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BEYOND THE NEW DEAL ORDER Edited by
Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and
Alice O’Connor
U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA
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CONTENTS
Introduction
1
Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor PART I. THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF NEW DEAL REFORM
1. From the Labor Question to the Piketty Moment: A Journey Through the New Deal Order
17
Romain Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel
2. State Building from the Bottom Up: The New Deal and Beyond
36
Meg Jacobs
3. The Making of “Liberal” Republicans During the New Deal Order
54
Kristoffer Smemo
4. The Unexpected Endurance of the New Deal Order: Liberalism in the Age of Reagan
71
Julian E. Zelizer PART II. INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
5. To Live Decently: New Deal Labor Standards, Feminized Work, and the Fight for Worker Dignity
93
Eileen Boris
6. Rights in the New Deal Order and Beyond
110
Sophia Z. Lee
7. Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956–1979
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David Stein
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vi Contents
PART III. A NEW ORDER TAKES SHAPE
8. Market Politics in an Age of Automation
143
Angus Burgin
9. Regulation and the Collapse of the New Deal Order, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Market
168
Reuel Schiller
10. Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order
186
Paul Sabin
11. The Rise and Fall of Internationalism During (and After) the New Deal Order
204
Michael Kazin
12. An Embattled New Deal Legacy: Public Sector Unionism and the Struggle for a Progressive Order
213
Joseph A. McCartin
13. In Search of “Forgotten” America
223
Alice O’Connor PART IV. CODA
1 4. America’s Neoliberal Order
257
Gary Gerstle
Notes 279 List of Contributors
367
Index 000 Acknowledgments
371
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Introduction Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor
In 1989 when The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order appeared, the collection of ten historical essays proved notable for two reasons. First, it introduced the concept of a political, socioeconomic order as one of the fundamental building blocks with which historians and social scientists construct and make sense of the American past. In this case, it offered an overarching interpretive framework, a sense of political and economic continuity for the sociopolitical order that began with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and ended sometime after Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. The volume’s editors, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle,1 invited scholars and journalists to consider the New Deal not only as a presidential moment but also as a far larger construction—a combination of ideas, policies, institutions, and electoral dynamics—t hat spanned several decades and sustained a hegemonic governing regime. This is a periodization that still pervades our historical understanding of twentieth-century America. A second notable feature of the Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order is this: although conceived and composed during the administration of Ronald Reagan, arguably the most conservative president since the 1920s, the authors and editors of the volume largely blamed American liberalism for what they considered an ideological and political debacle of the first order. As witnesses to the conflicts that had divided liberals since the tumultuous 1960s, most of these historians thought that if the New Deal order was crumbling, it had been subverted not so much by the rise of a political and cultural Right or by a shift in the contours of the economy, but by the contradictions—ideological, political, and racial—t hat had torn labor-liberalism asunder. This put “the sixties” front and center when it came to explaining the decline or outright demise of American liberalism. Although many of the historians who contributed to that 1989 volume positioned themselves to the left of liberalism—most notably, Steve Fraser, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ira Katznelson, Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin—Rise and Fall was not inspired by a New
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Left dismissal of what was then sometimes called “corporate liberalism.” These historians were genuinely appreciative of the substantial economic and social transformations inaugurated and carried forward by New Deal and Great Society politicians and civil rights and labor leaders. But the “sixties” are nevertheless privileged in the 1989 book as a distinct political and cultural moment whose successes and failures generated much of the “backlash” that gave rise to New Right conservatism. While the administration of Ronald Reagan captured and codified much of the political and policy consequence, the sixties w ere the pivot on which the decline of the New Deal order turned. In the volume, Ira Katz nelson asked, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” Jonathan Rieder found the rise of a right-w ing popu lism, which President Nixon called the “Silent Majority,” emerging out of the racial tumult of that era. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin highlighted the pervasive influence of sixties radicalism in triggering both progressive transformations in American culture and the resentfully conservative statecraft of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. It was left to Thomas Edsall, a journalist, to attempt an assessment of how business and other conservatives shifted economic policy to the right in the 1970s, and even he saw this as largely a product of racially motivated Demo cratic division rather than a consequence of fundamental changes in the way an increasingly politicized business elite responded to changes in the shape of global capital. In a point developed more sharply in his later journalistic writing, Edsall regretted the loss of working-class politics as a presumably unifying core of the New Deal Democratic Party, as reflected in the waning influence of organized labor and the rise of a more elite cadre of liberal reformers more committed to a regime of “rights” and “identity” politics.2 In recent decades, “the sixties” has been decentered as a pivot point in accounts of late-century political transformations. Those who still subscribe to the notion that t here was a New Deal order now tend to see the entire era from the 1930s through the 1960s and early 1970s as one in which the proponents of New Deal–style social democracy battled their opponents on relatively favorable economic and sociopolitical terms. The G reat Society, in this view, is seen as an effort to complete reforms begun in the 1930s and cover segments of the population (above all, African Americans) who had been purposefully excluded from much New Deal statecraft when FDR and northern Democrats made their Faustian bargain with the white South. Informed by the growing historiography of the “long” social democratic civil rights movement, historians have come to see more continuity than rupture between the class and “race”-specific aims of the black freedom and allied rights struggles. The 1963 March on Washington, they remind us, was a march for jobs and freedom.3 Likewise, if the late 1960s and
