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History isn’t just the study of distant past. We, too, are living through history, and I’m convinced that we’d benefit enormously from understanding how our own time fits into the broader sweep of history.
In recent years, influential scholars have sought to write or, better put, radically rewrite, the cultural, economic, intellectual, political and social history of American history since the onset of the Great Depression.
One school, which includes such prominent historians as Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstle and Nelson Lichtenstein; sociologists like Jonathan Rieder; and political scientists including Thomas Ferguson, has organized those eight decades around a key organizing theme: the rise and demise of two contrasting constellations of ideologies, policies and political constituencies: the New Deal order and its successor, the Neoliberal order.
The older order, which arose during the Great Depression, emphasized government regulation; negotiated compromises between capital and organized labor; a social safety net for the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and dependent children; and the use of fiscal and monetary policy to promote stable economic growth. It was succeeded in the late 1970s and 1980s by a new order that emphasized privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and globalization and that embraced an ideology that prized free market principles and celebrated entrepreneurship—and that transformed higher education from a public to a private good.
According to this interpretation, by the 1980s, the New Deal order, a distinctive set of ideas, public policies and political alliances, had begun to ebb. In the face of persistent and rising inflation, high interest rates, mounting government deficits, slow growth and stagnating living standards, the Carter and Reagan administrations took aggressive steps to dismantle the system of regulation that had been a bulwark of the New Deal order, deregulating airlines, energy, trucking, railways, telecommunications, finance and even breweries.
Even before President Ronald Reagan broke the air transport controllers’ strike in 1981, unionization in private industry, another linchpin of the New Deal order, began its steep decline. At the same time, presidents, whether Democratic or Republican, promoted free trade and the free movement of capital, goods and services, while the overall trend was to reduce tax rates for corporations and the highest earners. Meanwhile, financialization grew in importance—evident in the rapid growth of the financial sector and a sharply expanded role for banks and investors in the economy as they used financial leverage and complex financial instruments to generate profits.
Accompanying deregulation, de-unionization, free trade, tax cuts and financialization was a radical realignment of the electorate, sweeping shifts in party platforms and far-reaching changes in the nature of the political process as “a network of elites that includes fund-raisings, the leadership of interests groups, specialists in the technology and manipulation of elections and an army of Washington lobbyists and law firms” tilted the balance of political power away from the economic interests of those in the bottom half of the income distribution.
Then, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Great Recession fractured support for the Neoliberal order, paving the way for the very different populist currents personified by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
There are several problems with this synthesis. For one thing, it tends to exaggerate the disjunction between the two orders, as many essential elements of the New Deal order, including farm subsidies, the minimum wage and Social Security, persisted, even as other elements, like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (now TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), underwent modifications that weren’t nearly as radical or far-reaching as they were touted at the time of their enactment.
Then, too, the drivers of change aren’t obvious. One influential interpretation, by the political scientist Ferguson, stresses the role of capital-intensive industries, investment banks and internationally oriented banks, but precisely how these interests made their influence felt within highly diverse political coalitions isn’t clear.
In addition, the timing is a bit off. A strong case can be made that it was Jimmy Carter, rather than Ronald Reagan, who was instrumental in ending the New Deal order. It was his administration that deregulated oil and gas, trucking and airlines, and it was he who appointed Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve and who raised interest rates to record heights and cause two recessions to combat inflation.
But this interpretation’s biggest problem is that it hasn’t as yet dealt adequately with the role of race and immigration. It’s certainly not the case that these scholars ignored race and immigration. But I think it’s fair to say that this school treated those issues more as objects of political contention and partisan polarization rather than as drivers of transformation.
It’s clear in retrospect that the rapid increase in long-distance immigration was part and parcel of the broader process of global interconnectedness, driven both by pull forces (including the prospects of improved living standards as people move from the global periphery to the core) and push forces tied to the emergence of zones of disorder and disruption around the world, which are products of external forces (including climate change and disruption of local economies and labor markets, which are under pressure from global trade) and internal forces, demographic, economic, environmental and civil and political (such as political violence, civil conflict and criminal gangs).
It’s race and inequality that is the focus of a second school of interpretation, which gives historical depth to the arguments made by proponents of critical race theory about the persistence of privilege and gross disparities in income and wealth as well as grossly unequal access to quality education, health care and housing.
A key question that scholars like Michelle Alexander, Matthew Desmond, Walter Johnson, Peniel Joseph, Ira Katznelson, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Richard Rothstein, Richard V. Reeves and Thomas Sugrue ask is why despite groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions, landmark legislation and the election of growing numbers of diverse mayors, legislators and even a Black president and a Black and South Asian vice president, social mobility among the poorest Americans has not substantially declined and sizable numbers of people of color remain mired in multigenerational poverty.
These scholars have emphasized public policy’s pivotal role in promoting and reinforcing racial disparities. Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White, for example, showed how key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s deliberately excluded Blacks while driving upward mobility among many whites. Rothstein’s The Color of Law demonstrated how federal, state and local governments encouraged and buttressed neighborhood segregation and had the effect of concentrating poverty. Meanwhile, Alexander and Muhammad revealed the discriminatory role of policing and the criminal justice system (and especially the drug war), which had the effect of criminalizing poverty and dislocating Black communities.
Johnson, in turn, invoked the concept of racial capitalism (a term originally applied to apartheid-era South Africa) to describe the ways Blacks are at once economically exploited and marginalized, a theme that Desmond develops further in his new book, Poverty, by America, which shows how American society and government “knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor,” forcing them to overpay for housing, credit and other goods and services and concentrating the poor in lower-quality schools, economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and unstable, low-wage hourly jobs.
