“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
--Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980.
The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex marriage.)
Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.
...The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)
Ronald Brownstein, "America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good"
Until Reagan, even in the South, we were making real progress toward a more perfect union, and then it all stopped. Why? Because of Reagan's radical program to start the world over again by which he meant to restore America to a time before the New Deal.
I know it's more complicated, but I trace the acuteness of the current crisis of American democracy back to Reagan. Morning in America was really the beginning of a journey into the heart of darkness, a journey that led us to Trump. With Reagan the sorting and the polarizing and the tribalizing begins. He opened up the space for the more cretinous, resentment-driven, and hateful characteristics of the American character to emerge and to be legitimated.
At the root of the current crisis is a fundamental inability of great swaths of the American populace to distinguish truth from fantasy. Reagan's was always an American-greatness fantasy that had little to do with the complex realities of living in America. It gave Main Street Americans a meaning story when they intensely felt the need for one, but while it might have seemed benign and Norman Rockwell-y enough at first, Morning in America was the beginning of a longer story that has created in so many Americans a compulsive need for delusion that has made it possible for them to take Donald Trump seriously. as a legitimate political leader.
Conservatism, traditionally, has never really had a program; it was always primarily about enlisting a natural resistance to change as a way to protect the interests of the the wealthy. The philosophical roots of Conservatism are not Libertarian--quite the contrary--but Libertarianism has a convenient ideology to justify its negative animus toward an intrusive, constraining administrative state. Everyday Americans are duped into thinking that a bootstrapping, rugged individualism constitutes an essential element of the American character. Such an attitude might have promoted one's chances for success during pioneer days, but they make no sense in America after the Industrial Revolution.
More thoughtful Conservatives, guys like Bill Buckley, thought that too-rapid change was destabilizing and driven by naive, do-goody Liberals, who, even with all the best intentions, promoted a project that would destroy the social and cultural infrastructure that makes civilization possible. He was partly right, but it wasn't do-goody Liberals who were to blame but the fundamentally socially disruptive dynamics of laissez-faire capitalism. [See Note 1]
So conservatives don't like the way America changed after WWII, but really since FDR. And they waited a long time for their moment to roll things back. And they got their chance when the Progressive America that Brownstein describes above started to unravel in the late 60s and 70s. This unraveling was not caused by Liberals but by the necessary lancing of a long festering boil on the American soul--segregation in the South combined with outrage at a futile war in SE Asia. All this exploded in unrest in the context of a society whose norms were dissolving in consumer capitalism's torrential acid rain.
Reagan couldn't bring himself to blame consumer capitalism, so he blamed government: His laugh line--“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."--became a mantra for Republicans, and Neoliberal Democrats accepted that the era of big government was over. In doing so, they gave in to the idea that big government was the problem. Of course it wasn't. It was never about getting rid of big government but about whose interests it would serve--those of wealthy elites or of everyday Americans.
The enemy for conservatives was always the administrative state, the state that in its New Deal and Great Society programs provided the infrastructure for the progress described in the Brownstein excerpt above. Traditionalist Conservatives blame Liberals for getting in the way of their restoring the America they love and that they believe was taken from them, but it's rather like blaming Liberals for hurricanes and tornadoes--and then doing everything possible to prevent them from taking steps to mitigate their most destructive effects.
***
I'm not against capitalism; I'm against unfettered capitalism. I'm not against change; I'm against change that is dehumanizing. In order to direct change in such a way that it promotes human flourishing, you have to have a model of history--a compelling meaning story--that has some working relationship with the dynamic forces that are shaping history. In other words, you need a philosophy or a theology of history to make sense of it. It has to be plausible and intellectually honest, and that requires that it never present itself as the absolute truth, but rather as a working model to help us navigate history in the most humanly productive way. But it needs to be inspiring.
Americans have no such public philosophy of human flourishing except one shaped by a crude, it's-the-economy-stupid materialism. Our public religion by default is the cult of the Invisible Hand, the market deity that makes everything turn out right if we just let it do its thing. The Invisible Hand doesn't care about traditional values. It's a rapacious deity that is fed only by human greed and a compulsive need for growth. And it is greed and growth that have destroyed what Red America feels so deeply the loss of. They blame Liberals, but they should blame the Invisible Hand. And if they're honest, they will recognize that they, too, are worshippers in its cult.
