Two possibilities for 2011

It was last July 4 that I speculated for the first time that George W. Bush had been the crisis President of our era, that his Administration had shaped our domestic and foreign policies for some time to come, and that the United States was well launched into a new Gilded Age that would last for at least twenty years. That prediction, it seems to me, looks awfully good in light of the tax cut deal. Barack Obama has given up any ideas he ever entertained of leading a liberal resurgence and reviving the spirit of the New Deal. Mainstream commentators are now lauding him as a compromiser because he has pre-emptively given in to the new Republican Congressional minority. More alarmingly, he has agreed to an outrageous, completely unnecessary 2% cut in the social security payroll tax, whose genesis remains a complete mystery to me, but which will serve as an effective foot in the door for Republican efforts to gut the program. In foreign policy he remains committed to the war in Afghanistan. He may, before this weekend is out, have salvaged two victories: the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (see yesterday's post), and the ratification of the START Treaty with Russia. But in general, he seems to have stepped into the role of his fellow Nomad Dwight Eisenhower--the President from the weaker party of his era who enjoyed control of the Congress for only two years, and who rapidly abandoned any idea of reversing the changes inaugurated by the stronger party during the previous decade or more. Obama did, of course, pass one major reform, but I think the odds are about even now that the Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional by a 5-4 vote within two years. He obviously hopes to ride this new horse into a second term in the White House, and he may well succeed.

There are, however, two threats to this picture of emerging consensus. Obama has nothing to fear from progressives like myself, who, especially where foreign policy is concerned, matter only in primaries. We have been decimated in Congress and are not restoring our ranks, and we have no large body of organized allies among the people. He does, however, have to deal with the militant, Tea Party Republican right, who are determined to seize the political initiative. More importantly, we still do not know if the country can survive in the state to which it has evolved, especially economically, over the last few decades--the state which he and his advisers have now accepted as the new normal.

The most interesting reading I did last week was this article in The New Yorker about Congressman John Boehner and the new Republican minority. The first half of the article, about Boehner himself, is the less interesting part, because he is not a very interesting man--he is almost a caricature in miniature of his fellow Ohioan (and fellow Prophet, generationally), George Babbitt, created more than 80 years ago by Sinclair Lewis. The more interesting parts come at the end, which turns to three of Boehner's leading lieutenants, all Gen Xers: Patrick McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor. (It's an interesting symptom of the changes in American political life that the House Republican leadership consists of three Catholics and a Jew; WASPS, except in the South, are more likely to be Democrats.) These men are true revolutionaries dedicated to gutting federal and state government. Ryan wants to turn Medicare into a voucher system allowing seniors to buy private insurance--a catastrophic idea that would kick in just as his own Generation X began to retire. They do not trust Boehner and intend to hold his feet to the conservative fire in months to come. It was for their benefit, I am sure, that Boehner explicitly rejected the word "compromise" in his interview with Leslie Stahl. Developments yesterday suggest that a government shutdown is only months away.

I mentioned a week or two ago that there seemed to be a split emerging between establishment Republicans in the Senate and the new House. When every Senate Republican sent a letter announcing that they would oppose any new legislation in the Senate until the Bush tax cuts were extended in toto, they added that they also would demand a new budget that would carry the federal government well into next year. That interesting proposal appeared to be a hedge against an early, Tea-Party led confrontation with the White House, reminiscent of the 1995 government shutdown from which Bill Clinton emerged the victor. The Senate Republicans, however, apparently lost their nerve. Yesterday they triumphantly blocked a budget bill that would have funded much of the government through the current fiscal year. The old Congress should of course have taken care of the budget months ago, but Republican obstructionism made that impossible. Now the Senate Republicans say the new House has to be heard from--and it will be. We will have to wait and see how far they want to go, and what kind of "compromise" Barack Obama will have to give in to to pass a budget. Given his performance this month, when he still had considerable bargaining power, I am not optimistic about where he might make a stand

