Legacies of Losing in American Politics
eBook - ePub

Legacies of Losing in American Politics

Jeffrey K. Tulis, Nicole Mellow

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Legacies of Losing in American Politics

Jeffrey K. Tulis, Nicole Mellow

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

American politics is typically a story about winners. The fading away of defeated politicians and political movements is a feature of American politics that ensures political stability and a peaceful transition of power. But American history has also been built on defeated candidates, failed presidents, and social movements that at pivotal moments did not dissipate as expected but instead persisted and eventually achieved success for the loser's ideas and preferred policies.With Legacies of Losing in American Politics, Jeffrey K. Tulis and Nicole Mellow rethink three pivotal moments in American political history: the founding, when anti-Federalists failed to stop the ratification of the Constitution; the aftermath of the Civil War, when President Andrew Johnson's plan for restoring the South to the Union was defeated; and the 1964 presidential campaign, when Barry Goldwater's challenge to the New Deal order was soundly defeated by Lyndon B. Johnson. In each of these cases, the very mechanisms that caused the initial failures facilitated their eventual success. After the dust of the immediate political defeat settled, these seemingly discredited ideas and programs disrupted political convention by prevailing, often subverting, and occasionally enhancing constitutional fidelity. Tulis and Mellow present a nuanced story of winning and losing and offer a new understanding of American political development as the interweaving of opposing ideas.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Legacies of Losing in American Politics an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Legacies of Losing in American Politics by Jeffrey K. Tulis, Nicole Mellow in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

1

Political Failure, and Success

American politics is typically a story of winners: victorious politicians, successful social movements, effective and long-lasting political coalitions. It is not surprising that political victory is thought requisite to a genuine and lasting political legacy because, in general, that is the normal course of affairs everywhere. Founders who triumph; generals who are victorious in wars; presidents who win critical elections; social activists whose movements prevail in legislatures, in courts, and in civil society—all mark the major developmental moments in political life.
Losers in American politics tend to recede and be forgotten: Alf Landon, Henry Wallace, Wendell Willkie, Alton B. Parker, James Cox, John Anderson, Robert Dole, Michael Dukakis. Much further back in time: Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, John C. Breckinridge, Horatio Seymour. They were all presidential candidates. Few remember their names, and those who do care little about them. For political stability and legitimacy, the fading away of losers may be a helpful feature of American politics. At the presidential level, American candidates have almost always been good losers, in the idiom of sportsmanship. For example, the presidential election of 2000 was the closest election in American history. Ballots were challenged in Florida, and the outcome of the election was delayed until the Supreme Court ruled that there was insufficient time and insufficient legal justification for a recount. Almost immediately upon learning of the court’s decision, the losing candidate, Albert Gore, conceded to George W. Bush. After an exchange of speeches, a frenzied election was over and a peaceful transition of power ensued. Though the incidents are often less dramatic, American history is replete with examples of losers who conceded gracefully and disappeared into the background.1
Nested within this congenial picture of legitimacy and stability, however, is also one of disruption and challenge. Some losers do not fade away but, instead, live on and reshape the political landscape. Legacies of Losing in American Politics is an account of three such losers, and the chronicle that emerges forces us to rethink conventional narratives of American politics. In three separate and pivotal developmental moments of American political history, prominent political actors were vanquished decisively; yet these losers eventually achieved success for their ideas and preferred policies. At the Founding, the Anti-Federalists failed in their effort to defeat ratification of the Constitution. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson’s plan for restoring the South to the Union was defeated by Radical Republicans, who instead imposed Reconstruction. And in the 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater’s robust challenge to the New Deal order was soundly defeated by President Lyndon Johnson. The irrefutable nature of these three losses at the time they occurred served to underscore the significance of the success of their opposition. The Founding, Reconstruction (often called “the second founding”), and the New Deal are typically heralded as the most significant turning points in the country’s history, with many observers seeing each of these as political triumphs through which the United States has come to more closely realize its liberal ideals of liberty and equality. Yet our study of the losers in these moments shows that rather than disappearing under the currents of liberal progress, the Anti-Federalists, Andrew Johnson, and Barry Goldwater facilitated future successes for their defeated political programs. Understanding the legacies of these three losses in American politics is our principal aim.
By focusing on what we call the “antimoments” to the well-known political victories of the Founding, Reconstruction, and New Deal, Legacies of Losing in American Politics offers a new way of thinking about American political development. The initial policy and ideational defeats represented in these antimoments later transformed themselves into long-term successes. Our main goals are to describe the substantive agenda sought by the key actors in each case, to reveal the mechanisms by which the early failures facilitated long-term successes, and to show that fresh thinking about these hitherto neglected phenomena provides fertile ground to modify, if not recast, two major synoptic perspectives on American politics. Taken together, these particular cases offer a new window on American politics as a whole.

