Alexander Hamilton sees that impeachment poses a special problem for elective government. In Federalist 65, he writes that impeachment is designed to punish political offenses, that is, “the misconduct of public men,” their “abuse or violation of some public trust”—”injuries done to the society itself.” In a popularly-elected government, “the prosecution of [such crimes]… will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstration of innocence or guilt.” The Framers lodged the power of impeachment in the House, but lodged the power of conviction in the Senate, precisely so that the popular will could be registered, but at the same time would ultimately be expressed by that elective branch farthest removed from the passions of the moment. Thus the prosecutor (the House) is not also the judge. Thus also, the unelected Supreme Court does not make the decision, but its Chief Justice does preside over the Senate trial.

Given these safeguards, it is not surprising that serious impeachment attempts against presidents have been rare: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974, Bill Clinton in 1998. But it should be noted that impeachment has become a more likely event in the past 25 years, especially when it is remembered that the Iran-Contra investigation might have spun into an impeachment procedure, had not President Reagan’s alibi—’I didn’t know what was going on’—seemed plausible if one believed his enemies’ own ridicule-Reagan rhetoric for the previous six years. From what we now know about Reagan, it is likely that he cinched them into that very bind, but in any event they stepped right into a snare of their own making.

Despite these safeguard, the U. S. Constitution makes impeachment more likely than it is under, for example, the English Constitution, where the Prime Minister must head the majority party in the legislature, because America can have the presidency and the Congress controlled by opposite parties. As a sort of benchmark, it’s therefore worthwhile to see how impeachment played out in 1868, a time well removed from current political passions.

At that time Congress reaffirmed the Hamiltonian principle that impeachment is intended to check “abuse of power and public trust” for “defined, indictable offenses” (see Kelly et al. II. 342). Johnson allegedly had violated the tenure of Office Act, a statute Congress passed, many historians contend, precisely in order to force Johnson to violate it; defense maintained that the Act was unconstitutional, and therefore it could not be an impeachable offense to disobey, as (they admitted) Johnson had done. Although political in this broad sense, Johnson’s attorneys argued and won the point that the defendant could not be tried merely as the political opponent of the Republican Congressional majority; if solemnized, this standard would of course in effect turn the American federal government into a parliamentary system. Johnson was indeed being tried as the political opponent of the Republicans—or, not to trivialize it, as a very serious policy opponent. But it makes a difference if that can be openly admitted or not. If it can be openly admitted, then the evidence needed for conviction need only be: ‘He disagrees with us.’ If it cannot be openly admitted, then the impeachment proponents must prove that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and their motives for essaying that proof are legally irrelevant. This in turns feeds into the politics of the situation, inasmuch as voters who may not be quite so partisan as Congressmen will frown upon a too-nakedly-partisan trial.

House managers argued that Congress had as much right as Johnson did to say whether the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional. This was actually consistent with the longstanding Jeffersonian-Democrat claim that each branch of the federal government is entitled to interpret the Constitution within its own jurisdiction, so to speak. Johnson was saved not because the constitutional issues were settled, but because a sufficient number of conservative Senate Republicans did not want Johnson removed. As Kelly recounts, “they opposed the political and economic views of radical senator Ben Wade of Ohio, president pro tempore of the Senate, who would become president if Johnson were removed” (II. 345).

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the one nineteenth-century impeachment was an anomaly, the product of the unusually high political passions engendered by the Civil War. Although divided government was possible then as now, it was uncommon. Divided government occurred only four times in the century, and on two of those occasions it occurred in the last years of the president’s term (Hayes in 1879-80, Cleveland in 1895-96), when it scarcely would have been worth the effort to impeach the fellow, anyway.

By the time of the Nixon contretemps, the divided character of the federal government had become much more pronounced than it usually was in the nineteenth century. Post-World War II presidents frequently endured long periods of majority opposition in Congress: Truman in the last two years of his first term; Eisenhower in the last two terms of his first term and throughout his second term; all six years of the Nixon Administration; all of Ford’s brief administration; all of George W. Bush’s administration; the last two years of Clinton’s first administration and all of his second.

Eisenhower and (for the first three years) Bush were much too popular to be impeached. Congressional Democrats contented themselves with growling about the Iran-Contra transaction and caviling about Sherman Adams’s vicuna coat. Ford was a weak president, slated for electoral defeat. But Nixon and Clinton, though popular generally for most of their terms, were viscerally disliked by core constituencies within the opposition parties, and that is what made the difference.