Deficit cutting, an end to stimulus programs, and an end to serious regulatory projects will leave the economy more or less where it is. When unemployment benefits run out, as they almost surely will, misery will become more widespread. Meanwhile, Republicans at the state and local level, especially in red states, will be poushing a variety of anti-government and theocratic projects. Rick Scott in Florida is preparing a statewide school voucher plan, and the Governors of Ohio and Wisconsin have already killed big high-speed rail projects in the midst of the worst unemployment since the Depression. That is the potentially fatal flaw in Republican plans: they will do nothing for the country, and very little for the deficit. The question is whether they can continue successfully to blame Obama and the Democrats for anything that goes wrong--and whether, as seems most unlikely, the Demcoratic Party can now reverse course and start building a genuine left-wing following.

"A special Providence," Bismarck once remarked, "looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America." Until now we have had enough friends on Olympus to avoid the worst, but our luck may have run out. I hate to say this, but a new bipartisan consensus that turns its back on government intervention to create jobs and continues to feed our leading corporate beasts may actually be the best alternative we can hope for for the time being. I really have no idea where further economic decline and budgetary chaos might lead us. Our political class, however, seems as feckless, money-beholden and irresponsible as it did in the decades after the Civil War. Liberals will rejoice if Don't Ask, Don't Tell is repealed today, and that would remove an important obstacle to full participation in American life. Alas, the opening of opportunity to women, minorities and gays has been accompanied by an increase in economic inequality, a steady collapse of government services, and the rise of new and very powerful institutions who do little or nothing for the public at large. Eventually I shall be exploring the question of whether those changes, in some bizarre way, actually go together.

P.S. The repeal is how history and it is a great day in America, and especially within the American military. An institution that relies on integrity cannot but be hurt by hypocrisy. I'm looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

A guest contribution

Last March I did a post attacking the opinion of Air Force General McPeak, retired, who had argued against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and claimed that he did not know of anyone who had argued that allowing gays to serve would make units more combat effective. "General," I said, "let me be the first." I may have been the first, but I wasn't the last. The following op-ed by a Marine Captain appeared today, addressed to the commandant of the Marine Corps.

Sexuality Won't Matter In Battle

By Nathan Cox

I am an active-duty U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer. I have deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan and have commanded infantry Marines in combat.

On Tuesday, Gen. James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, said he believes repealing "don't ask, don't tell" and allowing gay and lesbian Marines to serve openly could "cost Marines' lives" because of the "mistakes and inattention or distractions" that might ensue. I am not homosexual. And in this instance, I must respectfully disagree with my commandant.

The commandant cites the importance of cohesion within small combat units and warns against its disruption by allowing homosexuals to stop concealing their identities. In my experience, the things that separate Marines in civilian life fade into obscurity on the battlefield. There, only one thing matters: Can you do your job? People care much more about whom you voted for or what city you're from while on the huge airbase with five Burger Kings, or back in the States, than they do when they're walking down a dusty road full of improvised explosive devices in Haditha or Sangin.

In the end, Marines in combat will treat sexual orientation the same way they treat race, religion and one's stance on the likelihood of the Patriots winning another Super Bowl. I do not believe the intense desire we all feel as Marines to accomplish the mission and protect each other will be affected in the slightest by knowing the sexual orientation of the man or woman next to us.

In the recent Defense Department survey, 58 percent of combat arms Marines said they felt allowing homosexuals to serve openly would negatively affect their unit, but 84 percent of combat arms Marines who had served with a homosexual said that there would be no effect or that the effect would be positive. It seems obvious that if allowing homosexuals to serve openly degraded performance, rather than improved it, a majority of Marines who had served with homosexuals would oppose repeal. Yet this is not the case, and homosexuals serve openly in the militaries of Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel and others with no ill effect. This suggests that much of the opposition toward repeal within the Marine Corps is based on the politics of individual Marines and not any measurable military effect.

