Chaotic neutral, p.36
Chaotic Neutral, page 36
3. For Biden’s remarks: Tau, B., “Biden Remembers McGovern,” Politico, October 25, 2012. For criticism of Biden based on the remarks: Bauer, F., “Biden and McGovern,” National Review, August 17, 2021.
4. See Risen, C., A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009).
5. See Cowie, J., Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), chap. 2.
6. For an overview of those changes, see Marcetic, B., “The Secret History of Super Delegates,” In These Times 40, no. 6 (June 2016); and Herndon, A., “Democrats Overhaul Controversial Superdelegate System,” New York Times, August 26, 2018.
7. Sanchez, J., “Revisiting McGovern-Fraser: Party Nationalization and the Rhetoric of Reform,” Journal of Policy History 32, no. 1 (2020): 1–24.
8. Dark, T. E., “Organized Labor and Party Reform: A Reassessment,” Polity 28, no. 4 (1996): 497–520.
9. Compiled FEC data via OpenSecrets.org.
10. See Gould, L., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), chap. 2.
11. An excellent summary of Wilson’s key ideas appears in Hildreth, A., “The Importance of Purposes in ‘Purposive’ Groups: Incentives and Participation in the Sanctuary Movement,” American Journal of Political Science 38, no. 2 (1994): 447–463.
12. Recommended reading on New Politics includes Hilton, A., “Searching for a New Politics: The New Politics Movement and the Struggle to Democratize the Democratic Party, 1968–1978,” New Political Science 38, no. 2 (2016): 141–159; and Shafer, B. E., Quiet Revolution: Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983).
13. This anecdote appears in Miller, J., Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, 2nd ed. (1994), 214. I thank Thomas Frank for bringing it to my attention in his The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (New York: Macmillan, 2020).
14. Details in this section are taken from David Paul Kuhn’s exhaustive The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
15. See Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot.
16. Quoted in White, T. H., The Making of the President, 1972 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 164–166.
17. For extensive detail, see Hilton, A., True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
18. This point about replication rather than recruitment is explored well in Geismer, L., Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
19. Beyond the reductionist assumption that economic changes are inevitable, scholars have pointed out that even the framing of postindustrial is reductionist in assuming that such societies must, somehow, be fundamentally different; see Ferkiss, V., “Daniel Bell’s Concept of Post-Industrial Society,” Political Science Reviewer 9 (1979): 61–102.
20. Quoted in Alterman, E., The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 261.
21. Quoted in Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 158.
22. Hilton, “Searching for a New Politics.”
23. For a complete discussion see Hilton, “Searching for a New Politics.”
24. Hilton, True Blues, chap. 4.
CHAPTER 3: THE WILDERNESS YEARS
1. See Ryan, A., Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Laski, H., The Rise of European Liberalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936); and Geuss, R., “Liberalism,” in ed. R. Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2. Roosevelt, F. D., Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1938, vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), xxix.
3. For example, Sabin, P., “Environmental Law and the End of the New Deal Order,” Law and History Review 33, no. 4 (2015).
4. Sabin, P., Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).
5. This section draws from Lawrence, J. A., The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Stoller, M., “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul,” Atlantic, October 24, 2016; Owens, J., “Extreme Advocacy Leadership in the Pre-reform House: Wright Patman and the House Banking and Currency Committee,” British Journal of Political Science 15, no. 2 (1985); and Young, N., “Wright Patman: Congressman to the Nation, 1893–1953” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1995).
6. Broder quoted in Jacobs, M., Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Macmillan, 2016), 136.
7. “A Bold and Balky Congress,” Time, January 23, 1978, 8–16.
8. Jordan, H., Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (New York: Putnam, 1982), 317.
9. Lydon, C., “Jimmy Carter Revealed: He’s a Rockefeller Republican,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1977.
10. Jordan, Crisis, 316.
11. All quotes from Schlesinger Jr., A., “The Challenge Facing Liberals,” Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1979.
12. For an exhaustive narrative of 1970s energy politics, see Jacobs, Panic at the Pump. This section owes much to Jacobs’s research.
13. Jacobs, Panic at the Pump.
14. “Fights Loom in Congress with Few New Initiatives Likely,” New York Times, November 12, 1978.
15. Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, 194.
16. Jacobs, 198.
17. Stanley, T., Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010), 92.
18. Tolchin, M., “Carter Briefs House Democratic Chiefs,” New York Times, January 23, 1979.
19. Jacobs, Panic at the Pump, 181.
20. Tolchin, “Carter Briefs House Democratic Chiefs.”
21. See “Transcript of Press Conference at the American Bankers Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana,” October 9, 1979, Statements and Speeches of Paul A. Volcker, Fraser, fraser.stlouisfed.org.
