiding over disaster at home and

abroad, to the most inspiring hope o progress since the New Deal underanother, personi ying all that is nest in the nation; to others, a spectrenot even American. For still others, the polarization o opinion they rep-resent is cause or despair, or alternatively com ort in the awakening o hitherto marginalized identities to the threshold o a new majority. Thetints change by the light in which they are seen.

For a steadier view o us politics, line is more reliable than colour. Itis the parameters o the system o which its episodes are eatures thatrequire consideration. These compose a set o our determinants. Therst, and ar the most undamental, o these, is the historical regime o accumulation in question, governing the returns on capital and rate o growth o the economy. 1 The second are structural shi ts in the sociologyo the electorate distributed between the two political parties. The thirdare cultural mutations in the value-system at large within the society.

Fourth and lastthe residualare the aims o the active minorities inthe voter-base o each party. The political upshot at any given point o time can be described, short-hand, as a resultant o this unequal quarteto orces in motion.

What remains unchanging, on the other hand, is the monochrome ideo-logical universe in which the system is plunged: an all-capitalist order,without a hint o social-democratic weakness or independent political

organization by labour.2

The two parties that inhabit it, Republican andDemocratic, have exchanged social and regional bases more than oncesince the Civil War, without either ever questioning the rule o capital.


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6 nlr 81Since the 1930s there has been a general, i not invariable, tendencyor those at the bottom o the income pyramidshould they cast a bal-lot, which large numbers do notto vote Democrat, and those at thetop, Republican. Such pre erences refect the policies by and large pur-sued by the two parties: Democratic administrations have typically beenmore redistributive downwards than Republican, in an alignment shad-owing, without exactly reproducing, divisions between le t and rightelsewhere. But these are rarely di erences o principle. A salient eatureo the consen sus on which the system rests is the fexibility o relativepositions it allows. Policies associated with one party can migrate to theother, not in requently assuming orms in the cross-over more radicalthan they possessed in their original habitat. A glance at the history o the past hal -century is a reminder o these eddies within the system.

1

Although it was some time be ore its character crystallized, Rooseveltsvictory in 1932 amously opened a new era in American politics. TheDepression, marking the end o a regime o accumulation based on the

gold standard, high tari s, low taxation and still early orms o mass pro-duction, discredited the Republicans who had long dominated it. Underthe shock o the slump, popular pressuresabove all, the labour strikesthat began in 1934drove the Democratic Administration beyond itsinitial measures o nancial stabilization and emergency relie towardssocial re orms and in rastructural programmes that consolidated itselectoral base, while the shake-out o least competitive capitals andcorporate concentration continued. 3 When the sharp recession o 1937

1Regime o accumulation: term derived originally rom the Marxist work o MichelAglietta, Rgulation et crises du capitalisme, Paris 1976, o which an institutionalistequivalent can be ound in Douglas Forsyth and Ton Notermans, MacroeconomicPolicy Regimes and Financial Regulation in Europe, 19311994, in Forsyth andNotermans, eds, Regime Changes, Providence, ri 1997, pp. 1768.2 Semantically, a symptom o this closed universe is the trans ormation in localvocabulary o the term liberal into a merely social or cultural outlook, denudedo re erence to the economic principles that have historically de ned it elsewhere,since in the us the axioms o the ree market are common to all. Thus neo-liberal,universal currency abroad, is a lexical embarrassment or those who identi y them-selves with the indigenous version.3 First came the o -ramp rom gold, passage o GlassSteagall and nira , in 1933;then the Wagner and Social Security Acts, in 1935.


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anderson: United States 7struck, unemployment was soon back up at 12.5 per cent. What trans-ormed the New Deal into the watershed it became was the arrival o massive state demand with rearmament. With the onset o a ull wareconomy, rom late 1941 onwards, a new regime o accumulation cameo age. The gold standard had gone. Taxation was higher; de cits were nolonger taboo; deposit insurance and banking regulation were in place;corporations had concentrated; consumer demand had expanded. Thesewere conditions o the trans ormation. But the decisive change camewith the huge jump in state spending and intervention in the economy,public expenditures soaring rom 19 per cent to 47 per cent in twoyears, when the country was mobilized or war and business returnedto the seats o power in Washington to run the industrial drive or vic-tory. Firing technological innovation and wiping out unemployment, thewar-time boom delivered American supremacy over the capitalist worlda ter 1945, with an international economic order to t its requirementsat Bretton Woods. The expansion unleashed by the war economy rolledon or a quarter-century o high growth rates at home and unchallengedhegemony abroad.

The political system ormed under this regime, though it descended

rom the New Deal, also di ered rom it. A ter the war the Democratsmaintained the electoral dominance they had secured in the thirties,when they won rst-time voters and second-generation immigrants,once-distant Protestant workers and northern blacks, while keeping atight grip on their historic stronghold in the racist South. While the twoparties divided control o the White House evenly, rom 1948 to 1968each winning it three times, Congress remained or nearly hal a cen-tury a Democratic preserve; between 1932 and 1980, the Republicans

took it just twice, or a pittance o our years. But the underlying politi-cal con guration encompassed both parties. A ter 1937, when the steelstrike was broken and the economy slid back into recession, the labourinsurgency that had orced the most signi cant social re orms ontoRoosevelts agenda was spent. The Wagner Act allowed unionization toincrease up to the early ties; but along with growth in membership came bureaucratization and domestication o the afcio . In 1947, amajority in both parties joined orces to repress militants and strikes

with the Ta tHartley Act.4

4 For this history, see Robert Brenner, Structure vs Conjuncture, nlr 43, JanuaryFebruary 2007, pp. 3740, the most important single text or understanding theevolution o us politics since the New Deal.


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8 nlr 81Collective labour was one thing, to be curbed wherever it risked becom-ing unruly. Atomized voters were another, to be courted so long as theprice could be a orded. I state spending as a proportion o gdp was nolonger at war-time levels, the long boom o the ties and sixties yieldedrates o pro t permitting regular wage gains or workers, and tax rev-enues or continuing public works and social bene ts, along with largemilitary budgets. But no regime o accumulation is static, and in duecourse there was an infexion. War-time planners in Washington hadenvisaged a post-war world in which a dollar standard and ree tradewould deliver export prosperity or us capital via economic recovery inEurope and Japan. The extent o damage in ormer allies and enemiesalike, and the over-riding imperatives o the Cold War, orced this designout o shape. To save capitalism abroad, pure ree trade would have tobe diluted, local rulers allowed some start-up assistance and a meas-ure o protection or their markets, i they were not to sink back intodepression. Recovery came, and as anticipated, American pro ts withit. But since labour costs were lower abroad, it was more rational or us capital to investwhere possible: Europe rather than Japanlocally inproduction or local markets, typically at higher rates o pro t than avail-able in domestic investment, rather than export to them. With the great

expansion o American multi-national corporations overseas, organizedlabour was urther weakened, not legislatively but structurally, rom themid- ties onwards.