Repeal would undoubtedly produce some disruption, but if other nations' experiences are any guide, it will be so minimal as to be essentially nonexistent. Consider what is likely to happen if and when "don't ask" is repealed: Lance Cpl. Smith will be having a typical Marine conversation with Lance Cpl. Jones, and the topic will turn to women. Smith will remark on how much he enjoys their company. Jones will reply: "Actually, man, I like dudes."

Smith: "Really?"

Jones: "Yeah, man, really."

Smith: "Wow. I didn't know that."

Both will then go back to cleaning their rifles.

Is it really likely that lance corporals who know each other better than brothers, and may have saved each other's lives in split-second reactions during deployments, are suddenly going to refuse to serve in the same unit or quit the Corps because they have to share a shower?

Repeal will of course have many effects. Gay and lesbian Marines who are now barred from discussing their identities honestly with their superiors, peers and subordinates would be able to do their jobs free from the nagging knowledge that they are being less than honest with their brothers and sisters in arms. It is difficult to see how this could do anything but improve their job performance. Gay and lesbian Marines have long fought and died for a country that refuses to acknowledge their existence. Some are certainly among the Marines who have passed through Bethesda Naval Hospital and rest in Arlington.

I believe the reluctance many Marines feel about repeal is based on the false stereotype, borne out of ignorance, that homosexuals don't do things like pull other Marines from burning vehicles. The truth is, they do it all the time. We simply don't know it because they can't tell us.

It is time for "don't ask, don't tell" to join our other mistakes in the dog-eared chapters of history textbooks. We all bleed red, we all love our country, we are all Marines. In the end, that's all that matters.

I don't know if the author is a Gen Xer or a Millennial, but to me he is an American hero.

Who is Barack Obama?

I met Jonathan Alter in 1977, I believe, when he was a sophomore and I was a junior faculty member at Harvard. In 1978-9, his senior year, I advised his senior thesis, which rather eerily paralleled a critical part of the book I was going to write twenty years later on the origins of the Vietnam War. It was one of the most successful theses of that year. At that time he was hesitating between politics and journalism, and he chose the latter and has been at Newsweek for most of the time since. He has now written three books, the second, The Defining Moment, about the beginning of FDR's Presidency, and the third, The Promise, on the first year of Barack Obama's, which has only just appeared. It is surely the most thorough book we have on Obama and his works, although the tone of restrained optimism on which Jon managed to end it now seems sadly out of date.

Jon hails from Chicago, his subject's adopted home, and the book is dominated by midwestern restraint. His FDR book, as I understand it, was cut back significantly by his editor and was in some respects, I thought, a bit thin; this one is about as detailed as a piece of contemporary history can be. Like Bob Woodward, he has relied largely on interviews, but without letting the interview become the story in the way that Woodward so often does. The book alternates chapters on the major policy issues of Obama's first year, including the stimulus, the auto industry rescue, relations with the financial community, foreign policy issues, and health care, with chapters on Obama the man, his life in the White House, and a few other key figures like the Clintons and Rahm Emmanuel. Democratic Congressional leaders get less attention, and Republicans get almost none. Essentially the book treats the growth of the Republican opposition the way the White House did--as unfortunate background that occasionally intrudes. Neither Obama nor Emmanuel nor Alter seems to have understood, when Alter finished the manuscript in the early spring of this year, how devastating the November elections would be.

Anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama in action should read the book. However his Presidency turns out, Obama, like Bill Clinton and, I suppose, Ronald Reagan, is an extraordinary American success story, rising from genuinely modest origins and a broken home to become the first black President. He reached the top almost exactly as quickly as Clinton but he had a much shorter political career (much to the Clintons' disgust.) The book deepens, rather than altering, our understanding of him. He is both extremely intelligent and very careful, and his equanimity is genuinely legendary. (In one of his more daring moments, Alter suggests that every successful black man still has to take care not to seem too angry, although there are certainly exceptions to this rule in academia, at least.) On the other hand, Obama has a disturbing weakness for overbearing men around him--Larry Summers and Rahm Eammanuel both come to mind--which suggests he may be relying on others to act out the tacit parts of his own psyche. He has a real sense of justice and wants to do good. Yet I came away feeling more than ever that this remarkable man has a truly tragic flaw: he trusts the system. And because our system desperately needs fixing, that alone, I am afraid, makes him the wrong man in the White House at this moment in American history--even though he certainly still looks to me as good as any of the other major candidates in the year 2008.

