A
Hollowed-Out Keynesian Warfare State:
American Democracy Today and Historically
Loren Goldner
Certain historians (notably W.J. Cash in his 1941 classic The Mind of the
South) have defined America as a Herrenvolk (master race) democracy, a term
which I think was quite apt for the 350 years of American history up to the
1960's/1970's: a (bourgeois) democracy for whites. Other writers have drawn
parallels with similar phenomena in settler states such as Northern Ireland,
Israel and South Africa (prior to the end of apartheid). It is not without
interest that all three of these examples, like the U.S. , have their ideological
origins in Old Testament myths of the "chosen people". Even today, when white
supremacy in the U.S. has been seriously challenged and weakened (but hardly
eradicated), race remains a fault line of American politics. The race question
has been a major dimension of every serious advance of bourgeois democracy
in U.S. history (the Civil War of the 1860's, the movements of the 1960's).
Social confrontation in the U.S. involving only whites (including militant
mass strikes) are often ultimately a family quarrel; when whites unite with
blacks on a true basis of equality (as in the early Populist movement in
the late 1880's, the IWW organizing in the South before World War I, or some
incidents of the 1960's) the most violent repression is brought to bear against
them.
A fundamental dynamic in
American history involves the triad of race, imperial expansion, and class.
In 1820 Madison already said "Our country is menaced by the red man on our
borders and the black slave within". Class enters the picture with the Democratic
Party, the historical party of the white worker, The Democrats have twice
dominated American politics by channeling populist revolt: in the Jacksonian
period (1828 to the 1850's) and with the Roosevelt coalition (1933-1968).
Jacksonian democracy was ruined by the controversy over the Mexican-American
War (1846), which led directly to a confrontation over slavery; the Roosevelt
coalition was ruined by the war in Vietnam (1961-1975) and the radicalization
of the black liberation movement of the 1960's. Insofar as this party of
white supremacy and expansion has been the party of the American worker,
class politics have never successfully separated from the questions of race
and imperial expansion.
This role of race
in shaping American democracy is intimately linked to a second central aspect:
that of de-centralization. From independence (1783) to the constitution (1787)
to the Civil War (1860-1865), America struggled to constitute a central (Federal)
state; the individual states were politically more important than the central
government; Sombart later said that "in continental Europe, the state created
civil society; in America civil society created a state". The tension between
centralism and decentralist local power was fought out in the constitutional
period between Federalists (Hamilton) and Anti-Federalists (Madison, Jefferson)
and has characterized American history ever since. ("Federalism" in the U.S.
context means centralism, it is the Anti-Federalists who are for local power.)
The main support for the Anti-Federalist position came from the slave-holding
states of the South; notoriously, a very significant number of early American
presidents, Cabinet members and military figures came from Virginia and
other southern states. The aim of the de-centralists, as stated by Madison,
was to create a system whereby a dissident majority would have great difficulty
seizing control of the state, an aim which has been successfully realized
to this day.
(Interestingly, this
American dynamic was recognized long ago by Rosa Luxemburg: "the Northern
states acted, representing the modern, big-capital development, machine industry,
personal freedom and equality before the law, the true corollaries of the
system of hired labor, bourgeois democracy and bourgeois progress. On the
other hand, the banner of separatism, federation, and particularism, the
banner of each hamlet's 'independence' and 'right of self-determination'
was raised by the plantation owners of the South" (from "The National Question
and Autonomy", in The National Question, New York 1976)
At the same time America
from the Revolution to the Civil War (and in fact well beyond) was the most
democratic society in the world, and not merely in the narrow political sense.
America achieved universal male suffrage (for whites) in 1828 and had levels
of real local political involvement greater than anything that existed in
Europe until the emergence of the modern workers' movements in England, France,
Germany, etc. It should not be forgotten that the U.S. had some of the first
trade unions in the world (1820's) and the first workingman's political
party (1828), the latter being quickly absorbed by the Democrats.
