The Genius of America (20 page)

But by the mid-1960s, groups of Americans began to push for a new level of rights, rights which reflected their particular group interests. Perhaps this was predictable. The government had proven itself responsive to the large demands of Americans for several decades, and there was no reason now to expect otherwise, or at least not to demand.

From the civil rights movement flowed movements to protect the rights of the poor, Hispanics, Native Americans, women, the elderly, the disabled and defendants (and it has continued through today with the addition of crime victims, unborn children, gays, lesbians and transsexuals). Fueling this rights explosion, at least in the early 1970s, were federal courts, which, with unclear authority, made a number of decisions, for example, on forced busing and affirmative action, that actively pitted whites and blacks against each other. These decisions also thrust the federal courts into the political vortex, leading many Americans to complain about activist courts and the Senate to become far more partisan in its confirmation process.

The framers of course expected factionalism, even tribalism. But their system envisioned factions fighting over interests that could be compromised through the process of government. Philosophically, the new language of rights demanded that the government fulfill obligations that could not be compromised.

An enormous crisis was developing. Roosevelt's addition of economic rights had become part of a national consensus, but the demand for something beyond that triggered a fierce backlash.

To many Americans, the focus of various groups on their own agendas and the preoccupations of many individuals with themselves seemed out of control, selfish, indulgent and threatening. Particularly unsettling were the claims of some groups that they were entitled to special treatment, affirmative action of one kind or another. The idea, for example, that one employee might be promoted over another on the basis of race alone simply seemed outrageous and un-American to a wide swath of Americans. The Constitutional Conscience spoke for equality of opportunity, not group-based advantages. Americans were fine with a “Social Gospel,” in which opportunities would be shared, but balked at anything much beyond that. “Americans were much less sympathetic when people demanded the ‘right' to social equality or special entitlements for groups. That was taking the Rights Revolution too far.” The American political culture, a reflection, of course, of the larger society, was going from the spirit of we to a culture of me (or, sometimes, us, as groups vied for advantage).

Politicians seized on these divides, these “wedge issues,” and became part of the problem. Nixon showed the way. He called on the “silent” or “forgotten” majority to support him. They were in his words “the non demonstrators,” of every color, age and nationality. “They work in American factories, they run American businesses. They serve in government; they provide most of the soldiers who die to keep it free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American dream. They give steel to the backbone of America.” And although this rhetoric served Nixon's southern strategy to pick up southern voters repelled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and also his regional strategy to isolate the Northeast, there was power in what he was saying for many Americans. The backlash was not simply a refusal to share rights with others; it was a reaction against what many Americans saw as a tearing apart of the American way, however they defined it. That is why the picture of a student desecrating an American flag resulted in such angry reactions. As the prize-winning historian James T. Patterson wrote: “The backlash represented considerably more than white racism, which polls suggested was less intense than in the past. It also affirmed the behaviors and the moral standards of traditional ways. It exposed a fragmentation of society and culture that seemed if anything to grow in the next thirty years.”

The point for our story is not which side of this divide you find yourself on. The point is that there was a deep divide. The framers had built a system to force antagonistic factions to the middle, where they would compromise to get action.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, this system had worked. The political consensus under which American government expanded from the election of President Roosevelt to the resignation of Richard Nixon created, even in its declining days, a sense that American government could successfully address any problem. But the essential ingredient is that there had to be a consensus on the problem and a willingness to compromise to win support for solutions. But by the time Jimmy Carter came to office, it was clear such consensus was out of reach, at least out of his reach. The expectation the framers had of “mutual concessions and sacrifices . . . mutual forbearance and conciliation” had been replaced by a nation of citizens unforgiving of a government that was not fulfilling their demands. As James Patterson put it, “Conditioned to expect progress, they [Americans] were impatient, and they resisted leaders who asked them to sacrifice.”

The leaders, in turn, looked for someone to blame (certainly not themselves). In the 1960s, the notion that government was the problem was heard mostly from the political fringes. “We wanted to create a situation in which . . . the federal government . . . would self-destruct,” said Jerry Rubin, a leader of one group of demonstrators at the Democratic convention in 1968.

But by the time of the Carter administration, the notion that something was wrong in the government could be heard from the White House itself. In 1979, President Carter complained that what he viewed as his “balanced” legislative agenda was being stymied.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

How much of this gridlock was the result of an unyielding Congress? How much was a president's inability to rally consensus on how to solve the nation's emerging energy crisis? And how much were these politicians unyielding because the public was demanding, unyielding and deeply divided?

Historians are still debating these questions. But it is clear the country wanted change. A new leader, Ronald Reagan, strong and articulate, would soon be brought to power by this discontent and division in the country. A lapsed New Dealer himself, he would try to rekindle a sense of common cause and a spirit, like Tom Paine, that it was morning in America again. About the gridlock in Washington, he would go one step further than Carter had, and place the blame squarely on the government itself.

7

GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE
SOLUTION, GOVERNMENT IS
THE PROBLEM

The separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches, whatever its merits in 1793, has become a structure that almost guarantees stalemates today.

