The American Political Pattern

Stability and Change, 1932-2016

Byron E. Shafer

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780700623273
  9780700623266
• eBook ISBN:
  9780700623280
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politicians are polarized. Public opinion is volatile. Government is gridlocked. Or so journalists and pundits constantly report. But where are we, really, in modern American politics, and how did we get there? Those are the questions that Byron E. Shafer aims to answer in The American Political Pattern. Looking at the state of American politics at diverse points over the past eighty years, the book draws a picture, broad in scope yet precise in detail, of our political system in the modern era. It is a picture of stretches of political stability, but also, even more, of political change, one that goes a long way toward explaining how shifting factors alter the content of public policy and the character of American politicking.

Shafer divides the modern world into four distinct periods: the High New Deal (1932–1938), the Late New Deal (1939–1968), the Era of Divided Government (1969–1992), and the Era of Partisan Volatility (1993–2016). Each period is characterized by a different arrangement of the same key factors: party balance, ideological polarization, issue conflict, and the policy-making process that goes with them.

The American Political Pattern shows how these factors are in turn shaped by permanent aspects of the US Constitution, most especially the separation of powers and federalism, while their alignment is simultaneously influenced by the external demands for governmental action that arise in each period, including those derived from economic currents, major wars, and social movements. Analyzing these periods, Shafer sets the terms for understanding the structure and dynamics of politics in our own turbulent time. Placing the current political world in its historical and evolutionary framework, while illuminating major influences on American politics over time, his book explains where this modern world came from, why it endures, and how it might change yet again.

1 | Birth Pangs of the Modern World

The Political Structure of the High New Deal Era, 1932–1938

Party balance: a tectonic shift from a large and established Republican majority to an even larger Democratic advantage; ideological polarization: minimally polarized electoral politics but a hugely polarizing institutional conflict between presidency and Court; substantive conflict: a world centered on issues of economic welfare, at every point and in every institution; policy-making process: essentially presidential, to an unprecedented degree.

The modern world of American politics—the long period from 1932 to the present—began with one of the biggest shifts of party balance in all of American history. In what became recognized as the High New Deal Era, a substantial, reliable, and recurrent Republican majority that had been in place for thirty-plus years gave way to a huge Democratic majority, one that would be in place for thirty-plus years thereafter. No one in its time could have been sure that this was a lasting change in public attachments, rather than a simple vote of no confidence in the party that had been in power when the Great Depression hit—though Democrats did hope and Republicans did fear. Eighty years later, while there are still interpretive issues that demand attention, the ultimate scope of this particular shift in party balance seems inescapable.¹

The presidential election of 1928 had appeared to confirm an ongoing, reliable, and substantial Republican majority for the nation as a whole. First registered in its continuing form at the presidential election of 1896, this majority had been rattled by internal divisions in the years immediately before the First World War, before settling back in a dominating—indeed, a blanketing—fashion as the war drew to a close. The presidential election of 1932 then represented the greatest shift in partisan outcomes at the national level since the modern party system, Democrats versus Republicans, had been stabilized in the aftermath of the Civil War. What could not have been known in its time was whether this shift should be regarded as deep-seated and potentially lasting or as idiosyncratic to particular personalities, to a single contest, or, especially, to dramatic events of the day.

Republicans would continue to make some version of the idiosyncrasy argument for a very long time. With hindsight, however, analysts have overwhelmingly agreed on a huge change of partisan balance, Republican to Democratic. Scholars did continue to argue about its dynamics, pitting those who emphasized actual shifts in party attachment against those who favored differential mobilization of those previously disengaged from the major parties.² Of late, scholars have also argued about when this new and sharply different party balance should be proclaimed, pitting those who regarded the 1932 election as pivotal against those who argued for an extended period in which the products of this election—new partisan incumbents but especially new policy programs—were gradually institutionalized.³

Abstractly, it is not hard to think of policy responses to the partisan outcome of the 1932 election that might not have led to a new party balance for the nation as a whole. Because these remain conditions contrary to fact, it is not obvious that an ambitious incoming administration would not have self-corrected in response to programs that were failing to institutionalize its new partisan potential. Nevertheless, in campaigning to become the initial vehicle for this change, Franklin Roosevelt had sometimes sounded as if he might try to “out-Hoover” incumbent president Herbert Hoover by raising taxes, cutting spending, and balancing the budget. Had Roosevelt actually hewed to that line—he did take some early actions consistent with it—the 1932 vote might have stood as a simple vote of no confidence, to be followed by another such vote in response to essentially the same Hooverite program.