1828 thus marked the beginning of mass party politics in its modern form,
with thecoming to power of Jacksonian
democracy, a populist revolt against previous elite control by New England
capitalists and Virginia slaveholders. Jacksonian democracy was an important
anticipation of the Rooseveltian New Deal in creating a coalition of Northern
workers, Western farmers and Southern poor whites, Jackson himself was responsible
for Indian removal (the famous "Trail of Tears" of the Cherokees) and was
pro-slavery; he thus crystallized the ongoing link between the mainstream
Northern workers' movement, westward expansionism and political rapprochement
with white supremacy in the South that has crippled the American workers'
movement ever since, first of all by its political containment in the Democratic
Party. On the other hand, because of the de-centralization of power in the
states, mass party politics did involve a high degree of popular (albeit
distorted) participation, as in the ethnic (e.g. Irish) political machines
that arose in Northern cities beginning in the 1830's.
Europeans looking at America
are often puzzled by the historical absence of mass working-class political
parties (i.e. Socialists, Communists). It must be thus underscored that from
the 1840's to the 1870's America was torn apart by the question of slavery,
that is by the race question, and that in America the race and class question
are inseparably intertwined. The Civil War was as much a political baptism
for American workers as the Paris Commune was for French workers or Bismarck's
anti-Socialist laws for German workers. (This included the notorious New
York anti-draft riots of 1863 in which Irish workers rioted and burned down
a black orphanage.) Further, over the whole arc of the development of mass
production (1870's-1930's) , more violence was used against American workers
historically than against any European working class. The key to American
Herrenvolk democracy is that white workers tend to think of themselves as
whites first and workers second. A number of contradictory phenomena illustrate
this. In 1848, during the European revolutions, the White House was lit up
at night to celebrate the advance of democracy against decadent monarchy.
(Unlike today, the U.S. was then still an "outsider" in world politics with
interests that went against the grain of the existing international balance
of power, dominated by Britain). At the same time, it was exactly in 1848
that the Democratic Party was torn apart by the question of slavery. A true
"class against class" confrontation emerged in the U.S. only with the 1877
railway strikes (which were denounced as an "American Paris Commune" by the
bourgeois press), while mass workers' movements (unions, political parties)
were growing in England, France and Germany. Contrary to much received opinion,
this difference does not point to the political immaturity of the U.S., but
rather to the fact that American Herrenvolk democracy underwent crises that
looked very different from the struggle for bourgeois democracy in Europe,
a struggle in which "socialist" and later "communist" parties played no small
role.
It was thus the U.S. Civil
War which completed the building of the American nation state, by eliminating
the struggle for control of the Federal government between the Southern slaveholders
and the Northern capitalists. Slavery had to be abolished to "save the Union",
the main slogan of the war. It should not be forgotten that in 1861 Abraham
Lincoln effectively suspended the constitution and ruled by presidential
decree in a state of emergency. From the Civil War onward the balance of
power began to shift from the states to the Federal government. It was also
during and after the Civil War that the large modern corporation began to
emerge from the smaller-scale capitalism prevalent earlier. The "great barbecue"
of the "robber barons" that brought forth the familiar capitalist families
such as the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Morgans transformed the U.S. in
the 1870's and 1880's into a recognizably modern capitalist society. At the
same time, in 1877, the withdrawal of Northern troops from the occupied South
(simultaneous with the first nationwide strike wave) set the stage for the
restoration of the old slaveholder elite in more appropriate capitalist form,
at the top of a new agrarian economy where slavery was replaced by sharecropping,
Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror. This new South re-entered the
American political equation as, once again, one part of the Democratic Party
triad of poor Southern whites, Northern political machines and Western farmers.
The Democrats for 60 years were basically exiled from national power, a coalition
of parochial interests.
