Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter: Erie Parallels

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter was faced with rising inflation accompanied by soaring house prices, an oil shock triggered by the Iranian Revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and a suddenly hawkish Federal Reserve under its new chair, Paul Volcker. If this sounds all too familiar, it should.

 

Today we find President Joe Biden faced with rising inflation accompanied by soaring house prices, an oil price shock, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a newly hawkish Federal Reserve. It certainly seems like that history is yet again, if not repeating, certainly rhyming. In early 2021 we wrote about the potential for the 2020’s to be a rerun of “That 70’s Show.” ( See: Shulmaven: Roaring 20's or That 70's Show )  Moreover Biden seems to be copying Carter’s energy policy incoherence by supporting policies that will simultaneously increase demand and reduce supply. Thus, instead of roaring, the 2020’s are looking more and more like the stagflation of the 1970’s.

My Amazon Review of Rick Pearlstein's "Reaganland: America Turns Right, 1976-1980"

 

Reagan Ascendant

 

Rick Pearlstein, a man of the Left, has written a very long (1120 pages in the print edition) and very important history of American politics from 1976-1980 through the twin lenses of the flowering of the American Right and Reagan’s successful campaign for the presidency. This is his fourth volume on the history of the modern American Right that starts in the 1950’s. (See my earlier review of his “The Invisible Bridge…” https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-amazon-review-of-rick-pearlsteins.html) As with his prior volumes he is very good at discussing the day-to-day politics of the era. The liberals were literally out of gas and there was a thunder on the Right led by the evangelical community, the revival of business lobbying and the new ideas coming from the neoconservatives. Standing athwart all of this was the hapless Jimmy Carter who found a way to upset the liberals on his left and the moderates on his right which leads to a challenge by Senator Edward Kennedy.

 

Pearlstein delivers terrific portraits of John Connally, Nixon’s Treasury Secretary and presumed Republican front runner in 1979, and anti-Equal Rights Amendment firebrand Phyllis Schlafly who successfully organizes the Right to defeat the amendment. We see the young Paul Manafort and Roger Stone practicing their dark arts that would become the basis of a powerful political consulting firm in the 1980s whose lives would turn into ignominy with the election of Donald Trump. We also see the rise of the direct mail wizard Richard Vigueri and his cohorts on the Right, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich.

 

The religious Right draws its strength from its opposition to abortion and gay rights. In its opposition to abortion American Protestants linkup with Catholics for the first time to form a powerful urban-rural coalition which undermines Democratic dominance of the eastern and Midwestern urban centers. In their opposition to gay rights, the Right finds a spokesperson in singer Anita Bryant who leads the charge to repeal a Miami gay rights ordinance.

 

Through it all we see Ronald Reagan methodically plodding along his path to the presidency with the ups and downs of his campaign culminating with his debate win over Jimmy Carter. To be sure he fires his first campaign manager, the egotistical John Sears and there are many gaffes along the way, but Reagan is opportunistic enough make a major issue out of the Panama Canal Treaty as sign of American retreat. Of course he and the Republican Party is helped along when everything falls off the tracks in 1979. We have the Iranian Revolution, the tripling of the price of gasoline, gas lines, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Iranian hostage crisis.

 

What Pearlstein misses is the sociological earthquake that was happening the 1970’s that gave rise to the religious Right. For example the birthrate collapsed from a peak of 4.3 million births in 1957 to a low of 3.1 million in 1975 with a modest increase to 3.6 million by 1980. The number of divorces more than doubled from 500,000 in 1970 to 1,200,000 in 1980 and the number of legal abortions increased from 500,000 in 1971 to 1,300,000 in 1980. There was good reason for Americans to be worried about the traditional family.

 

And if you overlay that on an increase in the female labor force participation rate from 43% in 1970 to 51% in 1980 which meant that the traditional one breadwinner household was falling further and further behind you can add an economic reason for the growing disenchantment of evangelical Christians. Now overlay that with a double-digit inflation you have a formula for deep resentment. To quote Karl Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” That was the America of 1980.

