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Creedal Passions in US Politics

27 November 2024


In 2016, Donald Trump likely secured his victory in his second debate with Hillary Clinton, when he forcefully repelled the moderators ganging up with his opponent on the issue of a potential intervention in Syria. Such was the conclusion of an article that failed to penetrate the media chaos of 2017 by the political scientists Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, which argued “that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate in Iraq and Afghanistan, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”


The story of the 2024 election can be reduced to a single individual – Liz Cheney, who in the closing weeks of the campaign was placed front and center before the voters in those very same states. It should be noted, for starters, that the Cheney name and record was likely a far greater red flag to Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan and beyond than the horrors in Gaza. But the theory behind those Liz Cheney events is even more sobering and revealing: the Harris-Walz campaign evidently dismissed any effort to reach the working class Obama-Trump voters of 2016, to run on Joe Biden’s actually popular legislative achievements, in favor of running up the score in the purple affluent suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.


Though the Romney-Clinton-Biden voter was a very real phenomenon, for more than thirty years leading Democrats have been obsessed with an elusive mass of moderate Republican suburban women who would turn out in droves for the Democrats on the abortion issue. On the relatively micro level, then, the defeat of Kamala Harris seems to mark the irrevocable demise of the center-left feminist paradigm bequeathed by the so-called “Year of the Woman” in 1992, just as the defeat of Mitt Romney marked the irrevocable demise of Reaganomics as a central organizing principle in presidential politics.

But as would befit the comeuppance of a political class that more truly than in any other case in my lifetime proved to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the 2016 election, the defeat of the one-note Harris-Walz campaign that literally embodied the classic Simpsons bit “abortions for some, miniature American flags for others” represents the rebuke of a far more deep-rooted value system, one very explicitly galvanized in the curious notion that the above syllogism amounted to the Democrats reclaiming the mantle of freedom from the right.


In 1970, the sociologist David Bazelon first described the rise of what he called the “New Class,” what today might more often be called the professional managerial class, arguing that “corporate capitalism has created a New Class of non-property owning managers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals whose life conditions are determined by their position within or in relations to the corporate order.” Then, in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, defining the years from 1960 to 1975 as the most recent of recurring periods, roughly every six decades, of what he called “creedal passion” – preceded by the American Revolution, abolitionism and the Civil War, and the Progressive Era, when broad social movements emerge in reaction to an increasingly untenable gap between the ideals of American society and the practices of American institutions.


Huntington identified those ideals across all four of his creedal passion periods with the American Creed – in short, the value system derived from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But in the core value system of the New Class, the mutually dependent principles of meritocracy and diversity of race, gender, and later sexual identity evolved into an absolute that overshadowed and eventually displaced the liberal and libertarian values of the American Creed. This was not unprecedented; the movement for Prohibition in the Progressive Era was a conspicuous earlier example of a creedal passion cause that aimed to restrict rather than expand freedom. But the rise of the New Class fatefully coincided with the ignominious conclusion of the Vietnam War, when the positive values of anticommunism – in other words, the American Creed – were on a fundamental level discredited.


This was certainly not obvious in the 1970s, but slowly metastasized throughout elite institutions and the culture, to the point from which emerged over the last decade the cultural movement that has gone by many names but at whose core is the doctrine of intersectionality – the first creedal passion period for the value system of the New Class.

It is at this point that the crucial distinction must be made between the American Creed and American exceptionalism, the latter representing a distinct set of historical conditions that like all historical conditions must inevitably pass away with time. The phrase has gone through many twists and turns, from its earliest esoteric interwar Marxist-Leninist meaning to a narrow Cold War-era definition that simply denoted the lack of a major social democratic party in the United States. But the literature that grew out of the latter broadened “American exceptionalism” into a concept that could be reduced to the three pillars of religiosity, belief in American mission in the world, and persistent upward social mobility.


Students of the history of American politics may notice that these three pillars correspond seamlessly to what was once seen as the “three-legged stool” of the conservative movement: religious conservatives, national security hawks, and economic libertarians. Indeed, it was thus that “American exceptionalism” as a concept had its bright final flameout as the catch-all slogan of the so-called “tea party” movement, whose collapse coincided with polling data in the late Obama years showing the dramatic collapse of belief in the three pillars among milennials – the stage set for the parallel rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.


The decline and fall of the three pillars of American exceptionalism can be traced from the 1950s, when the American Creed as set against Communism represented the zenith of any nationally unifying value system in American history, to the dawn of the 21st century. One must begin with religion, for on the eve of the 2016 realignment the greatest change already apparent was the decline of American religiosity, nearly to the same point as in Western Europe.


The culture war that began in the 1970s should be understood as the successor to an earlier Catholic-Protestant culture war that ended in a rout with the repeal of Prohibition and the demographics of the New Deal coalition. After the realignment that shattered the New Deal coalition in 1968, the Protestant mainline began its terminal decline and a rising evangelical movement, in effect, realigned to the historically Catholic side of the earlier culture war against the rising social base and value system of the New Class.


Again, what was not obvious in the libertine 1970s became so during the creedal passion of the 2010s, when a moralizing feminism that would have been recognizable in the Progressive Era reasserted itself. And this, in turn, came in the wake of the collapse of evangelicalism amid the wreckage of the George W. Bush presidency, coinciding with further engines of religious disaffiliation in the sex abuse scandal for Catholics and the second intifada for Jews.


The realignment of 1968 was most obviously anticipated by the 1964 election, when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide while carrying the Deep South. The case for emphasizing racial politics in that story is obvious if one is narrowly focused on voting behavior, as opposed to what is downstream from religion and economics. Indeed, the basic outline of that realignment was first evident in the election of 1952, when the Catholic working class delivered large majorities to Eisenhower while still reliably sending pro-labor Democrats to Congress, and it is here that the fate of upward mobility begins to become appparent.

After 1968, that voting bloc did not undergo the same sudden convulsion as the one-party South. The traditional Democratic urban machines representing the Catholic working class died slowly and peacefully, a process sublimated by the gradual transformation of American cities by gentrification on the one hand and lingering labor union loyalties on the other. The completion of this process following the 2008 financial crisis was perhaps the central demographic force behind the 2016 realignment.


On the flipside, just as Catholic working class support for Eisenhower revealed the reality over the self-image of the New Deal coalition, the coalition that elected and re-elected Bill Clinton was equally revealing of the Reagan coalition, that its backbone was not the Christian right or conservative movement but the slowly and steadily expanding New Class. Just as the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater anticipated the 24-year Nixon-Reagan supermajority begun in 1968, the landslide defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988 anticipated its succession four years later by the 24-year Clinton-Obama New Class ascendancy.


It was the great and profound long-term consequence of the 2008 financial crisis that would define the fate of that New Class ascendancy – the ascent of Silicon Valley to the commanding heights of the U.S. economy, and that economy’s complete reordering and realignment of the class system across the West. Indeed, the housing bubble that set the 2008 crisis into motion underscores how the conscious program of the George W. Bush administration fatally undermined all three pillars of American exceptionalism, and thereby created the conditions for the rise of Donald Trump.


What the financial crisis was to upward mobility and the collapse of evangelicalism was to American religiosity, to the sense of American mission in the world, of course, was the Iraq War. One need not linger on the expansive lineage from Manifest Destiny to Woodrow Wilson to the neoconservatives. At the height of the Iraq War, the political scientist James Kurth uniquely and shrewdly observed that the loss of what Andrew Bacevich called “the war for the Greater Middle East” – also known as the “global war on terror” – would be seen by that segment of American society historically overrepresented in the military as their profound betrayal by the champions of reasserting American predestination after the September 11 attacks.


For here lies the staggering irony of the last decade of American history: ordinary Americans from the base of the post-1968 Republican Party proved far more completely and radically disillusioned with American exceptionalism than the elites on the center-left. It has been argued that this particular legacy of the “global war on terror” amounts to a white nationalist backlash, a so-called “Second Redemption” after the failure of Reconstruction.


But quite the contrary: following the historic white class divide of pre-civil rights Southern politics, it was the upper class champions of “redemption” politics that assimilated into the party of Nixon and Reagan, and the more working class, largely Appalachian bloc that backed Bill Clinton before becoming the backbone of the Trump coalition. The declining elite of the Reagan and Bush eras, from Northern Virginia and the Great Plains to the affluent suburbs of Texas and Georgia, have rapidly integrated into the national center-left elite in a truly profound watershed in the history and sociology of American politics.


The 2024 election has made plain that this aborning class paradigm of American politics has extended to the non-white working class, a trend not likely to be arrested or reversed any time soon. It remains to be seen if, like the 1980 election after 1968, it will serve to decisively ratify a new era – but it is suggestive to examine a counterfactual 1980 electoral map combining the votes of Jimmy Carter and John Anderson, in which the electoral vote margin would have been in a comparable range to 2024 with razor-thin margins in at least a dozen states.


On a deeper level, this can be understood through a debunking of the common misconception that associates the major turning points of American history both at once with political realignment and the creedal passion cycle. The New Deal coalition could not have been built from the social gospel progressivism of William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, indeed it came to be by leading the Catholic side of the culture war in repealing Prohibition. The conservative movement was sustained as the core of the Reagan coalition only by a formidable evangelical voting bloc, whose alienation of ordinary Americans by 1992 provoked the “Year of the Woman” and the New Class ascendancy.


A related misconception was the basis for such hope invested at different moments in both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, in a transformative left-wing political era to follow the conservative generation that began in 1968. Simply put, the Clinton-Obama New Class ascendancy from 1992 to 2016 was that successor era. As a lonesome relic making a principled stand for his nominal party’s long-abandoned first principles, Bernie Sanders’ legacy will be to have been to this emerging multiracial silent majority what Rober LaFollette was to the New Deal coalition.


The principal legacy of the creedal passion of the 1960s, what would define the politics of the post-Cold War era, was a great zombie morality play in which for the neoconservatives, every crisis was Munich, and for the decadent political class they left behind after the George W. Bush debacle, every crisis was Selma. The hope that arises from this election’s decisive rejection of both is that just as the New Deal coalition bequeathed the American Creed itself as a concrete value system, the emerging multiracial silent majority can be the engine of its restoration.  


 



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