The Republican Party,
which had led the eradication of slavery, dominated American politics from
1860 to 1932, that is into the great period of capital concentration, the
rise of the modern corporation, the first attempts at capitalist regulation,
the creation of a central bank (1907), and the first attempts at a corporatist
integration of part of the working class through unions (which only came
to fruition in the 1930's). The period 1877-1934 was the high tide of American
working-class radicalism, and of violence against the working class by the
capitalists. But once again, it is interesting and important to point out
that most of this violence was local (state, municipal) and even private
(Pinkertons), so that---as Madison had hoped---the Federal government rarely
provided a direct political target for a national movement from below.
It is also important that
awareness of the relationship between race and class receded after 1877.
Most of the famous incidents of American labor history took place in the
years 1877-1934. In 1900 90% of American blacks were still in the five deep
South states. They entered the Northern proletariat through World War I, World
War II and the postwar migration up to the 1960's, prompted by the rapid
mechanization of Southern agriculture.
The social crisis of the
1890's has been largely forgotten because of the crises of the 1930's and
1960's, but it actually seemed to both workers and capitalists to pose more
of a threat to the social order than either of the later ones. Economic depression,
agrarian crisis, the rise of the Populist movement, corporate and banking
scandal, and labor radicalism (such as in the 1892-1894 railroad and steel
strikes) brought to the fore the statist "Progressive" reformers who laid
the foundation for the New Deal state which still, in spite of post-1970's
neo-liberalism, still shapes the existing American state. The role of the
Progressive reformers (and there was nothing "progressive" about them) is
the key to understanding what happened to bourgeois democracy in America.
In the 1890's when they began, American participation in elections was still
above 90% (having fallen to below 50% today), and the grassroots level of
politics still retained much vitality. The Progressives were technocrats
and top-down reformers par excellence, and their more or less conscious objective
was to transform politics into management by experts. It is often little remarked
to what extent Bismarck's Germany was a model for the reform of U.S. politics
and society in this period, in areas ranging from welfare state measures
to corporate regulation to state sponsorship of research and development
to reorganization of universities to central banking to labor legislation.
The Progressives used their journalistic exposes of scandal and corruption
to attack grassroots power in the interests of top-down technocratic power.
They exposed housing conditions
in big cities to ruin small slumlords so that large real estate interests
could take over urban housing. They exposed the local corruption of Democratic
party political machines dominated by ethnic groups to make power more faceless
and remote. They exposed the corporate excesses of the "robber barons" and
big trusts to put in place regulation of industry and banking by Federal
experts. A figure such as Mark Hanna, Ohio capitalist and later Senator,
argued from the 1880's onward for tolerance for industrial unions as the
alternative to social revolution. After the 1913 Ludlow massacre, the Rockefellers
were also convinced that violent repression of American labor had to be tempered
with more intelligent management. The most successful Progressive politician
was Woodrow Wilson, an unabashed white supremacist.
It was World War I which
gave the new ideas their best opportunity; it was the effective beginning
of the "American century"Everyone is familiar with the massive repression
against the IWW and other opponents of the war in 1917-1918; less noticed
is the great experiment (repeated as well in Britain, France and Germany)
in state management of the economy and participation of unions in government
labor boards. World War I forced capitalists everywhere to recognize that
they could use "planning" in their own interests.
Along with this, in the U.S.
case, was the emergence as an imperialist world power, with New York as a
world financial center and huge British, French and German debts to the U.S.
World War I ended with the
"Red Year" of strikes in 1919, but it should not be forgotten that 1919 was
also the year of some of the biggest race riots in U.S. history.
A similar convergence occurred
during World War II in Detroit where auto workers wildcatted against the
no-strike pledge but were also involved in major race riots taking place
at the same time. (Once again, the triad of race, class and imperial expansion.)