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early 1970s are seen as an integral part of the New Deal order, then the rise of a feminist consciousness and its insertion into the worlds of work, family, law, and social policy represents a rejection of the patriarchal ethos that characterized so much of the 1930s New Deal and an effort to expand and recast New Deal reformism as an agent of women’s rights and gender equity. Still, recent scholarship has also brought new perspectives to the difficulties of t hese reform efforts, however conceptualized. Especially influential has been the flourishing literature that scrutinizes New Deal social politics through the lens of historiographical currents—social, cultural, feminist, “new l abor”—that were just beginning to come into conversation with more traditionally construed political and policy history at the time of Rise and Fall’s publication. One of the central contributions of this large and still-growing literature has been to under score how deeply and thoroughly stratified the New Deal order was from the start. Certainly, this plays out along the lines of class and of variously (de)legitimized states of dependency, as students of New Deal relief politics and the bifurcated welfare state have documented in g reat detail.4 Led by feminist scholars such as Linda Gordon, Suzanne Mettler, Gwendolyn Mink, and Alice Kessler-Harris, historians have also come to recognize the gendered nature of the welfare state. We now have a rich body of interdisciplinary literature showing how New Deal policies and administrative structures systematically channeled women into subordinated tiers of social and economic citizenship in ways that would take decades and multiple strategies to unwind.5 The overlapping legacies of New Deal racial exclusions also have been amply documented, in studies showing how policies and public/private practices in areas ranging from Social Security and health care to employment, housing, and urban renewal conspired to uphold white racial hierarchies and segregationist norms.6 And for immigrants of color in particular, the New Deal policy regime proved a highly selective, and unequal, arbiter of social and economic citizenship, as we know from historical studies of restrictions and enforcement practices that involved the exercise of border control, deportation, and other forms of police power as well as administrative discretion over social provision.7 As recent literature on the grassroots freedom and antipoverty strugg les of the 1960s has revealed, Great Society measures may have opened the door to redressing what scholars have come to recognize as the intersectional inequities of the New Deal order, but it was organized social movements that provided the energy and imagination for more equalizing reforms.8 Another constellation of historians has argued that, intersection inequity notwithstanding, the New Deal order’s decline owed less to internal splits within the liberal-progressive camp during the 1960s than to a conservative assault
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originating outside left-liberal ranks in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, among the most significant contributions to twentieth c entury historiography in the last twenty-five years has been the discovery and recovery of a highly nuanced history of conservatism. This was a conservatism fiercely opposed to the regulatory state, Keynesian economics, the rise of labor, equality for white women and racial minorities, and the intellectuals and policy mavens who advanced and legitimized the New Deal order. It also had a distinctive history of movement building that played a transformative role in late twentieth-century politics and political culture. Alan Brinkley issued a clarion call for a new history of American conservatism in a 1994 American Historical Review essay, as did Leo Ribuffo, who bluntly challenged the members of his guild with this resonant question: “Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States, and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything About It?” Michael Kazin lent his voice to this new chorus, arguing that America’s venerated and progressive protest tradition, populism, had in the 1970s and 1980s taken a sharp rightward turn that historians had not adequately analyzed.9 These calls to study conservatism were soon answered by a new generation of scholars. Social historians such as Lisa McGirr, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Lassiter, Michelle Nickerson, and Rick Perlstein unearthed a set of social movements and “grasstops” insurgencies, ranging from small-town entrepreneurs to Orange County anti-Communists, whose hostility to modern liberalism, big labor, and the administrative state seemed almost a mirror image of the social movements that had animated and sustained the New Deal.10 They w ere joined by historians who validated what had once seemed obvious to an Arthur Schlesinger or John Kenneth Galbraith: most businessmen and many Republicans did not like the world constructed by the New Deal and its post–World War II sustainers. Colin Gordon, Kim Phillips-Fein, Elizabeth Shermer, and Meg Jacobs challenged the New Left idea that the business world was led by an influential corporate liberal contingent that had endorsed the New ere bulwarked by writers Deal or accommodated its reforms.11 These historians w including Jennifer Burns, John Judis, Daniel Stedman Jones, Angus Burgin, Nancy MacLean, Donald Critchlow, and Bethany Moreton who rediscovered the influence of conservative intellectuals Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, James Buchanan, and a generation of Christian conservatives who sought to reconcile God and the market.12 In the wake of t hese and other interventions, no historian could take seriously Lionel Trilling’s 1950 dismissal of the conservative impulse as a collection of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”13 Instead, it had become clear by the early twenty-first century that modern American conserva-
