American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  The post-election configuration of power in Washington reflected the continuing southernization of American politics. Not only was Clinton, like every successful Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, a southerner, but also the conservative congressional wing of the Republican Party had become increasingly southern-led. Gingrich, chief strategist for the conservative forces, was not a southern native but a northern transplant who adopted many of the South’s conservative values without all of its historical baggage. Born in Pennsylvania, the son of an Army officer, he spent part of his childhood in Europe before moving to Georgia, where he graduated from an all-white high school. He later wrote that he found segregation “shocking.” After getting degrees from Emory and Tulane, he went to Congress representing the suburbs of Atlanta. As he rose to power in the House, he found common political ground with southern-born conservatives like Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and William Archer.

  Gingrich’s suburban base typified the new character of southern political power. The drive for racial equality had hastened the movement of middle-class whites out of southern cities and out of the Democratic Party. In the suburbs where they decamped, they wanted low taxes and little government regulation, while becoming less fixated on the issue of race, in part because residential segregation minimized the flash points for racial conflict, such as school integration. Conservative suburban evangelical churches helped fuse religion and partisan politics. Southern religiosity contributed to a public and media fixation on sin and redemption among political leaders, especially Clinton.

  In the end, the 1994 Republican victory did not lead to a rollback of New Deal–Great Society welfare programs and 1970s environmental regulations, as the House Republican leadership and its business allies had hoped. Conservative environmental and government reorganization proposals, which included defunding environmental agencies, dissolving the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and terminating the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Education and the Council of Economic Advisers, failed when Republican moderates joined with Democrats to oppose them. Clinton and congressional Democrats also blocked efforts by the Republican leadership and business lobbyists to reduce social welfare spending, eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit, and cut taxes for the wealthy. Gingrich’s plan for a major reduction in Medicare spending proved politically disastrous, mobilizing opposition from senior citizen and health-care groups. The Democrats made hay when it came out that the amount of Medicare spending to be eliminated almost exactly matched a proposed tax cut for the rich.

  The most dramatic moment in the confrontation between the president and the Republican Congress came during the fall and early winter of 1995–96, when Clinton vetoed a series of appropriations bills, continuing resolutions (to allow government operations to continue without a budget), and measures raising the debt ceiling because they included drastic budget cuts or changes in environmental regulations. With the federal government running out of money and unable to borrow more, Clinton twice shut down all but its most vital operations, leaving most federal offices closed and federal employees without paychecks for twenty-seven days. Finally, congressional leaders gave in, agreeing with Clinton on continuing resolutions that got the government going again.

  While the Republican assault largely failed on its own terms, it pushed Clinton significantly toward the right, a process that had begun even before the 1994 election. After the health reform plan failed, Clinton proposed stricter limits on welfare and won a costly new anticrime program that included tougher sentencing guidelines and funding for more prisons and police officers. He also supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as heterosexual and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions.

  Once he saw the efficacy of Gingrich’s antistatist rhetoric, Clinton further distanced himself from liberal policies and symbols, betting his political survival on appropriating popular Republican themes and proposals. The strategy paid off for him personally but not for the Democratic Party, which continued to lose power and a distinct identity during the remainder of his presidency. Accepting a basic tenet of the Reagan revolution, in his 1996 State of the Union address Clinton proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” True to his word, though he periodically floated ideas for new liberal programs, he refrained from pressing for any major new federal spending. His restraint, along with an economic upturn, led to a federal budget surplus in 1998, for the first time since 1969. By the time Clinton left the White House, he had become the first president since Truman to reduce the number of civilian federal workers.

  Clinton’s chastened stance matched the diminished hopes that many Americans had during the 1990s, particularly on the liberal end of the political spectrum. Reformers largely abandoned their belief in grand designs and major breakthroughs, settling, like Clinton, for modest technocratic tinkering in spite of the end of the Cold War, the seeming absence of serious national security threats, and the enormous economic power of the country. The utopian enthusiasms that had been so common during Clinton’s college years had come to seem very distant, except, to a limited extent, on the Republican right, which brought to its counterreformist program millennial dreams. Gingrich, in particular, had a utopian (sometimes apocalyptic) streak almost completely lacking on the other side of the aisle, as he held forth on the fantastic possibilities of space exploration and “the Third Wave Information Age” and the glories that would come with a conservative restoration.

