| Sophie Cocke
May 15, 2006 Writing in 1991, journalist E.J. Dionne in,
Why Americans Hate Politics, argues that over the past three
decades Americans’ faith in democratic institutions declined and they
became increasingly disengaged from politics and public life. He
attributes cynicism towards the American political system to the failure
of the dominant ideologies, liberalism and conservativism, to present real
choices to the American people. Due to the instability and internal
contradictions of these two ideologies, political figures exploited
social, economic and cultural issues to maintain their coalitions, and
thus prevented the expression of consensus around many issues that had
broad popular agreement. Dionne attributes the causes of this
polarization to the cultural civil war that emerged in the 1960s. He
identifies three main issues that have shaped American politics into the
1990s and predicts their continued influence. These include, civil rights
and the integration of the black population into mainstream political and
economic life, the revolutions in attitudes towards child-rearing,
sexuality, and family life that emerged with the feminist movement, and
the ongoing debate over the meaning and implications of the Vietnam War. Dionne traces the evolution of competing
strands of political thought that emerged in the 1950s to 1991. He argues
that the New Left, counterculture, and neoconservatives of the 1960s
hastened the demise of liberalism and paved the way for conservatism.
Vietnam became liberalism’s war, and thus became associated with failed
anti-communist policy. It also became associated with discredited social
programs that, according to the neo-conservatives failed to understand the
social ills it was addressing, and failed to take into account the rule of
unintended consequences. The neo-conservatives, and later conservatives
associated these programs with a liberal, intellectual and social elite,
who lacked true understanding of the problems of the poor, and the
difficulties facing common, working class people. Support from the middle
and lower class segments for the Democratic Party, was now threatened by
the Republican Party who portrayed them as “limousine liberals.” The
conservative movement also benefited from white alarm over the civil
rights movement, and in particular the Black Panthers. Dionne argues that
poor whites bore “the brunt” of civil rights legislation, given that they
were the group that was thus thrust into contact with the black
population. This allowed the conservatives to further solidify their
lower and middle class base. Dionne also asserts the common interests of
the competing parties, and demonstrates the easy adaptability of New Left,
counterculture, and neo-conservative ideas to conservtivism. He disavows
that 1960s liberals radically broke with their radical roots to embrace
conservativism. The New Left, counterculture, and conservatives were all
concerned with a moral and spiritual void plaguing the country. They
favored isolationism, small businesses and localism, and disdained liberal
bureaucracy. The liberals of the 1960s and President
Jimmy Carter’s failures to produce a cohesive liberal vision paved the way
for the conservatives. But the conservatives straddled a difficult
coalition – on one side were the traditionalists who were concerned with
America’s moral degradation and on the other were the libertarians who
despised invasive government, and whose confidence lay in the free
market. The Republican Party included the competing interests of
traditionalists alarmed by the rise of large corporations, and the demise
of communities and small businesses, and leaders of corporations who
donated large amounts of money to the Republican Party. This coalition
coalesced around tax cuts, but were held together by little else. By the
1988 presidential race between George Bush and Michael Dukakis the hurdles
of straddling such a difficult coalition gave rise to a particularly
vacuous campaign in which no new issues were discussed. Central to Bush’s
campaign were trivial issues such as school prayer, gun control, and
prison furloughs, reinvoking the Willie Horton controversy. Dionne argues that the role of individual
actors in politics is important, but that he is concerned with the role of
ideas, and how they shape and limit public discourse. Thus, most of the
book only discusses the ideas behind competing political movements. But
he does not delve past the surface in describing their political
philosophies, and offers the reader little new insight into the political
developments of this time period. Furthermore, he does not define
liberalism, a serious omission given that he argues that this is the
ideology that these emerging parties are defining themselves against. At
one point he asserts that liberalism is so broad that it nearly
encompasses all of American political life and its intellectual world.
(p.56) He does not identify the constituencies that comprised these
parties making his analysis vague. Dionne does little to shed light on why
Americans hate politics. While he argues that political participation has
been on decline since the 1960’s, more in depth analysis of statistics
show that this is a fallacy. (See McDonald and Pomkin’s The Myth of
the Vanishing Voter,
http://macht.arts.cornell.edu The value of Why Americans Hate Politics, lies more in treating it as a primary source that articulates the concerns and pessimism that permeated American life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Central to this period was alarm over black poverty and the the break-up of families in black communities, the escalation of crime, the perceived demise of civic culture, the new negotiations taking place over family roles as women entered the workforce, materialism, the rise of large, impersonal corporations, and a lack of individual responsibility to the common good. Dionne argues that a new political center was needed to combat these issues in a productive way that catered to existing, broad agreements over the causes and solutions of society’s ills.
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