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tism was a serious intellectual project dating from the heyday of the New Deal order. Those intellectuals, we now know, designed strategies to affiliate with conservative businessmen, to fund think tanks, to connect with grassroots movements, and to influence the media. By the 1970s and 1980s, their conservative constellation had become formidable. Th ere w ere many divergences in their ranks, but the global war against Communism and its totalitarianism, atheism, and materialism gave them a coherence and a common e nemy that they saw as being embodied in the liberal state. The overarching historical consequence of this political movement is still not altogether certain. Clearly, the American conservative tradition was more significant than e arlier generations of scholars—including t hose who had contributed to The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order—had appreciated. As yet another new generation of scholars digs into American historical soil to unearth the roots of Trumpism, this tradition will come to seem more significant still. But was it so strong that its existence requires us to abandon conceptions of a hegemonic, mid-twentieth-century New Deal order, as Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore argued in a controversial 2011 essay, or as journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge posit in their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, published in 2004?14 The historians writing in this collection offer a mixed response: the New Deal’s ordering of politics and society did indeed prove the dominant structure explaining the contours of twentieth-century American life, but its impress has been far from uniform and in some contexts, including labor law, fiscal policy, foreign affairs, and social thought, strongly challenged since the 1940s. Ironically, the specter of world Communism and the Cold War engendered by that ideological and geopolitical challenge now seems to have done more to sustain than subvert the New Deal impulse. For decades, most American liberals have followed the lead of journalists and historians such as Richard Rovere, Geoffrey Hodgson, Richard Fried, Landon Storrs, and Ellen Schecker in condemning the conservative and even racist and homophobic manipulations of a spurious fear of Communism and a militarization of U.S. foreign policy. McCarthyism hobbled the labor movement and cast suspicion on a generation of New Dealers and popular front activists. But the existence of a world Communist movement that seemed dynamic and attractive, as Gary Gerstle argues in the last essay in this volume, struck fear in the hearts of capitalist elites, making them more willing to compromise on social policy with labor, civil rights, and antipoverty activists than would have otherwise been the case, and more willing, too, to isolate the Far Right and keep it distant from the levers of political power. The fear of an actual Communist
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takeover—abroad, if not at home—was g reat b ecause of the understanding of what a transition to a Communist regime entailed: moving society out of capi talist markets permanently, with no possibility of going back. Indeed, a number of post–Cold War historians including Kiran Patel, David Ekbladh, Mary Dudziak, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Michael Latham, Kevin Mattson, and Jennifer Delton have come to see the ideological and policy imperatives of that contest as well imbricated with the history of New Deal reformism.15 On the one hand, the eruption of anti-Communism in the dozen years after World War II called into patriotic question popular front politics of the sort that animated much New nion militancy, and the assault on the Jim Crow order. Deal statecraft, trade u But on the other hand, the existence of an international rivalry with an overtly anticapitalist set of powers gave a certain legitimacy to New Deal reformism, if only to file down the sharp edges of a market economy that had to compete, first in Western Europe and l ater in the “Third World,” against a system that sought to squash the market and denigrate the capitalist ethos. From this point of view, the collapse of Communism in 1991, and the abandonment by capitalist elites of their e arlier strategy of compromise with progressive forces, explains a g reat deal about liberalism’s eclipse and conservatism’s remarkable surge in the last quarter century. Communism had created a set of circumstances conducive to the domination that the New Deal order achieved; when Communism disappeared, so did one of the prime impulses sustaining the New Deal order’s winning formula. This was the meaning of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated essay “The End of History and the Last Man,” published in the summer of 1989, just before Rise and Fall reached the bookstores. Fukuyama argued for “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy” that had emerged throughout the world, “an end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.”16 Although the word neoliberalism is absent from his essay—and certainly from the essays collected in Rise and Fall—Fukuyama gave the concept a sense of global inevitability. It would take almost two decades—until the publication of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism in 2005, followed by the world financial collapse in 2008—for the word to achieve widespread currency and the explanatory power it holds today.17 This volume will be one of the first to reveal the effects of Communism’s collapse on U.S. domestic politics and historical scholarship. This volume also brings to bear on the study of American politics in the postwar era two other strands of historiography that were only weakly represented in Rise and Fall. One is the way that the state, as an autonomous force in American society, has shaped U.S. politics. The other is the role of political parties, a hoary but inescapable part of American history and political science.
