Over at Economic Principals, David Warsh has an uncanny knack for throwing off plausible, yet quite grand claims as if they were commonplace assertions. This week, he critiques the lack of attention that Clinton’s book pays to 1980 as a historical turning point.
To judge from Clinton’s account, the year 1980 holds no special significance for Americans. It was the year 1968, he writes. “that broke open the nation and shattered the Democratic Party; the year that conservative populism replaced progressive populism as the dominant political force in or nation; the year that law and order and strength became the province of Republicans, and Democrats became associated with weakness, chaos, and out-of-touch self-indulgent elites; the year that led to Nixon, then Reagan, the Gingrich, then George W. Bush.”
For most of us, however, 1968 was merely the Crack-Up — the year when the strains of the New Deal alliance began to show. It was 1980 in which America began to regain a broad dogma resembling the New Deal consensus (if the word had not become so depleted of meaning, I would call it a political paradigm) that which had governed winning politics for the previous 48 years.
…Taken together, don’t Reagan’s achievements add up to a long-term redirection of American politics as distinctive as Roosevelt’s New Deal? And even if they weren’t precisely symmetrical (and naturally they weren’t), don’t they add up to the same kind of watershed for the current generation, even if they were different in degree?
This line of analysis is not too different from what we heard in the remembrances of Reagan the week after his death. What, then, to make of Warsh’s final claim?
Perhaps Kerry will succeed in 2004. If he fails, another Democrat will get another chance in 2008 — and then, almost certainly succeed. The strains on the consensus we describe as the Reagan Revolution are growing daily. The pace of change has quickened somewhat. Before long, the Republicans will face their 1968.
The assertion is breathtaking in its confidence. But maybe he’s right. I can’t help but wonder what such a breakdown in GOP political concensus would look like. What are the strains that Warsh is seeing?
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