Yet so long as the overall regime o accumulation held, the calculus o party competition kept the parameters inherited rom the New Deal inplace. Within them, Republican rulers were per ectly capable o out-fanking Democratic predecessors. Truman, whose Presidency was

largely barren o domestic legislative achievement, broke more strikesthan Eisenhower, whose Interstate Highway Act launched the biggestpublic-works programme since the wpa. Anti-segregation activismand ghetto insurrections wrested the Civil Rights Act and the War onPoverty rom lbj , with a momentum that outlasted him. It was Nixon,not Johnson, who oversaw the largest increase in social entitlementsand economic regulation o post-war history, and proposed the mostambitious anti-poverty scheme, a guaranteed minimum income that

no capitalist country has yet instituted. At Congressional level, where inboth Houses the most rock-solid single bloc o Democrats was alwaysrom the South, Republicans voted in larger numbers than Democratsor the civil-rights bills.


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anderson: United States 92

Across the advanced capitalist world, the post-war boom came to anabrupt halt in the early seventies. Pro tability declined, wages ceasedto rise, and stagfation set in. The common cause lay in the inter-capitalist competition that had been intensi ying since Germany andJapan, restored by Washington as orward de ences o the Free World,had re-entered the world market in orce, o ten with newer capital stockand superior corporate and banking structures. 5 Forced to de end sunkcapital that could not readily be written o , American rms aced lowermargins just as unwelcome social spending and costly regulation werehitting a peak under a Republican president. To cap everything, a tercutting the link o the dollar to gold, Nixon resorted to wage and pricecontrols to throttle infation. Faced with this combination o economiccrisis and political profigacy, capitalbig and smallsprang into action.The Business Roundtable was set up in 1972. By the end o the decadethe Chamber o Commerce and National Federation o IndependentBusiness had doubled their membership, and corporate lobbyists inWashington multiplied over ten- old; political action committees undedby capital ar outdistanced those o labour, and hard-hitting new think-

tanksthe American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, CatoInstitutewere at battle stations. 6 The breakdown o steady growth gen-erated a systematic mobilization against the post-war settlement.

Such was the setting in which the agenda o a new regime o accumula-tion took shape. The neo-liberal order ahead would include deregulationo markets, de-unionization o labour, decreases in taxation and defa-tion o the money supplyin e ect, a reversion towards norms o the

original liberal regime prior to the Depression, minus the gold standardand tari protection. But there would be two critical di erences, in theposition o industry and the nature o the electorate. Manu acturing,just burgeoning into mass production in the twenties, with ty years

5 See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, New York and London2006, passim , the undamental history o post-war capitalism.6 The origins o the aei go back to 1943, when corporate executives focked toWashington or roles in the war economy, but its trans ormation into a conservativepowerhouse dates rom the seventies: by 1980 it had over 600 corporate sponsors.The Heritage Foundation was set up in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977. For thesedevelopments, see Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, NewYork 2010, pp. 11820.


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10 nlr 81o expansion ahead o it, would rom the eighties onwards contractrelentlessly under the pressure o lower-cost producers abroad, displac-ing capital into nance as the command-centre o the economy, and yetmore drastically eroding the position o labour. At the same time voterexpectations now precluded wholesale liquidation o insolvent or ine -cient enterprises: mass unemployment appeared incompatible withstable capitalist rule. In most capitalist countries o the period, analo-gous changes took hold. But in the absence o any signi cant traditionscritical o the over-riding prerogatives o private property and ree enter-prise, and the structural erosion o the power o labour, in Americathey acquired their purest orm. The parameters o the political systemshi ted to the right everywhere in the West, but nowhere so ar and withso little impediment as in the us .

At party level, a ter a high tide o progressive re orm under a Republicanpresident, the backwash o political reaction came with a Democrat inthe White House, and an overwhelming Democratic majority292143in the House and 6238 in the Senatein Congress. Less state, moremarket was the solution to the woes o the economy at the arrival o the bicentennial. The keynotes o the Carter Administration were tight

money and deregulation, to weaken labour and strengthen business.In Congress, the Democrats lowered the capital-gains tax and raisedthe payroll levy, whilein one vote a ter anotherrejecting re orm o health care, indexation o the minimum wage, consumer protection andimprovement o electoral registration. At the Fed, Volcker was entrustedwith a hard defation. Neo-liberalism was now in the saddle. The short-term cost or Carter and his party was high, when the steep interest ratesthat were Volckers cure or infation provoked a severe recession. The

electorate was not grate ul. But a larger problem lay in the lack o anideological message rom the Democrats capable o embellishing theturn in any terms less dour than the need or belt-tightening. Somethingmore alluring was needed.

Reagans victory in 1980, as decisive as Roosevelts in 1932, met therequirement. Neo-liberalism ound its popular supplement in an opti-mism o national reassertion and moralism o individual sel -reliance,

lacedi not excessivelywith aith in the Bible.7

This was an ideological7 For the notion o ideological supplement, see Testing Formula Two, nlr 8,MarchApril 2001, pp. 78.


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anderson: United States 11encapsulation with which the Democrats were hard put to compete.Though they had pioneered the neo-liberal turn, they were handicappedby identi cation with the order that had preceded it, in which they hadso long been the dominant party. The Republicans, with no comparabledi culty o adjustment, became the natural party o government in apolitical system whose centre o gravity had shi ted structurally to theright. The new regime o accumulation avoured them.

3

Behind the shi t in partisan ascendancy lay also sociological changes.The rst o these a ected the white working class. Hard-hat backlashagainst anti-war demonstrations and school bussing had already pro-duced a patriotic and racial vote or Wallace in 1968, and a greater oneor Nixon in 1972. But with real wages alling a ter 1972, and scal creepbiting into take-home pay, workers now also had ewer material reasonsor loyalty to the Democratic Party. Carter had abandoned them. Manyabandoned him. Reagan won a majority o them in 1980 and a muchlarger one in 1984. The second change was the shi t in population and

wealth rom the Northeast and Centre o the country to the West andSouthwest, where capital was newer and less trammelled, urban pat-terns more dispersed, traditions o labour organization weaker androntier imaginaries stronger. There, in Cali ornia, a revolt against prop-erty taxes o home-owners nanced by real-estate developers had alreadypassed Proposition 13, putting Carters Revenue Act o the same year inthe shade. For a century, no presidential candidate had ever come romthe region. Then rom the same springboard came Goldwater, Nixon and

Reagan. Finally and most decisively, the Southalways the most con-servative part o the country, which the memory o Lincolns victory inthe Civil War had or a century made a Democratic bastionhad startedto become Republican in the a termath o Johnsons conversion to civilrights. Its trans er as a regional bloc rom one party to the other, thelargest single shi t in the electorate since Abolition, was gradual. 8 Thirtyyears later, when the South was posting the astest economic growth inthe country, it would be close to total.

8 At presidential level, Goldwater took six Southern states in 1964; Nixon eight in1968, and the whole region in 1972. Reagan won all but Georgia in 1980, and sweptthe board in 1984. But at Congressional level, the Republican breakthrough did notcome until 1994.


