![]() At the presidential level, the McGovern-Fraser commission reforms led to direct primaries at the center of the nominating process. Its main characteristic was not a shift in voting preferences but the partial dissolution of the traditional linkages between elite and public, mediated by the traditional party system. Out of the crisis of the 1960s, a genuine critical realignment crystallized, unlike any in previous history. THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN AND THE INTERREGNUM STATE Our task here is to attempt to provide a reasonably integrated account of what happened and why in the pivotal election of 1992. ![]() Ross Perot, capitalizing on an immense breadth of public discontent with the existing order and its leadership, won the third largest share of the total vote ever secured by a nonmajor-party candidate in American history. Both his conduct in office and his defeat at the polls identify for us just what kind of incumbent George Bush was. An incumbent president running for reelection was defeated, but this was no ordinary defeat. To a quite unusual extent, 1992 presents a broad panorama of analytic issues associated with American presidential elections. Nor is it surprising that the general political atmosphere among the electorate in 1992 was so disturbed and filled with rage against politicians or that for a few weeks in early summer Ross Perot led both major-party candidates in the polls. Average real family income eroded under George Bush and growth was lower across this presidential term than in any during the past sixty years.Ĭonsidering that two entire political worldviews and regime orders associated with them had achieved bankruptcy within the space of a dozen years, we should hardly wonder that public demands for "change" were as loud as they were unclear or confused. More than any of its postwar predecessors, this recession has raised acute anxiety within the broad American middle class-anxiety not just for their own future but for their children's. The promises and dreams of the 1980s were liquidated not only by persistent recession but by its association with a massive, structural downsizing of American capitalism. Even Republicans agree that the Reagan-Bush era in American political history is over, mainly because it failed economically. Its policy consequences will long outlive the political order-particularly public debt exceeding 50 percent of the 1992 gross domestic product. ![]() A massive policy realignment ensued as Reagan and his allies launched their brand of political, economic, and social revitalization, confident that their new regime was both viable and durable.īut the 1992 election repudiated that attempted synthesis and its rhetorical, coalitional, and public-policy regime. The stage was set for Ronald Reagan and right-wing "conviction politics" designed to stop the rot on all fronts. Its effects (stagnation and price-inflation coupled with low real interest rates) were reinforced by signs of foreign policy weakness and the emergence of the socio-religious right. In the 1970s, severe economic crisis replaced Vietnam as a driving issue. A new electoral regime emerged from the ruins, marked by three main features: normal Republican control of the presidency divided government as the (unprecedented) norm and a candidate-dominated "permanent campaign," in which a capital-intensive personalism crowded out labor-intensive political parties. In 1968, undermined by the Vietnam War and the civil rights revolution, the New Deal order collapsed. Three pivotal and highly abnormal electios have punctuated this crisis. ![]() F or a generation the United States has experienced a complex and deepening crisis of its political and economic order.
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