Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics

by Thomas Ferguson, Joel Rogers

A critical assessment of the 1984 election analyzes the decay of the Democratic party and the rise of a business-oriented political coalition in the GOP

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, American History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as Thomas Ferguson

See also: Thomas Fergusson

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thesis of this great book (recommended by Noam) is, “American public opinion has not caused the right turn in public policy. What caused it was the disintegration of the New Deal system itself. That system is now dead, killed off not by voters but by a dramatic realignment of major investors in the political system.” Thomas takes us back to 1984, where there is a democratic fundraiser with all the financial funding heavies there. Bruce Babbitt gets up and attacks the New Deal and sits down. Gov. Charles Robb not to be outdone gets up and says that Democrats need to win back the recently lost racist Dixiecrats by now saying yes to business, saying yes to war, and cutting all government spending (that’s not for the military or subsidies to the rich). In short, selling out the majority of the American people. When the smoke cleared, Babbitt and Robb had won the “abandonment of core political commitments that marked the New Deal itself.” Going even further to the right, the Democrats then “abandoned the view that the federal government has a major role to play in guaranteeing the rights of minorities and victims of discrimination.” This book then shows how in polls most Americans did not approve at all in this rightward shift in politics but that mattered not; the Democratic party had decided it was going for the money, no longer the people. Rather than connect working class white and blacks in the South horizontally to each other on the tough economic issues, the Southern blacks were simply abandoned.

This book sees Jimmy Carter as the last president to run as a New Deal democrat. However, “James Schlesinger and other superhawks came over dramatically to Carter after working against Ford in the Republican primaries” Carter even drifted right domestically by trying to “lower cotton dust standards” and then to “loosen restrictions on strip mining.” This book makes the case that the U.S. led anti-Iranian press these days is residual sour grapes from Iran kicking out American finance after the hated Shah decades. And analysts still see the loss of Iran as a “dramatic instance of failure”. The Press followed finance to the right, and soon critical coverage of all American international belligerence, came to a standstill. Chapter Five provides ample evidence of how Democrats colluded with Republicans on worst of military buildup and how the Democratic switch to unquestioning support for the military made today’s bi-partisan permanent war state possible. In addition, many Democrats supported Reagan’s tax plan. You need seriously big investors to become president. The only other way you can mobilize the American voter is if you offer them something, and the Democratic elites are not willing to do that; “they are not about to subsidize a broad popular coalition inimical to their own economic interests.”

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the mid-1980s, after suffering a major defeat in the 1984 presidential election, a powerful faction in the Democratic Party, centered around the likes of Al From and the DLC, argued that the party’s problem was that it was too far to the left, that it had caved too much to “interest groups” like labor unions, women, minorities, and environmentalists. They argued that the Reagan’s success showed that the country had become more conservative and that Democrats should become more conservative—especially more pro-business—in response.

Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers’s Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, published in 1986, offered a counter-narrative. On one hand, public opinion on many of the key issues of the New Deal consensus had not changed in any significant way; in some cases, the public was actually tilting more to the left. However, the most significant part of their analysis lies in their “investment theory” of party systems. The New Deal coalition was not just the popular coalition that we often recall. There was the investor coalition as well, largely consisting of investment bankers and capital-intensive, internationally-oriented companies. Being capital-intensive as opposed to labor-intensive, they could afford to be in coalition with labor, and they benefited from the internationalism characteristic of the FDR-type Democrats. These Democrats combined welfare legislation at home with free trade abroad to appease their popular and investor constituencies respectively. However, changes in the domestic and global economy in the 1970s made this coalition increasingly unsustainable. Democrats largely sided with the investors over the base. After having Fed chairman Paul Volcker induce a recession for the sake of combating inflation, Jimmy Carter campaigned in 1980 on cuts to social spending and increases in military spending. In 1984, Walter Mondale ran a campaign largely focused on deficits.

Ferguson and Rogers’s conclusion still resonates today:

“If labor, community groups, and the press are currently improbable vehicles for a new mass political movement, it is hard to think of anyone else who might stand in for them. As the Mondale campaign made clear, virtually no Democratic business group has a stake in expanding the party’s mass base. To gain the support of the millions and millions of poor nonvoters and marginally identifying blue- and white-collar workers, the Democrats would actually have to offer them something—perhaps a progressive tax code, or full employment, or unionization with real power for the rank and file, or enhanced social programs. In the fitful, anxious world political economy of the 1980s, the party’s dominant business elites are not prepared to do this.”

[Public Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book became a bit of a chore to finish, but it is an invaluable document of a very specific period in US political history. Ferguson and Rogers meticulously detail the confluence of events that helped shift the balance of the Democratic Party away from the New Deal and toward the finance/donor class that call the shots to this day. Their description of how big business donor groups affect the direction of national politics and orientation of the two party system is a real eye-opener.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

the back of the book from September 1986
is interesting:


"For its reading of public opinion alone, this book should be must reading for people like Joseph BIden, Mario Cuomo and other Democrats thinking about running for President. It contains advice that they are not likely to get from consultants, who seem to feel the truck for a Democrat is to keep his hair short and act like a Republican."
The Washington Post

"What makes Right Turn such an important book is its documentation and its detail - Ferguson and Rogers give us an annotated blueprint of the real political structure that runs our nation."
In These Times

"Right Turn is to be recommended as one of the most illuminating accounts of politics in the 1980's now in print, or likely to be in print It is indispensible reading for anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the United States."
Walter Dean Burnham, MIT

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one amusing review from Amazon

This book should have served as a warning to all Democrats...we should have read it and paid attention.

I wish I had read this book when it first came out. I would have paid more attention to what the neoliberals were doing to the Democratic tradition of being on the side of ordinary people. I could have paid more attention when Bill Clinton dragged over enough Democrats to deregulate bankers and to give the far right everything that Reagan couldn't get for them. But I didn't. I believed in the Clintons as victims, and felt sorry for them until Bill gave the eulogy at the memorial service for Richard Mellon Scaife and called him "friend."

Mary Jean Mayer

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

good analysis of the 1980s...