The Democrats were vastly helped in 1974 because Nixon really had committed impeachable offenses. Buoyed by his landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972, Nixon decided that he had a ‘mandate’ in effect to govern as he pleased—the so-called “plebiscitary presidency” (Kelly et al. II. 665). It is of course true that Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had thought pretty much the same way, but he had the luck to have a Congress controlled by his own party. Additionally, Johnson had the ill luck to enmesh himself in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, which provided all the hook his Democratic Party opponents needed to get rid of him electorally, without legal action; a supremely astute politician when it came to anticipating electoral outcomes, Johnson spared himself considerable embarrassment by bowing out of the Democratic primary elections. At any rate, the political will to attack Nixon and reverse the results of the 1972 election was there, and the only real challenge was to find the decisive evidence against him. This was provided by the famous ‘smoking gun’ section of the White House tapes, in which Nixon specifically instructed his underlings to obstruct justice by lying under oath. Although Nixon resigned before being impeached, he did so because he knew he would be impeached and convicted; in effect, he was the second president to be impeached and the first to be convicted, although, again, neither of these things happened in fact or in law.

Clinton was equally despised by the opposition core. What liberal Democrats were to Nixon the conservative, the conservative wing of the Republican Party was to Clinton. With the examples of Watergate and Iran-Contra before them (the latter, while not resulting in impeachment, effectively hamstrung the second Reagan Administration, and so was an effective piece of political maneuvering), conservative Republicans had not only the motive and the means (a majority in both houses of Congress, beginning in 1995), they also had evidence of wrongdoing that hit the most impassionating ‘hot button’ on their constituents’ dial: passion itself, a sex scandal during the course of which the president committed what were arguable impeachable offenses, namely, perjury and obstruction of justice in a civil lawsuit.

Few but the most naïve partisans believed that Clinton was not a serial adulterer and inveterate liar, but character flaws typically are addressed electorally, not legally, and Clinton had been reelected easily in 1996. These character flaws were precisely the kind that animated the conservative constituency, however, so what was needed was proof that Clinton had committed illegal acts that were public in character, according to the Hamiltonian definition. Such proof eventually came in the forms of telephone tapes and the celebrated DNA dress, lovingly preserved by a former Clinton inamorata. Because in Clinton v. Jones the Supreme Court had ruled that a sitting president can be sued for private actions unconnected to his public duties, Clinton had been forced to testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit case; instead of ‘taking the Fifth,’ his most prudent available move, he decided, as usual, to brazen his way out and to deny everything. Some of ‘everything’ turned out to be true; Clinton was caught in perjury and obstruction of justice, and arguable grounds for impeachment were handed to his political enemies.

In arguments before the House, representatives Inglis and Canady observed that high crimes and misdemeanors are “offenses against public justice, against the public peace, against public trade, and against the public police or economy”; they include perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton could not consistently respond that he was guilty of merely private wrongdoing (although his handlers did, anyway) because in addition to lying he had invoked executive privilege during the months-long investigation by the Special Prosecutor, in yet another series of attempts to delay the process. The Democrats in Congress were reduced to arguing that, yes, Clinton had indeed perjured himself and obstructed justice, but he had done so in matters that themselves had nothing much to do with his official duties—private liaisons dangereuses, albeit some committed in the president’s offices at the White House. Although admittedly not all ‘private’ crimes could be so waved aside—murder and rape presumably would be off-limits—lying under oath about mere adulterous friskiness shouldn’t count. Democrats could then use words like “reprehensible” and “immoral” to describe Clinton’s behavior, but could also say his crimes did not “rise to the level of impeachable offenses.” That is to say, while Republicans stuck to the rigors of exact legality, Democrats proposed a sort of balancing test.

With 95% of House Republicans voting ‘yes’ and 95% of House Democrats voting ‘no,’ Clinton was impeached. The Senate, whose role ostensibly was to judge innocence or guilt of the crimes as defined rather than to undermine the House’s definition, predictably went ahead nd did what it wanted to do, which was exactly what the majority of their constituents wanted them to do: Let the guy off the hook and get on with other issues. There were the expected rhetorical gymnastics by the senators. My favorite was Olympia Snowe’s “Acquittal is not exoneration,” although Senator Breaux’s “[the President] is not innocent”—though presumably not guilty, either—ran a close second.

The inclination to paralyze rivals by means of Congressional investigations and sometimes impeachment has come to the surface mostly in the post-World War II period. Part of this may have to do with television, which is concurrent with the inclination: TV makes show trials more showy, whether it be McCarthy going after the Truman Administration, Sam Ervin reading from the Constitution during the Watergate hearings, or Bob Livingston immolating himself during Monica Madness Days.

More telling, perhaps, was the tendency of American voters to want two things. First, they have wanted to continue the basic New Deal apparatus of limited social provision. That means they have usually wanted Democrats running Congress, where so much domestic policy gets made. Recently, that has meant that they wanted Republicans running Congress; if the social-provision apparatus gets too extensive or burdensome, and if the people running it are seen as too corrupt, out Democrats will go and in will Republicans come.

Second, American voters have also wanted strong military defense, having decided that the Second World War resulted from the weakness of the democratic republics, and also having decided that communists were no better than fascists. For this stern task they have preferred Republicans, the party that has remained consistently ‘nationalist’ since its beginnings in the 1850s, and which never had a Henry Wallace/George McGovern wing that could be accused of harboring ‘no enemies on the Left’ sentiments.

