My father is 87 years old and living with my mother in an assisted living community. I haven’t seen either of them since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we have plans to meet up this weekend. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying reading chapters of my father’s autobiography which he’s been sending along at a steady clip. There are a lot of amusing anecdotes and plenty of history I did not know. So far, he’s only covered the period between his childhood in Iowa City, Iowa as the son of an art professor, and the beginning of his college years at Oberlin. If fortune smiles on him, he’ll eventually get to what I call his “Mad Men” period.
My father is about as different from that cast as it is possible to be (or, at least, that’s what he wants my mother to believe) but he did work at the advertising agency depicted on the show in the relevant time period. While I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t sexually harassing the secretaries and lunching at whorehouses, he was still a part of that culture, and that means that a lot of my experience in life owes something to the general outlook of successful professional white men at the peak of their postwar power and privilege.
If you’re familiar with Mad Men, you know it highlights a lot of retrograde attitudes, which isn’t surprising since it begins in the early 1960’s before the war went bad, before women’s lib, before gay rights, and before the Civil Rights Era had run its course. But there was also a general acceptance of the political order, which was a liberal order at the time. The 89th Congress, which sat between 1965 and 1967, began with a 295-140 Democratic majority in the House and a 68-32 Democratic majority in the Senate. As you might expect, the upper echelon at Manhattan advertising agencies included plenty of country club Republicans who weren’t sold on John F. Kennedy or certainly the boorish Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson. On the whole, though, these were Kennedy men. The New Deal had not been bad for business, and it therefore had not been bad for the advertising industry. For them, the system was working.
They most definitely looked askance at the conservative takeover of the GOP that occurred at the Cow Palace in San Francisco during the 1964 Republican National Convention.
Goldwater’s tone reflected the tenor of this ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912, as entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents. In an era in which a national consensus seemed to have coalesced around advancing civil rights, containing Communism and expanding government, the moderates believed they had to win to preserve the Republican Party. The conservatives—who wanted to contain the role of the federal government and roll back Communism—believed they were saving not just the party but Western civilization.
In the years since the 1964 election, the conservatives have dominated not only the Republican Party but, since 1981 at least, our national political conversation. They flipped the South from solid Blue to solid Red, built their own media empire, crushed unions, seeded the courts with true believers, and elected a string of corrupt and mostly ignorant presidents who have gutted the brains of our government.
This happened because business leaders who remained opposed to the “national consensus” that had emerged by 1964 discovered that the GOP did not have to remain a permanent minority. By making common cause with conservative Christians and diehard racists, they could win the presidency and eventually get durable majorities in Congress.
By the mid-1980’s, the business culture in New York City was more supportive of Ronald Reagan than old New Dealers like Walter Mondale. Yet, they were also comfortable with Bill Clinton, for the most part, since he was better aligned with their culture than the conservative opposition led by people like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.
It was only when a conservative president was matched with a conservative Congress after the contested 2000 election that the pendulum started to swing back in a progressive direction. Barack Obama easily carried the affluent suburbs around the city where most upper management types live.
This has now gone national, as white, well-educated professionals of all types have abandoned the GOP. It didn’t cost the party the presidency in 2016 because the losses were made up among white working class folks who had previously been heavily unionized and incredibly hostile to the party of management. This worked out to a degree for the finance types, but it really represented a loss of control.
To see what I mean, consider the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The 2020 election cycle is on pace to be the most expensive in the nation’s history. But there’s one major political spender that’s been largely missing in action: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
As the main advocacy arm for corporate America, the Chamber traditionally has few competitors when it comes to wielding power in the nation’s capital…And when it comes to the Hill, few entities have shown a better ability to shape legislation, in part because of the millions of dollars that the Chamber is willing to spend in order to do so.
…But for reasons that have baffled and intrigued seasoned operatives, the group has stopped writing those checks. So far, for the 2020 elections, the Chamber has reported just $1.6 million in political spending to the Federal Election Commission. By this point in 2016, it had spent more than $16 million. For context, it’s spent less this cycle than super PACs backing the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. So far this cycle, the Chamber is just the 43rd largest independent spender, according to CRP data.
They’ll get more involved as things go along. They still see the value in having a Republican majority in the Senate.
“We recognize that the Senate is the backstop,” said Scott Reed, the chief strategist for the United States Chamber of Commerce, calling it the group’s “top priority” in 2020.
With some glaring exceptions, the Senate Republicans still behave like normal pro-business conservatives, and they haven’t obliged some of President Trump’s more heterodox positions. But the Senate is the last place remaining where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still feels like its interests take precedence over the fire-breathing Tea Party lunacy that has overtaken their party. They’re actually more comfortable with the Democrats, provided that the Sanders/Warren faction doesn’t become too ascendant and the Occupy protestors remain at bay.
