The Power of Presidential Ideologies:
INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERNET EDITION
I. Ideas, Presidents, and Public PolicyII. The Perils of Prediction: Looking Back at Looking Foward
III. Where I Missed the Boat
The Republican Takeover of Congress
The Stumbling of Japan, Inc. and the Rapid Rise of China
Underestimating the Power of American Hegemony
Specific Errors Born of Underestimating American HegemonyIV. Where I Was on the Mark: Politics and Policy
Ideological Majorities: The Presidency, the Party System, and Policy Change
Major Change in the Party System and Public Policy:
Ideological Majorities vs. Partisan Realignment
The Regional Shift in the Party SystemV. Where I Was on the Mark: Ideas and Public Policy
THE RANGE OF POLICY IDEOLOGIES
I. Ideas, Presidents, and Public Policy return to top
This book is based on a few simple premises:1. Ideas matter in politics.
2. Ideas play an important role in shaping public policy, in determining "who gets what" from government actions.
3. There are long-term continuities in the ideas and discourse which shape public policy. It makes sense to think in terms of an ideological spectrum.
4. However, political ideas and the terms of policy discourse often serve to obscure rather than reveal who really benefits from public policies.
5. Presidents play an important role in the policy process, especially in the process of change in public policy and ideological discourse.
6. The media visibility of presidents gives them a particularly crucial role in shaping the ideas that drive public policy, in shaping the terms of ideological discourse.
These premises might seem like common sense. Of course, the way we think about something shapes how we act. Of couse, in the political world, there are patterns of thought that can be characterized as ideology. Of course, the presidency is critically important in the policy process, if for no other reason than its media visibility.
Actually, in the arcane world of political science, all these propositions are quite controversial. The method used here to study public policy over the past century are actually quite unconventional, even slightly heretical to orthodox political scientists. That may explain why the first edition of this book, published in 1992, was largely ignored by my professional colleagues. Admittedly, my own weaknesses as a self-promoter and professional networker also contributed to my research being little noticed by my peers.
But now the internet gives me a way to bring my work directly to those are interested in the relationship between ideas, public policy, and presidential administrations. I have tried in my rather unsophisticated way to take advantage of the capabilities the internet to provide images and graphics to spice up text. More importantly, I have begun updating my research to account for developments in the 1990s. The first step in this process is looking back at how the original edition effectively foresaw political developments in the 1990s and where it did not.
II. The Perils of Prediction: Looking Back at Looking Foward return to top
The first edition of this book was published by Praeger Press in 1992. It covered presidents ranging as far back as Woodrow Wilson (1913-1920) and Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945) up to the elder Bush administration. Roughly a decade has passed since I so boldly scribbled my analysis of the interaction between ideas, presidential administrations, and public policies. Not surprisingly, some of my analysis has proven useful in understanding the Clinton presidency and the new Bush administration, while some of my analysis was just plain wrong.
For several generations now political scientists have been trained to seek explanatory and predictive theory, even though the ability of political scientists to accurately predict the future is actually quite limited. Certainly any political scientist who has made any public pronouncements about American elections in the past decade, much less the state of U.S.-Russian relations or the trajectory of the East Asian development, has been sobered about the predictive power of the discipline. Contemporary political science cannot predict the future very well. Political scientists cannot even agree very often on explaining the past. In fact, all too often in the real world the works of political scientists are judged more on the richness of historical description and conformity to conventional wisdom.
From my vantage point in the early 1990s I offered some new theoretical constructs to interpret presidential and congressional behavior and some concrete scenarios that, while not actually predicting any particular outcome, did sketch a range of possibilities and probabilities. It is a challenging intellectual exercise to go back now and assess how closely I hit the mark.
III. Where I Missed the Boat return to top
First let me begin with what I totally missed. Delays in finding a publisher actually spared me the embarrassment of seeing my analysis of U.S.-Soviet relations become not just wrong, but quaintly obsolete. But I still made some other whoppers.
The Republican Takeover of Congress return to top
On the domestic front, I, like virtually everyone in the field, did not anticipate the Republican takeover of Congress. At the time I wrote the book, the last time Republicans had controlled the House of Representative was when I was 4 years old, and they had not even come close since then. The detachment of presidential and congressional elections that became institutionalized in the 1950s coupled with the growing advantages of incumbency seemed to make Democratic control of the House a political constant. I admit to failing miserably even entertaining the possibility of this development, but in fairness to myself and others in the field, the political system gave almost no warning signals that this development was imminent.