 

To focus more on the economic side of things the roaring inflation was forcing the average worker into higher and tax brackets, a product of a tightly bracketed tax code. Further, if a second family member entered the labor force the marginal tax rate could very well be as high as 40%. Then of a sudden, the California tax revolt leads to the passage of Proposition 13 which cut property taxes by 60%. Pearlstein is very good with his discussion of this. I was in the middle of it and was quoted in the Howard Jarvis Time magazine cover story that he cites. Its passage gives succor to the Republicans in Congress supporting the Kemp-Roth 30% across the board income tax cut. That will pass later under Reagan.

 

However Pearlstein leaves out three critical factors as to the cause of Proposition 13. First the tax revenue coming in from rising property values was spent by government, not rebated in the form of lower rates. Second, the Crawford vs. L.A. Board of Education decision calling for crosstown busing made the local school less important to the typical suburban voter. Similarly the Serrano vs. Priest decision equalizing school finance detached local property taxes from support of local schools. Both those decisions took place in the early 1970’s which rendered ineffective the anti-Prop 13 message that the schools would be destroyed if the measure passed.

 

One thing that really bothers me about the book is Pearlstein’s reference to corporate lobbyists as “boardroom Jacobins.” He fails to understand that the real Jacobins were in the regulatory agencies who running a regulatory reign of terror against the business community. To be sure much regulation was needed, but the way they went about with little attention paid to cost/benefit analysis created a tough adversarial environment. Further effective business taxation was on the rise because the great inflation was rendering depreciation allowances woefully inadequate and stock prices measured in real terms collapsed. Even Senator Kennedy was supportive of increasing depreciation allowances and he said so in response to me at a rally in Los Angeles.

 

As far as the average industrial worker was concerned the Democratic Party was nowhere to be found. On September 16, 1977 the Youngstown Sheet and Tube factory closed firing 5,000 workers in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. Within a few years 50,000 steel jobs were lost. The Democrats controlled the White House and had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. They did nothing and it is no wonder that Reagan got the bulk of their votes in 1980. Pearlstein does not mention this.

 

The Reagan we see in Pearlstein’s book is sunny optimist. He is pro-immigration, pro-trade and was way ahead of his time with respect to NAFTA and he had live and let live with respect to gay rights. He opposed the Briggs Amendment, a California anti-gay measure on the ballot in 1978. Thus the Reagan of 1980 is a far cry from the Republican Party of today. Simply put there is no way the wackos in today’s Republican Party would nominate him.

 

Rick Pearlstein gives us great history. It very detailed and well sourced. Despite my quibble above it is a must read for serious students of America’s political culture.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RTGEJNHPIBVNP/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Craig Shirley's "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980"

The Return of the Gipper

Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has written a hagiographic account of how Ronald Reagan rebounded from his defeat at the Republican convention in 1976 to his nomination four years later. Shirley has written a breezy telling of what happened with lots of inside baseball. Reagan, of course is the hero and the villain of the piece is John Sears his campaign manager who deliberately kept Reagan out of the limelight in 1979. That gave rise to serious opposition, especially from George H.W. Bush. The unsung hero of the Republican return to power is party chairman Bill Brock who picked up the pieces after the narrow defeat of 1976 to Jimmy Carter and an across the board loss in the congressional elections of that year.

My problem with Shirley’s account is that there are too many errors in the book. Among those errors is his view that the economy was weak in 1978. To the contrary, the economy was in an all-out boom. That is the reason the Republicans made only marginal gains in the House and Senate races. He pays lip service to the roll of California’s Proposition 13 which set off a wave of tax cutting in the states and it help legitimize the Kemp-Roth tax cut the Republican were advancing. Without Proposition 13 there would be no Kemp-Roth. He also omits the Steiger Amendment which lowered the capital gains tax in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress in 1978. Change was in the air and Reagan knew it.

Shirley also misstates Lyndon Johnson record on civil rights. To be sure Johnson was slow to civil rights, but it was through his efforts that the first civil rights legislation since reconstruction passed in 1957 and 1959.

Shirley spends a great deal of time on Reagan’s opposition to the Panama Canal Treaties which became a cause celeb among the Republican right. The treaties passed and now 40 years later nothing really bad has happened. He should have noted that it was a political gimmick from the beginning. But it worked.

Finally although breezy reads well, the book needed much better editing and fact checking. Thus I can only rate it a modest three stars. 

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2WTP65BRHZDPT/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv