The Rise of the New New Left

By Peter Beinart

Sep 12, 2013--Bill de Blasio’s win in New York’s Democratic primary isn’t a local story.

It’s part of a vast shift that could upend three decades of American political thinking.

Maybe Bill de Blasio got lucky.

Maybe he only won because he cut a sweet ad featuring his biracial son.

Or because his rivals were either spectacularly boring, spectacularly pathological, or running for Michael Bloomberg’s fourth term.

But I don’t think so.

The deeper you look, the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.

It’s a challenge Hillary Clinton should start worrying about now.

To understand why that challenge may prove so destabilizing, start with this core truth: For the past two decades, American politics has been largely a contest between Reaganism and Clintonism.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan shattered decades of New Deal consensus by seeking to radically scale back government’s role in the economy.

In 1993, Bill Clinton brought the Democrats back to power by accepting that they must live in the world Reagan had made.

Located somewhere between Reagan’s anti-government conservatism and the pro-government liberalism that preceded it, Clinton articulated an ideological “third way”:

Inclined toward market solutions, not government bureaucracy, focused on economic growth, not economic redistribution, and dedicated to equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.

By the end of Clinton’s presidency, government spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product was lower than it had been when Reagan left office.

For a time, small flocks of pre-Reagan Republicans and pre-Clinton Democrats endured, unaware that their species were marked for extinction.

Hard as they tried, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole could never muster much rage against the welfare state.

Ted Kennedy never understood why Democrats should declare the era of big government over.

But over time, the older generation in both parties passed from the scene and the younger politicians who took their place could scarcely conceive of a Republican Party that did not bear Reagan’s stamp or a Democratic Party that did not bear Clinton’s.

These Republican children of Reagan and Democratic children of Clinton comprise America’s reigning political generation.

By “political generation,” I mean something particular.

Pollsters slice Americans into generations at roughly 20-year intervals: Baby Boomers (born mid-1940s to mid-1960s); Generation X (mid-1960s to early 1980s); Millennials (early 1980s to 2000). But politically, these distinctions are arbitrary.

To understand what constitutes a political generation, it makes more sense to follow the definition laid out by the early-20th-century sociologist Karl Mannheim.

For Mannheim, generations were born from historical disruption.

As he argued—and later scholars have confirmed—people are disproportionately influenced by events that occur between their late teens and mid-twenties.

During that period—between the time they leave their parents’ home and the time they create a stable home of their own—individuals are most prone to change cities, religions, political parties, brands of toothpaste.

After that, lifestyles and attitudes calcify.

For Mannheim, what defined a generation was the particular slice of history people experienced during those plastic years.

A generation had no set length.

A new one could emerge “every year, every thirty, every hundred.”

What mattered was whether the events people experienced while at their most malleable were sufficiently different from those experienced by people older or younger than themselves.

Mannheim didn’t believe that everyone who experienced the same formative events would interpret them the same way.

Germans who came of age in the early 1800s, he argued, were shaped by the Napoleonic wars.

Some responded by becoming romantic-conservatives, others by becoming liberal-rationalists.

What they shared was a distinct generational experience, which became the basis for a distinct intra-generational argument.

If Mannheim’s Germans constituted a political generation because in their plastic years they experienced the Napoleonic Wars, the men and women who today dominate American politics constitute a political generation because during their plastic years they experienced some part of the Reagan-Clinton era.

That era lasted a long time. If you are in your late 50s, you are probably too young to remember the high tide of Kennedy-Johnson big government liberalism.

You came of age during its collapse, a collapse that culminated with the defeat of Jimmy Carter.

Then you watched Reagan rewrite America’s political rules.

If you are in your early ‘40s, you may have caught the tail end of Reagan.

But even if you didn’t, you were shaped by Clinton, who maneuvered within the constraints Reagan had built.

To pollsters, a late 50-something is a Baby Boomer and an early 40-something is a Gen-Xer.

But in Mannheim’s terms, they constitute a single generation because no great disruption in American politics divides them.

They came of age as Reagan defined a new political era and Clinton ratified it.

And as a rule, they play out their political struggles between the ideological poles that Reagan and Clinton set out.

To understand how this plays out in practice, look at the rising, younger politicians in both parties.

Start with the GOP.

If you look at the political biographies of nationally prominent 40-something Republicans—Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz—what they all have in common is Reagan.

Jindal has said about growing up in Louisiana, “I grew up in a time when there weren’t a whole lot of Republicans in this state.

But I identified with President Reagan.”

At age 17, Scott Walker was chosen to represent his home state of Colorado in a Boys Nation trip to Washington.

There he met “his hero, Ronald Reagan,” who “played a big role in inspiring me.”

At age 21, Paul Ryan interned for Robert Kasten, who had ridden into the Senate in 1980 on Reagan’s coattails.

Two years later he took a job with Jack Kemp, whose 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut had helped usher in Reaganomics.

Growing up in a fiercely anti-communist Cuban exile family in Miami, Marco Rubio writes in his autobiography that “Reagan’s election and my grandfather’s allegiance to him were defining influences on me politically.”

Ted Cruz is most explicit of all. “I was 10 when Reagan became president,” he told a conservative group earlier this year.

“I was 18 when he left the White House … I’ll go to my grave with Ronald Wilson Reagan defining what it means to be president … and when I look at this new generation of [Republican] leaders I see leaders that are all echoing Reagan.”

Younger Democratic politicians are less worshipful of Clinton.

Yet his influence on their world view is no less profound.

Start with the most famous, still-youngish Democrat, a man who although a decade older than Rubio, Jindal, and Cruz, hails from the same Reagan-Clinton generation: Barack Obama. Because he opposed the Iraq War, and sometimes critiqued the Clintons as too cautious when running against Hillary in 2008, some commentators depicted Obama’s victory as a rejection of Clintonism.

But to read The Audacity of Hope—Obama’s most detailed exposition of his political outlook—is to be reminded how much of a Clintonian Obama actually is.

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Part One of three posts on the New Republican Party and How The NeoCons Have Reshaped It.