The party is, at most, a fund-raising vehicle for a telegenic candidate. If a candidate is popular and wins the nomination, the party becomes supportive. That candidate then benefits slightly by getting more resources, organizational support, and new lists of potential donors. In fact, primary candidates find it useful to run against the party establishment. It gives their campaigns freshness and the appeal of the underdog battling the machine -- an approach that worked for George McGovern, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter. Today, however, this strategy is more difficult because there is no longer an establishment to run against. Who was the Democratic establishment’s candidate in 1992? Bill Clinton, Bob Kerry, or Paul Tsongas? None of the above. The success of George W. Bush was due not to his being the candidate of the establishment but to his being the candidate of his family; he had the two things you need in a partyless system -- name recognition and a fund-raising machine. Anyone who has both, whether they have any experience in politics or not, is now at a huge advantage. Thus, in this new, more “democratic” system, we have seen many more political dynasties, celebrity officials, and billionaire politicians than before. And this is only the beginning. As the political party declines further, being rich and/or famous will become the routine path to high elected office.
For most of American history, presidential candidates were reflections of their political parties. Today, parties are reflections of their candidates. If the candidate moves to the center, the party moves to the center. If the candidate bucks left, the party bucks left. Once Clinton was elected as a “New Democrat” it became difficult to find any old Democrats in Washington. And when George W. Bush announced that he was a compassionate conservative, the rest of the Republican Party discovered that was what they had been all along. The political party today is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by a popular leader.
That’s some pretty good analysis of what we have, in fact, witnessed in the twenty years since it was written.
And there’s another section that seems eerily prescient -- although much less intentionally so. In describing the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s, Zakaria says this:
Germany at the turn of the century seemed to be moving in the right direction toward democracy. Then came World War I, which killed 2 million Germans and left the country devastated and was closed with the punitive and humiliating peace of Versailles. The years after Versailles saw the mass flight of ethnic Germans from Poland, Russia, and other eastern lands into Germany (a migration that produced immense social turmoil); hyperinflation; and finally the Great Depression. The liberalizing strains in German society were overwhelmed by much darker ones, and political order collapsed. In particular, hyperinflation -- which Niall Ferguson has aptly called an “anti-bourgeois revolution” -- wiped out the savings of the middle class and utterly alienated them from the Weimar Republic. The country became easy prey for extreme ideologies and leaders. It is common to read history backward and assume that Germany was destined to become what it became under Hitler. But even the United Kingdom and the United States had their ugly sides and desperate demagogues who grew in strength during the Great Depression. Had those countries gone through twenty years of defeat, humiliation, chaos, economic depression, and the evisceration of their middle classes, perhaps they, too, would have ended up being governed by demagogues such as Huey Long and Oswald Mosley rather than the statesmen Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
And now here we are, twenty years later, twenty years filled, for some sectors of our society, with defeat, humiliation, chaos, and the slow eroding of our middle class, and here we find ourselves more susceptible than ever to demagogues instead of statesmen.
But the best part is the piece that hits home what is only slightly alluded to there. Why didn’t the demagogues who grew in strength during the Great Depression take power in the United States, as they did in Germany?
Supporters of free markets often make the mistake of thinking of capitalism as something that exists in opposition to the state. When it is time to pay taxes, this view can seem self-evident. But the reality is more complex. Although in the twentieth century many states grew so strong as to choke their economies, in a broader historical perspective, only a legitimate, well-functioning state can create the rules and laws that make capitalism work. At the very least, without a government capable of protecting property rights and human rights, press freedoms and business contracts, antitrust laws and consumer demands, a society gets not the rule of law but the rule of the strong. If one wanted to see what the absence of government produces, one need only look at Africa -- it is not a free-market paradise.
In the developing world, the state has often had to jump-start capitalism. Again this mirrors the European example, where modern capitalism began with the state taking large tracts of agricultural land from the hands of feudal lords and using it in ways that were more market-friendly. This move broke the back of the large landowners, the most politically reactionary group in society. As important, millions of acres of land were moved out of stagnant feudal estates, where they lay underutilized, and into a market system. The new owners, often the farmers who tilled the land, used the land more efficiently, since they now had an incentive to do so, or they rented or sold the land to someone who would. In other words, it took a massive redistribution of wealth to make capitalism work.
They didn’t because the state provided the infrastructure necessary for capitalism to survive, much like the redistribution of land in Europe that helped capitalism take over from feudalism. In one of those weird coincidences of life, on the day I am writing this I began reading The Common Good by Robert Reich, in which he makes the same point even more bluntly. To paraphrase, the government and capitalism are not in opposition to one another. In the sense that it is the government (or the Leviathan, if you prefer) that provides the infrastructure of laws and property rights that allows capitalism to function, the government is capitalism.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