Desmond’s claim that there has been little or no improvement in the poverty rate since the 1960s has been subjected to harsh criticism, since his figures fail to adequately take account of transfer payments, for example, from the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, SNAP and other housing, training, health-care and educational programs. That’s certainly the case. But rather than rejecting his argument outright, I’d reframe it. While government benefits have certainly ameliorated some of poverty’s hardships, they have failed to break the cycle of intergenerational and concentrated poverty by placing recipients in secure and rewarding jobs.
A third perspective on the history of the past eight decades is a pluralistic approach that emphasizes conflict over a host of never-ending policy and legal issues that involve ever-shifting alliances. These include struggles over the size and scope of the federal government, taxation and the U.S. role in the world, but also a host of seemingly smaller, more focused or more parochial issues.
Politics, then, is essentially a competition among groups—parties, advocacy groups, interest groups, lobbies, factions, special interests and pressure groups—to advance certain values, interests, ideologies, agendas and policy preferences. This approach reminds us that in a democratic polity, it’s not individuals who are represented, but groups sharing common interests, concerns and values.
To be sure, political power is not equally dispersed or represented. But it is certainly the case that a growing number of groups—including civil rights groups, environmental groups and social justice groups—now play an active role in the struggles over policy and values. The key point is that within this country’s democratic polity, no single group, on its own, can determine policy outcomes. Power hinges on competing groups’ ability to persuade, to forge alliances and to invoke common values in order to advance their aims.
There is far more than a grain of truth in the narratives that I’ve sketched out above. However, I think it’s now high time for a new synthesis that brings together the insights of those points of view. So, let me suggest a fourth approach to U.S. history from the 1930s to the present, one that focuses on the advent, crystallization and mounting challenges to four key concepts—liberal capitalism, liberal democracy, liberal internationalism and liberalism as a political and moral philosophy.
It was during the Great Depression and World War II that certain liberal ideas gained ascendance within the United States. Nations responded to the Great Depression in distinctive ways. Western and Northern Europe embraced welfare capitalism. Central, Eastern and Southern Europe and Japan turned to fascism and/or militarism. Many Latin America countries embraced military dictatorship, while the Soviet Union launched a campaign of forced industrialization.
In contrast, the United States under the New Deal adopted a mishmash of somewhat contradictory antitrust, labor, public works, reformist, regulatory and social welfare policies that became the hallmarks of the modern liberal state, with its mixed economy and a political philosophy that gave the federal government responsibility for maintaining national prosperity, ensuring an equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth and addressing poverty, unemployment, disability and the economic ravages of old age.
The New Deal did not offer a unified or coherent response to the Depression. It pitted various groups—planners, centralizers, decentralizers, Keynesians, balanced budgeters, segregationists and civil rights advocates—with distinctive ideologies and agendas against one another. Diversity of interests and ideology remain a defining characteristic of political coalitions today.
Even though the Depression-era unemployment was deeper and lasted longer in the United States than in other countries, New Deal liberalism succeeded in restoring the nation’s morale and saved American capitalism even as it allowed many gross inequalities to endure.
As Eric Goldman argued in his classic Rendezvous With Destiny, first published 70 years ago, in the wake of the Depression and especially following World War II American liberalism became increasingly torn between two competing visions: whether to extend American-style democracy and liberal capitalism globally and defeat Communism or to strengthen and expand the incipient American welfare state.
In some respects hegemonic, liberal ideology nevertheless face repeated challenges from the anti-Communist, free market and libertarian right and the more progressive, antinuclear and antiwar left, including the New Left and the counterculture during the 1960s, neocons during the 1970s through the 1990s, and Tea Party conservatives on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left following the onset of the Great Recession. The second half of the 2010s witnessed the rise of the Trump and Sanders insurgencies and the rise of new forms of progressive politics with its distinctive vocabulary and agenda.
Much as the proponents of the Neoliberal turn have argued, the 1970s represented a crucial turning point. But the challenges to the liberal order faced were even broader than those historians have argued. These involved not just the end of an era of rapid economic growth—apparent in the energy crisis, stagflation, mounting foreign competition and deindustrialization—but a loss of faith in political leadership, a weakening of the party system, reassertions of congressional power and a fear that the United States had become a paper tiger in international affairs. The Carter and Reagan administrations represented efforts to address the range of challenges that the nation faced.
The end of the Cold War not only spawned fantasies of the end of history and the triumph of free market capitalism, but unleashed a host of internal and interstate conflicts that the Cold War had suppressed and encouraged a heightened willingness to intervene overseas in the name of humanitarianism, extending democracy and safeguarding national security. It was the Great Recession, however, that triggered the strongest critiques of liberalism. Mounting concerns with income stagnation, deepening disparities and a tattered social safety net helped spawned the Trump and Sanders versions of populism, along with new forms of progressive politics.
Will liberalism in its classic New Deal or Great Society or Clinton- and Obama-esque guises remain the dominant strain in American politics and economics? Or will alternatives to those conceptions of liberalism triumph? I can’t say. I’m a historian, and like the Sankofa bird of the Akan, I look backward as history moves forward.
But I do think that this society would benefit from thinking historically about our own time. That will require us to understand that today’s inequities are rooted in the past and unless addressed will persist into the future. It also requires us to recognize that politics is necessarily a contentious process and that we, not as individuals but as members of organized groups, will help shape policy priorities and outcomes. Above all, it reminds us that nothing in history is inevitable but is rather the product of choices and actions made either intentionally, deliberately or purposely or else blindly, inadvertently or out of inertia.
The French philosopher, sociologist and political scientist Raymond Aron once said, “In politics the choice is never between good and evil but between the preferable and the detestable.” It’s up to us, acting collectively, to seize the burden of responsibility and take steps to ensure a better future, first and foremost at our own institutions, and make sure that they live up to their obligations.
