Two years after an election that seemed to portend a new era of comity, American politics has resumed what now appears to be its permanent condition of polarization, quite possibly worsened by widening rifts within the two major parties. Jonathan Alter, in his cover essay this week on liberalism, notes that theDemocratic Party is split between purists and pragmatists; Christopher Caldwell, assessing the state of conservatism, warns that the Republican Party, should it gain control of Congress, will be accountable to angry insurgents aligned with the Tea Party movement.
If Alter and Caldwell are right, and the books they discuss suggest they are, then Democrats and Republicans seem destined to move even farther apart than they are now. How, then, will they forge the compromises that are the foundation of effective governance?
The answer is: They may not need to. For most of the past century, consensus in American politics has been more phantom than fact, especially when it comes to staking out ideological ground. Even in the cold war era, a peak period of bipartisan cooperation, liberals and conservatives clashed over first principles, and the most respected spokesmen in either party were not afraid to say so.
Consider an important midcentury manifesto, “A Democrat Looks at His Party” (1955). Its author, Dean Acheson, had left government after the 1952 election, but he remained a formidable presence — perhaps the greatest of all modern secretaries of state. Yet his book, although written in courtly prose, with learned references to Renaissance history and choice aphorisms from Oliver Wendell Holmes, was an act of ideological revivalism, steeped in the glories of the New Deal.
The Democrats’ triumphs, Acheson argued, originated in their discovery that the federal government, in particular the executive branch, should be “an instrument to accomplish what needs to be done, even if this cuts across cherished doctrines,” including those stated or implied in the Constitution.
In fact, Acheson explained, the history of the Democratic Party, dating as far back asGrover Cleveland’s presidency, “is the history of America’s unwritten constitution, of the powers of the federal government, of the nature and authority of the presidential office and its relation to the legislative and judicial powers.” It climaxed in the rush of programs and agencies Democrats devised to meet the crisis of the Great Depression. These innovations required “knowledge, perceptiveness, imagination — in other words, brains,” and it was the Democratic Party that“attracts intellectuals and puts them to work.”
Republicans, meanwhile, clung to an outmoded ideal of a weak federal government: “In the name of checking . . . ‘executive aggrandizements,’ the party historically would subordinate the Executive to the Congress, and the national voice to a babel of local voices,” Acheson wrote.
The unwritten constitution? The babel of local voices? It’s hard to imagine the high-profile Democrat today who would so openly acknowledge these presumptions of modern liberalism.
Republicans in the 1950s were no less direct. Take, for instance, the ideas expressed by Arthur Larson, the under secretary of labor to President Eisenhower, in his book “A Republican Looks at His Party,” published in 1956. Responding to Acheson, Larson accused him of a “thinly veiled contempt for state and municipal government,” formed under “the influence of a school of European political theory” — specifically, the socialist theory of Harold Laski. Larson stated his party’s position in language as strident as Newt Gingrich’s. “Let us put it perfectly bluntly: the typical American is inherently a states’-righter by inclination and sentiment.” That same American had “an instinctive sense that . . . excessive centralization means the threat of ultimate loss of personal liberties, and that our constitutional division of powers between the central government, the state governments and the people is right and must be preserved at all costs.” The Democrats’ ideal of the federal leviathan, Larson warned, would place the nation on the road to “totalitarian dictatorship.”
Acheson and Larson were by no means extremists. Each stood at or near the political center. Acheson had been the architect of the cold war containment policy that included the use of loyalty oaths, enacted under Truman, to expunge suspected Communists from the government payroll, though in his manifesto he regretted this “grave mistake.”
Larson, a self-described “New Republican,” proudly pointed to the Eisenhower administration’s expansion of New Deal programs — unemployment insurance, for one — and advocated a “strong, confident center-of-the-road American consensus,” a view repudiated by the conservative wing of his own party.
The dominant political figure in the 1950s was Eisenhower, a popular president twice elected with sweeping majorities. He disdained ideological debate but it swirled all around him, at times almost paralyzing his administration. For two years, he was locked in battle with his party’s right wing, most conspicuously with a group of legislators led by SenatorJoseph R. McCarthy, the ringmaster of loyalty investigations that reached deep into the executive branch. Other Republicans, exploiting wafer-thin majorities in Congress, gave less attention to major appropriations bills than to drafting constitutional amendments that might confound the most devout Tea Partier. In his 1956 book “Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years,” Richard Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, counted no fewer than 107 amendments that had been submitted to Senate committees as of June 1954. They included one empowering state governors to fill “vacancies” in the House of Representatives should Washington suffer a nuclear attack, another to prevent “interference with or limitation upon the power of any state to regulate health, morals, education, marriage, and good order in the state,” and a third that would have inserted the following words in the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”
At one point, Eisenhower, frustrated that the nation’s serious business was being ignored, considered quitting the Republican Party and starting a new party of his own.
The problem was temporarily solved by the 1954 election. It was a defeat for Congressional Republicans, but not for Eisenhower since, as Rovere reported, the election had “removed several persons whom the president found offensive and had weakened the authority of quite a few others,” most of them Republicans.
Democrats, all the while, were equally fissured, as the party nearly self-destructed over civil rights, the great social issue of the 1950s (though neither Acheson nor Larson had much to say about it). The fiercest proponents of the states’ rights ideology championed by Larson were not Republicans, but Southern Democrats. Some had already broken with the party, in 1948, when Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, headed a third-party, states rights’ ticket, the Dixiecrats, which captured four states in the general election, the first step in the Democratic Party’s eventual loss of “the Solid South.”
Today, much of this history has been forgotten, and the Eisenhower years are remembered instead as an oasis of responsible governance and nonideological, bipartisan calm. It is too soon to say the same about the politics of the present moment. But it is also too soon to say where we are headed or even to guess how we might get there.
Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review. His book “The Death of Conservatism” was published in paperback this month.