With long-term partisan splits between the executive and legislative branches brought about by these dual policy goals of the American people, it is no surprise that infighting gets nasty. As always, politicians will be punished when the overreach, as Congressional Republicans were (mildly) in the 1998 midterm elections, and also as Vice President Albert Gore was punished in his attempt to succeed Clinton, a slightly creepy president he’d defended too-loyally. With the Cold War over, and with the Clinton fiasco in recent memory, will voters prefer undivided government for a time? They might have assumed this would cure the impeachment/investigate-to-death syndrome, but as it may happen with President Donald Trump, all you may need is a hostile fourth ‘branch’ of government, the federal bureaucracy, with allies in the ‘fifth estate,’ journalism, to roil the waters.

 

Work Cited

Kelly, Alfred H.; Harbison, Winfred A.; Belz, Herman: The American Constitution: Its Origin and Development. 2 volumes. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991.

Gaddis, John Lewis: Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Leffler, Melvyn P.: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Marable, Manning: Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction of Black America, 1945-1990. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

 

The ‘Cold War’ pitting the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites disputed the same territory—the world itself—in circumstances that made a ‘hot’ war too dangerous for either side to undertake. The Cold War profoundly influenced American politics in the two decades after it began helping to consolidate the New Deal state in many ways—not least by giving the Republican Party a major stake in that state. Although the Cold War consolidated the New Deal state, it eventually weakened the Democratic Party’s dominance in the regime which founded that state. The Democratic Party overextended U. S. power in southeast Asia, alienating many of the children of builders of the New Deal state.

I. Cold War Causes
There were four kinds of causes of the Cold War. In descending order of generality, they were: ideas, postwar historical circumstances, strategy, and particular events and judgments ‘on the spot.’ The Cold War instances what Melvyn Leffler calls the classical security dilemma, in which every move I make to enhance my security threatens or seems to threaten yours, and vice-versa. The rival regimes had many reasons to regard each other as threats, starting with the ideas that animated those regimes. Americans and Soviets both had a sharper interest in political ideas than many other peoples—both nations’ mindsets were the opposite of the British inclination toward ‘muddling through.’ Heresy hunting had characterized both regimes from their beginning. Both regimes also tended toward a view of ideational enemies as conspirers, and therefore shared strong motives for policies of pre-emption. The Marxist-Leninist suspicions of the international bourgeoisie need no rehearsal; as for Americans, their Declaration of Independence decries not only despotism but a design to reduce Americans to slavery. Inasmuch as Marxism-Leninism targets the international bourgeoisie, and America had been a leading commercial republican regime, rivalry was inevitable. In 1919, with the invasion of the Soviet Union by an alliance of commercial republics, the rivalry briefly became an actual war.

Rivalry does not, however, necessarily mean war, hot or cold, and this early, weak effort at strangling the baby Bolshevism in its cradle quickly subsided. To ideational rivalry geopolitical strategic considerations were added, twenty-five years later. Governing elites on both sides had studied Halford Mackinder’s writings. [1] Mackinder’s view of the world as a “closed system” (with Germany and Russia struggling for domination of the “Heartland” of the “World Island” and of the “crossroads” of that island around Suez) clearly called for an international politics of global power projection. In 1919, Mackinder himself warned that Bolshevism would end either in world anarchy or world tyranny (203); in 1943 he wrote, more moderately, that if the Soviet Union emerged from the war “as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land power of the globe,” and as the “power in the strategically strongest defensive position” (272-273). Leffler describes the American response to the Soviet in Mackinderian terms: “No one could dispute that in the heartland of Eurasia a brutal totalitarian state existed with the capacity to take advantage of the manifold opportunities presented by the postwar world” (497). Soviet ideology and Mackinderian strategy coalesced in the Soviet imposition or encouragement of Communist and pro-Communist regimes wherever feasible, with non-Communist allies as a second-best choice. For their part, beginning in the 1940s, U. S. policymakers “never doubted that U. S. security interests existed almost everywhere” (Leffler 180). Like the Soviets, Americans preferred to deal with regimes of their own kind, but had no hesitation in seeking support of non-republican regimes–military dictatorships in Latin America, monarchies in the Middle East—when no republicans seemed likely to rule.

The worldwide character of the conflict was accentuated by the Europeans’ need for the productive power of their colonies, which “appeared better able to close the [postwar] dollar gap than did European countries themselves” (Leffler 164). This gave the Soviets a weakness to target, and they revived Lenin’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, applying it vigorously to everyone but themselves. Americans had a more difficult problem. They had to resist the strengthening of European imperialism, fearing a return to pre-war mercantilism and economic autarky (Leffler 35). Free trade or worldwide capitalism required an anti-imperial policy. But the newly independent nations must also be kept from the Soviet orbit, and the Europeans must find some way to prosper economically without their colonies, lest even they become gulls to Soviet blandishments.

