Guest Blog by John Broesamle: Is America on the Threshold of a Transforming Era of Reform? (Part I)

During the primary season, we were told by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that the country was ripe for a sweeping new political movement which would transform the nation in profound ways. Once nominated, the moderate candidate, Joe Biden, evoked the memory of FDR and advanced the most ambitious agenda of any Democratic presidential candidate in decades. Democrats were, all of them, for big change; the difference was over how big. Now that Biden has been elected, we should be asking the question: Is America on the threshold of a great new era of reform?

Three decades ago, I debated the answer to that same question with the noted historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had been the resident historian of the Kennedy Administration. Together with his equally distinguished father, the senior Arthur Schlesinger, Schlesinger Jr. had argued for decades that American politics runs in predictable cycles: every thirty years or so, there is a reform movement that turns the country to the left, leaving behind landmark change. In a book published in 1990, I stated flatly that this was – to borrow a word from Joe Biden – malarky. Quite to the contrary, I argued, reform movements occur in a staccato fashion and tend to materialize unpredictably. Schlesinger and I had a dignified scholarly debate. Perhaps as a result, he soon modified the theory to claim only that every three decades reform movements have an opportunity to materialize. I would argue that they may materialize at any point, but that they are not cyclic. That is, unlike a pendulum or a metronome, they are not predictable.

A reform movement as historians define it is a political wave that has clear leadership, sweeps up millions of supporters, and is directed toward liberal or progressive – pick your term – political goals. Often these goals are social (racial equality, women’s right to vote, women’s right to choose). These movements can be broadly focused across an array of causes, or they can be narrower. Again, they originate on the left. Changes of the kind Donald Trump attempted to institute do not qualify – although in recent years the right has tried to appropriate the word “reform” from the left, relabeling it “conservative reform.”

Are we on the cusp of a reform movement now? Surely there is a vast array of issues crying for attention, together with proposals to address them: COVID-19, climate change, economic recession, access to health care, racial justice, infrastructure, income stagnation, college debt, on and on. What are the chances all this will add up to a political movement along the lines of the Progressive Era (1900-17), the New Deal (1933-39), or the Great Society (1964-68) – something on a truly transformative scale?

The chances depend on a number of factors, some of which I will describe here. It is impossible to assign weight to them because their relative weight will vary from era to era. Still, if historic patterns hold, a truly transformative wave can be expected to include all or nearly all of them.

The first is a sense of crisis about a set of problems that are clearly identified and widely perceived as demanding attention. We see that today in the ones I have listed above. This sense of crisis grows out of a widespread unease and anxiety. We cannot measure such things over the country’s history, but if we could, we would likely find that this society is presently experiencing more of both than at any time since the Civil War.

Unease and anxiety, and the sense of crisis, lead in turn to broad public support for change – a widespread enthusiasm for dramatically altering the political and often the social order. That sense is never universal – conservatives have made an energetic stand for the old ways in every reform era, compelling progressives/liberals to compromise. Today, though, is remarkably different. The GOP has shown an increasing unwillingness to yield or compromise at all, notably during the Obama Administration and climaxing with the Trump era.

Usually, support for change is accompanied by a sense of moral outrage, together with a parallel surge of idealism. This idealism is often naïve – about what is possible, about society’s tolerance for change, about the way that politics works, even about human nature. Idealism and moral outrage used to come from the churches; think of Martin Luther King Jr.  Reformers need to seize the moral high ground, and they have had no better supporters than ministers, priests, and rabbis. Today, although the black church remains powerful, the mainline Protestant denominations are fading stars. A massive counterforce now stands in the way of any new liberal movement – politicized white evangelicalism. Eight in ten white evangelicals voted for Trump this year. Clearly, today’s religious moral outrage cuts in both directions.

Nothing prods action better than a vocal and demonstrative radical left. These people are the necessary scolds – they nag and insist and act out and offend. That is their job. Theodore Roosevelt called them the lunatic fringe. Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson understood their role well. Roosevelt once met with a group of agitators, and after a while said: “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.” What drove FDR leftward were socialists, civil rights advocates, militant labor unions, and radical agitators like Huey Long. Bernie Sanders is perhaps the counterpart of Gene Debs or Norman Thomas a century ago, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Emma Goldman or Mother Jones. The individual leadership may be there today. But where is the organizational heft? Can groups like Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement, and Democratic Socialists of America wield the same kind of clout? That remains to be seen.

Mounting pressure for change leads people out of their individual private world and toward focusing on the national political arena. Unless there is a war or a big international incident, foreign policy is always of peripheral interest to the American people, all the more so when the country is undergoing major internal reform. Both Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson thought of foreign policy as an annoying distraction, like hives. (Each wound up being dominated by it.) During sweeping reform eras, foreign policy and national defense concerns get marginalized. Ironically, Donald Trump has already tried to accomplish that.

A heightened concern for others gains ground, as against the default pursuit of personal interest. The new ideal becomes collaboration between classes and groups. Reform eras tend to stress democracy and democratic values. The poor, downtrodden, and oppressed draw national attention. Joe Biden is explicitly trying to summon these values right now. So did Barack Obama. 

Finally, reform eras are polarizing. Polarization erupts around issues of politics, race, class, economics, gender, and now gender identity. No one can say we are not polarized today. The problem is that we are hyper-polarized. In the highest-turnout presidential election in 120 years, both Biden and Trump got more popular votes than any other candidate in history. Reform administrations do not have to win by landslides, but they do have to have some sort of mandate, together with majorities in Congress to carry it out. The outcome in 2020 was as mixed as could be – Biden won, but the Democrats suffered major disappointments in Congress; likely the GOP will still control the Senate following the upcoming Georgia runoffs. That fact would in itself obliterate any chance of a new New Deal, and the incoming Biden Administration is drawing up two sets of plans depending on how the Georgia races turn out.

Are the circumstances, then, which typified twentieth-century reform waves present right now? One can only conclude that the signals are mixed. On the whole, they point toward caution about predicting change on a genuinely massive scale – at least for now. Over the longer term, I believe a combination of systemic dysfunctionality in the way our democracy performs, demographic change, and continually accumulating crises that our society has to confront will lead toward a new reform movement, either abruptly or perhaps as a slow-moving avalanche. It has happened both ways in the past. One always stands to be surprised. 

My debate with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was basically about the wisdom of trying to predict human behavior. By the way, you likely noticed the fact that those early-to-mid-twentieth century reform movements we have been referring to did begin roughly thirty years apart. Knowing this, Schlesinger was anticipating another one right on schedule, around 1990. He was disappointed, though, and by the end of that decade was struggling to account for why it had failed to happen yet. The Clinton Administration did not live up to his expectations, to put it mildly, nor even the Obama Administration later. (Schlesinger died in 2007.) It has now been fifty-five years since the massive-scale Great Society peaked. Schlesinger was mistaking a coincidental pattern for a predictable one. 

So, what will happen next? I hesitate to predict. But, of course, you already knew I would.

John Broesamle, a previous contributor to RINOcracy.com, is Emeritus Professor of History at California State University, Northridge. His books on American politics and society include Reform and Reaction in Twentieth Century American Politics, Twelve Great Clashes that Shaped Modern America: From Geronimo to George W. Bush (with Anthony Arthur), and, most recently, How American Presidents Succeed and Why They Fail: From Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.