Barack Obama was certainly capable and dedicated enough to have risen through our educational system without affirmative action, but I cannot help but wonder if it had an effect on him nonetheless. In generations past, those like W. E. B. Dubois or Thurgood Marshall whose skin color denied them certain educational or professional opportunities inevitably became skeptics dedicated, for better or worse, to fundamental change. In the same way, although a combination of ability, birth and circumstance gave me every possible educational advantage, my professional life has instilled me with eternal skepticism about the "best and the brightest" of many eras, but especially of my own. To put it bluntly, Obama seems to have a good deal more respect for the leading economists, bankers, and even politicians of our time than I do either for those same people or for my fellow historians. In the economic sphere, especially, he surrounded himself with very conventional thinkers, led by Larry Summers, whose previous record of creating havoc at Harvard did not disturb him. "[Treasury Secretary] Geithner," Alter writes, "didn't beliee in punishing Goldman or anyone else. And he didn't back fundamental restructuring of the banking industry because at bottom, he didn't think the system was broken." There are no Harry Hopkinses or Harold Ickeses in the upper ranks of this Administration, men with backgrounds as social workers who felt the system had to be changed. The same is true in foreign policy, where Hillary Clinton has turned out to be an entirely conventional secretary of state. If one thinks that the status quo in domestic and foreign policy just needed a little fine tuning, this would make sense. If on the other hand you believe that the economic and foreign policies of the last 10-20 years have led us to the brink of disaster, then Barack Obama is not your man.

To a considerable extent Alter accepted the Obama Administration's own view of its actual accomplishments. He gives them generous credit for the simulus, for the rescues that avoided the collapse of the banking system and the auto industry (both of which, to be sure, had begun under George W. Bush), and even for health care reform. Indeed, some of the most interesting passages of the book suggest that the health care bill will allow for a real transformation of American medicine, including the end of fee-for-service compensation. If that is true the Administration was very careful indeed not to tell us about it, though, and the changes in our political life that have taken place in the last year do not make it seem more likely. But having studied FDR, Alter is only too keenly aware of Obama's nearly complete failure to emulate FDR's greatest achievement, his ability to make the American people feel, in much worse times than these, that he was on their side and would lead them to safety.

A few weeks ago I heard FDR's grandson Curtis Roosevelt, who has become a good amateur historian himself, discuss the didfferences between Obama and his grandfather. He too had read Alter's book, and he emphasized Obama's isolation within the White House and his trust of the experts. Like Obama, FDR heard from the leading economists of the day that public works programs wouldn't help the economy in the long run, but unlike Obama, he didn't care. "[The Obama White House's] disconnection from the world," Jon writes, "was the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved fro a mere culture to something approaching a cult. Obama was skeptical of cant but still in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a 'right answer' to everything. But a right answer for whom?" By 2010, Alter writes, Obama was moving towards new job creation moves, but it turned out to be much too late.

Our leadership, both Democratic and Republican, has failed us, just as it did in the 1920s and for a long time in the aftermath of the civil war. Having grown up in the secure world created by our grandparents and parents, the Boom generation has blithely torn it apart, drawing perhaps on the evidence of our childhood and youth that nothing we did could do lasting damage to existing structures. Unfortunately, it has. I am delighted that my old student declined to jump on any particular bandwagon. He has given us an unusually detailed and balanced account of a key moment in recent history, far more informative per page than any of Bob Woodward's, and I like to think that the intense year we spent putting his thesis together might have had at least a little to do with it.