Synoptic Perspectives

Among students of American political development, two narratives of American politics loom especially large. One focuses on the idea that there are moments of profound regime-level change in American politics that usher in fundamentally new political orders. The other narrative focuses on continuities in American political life, beginning with the assertion of the hegemony of liberalism, or a distinctively American creed in the constitutional order. Both narratives have generated substantial scholarly debate, and this book aims to usefully conjoin and revise these two important intellectual traditions.
For leading students of transformative change, American political history has been marked by several unusually significant moments, or breaks, when the polity has been founded or refounded. Some of the most impressive accounts of the historical trajectory of American politics—for example, books by Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi, and Walter Dean Burnham—show the vital importance of transformative eras in American politics.2 Ackerman calls these “constitutional moments.” Lowi calls them America’s successive “republics.” Burnham made famous the notions of “critical elections,” “critical realignments,” and “punctuated equilibria” and has linked these to Ackerman’s account of American political development. These formative thinkers and others like them agree on the unusual times in which American politics transformed, when one era of normal politics dramatically gave way to a new and different era of normal politics. In these moments, a domestic or foreign crisis, political agitation, societal cleavages, and competing ideas and programs of action disrupted the political convention; after the dust settled, a new “normal,” with new governing ideas, newly dominant interests and leaders, and new institutions came to prevail. Scholars of these sorts of transformations mark three “moments” in particular—the Founding and the ratification of the Constitution, Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the New Deal political order initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt—as the most consequential. They are therefore of most interest to us.
It is now conventional wisdom to point to the victors in each of these three transformational occasions—the Federalists (or, more popularly, “the Founders”), Lincoln and the Republican Party, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Democratic Party, as the actors who decisively shaped American politics thereafter. Indeed, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt regularly top historians’ lists of great presidents, presidents who made a profound mark on the trajectory of the country’s development. The conventional wisdom also happens to be true. Politics before and after each moment was unmistakably different in terms of the dominant ideas, influential actors and interests, institutional configurations, and policy enactments. Prior to ratification of the Constitution, only a loose confederation of newly independent states existed while after came a constitutional republic on a scale not previously realized for republics. Slave states coexisted uneasily with free states and in tension with the new national government until the Civil War and Reconstruction abolished slavery and fortified the supremacy of the national government. National power was nonetheless still limited, and ideas of laissez-faire capitalism reigned until the New Deal ushered in federal government regulatory and social welfare activism and built the modern administrative state. The significance of the changes that occurred in each of these three moments is incontrovertible, and the leaders whose victories are associated with them shaped all subsequent American politics.
Yet we mean to show how it is also the case that the losers in each of these major, order-determining contests decisively shaped the subsequent course of American politics. Each constitutional moment had its antimoment, and both fundamentally shaped politics thereafter. The Anti-Federalists, Andrew Johnson, and Barry Goldwater were all regarded by their contemporaries as the losers in the immediate contests in which they engaged. In the moment, there was no question about the fact of their loss or its significance for the politics at the time: there would be a new constitution; an agenda of reconstruction, not restoration, of the postwar South would proceed; and New Deal liberalism would remain the dominant political mode, its reach expanded. When aspects or features of a politics at odds with these outcomes subsequently became visible—a forceful resurgence of states’ rights after ratification of the Constitution, the emergence of Jim Crow after Reconstruction, or the success of “Reagan Republicanism,” for example—observers have typically misapprehended the significance and failed to recognize the earlier antimoment losers as sources of these seemingly anachronistic political developments.