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12 nlr 81Sweeping victory at the polls on a plat orm o reeing enterprise romgovernment at home, and re-establishing American power and con -dence abroad, gave Reagan a mandate or a radical shi t in what waspossible to enact in Washington. Without delay, he pushed through themost ar-reaching overhaul o the tax structure on recordloweringrates or all, but heavily weighted towards the richand broke the rstnational strike that came his way, by the air-tra c controllers union.These were highly popular moves, enjoying bipartisan support and widepublic approval. But though a great political success, the tax-cuts were noremedy or the Volcker recession, and had to be partly retracted, be oreanother round ollowed in Reagans second term. But neo-liberal recipescould no more be taken pure economically than ideologically: in prac-tice, a large dose o military Keynesianism was required to keep growthgoing, as steep increases in de ence expenditure primed demand, gen-erating annual de cits three times higher than under Carter. A ter 1985,the shake-out o the Volcker recession and a lowering o the dollar, com-bined with wage-repression and scal hand-outs, allowed manu acturingexports to recover, restoring corporate pro tability. Yet the per ormanceo the American economy did not substantially improve. The initiallyhigh dollar, attracting oreign capital, accelerated the rise o the nancial

sector and widened the trade de cit. Overall growth was less than inthe seventies. By the end o the Reagan era, its epilogue under the rstBush, the ederal debt had tripled. The underlying impasse o the longdownturn had not been resolved.

4

The Democrats were meanwhile adjusting to the parameters o thenew order, as the Republicans had done to the old one. Within a yearo Reagans re-election in 1984, the Democratic Leadership Councilwas ormed to reposition the party in line with the requirements o thetimeshedding outdated commitments to public spending, labour orwel are dependents or a new centrism, champion o a leaner state athome and a more resolute one abroad. By the turn o the nineties, massmovements o any kindlabour, student, black, eminist, rainbowhad

vanished rom the scene. Picked by the media as the most reassuringcandidate rom the dlc , Clinton took the Presidency in 1992 on a splitvote, Perot dividing the Republican electorate in a recession year. Oncein the White House, he took the opposite path to Reaganraising taxes


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anderson: United States 13to reduce the de cit, in the belie that bond markets held the key to busi-ness con dence as the engine o growth. Wel are re orm, discipliningoutlays to dependents, sent another strong signal to the markets thatthis was a responsible Administration. The recession aded, the budgetwent into surplus, and at the end o Clintons second term, the economyexpanded at a hectic clip.

But the boom was no healthier than Reagans, since the debt expungedrom the public accounts reappeared, vastly magni ed, in privateaccounts, household and corporate, in the wake o the nancial deregu-lation that became the signature drive o the Clinton Presidency. Therepeal o GlassSteagall demolished New Deal separation o invest-ment rom retail banking, and the Commodity Futures ModernizationAct li ted any restraint on trades in over-the-counter derivatives. 9 Witha return to the high dollar, oreign capital fooded into the stock mar-ket, while pro tability in manu acturing declined once again. In thearti cial fush o Clintons last years, mortgage liabilities were stokedby lavish government loans, corporations borrowed against their ownshare prices, speculation in hi-tech start-ups exploded, and equitiessoared. E ectively, asset-price Keynesianism had replaced scal-military

Keynesianism, doping domestic demand enough to return briefyto higher growth.

Behind this change lay an infexion in the regime o accumulationoperative since the early eighties, comparable to that o the mid- tiesin the antecedent regime. Once again, the change came rom abroad.This time it was the ull-scale entry o China into the world marketthat governed itlowering labour costs dramatically across manu ac-

turing; at once widening and bank-rolling the American trade de cit;

9 Celebrating the abolition o GlassSteagall, Treasury Secretary Summersannounced: Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed nancialservices since the Great Depression and replace them with a system or the 21st cen-tury. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete inthe new economy. Sandy Weill, head o Citigroup, which had just hired Summersspredecessor Rubin as its chairman, and would be ned $2.65 billionthe largestsuch penalty in the history o Wall Street or its criminality in the WorldCom

scandal, would proudly display among his trophies the pen Clinton used to sign therepeal o GlassSteagall: Je Madrick, Age of Greed , New York 2011, p. 349. Weillspoint-man with Clintons White House, helping him assure passage o the bill, wasGene Sperling, later a stipendiary o Goldman Sachs, now Chairman o ObamasNational Economic Council.


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14 nlr 81propelling us assembly-lines out to China; uelling ctive capital athome. 10 The Reverse Plaza Accord o 1995 to revalue the dollar provedthe tipping-point, at once or outsourcing o manu acturing to the prc and insourcing o money or the stock and real-estate bubbles o theend o the century. In contrast to the thirties and eighties, but in thistoo like the ties, the change was not primed by an intellectual model,but presented on a plate by global conditions. Banks and corporations,hedge unds and start-ups reaped the bene ts o the planetary expansiono the world-capitalist economy under American monetary domination,extolled ex post factoas globalization, and the great moderation. Theinfexion was not a departure rom the neo-liberal order as conceived inVienna, Chicago or Minnesota, but a deepening o it.

Politically, Clintonism appeared to have made Democratic rule competi-tive with Republican under conditions at the outset less avourable to it:not only speeding up nancialization o the economy, while restoringbudgetary balance, but transmitting a glow o prosperity to the modestas well as the opulent. In 1996 bankers and voters alike gave thumbsup to the President or a second term, Clinton raising more moneythan Dole on Wall Street, and taking thirty-one states and close to hal

the electorate: not a triumph on Reagans scale, but healthy enough,with a promisingly wide gender gap11 per centas pledge or thepartys uture. Ideologically, the discourse o a Third Way reconcilingeconomic reedom with social cohesion, ortunes or the rich and side-payments or the poor, had superior appeal in a post-Cold War periodwhen uncontested American primacy, with the disappearance o the EvilEmpire, made national sel -assertion less pressing an issue in popularsensibility. By every standard measure, another Democratic success

should have ollowed.

Clintons ellations in the White House, however, cost the party the elec-tion o 2000. The contingency o a sexual bavure let the Republicansback in by an in nitesimal margin. Yet it so happened that a victory won

10 This huge supply shock radically changed the relative returns on capital andlabour. It made infation global, meaning that its rates have become highly cor-related all over the world, and it subdued long-run infation. Subsequently riskaversion abated, and in most emerging-market countries the cost o credit hasallen, while the rate o pro t has risen. No wonder that credit surged and nanceda boom in asset prices: Michel Aglietta, Into a New Growth Regime, nlr 54,NovemberDecember 2008, p. 72.


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anderson: United States 15by such a chance crystallized a value-division o increasing intensity.Since the sixties, a more or less bohemian counter-culture had devel-oped in the us , rejecting conventional mores and belie s. Radicalized byopposition to the war in Vietnam, it had served as a convenient targetor Nixon to rally a silent majority o law-abiding patriots to his cause.With the ading o war in Indochina as an issue, depoliticization o this area set in. From the late seventies onwards, much o what wasonce a counter-culture migrated into a less rigidly regimented, vaguelybien-pensant sector o mainstream bourgeois li e itsel , where marketorces normalized fouting o traditional taboos into pro table orms o repressive de-sublimation. 11 This mutation, o which Clinton could betaken as a tawdry emblem, catalysed a vehement reaction in the rankso low-denomination religion, pitting no longer a silent but a moralmajorityin reality another minority, o evangelicalsagainst godlesssubversion o right living. Sel -conceived as conservative, these groupsbecame over time shock troops o Republican electoral mobilization,propelling contrary orcessympathy or lgbt would be a short-handtodayinto the Democratic camp. Here, it is widely believed, lay oneroot o an increasing polarization o the political system. 12

5

In 2000 Bush was a bene ciary o this tension. But his campaign wasmoderate in tone and its success was not due to any overt appeal to reli-gious zeal: capture o independent voters, not turn-out o the already

11 A process oreseen by Marcuse already in the mid- ties, coining the term in Eros

and Civilization.12 For dismissal o the idea that signi cant value-conficts divide the electorate atlarge, as distinct rom minorities on either side, see Morris Fiorina (with SamuelAbrams and Jeremy Pope), Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, NewYork 2005, pp. 1525 et seq,and (with Samuel Abrams) Disconnect: The Breakdownof Representation in American Politics, Norman, ok 2009; supported by AndrewGelman, Economic Divisions and Political Polarization in Red and Blue America,Pathways, Summer 2011, pp. 36, or whom value-conficts are con ned to theupper-middle class and the rich, leaving the rest o the population cold. That polari-zation is, on the contrary, rooted in conspicuous divisions o popular sentiment and

conviction is a leading theme in the work o Alan Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization and American Democracy , New Haven 2011,and The Polarized Public? , Upper Saddle Valley, nj 2013. There is little doubt thatAbramowitz has the better o the argument, or which the hardening division o states into blue and red columns is the plainest evidence.