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When Rise and Fall was published in 1989 scholars w ere only beginning to respond to the challenge that Theda Skocpol and her colleagues had issued in 1985 to “bring the state back in” to political history.18 Prior to that time, students of American politics had not regarded the state as a structure indepen dent of class or other social forces and thus did not consider the governmental apparatus and the parties that animated it a subject worthy of much study in their own right. If scholars examined the U.S. state at all, they tended to portray it as weak, at least relative to the states that the industrialized polities of Western Europe had constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Skocpol and others such as Stephen Skowronek argued that a conclusion about the weakness of the American state was premature, and that students of the American state had been too quick to judge it by European standards—t hat is, the degree to which it exhibited a highly centralized administrative structure and a robust sets of social welfare policies.19 Before labeling the American state as weak, Skocpol and others insisted, scholars first had to determine what that state was and how it worked. Alan Brinkley had raised this m atter in his essay in Rise and Fall on the “idea of the state” in America. But so little actual historical work had been done on the state when Brinkley was writing his essay that he did not have the materials he needed to provide a full answer. Those materials now exist as a result of a cascade of work not just by Skocpol and Skowronek and their social science colleagues and students but also by a large group of historians determined to demonstrate the dialectical relationship between state structures and policies and virtually all aspects of American history. Much discussion has considered the rise of a “warfare state,” the formation of a “carceral state,” the emergence of a “straight state,” and the existence of a hard-to-see but nevertheless influential “submerged state” largely devoted to supporting markets and middle-class entitlements. Other historians, meanwhile, have considered the degree to which an “administrative state” has shaped economic regulations, environmental protections, labor law, and the meaning of gender equality in the workplace.20 In the telling of t hese scholars, the American state had its weaknesses, to be sure, but it turns out to have been far more robust, creative, and determinative of politics than we once thought. Brian Balogh and Jacob Hacker stressed the importance of private/public interpenetration as a key form of state building in America.21 William J. Novak, Tom Sugrue, Gary Gerstle, and Karen Tani argued that no conception of the American state was adequate without considering the role of states and municipalities.22 Ira Katznelson and Julian Zelizer have emphasized the importance of Congress as a state-shaping institution, with Katz nelson showing how it became a mechanism for perpetuating white supremacy
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throughout the years of the New Deal order.23 Daniel Ernst and Anne Kornhauser have traced the rise during the New Deal of an administrative state that increasingly freed itself from mechanisms of democratic accountability.24 These sorts of perspectives were largely missing from The Rise and Fall of New Deal Order. So too was the question of what happens to a state in circumstances of permanent war, a condition that has characterized the American polity from 1941 to the present day. The imperatives of war making require us to think about the rise of a military industrial complex during the middle years of the twentieth century and the surveillance regime associated with the war on terror several decades later.25 In parallel fashion, the racial and class tensions that have led to the emergence of a giant prison complex in the United States have generated numerous historical studies seeking to explain the cause and character of a uniquely American carceral state.26 Of course, the state, whatever its character, cannot be divorced from partisan politics. The 1989 volume ignored parties, elections, and the ebb and flow of legislative law making. Although an e arlier generation of historians and po litical scientists including James McGregor Burns, Samuel Lubell, V. O. Key, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been highly attentive to party policies and electoral coa litions, the generation of social, labor, and gender historians who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s marginalized such concerns. But the ideological polarization that has characterized politics in recent years has pushed to the forefront what we used to think of as a very traditional sort of political history. Among historians, Julian Zelizer, Ira Katznelson, and Rick Perlstein pioneered in this effort. In the present volume there is a chapter by Zelizer tracing the per sistence of New Deal liberalism in Congress and the Democratic Party and another by Kit Smemo explaining why polarization on labor and racial issues extinguished within the GOP a vibrant cohort of liberal Republicans whose very existence had once done so much to legitimize the New Deal order.
