scholarly journals THE RISE AND FALL(?) OF AMERICA'S NEOLIBERAL ORDER

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 241-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

The 1980 and 1984 U.S. Elections and the New Deal: An Alternative Interpretation

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right ◽  
Federal Administration ◽  
The New Deal

This article has three sections. The first discusses the hegemonic interpretations of the 1980 and 1984 U.S. elections that are being reproduced on both sides of the political spectrum and that are presented as justification of current federal health and social policies. This section presents evidence that questions those hegemonic interpretations. Section II presents an alternative explanation of current political realities rooted in the class practices of the current federal administration and the Republican Party and in the abandonment by the opposition party—the Democratic Party—of the class practices of the New Deal. It discusses the reasons for that situation and analyzes its consequence for social policy. Section III presents evidence that questions the ideological arguments that are put forward by the Right (and are uncritically accepted by large sectors of the Left) and that sustain current federal economic and social policies. This section concludes with a discussion of alternative policies, stressing the need to rediscover class practices and its implication in health and social policy.

The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Loyalty Program ◽  
Federal Employee ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Consumer Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. This book draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program—created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. This book finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, the book shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their “effeminate” spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. This book demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.

SOCIAL POLITICS IN A TRANSOCEANIC WORLD IN THE EARLY COLD WAR YEARS

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The New Deal

ABSTRACTThis article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.

The Strange Career of A. A. Ahner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Feurer
Keyword(s):  
Learning Curve ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Career Path ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning

Paving the Way for Reagan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Third World

The book analyzes the influence of National Review, Human Events, and Commentary on the foreign policy ideas of the Republican Party from 1964–1980. During that eighteen-year period, the publications of conservative opinion provided ideological clarification on important national issues that played a fundamental role in reviving the political fortunes of the American Right, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan. Those who wrote for these publications used their positions to offer suggestions to conservative policy makers that called for a more confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union and the nations that sought to compromise the United States’ interests around the world. In recommending a shift in foreign policy, Human Events, National Review, and Commentary assisted right-wing decision makers by contributing arguments to revive what these publications believed was a weak and indecisive United States that had become uncertain about its role in the world following the defeat in Vietnam. By criticizing policies, such as détente, or the aggressiveness of the Third World within the United Nations, opinion makers on the Right offered conservative political leaders information and analysis that called for the return of American power in the face of an ever more confident Soviet Union.

The House and the Federal Role: A Computer Simulation of Roll-Call Voting

1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 494-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
White House ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Post War ◽  
The New Deal

Much of the business of the U.S. Congress in the post war period has involved issues concerning the size and scope of activities of the federal government. The legislation in this area can be traced, for the most part, to measures which originated during the period of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and to measures enacted during World War II to meet the short-run exigencies attendant to rapid economic and social mobilization. From the point of view of the expansion of the federal role, the Eisenhower years are of some moment. While they marked a lull in the expansionist trend witnessed under the Democratic presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman, their significance lies in the fact that despite the change in adminsitrations, there was no reversal of the policies begun during the Roosevelt years. While most of the Republican legislators were on record in opposition to the expansion of the federal role, the failure of the Republican Party to introduce and enact legislation to reverse the trend of federal expansion resulted in a new plateau of federal activity from which the congressional dialogue was to proceed during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.While the 87th Congress, meeting during Kennedy's first two years in the White House, did not enact the quantity of legislation expanding the federal role that Kennedy had called for in his inaugural, In the 88th Congress both parties supported a larger federal role to a greater extent than they had previously. In fact the first sessions of the 88th Congress as it bears on the federal role has been summed up as follows: “At no time did the majority of both parties reject a larger federal role.” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1963, p. 724) With two exceptions, the statement holds true for the second session in 1964.

The Lessons of the New Deal: Did Obama Learn the Right Ones?

History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 97 (325) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
TONY BADGER
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

Victims of the Great Depression: Self-Blame/Non-Self-Blame, Radicalism, and Pre-1929 Experiences

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Sternsher
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Self Blame ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

scholarly journals A High-Wire Crusade: Republicans and the War on Poverty, 1966

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-405
Author(s):  
Mark McLay
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Great Society ◽  
Elementary And Secondary Education ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Economic Opportunity Act ◽  
Antipoverty Programs ◽  
The New Deal

Abstract:During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.

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