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16 nlr 81committed, gave him the White House. By 2004, this had changed:his three-million-vote victory came in good part rom all-out mobiliza-tion by the evangelical base the Republican Party could now rely on. Butbetween the base o the party and its high command there remaineda signi cant distance. Belying its reputation as a regime o the radicalright, the Bush Presidency was in general domestically pragmatic, notreversing but adapting to the infexion o neo-liberal accumulationand legitimationbequeathed by Clinton. Con ronted with the sameeconomic di culties as his two predecessorsat inauguration, abusiness-cycle recession; throughout, the intractable pressures o the longdownturnBush presided over a combination o the scal giveaways andmilitary Keynesianism o the rst with the asset-price Keynesianism o the second: public de cits triple the size o Reagans, and a mortgagespree on top o Clintons, taking housing debt to $11 trillion at a timewhen the gdp o the country was around $14 trillion. Three tax-cutsexceeded Reagans record in size, i not quite in the extentpronouncedenougho their tilt towards wealth. Bankruptcy laws were tightened toavour creditors. An aggressive bid to privatize parts o Social Security, anidea already foated by Clinton, came to nothing. With bipartisan support,civil liberties were cut back and de ence expenditures doubled.

But like that o the Democratic Administration be ore it, at home theneo-liberalism o the Republican regime was compensatory in design,requiring its ideological supplement. Sub-prime mortgages, manna orpackagers and bankers presented as help to the disadvantaged, were atypical inheritance rom Clinton. But however large these would loomeconomically, they required a social agenda alongside them. Bush hadbeen elected on a slogan o compassionate conservatism, and in o ce

paid his respects to it. The No Child Le t Behind Act increased ederalspending on education more than any government since the War onPoverty. The Medicare Prescription Billin the words o a Democraticobserver, a massive expansion o the entitlement statewas the largestextension o health care since the time o Johnson. Even immigrationre orm, to regularize the position o illegal entrants and tighten employeruse o them, though blocked by opposition in Congressprincipally butnot exclusively rom his own partywas attempted by Bush. In the wake

o mega-scandals le t by nancial deregulationEnron, WorldComthe SarbanesOxley bill instituted weak checks on corporate raud,rather than actively enabling it as Rubin and Summers had done. Theoverall social record was not one o die-hard reaction.


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anderson: United States 17Macro-economically, the direction was set at the Federal Reserve, whereGreenspan backed the new round o tax-cuts as a stimulus to growth,lowered interest rates repeatedly to sustain equity prices, and encour-aged the spread o sub-primes. But the nancial bubble created in thenineties could not be extended orever. In the autumn o 2008, thereckoning came on Bushs watch. Amid general panic at the collapse atLehman, a meltdown o the banking system was averted only throughemergency purchase by the Treasury o $400 billion o assets at risk onWall Street. The debacle, an end-product o the Clinton era, ensured therout o McCain a ew weeks later.

6

Democratic victory at the polls, however, was more than a refex o thecrash. It corresponded to a gradual sea-change in the sociology o theelectorate, under way since the nineties and long predicted to alterthe balance o partisan orces in times to come. The hard-hats won byNixon and Reagan had shrunk: between 1980 and 2010, the proportiono whites without college education dropped rom 70 to 40 per cent.

The size o the non-white electorateblack, brown and yellowhaddoubl ed since Clinton had won it in 1992, rom 13 to 26 per cent. Sincethen, no Republican has won a majority o its astest-growing segment,Hispanics. Most important o all, women had started voting in greaternumbers than men in the eighties, and rom the nineties onwards, notonly has a large majority invariably voted Democratic, but their turn-out has increased disproportionately. In 2008, some ten million morewomen cast a ballot than men. To these demographic dividends were

added the gradually cumulative e ects o cultural deregulation, as mar-riage rates tumbled and pro essions o aith declined. In the ties, over90 per cent o American voters under thirty were married; today, lessthan 30 per cent. Married couples now orm only 45 per cent o house-holds, those with children just 20 per cent. More than a quarter o thepopulation no longer describes itsel as Christian. 13

Such corset-looseningcompatible, o course, with any amount o

market- riendly con ormismhas gone urthest in the two groups13 For these gures, see Abramowitz, Disappearing Center , p. 129; Economist , 25June 2011.


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18 nlr 81historically most a ected by the domestication o the counter-culture,youth and wealthy pro essionals, each now a key Democratic vote-bank.Crucially, it has also wrenched apart the Sunbelt: Cali ornia, the most pop-ulous state in the nation, becoming overwhelmingly Democratic in themid-nineties, just as the South became overwhelmingly Republican. Thenet e ect o these changes has been to replace what was once somethinglike class politics with what is now closer to identity politics, as the basis o coalition- ormation and electoral mobilization. In the process, traditionalincome determinations have been losing their salience, or warping intotheir opposite. 14 Emblematically, in 2008 a majority o white voters livingon less than $50,000 a year voted or McCain, a majority earning over$200,000 a year or Obama. Four years later, eight out o the ten richestcounties in the country voted or Obama. In every one o these cradles o plutocracy, his margin o victory was greater than the national average. 15

Financial crisis, demographic change, socio-cultural permutation: at thedusk o the Bush Presidency, all avoured the Democrats. To these thecandidate added his own symbolic charge. Obama won the nominationin 2008 because the Democratic Party or which, like the Republican,rst-past-the-post rules, inherited rom a pre-modern English oligarchy,

orm an untouchable system o political closure in the public arenahad or the rst time mandated proportional representation in all o itsprimaries. Had traditional winner-takes-all rules applied, Clintons wi e,scooping the pool in seven out o ten o the largest state delegations, 16 would have won the nomination with ease. In the event, the rule-changeproduced the per ect candidate or the hour: not only younger, cooler

14 The most extended case or the belie that there is a continuing, clear-cut econ-

omic division between Democratic and Republican electorates, the less well-o opting or the ormer, the better-o or the latter, is developed in Nolan McCarty,Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America, Cambridge, ma 2008,which argues that the income e ect trumps all other determinants o votingbehaviour. Appearing be ore Obamas two electoral victories, their ndings risklooking dated in the light o them. In 2012 Obama carried only one-third o non-college [sc . working-class] white men, the worst per ormance since Walter Mondalewas buried in Ronald Reagans 1984 landslide: Ronald Brownstein, Why ObamaIs Giving Up On Right-Leaning Whites, The National Journal , 31 January 2013.15 Paul Toscano, Obama Wins 8 out o 10 Wealthiest Counties in us , cnbc , 7November 2012, based on Census Bureau data o average household income 200611.16 Cali ornia, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. The pro-vincialism o American political science, and debate in general, is such thatthis condition o Obamas success has merited scarcely a line o comment, letalone o refection.


