The End Of The Liberal Experiment?
We could be witnessing the death throes of America’s liberal tradition
This is the introduction to a subsequent three-part series on the 2016 GOP victory in historical context by professor and author John Moretta, whose book The Hippies is out now with McFarland Press.
At no time since the Second World War has American liberalism been in greater peril. At risk is the complete eradication of the liberal ethos from the body politic, along with the socioeconomic institutions that have sustained it since the New Deal. Donald Trump’s shocking and disturbing Electoral College victory in November has shaken the Democratic establishment to its foundations, in the process forcing the Party once again to reexamine the electoral viability of its liberal ideological core while simultaneously reckoning with the various causes of their nominee’s devastating defeat.
Most disquieting, not just to progressives but to millions of Americans, was the election of the undeniably least qualified individual — in every intellectual, experiential, and personal capacity — ever to aspire realistically to be President of the United States. In the 228 years of the history of the American Presidency, none of Trump’s predecessors — Republican or Democrat — lacked in such bountiful quantities so many of the essential prerequisites of temperament, integrity, decorum, wisdom, and general statecraft as Donald Trump.
Since the 1930s, liberalism has defined the Democratic Party, informed its policies, and sustained sustained decades-long majorities in the House and Senate. However, for a variety of cultural and socioeconomic reasons — beginning in 1968 and unfolding over the course of the next two decades — the liberal ethos encountered serious challenges emanating from an angry, disillusioned, and betrayed white, blue-collar middle class.
And now, the Republican Party has control of both the executive and legislative branches with the likelihood of a conservative advantage in the judiciary as well. And at the helm is an individual not only void of any semblance of governing experience, but one who is intellectually vacuous, vengeful, petulant, and mercurial in equal measure — a man empty of core beliefs save an insecure insatiability of self-aggrandizement, ego, and celebrity.
With Trump in the White House, the GOP-dominated Congress will be emboldened to extinguish the liberal tradition finally. Donald Trump represents manna from heaven, the perfect conduit, for House and Senate Republicans, some of whom have been waiting since the Reagan era for the opportunity to eliminate the last programs of the New Deal and Great Society eras, times of positive government. Indeed, the Republican Party has spent years laying the institutional groundwork for such a coup.
Republican-dominated state legislatures and governorships gerrymandered congressional districts with ruthless precision while simultaneously passing anti-democratic voter ID laws and curtailing polling hours and locations, all in an attempt to destroy their Democratic opponents. This past November, no sooner did North Carolina voters officially elect a Democratic governor than the Republicans of that state ramrodded through a whole series of laws stripping the governor’s office of many of its powers, ensuring that the incoming governor would be at the mercy of the Republican-controlled state legislature. Establishment protests to the contrary, Donald Trump is not an aberration; rather, he is the end result, the final product, of the GOP’s years of subversive rhetoric and insurrectionist tactics, their pandering to anti-government, extremist groups like the Tea Party movement and to the media outlets that supported such illiberal crusades.
In jeopardy of being privatized or extinguished altogether in the name of the right-wing counterrevolution against the welfare state: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Also on the Republican agenda: income and corporate tax “revision” (i.e. increased tax breaks for the wealthy and for alleged incentives for corporations to “invest” in the US economy by creating new manufacturing jobs — a dubious initiative), the possible repeal of Dodd-Frank, and Trump’s campaign pledge to tear up the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — “Obamacare” — , which Republicans have been waiting to do from the Act’s inception.
Indeed, the Republican Party has spent years laying the institutional groundwork for such a coup.
This obliteration of what really are the last remnants of the liberal political economy could become a reality in Trump’s first Hundred Days; along with other Congress-promoted, Trump-approved acts of callousness, the remaining bulwarks of the liberal state that since the 1930s has uplifted millions of citizens out of poverty, despair, discrimination, and disfranchisement may soon be completely put to death. In short, Trump supporters have elected an arrogant, incurious narcissist who has unseated the Republican Party’s decent establishment (or what was left of them), and is bringing new radicals into the White House.
Ironically, the term “Hundred Days” harkens back to that halcyon moment in FDR’s first three months in office, when he became a legislative juggernaut, railroading through Congress some of the most sweeping, progressive reform measures ever passed in United States history, laying the foundations for the liberal impulse that Democratic and even some Republican administrations would build upon. Thus, Trump’s election and accompanying GOP victories in the House and Senate require a redefining of all of our previously accepted historical assumptions and traditions that have generally united Americans since the end of the Second World War.
Since the 1930s, liberalism has defined the Democratic Party, informed its policies, and sustained sustained decades-long majorities in the House and Senate. However, for a variety of cultural and socioeconomic reasons — beginning in 1968 and unfolding over the course of the next two decades — the liberal ethos encountered serious challenges emanating from an angry, disillusioned, and betrayed white, blue-collar middle class. This constituency rose up against perceived liberal excess and unwarranted entitlements, especially to those perceived to be undeserving of assistance. Similar to the 1968 blue-collar revolt, Trump and Republican Party have incited an anti-liberal, anti-progressive working class America, one that now forms the ideological backbone of one of the most profound backlashes in US history.
Trump has energized an angry yet somewhat amorphous working class claiming to be fed up with the defamation of all they believed about American greatness and exceptionalism — as well as their place in it with their bitter feelings about being economically discounted and culturally marginalized by liberal elites.
To better understand Trump’s victory in historical context and what it means for both the Republican Party and the liberal ethos, it is important to revisit the election of 1968. During that pivotal election year, the various cultural and sociopolitical forces that ultimately catapulted Trump to the White House in 2016 first appeared, coalesced, and forever changed the face of American conservative politics — and by extension, the fate of American liberalism.
Check in next week for Part I . . .
CORRECTION: This piece previously noted that the last time the GOP controlled both legislative houses and presidency was 1928. In fact, the GOP had the trifecta briefly under George W. Bush.
John Moretta is based in Houston. He is a professor of history at Houston Community College and University of Houston’s Honors College. His books include The Hippies: A 1960s History, William Penn and the Quaker Legacy, and William Pitt: Texas Lawyer, Southern Statesman, 1825–1888.