These antimoments, while sometimes individually recognized, have yet to be sufficiently theorized or even studied as part of a larger phenomenon of American political development. Occasionally, one of these losers, in isolation, has been retrospectively identified as a herald of future political developments, even while their influence on that development is underappreciated. Not only do we uncover the ways in which the failure of each of our losers helped to facilitate the eventual success of the losers’ programs, but we also bring these episodes together to generate a new account of transformational change. More precisely, our cases are especially interesting because they supplement and complicate the well-known studies of transformation. Although we show that the constitutional moments that concern scholars were not as unequivocally transformative as has been claimed, the fact that our losers eventually won does not mean that the well-known winners eventually lost. The cases don’t “refute” Ackerman, Lowi, Burnham, and others. Rather, our cases make more complex the story of winning and losing that is traditionally told. If we are correct in our assessment of these self-transforming defeats, then much of the current understanding of the character of the American constitutional order, and the logic of its change—advanced or presumed by the “constitutional moments” perspective—needs to be modified. Rather than a narrative of liberal constitutional progress, we offer an interpretation of a braided developmental process in which liberal constitutional moments are entwined with constitutional antimoments that sustain and ingrain illiberalisms or ascriptive hierarchies.
The other synoptic perspective that interests us, and one from which the constitutional moments conversation was born, is the even more fundamental claim that America has a hegemonic liberal tradition that marks it as distinct from other advanced industrial democracies. The claims about the foundational nature of American liberalism, American exceptionalism, or the American creed are well known, and we need not belabor them here. From Tocqueville’s assessment of a nation “born equal” to Hartz’s assertion that a country lacking a feudal past had no socialist future, the view that the United States is indefatigably liberal—committed to the political ideals of individual liberty, equality, and the rule of law—is one of the most influential ideas in the study of American politics.3 Even those who resist the claim that there is no real conflict in America because of the liberal consensus nonetheless often subscribe to the liberal narrative as America’s aspirational or regulative ideal. In addition to the work of scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, who see conflict in American political history as a regularized effort to better realize liberal ideals, the story of America’s constitutional moments, outlined above, is inscribed with a narrative of liberal progress.4
So profound is the claim about American liberalism that most scholarship in American political science simply assumes this feature of the political order, even if the research effort undertaken is to explain time- and place-based departures from it. In recent years, however, the liberal tradition thesis has become the subject of much of the most interesting work in political science about American politics, work that seeks to better understand the nature of the polity and the deep sources of political conflict and change. In this genre, Rogers Smith’s “multiple traditions” thesis is seminal. In his pathbreaking work, Smith shows that alongside the American liberal tradition are persistent republican and “ascriptive” traditions that have been overlooked by scholars. These other traditions are of sufficient duration and consequence to require, in Smith’s view, a redefinition of American political identity and culture beyond liberalism alone.5 Other scholars have elaborated the challenge to the theory of American liberalism by identifying other political traditions, such as a persistent moralism, or by seeking to explain evidence of citizenship hierarchies despite the country’s de jure liberal commitments.6
Because the ascriptive tradition, which defends inequality and hierarchy, runs so counter to the dominant American liberal creed, how it has been sustained remains something of a puzzle and, of course, given the attention to racial and other animosities at the current moment, an especially aggravating puzzle. Our book begins to provide an answer. The ascriptive tradition is not just a bottom-up phenomenon sustained by fringe groups, state and local laws, and the customs and prejudices of once-powerful majorities. As our cases show, this tradition is also an inheritance sustained and facilitated by the actions of leaders at the national level. Because the cases of antimoments we examine here have not previously been studied together, nor has the significance of the failure-to-success leadership phenomenon we identify been previously revealed, our choice of cases allows us to show how the narrative of progressive liberal transformations across American history is only part of the story. We show that another part of the story of America is a regressive tradition of citizenship hierarchies that flourishes anew each time it is believed to have been vanquished, and that the currents of one antimoment loss feed and inform the subsequent moments. This is at the heart of our concept of braided constitutional development.
Offering correctives to these two synoptic views of American politics is the ultimate payoff of the three cases that form the core of our book, and we will return to them at greater length in chapter 5. Although we mean to intervene in these two debates and offer our own big picture of the character of American politics, the bulk of our book is devoted to depicting the three cases in sufficient detail that the many scholars engaged in these debates will have to take our three cases into account whether or not they agree with our interpretations of their significance.

