Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent by E.J. Dionne

Author:E.J. Dionne [Dionne, E.J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

II

The great transformation of the Republicans from the party of national action to the party of states’ rights and a restricted view of what the Constitution allows the federal government to achieve is simultaneously well known and underappreciated.

The party’s shift toward conservatism is certainly a given in our discourse. Javits himself conceded as much when he acknowledged in his book how often he was asked: “Isn’t it illogical for you to be a Republican?” What’s missed is how profound this shift in the Republican worldview actually was, how much of a break it represented from the party’s history, and how radically the definition of what constitutes “conservatism” had changed and narrowed. Liberal though he was in conventional terms, Javits was not wrong to insist that the conservative’s task in politics always involves “explaining why the complexities of existence stand in the way of utopian solutions to all problems, and why in so many hard cases the best we can hope for is a succession of provisional compromises or accommodations, subject to change as circumstances change.” This is the conservatism of prudence and complexity that acknowledges human imperfection.

But I have offered Javits his say here for a larger reason. By emphasizing the ideas of Hamilton and Clay and their role in the early American story, his account underscores the flaws in currently popular historical understandings. Those understandings go something like this: The United States spent its first century or so after the Founding as a nation in which the federal government played an exceedingly limited role in public life. The Constitution was read as placing severe limits on government action. Economic life was left in the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs. Government “got out of the way” and let the market operate freely in a nation where individualism was the single, dominant American characteristic.

According to this view, it was only during the Progressive Era administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—and then, more dramatically, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—that the federal government became an active player in American economic life. And it was only with the Supreme Court decisions of the later New Deal years and after that this rapid growth of government was sanctioned as constitutional. Not for nothing have judicial conservatives spoken of “the Constitution in exile,” by which they mean the Constitution as it was understood before New Deal jurisprudence opened the way for federal power to exert itself.

As in most conventional accounts, this one is based on certain important truths. The Progressive and New Deal Eras were breakthroughs, as I will be arguing later. Progressives signaled this when they amended the Constitution to allow for an income tax, to provide for the direct popular election of senators—overturning the system of elections by state legislatures that was both elitist and deferential to states’ rights—and also by extending the right to vote to women. The FDR years changed the country profoundly as the federal government assumed a much larger role in regulating the workings of banking and commerce and the relations between employers and employees.

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