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anderson: United States 19and more eloquent, but magnetic or the minorities on which victorydepended. Image, which in a politics o the spectacle always mattersmore than reality, normally requires projection. But here, in the percep-tion o colour, it was literal, allowing edi ying legend (an autobiographyunder contract be ore even graduation) to develop around reality withunusual speed and ease.

Personi cation o national triumph over race prejudice, vindication o theAmerican dream o success possible or all, devout yet moderate recon-ciler o divisions, bearer o hope to the disregarded and a ficted, Obamacould serve as a hold or any number o upli ting popular identi cations.Remote rom any ghetto, his actual background and trajectorylikeMcCain, product o one o the overseas outposts o turn-o -the-centuryus imperialism (Panama, Hawaii); tutelary grandmother, rst emalevice-president o a bank in the country; educated at one o Americas topprivate schools (Punahou is worth around $1 billion); passage throughColumbia and Harvardcould only be irrelevant to these. Once investedwith the authority o o ce, looks and aplomb have generated a celebrityrulercolour relaying style to yield a j k or a multi-cultural age, attract-ing much the same kind o engouement in the local intellig entsia and its

counterparts abroad. In the electorate at large, colour remains more divi-sive, but its equations have altered. There, in the net partisan balance,a racism that is still widespread, i now largely unspoken, has movedrom being a surreptitious asset to a clear-cut liability. Among voters, theprospect o the rst only hal -white President attracted less hostility thana vision o the rst hal -black one aroused enthusiasm.

The bearing o colour, critical in delivering victory to Obama at the

polls, has been minimal on his record in o ce. One out o ve maleblacks has continued to know incarceration under his rule, without aword rom the White House on their ate. The indices o black unem-ployment and poverty have not budged. The business o the DemocraticAdministration has lain elsewhere. Its rst concern was necessarilycontainment o the nancial crisis: the banks had been bailed out underBush, but in the wake o the crash the economy was in ree all. Tocheck the drop, an emergency stimulus o $800 billionthe American

Recovery and Reinvestment Actwas rushed through, o which taxcuts were once again the largest single component (37 per cent). Butthis time assorted expenditure on in rastructure, research, energy andsocial needs made up nearly hal the total (45 per cent), or a package


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20 nlr 81hailed by its admirers as a New New Deal. 17 Re orm o health care, atwhich Clinton had stumb led, was the next priority. With the backing o the insurance industry and the ama , and a libuster-proo Democraticmajority in Congress, Obama could now pass an A ordable Care Actseeking to make health coverage universal, and reduce costs enoughto pay or itsel . To avert urther nancial mayhem, the DoddFrankBill multiplied new agencies or the oversight o Wall Street, and dutiesor the existing agencies. To maintain vigilance against terrorism, theAdministration extended wire-tapping without warrants under thePatriot Act. Last but not least, the military budget, running at $629billion when Bush le t o ce, rose yet urther under Obama, to $707billion by 2012. The public debt, $10.7 trillion in 2008, had jumped tonearly $16 trillion by the end o his rst term.

7

How little the parameters o the political system had shi ted with thereversion to Democratic tenure o the White House can be seen by thedegree o continuity in the agendas o the Bush and Obama presiden-

cies. Both rulers, like Reagan be ore them, took o ce in a recession andresponded with tax-cuts to goose the economy. Both presided over weakmeasures to rein in nancial excesses. Both extended health-care bene tsto gain social support. Both increased ederal unding on education. Bothsought re orm o immigration. Both hiked military spending, and curbedcivil liberties. Both escalated the de cit. The principal di erence has lainin the size and direction o the side-payments each partisan variant hasmade, within a ramework set by the joint requirements o business con-

dence and voter appeasement, in conditions o deteriorating economicper ormance. Under the Republican Administration, the ideologicalsupplement sustaining the regime became a hyperbolic nationalism,powering the strike-back against 9/11, and covering a scal tilt to the

17 The most euphoric billboard or the Administration has been erected by MichaelGrunwald, The New New Deal , New York 2012, where the stimulus becomes morethan 50 per cent bigger than the entire New Deal, twice as big as the LouisianaPurchase and Marshall Plan combined, the biggest and most trans ormative

energy bill in us history, the biggest and most trans ormative education re ormbill since the Great Society, the biggest oray into industrial policy since dr , thebiggest middle-class tax cut since Ronald Reagan, the biggest in usion o researchmoney ever, etcall this rom an author capable o writing nothing in li e exceptparenthood lives up to the hype ( sic ): pp. 1011, 448.


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anderson: United States 21rich. By 2008, the length and outcome o successive overseas expeditionshad exhausted this ormula, clearing the space or a Democratic alterna-tive somewhat closer to Bushs original appeal, what in the local idiommight be called compassionate liberalism, covering an increase in pub-lic expenditure and a scal tilt towards the less well-o .

The political di erence was su cient to put Obama back into the WhiteHouse in 2012. But it scarcely alters the boundary-markers in place sincethe days o Carter and Reagan. The scattered disbursements o the ed-eral stimulus, o ten undercut by scal contraction at state level, have le tmost o their recipients cold. The centre-piece o Democratic re orm,the A ordable Health Care Act, is a much more ambitious scheme thanBushs Medicare Prescription bill. But it is cast in the same mould: anextension o social bene ts in exchange or a bonanza to the privatehealth-care industrythe pharmaceutical corporations, their over-priceddrugs guaranteed a state-subsidized market in one case; the insurancecompanies, their over-charged customers expanded by state ordinancein the other. 18 In theory a universal health-care system compelling everysolvent adult under 65 to take out private insurance, in practice it ismainly an extension o Medicaid, but one that will still leave about 30

million Americans uninsured, 19 and the rest bewildered in a system o yet more complexity and opacity than be orethe bill enacting it is 900pages long. In due course, sectors o the population will bene t, i not as

18 In the grati ed words o the leading encomium o the Act, complete with WhiteHouse photo-ops on the cover, As or businesses in the us economys vast health-care sector, they are going to win, on balance, enjoying more customers andopportunities or growth and pro ts . . . Traders in health-industry stocks knowhow to penetrate the partisan and ideological og to see the economic bottom line:Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, Health Care Reform and American Politics:What Everyone Needs to Know , New York 2010, p. 135: on the day the Act was passed,Wall Street hit an eighteen-month high. The principal architect o the law, ElizabethFowlerworking under the top senatorial recipient o cash rom the health-careindustry, Max Baucuswas ormer Vice-President or Public Policy o WellPoint,Americas largest insurance company. Obama then appointed her to implementthe Act. Two years later, she returned to her natural habitat as a top executive o thepharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. For a trenchant summary o the politicaland social nub o the Act, see Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking , New York 2012,pp. 22831; or a deeper and yet more devastating critique, see Roger Hodge, TheMendacity of Hope, New York 2010, pp. 12949.19 For the numbers who will continue to be uninsured, see the estimates o theCongressional Budget O ce, cited in Courts Ruling May Blunt Reach o theHealth Law, New York Times, 24 July 2012.