The Stumbling of Japan, Inc. and the Rapid Rise of China return top
Although the configuration of power in the Pacific figured only tangentially in my analysis of American foreign policy, I must also admit to not foreseeing that the Japanese economy would stumble so badly, that Chinese power would rise so quickly, or that all of East Asia would be thrown into a severe economic crisis. I actually belonged to the school that thought American scholars underestimated the significance of the rise of Japanese economic power. I still think most American pundits are not aware the degree to which the resurgence of China, Japan, and Pacific Asia generally will alter global politics in the 21st century, but I must admit to not being able to see very clearly how.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Chinese President Jiang Zemin
Underestimating the Power of American Hegemony return to top
But my greatest mistake, and the one that was most avoidable, was my underestimation of the power of American hegemony. Here, wish outran reality. Unlike 99% of American scholars, I find American hegemony deeply disturbing, not just in terms of democratic values or maldistribution of global resources, but even more importantly in terms of global peace and security. It is just not right that a nation with only 5% of the world’s people should have the largest say in the structure of the global system. And the smug assumption that the rest of the world is not only economically determined to become Americanized but actually ardently seeking that transformation is not just arrogant but truly dangerous. In fact, most of the world’s people and many of the world’s powerful nations have aspirations and values that conflict with the American mission of civilizing the heathen. Although it sounds like heresy to almost all American policymakers, I find the American position in the world almost unnatural.
But apparently American hegemony is based on greater and more enduring real power dynamics than I realized. Although I still see American political hegemony and western cultural hegemony as ultimately fated to pass from the scene, I am forced to admit that Huntington is probably right that the process will more likely take centuries rather than decades.
Specific Errors Born of Underestimating American Hegemony return to top
My misestimation of American power led to several subsequent miscalculations. I did not foresee the durability of prosperity in the 1990s that not only banished the pessimism that had haunted the American people and their pundits since the stagflation of the 70s but also terminated the era of budgetary shortfalls that had dominated relations between presidents and Congress since Jimmy Carter and particularly since the early Reagan years. In many ways we are “back to the future.?amp;nbsp; The 1930s/40s generation shaped by scarcity gave way to a generation habituated to affluence in the 1950s and 60s. While living standards in the mid 70s to the mid 90s outstripped those of the Depression generation, public life in those decades was similarly shaped by a lack of budgetary resources. The new politics of doling out surpluses is whole other enterprise compared to the dreary politics of allocating budgetary pain. It remains to be seen however whether the new budgetary affluence will lead to a renewed commitment to attack long festering social ills as it did in the 60s.
My underestimation of the power of American hegemony also led to several misjudgments about the development of the global system and American foreign policy. I never expected Russia to so docilely accept the continuing expansion of NATO membership and mission or the continuing subordination of its economy to western dominated institutions. I was proven right that Russia could not fit easily into the West and that it was just not possible or desirable to try to transform Soviet socialism directly into western-style capitalism. I did foresee that attempts at too rapid an economic and political transformation would actually harm rather than help the Russian economy. But I overestimated the ability of nationalist forces in Russia to resist these trends. I still expect a resurgence of conflict between Russia and the West because I still expect the West to continue to humiliate Russia as they did in the Kosovo crisis. But the implications of that conflict for the international system may be less than I originally thought because not only the military and economic but also the political capabilities of Russia have degraded so much in the past decade. Still, any level of conflict between the West and the nuclear armed remnants of a military superpower should be something to give any thoughtful person pause. But as both the Kosovo crisis and Bush’s missile defense plan show, caution at stepping on Russia’s toes is not much of a factor in contemporary policy deliberations.
President Bush addressing U.S. soldier in KosovoJust as underestimating the power of American hegemony led to misunderstanding of the international position of America’s long time adversary, it also led to overestimating of the power of American allies. When I wrote in the early 90s, the Japanese economy seemed on its way to matching or surpassing the American economy. As the Berlin Wall crumbled, the EU was cementing the ties of a common market larger than the North American market and preparing to launch a common currency. After a spurt of growth in the mid 80s the U.S. economy was returning to the funk that had characterized the 70s and early 80s. The U.S. government couldn’t even pay its bills without depending heavily on capital inflows from Japan and Europe.
I was certainly not alone in predicting that a new global economic order was imminent and that the rising economic power of Japan and the EU would translate into at least a redefinition of roles in the Western alliance and greater political assertiveness of Japan and the European powers. Many conventional American analysts feared a retrenchment of the American position in the world, a reduction of American power and perhaps even military forces in both Europe and East Asia. American hegemony in the global system seemed in doubt, not only abroad, but even in some quarters in the U.S.
G-8 annual summits affirm the continuing integration of Western economies and politiesHowever, most of these trends reversed themselves in the 1990s. Suddenly the Japanese economy was the sick man on the global scene, while the American economy was outstripping not only Japan but the new juggernaut of the EU. In 1997 Japan signed on to new guidelines in its alliance with the U.S. that perpetuated its subordination to American hegemony in East Asia for at least another generation. The EU proved unable even to set the European house in order, turning to the U.S. to play the leading role in the never-ending series of crises in the Balkans. The U.S. proved once again that it was still much more than first among equals, with Japan accepting the role as junior partner and the nascent EU so fragmented it was in no way equivalent to the truly “United?States.
IV. Where I Was on the Mark: Politics and Policy
But enough mea culpa. Despite all its flaws, I still think my book was basically on the mark in many ways.
Ideological Majorities: The Presidency, the Party System, and Policy Change return to top
1. The first edition of ThePower of Presidential Ideologies stressed that despite the strong tendencies of the American political system toward incrementalism, there are also periods of rapid change in domestic policy. It argued that these policy changes are associated with large swings in the number of seats the parties hold in Congress. It introduced the concept of an ideological majority to describe major shifts in party strength in Congress and public policy. Not every large shift in party strength leads to a the creation of a successful ideological majority and major domestic policy change, but every case of rapid, broad scale domestic policy change comes after a major shift in the relative power of the parties in Congress.
The Republican capture of Congress in the 1994 election and the ideological conflict that followed the pattern I identified in the 1992. I have admitted already I did not foresee this Republican triumph. But even so, the Republican congressional campaign of 1994 and the behavior of the congressional Republicans in 1995 and 1996 fit the pattern I described in my book of an emergent ideological majority. The Contract with America that was the basis of the Republican congressional campaigns of 1994 and the center of their legislative agenda in 1995 and 1996 was very clearly an attempt to create a new conservative ideological majority. The new Republican majority in Congress was not simply feisty; they set out to reshape the very contours of American domestic policy. Now, in fact, they were foiled in their attempt by Democratic President Clinton. The new Republican congressional majority was not successful in dramatically altering the course of public policy, but the theory of ideological majorities can also account for that. Not all attempts at ideological majorities are successful.
2. I also emphasized the crucial role of presidential leadership in policy and ideological change. The limited results of the 104th Republican Congress's attempt to translate the Contract with America into a major shift in public policy illustrated that even if most of the elements for ideological change are in place, without presidential support, domestic policy is unlikely to change dramatically. After the surprise Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich attempted to provide ideological leadership historically wielded by presidents. But without the leverage of the presidency, Gingrich was unable to set a truly new direction for public policy.
3. The policy swings of the Clinton administration further illustrate the ideological cross pressures that in most circumstances lead administrations to send mixed ideological signals. The Clinton administration, like many administrations, made it most bold domestic policy initiatives in its early years and then moved to the center as it approached its reelection campaign and during its second term. The contrast between the relatively bold health care reform initiative in the first two years of the Clinton presidency and the more centrist and incremental proposals of the later years is one more example of one ideological pattern I described in detail. Administrations make their most bold domestic policy proposals in their early years and then to move to the political center over time.
Hillary took a leading role in the Clinton health care reform plan presented in 19944. The 1996 and 2000 presidential elections showed the predicted ideological positioning of the candidates. In the 1996 nomination process some Republicans candidates, the most successful being Pat Buchanan, appealed solely to the conservative ideological wing of the party, while others, such as Bob Dole, tried to balance a more moderate approach with appeals to the more ideologically conservative Republican primary voters. Like all eventual nominees, once Dole secured the nomination he moved toward the center to broaden his appeal to the less ideologically consistent general election voters.