A new era begins

The almost complete disconnect between the machinations of Washington, D. C. and what is actually happening in the United States at large has seldom been more apparent. Conservative Republicans, of course, claim that the Tea Party movement and the new Republican majority in the House will close that gap, but this is the reverse of the truth, because the Tea Party has even less of substance to offer than corporate-dominated establishment Republicans and Democrats. Today's Republican Party presents a remarkable paradox. It commands impressive financial resources and has a 24/7 profit-making propaganda machine with no parallel in history on Clear Channel and Fox News. It has determination, affect, emotional commitment, and a strong and identifiable ideology. But it has nothing positive to offer in the sphere of government. It now also has to deal with its revolutionary Tea Party minority, which is dreaming, yet again, of remaking Washington and returning the country to some pastoral paradox that actually never existed. As the lame duck session goes to work, it is becoming clear how they may use their new power.

Several stories in the last few days' papers illustrate this point and paint a frightening picture of what is to come in the next few months. Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint have made it clear from early 2009 that their priority was Obama's defeat in 2012. To make it happen they practiced maximum obstructionism for two years, fought effective measures to deal with the recession, and rode economic distress to success in the recent elections. They have emphasized the deficit among all our ills but their first act is going to be to insist upon keeping the Bush tax cuts, which are responsible for a very large portion of it, in place. And because every Democratic political consultant seems to accept the idea that the Republicans have successfully defined the terms of the public debate, Barack Obama is not, apparently, going to try to stop them. The Constitution gives him the trump card: he could veto any extension of the tax cuts, or any extension that does not restore the Clinton-era rates on the highest bracket, thus bringing a great deal more money into the Treasury without hurting anyone who is currently unemployed. But he is not going to do so. Truly responsible action has been ruled out by thirty years of hysterical anti-tax propaganda. Instead, an excellent Washington Post story yesterday suggested that Obama's price will be more tax breaks for the working poor--a noble goal, surely, but one which will help make the deficit even bigger. Are we totally out of responsible politicians?

The same story had an interesting footnote introducing some subtlety into the McConnell-DeMint strategy, and heralding a Republican split. Every Republican Senator signed a letter the other day promising to stop consideration of any legislation (as Senate rules allow them to do) until both the extension of the tax cuts and an increase in the debt limit is passed. What slipped by was that they want to make the debt limit increase big enough to let the government keep operating until next October. McConnell is old enough to remember the government shutdown in the second half of Clinton's first term, which discredited Newt Gingrich and the Republicans badly, and he wants to stop militant Tea Party House Republicans from pulling the same trick. Today reports say the Administration wants to get a huge appropriations bill through as part of the price as well to tie the new Congress's hands until the fiscal 2012 budget has to be prepared. Curioser and curioser.

The Republicans are obviously in an uncompromising mood, and Barack Obama, as Paul Krugman rather angrily pointed out yesterday, seems to be in a yielding one. But the Republicans have nothing to offer--neither relief for the unemployed, which costs money they will not spend, nor real deficit reduction, which means cuts in programs upon which their older voters rely, or higher taxes to which they will never agree. Thus, as I suggested last week, a move towards a new "center"--one which half a century ago would have represented the right--still seems more likely than anything else. The President is also busy touting the war in Afghanistan, a trip which I have to admit reminds me of Johnson and Nixon's excursions to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, in the real America--the one the average population inhabits--things are getting worse once again. Unemployment rose last month by .2 per cent. The New York Times story on this reports that the public sector (which will now be starved more than ever) lost ground while private sector job growth was extremely modest. Corporate profits have been going up, but what the story does not explicitly say is that corporate profits now tend to correlate negatively, not positively, without growth--instead of pushing companies to hire more workers, they reflect shedding workers. The bulk of those hired have been temporaries, who do not receive benefits. This in turn suggests that we have already reached the point President Obama was warning us about when he introduced the health care reform bill: health care in the United States is too expensive for corporations to hire workers. That is why the only real cure was a public option, but it dropped out of the bill because it did not command the support of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, who for two years were the most powerful men in America. Another story, a brilliant piece of reporting by op-ed columnist Gail Collins, also relates to health care. In its rush to cut the budget, the Arizona legislature stripped certain transplants from Medicaid coverage, and now a laid-off 32-year old truck driver with four children named Francisco Felix has been denied a liver transplant he needs to survive because he does not have a $200,000 deposit. Senator John McCain's office declined to comment on the situation and Governor Jan Brewer, the scourge of illegal immigrants, refuses to take some federal stimulus money and put it into medicaid funding. It will be interesting to see if Collins' story has any results.

I have returned several times during the last year to the analogy between Weimar Germany, which became ungovernable in the midst of a depression, and the contemporary United States. The "conservative" Republican movement and the Tea Party, I have said again and again, are not really like the National Socialists--but in a sense, one could argue, that is actually unfortunate. Adolf Hitler had horrifying plans for the future which cost humanity tens of millions of lives, but in the short he realized that the depression had brought him into power and that he had to get the German people back to work. He did not undo the public works programs that previous governments had already begun--he expanded them massively, building the autobahns, and, of course, ramped up rearmament. The German economy had very serious problems throughout the 1930s, including shortages of food, but it was the only advanced economy in the world without unemployment. The Tea Party's policies are designed, in effect, to make our economic mess worse. Next week, I hope to discuss why the Democrats have failed so utterly not only to offer convincing policy alternatives, but also to connect with the American people.

What does the future hold?

I had hoped to be posting this weekend on a new book, The Promise, by my old friend and one-time student Jonathan Alter, but the book is so thorough and moves at such a relaxed pace (something I am enjoying, actually), that that will have to wait. It is really a portrait of the modern Democratic elite, composed both of my contemporaries and those about a decade younger (like Alter himself), and it does explain a lot about the failure of liberalism in the era of Boomer leadership, but I shall have to get further to have too much to say about it. Meanwhile I have been pondering the future in the wake of the elections, and particularly the role of the Tea Party, and although it is much too early to make any definite predictions, I would like to put forward a hypothesis as to what their role might be.

While the Tea Party undoubtedly benefited enormously from generous corporate support, it represents an authentic grass-roots movement, driven by fear, anger, and resentment. Much of it genuinely opposes the Republican establishment as well as the whole Democratic Party, and a terrible battle is brewing within the Republican Party to determine whether the nominee in 2012 will be Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin. (I would give Palin at least an even chance at this point.) The Tea Party is now strong enough in the House of Representatives to make real legislative trouble for the federal government, and a story in today's New York Times indicates that the new chief House investigator, Darrell Issa, plans extensive investigations of federal bureaucracies to uncover waste. The Tea Party is also rumored to contain powerful isolationist elements (led by Rand Paul, its leading Senate infiltrator) who might actually want to reduce the US role around the world. How far is this likely to go?

The answer, in my opinion, is not very far, at least with respect to actual results. The Tea Party is actually the first Boomer-led political movement since the protests against the Vietnam War (as opposed to social movements like the women's and gay rights movements), and is therefore long on outrage and vision and short on specifics. Its vision repudiates the last 80 years, if not the last century, of American history. And thinking about comparable movements in other lands, I am reminded on the one hand of the Parisian sans culottes during the French Revolution, and the German artisan movement during the revolution of 1848--two more or less radical groups defending what they saw as their way of life, who left relatively little imprint upon history.

The sans culottes represented the Parisian mob in the early 1790s. They hated aristocrats and thus initially were the shock troops of the middle-class Jacobins, led by Robespierre, but they were not really in sympathy with the Enlightenment or the modern world. Being artisans and urban workers themselves, they distrusted capitalist enterprise, which was in its infancy in France, and free markets. Their biggest economic demand was for a "just price" of bread. Like Tea Partiers, they wanted direct democracy. The German artisans in 1848 were in a similar position: they wanted political rights, but they also wanted to stop the march of free markets and capitalism that was going to destroy their way of life, and the middle class professionals in the Frankfurt Parliament that was trying to unify Germany shunned them.

The Tea Party, it seems to me, is in a comparable state of denial about the modern world. Big government remains a necessity, not an aberration. As their own equivocations show (see for example this exchange between Rand Paul and Eliot Spitzer), they have no plan actually to cut the federal budget significantly because they cannot significantly reduce the entitlements upon which their older supporters defend. They will be no more successful than the moribund left in reducing our presence abroad. And Palin herself, with her eye on the White House, is most unlikely to favor anything that would actually make corporate America--including the big banks--very angry. And thus, I predict, the Tea Party will have a fate similar to that of the Sans Culottes, whose leaders were guillotined by the Jacobins early in 1794, not long before Robespierre's own fall signalled the end of the radical phase of the French Revolution. They, like the radical Republicans in the late 1860s and early 1870s, will eventually be defeated without achieving their goals, and this in turn will mark the forging of a new American political consensus, one likely to last for a couple of decades.

Because the Tea Party can only offer investigation, rants and obstruction during the next two years, it is very likely to discredit itself. The Republican leadership in the House and Senate--which has pandered to the Tea Party without, for the most part, actually embracing it--is leery of a replay of the government shutdowns of the Gingrich era, which helped Bill Clinton on his way to re-election. There may be shutdowns all the same, but the leadership, I think, will be forced to bring them to an end fairly quickly. I expect some federal workers to be laid off and I expect my salary to be frozen--an equitable decision in itself, although less equitable since there are no comparable checks on the compensation of the Wall Street traders who got us into this mess. The government will obviously make no new efforts to create jobs, unemployment benefits may be allowed to lapse, and certain important infrastructure projects may well be cancelled. There will also be a renewed conservative onslaught on social issues in states like Kansas which are now totally in Republican hands. But although the Bush tax cuts now seem certain to be renewed in their entirety, the George W. Bush Administration pushed the tax cut frenzy about as far as it can go for the foreseeable future. Their achievement was, from their point of view a remarkable one. The great fortunes they created will dominate our political system for many years to come. They indeed shifted the political center even further to the right than Ronald Reagan did, and we Boomers will live with the effects of that change for the rest of our lives. But I suspect that as a practical matter, the conservative revolution has run its course, and the Tea Party will be disappointed.

The discrediting of the Tea Party will parallel the final discrediting of New Deal liberalism that has taken place over the last two years. Barack Obama has been a very moderate reformer (a subject for a later post), but Republican propaganda and the election results have now convinced the mainstream media (e.g. David Brooks) that he was too liberal for the American people. To judge from the way the White House is caving in on the tax cut issue, he himself may have reached this conclusion himself. In our last national crisis the New Deal initially discredited the extreme right, but the postwar reaction beginning in 1946 then discredited much of the Left, which had allied during the war with the Communist Party of the United States. We now seem ready to see the same drama played out in reverse. Liberalism seems ready to be proclaimed dead; the most militant conservatives will have to be sacrificed to create the new consensus--the consensus which, ironically, Barack Obama dreamed of recreating. His wish may yet come true.

Indeed, it is possible that in 2017, Barack Obama will leave office having played the role of the new U.S. Grant or Dwight Eisenhower, the man who actually put many of our partisan struggles behind us. That will be even more likely if Sarah Palin wins the Republican nomination and loses, as I am inclined to think she probably would. That in turn would spur the Republicans to become somewhat more respectable as well. None of this will be especially good for America. Unemployment will remain at levels that would never have been tolerated between 1946 and 1980; inequality will continue to increase; and the Millennial generation will have a very tough time establishing itself in secure employment. We will also, quite probably, remain mired in the Middle East. To judge from the post-civil war example, it could well be another thirty years before Congress seriously addresses the nation's real problems again. (Some states, in all likelihood, will revive activist government sooner than others.) But this is, as Strauss and Howe postulated, the rhythm of history. Liberalism seems to have lost this round of our great national struggles, and a period of quiet will be needed before battle lines can be redrawn and the struggle can resume with some hope of success. Let us hope that new foreign or domestic catastrophes will not usher in a further period of militance, which is likely to benefit the right once again.