The Three Antimoments

As should be clear by this point, our cases—those of the Anti-Federalists, Andrew Johnson, and Barry Goldwater—were chosen as occasions to rethink the significance of the most crucial junctures in American politics, those of the Founding, Reconstruction, and the New Deal. Extraordinary moments in political time govern our choice of these extraordinary cases. In each instance, we sought to identify the most robust challenge to the “constitutional moment” at hand. In the case of the Founding, it was the ratification battle and thus our focus is on the Anti-Federalists who waged that battle. As we explain in chapter 2 and as is well known by scholars of this era’s politics, ratification was by no means assured, and the rhetorical and strategic assault launched by the Anti-Federalists was formidable. That they were defeated makes the triumph of the Federalists’ constitution all the more profound, but our goal in this chapter is to show how the Anti-Federalist loss was nonetheless reconfigured into a powerfully lasting legacy for American politics.
The possibilities during the era of Reconstruction were, in a sense, without precedent in this country because of the uniqueness of the victory in civil war; it was a moment for the victorious North, with its total control of national government and military power, to redefine the terms of the still young Union. Andrew Johnson stood in the way, and his loss is thus celebrated as evidence of the nation’s forward march toward greater equality and liberty. Yet we show in chapter 3 how Johnson ultimately took advantage of the postwar disarray, drawing rhetorical resources from the Anti-Federalist legacy and supplying new strategies to ultimately thwart and undermine the Reconstruction agenda imposed against his will during his presidency. The Jim Crow challenge to the Reconstruction agenda cannot be understood without first grappling with Johnson’s legacy for the South and the nation.
Finally, we chose Barry Goldwater as the antimoment to the New Deal because the Democratic order was flourishing in the early 1960s, finding new articulation in the presidencies of John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson. Unlike other earlier, successful Republicans of the era (Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, or even Richard Nixon, for example), Goldwater’s candidacy represented the first real and significant challenge to the New Deal order, one that struck at the heart of its presumptions and its ideological claims. That the American electorate so soundly rebuffed Goldwater was taken to be evidence of the continued power of New Deal Democratic ideas. Chapter 4 shows how every dimension of his loss helped bring about Ronald Reagan’s and modern conservatism’s eventual success. Because Goldwater’s campaign supporters trafficked, sometimes recklessly, in the legacies of the earlier losses we describe—those of the Anti-Federalists and of Johnson—the subsequent success of modern conservatism brought with it features Goldwater endorsed as well as those that he, himself, would repudiate.
Beyond their significance as antimoments, our cases are interesting and useful for additional reasons. First, they invite consideration of the relationship between loss and success in very different contexts: constitution making, legislative and policy leadership, and presidential election campaigning. Each of the three cases has a different central actor: a social movement, a president, and a candidate, respectively. How victory was sought—and initially denied—is also different in each case: an antiratification contest waged, and lost, in state conventions and newspaper editorials; a postwar reunification battle waged between a president and Congress, with the former’s terms of settlement defeated and he politically routed; and a presidential electoral contest in which the challenger was decisively trounced. In all the cases, however, the central actors sought to persuade others of the superiority of their ideas and to promote related laws and policies. And in all three cases, these desired and significant ideas and policy outcomes were, after being initially decisively defeated, subsequently realized. That success was achieved in each, and yet that the relationship of loss to success occurred in such different contexts, is to us provocative and fascinating. And we believe the fact that the relationship transcends the particulars of each case attests to the power of the antimoment current in American politics.
If we are successful in prosecuting our argument about antimoment losses and their legacies, this may prompt inquiry into the large array of topics opened up by our new way of thinking about political loss. Others may seek to develop a general theory of the conditions under which losing is likely to lead to success in the long run. We do not do that here. Our cases were not chosen with that kind of project in mind—though we would be delighted if others are prompted...

Table of contents