22. For a useful summary, see Durand, C., “1979 in Reverse,” New Left Review, June 1, 2021.
23. Quoted in Greider, W., Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 149.
24. Greider, Secrets of the Temple, 154.
25. Carter is examined in detail as a “disjunctive” president overseeing the final stage of a collapsing political regime in Stephen Skowronek’s classic The Politics Presidents Make (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
26. Bibby, J. F., and B. F. Schaffner, Politics, Parties, and Elections in America (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1996).
27. McGirr, L., Suburban Warriors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
28. Quoted in DiSalvo, D., Engines of Change: Party Factions in American Politics, 1868–2010 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
29. Historian Brent Cebul has written persuasively on the long history of economically moderate-to-conservative promarket views within the Democratic coalition. See Cebul, “Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats,” Modern American History 2 (2019): 139–164.
30. Prominent examples of this view include Geismer, L., Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Selfa, L., The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); Davis, M., Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class, 2nd ed. (London: Verso Books, 2000); Hedges, C., Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Bold Type Books, 2011); and basically everything Thomas Frank has ever written.
31. Schlesinger Jr., A., “For Democrats, Me Too Reaganism Will Spell Disaster,” New York Times, July 6, 1986, 13.
32. Quoted in Baer, K. S., Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 73–74.
33. See Bertram, E., The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
34. See Frank, T., Listen, Liberal (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), chapter 2.
35. Rothenberg, R., The Neoliberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).
36. Liechtenstein, N., “Labor, Liberalism, and the Democratic Party: A Fruitful but Vexed Alliance,” in ed. J. Bell and T. Stanley, Making Sense of American Liberalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 4: INSURGENT MODERATES
1. This section draws from three thorough accounts of the early years of the Democratic Leadership Council, one of which is first-person and the others with access to the principals and archives directly: Baer, K. S., Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); From, A., and A. McKeon, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Macmillan, 2013); and Hale, J. F., “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 2 (1995): 207–232. I am indebted to all of these authors for their research.
2. See Conroy, S., Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary; America’s Discerning, Magnificent, and Absurd Road to the White House (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017).
3. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 34–38.
4. Granat, D., “Democratic Caucus Renewed as Forum for Policy Questions,” CQ Weekly Reports 41 (1983): 2115–2119.
5. Baer, Reinventing Democrats, 41.
6. Committee on Party Effectiveness, Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: A Democratic Direction for the 1980s (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982).
7. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” 211.
8. Cooper, D. N., Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity, Not Just Filling in the Potholes: A Labor Perspective (Storrs: Labor Education Center, University of Connecticut, 1983).
9. These are the terms used in the original language of 1982. Elving, R., “Debating Length, Language, Democrats Ponder Platform,” CQ Weekly Report, June 11, 1988, quoted in Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats.”
10. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats.”
11. See Borquez, J., “The Reagan Democrat Phenomenon: How Wise Was the Conventional Wisdom?,” Politics and Policy 33, no. 4 (2005): 672–705.
12. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” 215–217.
13. Caddell, P., “A Party Afraid of the Truth,” Mainstream Democrat 2, no. 4 (December 1990).
14. Galston, W., and E. C. Kamarck, The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency, report, Progressive Policy Institute, September 1989.
15. Carmines, E. G., and J. A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
16. See Gilens, M., “‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to Welfare,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996): 593–604; Peffley, M., J. Hurwitz, and P. M. Sniderman, “Racial Stereotypes and Whites’ Political Views of Blacks in the Context of Welfare and Crime,” American Journal of Political Science (1997): 30–60; and Wetts, R., and R. Willer, “Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats Lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs,” Social Forces 97, no. 2 (2018): 793–822.
17. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” 221. See also Grim, R., We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (New York: Strong Arm Press, 2019).
CHAPTER 5: IT’S BILL CLINTON’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY NOW
1. Berke, R. L., “Brown Renews His Battle Against the Moonbeam,” New York Times, April 12, 1992.
2. Broder, D., “The Evolution of Bill Clinton as a Different Kind of Democrat,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1992. Even a month after the election, journalists were still exploring the question of what exactly this different democrat was.
3. For example, Locin, M., “Clinton Says He Is a ‘New Democrat,’” Chicago Tribune, October 22, 1992.
4. Baer, K., Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 198, 204.
5. Berke, R. L., “Clinton: Getting People off Welfare,” New York Times, September 10, 1992.
6. Gilens, M., “Racial Attitudes and Opposition to Welfare,” Journal of Politics 57, no. 4 (1995): 994–1014.
7. Peffley, M., J. Hurwitz, and P. M. Sniderman, “Racial Stereotypes and Whites’ Political Views of Blacks in the Context of Welfare and Crime,” American Journal of Political Science (1997): 30–60.