I shall examine how these strategies played out at the beginning of the Cold War on each side, starting with the Soviets.

a. Soviet Actions and Reactions
The Soviets formulated an imperial network of more-or-less subservient local Communist parties, using them to undermine non-communists regimes by whatever means Moscow deemed useful (Gaddis 42). Playing from an unusual position which combined military and political extension with military weakness owing to the devastation of the world war, Stalin moved to consolidate power in eastern and central Europe. Leffler contends that he “acted defensively” (186); it is worth noting that for Stalin, acting defensively meant purges and militarily-enforced domination of what were quickly described as the Soviets’ ‘satellite states.’ Stalin was indeed cautious beyond his own (noticeably expanded) sphere; that is very likely because he was quite weak beyond his own sphere. Leffler observes that the Communist parties in France and Italy wanted not immediately to overthrow but to reenter postwar governments; again, this is a function of weakness, Gramscianism being Marxism weakly endowed. De Gaulle, for one, was hardly deceived by Maurice Thorez’s seeming meekness. For their own part, the Soviets overplayed their hand in demanding war reparations in the form of products from the Ruhr Valley, products Germany and Europe generally needed for economic and political stabilization. As usual, Soviet demands for ‘justice’ dovetailed nicely with grand policy considerations, doubtless yet another instance of the Marxist claim to synthesize theory and practice.

In Asia, the Soviets feared that the U. S. presence in china threatened the Trans-Siberian railroad and the eastern Soviet Union generally (Leffler 88). Stalin exploited such themes of encirclement and foreign hostility, and was “not interested in striking a deal” on nuclear weapons” (Leffler 115). With whatever mixture of fear and cynicism, the Soviets did little to assuage American feats of their aggressiveness in these key years immediately after the war. Their actions alarmed U. S. planners, and also fed back into U. S. domestic politics, where Republicans were rhetorically alert to any signs of Democratic appeasement—understandably so, in view of the New Dealers’ participation in the Popular Front movement of the mid-1930s. Republicans did not immediately grasp the need for backing up their rhetoric with serious actions in terms of military spending and the end of their longstanding isolationism.

b. American Policy Initiatives
From their position of strength, Americans quickly seized the initiative in the Cold War. Stalin had every reason to play for time. Therefore the Americans had every reason not to.

President Truman was a genuine democrat, and therefore anti-Stalinist at heart. His foreign policy advisers had already made a Mackinderian analysis of European politics in 1940, determining that Axis domination of Eurasia would jeopardize political and economic liberty in the United States. FDR foresaw the danger of tyranny in the United States in response to the pressures exerted by a Nazified Europe (Leffler 22). New Dealers understood that foreign policy had serious national security and regime implications (Leffler 24).

It was simple enough to apply this basic insight to the prospect of a Europe dominated by ‘totalitarians’ or tyrants of the Left, now that the internationalist/imperialist Right had been crushed. George F. Kennan, the most influential strategist on the National Security Council, had a more complex, pluralistic view of the world than Mackinder, identifying several world military-industrial “power centers.” However, he saw that the Soviet Union was the only one of these hostile to the United States, so the conclusions he drew were similar to Mackinder’s (Gaddis 57). In 1945, U. S. officials did not worry much about an immediate Soviet threat, nor were they initially very concerned with Soviet ideology, supposing that they might be able to cut deals with Stalin. But by 1946, Clark Clifford and George Elsey did begin to see the political heft of Soviet ideology—an analysis Leffler decries as too stark, while in effect admitting that it nonetheless WAS the analysis these men made, and therefore influential (133). At least as pertinently, Americans feared Soviet trade and military agreements in Europe, which would issue in permanent political advantage to the Soviets—who, it should never be forgotten, were in Europe, with a permanent physical presence the United States (obviously) could not match. In Asia, American fears mirrored those of the Soviets—again with the added problem that America is not physically located in Asia, whereas the Soviet Union was. Americans feared Soviet consolidation of power in Manchuria, northern China, and Korea, which would have been similar to Japanese hegemony in East Asia in the 1930s (Leffler 124).

In April 1945, Secretary of State Averill Harriman told Truman that the Soviets were ambitious but weak. The United States, he proposed, should take advantage of its financial superiority to stop further Soviet advances, starting with a threat to withdraw offers of financial aid if the soviet tried to dominate central Europe (Leffler 31). The Soviets proved more formidable opponents than Harriman supposed, refusing to be bought off. The Americans adopted a strategy of military containment (a true man of the State Department, Kennan wanted only diplomatic and political containment) coupled with efforts at political divide-and-conquer (Gaddis 70). they hoped to widen incipient divisions among Communist parties.