—L
LOYD
C
UTLER
, W
HITE
H
OUSE COUNSEL
, 1980

B
Y THE TIME
Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, a serious rebellion was under way against the complicated system the framers had designed to manage America's democracy. Acts of rebellion could be found from left to right in the political spectrum, and in the highest reaches of society, including in the White House itself. Some acts of rebellion were highly intellectual. Some were fervently political. A few were just plain criminal. The rebels included a California opponent of the New Deal consensus, a Democratic White House counsel and a marine colonel who only later would emerge as a conservative spokesman. Their backgrounds were diverse. What they shared was a frustration that the system was blocking them from achieving what they believed was best for the country. This was happening, they concluded, because the system had fallen into the hands of “special interests” that pursued their own interests, not the country's best interests.

The framers worried about special interests, too. They called them factions. The suggestion that factions or individuals would confuse their own goals with the general interest of the country would hardly have surprised the framers. They designed the constitutional system precisely to absorb that kind of self-interested drive. What probably would have worried the framers is that all three of these rebels believed that the way to solve the problem of factions, and achieve their aims, was to abandon the constitutional system by going around it, dismantling it entirely or simply disobeying its decisions.

By the end of the 1970s, frustration with government was rampant. The government seemed better at producing strife than at finding solutions to the tangle of inflation, unemployment and social fragmentation that plagued the Carter administration. “Our political institutions do not match the scales of economic and social reality,” complained the liberal sociologist Daniel Bell. “The national state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems.”

This disillusionment bubbled over in many places. In 1978, a conservative activist named Howard Jarvis revived a tool from the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, known as initiative and referendum, and used it to go around the deliberations of the California legislature and restrict that state's ability to raise taxes. In 1980, the counsel to President Jimmy Carter, Lloyd Cutler, said directly that the system Madison and his colleagues had invented not quite two hundred years before was outmoded and should be replaced. And in 1984, the marine colonel Oliver North, sworn to uphold the Constitution, simply disobeyed the explicit orders of the Congress and ran a private little war from the White House.

For many Americans, Ronald Reagan came to embody the widespread discontent toward government. A “revolution” against big government came to bear his name. As he took office, Reagan sounded as if Tom Paine had returned to help craft his inaugural address with its call for simpler government resting directly on the people. “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan proclaimed. “Government is the problem.”

Reagan in many ways was like Paine. He was a great communicator of his idealism, a great optimist about the potential of Americans. He, like Paine, could speak simply and powerfully to and for the discontentment of Americans.

The attack on government had already been heard from the White House under Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter. Carter had described the country's divisions as “wounds” from the 1960s that were “still very deep. They have never healed.” In Carter's view, these divisions had frustrated his legislative efforts. Even with a Congress controlled by his own party, Carter had failed to build a consensus for needed energy and economic policy. This failure he blamed on the selfishness of members of Congress and the “self-indulgence” of the American people. The framers might have advised Carter to get over his shock at discovering the “sinfulness” of self-interest. But they would have agreed with his analysis of human nature, if perhaps not his naive hope that Americans could be lectured into being more virtuous.

Ronald Reagan, harking back to Paine, took the other course offered by American political history, embracing the ideas of 1776 rather than 1787. He shared Carter's belief that the government was paralyzed by special interests. But he expressed none of Carter's skepticism about the virtue of Americans. It was not the competing claims of self-interested Americans that paralyzed the government. It was the government itself. Get the government out of the way, and “we the people this breed called Americans . . . can and will resolve the problems that confront us.” Get government off their backs, Paine had said, and Americans would have a blank slate to write upon.

Reagan's optimistic message was well received. He legitimized the frustrations felt by millions of Americans, while restoring a sense of confidence. Perhaps his message to Americans that they were not at fault for the country's obvious fault lines was a needed part of that restoration. Reagan remains one of our most influential twentieth-century presidents. But as we look back, it is also easy to see how the Reagan era, and his message that government was the problem, accelerated the crumbling of our Constitutional Conscience that has become so apparent in the last few years.

Reagan coaxed the country out of what Carter had called its malaise. But he was not able to forge a new consensus to replace the one that had driven the country from FDR almost to Nixon. Indeed, one of Reagan's great strengths was his pragmatism. He held his beliefs strongly. But in the best American tradition, he valued progress more than ideological purity or coherence. He cut taxes a lot, then raised them a bit. He could not end most social programs, but then again after four decades of growth he did not add new ones either. Reagan worked with the Democrats. His friendship with that quintessential Democrat Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House, is often cited as the last hurrah of a bygone bipartisan era. As one historian wrote, “While fond of damning big government . . . he recognized that liberal interest groups had effective lobbies on the Hill, that major New Deal–Great Society social programs . . . were here to stay, and that rights consciousness had become a powerful political source.”

Reagan won victories. After four decades of New Deal liberalism, he revived conservatism as a plausible political alternative in national politics. But by the end of his presidency, the country remained politically divided. And across that divide the strife worsened. As the differences deepened, the confidence in the constitutional system designed to channel our political differences continued to erode. A
Time
magazine cover provocatively asked,
IS GOVERNMENT DEAD
? and followed with this unsettling observation: “After almost nine years of the Reagan Revolution, Americans may wonder whether the Government—from Congress to the White House, from the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget—can govern at all anymore.”