Directing change that promotes broad human flourishing is almost impossible to do when there is no consensus about what constitutes human flourishing. in a Libertarian ethos, we are constrained from making judgments about the choices people make. Who are we to judge? So this in turn leads us to a least-common-denominator imagination of human possibility, for instance human possibility as Judd Apatow or Mark Zuckerberg might imagine it. Apatow's vulgarity and Zuckerberg's callowness are wildly successful as measured by the marketplace, and their success therefore makes them saints in the Invisible Hand's cult.
But most spirited Americans want to think better of themselves than that, and so they are likely to grab onto anyone or anything that tells them they can do better. Some join the military. Others Doctors without Borders or the Peace Corp. Fundamentalist religion offers another possibility, and often that is combined with the 19th-century American mythos to which Reagan gave new life--a mythos of rugged individualism, never-stand-down toughness, and loyalty to god and country.
But what do Liberals have to offer traditionalist Americans that's better--career advancement in a meritocratic technocracy? Jobs in a cubby in some soulless high rise in Oklahoma City? For many of the people whose customary culture has been destroyed in the decades since WWII, to pursue such a life feels to them like surrender to the enemy that has taken everything from them that they and their ancestors held sacred. They'd rather blow it up.
But Democrats and Liberals in general seem incapable of understanding this simple idea: It's the meaning, stupid. They keep thinking that the solutions to the crisis are primarily economic, and of course there must be an economic dimension to any solution that might work. But such a solution can only be advanced within a larger, animating meaning story, a story that Liberals haven't the resources to tell. Red America does have an animating meaning story; it's divorced from reality, but it inspires action and commitment in a way that Liberals don't understand. Because the solution for finding a progressive animating story is a religious one, and Progressives don't trust religion.
Liberals, at best, see religion as a consumer choice, and most don't feel a need for it. Their lives feel meaningful enough without it. They are mostly educated and prosperous, and so have the financial and cultural resources to live decent, interesting lives. But they see themselves as magnanimous and openminded about religion. "If you want to be religious," they'll say, "good for you." But this is so patronizing, and really they are thinking, "Why can't you just be like us? Isn't your religion just you're clutching a teddy bear to get you through the night? Do you really need it? Grow up."
Blue America can't understand why it is hated so much by Red America or why Red America won't become more like Blue America. And because it won't, Blue America justifies its contempt for Red Americans as a failure to adapt. It's rather like the way white settlers came to see Native Americans as sullen, drunken layabouts for their unwillingness to assimilate. Of course, it never occurred to the white folks that their having destroyed their thousands-year old culture might be a soul-crushing loss and cause for disgruntlement. You lost. Get over it. Move on. Is Rust-Belt and rural resentment toward educated elites essentially different? Aren't their resentments cognate with the resentments of Native Americans toward the whites who held them in contempt for similar reasons? I'm not saying the situations of the two groups is equivalent, but analogous. [See Note 2]
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Now I say I blame Reagan, but you might retort that if it wasn't Reagan it would have been someone else. Maybe. But what if the someone else that had been elected in 1980 had the stature and charism of Lincoln or FDR? What if it were someone who could have faced down the dark side of the American character and led the nation out of the confusion of the 60s and 70s toward a more perfect union. Is that so hard to imagine? Isn't that in our American DNA as much as the delusions of grandeur that Reagan represented? ...
Carter, as admirable as he was in so many ways, was just not the man for the moment. He was a morally serious guy who wanted us to eat our spinach, but people won't eat it if there's someone offering them ice cream instead. And that's what Reagan's Morning in America was--junk food. What Americans needed in 1980 was someone to inspire them in a way Carter was incapable of, and so his failure cleared the way for Reagan who was indeed inspiring, but he was selling the sugar high, and it made the country sick.
As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Ailes were given the space to emerge into the mainstream to do their destructively polarizing thing in the 90s. I'd argue there are similar paths taken from Jackson to Jefferson Davis as from Reagan to Donald Trump.
So yes, I blame Reagan. I don't think America had to go the way he diverted it, but arguing counterfactuals isn't useful unless it can help our understanding the problem we're trying to solve. If 1980 was a fork in the road in American history that led us to this moment, what would the road untaken look like, and is that a route that is open to us now?