8. Hale, J. F., “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 2 (1995): 228.
9. Lewis-Beck, M. S., and T. W. Rice, Forecasting Elections (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1992).
10. Lacy, D., and B. C. Burden, “The Vote-Stealing and Turnout Effects of Ross Perot in the 1992 US Presidential Election,” American Journal of Political Science (1999): 233–255.
11. Alvarez, R. M., and J. Nagler, “Economics, Issues and the Perot Candidacy: Voter Choice in the 1992 Presidential Election,” American Journal of Political Science (1995): 714–744.
12. Belkin, A., and G. Bateman, eds., Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003).
13. A remarkable history of deficit politicking in the US: Kelton, S., The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (New York: Hachette, 2020).
14. Contemporary views on the benefits of deficit reduction are captured in Mann T., and C. Schultze, “Getting Rid of the Budget Deficit: Why We Should and How We Can,” Brookings Review 7, no. 1 (1988).
15. Woodward, B., The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 70–71.
16. Woodward, The Agenda, 90.
17. Woodward, 115.
18. Woodward, 249.
19. Woodward, 129.
20. Woodward, 126.
21. Woodward, 37.
22. Woodward, 112, 262.
23. Woodward, 206.
24. Woodward, 297.
25. Woodward, 155.
26. Woodward, 162, 170.
27. Woodward, 233.
28. Hero, J., et al., “Understanding What Makes Americans Dissatisfied with Their Health Care System: An International Comparison,” Health Affairs 35, no. 3 (2016): 502–509.
29. Blendon, R. J., and K. Donelan, “Public Opinion and Efforts to Reform the US Health Care System: Confronting Issues of Cost-Containment and Access to Care,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 3 (1991): 147.
30. Nather, D., “How Clinton WH Bungled Health Care,” Politico, February 28, 2014.
31. In Bob Woodward’s book The Agenda (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) is an example of Clinton lauding the supposed willingness of moderate Republicans to “get something done” while lambasting the unreliable and demanding Democratic caucus (pages 179–181).
32. Quoted in Rushefsky, M. E., and K. Patel, Politics, Power and Policy Making: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
33. Blendon and Donelan, “Public Opinion and Efforts to Reform,” 148.
34. Two examples are Greenberg, S. B., “Third Force: Why Independents Turned Against Democrats—and How to Win Them Back,” Democratic Leadership Council, 1994; and Starr, P., “What Happened to Health Care Reform?,” American Prospect, Winter 1995, 20–31.
35. Selfa, L., The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008), 51–53.
36. Quoted in Cornwell, S., “From ‘Hillarycare’ Debacle in 1990s, Clinton Emerged More Cautious,” Reuters, June 6, 2016.
37. Donnelly, K. P., and D. A. Rochefort, “The Lessons of ‘Lesson Drawing’: How the Obama Administration Attempted to Learn from the Failure of the Clinton Health Plan,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 2 (2012): 184–223.
38. These data are presented clearly in Lopez, G., “The Simple Truth About Why Mass Incarceration Happened,” Vox, August 30, 2015.
39. For example, Alexander, M., The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).
40. A là Marcetic, B., “Joe Biden, Mass Incarceration Zealot,” Jacobin, August 9, 2018.
41. See Mancillas, L. K., Presidents and Mass Incarceration: Choices at the Top, Repercussions at the Bottom (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018).
42. See Sacco, L. N., The Violence Against Women Act: Overview, Legislation, and Federal Funding, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, May 26, 2015.
CHAPTER 6: RED TIDE
1. Coppins, M., “The Man Who Broke Politics,” Atlantic, October 17, 2018.
2. Quoted in Strahan R., and D. J. Palazzolo, “The Gingrich Effect,” Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 1 (2004): 99.
3. Quoted in Zelizer, J. E., Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 305.
4. For an extensive look at the relationship between the two see Gillon, S. M., The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5. Shafer, B. E., “The Partisan Legacy: Are There Any New Democrats? And by the Way, Was There a Republican Revolution?,” in ed. C. Campbell and B. A. Rockman, The Clinton Legacy (London: Chatham House, 2000).
6. Gillon, The Pact, 38–50.
7. Fineman, H., “The Warrior,” Newsweek, 1995, 28–33.
8. Zelizer, Burning Down the House, is encyclopedic on the details of this battle, and the summary version I offer here is based on that work.
9. Rosenson, B., “Ethics Evolving: Unethical Political Behavior Viewed Through the Lens of US House Ethics Investigations, 1798–2011,” Public Integrity 16, no. 3 (2014): 227–242.