It’s not just that the Republican Party no longer reliably serves finance. Even if they did remain useful, they’re on the verge of losing Texas as the anchor of the right. The alliance with fundamentalists and racists was always a means to an end, and if that end can no longer be achieved within the alliance, then it just makes more sense to lobby within a new national consensus than to throw rocks from the outside.
There will always be a diehard core of financial elites who are ready to spend billions on politics to preserve and increase their status. But without a party to spend that money on, their influence wanes and will eventually go back to 1964 levels.
Now one of two things will happen. Either a new restorative national consensus is built and contained with a large, if unwieldy, Democratic coalition, or the dam breaks as the old structure built by postwar white men is swept away by something new and unrecognizable.
My money is on the latter scenario, but Biden looks to be a possible bridge who can ease the transition and avoid a potent backlash that prevents a new consensus from forming. To many, this will look like what it is…someone holding up the stream of progress. To others, it will also look like what it is…a responsible effort to control chaos so that everything isn’t wiped out in a deluge.
Either way, the more than half-century alliance between cultural conservatives and business elites is coming to end. I hope the last chapter in my father’s autobiography will tell me how it turned out.
Great analysis, Martin. Exactly why this is my go-to blog. It helps me to build a nuanced understanding of the political climate. Here and there I’ve disagreed with you but not often and typically around the edges.
My dad is 87 and we’re not far apart in age. I’m a few years older, having been born in 1963. I have vivid memories from as early as 3 and so have seen an enormous swath of change. My parents were working class and had never attended college, so I wasn’t exposed to sophisticated ideas or perspectives. I certainly didn’t grow up in a swanky place like Princeton. But I got a wonderful inside look at working class culture. There are aspects of that culture that I love. The way people stick together most of all. The loyalty between my dad and his friends was immense. They would have done anything for one another. In that world, one sees men who love other men, though they’d never conceptualize it that way or give voice to it in any way, shape or form. They’d simply do anything for one another. The women weren’t generous in quite the same way but they would care for each other’s children. I spent a lot of time with another family and thought of the grownups as a second set of parents, the kids as almost-siblings.
I remember a world in which men were in charge and women were treated a lot like children. My dad had a lock on the phone so my mom couldn’t run up long distance phone charges. None of my parents’ friends — male or female — seemed to think he was a jerk. Nor did my mom. She would have admitted that, but for that lock, she would have not been able to resist and would have incurred charges they couldn’t afford. Both my parents were incredibly homophobic. My father made racist comments and was clear that he didn’t want black people in our neighborhood.
Years later, my mom was among the first to go back to school and create a career. When I was 7 she went to community college. Two years later, Associates Degree in hand, she became a computer programmer and gave me, her 9 year old son, a key to the house. I came home and took care of myself. I was the one of the first latchkey kids (before there was a word for it).
My mom was brilliant. She didn’t know it. None of us did. But she was and she did really well. In time she was making a lot more money than my dad. She pulled our family into the middle class and ultimately quite a ways toward upper-middle class status. By the time I was in high school, they weren’t rich but they also weren’t borrowing to pay the utilities. We sometimes want to restaurants and it was no big deal to give me a few dollars to grab some slices of pizza for dinner.
I worked hard to get into an elite university. Got enough financial aid and took out loans. Then went off track but some years later, two children in tow, they were willing and able to help me so I could attend law school.
Over time, my parents were changed as our culture changed. They became open to things like gay marriage and integration. My mom died a couple of years back but well before she passed, she had become someone who wanted justice and was willing to pay higher taxes to give others a hand up. My dad became an MSNBC fanatic and reliable Democrat. This guy who I used to think of like Archie Bunker is nothing like that anymore. Both of my parents grew a lot across the course of their lives. They were unsophisticated and my dad still is, but capable of personal growth.
This is why I keep coming back. Martin’s analysis, of course, yes. But occasionally these very on-point, personal, and nuanced comments like this. I suspect a number of us have similar stories. I know my parents certainly have evolved considerably since the 1970s, to the point that they are to the left of me. Well, it’s more complex than that, but one hopefully gets the drift.
As an older Millennial, good riddance to bad rubbish. The financial elites have turned our planet into a dumpster fire for the almighty quarterly profit. The conservatives have made people’s lives measurably worse by focusing on the yet to be born or the dead, instead of the living. They both need to be consigned to the dustbin of history so a people centric party can get power. Save the planet, which will do the markets just fine, btw. Focus on improving people’s lives with good schools, healthcare, and a job if needed. Our precious financial markets will do what they do and be fine.
When even Pat Toomey–who is supposed to be a rational, business-minded Republican–votes for a return-to-the-gold-standard nut for the Federal Reserve, one has to ask: what good is the republican party to *anybody*?