Truman found a bipolar world rhetorically easier to explain and defend to the public than the more complex story of intersecting forces of ideas, nationality, economics, and political ambition. A variety of events helped him: the soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, which ended America’s short-lived reliance on nuclear weapons to ensure unquestioned military superiority; the Alger Hiss trial and other reports of Soviet espionage; the British financial crisis, which sobered any lingering expectations in London of an enduring empire; Communist moves in Asia, particularly in China and Korea. All these things focused public attention on the Soviet threat. The replacement of Kennan with Paul Nitze at the NSC sharpened the hawkish profile of the Administration. Even the American Communists (apart from Hiss) inadvertently made Truman’s case for him. Their earlier Popular Front strategy, viewed retrospectively, played into fears of infiltration and espionage. David Plotke observes that only some U. S. Communists actually engaged in subversion, and that this was not sufficient reason to punish the whole organization. This overlooks the impossibility of knowing that, at the time, and of knowing how well-placed Communists were. Moreover, with fears of Nazi ‘fifth columnists’ and slogans such as ‘Loose lips sink ships’ still fresh in the public memory, and ‘No more Pearl Harbors’ a phrase to conjure with, Plotke’s cool assessment was unlikely to gain traction, regardless of its accuracy or inaccuracy.

The Marshall Plan to aid in the economic reconstruction of Europe appealed to European democratic socialists like Bevin of Great Britain, who wanted money to support his substantial domestic political agenda. NATO appealed to continental Europeans, who wanted a real, flesh-and-blood U. S. stake in European affairs, and needed strong, effective military support, lest their nations prefer to attempt some neutralist, ‘Third Way’ strategy. The Cold War, and the institutional supports that would lead to victory in it, were well in place.

II. Cold War Domestic Effects

The Cold War consolidated the New Deal in many ways. The strengthening of existing agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the establishment of a new cluster of ‘alphabet soup’ agencies—managing not only economic matters but foreign-policy, military, and national-security matters, as well—further concentrated political power and authority in Washington. Postwar America looks much more like a European state than even FDR’s America did.

Federal budgets increased, and their proportions altered. A bureaucracy devoted almost exclusively to domestic issues was no longer possible, and various groups within the bureaucracy had to compete for tax revenues. So did domestic constituencies. The now-familiar fights between domestic-oriented interest groups and (often newly-created) military-oriented interest groups became institutionalized.

The overall international economic strategy designed in part to fight the Soviets had immense domestic economic benefits. It is hard to suppose that the affluence of the next twenty years could have been possible without the release of pent-up European demand for American goods, and the means to pay for them provided by U. S. policy. Free trade enabled the United States to exploit its considerable postwar advantages: an intact and recently-expanded industrial base, a distribution network, a talent for advertising and publicity. These international economic policies might have occurred without the Cold War, but the Cold War made their implementation more urgent, and won support from interest groups that might otherwise have opposed or at least not supported them.

Consumerism, which had enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1920s. returned with this new affluence. Critics on the Left suspected the passivity of citizens living with worries about nuclear war contributed to an atmosphere of hedonism and privacy—the reconstitution of the home. Whatever its cause, the ‘consumerist’ mindset would be jarred by occasional spasms of activism, later on. Either way, the interruption and trivialization of what had been normal self-government in America—the America of courthouse and town hall—that the Depression and the world war had allowed New Dealers to effect, now became regularized. Consumer comforts even became part of the American appeal, nationally and internationally, against communism; not only Nixon’s ‘Kitchen Debate’ with Khruschev highlighted this; more lastingly, powerful glimpses of affluence purveyed by Hollywood on television and in the movies, exported worldwide, took on a political dimension that they might have lacked in other circumstances (May 158).

The Cold War also reinforced the old Progressive theme, the rule of the expert. The prestige of science and technology, enhanced by federal subsidies of science education, assured a steadier supply of ‘technocrats’ than America had seen before. The government also increased its investment in technology generally, with major domestic economic benefits resulting from ‘spinoffs’ from military research. There was a debate over whether such indirect investments in domestically-usable technology were actually cost-effective—it suffices to remember the name of Sidney Lens on the Left, and of a phalanx of libertarian economists—but the investments and the spinoffs did occur.

Manning Marable argues that the Cold War delayed the civil rights struggle for about a decade by inducing the purge of Communists who had been key workers in civil rights organizations in the 1940s. The Communists were distrusted by middle-class black leaders for seeming to have “placed the Soviet Union’s survival above the battle for black equality” (Marable 20). The heavily polemical tone of Marable’s article raises suspicions, and one might reply, with equal polemical brio, that resistance to Soviet tyranny was indispensable to defending civil rights for anyone, of any race. Returning to settled fact, the Cold War didn’t delay the civil rights movement for long (if it did) and when it reappeared it could no longer plausibly be accused of serious communist ties, although of course that didn’t stop such accusations from being leveled.

With the Cold War, foreign policy issues became for the first time consistent topics of political debate. Failure in managing a major Cold War issue had electoral consequences, as seen in the fictitious ‘missile gap’ of 1960 and, increasingly, the Vietnam War. McCarthyism had its day, raising issues of loyalty and legality that remained long after the junior senator from Wisconsin self-destructed with a well-timed push from Eisenhower. McCarthyism had a larger political significance; it was the first attack on the New Deal political order ‘from below.’ Although unsuccessful, it proved that such attacks were possible.