In the 2000 Republican race again many candidates tried to stake claim as the conservative alternative to front-runner George W. Bush. Reflecting his huge early lead in the polls and in money raising, in the beginning Bush ran his primary campaign more like a general election candidate. Yet once Bush encountered stiff opposition from Senator John McCain, he shifted sharply to the right to appeal to conservatives who make up most of the voters in Republican primaries. Once he was past the convention, Bush then downplayed his ideological conservatism to appeal to the more moderate voters that Republicans need to carry to win general elections.
In the book I gave reasons why Republican presidential candidates tend to self-identify themselves as conservatives and since the 1970s Democratic candidates have generally fled from the label liberal. The behavior of Bush and Gore in the 2000 campaign once again followed the patterns I described. Bush’s self-characterization as a “compassionate conservative?was tailored to send exactly the kind of mixed ideological messages I detailed in my book. At appropriate moments Bush can emphasize his “compassion?to distance himself from strong ideological conservatives who are perceived by non-conservatives to lack compassion. At other times Bush can appeal to the Republican right by emphasizing his “conservative?credentials.
Cartoonist Clay Bennett's impression of compassionate conservatismOn the Democratic side, incumbent Vice president Al Gore also pursued an almost general election, centrist campaign throughout most of the primary season, reflecting his strong front-runner status. Like his mentor Bill Clinton and like the only other winning Democratic candidate in the past generation, Jimmy Carter, Gore actively avoided the label of liberal, downplaying the role of ideas in his campaign. Lacking a serious challenge within the Democratic party, Gore could use the primaries to position himself for the general election. The one deviation from this pattern came in the early Democratic candidate debates with Bill Bradley. At that key point Gore, while still eschewing the term liberal, made more traditional programmatic appeals to the constituent elements of the Democratic party to forestall Bradley’s “big ideas?from catching on and creating a real challenge to the Gore campaign.
Major Change in the Party System and Public Policy: Ideological Majorities vs. Partisan Realignment return to top
Studies of public policy by American scholars tend to have an incrementalist perspective. That is, most American scholars see the process of policy change as a series of small changes from the status quo; change comes in small “increments.?amp;nbsp; And American political system, based on separation of powers and federalism, usually does make policy by a series of mutual adjustments of multiple players which limits policy change to series of small steps. Certainly the Framers of the Constitution designed a system intended to keep government limited by engaging different branches and levels of government in a series of checks and balances.
But in surveying American history it is clear that while incrementalism is the norm, there have been periods of rapid political and policy change. Since its emergence in the 1960s, the most powerful theory of rapid political and policy change in the American political system has been the theory of partisan realignment.
The theory of critical elections and partisan realignment as articulated by Key, Burnham, Sundquist and others masterfully summed up American political history in the 19thcentury and the first half of the 20th century. The theory of partisan realignment stands as one of the few truly powerful conceptualizations of long-term American political history.
The Basic Propositions of Critical Realignment Theory
1. The American two party system is a one party dominant system. Lubell called them the "sun" and "moon" parties. Systems of party dominance last for generations.
2. Critical elections rapidly change the party balance.
3. Critical elections establish new party coalitions that endure for generations.
4. Critical elections are caused by massive political crises.
5. Critical elections lead to major changes in public policy.
6. After critical elections, there is secular decline in the power of the dominant party.
7. Over time, new issues cause new cleavages and new coalitions.
8. Still the dominant party continues to predominate (until it loses a critical election).
Unfortunately, the theory of partisan realignment explains historical political systems much better than it does the current system that has developed since the 1960s. The political science literature in the 1990s has increasingly pointed out the declining usefulness of the theories of partisan realignment in explaining the dynamics of the contemporary party system. The classical theory of partisan realignment just doesn't explain the emergence of a seemingly permanent state of divided government in the second half of the 20th century. Shafer proclaimed the "end of realignment" about the same time my book appeared, Ladd has advised us to stop "waiting for Godot," and Shea has referred to the "baseless" party system. Others have shrunk the magnificent and powerful classical concept of partisan realignment to fit any short-term shift in party strength.
But as far as I know, no one has proposed a concept of shifts in partisan power more enduring than one election or administration but yet short of a complete classical partisan realignment. The concept of an ideological majority not only provides a meaningful concept of partisan shift smaller than an enduring realignment but greater than a temporary fluctuation. It also provides the same kind of strong link between partisan shifts and public policy that made classical realignment theory so attractive. Again, the emergence of the Contract with America and the behavior of the Republican majority in the 104th Congress show that even if the political system seems incapable of producing a classical partisan realignment, historically significant shifts in party strength, ideological orientation, and even public policy are still possible.
The Regional Shift in the Party System return to top
Every serious student of American politics is aware of the sweeping changes in the political strength of Republicans and Democrats in the South since the 1960s. In the hundred years from the Civil War to the civil rights acts of the mid 60s Democrats so totally controlled the South that a Republican member of Congress or a Republican governor in the South was a rare bird indeed. However, by 1994 a majority of southern members of Congress were Republicans.
But while most political scientists in the 1980s were still talking about how the Republican southern strategy had given them a "lock" on the electoral college, I pointed out how the results of the 1988 election provided a model for future Democratic presidential victories that did not require doing well in the South. A potential winning coalition for the Democrats was to capture almost all of the Northeast and Midwest and part of the West. In that chapter I also pointed out that the risk of such a presidential coalition for the Democrats would be that it could further undermine their congressional delegation's historical base in the South.
Another map is suggestive of how regional change in support for political parties is not confined to the South. It shows the amazing similarities between the William McKinley's Republican winning coalition in the election of 1896 with the Democratic winning coalition in the Clinton years.
The election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and his reelection in 1996 came with few of the electoral votes in the South, proving my assertion that the Democrats no longer needed to carry much of the South to win a national election. The Republican capture of Congress in 1994 and the erosion of the Democratic party's position in the statehouses and state legislatures in the 1990s has borne out my other prediction—that winning the presidency through a regional coalition excluding the South could cost the Democrats dearly in congressional elections and in their one-time “solid?southern electoral base.
V. Where I Was on the Mark: Ideas and Public Policy return to top
The previous two sections have recounted how the first edition of The Power of Presidential Ideologies characterized the relationships between the president, Congress, and the parties in making public policy that remained valid throughout the 1990s. However the book was about more than the politics of policymaking. Its primary interest was in the relationship between ideas and policy, about the way policymakers think about issues and the range of policy options policymakers consider feasible and why.
Following Scammon and Wattenberg's typology devised in the late 60s, I divided policy into three areas--economic, social issues, and foreign policy. I argued that in each policy area there was a recurring ideological debate. Like all ideological discourse, this debate at the same time both illuminated and obscured what was really going on. On the one hand, this dominant discourse set real boundaries on what policies were possible, of what policies were considered desirable and feasible. If one knew the parameters of this discourse, one could relatively accurately describe the range of policies that were likely to emerge from the political process and the subtle but real differences likely to emerge from Democratic and Republican administrations. Both Democratic and Republican presidencies would tend toward the political center, but Republicans would shade toward right-center while Democrats would be more likely to shade toward left-center.
THE RANGE OF POLICY IDEOLOGIES return to top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the other hand, this debate obscured who was actually being served by these policies, what interests were winning and who was losing out. For example, in the economic policy the traditional liberal vs. conservative rhetoric pits the liberals as the champions of the poor and disadvantaged against the conservative defenders of individual freedom. In fact, the Limited Interest State favored by moderate conservatives serves corporate interests while the Social Security State favored by moderate Democrats seeks similar targeted benefits for other organized interests groups beyond the historically favored corporations.
Predicting the Range of Policy Debate in the Post-Cold War World return to top
During the time I was writing the first edition of my book the Cold War came to close as the Soviet Union suddenly and unexpectedly disappeared. The conflict that had driven U.S. foreign policy for half a century was over, and U.S. foreign policy doctrine was left fumbling, wondering how to cope with a new world. A decade later American policymakers and scholars are still perplexed about the character of this new global configuration, unable to come with any better term for the new system than the post-Cold War world. Back in the early 90s it was quite a difficult task to predict the parameters of the foreign policy debate that would emerge in the new post-Cold War world.
I think the typology I came up with then has held up pretty well over the past decade. As I predicted a debate about America pursuing a multilateralist vs. a unilateralist approach to the post-Cold War world has been at the center of American foreign policy debate in the past decade. Generally, Democrats have been more committed to consultation with allies, engagement of potential enemies, and working through international institutions than Republicans. Generally, Republicans tend to base their foreign policy on the accumulation of military power and downplay diplomacy while Democrats tend to combine the use of military force more with diplomacy. This was true during most of the Cold War and continues to be true in the post-Cold War world.