Nevertheless it was the historical
moment of the American internationalist faction of capital, which for decades
had been preparing to replace the British empire as the pre-eminent world
power. (This is the group which is still concentrated in the Council on Foreign
Relations and which in the 1970's spawned the infamous Trilateral Commission
which came to power with Carter in 1976.) These people came from both finance
and high-tech export industries, and it is remarkable to see how far-sighted
they were both globally and domestically. From finance came Owen Young, who
was deeply involved in framing the Versailles Treaty and who organized the
financing of German recovery after World War I, up to the 1929 Young Plan;
from industry came Young's close associate General Electric executive Gerard
Swope, who worked closely with Young and who was himself deeply involved
in German politics through G.E."s German counter-part AEG Telefunken. (Swope
was also dazzled by his contacts with the German corporatist visionary and
businessman Walter Rathenau, another theoretician of labor-capital harmony.)
These figures are especially worthy of mention because they were, during
the reactionary 1920's, outspokenly in favor of industrial unions, a position
resulting in abuse and red-baiting from most other major capitalists. They
are also worthy of mention because Swope went on to draft the Swope Plan
for recovery from the 1929 depression, much of which was incorporated into
Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (1935) and the Wagner Act, which legally
opened the way for industrial unionism. During World War II, the CIO repaid
these sponsors amply with the enforcement of the no-strike pledge.
It is here possible to bring
together the strands of the above analysis. Roosevelt's coalition, like Jackson's
before him, united Northern labor, Western farmers and Southern whites (the
South was 100% Democratic from the end of the Civil War to the civil rights
movement of the 1960's; the Republicans were the "nigger party" of slave emancipation).
The New Deal completed the shift of power from the states to the Federal
government that had begun in earnest with the Civil War, and accelerated
with the Progressives, but its reforms were designed to in no way interfere
with the Jim Crow Southern Democratic planter oligarchy.
Most New Deal legislation
was carefully written to exclude Southern states from its impact, so that
the "welfare state" elements, along with the toleration of industrial unionism,
were in fact a regional reformism. This set the stage for the crisis of the
1960's, where the black movement, radicalized by the Vietnam War, destroyed
the Democratic national coalition, just as the anti-slavery movement, taking
off in the 1840's and radicalized by the Mexican-American war, had destroyed
the Jacksonian coalition. The creation of the statist apparatus of American
world empire, including the full apparatus of normalized labor relations,
prepared the U.S. to pick up the pieces of the coming Second World War. At
the same time, the trends away from grassroots political participation continued
uninterruptedly, through the full bureaucratization of the political parties
(particularly the Democrats) and of the unions. The forces which had made
possible the IWW were by 1937 supplanted by the CIO, much more successful
in organizing industrial workers in the North but also junior partners in
the state and in the nascent American world empire.
One might characterize
the U.S. at the height of its world power in 1945 as a "liberal democratic
welfare state" (while recalling that one pillar of the ruling coalition was
the Dixiecrat Jim Crow South, to which none of those adjectives applied).
This was, at any rate, the official ideology. It must also be recalled that
from 1947 to 1955 this liberal democracy used McCarthyism to cripple the
CIO and push the remaining element of labor radicalism that had helped build
the CIO to the margins. It also became the bulwalk of the international status
quo, supporting anti-communist dictatorships through the Third World.
Two currents, not
unrelated to each other, ran counter to this status quo. The first was the
black civil rights movement, which was growing throughout the war years and
thereafter with the de-segregation of the U.S. armed forces (1948), the Supreme
Court ruling on school segregation (1954), the intervention of the U.S. Army
to support school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas; the sit-in movement
after 1960 and the civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965 which effectively ended
legal Jim Crow. It should not be forgotten that this movement was always
supported by part of the establishment, first for foreign policy ends (the
ideological competition with the Soviet Union in the Cold War), and secondly
by a faction of Southern capital itself which realized that the automation
of Southern agriculture and the decline of the black rural Southern economy
needed to sweep away Jim Crow to create a more up-to-date urban consumer
society. These forces basically ended the segregated South which had existed
since 1877. Lyndon Johnson himself recognized that Democratic Party support
for black civil rights would give the South to the Republicans for a generation,
and the white population of the South has been Republican ever since. This
by itself was an earthquake in American politics, because it meant the end
of the Roosevelt coalition.