Isolationism—of American from the world, of Americans from world issues—was defeated. A variant of Mackinderism triumphed, not least in the Republican Party, which, after initial hesitations, became at least as ‘internationalist’ as the Democrats, and, ultimately, with far greater political profit. The Republicans could never ‘outbid’ Democrats on domestic issues on the national level. But they could outbid them on military issues and, beginning with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, it began to do so consistently and with increasing success. This ‘global’ perspective of Mackinderism would have profound effects not only on military and diplomatic policies, and not only on domestic policy, but also as preparation for the ‘environmentalist’ movement, which takes up Mackinder’s globalism, most probably without knowing it, for very different purposes.

The Cold War also contributed to one of the bitterest conflicts of the 1960s, the conflict engendered by the ‘New Left’ student movement. Combined with an ill-judged war on the Mackinderian periphery, conscription at first fulfilled Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of a more regimented population well adapted to industrial and corporate life. But by the latter half of the ‘Sixties, what C. Wright Mills called “liberal corporatism” spurred a rebellion whose effects have endured. The revolt against technology and bureaucracy, weakening the New Deal ethos itself, would have lost much of its urgency without the apocalyptic context of the Cold War. The Democratic Party’s political order alienated many of the sons and daughters of its progenitors. I am tempted to say that the students wanted to be good Whigs, but—having been educated by New Dealers—they didn’t quite know how. And although the anti-technological and anti-bureaucratic animus of the New Left has subsided with the end of the Cold War, the New-Left ideology has permeated much of the education system and probably has altered the course of technological and even bureaucratic efforts themselves. Before the New Left, the term ‘personal computer’ would have seemed self-contradictory, but along with portable telephones, on-demand entertainment delivery systems, and individualized services of all kinds, technology and bureaucracy have been made to seem, as the saying goes, ‘user-friendly.’

The Cold War thus consolidated the New Deal state but to some degree undermined the New Deal political order. The Cold War raised the stakes in American political life. More lives were at stake, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons; more dollars were at stake, with ever-increasing federal budgets. Decades after the Cold War’s conclusion, Americans still seem not quite sure what to do without it.

Note: This essay was written in 1999, as I looked back at a political trend prevailing in the United States at the end of the century, with some comparative glances at contemporary trends in western Europe.

 

The United States and the Western European countries share the same political regime, commercial republicanism, as well as the practice of more or less universal suffrage for adult citizens. But United States voter participation has declined from the high levels of one hundred years ago, whereas European voter participation is high. Further, U. S. voting rates have declined recently, both in the decade of the 1990s and in the previous three decades.

To take the recent numbers first: In the national midterm elections in the period 1962-1970, Americans voted at rates ranging from just under 47% to 48.6%. By contrast, in the period 1986-1998, percentages have ranged from a high of 38.8% in 1994—the year of the ‘Gingrich Revolution,’ in which annoyed voters overthrew a longstanding Democratic-Party majority in the House of Representatives—to a low of 36.1% in 1998.

In western Europe in the 1960s, some countries saw voter turnouts nearing 90% (Burnham 82-83). The European turnouts in the 1990s are also noticeably higher, for the most part, in the United States.

The numbers in presidential elections have been higher, but parallel. In 1996, 49% of voting-eligible citizens voted, down from 63% in 1960. Admittedly, the result of the 1996 election was a foregone conclusion, in sharp contrast to the heavily contested 1960 race. With the advent of fairly reliable scientific polling, many people may not bother to go to the polls when the decision seems already to have been made; if one prefers Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, and one expects Clinton to win easily, why not let my fellow citizens be the good soldiers and troop off to the polls? Nothing crazy is likely to happen, and one saves time and effort by staying home.

Except that the trend prevails across elections. Turnout has declined despite the effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, with provisions such as ‘motor voter,’ which make registration easier. Although Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward argued some years ago that voter registration in the U. S. is too difficult, that European governments are obligated to register voter, that two-thirds of unregistered citizens in American are below the median household income, leading to underrepresentation of those who depend upon government services most, the rather flaccid response to liberalized procedures can give little encouragement to such reformers. Although economist Stephen J. Knack and others have made brave efforts to put the best face on these results, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that deeper forces are at work than the effects of voter registration rules.

The highest turnout in the 1998 elections occurred in Minnesota, where the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura captured the imaginations of his fellow citizens, as he had so often done in his previous career. Unless we are to empty the ranks of the World Wrestling Federation—that Jeffersonian breeding ground for the natural aristoi of virtue and talent—in the quest for revivified civic consciousness, it is difficult to see how to proceed.

Several dubious arguments have been advanced to explain the ‘secular’ or century-long trend as well as the shorter-term trend. Theodore J. Lowi blames not one aspect of the legal system, the registration rules, but the system itself. “Modern law has become a series of instructions to administrators rather than a series of commands to citizens…. The citizen has become an administre, and the question now is how to be certain he remains a citizen” (Lowi 144). Sentences worthy of a latter-day Tocqueville, perhaps, but are not the Europeans more ‘administered’ than we, their states more extensive, bureaucratic, and intrusive? Could it be that there is something to the fact that Americans were first democratized, then bureaucratized, whereas in much of Europe the reverse was the case” Lowi does not ask, and so does not say.