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22 nlr 81much as those pro ting rom them, but it is little surprise that enthusi-asm or the re orm has been so tepid, suspicion so widespread.

By 2012, now all too aware o the modesty o A ordable Cares pop-ular appeal, and the relative invisibility o the e ects o Recovery andReinvestment, the Administration switched over to an attack on theavours lavished on the rich by the Republicans, to ar greater politicale ect. Ideologically critical to Obamas re-election in 2012, the practicalimport o this turn has been limited: a mere 5 per cent increase in thetop rate o income tax on the very wealthy, in exchange or a 2 per centincrease in the payroll tax extracted rom those who are not, and the lock-ing in o Bushs tax-cuts or all those earning less than $400,000 a yearas permanent reductions. Surveying the record, a staunch supporter o Obama was moved to complain that a president whose plat orm consistso Mitt Romneys health-care bill, Newt Gingrichs environmental poli-cies, John McCains de cit- nanced payroll tax cuts, George W. Bushsbailouts o ailing banks and corporations, and a mixture o the Bushand Clinton tax rate was being caricatured by Republicans as a threatto capitalism. 20 Attempts by enthusiasts to talk up the Administrationsachievement as a second New Deal miss the comparator. Its egalitarian

sheen belongs with the callisthenic gauze o the New Frontier.

8

Obamas stimulus helped to prevent the American economy rom goinginto a nose-dive in 2010: according to conventional estimates, it savedabout 3 million jobs and 6 per cent o gdp , a bit less than the combined

impact o tarp and monetary loosening by the Federal Reserve.21

Growthremained anaemicjust over 2 per cent across Obamas rst termandunemployment high: o cially calculated at around 12 million, or 8 percent o the work orce. 22 But given that the nancial crash o 2008 wasa bigger shock than that su ered by any other major capitalist country,

20 Ezra Klein, Block Obama!, New York Review of Books, 27 September 2012.21 Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End,27 July 2010, p. 7; available on Moodys Analytics site.22 The true gure, including drop-outs rom the labour orce who no longer evenseek a job, is probably over 14 million: see Mort Zuckerman, How We Can EndOur Modern-Day Depression, us News and World Report , 1 February 2013. Between2000 and 2011, the economic participation rate dropped rom 64 to 58 per cent o the population: Luce, Time to Start Thinking , p. 92.


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anderson: United States 23the short-term response to it was e ective. With less at risk, the lead-ing European states did worse: over the same period o crisis, growthin Germany averaged 0.7 per cent, France 0.075 and Britain minus 0.2,Italy minus 1.45. Per ormance has ollowed policy: scal austerity to bal-ance budgets in Europe, scal abundance to check recession in America.The key to Obamas political survival, however, was the privilege o us seignorage: the ability o the American state, and it alone, to run whatde cit it pleases without much risk o futtering oreign bond-holders.Even as its trade gap steadily widens, and its public debt rises, the UnitedStates remains the central ortress o the world capitalist economy, andin times o general uncertainty the sa est haven or property-ownerseverywhere. Stop-gap as the measures o the Democratic Administrationmay have been, the hole into which the American economy risked all-ing was avoided.

The long-term trends o the economy are another matter. Campaigningor re-election, Obama decried the gul between the super-rich and themiddle classthe local euphemism or the rest o the population,American society by de nition containing no lower classespromisingto set matters right with juster taxes. Rhetoric and reality have had lit-

tle connexion. Under Obama, inequality has continued to grow. A yeara ter tarp , when one out o every six Americans was jobless, and labourunions lost a tenth o their membership, the amous 1 per cent at thetop o the income pyramid took 93 per cent o all gains, and Wall Streetladled out the second highest pool o executive bonuses on record$140billion. By 2011, while 45 million Americans were on ood stamps andmedian wages ell 2.7 per cent, corporate pro ts were up 50 per centsince the crash and the Gini index recorded its biggest one-year jump

since 2003.23

Big capital has done well out o the Great Recession, thebigger the better. By the close o Obamas rst term, the ten largestbanks controlled nearly 50 per cent o all assets and the top twoBoA,jp Morganeach held over $2 trillion.

So ar there has been little popular protest. The one attempt to arouseit, the Occupy movement, ailed to ignite any mass response. Evenwhen its slogans wereall too easilyrendered down into Presidential

23 Je Madrick, Age of Greed , p. 397; Daniel Gross, Better, Stronger, Faster , New York2012, p. 52; Timothy Noah, The Equality Inaugural, The New Republic , 21 January2013. Median income ell by more during the recovery o 200911 than during therecession o 200709: Luce, Time to Start Thinking , p. 272.


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anderson: United States 25It is not new. The structure o the all-capitalist ideological universeamental rmament in which the sanctity o private property and super-iority o private enterprise are truths taken or granted by all orces inthe political arenais such that, at any given point o time, there willtend to be more elasticity to the right o its centre o gravity than to thele t, since the basic belie system lends itsel to stronger articulation,and readier appeal, in unalloyed rather than dilute orm. This did nothold in the emergencies o depression and war during the thirties andearly orties, when the role o the state in sustaining the market andde ending the nation was too plain to be generally denied. But as soonas peace returned, a reaction set in, o which Ta tHartley laid downthe rst marker.

Since then our eatures have, over time, come to set the political cultureo Republican oot-soldiers apart rom those o any conservative partyin Europe. The rst and most undamental is a degree o hostility to thestate, rooted in rontier traditions and empowered by the American creed,all but unknown elsewhere. The second has been the development o atype o nationalism peculiar to the United States as the capitalist super-power in the struggle with communism, inherently more hyperbolic

than that o any other Western society. The third has lain in the partyscapture o the South, the astness o a New World racism, originating ina colonial slave society without equivalent in the Old, which has becomean undeclared holding in the a ective port olio o the party. The ourthcomprises new brands in the long-standing market or religious bigotry,attaching themselves to the Republican cause as secularization startedto lap Democratic constituencies. These were not simultaneous but suc-cessive accretions in the palimpsest o the Republican base. Two o the

ourrace and religionwere late trans ers rom the Democratic bloc,where the Bible Belt and Jim Crow were originally at home; civil rightshad been pushed through Congress by the troops o McCulloch andDirksen, and Nixons plumbers would not have given a pastor the timeo day. Even a third, expansionist nationalism, was only an intermittentpassion: the stalwarts o Ta ts generation were isolationist, not imperial-ist. But in due course, the Cold War brought empire, Johnson deliveredrace, Falwell inducted God into the party.

This was a cocktail to intoxicate the Republican base. The high com-mand, since Reconstruction solidly anchored in big business, remainedmore sober. In a pattern that started in the ties, outbreaks o


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26 nlr 81extravagance rom below would be checked by realists rom above, onewave or eddy a ter another breaking against raison de parti in electoralcompetition. McCarthy was nished o by the Watkins Committee. TheBirch Society was put out o court by Buckley. Goldwater was crushed atthe polls. Even Reagan, or the purists, in the end disappointed. Gingrichdefated. Robertson imploded. The latest such squall, the Tea Party, isunlikely to be more lasting. 25 Even in a year when commentators all butunanimously pronounced the Republican Party in the grip o a collec-tive dementia o extremism never witnessed be ore, no rebrand camenear to winning its presidential nomination, which ended in an easyvictory or the most conventional establishment candidate on o er. ItsCongressional delegationin the words o one authority, light years tothe right o the party in 200004 26re-elected nem con as Speaker theepitome o a low-wattage Mid-Western pol o the old school.