  Welfare reform represented the most important manifestation of what Clinton’s pollster and adviser Dick Morris called “triangulation,” an effort to find politically defensible space between the Republicans and the Democrats. Accounting for only 1 percent of federal spending, “welfare,” as the term was usually used—meaning Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—was dwarfed by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which together ate up nearly half of all federal spending. But welfare had disproportionate ideological, cultural, and political importance. Its critics portrayed it as a source of moral decay, replacing self-reliance and self-discipline with government dependency, a view that resonated with broad swaths of the public. With African Americans making up a large segment of the welfare population (37 percent in 1996, down from 46 percent in 1973), racism often lurked behind antiwelfare rhetoric. Because welfare benefited relatively few voters, defending it was difficult, in contrast to Medicare and Social Security, which with their vast pools of beneficiaries were politically untouchable.

  The Democratic Leadership Council had viewed welfare as deadweight on its effort to win national power. In 1992, Clinton called for ending “welfare as we know it.” He wanted to shift control over the system to the states and force recipients to go to work after receiving aid for two years, if need be having the government help create jobs for them. The Republican-proposed Personal Responsibility Act, part of the Contract with America, echoed some of these ideas, but it did not include the job creation, training, health-care, and daycare programs Clinton wanted to help ease welfare mothers into the labor market. Clinton vetoed two versions of the Republican bill, but after some modifications, in 1996 he signed a bill that terminated AFDC, replacing it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The new program handed control of welfare to the states, limited to two consecutive years and a lifetime total of five years the time recipients could stay on the rolls even if they could not find employment, reduced childcare and nutrition programs for welfare recipients, and made most teenage mothers of illegitimate children ineligible for assistance. The end of the federal commitment to helping mothers of children without other means of support, which had been in place since 1935, was one of the few terminations of a major New Deal program since the end of World War II.

  In 1996, Clinton easily beat veteran Republican senator Robert Dole, who ran a weak campaign, to become the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to win reelection. The 1993 National Voter Re
gistration Act significantly increased the number of citizens registered to vote by requiring states to provide voter registration applications with applications for driver’s licenses and otherwise increasing outreach efforts. But the number of actual voters did not increase proportionately, as turnout for the election fell to a postwar low of 49 percent. In spite of (or perhaps because of ) the intense partisanship in Washington, most Americans did not think it was worth their effort to vote. All the states Dole carried, with the exceptions of Indiana and Alaska, lay in the South or the Great Plains–Rocky Mountain region, while Clinton, benefiting from an economic upturn, dominated everywhere else, confirming the regional divide that had come to characterize national politics. The Republicans maintained control over Congress, denying Clinton the ability to pass any major initiatives even if he wanted to.

  Culture War

  Social and cultural issues loomed large on the political landscape of the 1990s, as fierce fights raged over efforts to use the power of the state to enforce moral standards. In many of these contests, liberals and conservatives reversed their usual positions: while conservatives generally argued for less government regulation, many of them—libertarians excepted—wanted to use government to control sexual and reproductive behavior and impose moral codes, while liberals, who tended to support more government regulation, wanted less of it in the personal realm. Power, not culture per se, lay at the heart of the so-called culture wars of the 1990s.

  Some of the most intense battles concerned sexuality and women’s control over their bodies. Many conservatives found the continuing liberalization of attitudes toward sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, and gender roles threatening to their moral beliefs and the strength of American society. Abortion in particular remained deeply divisive. Though the Supreme Court, even as it became more conservative, continued to uphold the basic principles of Roe v. Wade, its 1989 ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services permitted states to ban the use of public money for abortions and impose some restrictions on abortion rights. Under pressure from antiabortion activists, over half the states forbade the use of public money for terminating pregnancies. Many also made getting an abortion more difficult through rules such as requiring women to go through a waiting period.

  Opponents of abortion engaged in direct action as well as lobbying, blockading abortion clinics, and harassing their clients. A few went further, bombing clinics, setting them on fire, and assaulting abortion providers. In a two-year stretch from 1993 to 1994, two doctors, one clinic escort, and two clinic receptionists were murdered. Between legal restrictions, the elimination of public funding, and harassment and violence, access to abortion services diminished or disappeared in large parts of the country.

  Attacks on abortion providers were part of a burgeoning of violence and threats of violence on the far right, including from the so-called militias, secretive armed groups that popped up in some largely rural parts of the country in opposition to federal power, especially gun control. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a few groups on the fringe of the New Left and Black Power movements had openly advocated violence as a path to social change. Twenty years later, no left-wing groups still held such views (few left-wing groups even existed anymore), while the mantle of transformative violence had been taken up by the far right. Mostly it took the form of preparations, arming, and manifestos, not action. But in 1995, militia sympathizers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used a truck bomb to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, the worst single incident of domestic terrorism in American history.

  Sex education provoked almost as intense battling as abortion. Starting in the 1960s, sex education in schools became more common and more broadly conceived. Its supporters argued that it would reduce teenage pregnancy and the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, while encouraging healthier attitudes toward sex. But many conservatives believed that it would have the opposite effect, encouraging immoral acts and leading to more disease and pregnancies among unmarried teenagers. Christian conservatives used sex education as a mobilizing issue, moving from opposition to any sex education to trying to shape its content, with considerable success. Mandates that sex education teach only abstinence as a way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases became increasingly common during the late 1980s and 1990s. When soon after the 1994 election Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, in response to a question about masturbation, said that it was “part of human sexuality and it’s part of something that perhaps should be taught,” President Clinton responded to a storm of criticism by firing her.

  Implicit in the fights over abortion and sexuality were disagreements over the place of women in society, though the idea that they had equal rights to men had become broadly accepted, at least in the abstract, and rarely challenged frontally. Somewhat similarly, continuing fights over affirmative action spoke to the position of African Americans in the society, without challenging the national consensus supporting equal racial rights that came out of the civil rights movement. Conservatives led the opposition to affirmative action, including a few African Americans like Clarence Thomas, whose antagonism to affirmative action and quota hiring led to widespread opposition to his appointment to the Supreme Court from liberals and civil rights groups.

  Much of the fight over affirmative action took place in the courts, which narrowed what constituted illegal discrimination and the circumstances under which group targets for admissions or hiring could be used. In the early 1990s, the Supreme Court ruled that school districts did not have an obligation to continue school busing or other racial integration measures if the resegregation of schools resulted from new patterns of residential segregation not caused by legal restrictions. “When resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a 1992 decision. With just such segregation accompanying the ongoing suburbanization of the nation, the Court in effect gave hundreds of local governments and school boards a free pass from responsibility for integrating schools.

  A bitter 1996 battle in California demonstrated the political salience of opposition to affirmative action. Its critics put a measure on the ballot to ban government entities, including the California public university system, from granting preferential treatment in employment, contracting, or education to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. The proposal won backing from national Republican leaders and Ward Connerly, an African American member of the University of California Board of Regents, who became the public face of the campaign. Belatedly, key Democrats, including President Clinton, came out against the measure, but it won passage by an eight-point margin. In the first year after the University of California was forced to end its affirmative action programs, the Berkeley law school enrolled only one new African American student and the number of black undergraduates accepted fell by well over half.

  Immigration and Immigrant Rights

  California also saw sharp battles over immigrant rights. The rapid growth of emigration from Mexico and other parts of Latin America swelled anxiety and resentment where the newcomers settled, especially in California, the destination of nearly two-thirds of Mexican migrants between 1985 and 1990. The recession that hit Southern California with the post–Cold War drop in spending on military equipment—a major regional industry—increased worries about economic competition from immigrants and their downward pressure on wages. Because much of the migration took place outside legal channels, fears grew that the country had lost control of its borders. Many Americans felt threatened or were angered by the spread of foreign ways, foreign languages, and foreign cultures, undermining what they saw as a shared national culture. The late-twentieth-century celebration of diversity, ethnic heritage, and bilingualism stoked doubts that newcomers would assimilate. “The historic idea of a unifying American identity is now in peril,”
wrote historian and former presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in 1992, “in our politics, our voluntary organizations, our churches, our language.”

  In 1986, Congress attempted to address the central contradiction of immigration policy with the Simpson-Rodino Act. On the one hand, business and the daily functioning of the country depended on a steady flow of low-wage workers, which discouraged any serious effort to lessen immigration, legal or illegal. On the other, growing popular opposition to large-scale and illegal immigration pushed politicians toward gestures that at least symbolically asserted the law and raised the bar to illegal entry into the country. Simpson-Rodino required employers, for the first time, to check the immigration status of workers they hired. It also expanded the Border Patrol from a small, low-tech police force into a massive agency deploying over ten thousand uniformed officers. Along with these provisions designed to reduce illegal immigration, the law made it possible for undocumented immigrants who had been in the country since 1982 to achieve legal status. To address fears of a fragmenting culture, the legalization process required applicants to take English and civics courses.

  Simpson-Rodino only temporarily slowed illegal immigration. Worksite enforcement proved ineffective, since companies did not have to validate the authenticity of the documents workers presented to prove their eligibility to work and the federal government devoted few resources to inspections. Instead, the Bush and Clinton administrations concentrated on trying to harden the border. But in spite of high fences, motion sensors, and heavy patrolling, immigrants (and drug runners) found ways to get through. Illegal immigrants became such a pervasive presence that in 1996 the AFL-CIO reversed its historic position demanding strict enforcement of immigration laws to become an advocate for the rights of undocumented workers, concluding that only by reaching out to them would it ever succeed in organizing the service sector and other parts of the economy where they were a growing part of the workforce.