Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart recently wrote an op-ed piece in the NYT predicting that the upcoming election will present the winner with the opportunity to create a new cycle of American history, an age of reform.
Hart dusts off the idea that American politics does run in cycles, or shifts between poles of conservatism and innovation, perhaps most prominently championed by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Hart identifies the most recent cycles as the FDR New Deal cycle from 1932 to 1968 and the Reagan conservative movement from 1968 until now.
If we are indeed moving into a realignment and a profound restructuring of our politics, one of the keys to the coming cycle will be undoing one of the Reagan revolution’s major victories, the demonization and rollback of government regulation of corporations. Ralph Nader may have become a laughingstock due to his electoral crusades, but the message is still sound. Corporations have gone hog wild and need to be reined in.
An example of this coming new age rolled into my e-mail box this morning, a press release from U.S. Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services. The Committee announced a hearing where Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will testify on the restructuring of regulations governing financial markets.
Viva la revolucion!
Tags: history, political cycles
July 8, 2008 at 3:11 am
i’d like to think you’re right, and i’ll hold out hope. the problem is that the fdr era – which, i agree, unleashed the forces that would overthrow segregation and in many others ways throw sunlight into the american experience – was predicated on mass trauma, in the form of the great depression. only when a huge segment of the population had felt pain and loss was the nation ready to embrace a wildly different view of government. right now, a good chunk of the country is white-knuckled in holding onto what it’s got, physically and by extension politically. that’s a whole different vibe than what was happening in the 1930s.
sean
July 12, 2008 at 4:50 pm
It’s the cycles Sean. The theory is that each cycle eventually wears out its welcome and forces a return to the other pole of thought. In this case, the anti-regulation movement conservative movement has worn out its welcome. As David Brooks said, the movement that “Goldwater started, Nixon elected, Reagan coronated, Gingrich radicalized, DeLay criminalized and Bushended.”
Everything starts out fine but becomes a caricature of its original self. Now reform is looking pretty darn good to people, tired of being lied to by institutionalized crooks without the ability to adequately run the government.
We have the same preconditions of the New Deal: insert the war-mongering, Halliburton-enriching, Katrina punting, corporate toadies in power now, for the red scare, don’t spend a dime on the people Hooverites.