Thomas B. Edsall observes that top income earners are more likely to vote than those whose family incomes are low (Edsall 179-181). If so, why have voting rates declined in the last two decades, when more Americans have become wealthy than at any other time in our national life? There is, further, less really grinding poverty today than in the 1930s, and probably less than in the nineteenth century. Could there be, then, some correlation between widening income levels and non-participation? Could it be that the increasing numbers of affluent voters are more than counterbalanced by increasing numbers of nonvoters who are less well-off relative to the upper echelons? That might correlate better with existing economic conditions, but Edsall, writing in the early 1980s, does not ask, and so does not say.

Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone cite “the transcendental importance of education” as a factor in voter turnout (102). The more highly educated one is, the greater one’s sense of civic duty, and the greater the social pressure to vote. That may very well be true, but that cannot explain the decline in voting, long-term or short. Americans in the twentieth century are markedly better-educated—or at least educated more extensively—than were their predecessors. And Americans in the past twenty years re no less educated than Americans of the 1960s. Could it be that the content of American education—especially the primary and early secondary education that is universal today—somehow discourages voting in adulthood? Could be: Some more civic-minded version of Allan Bloom might write a jeremiad on the subject. But Wolfinger and Rosenstone do not ask, and so cannot say.

Wolfinger and Rosenstone also notice that farmers, being more dependent upon government policies than most groups, tend to vote more. The decline of the farm population might then be a factor in the century-long trend. But poor, urban blacks and Latinos also feel the impact of government policies more than most groups, and their voting rates are low. Sheer dependency upon government services cannot be the main factor. After all, in this century nearly all Americans have become increasingly affected by, if not dependent upon, government regulations. surely we should all be voting early and often, but we are not.

No monocausal socioeconomic factor seems decisive. A social scientist might devise a complex formula that would measure the weights and interrelations of these trends. I am not that political scientist, and so must leave such projects to the adepts.

Retreating to that sanctuary of the mathematically impaired, political history, I shall explain the decline of voting in America and contrast the American circumstance with that of Europe, writing in terms merely plausible, rather than mathematical and demonstrative. The esprit de finesse may be less impressive than the esprit de géométrie, but perforce I must go with the former.

Historians mark the beginning of the decline of voting at 1896, when 80% of eligible voters (i.e., adult, mostly white, males) voted (Chambers 14). Voting correlates with strong party identification; post-1896, party identification weakened (Burnham 120, 133; Campbell et al., chapters 6 and 7). The year 1896 was one of America’s so-called critical elections, that is, an election in which a significant and long-term political alignment occurred. This particular realignment had effects that caused voter turnout decline. Why might one think so?

John Agnew’s concept of ‘core and periphery’ can be and has been usefully brought into play here. Agnew argues that the socioeconomic ‘core’ of the United States—the centers of commerce and manufacturing—has long been politically at odds with the ‘periphery’—the agrarian hinterlands. It must be admitted, of course, that the ‘core’ started out as a fairly puny area—a network of dots along the eastern seaboard. Nonetheless, by 1787 the ‘core’ was sufficiently influential to get the new, commercial-republican constitution ratified; a century later, the ‘core’ could be said to occupy most of a whole region, the northeast. In the 1896 election, the socioeconomic core and periphery were matched up, for the first time since the days before the Civil War, with the party political system. The Northeast became solidly Republican, the South solidly Democratic, with the West siding with the North. This had been true of antebellum America, but this time the impassionating issue of slavery was gone; division did not lead to disunion but to political stability, both within the key regions. Republicans were safe in the Northeast, Democrats safe in the Southeast) and nationally. Republican majorities rested largely undisturbed, except by the anomalous Wilson, beneficiary of a Republican split, until 1932.

An important dimension of this episode was described by Peter H. Argersinger in his 1980 article, “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” Fusion (the support of one set of candidates by more than one party) gave party competition added juice. In the West, Republicans had a plurality but not a majority of the votes in many states. Democrats could counter by pooling votes on a fusion ticket with, for example, the Greenback Party or some other populist organization. Obviously, in the West this gave Republicans a strong motive to get rid of fusion balloting and replace it with the blanket ballot or ‘Australian’ system. Republicans succeeded in this campaign by invoking an anti-corruption argument; that paved the way to 1896 (Argersinger 287-306).

The new settlement enabled Southern Democrats to put the finishing touches on their post-Reconstruction program of disenfranchising blacks and poor whites. These groups were electorally unnecessary and both politically useful to suppress, as Jack Bloom explains.