***
I've been arguing here over the years that fundamental to the crisis in our political order is a deeper crisis of meaning in our cultural order. This dimension of the crisis is something most Liberals in Blue America don't feel acutely for reasons alluded to above. And so their ideas since WWII about progress have always been shaped by a utilitarian calculus about material progress. And so their program has been mostly limited to economic policies designed to mitigate the destructive effects of capitalism on those most vulnerable to be hurt by them. This kind of materialistic utilitarianism lacks the fervor and animating vision of the early Progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Liberals don't understand that It's the meaning, not the economy, stupid.
The Progressivism that gave us all the progress that Brownstein describes above was incapable of dealing effectively with the crisis of meaning that Main Street Americans experienced in the wake of the disruptions of the 60s and 70s. All Democrats had to offer were programs that never addressed the underlying causes of the crisis, which was Traditional America's losing its meaning story as it was embedded in its customary culture. The loss was accelerated by Reagan's program to dismantle the New Deal and unfetter the nihilistic forces of corporate capitalism. [See Note 3]
So I would argue that most Liberals don't understand that there's double whammy here for Red America in its feeling that Liberals are the cause of their having become both culturally and economically marginalized. While cripple-the-government Republicans are more to blame for their economic losses, Red America blames Democrats for both because they've come to think that Republican pols care about them when they show up wearing their red jerseys and then feed their resentments regarding their cultural losses. These pols and their media propagandists tell Red America that the Liberals want to take away their religion, their guns, and their whiteness, but guns, religion, whiteness are just MacGuffins in the meaning story plot. Give Red America a better meaning story, and they lose their importance. But until that story changes, they play a central role in supporting the cult. The challenge is not to persuade Red America that their ideas are wrong, but to inspire them with a better story.
Red America's losses are not the fault of Liberals, but Liberals are at fault for not understanding why they are being blamed by Red America, and their Blue cluelessness leads them to endorse attitudes and policies that make things worse. It's astonishing to me to think that Democrats could ever think that nominating Hillary Clinton was good idea. It only makes sense from within a particular kind of blinkered technocratic/meritocratic version of feminism that has no sense of the causes that have led the broader society into this crisis.
But as bad as the Clintons were, they were simply adapting to the world that Reagan created. His Morning in America was a celebration of both unfettered, deregulated capitalism and traditional American values. And so follows the irony that in the name of traditional American values he unleashed the forces that in subsequent decades destroyed the social infrastructure that supported them. In doing so, Reagan began the process of creating a deracinated, anomic mass that was ripe for exploitation by the first demagogue to come along, which turned out to be Donald Trump.
That such an absurdly ridiculous figure should be so successful in not a testament to his talent, so much as it is a testament to the social psychological damage done to the country by Reaganism. His unfettering of the nihilistic forces of capitalism, dressed up in a 19th-century, rugged individualist fantasy, thrust Red America into a ferocious ontological vertigo, a vertigo that they could remedy in this crusade to take their country back from the Libs who are absolutely convinced stole it from them. Trump's claims of a stolen election are so persuasive because it fits the story that that's what Libs do, steal and cheat. They did it to them, and so, of course, they did it to Trump. That's what explains MAGA and J6. Reagan and the right wing demagogues who emerged after him told them to blame big-government Liberals, and Trump has just taken it all to its logical conclusion.
So since Reagan and the GOP, with the acquiescence of Neoliberal New Democrats, have not only impeded the country's social and material progress, but have led us to a condition where it's not enough for the worst tendencies in American society to be tolerated, but rather for those worst tendencies to become the norm. The Reagan-promoted fantasy of America created the space for the most regressive and shameful elements in the American psyche to emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult to understand how it created the shame-denying, resentment-driven, reality-averse habits of mind that inevitably led so many conservatives to embrace Trump.
So rather than admit that they were wrong, MAGA conservatives and their fellow travelers must do whatever is necessary to shut out the truth and the shame of their having enabled such madman. And in their doing so they have played a critical supporting role in his project to smash basic norms and impediments without which a healthy democracy cannot survive. Their repressed shame requires that they double down in their hatred of the morally smug Libs who they can never acknowledge were right. So they must do whatever it takes, whether legal or illegal, to shut Blue America out of power because that's the only way to shut them up. This was the psychology of the slaveholders in the 1850s, and it's true now of any conservative who is not a Never-Trumper. Brownstein reinforces the point:
The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.
