In 1980 and again in 1984, the American electorate voted Ronald Reagan into office with gusto. In 1988, Americans had relatively little enthusiasm for either Democrat Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, or Republican George Bush, vice president of the United States. Nor was there wild enthusiasm in 1992, when the incumbent Bush was opposed by the youthful governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. However, during the Bush administration, the American dream seemed somehow to have slipped farther away. True, the world was probably a safer place than it had been at any time since the end of World War II (but it was still a dangerous world), and the United States had acquitted itself in the best tradition of its long democratic history by resolving the Persian Gulf War. Yet the electorate felt that President Bush habitually neglected domestic issues and focused exclusively on international relations. Candidate Bill Clinton’s acerbic campaign manager, James Carville, put it directly, advising Governor Clinton to write himself a reminder lest he forget the issue on which the election would be won or lost: “It’s the economy stupid.”
Third Party Politics
The economy. It was not that America teetered on the edge of another depression in 1992. Although homeless men, women, and even children could be seen on corners and in doorways of the nation’s cities, there were not the long bread lines or crowded soup kitchens of the 1930s. But a general sense existed among the middle class, among those who had jobs and were paying the rent, that this generation was not doing “as well as” previous generations. Sons were not living as well as fathers, daughters not as well as mothers. The pursuit of happiness, fueled in large part by cash, had become that much more difficult, and a majority of voters blamed it on George Bush. Bill Clinton entered the White House by a comfortable margin, but if voters rejected Bush, a sizable minority of them also rejected Clinton.
For the first time since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose candidate in 1912, a third-party contender made a significant impact at the polls. Presenting himself as a candidate dissatisfied with both the Republicans and Democrats, billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot (b. 1930) told Americans that they were the “owners” of the nation and that it was about time they derived benefit from such ownership.
The New Right
The Perot candidacy was not the only evidence of widespread discontent with politics as usual. Americans who had come of age in the 1960s, the era of the Great Society and of protest against the Vietnam War, tended to take liberalism for granted, as if it were naturally part and parcel of the American way. Beginning in the 1970s, however, a conservative counter-movement gained increasing strength. Its values rested upon the family as traditionally constituted (father, mother, kids), a strong sense of law and order, reliance on organized religion, a belief in the work ethic (and a corresponding disdain for the welfare state), a passion for decency (even to the point of censorship), and a desire for minimal government.
Right to Life
Many who have identified themselves with the new right hold passionately to a belief that abortion, even in the first trimester of pregnancy (when the fetus cannot survive outside of the womb), is tantamount to murder. The so-called Right to Life movement has spawned a fanatic fringe, whose members have bombed abortion clinics and have intimidated, assaulted, and even murdered physicians who perform abortions. However, the mainstream of the movement has relied on legal means to effect social change, with the ultimate object of obtaining a constitutional amendment barring abortion. The Right to Life movement became so powerful a political lobby that the Republican party adopted a stance against abortion as part of its 1992 platform.
Regardless of one’s attitude toward abortion—whether pro life or pro choice—many Americans are alarmed by a trend among particular political candidates and even entire political parties to become identified with single issues—such as abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, gay rights—rather than with an array of issues, let alone a philosophy of government.
Christian Right
The First Amendment to the Constitution specifies that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Church and state are explicitly separated in the United States; but the government freely invokes the name of God in most of its enterprises. Our currency bears the motto “In God We Trust,” both houses of Congress employ full-time chaplains, and (despite occasional protests) the Pledge of Allegiance most of us grew up reciting at the start of each school day describes the United States as “one nation, under God. “ While many Americans shake their heads over their perception that religious worship has somehow gone out of fashion in America, most opinion polls agree that approximately 96 percent of the population believes in God. A 1993 survey was able to turn up fewer than one million Americans willing to identify themselves as atheists-out of a total U.S. population, according to the 1990 census, of 248,709,873.
The rise of the so-called Christian Right—religiously motivated conservatism-should surprise no one, though it has worried many, who see in overt unions of religious faith and politics a threat to First Amendment freedoms. At present, the most significant political manifestation of the Christian Right is the powerful lobbying group called the Christian Coalition, which was spun off of the unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign of religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (b. 1930). Based in Washington, D.C., the coalition boasts a membership of 1.6 million and has claimed responsibility for the Republican sweep of the Congress during the midterm elections of 1994. In 1995, the organization spent more than a million dollars mobilizing its “born-again” evangelicals behind the conservative “Contract with America” promulgated by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. While some people have welcomed what they see as a return of morality to American political life, others see the Christian Right as narrow, coercive, and intolerant.
The Age of Rage
In turn, the Christian Right has viewed liberal America as too tolerant of lifestyles and beliefs that seem alien or offensive to certain religious principles, or that apparently threaten the moral fiber of the nation.
This is hardly a new dialogue. Right and left have been taffy-pulling national life since well before the Revolution. Indeed, Americans may be too accustomed to thinking in terms of right versus left; for another body of belief appears to want little to do with either side. In its mildest form, this group has expressed itself in a third political party, the Libertarians, founded in 1971. Libertarians oppose laws that limit personal behavior (including laws against prostitution, gambling, sexual preference), advocate a free market economy without government regulation or assistance, and support an isolationist foreign policy (including U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations).
But look around and listen. It’s not Libertarian dialogue that you hear. It’s rage. Most of the time, it”s part of the background, the Muzak that marks the tempo of our times: angry slogans on bumper stickers, the endless, staccato of sound bites reeling out from the television tube, the jagged litany that issues from talk-radio DJs, and the remarkable volume of violence that plays across movie screens. Sometimes the rage explodes, front and center.