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The essays assembled here offer an historicized analysis of the degree to which the original understanding of that order still holds. The unifying theme of the essays lies not in their subject matter—politics, political economy, social thought, and legal scholarship are all well represented—but in their effort to bring a fresh twenty-first-century perspective to the historic meaning and significance of an extended New Deal moment. Along the way, the contributors to this volume also ascertain the degree to which that old order has been displaced or even overthrown by a different, more market-centered reform logic that became the basis
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of shifting electoral and policy coa litions in the 1970s and beyond. Various contributors identify elements of a distinctively new order arising from the po litical economic, ideological, institutional, and electoral currents of post-1970s politics. This collection is divided into four parts. The first, “The Nature and Limits of New Deal Reform,” self-consciously moves “beyond” several of the essays in the 1989 volume by challenging or bringing new perspectives to Rise and Fall’s narrative. Romain Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel “place” our volume in a par ticular economic and reform moment that explains the degree to which the work of Thomas Piketty and other scholars of rising inequality have reanimated the ideological and social agenda initially identified with the New Deal reform of American capitalism. Huret and Vinel invite us to consider the consequences of the New Deal’s focus on economic security at the expense of a more robust challenge to the larger inequalities, economic and political, continually generated by twentieth-and twenty-first-century capitalism. In her essay “State Building from the Bottom Up: The New Deal and Beyond,” Meg Jacobs tackles head-on the central question many students of twentieth-century capitalism ask: Why did an economic crisis in the 1930s move the country to the left, while in the 1970s and afterwards, economic bad times moved it to the right? Her answer is that state building had a different character in t hese two moments. In the 1930s new legislation covering consumers, labor, and even business was designed to activate self-organization and thereby redistribute income, enhance consumption, and bond citizens to their government. In contrast, a new generation of conservative state managers in the 1970s sought to “regulate without mobilizing,” which served to delegitimize the state and shrink its capacity for expansive economic and social intervention. Although partisan politics—Democrats versus Republicans—has long framed the headline conflict between opponents and proponents of a New Deal order, historians have too often been poor narrators of this contestation. Two essays help rectify this debility. In the first, Kit Smemo offers a history of liberal Republicanism to interrogate the way labor and race issues engendered for a full political generation a “New-Dealized” Republican Party. From the late 1930s onward, Republicans such as Harold Stassen, Earl Warren, and Nelson Rockefel ler sought to both accommodate and contain the l abor movement; likewise, they saw the rise of a vigorous civil rights movement as an opportunity to both reclaim a neoabolitionist heritage, and the black votes that went with it, and at the same time raise labor standards in the South in order to forestall the migration of northern industry to the region. The political basis of liberal Republicanism collapsed after 1980 as the demise of labor and the waning of the civil
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rights impulse subverted the ideological and institutional rationale of this party faction. But New Deal liberalism did not die, even at the height of the “Reagan Revolution.” As Julian Zelizer makes clear in his contribution, liberalism in the 1980s remained a powerful presence in Congress, northern state legislatures, and within the Democratic Party itself. To the annoyance of conservatives, liberalism also remained a powerf ul policy current when it came to the crafting and implementation of the legislation Reagan and his successors did manage to push through Congress. Part II of this volume, “Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender,” features three essays that illuminate core New Deal issues, including labor law, labor standards, and regulation of the economy, in order to uncover their racial and gendered dynamics. Historians today understand that New Deal–style resolutions of the “labor question” were inextricably bound up with racial and gender imperatives. In her essay, Eileen Boris uses the history of the Fair L abor Standards Act (FLSA) to argue that the decades-long debate over its expansion can serve as a lens through which to examine how the American polity grappled with a changing set of cultural and social assumptions about race, gender, and the very meaning of t hose activities that constituted work itself. Boris rejects as illusory the Whiggish narrative that purports to demonstrate how all t hose left out of the original legislation—field hands, domestics, retail workers, and government employees—were eventually covered. Instead, Boris offers a narrative of deeper failure, as the FLSA and other labor laws failed to accommodate new employment structures such as the “gig economy” and its many variants, which in recent decades have radically