Alternatively, Roosevelt might in principle have settled on an aggressive program whose policies proved more or less clearly and in short order not to work. To accomplish this, the president would presumably have had to dilute those aspects of the New Deal that are most often saluted by economists after the fact: rescuing the banking system, inflating the currency, and, in a development actively opposed by Franklin Roosevelt, settling substantial cash bonuses on millions of veterans. In their place, he would have had to elaborate those aspects of the program that have always drawn a more skeptical professional judgment, perhaps by further augmenting the National Recovery Administration and its aspiringly comprehensive regulatory codes, as some critics within his own party certainly preferred.⁴

Once more, even under these alternatively extreme conditions, ambition coupled with duty might well have caused the Roosevelt administration to self-correct, so that the electoral upheaval of 1932 still became a new and lasting party balance. Either way, the remainder of the High New Deal Era was to confirm, less grandly but more explicitly and directly, that the general public was fully capable of adjusting its voting behavior to take account of policy outcomes and to pass judgment on them. Thus the presidential election of 1936 would confirm that the general public could pass a solid positive judgment on the policy products of the overall New Deal, just as the midterm election of 1938 would confirm that this public could pass equally negative judgments when it felt that the program was not producing.

Accordingly, despite alternative abstract possibilities and despite actual concrete disputes among professional experts about the precise dynamics that made the election of 1932 pivotal in terms of party balance in the United States, most of the disputants, both active partisans and professional analysts, appear prepared to accept three overall summary judgments about the arrival of a new balance in American society after 1932:

• While scholars might continue to debate the precise point at which a new majority could be said to have been institutionalized, that is, converted into a majority of Americans who would reliably call themselves Democrats rather than Republicans, it would be hard to find any voices ready to argue that the Republicans were as strong in the thirty years after 1932 as they had been in the thirty years before, and/or that the Democrats remained as weak. A serious party rebalancing did follow in the wake of the 1932 presidential election.
• At the same time, it was events of the day rather than previously established party programs that propelled this huge partisan change. John W. Davis had offered a Democratic policy program in the presidential campaign of 1924, Alfred E. Smith had offered another in the campaign of 1928, and Franklin D. Roosevelt offered a third, however ambiguous, in the presidential campaign of 1932. Yet it would be hard to find a serious voice wanting to argue that the promised programs of Davis, of Smith, of Roosevelt, or of all three together, were what propelled this underlying partisan change, rather than public demands for a policy response to the Great Depression.
• Finally, most analysts, opponents as well as supporters of the resulting programmatic response, are prepared to accept that it was indeed the collection of policies gathered as Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal for the American people” that ultimately confirmed a new partisan majority in the nation as a whole. That program reached broadly across American society and deeply within it. Many of its key planks—unemployment insurance, a public retirement system—remain core elements of American public policy eighty years later.

On the other hand, the overall composition of that program and the specifics of its individual pieces were still powerfully shaped by the structure of American politics in the High New Deal Era, especially by its degree of ideological polarization, by the substantive content of its legislative conflicts, and by the nature of the policy-making process that resulted.⁵ Initially, then, it is necessary to ask: How was this new party balance related to ideological polarization? Or, said the other way around: What level of ideological polarization infused this new party balance, and just how did it do so? Yet more than in any successor period, it is necessary to go on and ask whether during the High New Deal Era these partisan attachments captured the operative ideological polarization of its time. And there, uniquely to the High New Deal, the answer was no.

Why were the appropriate answers not as straightforward as they might abstractly seem in this opening era of modern American politics? Partly, this was because the separation of powers as a grand institutional framework always provides several different places where ideological polarization can be registered. Thus the presidency, Congress, and, in this case especially, the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: An American Political Pattern?
• 1. Birth Pangs of the Modern World: The Political Structure of the High New Deal Era, 1932–1938
• 2. The Long Arm of the New Deal: The Political Structure of the Late New Deal Era, 1939–1968
• 3. The Rise of Participatory Politics: The Political Structure of an Era of Divided Government, 1969–1992
• 4. A Political Structure for the Modern World: The Era of Partisan Volatility, 1993–2016
• Conclusion: Stability and Change in American Politics, 1932–2016
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover