Essay #1

In this series of essays, InstantReplay is outlining a set of “alternate realities”, one or more of which may characterize the next few decades of American political history. For those of us coming of age in the Bush-Clinton Years (1989-2008), the question of where the country is headed is an important one.

In writing “future history”, InstantReplay is looking back at the current time from a specified point in the future, say 2032. That means seven presidential terms will have been served, technology will change radically, and 2004 will be at least as distant as 1976 is now.

In the Christian Science Monitor on November 5th, Liz Marlantes wrote an article related to our current discussion:

As dispirited Democrats take stock of across-the-board electoral losses and begin an inevitable bout of soul-searching and recriminations, they might take comfort in reflecting on the position of Republicans in 1976. President Gerald Ford had just lost the White House to Jimmy Carter, and with memories of Watergate still fresh, many Republican officials worried that their party faced permanent marginalization. Some even suggested changing the party's name, believing "Republican" had become a political albatross. "People were writing the obituary for the Republican Party," says Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and author of "The Losing Parties." Four years later, with President Carter plagued by long gas lines and the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan swept into office and launched a new period of GOP dominance.

Marlantes goes on to talk about the immediate concerns of the Democratic Party. As a reporter, she naturally tends towards the pedestrian view of current events; while something may be the biggest news ever today, most of it fades quite quickly when tomorrow’s big news arrives. However, not all news is temporary. September 11th, 2001, defined the opening of the new century as no other news day could, and its reverberations will be felt until and beyond the date of our future historian’s writing, November 5, 2032…

Back to the Future

The date is November 5, 2032. This is the first year since 2004 that Election Tuesday was held on the earliest date possible, November 2nd. Beyond that, there are few connections between the two years. When President Marlon Snow - yet another white, Protestant male - takes office on January 20th, a number of former Presidents will be in attendance, including George W. Bush, who made news for the first time in years when former First Lady Laura Bush passed away in March.

The “Bush-Clinton Era”, the subject of this essay, is really a spurious topic given the true contours of history. The accident of a 24-year period with Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Clinton may make for entertaining history, but it is essentially indistinguishable from what has followed.

Certainly, those years – like any quarter century – contained a number of important events, not least of which the breakup of the Soviet Union and the globalization of world trade – and world terrorism. However, the panicky response to terrorism when it first reached American shores is regarded now by most as a second incarnation of McCarthyism. While both “panics” broke up a certain number of truly anti-American organizations, neither addressed the actual issues of its time, and for that reason both fell by the wayside within a decade.

The Cold War, Americans soon realized, was far more an external threat than an internal one. By 1960, Democrats had taken over Washington and correctly (though often ineptly) led the country against the external, Soviet threat. John Kennedy’s successors did not, however, remain long in power. Just as Kennedy won the presidency by inventing a “missile gap”, his Republican opponents moved swiftly to neutralize that advantage, and ultimately took the most credit for winning the Cold War. Really, partisanship over an existential threat is silly (though it continues to this day); the fact is that both parties would have pursued very similar goals in the long run.

The successor to the Cold War was the challenge of globalization at home and abroad. As America adjusted to the interdependency of a super-specialized world economy and true freedom of trade, they confronted the realities of reactionism around the world. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq accomplished less democratization than partnerships, patience, and cooptation did in the Persian Gulf and North Korea, so such ventures soon ceased. While the international scene may have changed, and with it the rhetoric of American politicians, the political landscape within the U.S.A. was unaltered.

America entered the World War II/Cold War Era with a healthy two-party system given to fits, starts, and cycles. Not since the 1850’s had one party been truly ascendant – and in that case the vacuum gave birth to the then-liberal Republican Party. The current two-party system is functioning healthily today, and has been all the way.

Electoral mapping and demographics took off after the 2000 election, and analysts were further convinced of the importance of these studies when the 2004 election ended up closer in the electoral college than in the popular vote, whereas in most elections before and since the electoral college has magnified the popular vote. However, these effects were not a symptom of a changing polity or a new structure of democracy; rather they merely reflected on the controversy of Bush as a leader and the weakness of now-forgotten candidates Gore and Kerry.

Coming back to the present time – 2032 – it is evident now more than ever that the two-party system is here to stay. If we must infer something from American history, it would be that only internal existential crises can destroy or birth new major parties, and no such crisis has occurred since the Civil War.