transformed the work regimes progressives and New Dealers once sought to reform. Sophia Lee’s essay, “Rights in the New Deal Order and Beyond,” tackles a parallel question, about the rise of a presumptive conflict between collectivist ways of organizing economic and social life and the increasingly robust rights claims put forward by civil rights and other social movements in the last third of the twentieth century. Extending the argument introduced in her book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Left (2014), Lee argues that the National Labor Relations Board and other federal agencies proved incapable of incorporating t hese “rights” claims not merely because of militancy from the social movement left but also, perhaps even more importantly, because anti-union employers and other conservatives saw a species of such “rights talk” as an effective way to delegitimize much New Deal statecraft. David Stein’s essay, “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956–1979,” links
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two seemingly disparate perspectives on the fate of the New Deal order. Keynesian fiscal policies made inflation a constant threat during the early postwar years, but instead of responding with planning and price controls, as New Dealers of the World War II generation had done, a fiercely independent and conservative Federal Reserve Board used a set of hawkish monetary policies to staunch inflation by generating high unemployment and periodic recessions. African American workers, now an urban and proletarian segment of the population, bore a disproportionate share of this burden, an injustice that civil rights forces repeatedly tried to correct: first through a radical “Freedom Budget” in 1965, subsequently by supporting the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in the 1970s, and finally by denouncing the draconian, recessionary interest rates inaugurated by the Fed’s Paul Volcker in 1979. Part III of this volume, “A New Order Takes Shape,” invites us to consider the preoccupations, social and economic dilemmas, and emerging ideological contours of a “post”–New Deal order. Angus Burgin’s “Market Politics in an Age of Automation” opens this section by reminding us that postwar debates about technological change anticipated structural shifts and the kind of “free-market” techno-utopianism that would eventually undermine the New Deal order. Liberals and leftists had long championed the technologically driven disappearance of the mines, mills, factories, and the backbreaking and exploitative work therein, but by the early postwar years such a transformation seemed increasingly driven by managerial efforts to limit the rise in labor costs and thwart union power. Focusing on the thought of automation consultant John Diebold, Burgin shows how the idea of “postindustrialism” was now deployed by conservatives and managers to limit the legitimacy of trade u nions, government regulatory agencies, and all t hose who seemed to stand in the way of technological “progress” as defined by corporate innovators. Reuel Schiller explores the increasing influence of market ideology within the regulatory apparatus of the federal government bureaucracy and the administrative state. He presents a revealing contrast between the approaches outlined by the New Deal regulatory intellectual James M. Landis, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and dean of Harvard Law School, in his 1938 book The Administrative Process and by policy analysts David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in Reinventing Government, published in 1992 at the beginning of the Clinton administration. While all three were liberal advocates of the regulatory state, Landis’s ideas embodied a full-bore progressive/New Deal faith in expertise and purposeful governmental action, while Osborne and Gaebler evoked a twenty-first-century propensity to use market forces as a mechanism by which progressive statecraft would realize its potential. An accommodation
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to the political Right explains part of this effort to “reinvent government,” but even more important, argues Schiller, was the 1960s left’s own disaffection with the centralized, expert-led regulatory state and the rise of a market-centered, rights-oriented ideology at the heart of late twentieth-century liberalism. Paul Sabin’s study of the environmental movement and its litigation strategy confirms the nongovernmental, consumer-oriented trajectory identified by Schiller as a defining feature of post–New Deal statecraft. However, in this instance the locus of innovation would not be the entrepreneurial spirit of the market but the cadres of community-oriented advocates and foundation and “third-sector” professionals acting in the name of the public interest. Beginning in the 1960s, an imaginative cohort of environmental l awyers attacked the planning triumphs of the early twentieth century: the dams, highways, power plants, and urban redevelopments that had once been among the New Deal’s proudest achievements. Now, in the wake of oil spills and Vietnam, t hese environmental litigants came to see the administrative state and its agencies as having been “captured” by t hose industries and interests they were designed to regulate. While maintaining environmentalism’s skepticism of market interests and claims, the public interest lawyers at the center of this movement contributed to the broader destabilization of New Deal statism with institutionalized