This is not to say that little has changed since the nineties. The greaterweight o the South within the Republican bloc, and loss o the coastalWest, has hardened and narrowed American conservatism. The cardso race and religion have become a losing suit; empire has passed tothe hand o its opponent. As an appeal, anti-statism remainsthe Tea

Party itsel marking a shi t rom moral to scal anaticism. 27 In theUnited States, where there are more owners o small businesses than

25 For the continuities in the politics o the popular Right in the us , see the essayswritten between the mid- ties and mid-sixties by Richard Ho stadter. The modernright wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, eels dispossessed: America has been largelytaken away rom them and their kind, though they are determined to repossess it.Noting that the entire right-wing movement was not only dotted with undamen-talist preachers, but in used at mass level with the undamentalist style o mind,

Ho stadter reminded his readers o how passionately the small-town and ruralProtestants o the 1920s had de ended cultural values that were resur acing in theGoldwater period, when plus a changethe largest single di culty acing theright wing as a orce within the Republican party is its inability to rear and sustainnational leaders. The Tea Party is less outr than many o its orebears, or whomEisenhowers nomination meant eight more years o socialism, and Dulles was aCommunist agent: The Paranoid Style in American Politics[re-edition], Cambridge,ma 1996, pp. 23, 73, 789, 45, 28.26 Theda Skocpol, Obama and Americas Political Future, Cambridge, ma 2012, p. 47.27 Survey data report that nearly hal o Tea Party supporters say they have notheard o the religious right or have no strong opinion about itand about one inten Tea Partiers express strong disagreement with religious conservatism: ThedaSkocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of RepublicanConservatism , New York 2012, p. 36.


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anderson: United States 27trade-unionists, a social basis or that exists in the stratum o minoremployers who populate the Tea Party and make up 40 per cent o thenew Republican cohort in the House. But taxes have lost their buoyancyas an issue, now unctioning more as a shibboleth o de ence than attack.Dispirited by the de eat o 2012, but insu ciently shaken by a nationaloutcome statistically still quite tight, the party has plainly lost its bear-ings. But careers are likely to matter more than convictions as electoralrealities un old. Opportunism is no monopoly o Democrats. In the past,timely conversions have made o many a ormer Republican moderatean intransigent conservative. 28 Corrections in the opposite direction canbe expected among the ultras o today.

10

Meanwhile, the Democrats have the upper hand. Demographic projec-tions avour them, as millennials and Hispanics loom ever larger inthe electorate, and whites decline. 29 Ideological advantage has shi tedin their direction too, and is set to increase, as race and aith becomehandicaps rather than assets in the construction o an electoral major-

ity, and the country no longer looks so endangered abroad. A ter theadventitious victory o 2000, the War on Terror o ered the supplemento a hyperbolic nationalism or the Republican consolidation o powerin 2004. But with the winding down o the battle against terrorism, aspreviously against communism, the administration o empire ceases torequire the atmospherics o national emergency. Just as in the ninetiesthe strategic baton could pass without incident to Clinton, or a socialreadjustment o the ormula or neo-liberal rule, so today Obama can

28 Cheney was once a critic o any crackdown on campus protests, calling orgreater understanding and moderation in responding to student concerns anddisorders; Rums eld, a young moderate in revolt against his moss-back elders;Gingrich, a ollower o Nelson Rocke eller; Mitch McConnell, a scorner o the NixonAdministration as at worst completely reactionary and at best totally indecisive:Geo rey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin, New York 2012, pp. 267, 132, 242, 320.29 For a coruscating analysis o these trends, and the concomitant tensionswithin the Republican bloc, see Mike Davis, The Last White Election, nlr 79,JanuaryFebruary 2013, pp. 552, which also o ers the most telling account o theconsolidation o Republican power at state level in its bastions o the South andMidwest, and their importance in the odd and complex orrery o the us politicalsystem at large, where at ederal level the Supreme Court circles in another gener-ally conservative orbit: pp. 12, 467 .


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28 nlr 81give it a cultural turn without ear o being outbid in an imperial securityauction, leaving the Republican version reduced to the in erior draw o bare tax phobia.

Ampli ying the gap between these appeals is the Democratic grip on themainstream media. To all intents and purposes, the Republican mega-phones on talk radio and television now speak only to the converted.Opinion ormation where it matters, among the well-o and well-educated, and the independent segment o the electorate, is the territoryo the dominant print media. There, the one-party regimes o red-statelore have a blue counterpart. In the capital, just under 90 per cent o bureau-chie s voted or Clinton in 1996. 30 University departments areonly a little less monolithic, close to 80 per cent voting or Kerry in2004. 31 In 2012, the leading newspapers in every key city outside theSouthNew York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston,Washingtonendorsed Obama. With a President at long last attuned totheir sensibilities, press and academy have a spring in their step.

Demography and ideology are not the only terrain on which the balanceo orces has changed. In the mid-seventies, be ore the onset o the new

regime o accumulation, the campaign costs o a success ul challengeto an incumbent in Congress averaged around $100,000. By 2002,they were $1.5 million. Total expenditure on presidential contests rosemore gradually, rom a plateau o some $300 million across the eightiesand nineties, to $400 million in 2000, be ore jumping to $850 millionin 2004, when Bush and Kerry raised over $400 million apiece. Fouryears later, Obama threw o any restraints o public unding to pile upa war-chest o over $800 million, crushing McCain in the largest nan-

cial landslide in American history: a margin o 68 to 32 per cent, arexceeding his majority at the polls, and leading the way to new heightsor the politics o money. Once in o ce, the President wasted no timesetting a urther record in the quest or cash. Within ve months o hisinauguration, Obama was already on the trail calling or donations. Bymid 2011, with elections over a year away, he had attended more und-raisers than Carter, Reagan, the rst Bush and Clinton combined, andwas on course to overtake all ve o his immediate predecessors put

30 Thomas Edsall, Building Red America, New York 2006, p. 101.31 Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, The Social and Political Views o AmericanPro essors, Working Paper, September 2007, p. 36.


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anderson: United States 29togetherthe second Bush includedin their re-election bids. 32 In the2012 campaign, Obama doubled his takings again, this time matchedby Romney, the two candidates between them raising $3.2 billion intheir own name, and with respective ront organizations, a grand totalo $7 billion. 33

In this deluge o money, the Democrats now have the edge. In 2004,the Democratic National Committee already raised more than theRepublican. To traditional spigotsthe entertainment industry, triallawyers, labour unions, Silicon Valleythe party has added not only acash-fow unmatched by its opponents rom loyalists on the web, but averitable downpour o unds rom the health-care, real-estate and bankingindustries. Ties to the nancial sector ormed in the nineties have onlystrengthened over the intervening years. In 200708, the DemocraticSenatorial Campaign Committee raked in our times as much moneyrom Wall Street as its Republican counterpart. 34 The shi t in corporateallegiance is in part simple recognition o which party is in the ascendant,and in a position to return the most avours. But it also refects rationalcalculations o which is a better stabilizer o capitalism in a period o turbulence, when the economy needs urther pump-priming and society

a rhetoric o diversity and inclusion. 35 On its side, the Democratic Partyis using its new- ound wealth to build a nationwide party machine morepower ul than anything so ar in prospect across the aisle, convertingObamas campaign hoard into a non-pro t organization to keep its sup-porters at action stations or the duration. Its planners look orward withcon dence to an era o continuous political dominance.

