Chris Bowers posed a striking historical theory at Open Left this week: compared to Europe and Canada, the US has been a basically progressive country for most of its history, and the past 30-40 years of conservative dominance is a historical abnormality. He also suggests three causes of this conservative dominance: the Cold War and its resulting military-industrial complex, high rates of religiosity, and the American apartheid state. The election of Obama, so goes the theory, will seriously chip away at the apartheid state, and will thus help chip away at the era of conservative dominance.
Bowers's theory directly conflicts with the famous Schlesinger thesis, which argues that we have cycled back and forth between eras of conservative and progressive dominance which have lasted about 20 years each. On balance, I think the Schlesinger thesis is a bit more accurate, for a number of reasons.
- Bowers's thesis doesn't account for the government's policy towards Native Americans and African-Americans. The US was far behind the rest of the Western world in abolishing slavery, and its aggressive and brutal expansion into Native American territories compares similarly to European imperialism in the 19th century. So on these two policies - which were the foundation of the country's existence, remember - the US was no more progressive, and in some ways even more regressive, as its European counterparts.sed in the 19th.
- The culprits Bowers names are not one-sided in creating conservative culture. Many churches, as Chris readily admits, formed the foundation of the abolition and civil rights movements, and supported labor unions. The military, for all its problems and its undoubtedly conservative pull, has a progressive undercurrent, both in its capability (so far vastly underutilized) to protect marginalized people throughout the world, and in its capacity to socially promote marginalized people at home. The apartheid state remains, of course, a massive force of conservatism, but it has been around since the country was founded (with a brief hiatus during Reconstruction, perhaps), and in fact it was slowly receding during the recent period of conservative ascendance.
- On top of that, these culprits aren't unmatched. In the same time that we took a sharp right turn, more and more people graduated high school and went to college, and more and more people delayed marriage or eschewed the traditional heterosexual nuclear family altogether. Both of these trends probably made us more progressive as a culture, on the whole. And if the military-industrial complex made deeper investment in the safety net impossible, Social Security and Medicare demonstrated the feasibility of such grand investments in a very tangible way.
Of course, I don't deny the fact that the country has taken a sharp conservative turn in the past thirty or forty years; that is obvious. My point is that sharp conservative turn isn't so much an anomaly as it is a continuation of a very long historical trend, identified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
I also think it's plain that there are structural features of the Constitution which virtually guarantee this kind of cyclical ideological history. Lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, the staggered nature of the election of each third of the Senate, and the capability of dissidents to gather strength in state and local government before running for federal office, are all a part of this cyclical nature of our ideological history. Technology, which can make the governing ideology obsolete overnight and make radical ideas suddenly pragmatic, also plays a part.
I'm been very interested in the Schlesinger thesis over the last years, and particularly in the last few months, as it appears more and more likely that we really are on the verge of another progressive cycle. It's certainly exciting to be able to see that happening, and to be a part of that moment. More than that, if the theory proves true, then we are due for two or three decades of progressive dominance. That's a very long time, and there's a lot we can do with that kind of time and power. The question is, what? What would we do with the country if we knew we had two or three decades to play with? Medicare-for-All? A renewable energy economy? True racial and sexual equality? A dramatically smaller military? A democratic China?
As fun a game as this might be, it's also a bit depressing. After all, if Schlesinger is right, we're due for a countervailing conservative resurgence in 20-30 years. If that's true, then what kind of buffers can we create against that future time? More than that, what can we do to keep our own progressive moment going as long as possible? How will we guarantee that we don't overreach and end up, as JFK put it, inside the tiger?
I have some thoughts on some of these questions, and perhaps I'll write them up separately a bit later on. But if you have anything to chime in, I'd love to hear some thoughts.
Full disclosure: My company worked on a small technical/design project for Chris and Open Left last year.