During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.
By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.
It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”
The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.
And as in the 1850s, the forces of resentment and reaction are aggressively overreaching today. Conservatives are justifying their support for Trump because he gave them the court that overturned Roe, but more consequential is that he gave them the court that is bent on its project to dismantle the administrative state--to return us to the 1880s if they can. Or something even worse. We could be headed toward the fulfillment of Bannon's "Leninist" dark fantasies to destroy the administrative state, and to replace it with what? Some Putinesque, synarchist-theocratic nightmare?
Will such a project or something like it succeed? There's a good chance of it. Reactionary Red America has short-term structural advantages--the Supreme Court, the electoral college, the Senate, a majority of state legislatures, the obliviousness of a center-right-leaning electorate. But Progressive Blue America has the greater numbers, and the cultural, economic, and intellectual energies that Red America simply can't constrain indefinitely.
It's possible we'll have a decade like Cromwell's parliamentary dictatorship in the 1650s, but that will prove so unattractive that it cannot last. Maybe we will need Red America to do its worst before a backlash will develop that will empower a broad consensus to push back against it. Perhaps that's the only thing that can galvanize the political will to push for a Progressive Restoration that picks up where it left off in 1980. Perhaps only then can we get the constitutional changes that will free the country from the 18th/19th century thinking and institutions that prevent it from dealing with 21st century challenges. That's as much optimism as I can muster at the moment.
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Note 1: Buckley is a fascinating character, and I have more to say about him in a post entitled "Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary". But his Catholicism and his embrace of capitalism never really made much intellectual sense. Capitalism has always been more of a Calvinist thing. But he came from oil wealth, and so for all his purported Catholic fervor, that side of him never really got into a very deep conversation with the capitalist side of him. His Catholicism and therefore his conservatism always struck me as having more in common with that of Latin American oligarchs--i.e., more about protecting their privileged place in the social order than about the spirit of the gospels. His theology was deeply correlated with his sense of social privilege in an older oligarchic sense.
Nevertheless, there's a partial truth buried in Buckley's critique of the naïveté at the heart of the Liberal project, but the deeper reality is that Liberals simply adapted to the dynamically changing world that post-WWII consumer capitalism created. Capitalism's consumer-driven-choice-and-self-indulgence ethos was the acid that slowly dissolved whatever feeling Americans had for the public interest that formed during the depression and WWII.
Note 2: That's why Liberals are so obsessed with education. Education is always the solution for Liberals because it was the key to their own success. But getting educated has come to mean for Red America its becoming brainwashed in institutions dominated by the ideology of its enemy, the enemy that destroyed everything they and their ancestors held sacred. The brouhaha about CRT has nothing to do with CRT; it's all about the fear that traditionalist Red Americans have about losing their kids to the enemy and its ideology. Conservatives see themselves as the earthy, valiant, freedom-fighting Celts in Braveheart, and Liberals as the ever-expanding machine, that is, the hated, snotty, slick English that would as soon squash them all as if they were only bugs. Liberals aren't that, of course, but they are more comfortable in the machine than conservatives are, and so are guilty by association.
Note 3: I'm surprised this theme doesn't get more attention. Reagan's program was abetted and advanced by Neoliberal Democrats in the 90s. The Washington consensus for deregulation and free trade endorsed by both Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats insisted that lower prices were good for everyone, and if in order to get them some people needed to lose their jobs, well that's unfortunate, but they can be retrained to do something else. Was it ever a consideration how such policies atomize American society and have destructive effects on families and the communities that support them? Conservatives are right that government programs are no substitute for healthy families and communities, but conservatives--thick, dull guys like Romney and Paul Ryan--never understood how market capitalism worked so mercilessly to destroy them.
Oren Cass is an interesting conservative exception who understands that public-private partnerships are essential to promote healthy local communities and the families that are their life. This should define the common ground between Democrats and Republicans, but the Republican Party policy wing is dominated by Libertarians who don't want the government involved in solving problems. They are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. Just lower taxes and let the markets do their thing, and all shall be well. There are a lot more Democrats in today's congress who would be open to Cass's ideas than Republicans.
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See also "How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name", a reflection Rick Perlstein's Nixonland shortly after it came out.
Also "Growth Idolatry" about the tradeoffs between fairer wealth redistribution and rates of economic growth.