In the North, the new stability eventually made political bosses, always a bit unsavory to respectable, middle-class sorts, less salient, as well. Although initially more secure in the new alignment, bosses lost in the long term. Less competition yielded less urgent need for political mobilization. Reformers, including business interests, could not push confidently for professionalized government, the end of the patronage system, of ‘corruption.’ But the end of patronage meant that a major incentive to vote, namely, the desire for an indoor job with no heavy lifting, disappeared. If I can get a government job by passing a test instead of voting and getting others out to vote, I will sharpen my pencil and stay at home. Progressives supposed that a new system of primary elections, initiative and referendum, and similar devices would keep participation rates high. They were mistaken. Civil service reform meant that the basic infrastructure of government would remain, whatever party was in power. Absent some major crisis, why vote?

By 1912, less than 59% of eligible citizens voted. The crisis of the Depression brought turnouts into the low 60s for a time (still far less than the rate in the 1890s); in 1952 and 1960—both elections about the future of the New Deal-type government the Depression brought on—the numbers got into the low 60s again. But for the most part, numbers dwindled.

By the 1950s the “quasi-military drill” of nineteenth-century American politics was long gone (Chambers 15), replaced by media-centric advertising, which further diminished the strength of the parties (Sorauf, in Chambers, 54-55). Motivated by the invigorating thumotic passions attendant to peer pressure (no ‘Australian ballots’ in the nineteenth century until 1892—your neighbors knew how you voted) and by the less invigorating but no less compelling motive of job-seeking, political soldiers had been displaced by consumer-spectators, motivated by images and sounds—less compelling devices, as any experienced preacher, or salesman, will tell you.

The American circumstance can be contrasted with the European. In America, bureaucratization took a lot of the fun, and some of the point, out of democratic politics. In Europe, bureaucracy already existed. Democratic-republican politics, hard-won during violent revolutions in the nineteenth century and world wars in the twentieth, took on a much more earnest character than it did in twentieth-century America, where the fight for voting rights (except for the suffragist and the civil rights movements) was fought overseas, in trenches and not in ballot booths.

Angus Campbell and his colleagues remark that Americans are not so ‘ideological’ as Europeans, and not so strongly partisan. European political parties still recall regime politics—forgotten in the United States since the 1860s—and still galvanize political passions. Sharper class struggles are tied to regime politics; for decades in Europe (certainly up to the time of Mitterand’s France, which changed expectations by doing so little) a socialist party victory might be seen as the capture of the state apparatus by ‘the workers,’ a new politeuma or ruling body. Not so, the New Deal, or at least not so obviously. This is reinforced by the fact that in Europe the state itself is regarded as sovereign, not the people, as in America. By reason of history, by reason of the socioeconomic character of the parties, and by reason of the structure of sovereignty itself, Europeans are less likely to be altogether more earnest and conscientious about voting than their lackadaisical New-World allies (cf. Lowi in Chambers 240-241).

Unlike the president-oriented twentieth-century American republics, European republics tend to be parliament-centered (McCormick in Chambers 104). The function of parliamentarism is similar to that of local patronage networks in nineteenth-century America. Parliamentarism reinforces localism, and therefore peer pressure, even with ‘Australian’ ballots. Thus the European republics, which appear heavily nationalized, actually have rather strong local roots. Steady, day-to-day ruling goes on, with a strong connection between local communities and the large, patronage-dispensing bureaucratized state apparatuses.

What of the shorter-term, post-1970 decline? With the sociopolitical infrastructure of American politics replaced by media-driven entertainment packages, about which voters are increasingly sophisticated and therefore skeptical, it is no wonder that increased levels of education have coexisted with increased non-participation. Jesse Ventura is right: If it takes a high school education to make a fan see that pro wrestling is fake, then the way to the hearts of an educated electorate is to do what the World Wrestling Federation did, starting in the 1980s: Admit that the performers are faking it, let the public in on the act, wink at the camera in your campaign commercials. This, however, isn’t likely to be a very long-lasting ‘fix.’ Absent some way to tie national political campaigns and daily governance to local and family concerns—other in the abstract, emptily rhetorical way of proclaiming ‘The Year of the Child,’ ‘The Year of the Woman,’ the Year of the This or the Year of the That—there will be no cure for mediocre turnouts.

 

Works Cited

Agnew, John: The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Argersinger, Peter H.: “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” American Historical Review, LXXV (1980) 287-306.

Bloom, Jack: Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Burnham, Walter Dean: Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970.

Campbell, Angus, et al.: The American Voter. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet: “Party Development and the American Mainstream.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet, and Burnham, Walter Dean, eds.: The American Party Systems: Stages in Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Edsall, Thomas B.: Power and Money: Writings on Politics, 1971-1987. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Knack, Steven J.: “Does Motor Voter Work? An Analysis of State-Level Data.” Journal of Politics 57 (3) (August 1993) 796-811.

Lowi, Theodore J.: “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

McCormick, Richard P.: “Political Development and the Second Party System.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.,

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Why Americans Don’t Vote. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Sorauf, Frank J.: “Political Parties and Political Analysis.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Rosenstone, Steven J.: Who Votes? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.