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Thomas Ferguson
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Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics Hardcover – January 1, 1986

by Thomas Ferguson (Author), Joel Rogers (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 10 ratings
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
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  1. Print length
    276 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Hill & Wang Pub
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 1986
  5. ISBN-10
    0809081911
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0809081912
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a sequel to Ferguson and Rogers's anthology of studies that examined the 1980 presidential election ( The Hidden Election, LJ 10/1/81). This new study focuses on both the party-electoral system of of the past and its likely future. The authors claim that over the past several years public policy and the party system have moved to the right while public opinon has remained essentially stable and left-of-centera pattern they foresee as continuing regardless of which party occupies the White House. What may be of greatest interest and controversy is the new "investment perspective" the authors employ to explain these changes. For informed laypeople and specialists. Edward C. Dreyer, Political Science Dept., Univ. of Tulsa, Okla.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill & Wang Pub
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 1, 1986
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ First Edition
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 276 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0809081911
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809081912
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

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Thomas Ferguson

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  • Mary Jean Mayer
    5.0 out of 5 stars This book should have served as a warning to all Democrats...we should have read it and paid attentin.
    Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    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." Scaife was the father, architect and sugar daddy of what Hillary called "the vast right wing conspiracy." THAT popped open my eyes. This book is an excellent prequel to Thomas Frank's "Listen, Liberal." It tells us what happens when we give blind trust to a party that is led by professional victims, and stop paying attention to what they are up to.
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  • Sean Mulligan
    5.0 out of 5 stars What really caused the Reagan Revolution
    Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2010
    In the era of the Tea Party and claims that Obama is a Socialist, this book, which helps show how U.S. politics has gone so far to the right, is very relevant when the Tea Party is claiming to battle the establishment in this election cycle. While many people claim, that the Reagan presidency, showed the American people were moving to the Right, this book shows, through analysis of opinion polls, that the political opinion of the American public either stayed the same or moved to the Left on most issues.

    The change in the country's political climate, resulted not from a change in public opinion but the defection of a number of business interests that usually supported the Democrats to the Republicans. The elite groups in the Democratic Party prevented Carter, in 1980 and Mondale in 1984 from offering an attractive alternative to the Reagan program. The book mentions the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council, aimed at moving the Democratic Party to the Right. This movement resulted in the nomination of the DLCer Bill Clinton and the Clinton presidency.

    This book is still relevant and offers some tips on how the Democrats can defeat the Tea Party/Republicans.
    23 people found this helpful
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  • Rodolfo
    5.0 out of 5 stars On How Big Business Came to Prefer the GOP Over the Democrats in the 1970's...
    Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2013
    After President Ronald Reagan's landslide 1984 defeat of former Vice-President Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party's leading fund-raisers and policy analysts decided to coalesce around a plan to push the party rightward. Democrats were losing, they argued, because the party was being held hostage by so-called special interests (labor, minorities, women and the poor) while the rest of America had moved on. The liberal values that had produced the New Deal and the Great Society, they explained, were being rejected at the polls while self-serving, narrow interests within the party were refusing to release control of a bus heading off a cliff. The authors of the present book, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Rogers, argue, on the contrary, that there is little to no evidence to back up this belief in a "right turn" within the American electorate.

    Beginning with a detailed study of public opinion, the authors conclude that throughout the 1970s (the period which oversaw the vast increase in business support for the GOP at the expense of the Democrats) public opinion on the vast majority of political and economic issues of the day either remained stable or moved considerably to the left. While *ideologically* moderately conservative, the U.S. populace continued to be *programmatically* liberal or social democratic; very often increasingly so. Turning then to an examination of the theory of critical realignment (the belief that electoral change occurs through shifts in well-defined social groups such as Catholics, blacks, blue-collar workers, rural Protestants, southern whites, etc.), Ferguson and Rogers find much there to criticize. Where these voting blocs are found to exist their existence is sometimes not stable over the lifetime of the party systems they are thought to be responsible for, or their existence is found to continue uniformly *across* periods of realignment. The authors instead posit an alternative approach - an *investment theory of party politics* which focuses on coalitions of major business interests that come together to push favored candidates and parties in order to control the state. Voter-centered analyses, they argue, greatly underestimate the vast expense in money, time and information acquirement necessary to control the state. Formulating and implementing particular policy is even more expensive. While a large corporation or business-funded think-tank may be able to research a candidate's voting record and policy positions, the vast majority of voters are left to evaluate candidates primarily on the basis of superficial campaign marketing.

    The main body of the book studies the trajectory of the New Deal coalition that came together around Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's and began fragmenting in the 1970's. The modern Democratic Party was born as the party of capital-intensive, internationalist free-trade oriented big businesses, with organized labor as a junior partner. Because these firms were capital rather than labor-intensive they could afford to co-exist with organized labor while the labor-intensive (and protectionist-seeking) businesses that coalesced around the Republican Party simply could not. While this New Deal business bloc - made up of firms like General Electric, IBM, Pan Am, the Standard Oils of NJ and California, Bank of America, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros. - was quantitatively a relatively small part of the American business community it was far wealthier and more powerful than its GOP-oriented competitors. So while the Great Depression was forcing upon other industrialized nations - those with fewer capital-intensive and internationally-oriented big businesses - the revolutionary choice between socialism and fascism this new version of the Democratic Party was able to successfully accommodate *both* capitalist and worker. In the historical narrative that follows the book spends little time with either the Truman or Eisenhower administrations although it notes elite disappointment with the relatively austere fiscal policy and correspondingly anemic growth rates of the latter. The 1957-58 Eisenhower recession further confirmed for a significant segment of business the need to return to a Keynesian growth model based on a combination of lower taxes and higher fiscal spending. The JFK, LBJ and Nixon administrations (both the business support and opposition to them) are explored in relatively more detail. These sections makes for a fascinating read.

