Cycles in American History - 1

The double headed snake of republican and democratic movement.

Late to the party.

We had had the Fourth Republic since 2000. It was the point in the presidential election cycle where the Conservative party went from being dominant to a cycle where the reactionary party, the successor to the conservative party, could only barely be the presidency and that half the time by a plurality of voters. This is not some second-guessing nor hindsight because I wrote it at the time. This is the case of what Asimov called the three changes in a system of government. The first time it is a sign that only in retrospect shows the direction that inevitably comes to be. The second time is when the recognition has been shown to the elites. And the third time is talking about it in the video.

We had reached the last stage with Strauss & Howe pronouncing in a somewhat statistical pattern that the fourth turning is upon us. No, the Supreme Court of the United States decided who the president was going to be. This was not and was written about the event at the time. What did not happen was the recognition of this fact because the consequences were too unthinkable to imagine.

And then they got worse.

While true historians will debate when the first turning happened it was obvious to some that the fourth turning, the Fourth Republic, had occurred. The French are more logical and orderly and label their successive states by a number and the kind of executive authority. So, The Ancien Regime, The First Republic, The First Empire, and so on down to the Fifth Republic. In France, they make the change of government a constitutional show for all to see. In the United States however often the change in government is more muted but still visible in how presidential authority is wielded and delivered. We have understood the three presidencies for at least as long as Professor Bruce Ackerman’s we the people legally the first public foundations and the second Republic transformations.

The second step is recognizing when the change in government happened. This step was 20-odd years ago, and some people recognized it and even published it. The signs were everywhere and were on the front pages, an anachronistic way of saying “in the news” for a more print-oriented culture, on every paper and news channel available. This was the fourth Republic thesis, and it caused a minor stir in the “blog” centric world.

Strauss and Howe however have the Zeitgeist of being important enough people we had a theory that can say “We can now all admit what we failed to recognize because it was inconvenient.” With their thesis enunciated in Generations, they have the singular recognition that now is the time to recognize the unrecognizable. And this is no small accomplishment because recognizing truth often means that one is ignored or laughed at or placed in that large bucket of people who constantly are crying wolf at every given corner. It is a dreary place and I would not recommend it to anyone.

What stress and how to realize is that there is finally the end of a generation, with one more hurrah left and their presidential arsenal, and therefore they combine the mastery of facts with the felicity of the common dialogue about the state of the country that makes it safe to call the change. But Trump was more than a small clue and even Obama was fairly clear. The overturning of Roe by the SCOTUS is also clear that the change has happened and not will happen. Rights abolished are monumentally clear.

This is not to say that Strauss & Howe have not reported and have a basis for it but there was evidence by 2004. Consider that 1952, 1956, 1972, 1980, 1986, and 1988 were Republican Party Presential Victories on a massive scale. The GOP did not just win, they crushed:

Electoral votes            Popular Percent

1952: 442 – 89               55.2%  - 44.3%

1956: 457 – 73               57.4%  - 42.0%

1972: 520 – 17               57.4%  - 42.0%

1980: 489 – 49                50.7%  - 41.0% - 6.6%

1984: 525 – 13                58.8%  - 40.6%

1988: 426 – 111              53.4%  - 45.7%

Together the Democratic contender over 6 elections did not score as any one Republican winner. Phants: 6 Donks: 0.

The Democrats were front-loaded: they too had crushing victories but except 1, they were all at the beginning:

1932: 472 – 56                  57.4%  - 39.6%

1936: 523 – 8                    60.8%  - 36.5%

1940: 449 – 82                  54.7%  - 44.8%

1944: 432 – 99                  53.4%  - 45.9%

1964: 486 – 52                  61.1%  - 38.5%

Now in reality the number of votes was important, and the Presidency is only 1 branch of government. But the number of votes is less telling but very real except in 1980 when Ronald Reagan had two major opponents. The other point is that the election is a predictor. Two of the elections were overturned by events: 1964 for the Democrats and 1972 for the Republicans. However, the governance being divided in our “Third Republic” is more important because the House of Representatives was almost always controlled by the Democrats. Here we can see the fatal flaw in the Constitutional Order and therefore the first clue that the collapse of a broad constitutional consensus was about to occur. When the presidency went to the Republican party it was in part a sign that the general direction of the country should be slowed but not halted.

Now let us take a look at the situation since 2000. While the Republicans have three presidential elections, none of them were crushing and two were one by the electoral votes but not the popular majority. This design is embedded in our democracy and is the subject of a great deal of debate, but it is part of the national consensus. During this period of time, only no victory can be regarded as crushing because the standard of almost every state in the union is resolved to make a change at the presidential level. Even if there is a popular vote victory of a certain size there is not a geographic victory in any of the elections to date and what is more, it looks to be very similar for the immediate future.

 In policy, there is a change as well that of the neoliberal consensus, which again was in the 1990s. and again it is the other side that the governing consensus is about to change. After all, one needs to have a governing consensus that can deliver the intellectual consensus and political will to do what must be done. In the neoliberal paradigm, the recognition is that there is more labor outside the US to manufacture most components and then the obvious thing to do is to offload by offshore manufacturing. Again, this is a key area of dispute although it is a fact of the Washington consensus. However, it must be pointed out that the neoliberal paradigm has reached limits and has begun to pull back because economics is not merely what travels boundaries. If goods can travel so can pandemics. This means that the neo-liberal paradigm is incomplete and probably going to end with the necessity of keeping certain key aspects of production and agriculture within the nation-state.

This argument was made at the time and there is nothing controversial about it. However, there is a deep sociological and psychological underpinning to this argument. And that is that there is a republican cycle and a democratic cycle, small letters because it is not the parties but the overall thrust of the general direction of the way in which governmental change is made. And in this Strauss and Howe are correct in that this is a democratic cycle, and they are prescient in how the generational cycle is democratic in that it is the large populous that wants change as opposed to the governmental forces which are Republican in cycle. This then creates the difference between a republican cycle and a democratic cycle.

Strauss & Howe are looking at the generational cycle and one can understand why: government compiles generational material: when people are born, when they go to school, when they get married, when they retire, when they die. It also compares where they did this life change event against the past and makes predictions about the future. For example, look at the rate of high school, college degree, and advanced degree attainment: as the rate of attainment increases then the workforce age increases because of the need for more educational attainment. This means that in 1950s America a college baccalaureate is much more important than it is in 2020s America and the degree varies by the educational attainment of one’s cohort. Strauss & Howe are sitting atop a gold mine of such information and the means to assess it is key to their argument.

This means, and again this was made 20-odd years ago, that there are at least two cycles and these two are intertwined: there is a democratic cycle that is heralded by a new generation coming of age and demanding certain aspects to be changed, that is a generational cycle, but there is also the view from the top, which looks down and sees the necessity for a new consensus government, which is the republican cycle. That they are interlinked means that they are often confused. But they are distinct in their motivation. Generational cycles such as the 1960s want individual rights and lower-level governmental accountability. The age of Andrew Jackson and the age of populist government especially in the West are the changes which we should be looking at, the age of national consensus is still waiting in the wings because we do not know which rights will be one or lost in this current cycle.

That is to say, there was deep theory in the Fourth Republic thesis not just a tally of electoral and popular votes in their consequences.

The next post will be on the republican and democratic cycles, how they are interlinked but separate in their motivation, and how in the United States’s case they are at consistent cycles.