mechanisms for holding government accountable and keeping its powers in check—while leaving the question of how to effectively regulate an increasingly empowered market unresolved. As Michael Kazin’s essay makes clear, accompanying these and other debates about the agents of post–New Deal governance and reform were significant shifts in the scope and aspirations of liberalism itself. Kazin considers the once-salient liberal commitment to an American internationalism, inaugurated during the era of Woodrow Wilson and increasingly significant from the late 1930s onward when the conflict between ‘isolationists” and “interventionists” was infused with uman rights campaigns and moral passion. Although environmental and h worldviews still motivate some aspects of twenty-first-century internationalism, Kazin finds a remarkable demise of this idea, not so much when considering formal diplomatic statecraft but in terms of popular sentiment and organization among leftists, liberals, and Democrats. Inaugurated and escalated largely by Democrats, the Vietnam War certainly helped discredit liberal internationalism. The end of the Cold War seemed to lower international stakes even further in what had once been a world of high ideological contestation. Neoconservatives and advocates of a strident, chauvinistic American exceptionalism have tried to fill this vacuum, with largely disastrous and unpopular results.
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Tracing a similar constriction in a once expansive liberal commitment, Joe McCartin links the currently embattled status of public-sector u nionism to the conflict over labor rights, often within the Democratic Party itself, that has subverted the New Deal order in recent decades. Contra contemporary conser vative memes, McCartin demonstrates that even in the 1930s, public-sector unionism was organic to the New Deal ethos. The origins of the controversy that now engulfs public-sector u nionism dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when fiscally strapped big-city Democratic mayors scored political points by pushing back against wage and contract demands from unionized teachers, and sanitation and other municipal workers who also were feeling the pinch of rampant inflation. Th ese protracted battles engendered a discourse of u nion selfishness and fiscal toughness that left urban Democrats bitterly divided. They also paved the way for an increasingly militant anti-unionism that would be taken up full throttle by the Republican Right, fueled by a taxpayer revolt, which mounted a radical attack on public serv ices and the workers who provide them. Reflecting history as much as contemporary circumstances, by the early twenty-fi rst century this attack had put public-sector unions at the forefront of defending what remained of the original New Deal order. Alice O’Connor picks up on another fissure in post–New Deal politics in an essay titled “In Search of ‘Forgotten’ America.” She traces the roots of the “angry white working-class” narrative that has played a part in widely disputed accounts of the decline of the New Deal order since the 1960s, only to return with a vengeance in the presidential election campaign of 2016. Detailing the variations on this narrative since its first full-blown iteration in the wake of George Wallace’s insurgency and Richard M. Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential campaign, O’Connor argues that it rests on, among other t hings, a static and anachronistic conception of the working class and an at-best partial account of the coa litions driving liberalism’s storied defeats. Nevertheless, for an increasingly right-w ing Republican establishment and “New Democrats” alike, it provided the rationale for political strategies and neoliberalizing economic and social policies that undermined the already fragile New Deal electoral coa lition without addressing the needs and concerns of a postindustrial working class that had grown more feminized, racially and ethnically diverse, and anchored in retail, serv ice, health, and other nonmanufacturing employment than conventional white working-class imagery suggests. Echoing a theme raised in the volume’s opening essay, O’Connor argues that the shifting alignments of white working-class voters are less a sign of the definitive breakup of the New Deal electoral coa lition than an indication of the ongoing failure of post–New Deal
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14 Introduction
reform politics to adequately address the dramatic increase in economic in equality, which in the twenty-first century has reached levels unseen since the launch of the New Deal order eighty years ago. hether we are now witnessing In the closing essay, Gary Gerstle considers w the end of a neoliberal order—which many of the volume’s contributors have seen as a successor to the New Deal era—that was anchored in free-market ideology, neo-Victorian moral aspirations, and post-Communist global politics. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the rise of right-w ing populism in Europe and the United States, and the eclipse of that brief moment of capitalist triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War have all signaled an exhaustion of the neoliberalism that once seemed such a potent successor to Keynesian economics and social democratic statecraft. What comes next w ill indeed be a species of politics and social relations that lies beyond the New Deal order.
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