32 Brendan Doherty, The Rise of the Presidents Permanent Campaign, Lawrence, ks

2012, pp. 823, 149, 167.33 Federal Election Commission, 31 January 2013.34 From 1999 to 2006, the top ve Senatorial recipients o cash rom securities andinvestment rms were all Democratsin rank order: Schumer, Kerry, Lieberman,Clinton and Dodd: Winner-Take-All Politics, pp. 2267. In 2002, when the toprecipient in the House was Rahm Emmanuel, two-thirds o the roll-call o larg-est campaign donors poured their money into the party o the common man, asTruman liked to call it: perhaps surprisingly is the artless comment o McCarty,Poole and Rosenthal in Polarized America, p. 140within their ramework, it wouldbe more accurate to say, incomprehensibly.35 In Hodges crisp ormulation, Politics, we might say, is the continuation o business by other means: Mendacity of Hope, p. 8. In 2008 Goldman Sachs alonelavished three-quarters o its unding on the Democrats, with Citigroup not arbehind: p. 46.


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30 nlr 8111

In themselves, Obamas two victories all short o a turning-point in thepolitical system. Neither their scale nor their setting compare with thoseo Roosevelt or Reagan as historical landmarks. dr took 42 states with57.4 per cent o the vote in 1932, 46 states with 60.8 per cent in 1936;Reagan 44 states with 50.8 o the vote in 1980 (but with a third partycandidate, a nearly 10-point lead over his Democratic opponent), and49 states with 58.8 per cent in 1984. By contrast, Obama won 28 stateswith 52.9 per cent o the vote in 2008, and 26 states with 51.1 per cent in2012. His margins o victory were not only smaller, but declined a ter hisrst term, where theirs increased. That does not preclude subsequentdynastic consolidation under Clinton ii : the scansions o change withinthe system can alter. The more important di erence lies in the structuralcontext o the Obama Presidency. Roosevelt and Reagan took o ce whenthe previous regime o accumulation had exhausted itsel , and the linea-ments o a new one were to hand. In the thirties, there was no shortageo ideas in the Brains Trust or outside itthe Stockholm School, Keynes,Schacht or how to overcome the Depression, even i it took time orthe New Deal to make some use o them. In the eighties, a neo-liberal

counter-attackthe Austrians, the Chicago School, Lucashad longbeen in preparation, with an arsenal o prescriptions or dealing withstagfation to hand. Today, the regime o accumulation in place has alleninto disarray. But, objectively, it is not yet in acute crisis; and subjectively,the landscape is barren o ideas that might adumbrate a new one. It isthis underlying impasse which has produced a political scene at onceclosely and deeply divided. 36

36

For the novelty o this con guration, see Ronald Brownsteins commandingstudy The Second Civil War,New York 2007, pp. 1719 , passim . He points out thatRepublicans were easily dominant up to the Depression, Democrats during thehigh tide o the New Deal. Then, rom the late thirties to the mid-sixties, the politi-cal system was closely but not deeply divided, Democrats and Republicans routinelycrossing party lines in an era o bipartisan negotiation. Since then, it has becomeboth deeply and closely divided. The observation is acute, but its periodization isweakened by a tendency to elide partisan policies and electoral pre erences, leadingBrownstein to date the beginnings o the third era rom Reagans Presidency, onthe grounds that it detonated ideological passions that intensi ed confict betweenthe parties. The country, however, was not closely divided under Reagan, who com-manded huge majorities in the Electoral College throughout. It is only under the lastthree Presidencies that deep but close division set in. The un amiliarity o this devel-opment, underlined by Brownstein, is le t largely unexplained by him. In general, it


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anderson: United States 31In America, immediate di culties have been met with lame-Keynesianremedies: excess o public expenditure over revenue, quantitative expan-sion; in Europe, lacking the imperial prerogative o printing money, withsemi-Austrian recipes. Neither o ers an answer to the prolonged slow-down o the advanced capitalist economies that set in orty years ago,and the fuite en avant into ever new orms o debt creation to avert thedanger o a traumatic shake-out. 37 This is a regime o accumulation thathas enormously enriched a ew, but ailed to restore dynamism to theAtlantic world or its Japanese extension, and le t the system more precar-ious than when it came into being. In its hour o political triumph, theObama Administration aces economic pressures that o er little oppor-tunity or either the social re orms o Roosevelt or the scal donatives o Reagan: threatening de cits, escalating entitlements, sputtering growth.Cultural surrogates o er a temporary way out: changes that cost little ornothinglegalization o undocumented immigrants, gun control, mar-riage or all. Beyond them, the leeway looks small.

Since the emergence o a new regime o accumulation in the eighties,the Atlantic political systems have known two kinds o dominance: anorganic ormula or neo-liberal rule and a clear-cut electoral sweep. These

may coincide or diverge. The most coherent and e ective expression o an ideology, and decisive victory at the polls, are not always the samething. In Britain, which pioneered the turn, Thatcher achieved a com-prehensive hegemony without ever winning a majority o the electorate,the Conservatives o the period never getting more than 44 per cent o the vote. In the United States, where the terrain was more avourable,Reagan combined an organic ormula or the turn with large majorities.In the nineties, the Third Way regimes o Clinton and Blair o ered var-

iants on the legacy o their predecessors, unctioning at once to deepenits grip and anaesthetize its impact. Fair-weather ormations, the rstwas cut short be ore it could be undone by the retribution eventually

is striking how blind even the most accomplished American political science orsociology is to the economic history structuring shi ts in the political system. Forthe latest example, see the exchanges between Theda Skocpol, Larry Bartels, MickeyEdwards and Suzanne Mettler in Obama and Americas Political Future, all o whichproceed as i their subject could be discussed without so much as a glance at the

ortunes o American capitalism.37 The most power ul analysis o the political logic at work in successive phases o this process is provided by Wol gang Streeck, The Crises o Democratic Capitalism,nlr 71, SeptemberOctober 2011, pp. 529.


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32 nlr 81visited on the second or the economic costs o their tenure. Theirs wasa weightless hegemony. 38 Today, electoral victories much like thosethey achieved are commonplace in Europe, with still less staying-powerbehind them, as so many refex reactions to crisis without conviction o exit rom it. In the us , the regalian rights o the dollar have mitigated thee ects o the crash. But the system-wide deadlock in the regime o accu-mulation persists, politically over-determined by the local Kulturkampf o colours and mores. The upshot is the unbalanced balance o partisanorces at which commentators wring their hands today. The neo-liberalorder has become a political no-mans land, in which no organic ormulao rule is now in sight.

38 Susan Watkins, A Weightless Hegemony: New Labours Role in the Neo-LiberalOrder, nlr 25, JanuaryFebruary 2004, pp. 523.

perry anderson - homeland nlr31501

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