Centralization and hierarchy, which Robert Wiebe in Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy identifies as the dominant characteristics of American life for most of the 20th Century, seem to be yielding to decentralization and equality, as Wiebe shows they were, even more suddenly, in the early 19th Century. Then, when they were released from the threat of Napoleonic wars, Americans liberated religion and medicine from central authorities, stopped working for big employers and surged west in great numbers to become independent farmers and merchants. That America developed a national two-party politics, but as Wiebe puts it, "Politics diffused government power and united a sprawling nation." In the 1990s, Americans once again have been released from the threat of world war. They are rejecting the authority of hierarchies in religion (compare the declining mainline denominations with the surging fundamentalist faiths or the New Age mentality) and medicine (look at the popularity of alternative healing and fads even in a time of great scientific progress).
Geographically, ordinary Americans have been spreading out to edge cities and beyond, in computer-equipped houses in low-priced subdivisions, living comfortably on credit extended in free if seemingly disorderly markets. Economically, they increasingly work for small businesses or hop from one job to another with dexterity and optimism and without generating political demands for economic redistribution or government guarantees. Americans are not a people yearning for security, although the G.I. generation who grew up in the Depression, served in World War 11 and helped build prosperous postwar America do have a more than economic attachment to Social Security; but there are fewer G.I. generation members in the electorate every day, and more members of Generation X, born after 1965.
Intellectually, Americans take direction not from a cultural and educational elite that seeks to make the country obey abstract rules learned in prestigious universities, but from self-help advisers, television evangelists and radio talk show hosts. The Ivy League elite that Christopher Lasch described in his posthumous The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy no longer captures Americans' imaginations: compare the fascination with the Kennedys in the early 1960s to the now vitriolic dislike by some Americans and mild positive feelings of others toward Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This 21st Century Tocquevillian America is not necessarily Republican, any more than Tocqueville's 1830s America inevitably voted for the Jacksonian Democrats. The Whigs, when they escaped the thrall of their New England elites, won elections too, and in the 1990s Bill Clinton has shown that Democrats can win by convincing margins. They win when they develop a New Democratic coalition politics that is an acceptable variant of the Republican faith, a set of policies with a more communitarian thrust but not one that attempts to impose centralized, hierarchical solutions on a country that resists centralization and hierarchy. This Clinton did convincingly in 1991 and 1992 and once again in 1995 and 1996; his problem now is whether he can follow that course in 1997 and 1998 as he did not in 1993 and 1994.
In this new-old America the political rules are different from those most readers have grown up with and become accustomed to. Underlying much traditional political analysis is the assumption that the first things voters seek from government are economic-a smooth upward . business cycle and redistribution of economic income and wealth. But that is clearly wrong. The first thing voters seek from government is order-not some arbitrary, authoritarian order, but a rational, predictable order in which ordinary people can raise their families, make their livings, participate in their communities and go about their daily lives without fear of physical disorder or economic disaster. Americans have had a happy history during most of which they took this basic order for granted. But they have reacted strongly when order is threatened. The economic disorder of the early 1930s deprived Republicans of the national majority and gave Democrats the chance to become the majority party. The cultural disorder of the late 1960s deprived Democrats of their national majority and gave Republicans the chance to become the majority party.
The fallacy that the first thing most voters seek from government are economic is an idea that grew out of New Deal politics and Keynesian economics-specific responses to an episode of severe economic disorder. Yet even in the 1930s and the generation that followed that idea was never true except at the margins. In different elections 5% and sometimes even 10% of voters would change their minds because of the performance of the macroeconomy or in response to policies of economic redistribution. And in an electorate closely divided between adherents of the two major parties, those 5% and 10% could easily make the difference in election outcomes. But even at the height of what seemed to be class warfare politics-from 1935 to 1963, approximately-the very much larger blocs of the electorate adhered to party preferences based on cultural issues. Southern whites were Democrats because Democrats opposed the Civil War. African Americans, for three generations solidly Republican, became solidly Democratic, because Franklin Roosevelt seemed to back civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s as Abraham Lincoln and the radical Republicans had in the 1860s and 1870s. (Interestingly, the New Dealers who were most favorable to civil rights were former Republicans-Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Henry Wallace.) Voters of New England Yankee stock were heavily Republican, as they had been since they founded the Republican Party in the 1850s; voters of immigrant stock were heavily Democratic, as they had been since they came to the great cities of the East and Midwest and found them run by unsympathetic Yankee Republicans. To these culturally defined blocs were added some defined by their stand on economic issues, most notably the militant members of the industrial CIO unions, which transformed the cities of the industrial Great Lakes-Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit-from Republican strongholds to Democratic bastions. But the politics of economic redistribution even at its height was a driving force to only a minority of voters.
Today it is a driving force to very few. For more than 20 years, since 1973, income distribution has been growing less egalitarian-not only in the United States but in other advanced countries as well. From 1935 to 1963 the CIO unions' heartland in the industrial cities of the Great Lakes were a dependable constituency for the economic redistribution advocated by labor leaders from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther. But in 1994 these metropolitan areas voted Republican for governor or in some cases for senator-and for Republicans committed to lower taxes and less government spending. In 1996 these areas voted for Bill Clinton, but not necessarily Democratic for Congress, and the Republican governors remain popular. And while the AFL-CIO made a visible splash in national politics, the $35 million spent on ads in House races defeated few targets and total union membership continues to fall. Raising the minimum wage, a favorite AFL-CIO issue, is not very redistributionist in a country where most minimum wage earners are not heads of households and in many booming areas where the market has raised wages well above the statutory minimum already.
So we are moving from what has been an exception in American political life back to what has been the rule: a Tocquevillian politics in a Tocquevillian country. This is a country in which order exists because basic rules are accepted by the people, or insisted upon by them: from a government in which political forces and governmental mechanisms tend to ratchet down the size of government, not ratchet it up as did the political forces and governmental mechanisms operating from the New Deal years up through the 1980s
One such force is voters' strong conviction that taxes should not be raised, that government already takes a large enough share of what people earn. Voters demonstrated that in the 1990s by doing three unnatural things: in 1990 by giving reduced percentages to House incumbents of both parties, for the first time in 50 years, after most incumbents of both parties voted to raise taxes; in 1992, by lowering George Bush's percentage from 53% to 37% after he broke his "Read my lips-no new taxes" promise; in 1994, by ousting the Democrats' congressional majority at a time when economic indicators were good. Soon after their 1994 victory, House Republicans created another mechanism to hold down government spending, by getting rid of the "current services" budget procedure that gives every department an automatic increase for inflation and lets them argue for more. This system was based on the absurd premise that government, unlike all other large organizations, had achieved the maximum possible efficiency and could not figure out ways to deliver services more cheaply. The Republicans' balanced budget amendment failed to pass in 1995 and 1997, as Democrats encouraged senators who promised to vote for it but were not up for reelection in two years to break their word and vote against it. But politicians of both parties have acted as if it passed. There is considerable fiction in the Clinton plans and some in the Republicans' as well, but both feel obliged to promise a balanced budget, and there is heavy downward pressure on government spending. Another way that politicians used to expand government was by inflating the currency; this was how Richard Nixon pumped up the economy for 1972. But the stagflation of the 1970s made American voters inflationophobic, and the international marketplace now swiftly punishes any attempt to degrade the currency. Bill Clinton has had to go along; he made the most important economic appointment of his second term before it even began, when he renominated Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in February 1996, because he knew that an appointment of the kind many Democrats would favor would immediately raise interest rates and hurt his reelection chances. And because Greenspan critic Senator Tom Harkin delayed his confirmation until June 1996, Greenspan's term now extends to June 2000, which means that Republican senators can prevent the confirmation of any successor and leave the selection to the next president.
In any case, arguments about what sound like economic issues are often arguments over cultural issues. Consider welfare. For years the debate on the surface seemed to pit those who wanted to spend less of government's (and their own) money on poor people and those who wanted government to spend more. But the amounts of money involved, if not as trivial as some liberals suggested, were not as enormous as conservative rhetoric implied. The argument is better portrayed as a battle between one side whose cry is "personal responsibility" and another whose belief is "it's society's fault." The complaint of those who wanted to change the welfare system was not so much that it cost too much as that it degraded the morals of society by fostering irresponsibility and the growth of a criminal underclass. Subsidizing single mothers, it was argued, gives sanction to unmarried parenthood by women and irresponsibility by men and creates whole neighborhoods where adolescent boys are unsupervised and are readily drawn into association with the criminals who are the real rulers. Indeed, the same kind of arguments- "personal responsibility" versus "it's society's fault"-have been made on crime issues, and were on vivid display in the debate over the 1994 crime bill. The "personal responsibility" side called for harsher punishments; the "it's society's fault" called for, among other things, midnighl basketball and more counseling. It is an argument over discipline versus therapy. Every society, like every family, needs some of both and every society, like every set of parents, will differ how much of each is appropriate.
The Tocquevillian America of the 1990s has opted clearly, on both crime and welfare, for more discipline and less therapy. These were not the decisions of Washington elites or academic experts, who almost uniformly favor therapy; they were forced by the people on their national leaders, or were the product of local offficials and citizens acting in disregard of elite opinion. Since the 1960s, liberal elites used the federal government, and the leverage of federal dollars, to impose therapy-type approaches on social work and crime-fighting across the country, with success far greater than the amount of federal spending would suggest. Their secret was to shape the culture of the care-giving and law enforcement professions, through graduate schools, professional organizations and friendly mass media. This was not an invisible process to voters, many of whom understood that programs originally intended to encourage middle-class behavior instead tended to discourage the values that promote stability. They understood that welfare programs increasingly were run by social workers who did not believe in encouraging recipients to work, that schools were run by educators who did not believe in teaching basic skills and information but just in promoting self-esteem, that police departments were sometimes run by leaders who believed that "root causes" rather than individuals were to blame for crime and that prisons were run by penologists who did not believe in keeping people in jail.
Responding to these views, governors in many states sought to change the welfare system and the Clinton Administration, heedful of public opinion, granted some waivers from federal requirements. But the real change seems to have come with passage of the 1996 welfare reform act. Suddenly states were empowered to change the rules and, there is much reason to believe, suddenly recipients and potential recipients decided that welfare was something they could not rely on, and they had better try work. Welfare rolls, which peaked in 1994 started to fall and by late 1996, even before welfare reform was technically in effect, were falling rapidly. Similarly, crime rates in the middle- 1 99Os, after years of staying up near peak levels, started to fall. These were more than responses to a prosperous economy; economic good times in the 1970s and 1980s produced no such result. It is possible, though not yet certain, that we are seeing a decline in welfare and crime beginning around 1994 as sharp and precipitous as the increase in welfare and crime that occurred between 1965 and 1975.
These trends were not uniform across the country. Welfare rolls were down most sharply in Wisconsin-28% between September 1995 and September 1996-and crime rates fell most sharply in New York City-down by one-third since Rudolph Giuliani became mayor in January 1994. Specific individuals were responsible: Governor Tommy Thompson has been devising workfare programs for over 10 years and former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton made New York cops crack down on minor offenders and disturbers of the peace and used computers to isolate high-crime locales so that they could be flooded with police. But in a Tocquevillian America states and cities are laboratories of reform, and an experiment which works in one place can be copied elsewhere. But the successes of Wisconsin and New York City suggest that the culture of the care-giving professions can be changed by determined public officials and that actions by politicians can remove the apparent sanction of fatherless childbearing or criminal behavior.
In Tocqueville's America, politics became a kind of culture war, between a Yankee-led North and a cavalier-led South: indeed, eventually a real Civil War, in which 600,000 Americans lost their lives. Our America is in the midst of a less heated culture war, as Patrick Buchanan called it in 1992 (while showing more relish for it than suited most voters), whose contours are shown in the election results and the exit polls of the 1996 elections. To which let us turn.