    The great recession of 1973-75 marked a major turning point in American politics. The period immediately prior saw the beginning of a decline in the rate of profit in manufacturing, possibly either caused or augmented by the increase in international competition. The OPEC oil price shocks of the time also forced Democrats to choose between Big Oil and their working class base as the party felt compelled to institute price controls. Oil and gas responded by switching parties. Meanwhile, the increase of growth rates in the Third World relative to those of the advanced economies saw a business drive to expand overseas, a tendency exacerbated by the vast amounts of post-boom oil money being invested there. The collapse of detente (related to the above processes) initiated a call for a vast increase in military spending. Thus, in response to these increases in both costs and international competition, increasing segments of the business community turned to a direct attack on the working class and the New Deal, as a now significant layer of capital-intensive businesses turned to the Republican Party for the first time. The tragic result was the coming of the Reagan Administration which lead an attack on labor and the poor while siphoning vast amounts of wealth to its elite supporters by way of the Pentagon and lowered taxes on the wealthy, the combination of which lead to unprecedented deficits. Administrative offices like the Department of Labor, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were placed under similarly-minded, reactionary leadership, further shifting the financial burden from big business to the general population.

    Although this book was published in 1987 it presciently prefigures one of the major conflicts that most sharply divides the Democratic and Republican parties. Beginning with Reagan the GOP became the party of large deficits (e.g. Reagan, G.W. Bush, Gov. Romney's estimated addition, if he had won, of trillions of dollars according to various non-partisan budget analysts) while the Democrats became the party that sought balanced budgets (e.g. Mondale's call for higher taxes, Clinton's combination of spending cuts and additional revenue, Obama's calls for a "balanced approach"). In order to understand this one is once again asked follow the money. For investment bankers and other holders of long-term securities the concern is that if the debt becomes too large the government would be tempted to deal with this by simply printing a lot of money, thus lowering the value of their assets. The GOP, on the other hand, as the party backed overwhelmingly by labor-intensive businesses, are the people who stand to make a greater profit whenever there is greater worker insecurity so they purposely seek to make the deficit as big as possible in order to later use that as an excuse to shred Social Security, Medicare and what's left of the New Deal. As the size of the giant Reagan deficits kept ballooning the new coalition that had brought the him to power began to crack. More businesses jumped ship although many like weapons-manufacturers and labor-intensive firms cheered on. Some of the strongest opposition to Reagan included multinationals oriented towards Europe and hopeful of detente and with it a corresponding increase in US-USSR trade; this at a time when much of the rest of American business was shifting to the Pacific Basin, the Middle East and parts of the Third World. Allied with them were urban real estate interests who were opposed to Reagan's cuts in federal spending on real estate-friendly programs like mass transit and urban development (which compete with the Pentagon for funding). Among the most interesting fruits of the alliance of these business forces was their favoring of the Army and Air Force over the Navy (for reasons too complex for this review) and a turning to support what began as a grass-roots nuclear freeze movement, transforming and de-radicalizing it in the process.

    The book concludes with an analysis of the campaigns of the candidates for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination (Mondale, Hart, Glenn, McGovern, Cranston and Jesse Jackson), President Reagan's landslide re-election and final thoughts on what the then-future might hold. While the Democrats tried to re-win the White House by compromising on an industrial policy with a long-term dedication to free trade but short term commitments to troubled industries, the economy began improving and the high interest rates began to fall making so uneasy a compromise less urgent to the interested parties. As Mondale's campaign disintegrated Reagan responded with "Star Wars," a giant gift to high-tech industry fearful of Japanese competition, and abandoned his professed "free-market" principles and embraced industrial protectionism (including tariffs on steel and a forced market-sharing deal between Europe and Japan). The Reagan Administration thus attempted not only to service both sides of its coalition but also to postpone until later all necessary decisions that could eventually tear the GOP coalition apart. Thus, while the authors predicted that both parties would continue their shift to the right, the position of American business remained so dependent on global economic factors that they did not expect the GOP to monopolize government to the same extent that the Democrats had during the period of the New Deal coalition.

    A major strength of this book is the authors' analysis of why the American workers have not been better able to defend themselves against this right turn. Ferguson and Rogers rightfully focus the readers' attention on the utter corruption and accommodationist history of the American labor union bureaucracy. After WWII, rather than struggle to win additional benefits for American workers the union leadership decided to increasingly ally itself with state and management in order to better win benefits for itself. The AFL-CIO's almost unbelievable transformation into a tool of elite foreign policy is sadly illustrative, as by the 1980s the organization's budget for foreign activities (90% of which was funded by U.S. government sources) would almost equally match its domestic budget. This funding would then be used to compete with and attack indigenous labor unions protesting brutal, pro-U.S. regimes in El Salvador, Panama and the Philippines among many others. As candidate Jesse Jackson reminded us, such activity simply helped to make these Third World countries more profitable for U.S. business, thus hurting the American worker. All of this taking place in a society potentially ripe for unionization, at a time when the more "liberal" of the two business parties debated the benefits of increased voter registration of the poor against the fear that such increased participation would move the party undesirably to the left, in a country where from the mid-1950s to 1980 the tax burden on the average American had doubled while the corporate share of federal revenues was slashed. "Absent a sudden upsurge from below," the authors conclude, "or until economic catastrophe forces a new alignment of American business elites, the new, more conservative party system will be maintained. Democrats and Republicans will squabble and maneuver. The costs to the population will rise. But the basic structure of the party system will remain unchanged. America will continue its right turn."
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