Of course, Republicans also sometimes employ each of tools of diplomacy. Republicans have not adopted a purely unilateralist strategy. But the new Republican President Bush has pursued missile defense as a new military strategy in the face of massive criticism not only from potential enemies like China, North Korea, and Russia, but also against the advice a virtually every NATO ally. While Democrats have supported multilateral global institutions like the UN, the IMF, and the WTO, Republicans in Congress have blocked the U.S. from paying its full dues to the UN.
Former Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committe Jesse Helms is
a leading Republican critic of the UN and other international institutionsProminent Republicans including 1996 presidential candidate Dole have objected to American troops being led by foreign commanders in UN missions. Many conservative Republicans in Congress have opposed U.S. participation in the IMF and the WTO because these international institutions are not fully under the control of the U.S. President Clinton’s policies of engagement of China and North Korea came under severe criticism by conservative Republicans in Congress. The flap over the American spy plane downed in China has passed, but suspicions remain high on both sides. President Bush has not only discarded the term engagement, but raised questions about his commitment to negotiations with North Korea. Most Republicans do not support the concessions the Clinton administration made in order to facilitate the opening of North Korea to the world.
Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright meets North Korea Foreign
Minister Paek Nam Sun as part of the Clinton administration's "engagement" policyPart of the reason why more centrist Republicans shy away from multilateral institutions is that their party’s ideological right wing is openly opposed to what they believe is the compromising of American sovereignty to such international institutions. The main challenger to eventual Republican nominee Robert Dole in 1996 was Pat Buchanan who was the darling of the Republican right. The Buchanan campaign’s foreign policy echoed themes of isolationist Republicans in the 1930s and the early Cold War. In the 30s isolationist Republicans used the slogan of “America First?to oppose U.S. involvement in the political conflicts in Europe, so I used this catchy slogan to characterize the Republican right’s ideological tendencies.
Buchanan openly opposed U.S. membership in the UN, IMF, and the WTO and bitterly criticized the opening of the U.S. market to foreign companies via the NAFTA Treaty with Canada and Mexico and other international agreements. He cared little what foreigners thought, believing the U.S. should avoid ideological contamination trying to understand and placate foreign powers that did not share our traditional American values.
My characterization of the Democratic left was less apt. I correctly expected the Democratic left to be more sensitive to the issues that concern non-Western peoples and less supportive of American and European based transnational corporations and American intervention in the economies and politics of non-Western nations. However, unfortunately I chose the term Globalist to describe their more internationally oriented mind set. Of course, in the past decade the term globalism has been appropriated by the very transnational corporations and political forces that the Democratic left opposes. I will have to come up with a new term for this ideological tendency. But I was generally on the mark when it came to the particular international issues that engage the Democratic left in the post-Cold War world.
The Persistence of “Culture Wars?return to top
I also think a lot was gained by breaking down the ideological spectrum on domestic issues into two separate dimensions—political economic issues and social or identity issues. Historically, political scientists have tended to focus on bread and butter issues; that is the kind of political economic issues that admittedly drove American parties and elections from the Great Depression into the 1960s and will always be crucial issues in American politics. But beginning with the civil rights movement in the 50s and accelerating with activation of other ethnic minorities, the peace movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement, political movements more concerned with identity and non-economic issues have become ever more important in American politics. Most of these movements were on the left. But similar identity movements have also arisen on the right, beginning with the “white backlash?of the mid-60s but eventually crystallizing around another wave of revival of conservative Christianity asserting traditional values and the primacy of the historical white, Anglo-American cultural identity.
Of course, political scientists have not been oblivious to these developments. Scammon and Wattenberg first proposed the splitting off of social issues from historical economic issues in the late 1960s and many other political scientists have followed suit. The issue of identity has been central to the scholarly debates over the utility of post-modernist thought. But I believe I made a contribution to generalizing about the political impact of these identity movements. By breaking down a whole series of identity movements and social issues into the four part typology of a centrists dialog over cultural monism and cultural pluralism, influenced by the more polarized ideological debate over new identity movements vs. the Christian right, I think I helped clarify how a wide range of issues play out in the political process. Certainly Pat Buchanan’s call to arms at the 1996 Republican convention showed that the Republican right is still waging these cultural wars. And the early opposition to the Bush administration has shown that the ethnic identity, women’s, environmental, and peace movements are still active forces on the American political scene.
return to top
BACK TO THE POWER OF PRESIDENTIAL IDEOLOGIES FRONT PAGE