The second current was the
wildcat movement in industry which evolved from 1955 to 1973. (CLR James
has best captured its importance in his 1958 book Facing Reality.) It was
the most important symptom of the underlying vulnerability of the "Fordist
deal" in U.S. industry. By the 1960's the wildcat current increasingly converged
with the black movement in that hundreds of thousands of black workers were
employed on Northern assembly lines. Its finest hour was in 1969 with the
League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroit, challenging the racist
practices of the UAW in the auto plants.
The arrangement which
had taken shape from the 1890's until 1945, and which ruled into the 1970's,
unraveled. To date, nothing has replaced it, because neither America's international
position or its domestic economy have room for any new "inclusive" settlement.
Instead, there has been 30 years of stasis, drift, and "hollowing out", but
the Rooseveltian state, however weakened and however covered by a new ideology,
is still in place.
With the onset of
the world economic crisis in 1973, an epoch ended. It had already politically
ended in 1968 when the white South voted for the Republican Nixon, but socially
and economically the "Keynesian" "Fordist" model lasted into the 1970's,
not least in Nixon's own policy. The true neo-liberal counter-offensive
against the state built by the Progressives and the New Deal really took
shape only in the late 1970's, symbolized ultimately by the resumption of
the Cold War after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and by the triumph
of Ronald Reagan. In 1945, the force of the new arrangement was U.S. world
hegemony and the beginning of a new prosperity at home; in 1980, the hard
right made the connection between the failure of "New Deal" foreign policy
and domestic economic stagnation.
In the neo-liberal
counter-offensive, it was the "Madisonian" de-centralist ideology which returned
in force after 50 years in the wilderness. Once again, it often reappeared
in connection with the race question in a series of local initiatives against
school busing to promote integration, against affirmative action, around
prison construction (the U.S. now has 1% of its population in prison and
2% either on parole or awaiting trial), The very mediocre American welfare
state (mediocre in international comparison) is dismantled and transformed
into a workfare state with a barely concealed racist undercurrent, even though
a majority of welfare recipients are in fact white. The whole thrust of contemporary
ideology---one also largely accepted by the Democratic Party---(Clinton was
the most right-wing Democratic president since the 1920's)---is to blame
the chaos of the 1960's stemming from the Vietnam War and the black movement
on the "permissive" ideology of New Deal liberalism. The crisis of the education
system is blamed on "Washington bureaucrats" and the solution is more and
more de-centralized power to schools, making it possible for wealthy communities
to have high-quality public schools and for poor communities to have only
social parking lots. De-centralization and localism in education made it possible
for the state of Kansas to declare the teaching of Darwin illegal. On the
level of comedy, the ideology of de-regulation resulted in the series of
huge corporate bankruptcies and scandals of the past three years, massive
accounting fraud, and the defrauding of investors in the stock market. The
more sophisticated conservatives know that capitalism without regulation
tends to destroy itself.
Meanwhile, the hollowing
out of the political system continues. The Democratic Party today is a party
of corporate lawyers. Forty years ago, it was still rooted in local urban
political machines and in the unions. A similar gap has arisen between the
business elite that controls the Republican Party and the small-town lower-middle
class constituency that supports the Republican "cultural agenda" of a backlash
against "permissiveness", as on the abortion issue, or the separation of
church and state. The entire official political system is mobilized with
a "hard" Hobbesian edge against the "social": the program is to close factories,
close schools, close hospitals, build prisons.
Since September 11,
all of the hollowing out processes have only accelerated. The Bush administration
has been able to push through a huge arms build-up, a massive budget deficit
(the Democrats now attack him in the name of a balanced budget!), serious
rollback of the constitution in the Homeland Security Act, and a massive
tax cut for the rich because there is no official opposition.
(From the Break Their Haughty
Power web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner)