The ramifications of the applications of these two opposing approaches to power and politics is undertaken by Dr. David Paul Bennett with reference to the ebbs and flows of history as the world arguably approaches the commencement of the twenty-first century in a political context.

2012: The Political Beginning of the Twenty-First Century?

This year’s American presidential election result will be historic because the twenty-first century arguably commences with the January 2013 presidential inauguration. In historical and political terms, the *twenty-first century began in June 1914 with the tragic assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Archduke Ferdinand and His Imperial Highness’s wife, Countess Sophie, in Sarajevo in June 1914.

(*Alternately, there is an argument that the twenty-first century both chronologically and figuratively commenced with the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks).

The importance of who is inaugurated in January 2013 could well determine if the United States and therefore the world successfully adapts to the horrendous challenges posed by the onset of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). It is difficult to discern what is the miracle that is the United States. Nevertheless, if the United States does not continue to inspire the world by being effectively led, then difficult (to say the least) times will lie ahead for the planet.

What makes a nation ‘tick’ is often difficult to discern. With regard to long established democracies, insights into their sources of strength can be ascertained by reference to the evolution and the nature of their political party system. This is because the changing role of political parties in a society can both determine and reflect how a nation meets challenges that it is confronted with.

As one of the most important nations ever in history, there is relatively little appreciation of the development of American political parties and their impact on the United States and the world. Developments, changes and the United State’s capacity to adapt to challenges were reflected by the paradoxes relating to the evolution of the nation’s party system.

Early America: Federation or Confederacy?

Although the American colonies had a remarkably engaged citizenry at the time of the beginning of the break with Britain in the 1770s, there were no coherently organised political parties. Indeed it is often unappreciated by many non-Americans that in the first thirteen years of American independence (1776 to 1789), the nation did not have a central government. The government and political interests of the United States were undertaken by the Continental Congress which was composed of members nominated by state legislatures.

The central direction that the United States needed to fight the War of Independence came from the member states supporting a national army under the command of General George Washington. The United States in this context was then more of a confederation than a federation- that is a nation where constituent states were more powerful than the central authority (which was then the Continental Congress).

A federal government came to the United States with George Washington being inaugurated as the first American president in 1789. He was elected president by an electoral college composed of members nominated by state legislatures that were then elected under a restricted male suffrage. The federal constitution* that Washington was elected under was promulgated in 1788 seven years after the United States had won its War of Independence in 1781.

(*The United States has the world’s oldest written constitution. The American constitution is so important to the United States that it could almost be said that America will always exist so long as it has its 1788 Constitution.

Sweden would have had the world’s second oldest constitution had its brilliant 1809 Constitution not been replaced by one adopted in 1975 which dispensed with royal prerogatives that had previously evolved to guarantee Swedish liberty and help make the kingdom one of the world’s first modern social democracies.

Poland is probably unique in that there is still veneration for a constitution that no longer exists – the Constitution of May 1791. This constitution replaced the unstable ‘royal republic’ (sic) with an hereditary constitutional monarchy. Had Prussia, Russia and the Hapsburg Empire not partitioned Poland in 1795 due to their fear of constitutional democratic monarchy, then the dynasties of those empires might still reign today).

The extent to which the United States became a federation with the inauguration of Washington as president or continued as a confederacy was an ambiguous point which would not be resolved until the Union victory in the American Civil War in 1865. Nevertheless, the United States had previously been able to win her War of Independence as a confederacy.

A *confederacy is distinct from a federation in that the member states are more powerful then the federal government. The determining strength of the American colonies (which declared themselves states in 1776) was that they all had proactive legislatures that converted community sentiment into effective political and military action.

(*Switzerland is probably the major contemporary example of a confederacy).

Volunteerism: A Vital Ingredient of the American Miracle

The effectiveness of colonial and state legislatures was derived from volunteerism. This concept has broad meanings but, in an American historical context, volunteerism meant (and still essentially means in an American context) engaging in activity under the Rubicon of civil society as opposed to the state. A very important ‘early’ American who encapsulated voluntarism was Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).

The diplomatic, economic, philosophical and political impacts of Benjamin Franklin (who was perhaps with Abraham Lincoln the most important American that ever lived) were all respectively profound. Benjamin Franklin was originally supportive of the colonies being linked to Britain because he was ahead of his time in conceptualizing the British Empire as a commonwealth of equal nations as opposed to a mercantile imperialist empire. It was a pity that a Westminster system of parliamentary government was not developed in the American colonies. This would have helped reconcile the can-do attitude and capacity of the settlers to maintaining links with Britain.

The ethos of volunteerism has been adopted by so many subsequent migrants to the United States that this concept has since adapted to continue to be a source of great strength to America. But, as is often the case, a disproportionate source of strength can also be an underlying cause of weakness or challenge. Because of the fundamental importance of civil society in relation to the activation of volunteerism, there has been a danger of the state falling short in supporting the economically vulnerable.

Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists

Potential internal contradictions with regard to volunteerism undermining the United States were overcome by the surprisingly swift emergence of a viable two-party system. The equivalent of the contemporary Republican Party was the Federalist Party which was effectively founded by President Washington’s Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). Hamilton’s brilliance was not only derived from him articulating an economic philosophy but also outlining practical steps to facilitate its application.

The recently formed American federal government under President Washington may have been an ornamental extra had it not been for Hamilton’s success in establishing a national bank and currency (which were both known as the ‘national mint’). The most important legacy of Hamilton’s which is still very important (particularly in the contemporary context of the GFC) is that the nation has viable credit lines.

Without Hamilton’s technical skills (if not genius), debts that the new republic owed to France and the Netherlands might not have been promptly paid off and the new federal government might not have achieved fiscal pre-eminence in relation to the states that was necessary for the United States to become a viable nation. Furthermore, the credit worthiness that *Hamilton secured for American banking has since been crucial to the economic viability and economic strength of the United States.

(*Hamilton unfortunately lost his life in a duel in 1804 with America’s then vice-president, the selfish Aaron Burr, who should have been imprisoned for the murder. Had Hamilton lived, he could very well have become one of the United States’ great presidents).

It was ironic that Hamilton’s Federalist Party was a precursor of the contemporary Republican Party because this early American party was an advocate of strong interventionist government. The Federalist Party did not become the precursor to the contemporary Democratic Party because the Federalists had an elitist view that the United States should be led by men of commerce and business. In this context, government intervention was advocated by the Federalists to facilitate development in substantial parts of the emerging nation that were yet to be settled as opposed to addressing socio-economic concerns.

The Two-Party System and the Birth of American Democracy

A new oligarchy might have dominated the new American republic had this elite not split over the issue of whether to support the new French republic. President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton felt a strong sense of gratitude to the deposed Bourbon monarchy due to the invaluable support that Louis XVI had provided the United States during her War of Independence. Because the Washington administration was hostile to the French republic, the United States relatively quickly reconciled with *Great Britain.

(*The War of 1812 was not really a war between America and Britain but rather a military struggle between the United States and American Loyalists who had fled to what was to become known as Canada).

The Washington administration’s hostility toward to the French republic struck a raw nerve with many Americans due to the recency of the War of Independence which had engendered a widespread instinctive sympathy toward republican France. The Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) – who had previously served as American ambassador to France- resigned his position to protest in 1793 the Washington Administration’s hostility toward the French republican regime.

Even prior to Jefferson’s resignation, the basis for converting republican sentiment within the American elite into a popular base had been set in 1791 by his engineering the formation of the Democratic Republican Party (DRP). The scope for the application of democratic republican principles (‘popular sovereignty’) was further bolstered by Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1808.

The Jefferson Administration (1801-1809) was historically significant because the president’s democratic ideals were actually transformed into reality. This was partly due to President Jefferson’s success in geographically expanding the United States via the 1803 Louisiana Purchases and encouraging European settlement. Because the frontier settlers in the South and in the West were independently minded, they were hostile toward aristocratic notions of class that the Federalists were associated with.

Due to the establishment of new territories, an expanding suffrage and the misperception that the Federalists were unpatriotic during the 1812 War, the Federalist Party effectively ceased to exist as a party after the1816 elections. Consequently the Democratic-Republican Party effectively became a Dominant Ruling Party between 1820 and 1828 with political divisions within this party being the basis for competitive presidential elections. The development of a caucus pre-selection system within the Democratic Republicans temporarily undermined the scope for a viable alternate party.

Mutually Exclusive? Jeffersonian Democracy and Democratic Party Dominance

A danger of the United States having a Dominant Ruling Party was that geographical divisions could become a basis for national dis-unity due to the absence of an alternate ideological party with nation reach that bridged different regional interests. The competitive nature of the 1828 presidential election between President John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, who both ran as Democratic Republicans, established the basis for the contemporary division of the Democratic and Republican parties. The supporters of Adams (who lost his 1828 re-election bid) formally founded the National Republican Party in 1830 while the Democratic Republicans under President Jackson eventually became known as the Democrats.

President Andrew Jackson identified the aims of his administration (1829-1837) with those of the Jefferson presidency. The major policy similarity between the two administrations was a suspicion of government being an agent of eastern commercial interests. President Jackson’s most important achievement was that he lay the groundwork for American government funds being independently deposited away from big corporate banks.

Indeed, the failed pre-Lincoln Democratic administrations of Franklin Pearce (1853 to 1857) and James Buchanan (1857 to 1861) maintained their party’s popular support base due to their support of smaller banks as the drivers of economic growth. These two Democratic administrations also opposed protectionism which was widely considered as benefiting the narrow sectional interests of northern industrialists.

The main reason why the Pearce and Buchanan administrations were disasters was due to their grievous failure to clarify the nature of the relationship between the federal government and the states in relation to the issue of slavery.

American Liberty and the Contradiction of Slavery

Slavery was an issue at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 which was not addressed in a practical sense. Founding Fathers such as Alexander Hamilton opposed slavery on moral grounds and argued that it was inconsistent to advocate independence based on liberty if slavery was retained. It is perhaps Jefferson’s greatest failing that he did not use his influence to advocate the abolition of slavery at the time of the break with Britain. As president, the most that Jefferson (who did recognize to a limited extent the inconsistency of advocating the rights of man along with the retention of slavery) did was to support the 1808 ban on bringing new slaves to the United States.

Ironically, the Democrats as an anti-elitist party were hindered from adopting an anti-slavery position. The Democrats were strong proponents of state’s rights because they regarded states as an important protection against centralization of power by a northern business elite. As such, most Democrats were opposed to national anti-slavery laws on the basis that they encroached upon states’ rights.

The clear division that slavery would become in precipitating the American Civil War (1861 -1865) was foreshadowed by the Missouri Compromise of 1821 where the territory of Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1820 as a slave state while slavery was forbidden in new states to be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase above the latitude of the 33rd parallel. By the time of the Missouri Compromise, slavery had been outlawed in the North but there was to be acute controversy as to whether this evil practice would be allowed in the new territories that were being opened up in the West.

The Federalists Make Way for the Whigs

The division over slavery was such that the Whigs failed to consolidate as a national alternative to the Democrats. The Whigs were founded in 1833 by Henry Clay (1777 to 1852) by merging his National Republican Party with elements of the Anti-Masonic Party and political figures associated with the defunct Federalist Party. Even though former Federalists were taken into the *Whigs, this new party claimed affinity with the ideals of Jeffersonian Democracy on the basis that President Jackson was an authoritarian president.

(*The name Whig was adopted on the basis that the new party was opposed to supposedly elitist Tory type rule in Britain).

The Whigs were actually similar to the Federalists in that they were an elite and a middle class based party which advocated government support to help spur industrial and commercial expansion. As such, most Whigs believed that the Democrats were too beholden small farmers and settlers.

The Whigs probably would not have won their first presidential election in 1840 had they not run the prestigious general, William Harrison. What sort of president, Harrison would have made will never really be known because he died just over a month after taking office in 1841. Harrison’s successor John Tyler (1790-1862) of Virginia was an anti-Jackson Democrat who had found refuge in the Whigs and in doing so helped them win the 1840 presidential election. President Tyler was in essence a Democrat who manifested this by being a staunch proponent of state rights.

Tyler is the only American president who was expelled by the party he belonged to and in effect (after a half-hearted attempt to re-found the Republican Democratic Party) supported the Democratic presidential candidate, James Polk in the 1844 election against the Whig leader Henry Clay. Tyler’s support of Polk (who had been a dark horse at the Democrat convention) was conditional on his supporting the independent republic of Texas, which had previously seceded from Mexico in 1836 to become a slave holding state that would be admitted to the union.

The determined but narrow-minded President Polk not only ensured Texas’s admission to the union in 1845 but completed the territorial expansion on the continental United States by the time he retired as president in 1849. As such, the historical legacy of the Polk presidency is an ambiguous one because he achieved what he set out to do in a single presidential term without securing national unity in relation to the crucial issue of slavery.

Squaring the Circle: Compromising on Slavery

The 1848 presidential election was an eerie replay of the 1840 election in that the Whigs again nominated a war hero; General Zachary Taylor (1784 – 1850) who won. He was crucially helped to victory by former president, Van Buren splitting the Democrat vote as the presidential candidate of the anti-slave Free Soil Party. In fairness to General Zachary Taylor (1784 – 1850), the Whigs probably would not have been competitive in the 1848 election except that he was a hero in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. The Whigs were then very unpopular due to most of them having been opposed to Texas’s admission to the union which had resulted in them been widely perceived as been unpatriotic during the Mexican-American War.

Comparisons between the 1840 and 1848 presidential elections was also evident in that President Taylor died after a relatively brief period in office (sixteen months) to be succeeded by an ineffectual president who also alienated the Whig Party. President Taylor was succeeded on his death by Vice-President Millard Fillmore. The new president had been selected as Taylor’s running-mate to bolster the Whig’s chances of carrying the electorally vital state of New York.

Although Fillmore was notionally opposed to slavery, he disappointed most fellow Northerners by supporting the recently deceased president’s Compromise of 1850 which allowed California to be admitted as a free state while allowing some of the territory recently acquired by the United States from the American-Mexican War to be settled by slave-holders.

President Fillmore’s support for the 1850 Compromise was a profound mistake. The president was undoubtedly patriotically motivated in his desire to avoid a civil war that he overcame his abhorrence of slavery to accept these five ‘compromise’ bills. One of these bills, the Fugitive Slave Act, allowed for slavers to re-capture and return escaped slaves. This act caused considerable angst in non-slave (‘free soil’) states that it undermined President Fillmore’s attempt to gain acceptance of the continuance of slavery which he was avowedly morally opposed to.

The president instead should have applied his considerable political skills to secure the abolition of slavery on both moral grounds and as a dangerous threat to American national unity. By delaying the taking of difficult but necessary action, President Fillmore not only squandered an honoured place in American history that the best he could later hope for would be that his failed presidency would be regarded as an historical footnote.

In fairness to President Fillmore, he did pursue a proactive American foreign policy in which the United States supported Hungary’s bid for national freedom following the abortive 1848 Revolution and the president initiated contact with a then isolated and mysterious Japan by despatching Commodore Matthew Perry. For all his faults, President Fillmore was an American patriot who was intensely critical of outgoing President James *Buchan in 1860 for not militarily preventing the secession of Southern states between 1860 and 1861 to form the Confederate States of America.

(*A less benevolent manifestation of Fillmore’s nationalism was his presidential 1856 candidacy as the standard bearer of the anti-migrant American Party - which was part of the appropriately named the Know-Nothing movement. This third party candidacy allowed Fillmore to achieve his objective of preventing the new Republican Party from winning the presidency. It was therefore not surprising that Fillmore later opposed President Lincoln’s attempts to forge unity in relation to the Union’s war effort during the civil war).

President Fillmore’s support for the 1850 Compromise resulted in him losing the Whig Party’s 1852 nomination to General Winifred Scott. The selection of a military hero was in keeping with the tradition of the recent Whig Party of running war-heroes who were seemingly above the partisan fray. The nomination of General Scott was not due so much due to anti-slavery sentiment within the Whig Party but rather a desire to break with Fillmore whose support of the 1850 Compromise had alienated him from both opponents and supporters of slavery.

The nomination by the Whigs of a Southern war hero who inclined toward opposing slavery helped downplay passion over slavery to the extent that the dynamics of the 1852 election campaign did not set the scene for the outbreak of a civil war. The Democrats similar to the Whigs moved to downplay controversy by also nominating a war-hero as their candidate by selecting General Franklin Pearce as their own dark horse nominee.

The similarities between the two retired generals led to a nasty, personalised but boring election campaign in which the Free-Soil candidate (John Hale) and the southern states rights candidate (George Troup) had a negligible impact on the final result in which Pierce convincingly but not overwhelmingly defeated Scott due to the Democrats’ broader reach.

Crucial Transitions with Mediocre Presidents

It is often the case in history that leaders who apparently come from no-where surprise all by confounding expectations because they are not known quantities. This was not the case with Franklin Pearce whose mediocrity led him to support the passage of Senator Stephen Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. This legislation allowed the Nebraska territory to be admitted as a free state and that the territory of Kansas to be admitted to the union as a slave state. In effect, this legislation allowed the continuance of slavery in the South with the option of allowing other territories to be admitted to the union as slave states.

Strong northern opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was such that pro-slave southern elements within the Whig Party split which helped clear the way for the entry of the Free Soil Party (an anti-slavery breakaway party from the Democrats) to merge with anti-slavery Whigs to form the Republican Party in July 1854. The formation of the Republican Party ensured that the United States would not be able to indefinitely maintain the hybrid approach of the nation of being half-free and half-slave.

The formation of the Republican Party raised the terrible spectre of civil war which understandably concerned staunch opponents of slavery in the North. The subsequent action of the pro-slavery Pearce Administration in ending in May 1856 the illegal and forced control of the Nebraska territory by pro-slave elements from Missouri re-assured a sufficient number of Northern voters. A sufficient number of these voters helped elect the Democrat presidential candidate James Buchanan in the November 1856 presidential election over the Republican Party’s first presidential nominee, the anti-slavery John Fremont.

The Disastrous Presidency of James Buchanan

The basic political strategy of President Buchanan was to have the United States exist as a half-free/ half-slave nation with national unity being secured by a strong foreign and defence policy. A major foreign policy of President Buchanan’s was to either purchase or forcibly annex the then Spanish colony of Cuba to the United States so that Southern plantation owners could relocate there with their slaves by the time America abolished slavery. Had Cuba then been annexed to the United States, it is plausible that a time may later have come when the largest Caribbean island seceded from America to be ruled by transplanted Southern plantation owners.

President Buchanan’s strategy of ensuring national unity in the interim as a hybrid nation with regard to slavery was seemingly bolstered by the disturbing 1857 Supreme Court decision of Dred Scott that sanctioned the constitutional legality of slavery in American territories. The Buchanan gambit of maintaining national unity was however crucially undermined by the impact of the public meeting presidential debates between Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois and his Republican Party challenger Abraham Lincoln.

The Douglas-Lincoln debates in the November 1858 mid-term congressional elections were not over slavery per se but whether the nation could continue with a two tier approach of having a mix of free and slave states. Although Abraham Lincoln lost the Senate election to Douglas, the publicity that he received consolidated Republican Party opposition to slavery while dividing the Democrats. Divisions within the Democrats were such that the Republicans won the 1858 congressional election. Due to congressional hostility, it became impossible for President Buchanan to maintain his unethical policy of allowing states to maintain slavery for an indeterminate period of time.

If President Buchanan’s policies were misguided throughout most of his administration, then his actions between the time of the November 1860 presidential election and the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as president in March 1861were treasonous. The Republican Party’s victory in the November 1858 congressional elections set the scene for a probable Lincoln victory in 1860. Nevertheless, Senator Douglas’s success in defeating Lincoln in the 1858 Senate race helped him secure the 1860 Democratic presidential nomination with a good chance of winning the presidency so long as his party remained united.

Senator Douglas’s actual stance on slavery was ambiguous, not inspite of, but because of his sponsorship of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. He regarded this act as a stopgap measure vital to maintaining national unity until slavery could be abolished by popular sovereignty at a state level. As a Democrat Senator Douglas, was innately suspicious of ‘big government’ and was opposed to the utilization of government power to achieve major policy outcomes. The adoption of such a policy approach would have been unfortunate due to the urgency of expeditiously abolishing slavery.

It was probably best that *Douglas lost the 1860 election because, had he won, the South might have successfully seceded from the Union. The groundwork for southern secession was established by the outgoing President Buchanan supporting former vice-president John Breckinridge of Kentucky breaking with the Democratic Party to run as a presidential candidate of the Southern Democrats.

(*The personal integrity of Senator Douglas, who died in June 1861, should not be overlooked because he was the chief political opponent of Abraham Lincoln in the time leading up to his election to the presidency. Douglas might have utilized his own considerable rhetorical powers as president to have persuaded white citizens in Southern states and territories to lobby local legislatures to abolish slavery had President Buchanan not committed high treason by colluding in engineering Southern secession).

The Breckinridge presidential candidacy helped establish a subsequent attitudinal setting in the South that it was alright to secede that would not have been there if Southerners had voted for Douglas. Indeed, had Douglas won the 1860 presidential election, the Breckinridge candidacy would have still created the momentum for Southern secession. The undertaking of such an audacious action was unfortunately viable because it was covertly supported by the outgoing president, James Buchanan.

Although a president-elect Douglas undoubtedly would have opposed secession, a Douglas administration probably would not have stopped the establishment of the Confederacy. This was because, as a Jeffersonian Democrat who supported state’s rights, it would have been an anathema to a President Douglas to have used military power to preserve the Union.

The Treason of the Cotton Whigs

The concept of Southern secession was not as overwhelmingly supported as is now believed. There was still substantial patriotic sentiment in the South which was cleverly neutralized by the presidential candidacy of John Bell of Tennessee who ran as a candidate of the Constitutional Union Party. This new party was a coalition of the Southern (‘Cotton’) Whigs and the American Party/ Know-Nothings which avowedly had no position on slavery because the stated aim of the party platform was to maintain the continuance of the American Union at all costs.

The reality was that Bell (who gained just under 40% of the vote in the South) was a traitor who correctly calculated that his avowed change of stance would convert more than enough previously sceptical Southerners to make secession viable. Southern secession commenced with South Carolina in December 1860 which was a prelude to a convention being held in Montgomery Alabama in February 1861 where a provisional secessionist Southern national government was organised which initially represented seven states. By the following month, the number of Confederate states had increased to eleven.

It is a myth that the Confederacy was a venture predestined to fail. This was because most of the South’s senior political leaders encompassed Cotton Whigs and Southern Democrats who were politically shrewd, if not brilliant. Leaders such as John Bell, Judah Benjamin, Howell Cobb, Robert Rhett, Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs and William Yancey had set the necessary groundwork for the political dynamics of the 1860 presidential election to facilitate secession. The links that Breckinridge had to President *Buchanan ensured that the transition period to the new Lincoln administration was the time when the Confederacy was established.

(*Due to the respect that Americans understandably have for the institution of the presidency, there has been a tendency to regard Buchanan as a failed president rather than a high traitor. At the very least, the political actions of James Buchanan as the United States worst president warrant closer scrutiny).

The political shrewdness of the South’s political leadership was apparent at the February 1861 Montgomery Convention when Rhett and Yancey who had been the major propagandists advocating secession were surprisingly passed over to be provisional president in favour of Jefferson Davis (1808-1889). The choice of Davis was shrewd because he had an excellent military background as a Colonel in the Mississippi Rifles during the Mexican-American War and as Secretary for War in the Pierce Administration.

The selection by the Convention of Davis as ‘provisional president’ endowed the new Confederacy with a degree of legitimacy for many initially sceptical Southerners because he had previously been an avowed stalwart opponent of secession just prior to his selection. To reinforce the misperception that the new Confederacy had legitimacy going back to the 1776 Declaration of Independence, its constitution and initial flag were modelled on the respective Union versions.

There were however aspects of the Confederate Constitution that distinguished it from the United States’ 1788 Constitution. The former constitution effectively limited presidents to a single six year term and banned cabinet ministers from being elected to Congress. It was under this new constitution that Davis and Alexander Stephens (a one-time Whig) were elected unopposed to the confederate ‘presidency’ and ‘vice-presidency’ in November 1861 and inaugurated with a new Confederate Congress in February 1862 that had also been elected in the preceding November.

The ‘presidential’ inauguration took place in Richmond, Virginia where the Confederate capital had in May 1861 from Montgomery, Virginia. The selection of Richmond was a strategic military mistake because it was too geographically north such that the capital subsequently came close to the proximity of the war front.

Had the Confederacy survived, it is an open question as to whether it would have been a democracy, particularly as over a quarter of the population were subject to an institution (*slavery) that was ‘recognized and protected’ under the constitution. Furthermore, transparency of government, which is crucial to a democracy, was procedurally undermined by the practice of the Confederate Congress holding closed sessions. The only protection of political liberty under the Confederate Constitution was directed toward safeguarding state’s rights and strictly outlawing inter-state tariffs.

(*Had Thomas Jefferson opposed slavery when he was president between 1801- 1809, the South might have agreed to its abolition. This is because President Jefferson successfully banned the international slave trade to the United States which helped legitimize this in the Confederate Constitution).

The focus on state’s rights later rebounded on Davis when most state governors (notably Joseph Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina) later challenged his constitutional and political authority after 1863 as the Confederacy’s military position progressively weakened. Indeed, the major focus of Confederate politics became the conflict between the Davis administration and state governments in the 1863/1865 period.

The fundamental reason why the Confederacy ended in failure despite having politically talented leaders was due to the political skills of President Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln’s brilliance was reflected by the fact that he was in a politically weaker position than Davis at the time of his inauguration in February 1861.

From Strength to Weakness: The Leadership Failure of Jefferson Davis

The relatively strong political position of Davis was due to the adroitness of his previously cited backers. They had used their connections to the out-going Buchanan Administration to facilitate secession and then gain overwhelming white Southern support for this treason despite pre-existing apprehension and substantial patriotic sentiment toward the Union in the South.

The supposedly reluctant conversion of the avowedly pro-Union John Bell to endorse secession following Abraham Lincoln’s victory persuaded most of Bell’s supporters in the 1860 election to shift their allegiance to the new Confederacy. The Bell candidacy also had the political ramification of creating a base for a Whig revival in the South with this party making strong gains in the November 1863 congressional elections due to the high rate of voter abstention because of men fighting at the front.

Even though it would have been difficult for the Whigs to have displaced the Southern Democrats as the ruling party due to the Democrats’ massive support, base this would not have unduly concerned the Cotton Whigs. This was because the senior leaders of the Southern Democrats such as Davis and his close political ally Judah *Benjamin were really Cotton Whigs as members of Southern establishment.

(* Judah Benjamin a former Whig who had defected to the Democrats before the Civil War was the most interesting member of the Confederate government. It was amazing that a Jew who was born a British subject and married to a Catholic was able to serve successively as ‘Attorney-General’, ‘Secretary for War’ and ‘Secretary of State’ in a mainly Protestant government of white supremacists. Benjamin would not have been grudgingly accepted into the Cotton Whig establishment had it not been for his verbal articulateness in defending slavery in the 1850s in the Senate and Davis’s later reliance on him which in times of crisis bordered on dependence.

Perhaps in a twinge of conscience as someone who belonged to a community that was and has since being persecuted, Benjamin advocated in 1864 that those slaves who were prepared to fight for the Confederacy be emancipated along with their families. Even at such a militarily dire junction for the South, this proposal was thwarted by hardliners within the Davis regime. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that substantial numbers of blacks would have availed themselves of this offer.

As arguably the most able political figure in the Davis regime but one with so many enemies in the Cotton Whig establishment, Benjamin fled to Britain just prior to the Confederacy’s defeat. In Britain, Benjamin had a distinguished legal career and later retired to France where he died in 1884).

The introduction of a more extensive conscription law in February 1864- but which exempted slaveholders or overseers who had twenty slaves or more from the draft - was very unpopular among most whites. This disgruntlement led to a growing realization that the objectives of the South’s ‘cause’ might be for the narrow benefit of a cotton plantation owning elite.

The Union General, William Tecumseh Sherman, inflicted a scorched earth policy (of which was President Lincoln was ignorant) as his troops marched from Atlanta to Savannah between November and December 1864 to send a message to the Cotton Whig elite. This message was that a victorious Union military could and would take arbitrary punitive action against their economic interests unless they accepted military defeat.

The Cotton Whigs accepted co-option into a post-war political and socio-economic settlement in which their commercial interests were accommodated. The form that this accommodation eventually took was to be thrashed out during the eleven years of the Reconstruction era (1865-1876). There were moves by Reconstruction authorities to align the Cotton Whigs with Freedmen to establish a strong Southern based Republican Party.

An African American-Cotton Whig alliance was never viable because the latter refused to accept either land reform or labour rights being granted to former slaves which would have imperilled their formidable economic power. Instead, the descendants of the Cotton Whigs aligned to the broad mass of Southern whites who became virtually tribal in their allegiance to the Democratic Party between the conclusion of the Civil War and Barry Goldwater’s and George Wallace’s respective presidential candidacies in 1964 and 1968. With regard to blacks in the South, those who were not prevented from exercising their right to vote, overwhelmingly supported the *Republicans until the 1936 elections.

(*Martin Luther King Snr, 1889-1984, was a life-long registered Republican. Nevertheless, his endorsement of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960 was crucial in turning most remaining stalwart black Republican voters over to the Democratic Party. Mr. King’s continuing support for Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election after controversy concerning the terrible living conditions in which black tenants lived on his peanut property was crucial to saving his White House bid).

Tenacious Integrity: The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865)

Although the Cotton Whigs maintained their social and political ascendancy in the post-war South, they could have continued to utilize their talent to exercise power on a national scale by not instigating Southern secession. The calculated risk that the secessionists had taken was that President Lincoln would be unable to muster sufficient political authority to harness the far more formidable industrial resources of the North to militarily prevail.

The comparatively weaker industrial and military capacity of the South was initially off-set by the strong support among the white population for secession which was manifested by a formidable marshalling of resources. This support placed the North at an initial disadvantage while President Lincoln manoeuvred to assert his authority in the first two years of the Civil War.

This was because the political traditions and practices of the United States were that of having a federal government that was weak in political domestic affairs. This weakness had been previously manifested by the failures of all American presidents since the 1820 Missouri Compromise to safeguard national unity by abolishing slavery.

The relative lack of power of an American president was reflected by the secession of four more states to the Confederacy following the Southern attack on the federal military instillation of Fort Sumter in April 1861. Even with this onset of outright civil war in 1861, the power of the federal government was still in 1862 insufficient to have stopped the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky from seceding had they then so desired. It was for this reason that slavery was not abolished by the United States until early 1863 when the Union’s military situation had improved that further secession could be prevented.

The initial comparative lack of the Union was reflected by the acute difficulty that President Lincoln experienced in harnessing military capacity to stop Southern secession in the early stages. Had more volunteers heeded the president’s call to arms, then the North might have prevailed in the first six months of the attack on Fort Sumter.

At the outbreak of war, the Union army had 16,000 troops and its effectiveness was further undermined by nearly half of the Union officer corp defecting to the new Confederate army. Brilliant generals such as James E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Joseph Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnson and James Longstreet joined the new Confederate army. By contrast, President Lincoln was initially lumbered with ineffective generals such as Joseph Hooker, Ambrose Burnside and George Mc Clellan.

The military and political ramifications of the Union victories at the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863 gave President Lincoln the necessary authority to harness the North’s industrial and military capacities to then effectively prosecute the war. Had President Lincoln not replaced General Joseph Hooker with General George Meade as the commander at Gettysburg, this critically important battle (in both military and political contexts) might not have been won by the Union.

The hostility between General Meade and President Lincoln was symptomatic of poor relations between the executive and senior officers in the first two years of the Civil War. Important Union army commanders such as General George Mc Clellan were personally hostile toward President Lincoln. This hostility was increased because the president often had new ideas about how the war should be fought that conservative generals such as Mc Clellan were opposed to.

President Lincoln initially allowed inadequate generals such as Irwin Mc Dowell to ineffectively direct the union war effort in the South because he could not afford to dismiss them in the early stages of military conflict. This was because the political fallout would have been such that the North’s war effort probably would have been terminated.

By contrast, the immediate defensive military objectives of the South were comparatively easier to achieve due to the speed and flexibility with which Confederate troops could be deployed. Consequently, Confederate generals such as Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard were able to thwart early Union attempts to take Richmond.

Nevertheless, an astute military strategist such as General Lee realized that maintaining a purely defensive war was unviable. Lee knew that due, to the superiority of the North’s resources, it would only be a matter of time before the Union militarily prevailed. It was for this reason that the Confederacy launched two invasions to inflict military defeat in battle centres in the North to fatally undermine President Lincoln’s then vulnerable political position so that the war could no longer be undertaken by the Union.

Due to the high political stakes, a Confederate success in the Battle of Gettysburg in the northern state of Pennsylvania in July 1863 could have resulted in a Southern victory in the Civil War. The judicious appointment of General Meade - and Union forces gaining the higher ground at the battlefront - secured a Union victory at Gettysburg. The South might have lived to fight another day had Lee taken the advice of General Longstreet by making an expeditious retreat from the Gettysburg battlefield when one was still viable.

Ultimate union victory was all but assured by the simultaneous northern victory (July 1863) at the Battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi. The capture of Vicksburg under the command of General Ulysses Grant gave Union gunboats a free rein along the Mississippi River thereby virtually splitting the Confederacy. The Vicksburg victory was a vindication of President Lincoln’s then political-military strategy of reluctantly deferring to ineffectual generals prosecuting the war in the South in return for his having a free hand to prosecute the war in the West.

President Lincoln’s brilliant ideas about how to transport troops by boat on the Mississippi River and the support he received from effective generals based in the West, such as Grant and William Sherman, turned the tide of the war in the union’s favour in 1863. Following the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Northern war effort was directed by able generals who were not only supported by their president but were open to accepting his insightful ideas concerning tactics and strategy.

It also should not be forgotten that before and even after 1863, the Union’s war effort might not have been sustained had it not been for President Lincoln (at often great personal risk) boosting rank and file morale by visiting troops at the front.

The Battle Within: President Lincoln and the Radical Republicans

The political context in which President Lincoln operated was almost as dangerous as the military one. Ironically, President Lincoln was politically threatened by those who should have been his strongest supporters – the so-called Radical Republicans. Senator Benjamin Wade as Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War correctly drew attention to the waste of resources and military ineptitude of generals such as Mc Clellan. However, Senator Benjamin Wade tragically attempted to undermine President Lincoln’s authority because he did not appreciate that the president had to make compromises along the way to achieve slave emancipation.

The criticisms of President Lincoln by Radical Republicans such as Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin, Senator Wade and Congressmen Zachariah Chandler, Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Davis undermined presidential authority to the extent that it might have been fatal had it not been for the president’s political adroitness. Ironically, the Radical Republicans’ criticisms of President Lincoln precipitated needed actions such as replacing the ineffective Simon Cameron as War Secretary with the brilliant Edwin Stanton. Stanton’s appointment not only mollified the Radical Republicans because he was one of them but also improved the prosecution of the war due to his superb administrative efficiency.

Despite securing the appointment of supporters to key positions, the Radical Republicans still vehemently opposed their president with regard to policy approaches to recently recovered territories. The Radical Republicans wanted to impose direct military rule on former Confederate states. However, President Lincoln defiantly instituted a policy by executive order that facilitated special elections of new state governments by giving suffrage rights to 10% of the population of white males in a state that swore allegiance to the Union.

There was still the outstanding issue of whether to seat members of former seceded states in the Congress but the president’s policy established a clear dichotomy of whether a conciliatory policy would be adopted toward the former Confederacy or a confrontational one. The president’s vetoing of the Wade-David Bill in July 1864 - stipulating that a majority of white male citizens had to swear allegiance to the Union for the election of new state governments - laid down the marker of the ironically probable scenario that Abraham Lincoln’s opponents in his second term would be his erstwhile supporters.

The depth of Radical Republican antipathy toward President Lincoln was such that they briefly formed the Radical Democracy Party which nominated the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate from the 1856 election, John Fremont. He had the good sense to withdraw due to his realization that his third party candidacy would probably allow the Democrat candidate General Mc Clellan to win the 1864 election. The gracious resignation of the leading cabinet opponent of the Radical Republicans, the Post Master General, Montgomery Blair (who unfortunately was not opposed to slavery in principle) crucially helped contribute to Republican unity for the 1864 elections.

The Republicans’ support for President Lincoln was such that they reconfigured as the *National Union for the 1864 elections by aligning with the so-called War Democrats. This was most vividly illustrated by President Lincoln selecting the then military governor of Tennessee and its Senator, Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate. The selection of Johnson was both a masterstroke and ultimately a disastrous decision on President Lincoln’s part.

(*Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson could not convert the National Union into a formally merged party of moderate Republicans, i.e. non-Radical Republicans and War Democrats following his succession to the presidency, due to still entrenched party structures. The new president instead took the then unprecedented action of actively campaigning (‘Swing Around the Circle’) in the 1866 mid-term congressional elections to help ensure the victory of non-Radical Republicans and War Democrats to facilitate the formalisation of the National Union Party.

This strategy was an abysmal failure because the Radical Republicans increased their representation so that President Johnson’s supporters were subsequently confined to a small number of Southern Democrats who were entitled to take up congressional seats. President Johnson did not understand that despite his gift for oratory, most Northerners then considered it beneath the dignity of the office for a president to campaign in mid-term elections.

The success of the Radical Republicans (who still ran formally under the banner of Republican Party banner) emboldened them to attempt to impeach President Johnson in May 1868 which they almost failing by only one vote. It is interesting to note that, had Johnson been removed from office, he would have been succeeded as president by the Radical Republican Benjamin Wade who was then the Senate Speaker pro tempore. A Wade presidency might have changed the nature of the contemporary dichotomy between the Democrats and Republicans because the Ohio Senator was an advocate of female suffrage and labour rights).

The selection of Andrew Johnson was a masterstroke in that it essentially brought a substantial part of Democrats over to the Republican Party. Furthermore, the selection of a powerful signal to Southerners that a second term Lincoln Administration would pursue a conciliatory policy to the states of the former Confederacy. This neutralization of the Radical Republicans did not mean that a re-elected President Lincoln would not have promoted the civil rights of freed slaves but rather that he would have prevented his party men from pursuing a vindictive policy against former white Confederates.

Missed Opportunities: The Failed Presidency of Andrew Johnson

The disastrous aspect of the Johnson selection was that he was too narrow minded to be an effective president should he succeed President Lincoln in his second term. But in one of the cruel turns in which history abounds, that is exactly what happened when President Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, a month after his inauguration for a second presidential term*.

(*President Lincoln won his 1864 re-election against the Democrat candidate, the former Union Commander in Chief, General George Mc Clellan. The Democrat nomination of Mc Clellan was reminiscent of the Whig stratagem of running war heroes for president when the party’s patriotic bona fides were in doubt.

The selection of Mc Clellan actually turned out to be a mistake for the Democrats, many of whom were known as ‘Copperheads’, which was then a pejorative term for Confederate sympathisers in the North. Most Northern Democratic voters were probably sentimental Copperheads but their political position was fatally undermined because the certainty of a Union victory in 1864 made President Lincoln’s re-election a virtual inevitability. Mc Clellan himself – despite being sincerely anti-Lincoln- was genuinely desirous of a military victory that he disillusioned his voting base during the campaign by repudiating any notion of negotiating a settlement with the soon to be defeated Confederacy).

As terrible a president as Andrew Johnson would be, his first months in office were promising. Most Northerners touchingly rallied to their new president who had been a Southern Democrat who had supported Breckinridge for president in 1860 but had surprisingly defied his constituents by refusing to support secession. Because he was a Southerner, most Northerners expected and accepted his actions in promptly amnestying most former Confederate officials restoring the former seceded Southern states to the Union despite delays in seating their representatives in Congress.

All might have been well had President Andrew Johnson not supported the new governments in the Southern states passing legislation which discriminated against former slaves to the point of virtually restoring the former status. Had President Lincoln still been alive, he undoubtedly would have restored the constitutional rights of the former Confederate states while also advancing the civil rights of former slaves who became known as freedmen. Such a Lincoln policy probably would have gained grudging white acceptance in the South as a quid pro-quo for the full restoration of state rights.

The President Andrew Johnson policy of supporting the repression of former slaves had alienated Northern opinion against the South. Consequently, congressional legislation was passed in 1867 (over presidential veto) that divided the former Confederate states into five military districts presided over by an army commander which effectively denied these states their constitutional rights.

The Tragedy of Retrograde Reconstruction

The tragedy of the transformation of Reconstruction was that a potential process for reconciliation and renewal was converted into one of division between Southern Whites and former slaves. The latter were supported by a congressionally authorised federal government agency called the Freedmen’s Bureau. This Bureau unofficially helped establish Loyal Leagues that were predominately composed of former slaves. It was in opposition to the Loyal Leagues that the white racist Ku Klux Klan first emerged as a counterforce.

Due to the relatively vulnerable position of former slaves in transitioning from slavery to emancipation, they were too dependent in an immediate period upon the external support of the Freedman’s Bureau. This support began to give way with the election of Ulysses Grant to the presidency in 1868. Although Grant was a staunch Republican, he could never forgive the Radical Republicans for their previous hostility toward President Lincoln such that he would have no truck with them.

The eclipse of the Radical Republicans under the ineffective Grant Administration (1869 to 1877) saw a withdrawal of federal government support for blacks in the South. Consequently, by 1876, the restoration of constitutional rights to all the former Confederate states was commensurate with their being able to deny civil rights to their black populations including suffrage by stopping then from registering to vote.

The overall disaster of the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln was that it precipitated a series of inverse shifts culminating in most Southern whites counterproductively continuing to conceptualize the maintenance of their rights with racial repression. The resulting narrow outlook hindered economic development in the South for over one hundred years.

A more lateral approach toward race relations by whites in the South might have helped generate new ideas and a diversity of thinking conducive to economic creativity and the consequent achievement of higher living standards. Ironically the process which ultimately helped Southern whites recover from the Confederacy’s defeat and converted the transformation of most blacks into stalwart Democrats commenced with the civil rights campaign launched in the late 1950s by the great black social activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr.

Post-Reconstruction Nineteenth Century Presidents

As the military victor in the Civil War, the socio-economic ramifications for the Union states were more immediately positive. The Civil War helped spur the extensive *industrialization with the building of new railroads, particularly in the West. The downside of industrialization was the growth of corruption that the Grant administration seemed to acquiesce in if not facilitate.

(*The American Civil War stood out because both sides engaged in naval warfare with the Confederacy using British made ships, Confederate Cruisers. The less industrialized South also utilized submarines to avoid the Union blockade. Because torpedos had not yet been developed, the Confederate submarines inflicted negligible military damage against the Union Navy. Nevertheless, the industrial innovation of the Confederacy was surprising due to its very limited industrial base).

Public disenchantment with corruption under the Grant Administration so affected the ruling Republicans that they nominated the incorruptible Rutherford Hayes as their candidate in 1876. The Hayes Administration (1877 to 1881) grappled with corruption (which caused inner party turmoil for the Republicans) as did the brief Republican administration of James Garfield who was unfortunately assassinated in July 1881 after five months in office. President Garfield was succeeded by Vice-President Chester Arthur.

The Arthur Administration was also honest and earnest in its attempts to achieve civil service reform such that the president was similarly embroiled in conflict with his own party. Having lost the 1884 Republican presidential nomination to James Blaine outgoing President Arthur was less than distressed when Grover Cleveland became the first Democrat presidential candidate to win an election since 1856. Cleveland also achieved historical note for being the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

President Cleveland failed to win re-election in 1888. This was because the president disappointed Democrat machine men by continuing the work of presidents Garfield and Arthur by fighting for a merit based civil service. The consequent anti-Cleveland faction in the Democratic Party consequently withheld crucial support for the president such that he was defeated by the Republican nominee Benjamin Harrison.

The Harrison Administration was honest and in a throwback to the Republicans of the immediate post-Civil War period, supported civil rights for blacks. In addition to advocating black civil rights, his administration also advanced civil rights for Native American Indians. However, ambiguity as to whether President Harrison supported the gold standard for the American dollar or a combination of silver and gold alienated western Republicans who supported the third party candidacy of James Weaver. His candidacy split the Republican vote, thereby allowing Cleveland to win the 1892 presidential election.

Grover Cleveland also won the 1892 election for the same reason that he had in 1884 – respect for his personal integrity which attracted undecided voters and disillusioned Republican supporters. That is not to say that the post-Civil War Democrat voting bases of white Southerners and Irish and Italian migrants in big industrial cities such as New York were not important to Grover Cleveland. Indeed, had Blaine as the 1888 Republican candidate not denounced Catholicism, then voter turnout among Irish, Italian and Polish communities might not have been as extensive to first win Cleveland the presidency.

Ironically President Cleveland, similar to his predecessor and successor Benjamin Harrison, failed to win re-election because of internal party opposition over his failure to support silver as a mainstay of the dollar. The success of the so-called silver Democrats in denying Cleveland the party nomination in 1896 probably allowed the Republican presidential nominee William Mc Kinley to win the ensuing election.

President Mc Kinley was one of the United States most forthright presidents in that people knew where they stood with him. His aggressive foreign policy in instigating and winning the 1898 Spanish-American War, support for the gold standard, protectionism and tepid support for civil rights (which still infuriated Southern Democrats) were polarising in their impact on American domestic politics. Fortunately for President Mc Kinley, domestic political polarization isolated the Democrats to loyalist block votes in the South and immigrant communities in the big cities that he easily won re-election in 1900.

The Square Deal: The First Roosevelt Renewal

President Mc Kinley would probably now be more vividly remembered had he not been succeeded on his assassination in September 1901 by his indomitable Vice-President, Theodore (‘Teddy’) Roosevelt (1858-1919). In some respects, being president was not the pinnacle of Teddy Roosevelt’s amazing life but rather another fascinating facet in which he had been a state politician, writer, police commissioner, assistant secretary/war hero and *vice-president. Not only would President Roosevelt be a remarkable chief executive but have the great social and political impact after leaving office that no former president has since had.

(*Being vice-president was probably a low-point in Teddy Roosevelt’s career because a wary President Mc Kinley confined him to ceremonial functions).

The domestic hallmark of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency was his determination to rein in the power of big corporate interests with regard to banking, oil, railways and steel by applying anti-trust legislation. Furthermore, the Roosevelt administrations (1901 to 1909) also arbitrated disputes between unions and big companies to prevent major labour conflict. This Roosevelt Administration was also notable for promoting environmental conservation, irrigation and general support for small farmers. In foreign policy, President Roosevelt achieved a balance between securing American security interests and fostering international good will particularly with Latin America.

Having been the first president since Grant in 1872 to win re-election and having helped William Taft win the presidency in 1908, it seemed that Teddy Roosevelt (who was the youngest former president at age fifty) would continuing to make his legend as an African explorer. But he instead made his mark as a former president after 1910 by becoming embroiled in inter-Republican faction fights which culminated in his denying President Taft re-election in 1912 by splitting the non-Democrat vote as a third party candidate.

Perhaps it was too much for an energetic personality such as Teddy Roosevelt to make way for William Taft as president. Both Roosevelt and Taft were progressive Republicans in that they both supported government intervention to curb the power of big business in favour of the little guy. This approach had been a strong tradition since the liberal Republican movement emerged in the 1870s within the Grand Old Party (GOP) as a counter-reaction to the Grant Administration’s corrupt ties to big business.

The failure of former president, Ulysses Grant, to win the 1880 Republican Party nomination consolidated the ascendancy of the liberal Republicanism which evolved into the *progressive movement under Teddy Roosevelt. Although Teddy Roosevelt garnered 27% of the vote in 1916 election as the Progressive (‘Bull-Moose’) Party presidential nominee to President Taft’s 25%, the Republican Party still remained the alternate second party to the Democrats. This was because the Bull-Moose Party was really a personal vehicle of Teddy Roosevelt.

(*Confusingly, there have been other progressive movements previously and since in American history).

The separation of the once dominant progressives in 1912 (even if temporary) from the Republican Party helped transform the GOP into a more conventional pro-business party that was relatively aloof from social reform. Because Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft were philosophically similar, they overcame personal differences to support the moderate progressive former governor of New York, Charles Hughes, to be the Republican presidential candidate in the 1916 elections.

Even though the Roosevelt-Taft 1916 political reconciliation effectively re-united the Republican Party, a sufficient number of stalwart progressives gave their support to President Wilson which probably helped him win a narrow re-election. The narrow defeat of Hughes probably did not distress Teddy Roosevelt because his strong support for the former New York governor probably placed him in a position to win the 1920 presidential election as the Republican nominee.

Indeed, the continuing power of Teddy Roosevelt was such that President Wilson probably would not have been able to take the United States into the First World War against the Central Powers in 1917 inspite of his 1916 pledge to keep the United States neutral had it not been for the support of the former president. The unexpected death of Teddy Roosevelt in early 1919 therefore created a vacuum in the Republican Party.

Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle was assumed by General Leonard Wood who almost won the 1920 Republican Party nomination but was unable to overcome the power of the machine men who had moved into the breach following the wholesale departure of progressives in 1912. These politicos eventually engineered the presidential nomination of Ohio Senator and newspaper publisher Warren Harding.

The other important link to the Progressive era beside General Wood at the 1920 Chicago Republican Convention was Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. He had been previously weakened by his past rivalry in the progressive movement with Teddy Roosevelt so that his base in the Republican Party was weak outside his home state of Wisconsin.

Senator La Follette’s major impact on American politics was his unsuccessful bid for president in 1924. This was because his formation of the a new Progressive Party in 1924, which had moderate union labour support, resulted in Senator La Follette (who died a year later) essentially separating the progressive tradition from the Republican Party which also arguably ended an activist approach to government on the non-Democratic side of politics going back to the Federalists.

Progressive Failure: From Harding to Hoover

The election of Harding to the presidency in 1920 represented an electoral repudiation of the internationalist policies of the Wilson administration. Stalwart Democratic voting bases of *German and Irish American voters supported Harding due to anger toward President Wilson for taking the United States into the First World War in 1917. Disillusionment with President Wilson was compounded by the way in which Britain and France seemingly disregarded the American perspective at the Treaty of Versailles in France in 1919 by imposing a harsh post-war settlement on Germany.

(*There were possibly more Americans of German descendent than of any other ethnic group at this time).

The Harding administration adopted an isolationist approach to foreign policy in which the United States refrained from undertaking an activist role in international affairs outside of North and South America. The post-World War era was also noted for the onset of prohibition on alcohol distribution and government generally refraining from restraining the power of big corporate interests which had been the defining hallmark of Progressive Republicanism. These defining aspects of American politics and government in the 1920s reflected a popular mood due to the desire to put the dislocating impact of American involvement in the First World War behind the nation.

Although the Harding administration reflected the popular mood, it was one of the worst USA governments in history due to the president’s failure to rein in corruption among his cronies who were overly keen to partake in the spoils of office. There is little doubt that, had President Harding not died in 1923, he would have been impeached.

The impact of President Harding’s successor Calvin Coolidge was positive in the short term but very negative in the longer term. The dour former Massachusetts governor brooked no toleration of corruption that his administration was, in stark contrast to its predecessor, the epitome of financial and administrative rectitude. The Coolidge administration was similar to Harding’s in that it refrained from a progressive approach of intervening to prevent big business from becoming too powerful.

The pro-business orientation of the Coolidge Administration was reflected by the president’s famous quote of “the business of America is business”. This perspective was reflected by the Coolidge Administration’s balancing the budget and in a precursor to supply-side economics taxes were cut to boost demand. This administration also encouraged the availability of financial credit which was broadly similar to the contemporary practice of quantitative easing.

The laissez-faire approach to economics and isolationism in American foreign policy of the Coolidge era later obscured the fact that, as a Republican administration, there was still some continuity to the progressive era in that President Coolidge supported civil rights for black and Native Americans. Nevertheless, Coolidge’s presidency is generally now considered to be a failure because appropriate government measures (such as sufficiently regulating the money supply) were not undertaken as preventative maintenance to prevent the October 1929 Stock Market Crash which precipitated the Great Depression.

The greatest possible failing of Coolidge as president was that, as a highly intelligent person who may well have read the warning signs of impending economic catastrophe, he refused to do anything accept firmly decline to seek re-election in 1928. But, while economic times were still good it was relatively easy for the outgoing president to support his respected Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover secure the *1928 Republican Party presidential nomination and election that year.

(* The 1928 presidential election was notable in that the Democrat presidential candidate, New York Governor Al Smith, was a Catholic. Smith had antagonised Southern Democrats by his courageous denunciation of lynching and general support of civil rights. Due to the popularity of the outgoing Coolidge Administration and Governor Smith’s Catholicism, he failed to carry the South, although South Carolina and Tennessee supported him due to a deeply embedded allegiance to the Democratic Party.

This election was also notable in that the first non-white was elected to national office. Hoover’s running mate was a half-American Native Indian, Charles Curtis. The Curtis selection demonstrated that there was still then a strong tradition for supporting civil liberties for racial minorities in the Republican Party).

President Hoover is perhaps one of the most misunderstood presidents in American history. Both his many detractors and minority of stubborn admirers have misunderstood him as a laissez-faire president who (depending on your ideological perspective) was either ahead or behind the times during a time of great socio-economic crisis. The truth is that Hoover was a moderate progressive Republican whose prescriptions although notionally sound were insufficient due to the incredible challenge wrought by the Great Depression.

Hoover essentially supported the Coolidge creed that the ‘business of America is business’. He was however a moderate progressive Republican who had previously supported Teddy Roosevelt. Following the onset of the Great Depression, President Hoover undertook government intervention to reconfigure economic settings because of the downturn in economic conditions.

It is now overlooked that, after the 1929 Crash, the Hoover administration increased both corporate taxation and tariffs and initiated public works programmes to help generate an employment led economic recovery. Very importantly, the Hoover Administration established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932. This federal government agency crucially supported smaller financial institutions so that they could loan money to farmers and small businesses who might otherwise not have gained credit. The operation of the RFC (which was wound up in 1957) was crucial in mitigating though not overcoming the Great Depression.

The major reason for the failure of the Hoover presidency was his profound belief in volunteerism as the key to economic recovery from the Great Depression. Volunteerism had worked miracles since the time of the United States Declaration of Independence but, in the morass of the Great Depression, more extensive government social support was required. It was for this reason that the electorate in 1932 turned to the Democratic Party presidential nominee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).

The New Deal: Rooseveltism Returns

FDR as his surname suggests, was a distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt. His connection to the president was furthered by his marrying the president’s niece, Eleanor Roosevelt in 1905. The major difference between Teddy Roosevelt and FDR was one of party registration as the latter was a Democrat. As a New York state legislator who had been a key supporter of President Wilson’s amongst New York’s Democratic Party, FDR was appointed undersecretary for the navy in 1913.

As navy undersecretary FDR served with meritorious distinction. This record of service combined perhaps with the appeal of his surname to undecided progressive voters helped secure FDR’s selection as the running mate of Democratic Party presidential candidate James Cox in the 1920 elections. The unfortunate defeat of the Cox-Roosevelt ticket helped consolidate a base for FDR in the New York Democratic Party as a supporter of Al Smith.

As a Smith partisan, FDR supported Al Smith’s election as New York governor in 1922, his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1924 and his failed candidacy for the White House four years later. Smith in turn supported FDR’s election as New York Governor in 1928. The Smith-FDR alliance ended in 1932 because they were rivals for their party’s presidential nomination.

FDR, due to his excellent network of party contacts and as New York governor, entered the 1932 Democratic Convention as the front runner for the party presidential nomination. FDR did not squander his advantages and consolidated them by selecting the House Speaker and stalwart Southern Democrat John Garner as his running mate to easily take the nomination.

The hope that the Roosevelt-Garner ticket offered the nation in a time of widespread despair forged the surprisingly long lasting New Deal Coalition which encompassed conservative Southern Democrats, Catholics, Blacks, Jews, unionists and small farmers. This coalition endured because the Roosevelt Administration’s New Deal programmes appealed to the American tradition of volunteerism being applied in a context of state support.

It may seem oxymoronic for there to be government supported volunteerism but FDR essentially undertook what President Hoover could never have countenanced – establishing massive government bureaucracies to alleviate the poverty of the Great Depression and possibly lay the groundwork for recovery from the Great Depression. An array of federal government agencies (which were known as ‘Administrations’) was established by the Roosevelt Administration to address specific concerns for different parts of the economy. These administrations were staffed by relatively low paid but FDR inspired bureaucrats for different areas of the economy.

There was a degree of pump-priming as a result of government spending to support New Deal programmes but President Roosevelt was inherently suspicious of state bureaucracies eventually supplanting the market as the driver of economic activity. This concern was unfounded as it would be the relatively conservative but notionally Republican Administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1953 to 1961) which consolidated an American version of Keynesianism that the New Deal had first given rise to.

It is probable that, without the government interventionist approach of New Deal programmes aimed at alleviating social distress in the 1930s, the United States might not have had the capacity to orientate its industry toward massive war time production between 1941 and 1945. It was the massive increase in industrial output that in effect ended the Great Depression and laid the groundwork for the prosperity of the post-World War II period which was beneficial to business and *employment growth.

(*The New Deal was also important because under it the crucial National Labor Relations Act 1935 (the Wagner Act) which guaranteed the right of unions to collectively organise and bargain was passed).

FDR Inspired Political Reconfigurations

Because the New Deal was a considerable work-in-progress opposition from both left and right emerged with regard to its approach either going too far or not far enough. A far-left wing critique never gained sufficient traction because most Americans accepted that President Roosevelt had ameliorated the social ill-effects of the Great Depression and established the most plausible scenario for future economic recovery. The miniscule support of either the American Socialist or Communist parties to make any substantial electoral in-roads throughout the Great Depression was a reflection of the social successes of the New Deal and its limited but still appreciated economic achievements.

Opposition to the New Deal from a conservative perspective was intellectually rigorous but electorally non-threatening. Former president Herbert Hoover perhaps motivated by his long standing antipathy toward FDR and reflective of the further development of his ideas became a trenchant and articulate critic of the New Deal as did Ohio Senator Robert Taft who was the son of former president, William Taft.

The coalescence of the Conservative Coalition in late 1937 was a re-action to the most dubious aspect of FDR’s, the attempt to stack out the Supreme Court earlier that year. This coalition was an alliance between Southern Democrats led by Vice-President Garner and conservative Republicans led by Senator Taft. The Conservative Coalition created legislative challenges for the president but paradoxically posed no electoral threat to FDR. This was because the Southern Democrats would not split in order to avoid loyalists later challenging them at a congressional or local level.

Senator Taft’s informal alliance with the Southern Democrats alienated western and northern based liberal orientated Republicans from their more conservative inclined counterparts throughout the party. Liberal orientated Republicans from the North and West were able to undercut Taft’s nationwide conservative party base in the GOP to deny him the presidential nomination in 1940, 1948 and 1952 by aligning with the New York based Thomas Dewey.

The impact of geographical divisions in undermining Republican unity during the FDR era had been first apparent when Kansas Governor Alf Landon (a former Progressive Party supporter of Teddy Roosevelt) was able to win the 1936 presidential nomination on the basis that he had been the only incumbent Republican gubernatorial candidate to win in the 1934 elections. The half-hearted campaign that Governor Landon waged gave rise to suspicions (which he never really vigorously refuted) that he essentially supported the New Deal-and by extension FDR’s re-election- as a necessary stop-gap until economic recovery was achieved.

Although the mid-western governor (Landon) garnered an appallingly low 36% of the popular vote in the 1936 election, he remained a powerful figure in the Republican Party. This was because his nomination had substantially undermined former president Hoover’s influence within the Republican Party and the vacuum created by the vast array of GOP incumbents who lost re-election in 1936 cleared the way for Landon supporters to win nominations for the 1938. The strong gains that the Republicans made in the 1938 elections (which were almost inevitable as a rebalancing of the 1936 debacle) placed them in contention to win the 1940 presidential election.

The Republican failure to win in 1940 (despite FDR’s very controversial decision to seek an unprecedented third term) was due to GOP liberals being more concerned by the prospects for the United States of Robert Taft being president than under a re-elected President Roosevelt. Such concern was based upon Taft’s ideologically rigid isolationism which, although reflective of American majority opinion following the First World War, had came under general question in 1940 due to the Nazi German threat in Europe.

Manhattan District Attorney (DA) Thomas Dewey’s declared candidacy at the June 1940 Republican Convention crystallized an internationalist approach which a majority of the Convention’s uncommitted delegates were becoming inclined towards because of the shock and concern caused by the very recent Fall of France. To avoid a split over isolation, a deal was thrashed out between Dewey and Taft supporters by nominating a relatively obscure businessman, Wendell Willkie as the presidential nominee.

Willkie originally adopted an isolationist stance upon being nominated but, as the 1940 campaign progressed, he moved toward an interventionist position. This transition was viable because there were shifts amongst many Americans away from isolationism due to abhorrence for the Hitler regime. President Roosevelt ran on an avowedly isolationist platform while still conveying an underlying sympathy toward Britain that most Americans (particularly Southern whites) shared. The ambiguity of the 1940 election was an important factor which significantly contributed to President Roosevelt’s unprecedented re-election for a third term.

World War II and Post-War American Politics

Hitler’s declaration of war (and that of Axis allies such as Italy and satellites) on the United States following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 was moronic. This was because President Roosevelt would have been hard pressed to have the American Congress also approve the United States going to war against Germany in addition to Japan.

The fact that American isolationism had receded (to say the least) as a result of Pearl Harbour was reflected by Senator Taft not seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1944. It was therefore almost an inevitability that the GOP presidential nomination party went to Dewey because of his previous impact at the 1940 Republican Party convention. His political stature had been enhanced by since being elected mayor of New York in 1942, due to the crucial support of the Republican state governor Fiorello La Guardia.

Dewey’s 1944 presidential run has since been considered almost a practice for the 1948 election because President Roosevelt’s re-election was a virtual certainty. Although FDR was the favourite in the 1944 election, he might very well have lost had news leaked that he was prepared to concede post-war Soviet territorial claims against Poland. A defection of American Polish voters from the Democrats to the Republicans could have had a knock on effect of other stalwart New Deal voting blocs going over to Dewey.

The total Allied victory over the Axis in 1945 paradoxically saw a re-emergence of the issue of isolationism due to the issue of whether the United States should counter the Soviet Union’s attempts to dominate post-war Europe. President Harry Truman’s (who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945) resolve to oppose Soviet aggression was consolidated by British Opposition Leader Sir Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton Missouri in March 1946.

Paradoxically, President Truman’s political capacity would be enhanced by the Republicans winning the 1946 Congressional elections. This was because new Republican freshmen Congressmen (such as Richard Nixon from California) voted for the Marshall Aid Programme of vast economic assistance to post-war Europe without which that continent might have succumbed to communism.

The Congress also very importantly supported President Truman’s 1947 request to send military aid to Greece and Turkey. The Greek government was then fighting a civil war against local communists and Turkey was defying Soviet attempts at intimidation. Although President Truman probably saved Europe from a Soviet takeover-there was still a widespread misperception that he was weak on communism due to his refusal to effectively support Chiang Kai-shek against the communists in the Chinese Civil War. The American president loathed the Chinese Nationalist regime believing that good money after bad would be squandered by sending extensive American aid to China.

Even though President Truman was widely mis-perceived as being weak on communism, his determination not to allow the United States to relapse into isolationism precipitated the foundation of the Progressive Party which nominated Truman’s predecessor as vice-president, Henry Wallace. There was also a split on the right with Southern Democrats splitting because the 1948 Philadelphia Democratic Convention adopted a civil rights platform. The subsequent Southern Democratic breakaway party, the State’s Rights Democratic (‘Dixiecrat’) Party nominated South Carolina governor, Storm Thurmond as its presidential candidate.

Thurmond and Wallace (who both received 2.4 % of the vote respectively) almost achieved their objective of forcing the election of the president to the House of Representatives by denying President Truman (49.6% of the vote) a majority of the popular vote. This objective had been considered improbable on the basis that Dewey was at the very least expected to comfortably win the election. Why Dewey (who received just over 45% of the vote) did not campaign more vigorously is one of the great mysteries of American twentieth century politics.

President Truman, in contrast to his GOP opponent vigorously campaigned by undertaking his famous ‘whistle stop’ barnstorming train tour in which he denounced the Republican majority Congress as ‘a do-nothing’ institution. The president essentially won election because he conveyed the message that the New Deal domestic legacy (government support for a market economy and those less well off) would be imperilled by a Dewey victory. Furthermore, the electorate did not buy into the Republican fallacy that President Truman was soft on communism.

The president’s anti-communist bona fides were again demonstrated by his committing American troops to the United Nations (UN) mission to defend the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) against North Korean aggression and later Chinese Communist intervention following the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-1953). To avoid expanding the Korean War, President Truman dismissed General Douglas Mc Arthur in 1951 when he advocated an American led invasion of North East China. Mc Arthur’s dismissal was deeply unpopular in the United States that it essentially put pay to any prospect of the president seeking re-election in 1952.

Even though President Truman had essentially foregone running for re-election in 1952, the 1948 result had demonstrated that there would be strong public support for a Democratic presidential candidate. Indeed the Democrats may very well have held the White House in 1952 had General Dwight (‘Ike’) Eisenhower the former Allied Supreme Commander in Europe been *drafted to run with them. General Eisenhower who had previously refused to associate with a proposal to accept a Democrat draft in 1948 to displace President Truman accepted a Republican draft in 1952 organised by Dewey.

Dewey made amends to his party for losing the 1948 election by organising the 1952 Eisenhower draft. Had Eisenhower not accepted the 1952 Republican draft, Senator Taft (who died in 1953) would have undoubtedly won the Republican presidential nomination because the Dewey defeat of 1952 had so discredited the party’s liberals. A Taft candidacy more than probably would have resulted in another Republican defeat. This was because his isolationism was so out of sync with the American mainstream and his small government ideas were similarly not accepted*.

(*It is amazing that Senator Robert Taft’s philosophy was so conservative because many of his domestic and foreign policy approaches would not have been accepted by his father, the former president William Taft, who had actually been a moderate progressive Republican).

Republican Party Renewal

To keep party regulars onside, Dewey helped arrange for California Senator Richard Milhouse Nixon (RN) to be selected as Eisenhower’s running mate. RN was in the Taft camp but by now with most of the Ohio senator’s supporters he did not share his isolationist approach to foreign policy which had become unfashionable*. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket achieved the appropriate balance within the GOP and the former’s extensive popularity gave the ticket the edge that it needed to beat the widely respected Democratic presidential nominee Adalai Stevenson who was then the governor of Illinois.

(*RN had been consistently opposed to American isolationism since he was a university student in the 1930s).

The election of the essentially non-partisan Eisenhower paradoxically helped the Democrats consolidate the New Deal because the new president basically accepted its domestic legacy. The consolidation of the New Deal was reflected by the Democrats winning control of the House of Representatives in the 1954 mid-term congressional elections which they maintained until House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America campaign in 1994.

The considerable gap in relation to the Eisenhower Administration’s approach to partisan politics was more than adequately compensated by RN who redefined the role of vice-president from a politically dud position (unless the incumbent unexpectedly assumed the presidency) into the second most important leadership position in the United States.

RN was therefore the almost inevitable Republican nominee for president in 1960 but his chances of winning the presidency were challenged by the fact that for every one registered Republican there were then two registered Democrats. This hurdle was considered by political analysts to be surmountable due to RN’s expertise and prestige in relation to defence and foreign policy which he had demonstrated as vice-president.

1960, Partisan Politics Returns with a Vengeance

The outgoing vice-president would more than probably have won the 1960 presidential election had it not been for the formidable campaign that was funded by Joseph Kennedy for his son, Massachusetts Senator, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The Kennedy campaign was slick, ruthless and very effective due to its success in renewing a very substantial base of Americans who were supportive of the New Deal legacy.

RN’s frenetic campaign schedule almost overcame the formidable advantages of the Kennedy machine. This might have still been achieved had President Eisenhower more actively supported his notional party’s presidential candidate. Indeed, RN did actually win the election but, due to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley tampering with the electoral rolls the vote count in Illinois for the 1960 election narrowly went to Kennedy. RN could and should have lodged a legal challenge to the result but did not due opposition from President Eisenhower.

Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination makes his presidency difficult to assess. The two major foreign policy mistakes of his presidency were his failure to provide air support to Brigade 2506 of Cuban exiles during the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion and support for the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh *Diem of South Vietnam in a military coup in November 1963. The consolidation of Fidel Castro’s communist regime on Cuba and North Vietnam’s expanded capacity to wage war in Indochina were the two major challenges that confronted the United States in the Cold War in the Third World War.

(*The Diem regime by November 1963 was ineffective and unpopular. However greater care should have been taken by the then American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge – who had cordial links to the Kennedy Administration and had previously been RN’s ineffective running mate in 1960- to have safeguarded President Diem and his brother from being murdered following their surrender. The deaths of the Ngo brothers caused many leaders of third world nations to become fashionably anti-American.

The murders of the Ngo brothers were an indication that the Kennedy Administration did not have a satisfactory understanding of the situation on the ground in South Vietnam. It is therefore probable that the Kennedy administration did not realize that the success of the 1963 coup probably would lead to the chaotic power vacuum that did ensue).

The major question arising from the Kennedy assassination is whether most American liberals would have continued to support his administration’s internationalist approach to foreign policy by committing combat troops to South Vietnam? The late president’s two brothers Robert (‘Bobby’) and Edward (‘Teddy’) did the cause of American liberalism a great dis-service by later opposing the United States military commitment to South Vietnam. This helped give legitimacy to other avowed liberal-democrats later adopting a neo-isolationist approach which was (to say the least) unhelpful in countering the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The ramifications of RN’s 1960 defeat had more immediately profound ramifications for the Republican Party in terms of its sense of ideological direction. This helped ensure that the 1964 battle for the GOP presidential nomination was a polarizing affair which pitted two seemingly polar opposites against each other, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

In fact Goldwater and Rockefeller were not really that ideologically different. They were both staunch anti-communist internationalists and civil rights supporters. The major difference between them was that of degree- the extent to which the government should be involved in the economy.

Senator Goldwater gained a reputation as an arch-conservative because he had voted against the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Bill. He did this on the basis that the legislation was unconstitutional as opposed to him not supporting the principle of racial equality. The Arizona Senator may have calculated that by voting against the civil rights bill (which was probably President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s, LBJ, greatest achievement as president) that he would (as he did) gain the necessary ‘conservative’ support to win the 1964 Republican Party presidential nomination.

The Senator may have done better than what he did in the South in the 1964 presidential election had the incumbent president not been a Southern Democrat. The liberal Republican support that Senator Goldwater may have hoped to utilize by selecting New York Congressman William Miller as his running mate was thwarted by the consequence of his ill-considered Convention acceptance speech (which made RN feel physically ill).

The Goldwater acceptance speech (‘extremism in the defence of liberty is a virtue’) enabled the Johnson campaign to mis-portray Senator Goldwater as an extremist who could not be trusted with responsibility for nuclear weapons. The reality was that LBJ and Senator Goldwater were not that different with regard to the United States being strong in order to oppose the Soviet Union. The differences between them were in regard to the role of government in the economy and the establishment of a strong social security system.

LBJ regarded the massive vote (61%) that he won in the 1964 presidential election as a mandate to consolidate the New Deal with his Great Society legislation and programmes. It was therefore ironic that a former New Deal Democrat in the person of Ronald Reagan commenced his emergence as the standard bearer of American conservatism due to the positive reception he received for the speech (‘Rendezvous with Destiny’) he gave as a Goldwater supporter at the 1964 Republican Convention at Daly City, California.

Ronald Reagan never considered his 1962 change of party registration from Democrat to Republican as a personal repudiation of the New Deal. From Ronald Reagan’s perspective, the extent of government support that was needed in the 1930s for many (if not most) Americans to adapt to the Great Depression was no longer required due to the post-war strength of the private sector of the American economy.

A major objective of Ronald Reagan in public life (particularly after 1964) was to safeguard and enhance the United States economy by promoting free enterprise. As events would later show when he was president, this would mean that Ronald Reagan was prepared to reduce welfare spending to boost the United States defence capacity but not dismantle social security programmes, the antecedents of which his family had benefited from during the New Deal.

The Politics of the Great Society

Domestic opposition to LBJ’s attempt to consolidate the New Deal in the 1960s through his Great Society programmes resulted in the Republicans doing very well in the 1966 mid-term congressional elections. This electoral setback was misreported then and since considered to be due to opposition to President Johnson’s military support for South Vietnam.

The problems that the Johnson Administration was having due to many Democrats (such as Idaho Senator Frank Church) shifting their position on the Vietnam War did not help its cause. However the Republican gains in the 1966 congressional elections were due to many GOP voters returning to usual voting patterns following the 1964 Goldwater debacle.

RN was a very important Republican campaigner in the 1966 elections and his party’s strong performance placed him in viable contention to win his party’s presidential nomination. The major ‘baggage’ that RN had to contend with to win his party’s 1968 presidential nomination was the notion that he was a ‘political loser’ due to his 1960 defeat and in particular his failure to win the California gubernatorial race in 1962.

RN’s major competitor for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination was Michigan Governor George Romney. The major strengths of his candidacy was his effectiveness as an auto executive and then as Michigan governor. Governor Romney might have won the 1968 presidential nomination had he not done a ‘flip flop’ on the Vietnam War. The governor seemed to move away from his position of endorsing American support for South Vietnam to opposing this commitment after a tour of this allied nation when he said people had been ‘brainwashed’ into supporting the war.

There had been similar shifts with regard to the Vietnam War by Democratic politicians as much (but not all) of their voting base began to turn against this American international commitment. Republican voters had not made a similar *transition which fatally undermined Governor Romney’s capacity to win his party’s presidential nomination.

(*Most Republican, unaligned voters and many Democrat supporters were prepared to support the continuance of American combat operations in Indochina under the Nixon Administration on the basis that their nation’s troops would be fully withdrawn at the completion of RN’s first term. This undertaking was honoured by RN but due to the impact of the Watergate beat up it became impossible for the Nixon and Ford administrations to secure appropriate military aid for either South Vietnam or Cambodia to survive).

RN’s major rival at the Republican Convention held in Miami in early August 1968 was not Governor Romney of Michigan but now Governor Reagan of California. Had it not been for the last minute nature of the California governor’s challenge and adroit management by party operatives at the convention there might have been a Reagan challenge. Indeed the 1968 Miami Convention was notable for the orderly conduct of proceedings which augured well for RN to run an effective campaign for the White House.

The Democrats Convention held in Chicago in late August by contrast was turbulent, which was in keeping with the turmoil that had preceded this gathering. President Johnson had surprisingly announced in late March 1968 in a televised address that he would not seek re-election. This decision was due to the president’s fear that he would lose the nomination to Senator Bobby Kennedy. This senator had just announced his candidacy for the president after Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing earlier that month as an ‘anti-war’ candidate in the New Hampshire primary.

The LBJ withdrawal automatically made Senator Kennedy the front runner even though he had not yet even entered a primary race. Administration loyalists rallied behind Vice-President Hubert Humphrey by running as ‘favourite son’ candidates in local bailiwicks. However, by the time of Senator Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination, he and Senator McCarthy had a clear lead between them to combine to deny Vice-President Humphrey the presidential nomination. The New York Senator’s victory in the June California primary effectively made Senator McCarthy’s continued candidacy unviable as the presidential nomination undoubtedly would have gone to Bobby Kennedy.

The entry of Senator George Mc Govern as a candidate for president at the Chicago Convention divided Kennedy delegates. This was crucial to Vice-President Humphrey winning the party nomination at Senator McCarthy’s expence. The bitterness at the party establishment prevailing was reflected by rowdy scenes on the Convention floor and riots outside. To placate party dissent and assuage Senator Mc Govern a Mc Govern Commission was to be established to reform the Democratic Party nominating process.

The turbulence surrounding Vice-President Hubert Humphrey’s nomination made it initially seem that his victory was a hollow victory due to RN’s poll lead and the equivalent of a Dixiecrat revival with the newly formed Southern based American Independent Party nominating Alabama’s segregationist George Wallace (the former governor of his state) for president. But in a masterstroke Vice-President Humphrey named the highly respected Maine Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate. This selection helped steady the Democratic Party and connect it to its massive electoral base.

The Humphrey-Muskie ticket waged a strong campaign which defied the ‘anti-war’ protesters which tried to disrupt its progress. By the time of the November election, Humphrey had all but united the New Deal coalition that victory would have probably been his had it not been for the third party candidacy of George Wallace (who received 13.5% of the vote) splitting the vice-president’s vote (42.7%) to deliver victory to RN (who received 43.3% of the vote).

The New Deal Coalition Endures

The closeness of the 1968 election result reflected that the New Deal coalition was still intact. This led to the paradox that, regardless of the domestic and foreign policy achievements of the Nixon Administration in its first term,* it was politically vulnerable to electoral defeat in 1972. This was reflected by there being fifteen candidates going for the Democratic Party presidential nomination! The unexpected collapse of Senator Muskie’s bid narrowed the race to two polar opposites, Senator Humphrey and Governor Wallace.

(*The accomplishments of the Nixon Administration and politics of that period, including the Watergate set-up, are analysed in the Social Action Australia article, ‘Defrosting the Nixon Caricature’).

Incredible as it may now seem because of the eventual result (i.e. Senator Mc Govern winning the Democratic presidential nomination) Governor Wallace might have been nominated by the Democrats had he not been paralysed after he was shot in an assassination attempt in Maryland in May 1972. Senator Mc Govern was able to prevail (despite a valiant and last minute rally by Senator Humphrey) to win the nomination due to the advantages he gained as a result of his recommendations concerning the selection of party delegates being adopted.

From President Nixon’s perspective, his re-election was all but assured after Senator Mc Govern won his party’s presidential nomination. However, in what was then considered to be the South Dakota Senator’s social radicalism and his dovish foreign policy approach (which encompassed an obsessive abhorrence of what he regarded as exorbitant defence spending) he was so outside the political mainstream that his electability was at the least problematic.

Due to the previous assumption that Senator Muskie would be the Democratic presidential candidate, the Republicans ran a campaign which placed RN above the partisan fray. RN’s campaign was therefore co-ordinated by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREP). The objective of CREP was to make RN as presidential as possible to appeal to non-aligned and Democratic voters. The Democratic Party’s nomination of Mc Govern seemingly re-affirmed the soundness of having RN run a lofty presidential campaign with his wife, daughters, cabinet secretaries and GOP luminaries acting as virtual campaign surrogates.

The formation of the ‘Democrats for Nixon’ organisation headed by Treasury Secretary (and former Texas governor) John Connolly was probably reflective of RN’s previous desire to pick up Southern Democratic votes without pandering to segregationism in the context of his being opposed by a moderate (and electable) Democratic opponent.

With the benefit of hindsight, RN should have waged a partisan re-election campaign following Mc Govern’s nomination so that the Republicans could have won a congressional majority or at least made greater in-roads. Instead, Ted Kennedy utilized the Democrats increased 1972 congressional majority to establish the framework to bring President Nixon down by instigating the creation of the position of Special Prosecutor and the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Senate Watergate Committee).

Had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s success in orchestrating the Watergate ‘scandal’ to bring President Nixon down in August 1974, RN might have converted his nearly 61% of the popular vote victory in 1972 as a basis for achieving a Republican majority in the 1974 congressional elections.

Senator Ted Kennedy’s ‘success’ in bringing down the Nixon presidency meant that the Democratic Party presidential nomination was his for the taking in 1976. But not even a favourable Newsweek lead story with the senator on the front cover could coax him to run for president. This reticence may have been due to the Chappaquiddick incident in July 1969 in which he left the scene of an accident in which Jo Kopechne died. The ultimate ramification of Ted Kennedy’s non-candidacy was that a virtual political unknown in former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter won the Democratic Party nomination in July 1976 election and *narrowly beat President Ford despite having initially had a 35 point post nominating convention lead over the incumbent.

(*Jimmy Carter could not have prevailed in the close 1976 election had the South not voted for him, albeit again by some small margins on a state by state basis).

The Carter Presidency: When Smart Ideas Lead to Policy Failures

Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president (1977 to 1981) whose political inadequacies became a political disaster because they were ruthlessly exploited by Iran’s Supreme Ruler Ayatollah Khomeini during the 1979-1981 Iran hostages crisis in which American embassy staff were taken into captivity in brazen violation of the Geneva Convention.

Nevertheless, many of President Carter’s policies were ahead of their time such as his ideas regarding energy conservation and pollution reduction. The positive domestic *achievements of the Carter presidency were establishing departments for energy and education. A major reason why President Carter failed to successfully implement his clever ideas was due to the poor relations that he had with the Congress as a Washington outsider.

(*Although President Carter did not take any steps to overturn the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe versus Wade, he was arguably the most pro-life president since the legalization of abortion in America. The Carter Administration promoted adoption as an alternative to abortion and supported sex education in schools to prevent teenage pregnancy while the president resisted congressional pressure to increase abortion funding.

While there are humanitarian reasons for opposing abortion the Democrats do not seem to realize that their vigorous endorsement of this practice is causing substantial numbers of voters to support the GOP who might otherwise not do so. Unfortunately there are too many Republican politicians -but by no means all- who cynically declare a pro-life stance to gain crucial political support but then cynically do nothing in the interim toward effectively preventing abortion or have the practice banned in the long run. If Democrats are genuinely ‘pro-choice’ then they should at least pursue similar policies to what President Carter did).

The president’s failure to establish a productive relationship with a Democratic majority Congress was partly derived from his initial reliance at the White House on Georgia cronies (the so-called ‘Georgia Mafia’) such as Hamilton Jordan, Bert Lance, Jody Powell and Andrew Young. These close Carter supporters had been instrumental in their leader is upset presidential nomination victory. Their often unorthodox approach to politics alienated so many Democratic power brokers that the president never really fully recovered from the initial breach. This was despite President Carter establishing cordial relations with his Vice-President Walter Mondale (a former Minnesota Senator) which was of great assistance to his administration.

The strained relations between a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress led to the paradox of the Republicans only making limited gains in the 1978 mid-term congressional elections. This was because so many Democrat *incumbents were clearly at odds with an unpopular president that they managed to win re-election. The failure of the Republicans to make electoral in-roads in Congress was inspite of economic recession and high energy prices.

(*A notable election victory in which the Republicans won a seat was the victory of Newt Gingrich. His winning a congressional seat in the president’s home state of Georgia was impressive and demonstrated that Democrats who had voted for GOP presidential candidates were beginning to also support the Republicans at other levels of government. Indeed it should be noted that RN won 75% of the vote in Georgia in 1972 while Jimmy Carter achieved 67% of the vote in his home state in 1976).

The ambiguity of the 1978* congressional results was arguably a benefit to the president because they conveyed that, despite the Nixon interlude, the New Deal essentially remained intact. Consequently President Carter (barring a disaster) remained on track to probably win re-election in 1980. A political disaster did come the United States way in 1979 with the Iranian hostage crisis.

(* Senator Ted Kennedy launched a nomination challenge against Jimmy Carter which the president tenaciously fought off. Due to the Chappaquiddick controversy Senator Kennedy possibly did not really want to win the nomination but rather maintain his influence among his party peers due to their disappointment that his not running in 1976 had allowed Jimmy Carter to win the party presidential nomination).

The Iranian hostage’s crisis brought to the fore the fact that the Carter Administration was not going to make up the ground that America lost to the Soviet Union arising from the ramifications of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. The American failure to support South Vietnam and Cambodia might have been fatal to the United States maintaining its super-power status had it not been for the foreign policy achievements of the Nixon Administration.

President Nixon’s 1972 visit to mainland China helped shift the balance of power in international relations to give the United States a much needed potential advantage against the Soviet Union. Similarly the success of the Nixon’s Administration’s Dr. Henry Kissinger’s brilliant 1973 ‘shuttle diplomacy’ eventually allowed the United States to gain a valuable and potentially positive influence in the Middle East that it might not otherwise have today.

The Reagan Renewal

The underlying untenable position that a post-Saigon United States was in, was ‘brought home’ to the American people by the Iranian hostage crisis which ultimately resulted in Ronald Reagan being elected president in 1980. The 1980 Reagan landslide translated to the Republicans winning a Senate majority and having a working majority with conservative Southern Democrats.

The achievements of the Reagan era are now correctly regarded as a time of American renewal. This administration’s foreign policy accomplishments in ultimately bringing down the Soviet Union were achieved due to a massive increase in defence spending and support for anti-communist insurgencies in the third world and covert assistance to dissident organisations in Eastern Europe such as Poland’s Solidarity. The major domestic achievement of the Reagan Administration was the impact of the 1980s tax cuts boosting consumer demand to crucially help facilitate non-inflationary economic and employment growth between 1983 and 1990.

The Reagan era in retrospect is now interesting because President Reagan pursued his policies against a media background of relentlessly negative media and academic criticism. A consistent theme of then contemporary analysis was that the United States was in decline due to a massive foreign debt and trade deficits and that its confrontational policies against the Soviet Union were similarly leading to American decline associated with the concept of imperial overstretch.

The reality was that the budget deficit was reason for concern but not a cause for alarm. This was because the impact of the tax cuts in strengthening the private sector helped facilitate effective deficit financing. A budget deficit might have been avoided had the Reagan Administration or the Democrats in Congress been able to compromise. President Reagan was not prepared to forgo the historic opportunity of fatally weakening Soviet power by not increasing defence spending. The Democrats in Congress were similarly and understandably not prepared to sanction massive cuts in social welfare.

Although there were cuts in social welfare spending in the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration did not attempt to dismantle the American social security system and a majority of congressional Democrats agreed to increased defence spending. This outcome became a win-win scenario with Eastern Europe breaking free in 1989 and the Soviet Union peacefully winding up at the end of 1991. These two inter-related historical outcomes were a vindication of President Reagan’s foreign and defence policies because they demonstrated that the United States could maintain the essentials of its balanced system and approaches to public policy and still prevail against a power-over *totalitarian super-power.

(*An important reason why the Reagan and Bush Administrations were successful in their Soviet policies was the excellent understanding that their special advisers provided regarding Moscow politics. President Reagan gained invaluable advice on the Soviet Union from Suzanne Massey, his unofficial adviser and envoy to Moscow.

The main insight that Suzanne Massey (whose former husband Nicholas Massey wrote an outstanding book on Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra entitled Nicholas and Alexandra) provided President Reagan with was that most Russians were as hostile to the Soviet Union almost as much as the peoples of the non-Russian Soviet republics. It was for this overriding reason that the Soviet Union in effect later ended because of the paradox of patriotic Russian hostility).

Even though the United States outlasted the Soviet Union as a super-power, there has always been a need for American caution regarding the alternate dangers of becoming too confident or too self-doubting. Thankfully the American people had the correct balance in 1988 election campaign when most voters ignored media commentary and the message of the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis that President Reagan had led their nation into decline. Indeed, Republican presidential candidate Vice-President George W Bush probably could not have won his party’s presidential nomination and the subsequent popular election had he not loyally served President Reagan for nearly eight years.

The fact that George W Bush won the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 was somewhat ironic because he been Ronald Reagan’s major rival for the party nomination in 1980. Ronald Reagan almost lost his front runner status (which was a carry over from his strong nomination challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976) to George W Bush who had closely studied and applied similar campaigning strategies and techniques to what Jimmy Carter had four years earlier.

There was however too much Republican Party rank and file commitment to Ronald Reagan for Bush, the well-connected party insider with a relatively low public profile to overcome his rival’s advantages. Furthermore, a Bush narrative as to why he should be the Republican presidential nominee was never coherently advanced in the 1980 campaign.

Post-Reaganism?: The Presidency of George WH Bush, 1989-1993

Eight years later, a philosophically and ideologically bland George W Bush had a powerful narrative to take to his party and the electorate as the candidate who would defend the Reagan tradition due to the loyalty that he had given as vice-president. As a result Congressman *Jack Kemp who was arguably Ronald Reagan’s ideological heir as a supply-side economics advocate was not competitive against the then vice-president. Furthermore, loyalist Republican Senate Leader Bob Dole did win his party’s presidential nomination in 1988 because George WH Bush was by then considered to be the Reagan heir.

(*Then New York Congressman Jack Kemp approximated being the contemporary equivalent of a progressive Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt mode. His advocacy of supply-side economics for many peoples seemed to contradict his stated objective of overcoming poverty. Had Kemp as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary under President George W Bush between 1989 and 1993 been more effective in implementing his anti-poverty ideas he might have been selected as the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1992, thereby giving the GOP presidential ticket a better chance of winning that year).

That Bush defeated Dukakis was all the more impressive because the Reagan Revolution had not overcome the Democrats New Deal coalition legacy. This had previously been evident in 1984 when, despite Ronald Reagan’s landslide *re-election, the Democrats comfortably held the House of Representatives and most of the nation’s governorships. Indeed, despite President Reagan’s high personal popular approval going into the 1986 congressional elections, the Democrats won control of the Senate.

(* President Reagan won over 58% of the popular vote in 1984 which translated into him gaining every electoral college vote except those of the District of Columbia in Washington DC and his Democrat challenger’s home state of Minnesota which Walter Mondale only narrowly carried).

George W Bush gave the Reagan Democrats (i.e. his economically struggling Southern whites and blue collar workers) reason to vote for him as a presidential candidate due to his strong stance in relation to foreign and defence policy. A Reagan Democrat orientation toward George W Bush and middle class acceptance of him as Ronald Reagan’s heir was consolidated by his famous ‘read my lips’ acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans in which he promised there would be no increase in taxation under a future administration of his.

As an essentially technocrat inclined politician who had developed his skills since tenaciously building up a then near non-existent Republican organisation in Texas in the 1950s, George W Bush was always going to struggle to apply big policy ideas (‘the vision thing’) to convert Reagan Democrats into voting Republican at other levels of government. For President George WH Bush, administrative competence was to be the hall mark of his presidency with his highly developed political and foreign policy skills to be applied during times of crisis.

The major crisis in which President George W Bush applied his formidable skill set was in assembling a UN sanctioned international military coalition to eject Iraq from the Gulf sheikdom of Kuwait in early 1991 following an Iraqi invasion and occupation in August 1990. The military success of the American led military led to longer term policy failure. This was because the first Bush Administration shamefully refused to support the rebellions by different communities in Iraq which were viable because of Saddam’s weakened condition due to his recent defeat in Kuwait and assured of success had international air support been provided.

This American callousness was all the more condemnable because a capable Iraqi government-in-exile had been formed. This provisional government in exile represented Iraq’s different communities and had the support of nearly all the governments of neighbouring nations. The missed opportunities for having a powerful but democratic post-Saddam Iraq retarded the opportunities for reaching a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nevertheless, a protracted peace process ensued as a result of Kuwait’s 1991 liberation because a belated Israeli-Palestinian dialogue was commenced. This was because Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat was compelled by the Gulf states to participate in the 1991 international Madrid peace talks due to his ill-considered support for Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait.

Israel’s political leaders did not delude themselves that Arafat would not use the Madrid peace talks and then the secret negotiations between the PLO and Israel which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords as basis to eventually destroy the Jewish state. Nevertheless, Israel agreed to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) under the leadership of Arafat in 1994 which ruled parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Israeli concern that Arafat would foster an impass to wage an international campaign to pressure Israel to withdraw from all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip without a political settlement was borne out by subsequent events. Arafat adopted this approach because he wanted to later be in a position to eventually destroy Israel.

Self-Generated Failure: Never Missing a Chance to Miss a Chance

That Arafat adopted this win-lose approach was reflective of the well-known saying that the ‘Palestinians never miss a chance to miss a chance’. The reason why this saying became so uncannily consistently accurate can be traced back to the formative impact that Yasser Arafat’s uncle, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (the Grand Mufti) had on formative Palestinian nationalism.

The man who was to become the Grand Mufti of Palestine was born into a powerful landowning family in a part of the Ottoman Empire that was to become known as Palestine. The al-Husayni family supported the Arab Revolt of 1916 led by the Hashemite family who had previously been forced out of Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The 1916 Revolt was supported by the British to help force the German aligned Ottoman Turks out of the Arab components of their empire. The revolt was vitally assisted by the brutal *Thomas Edward (TE) Lawrence who became known as Lawrence of Arabia.

(*Battle hardened troops who belonged to the Australian Light Horse Brigade were shocked by the sadistic cruelty that they witnessed Lawrence instigate against Turkish troops and their Arab allies).

The British support for the Arab Revolt initially resulted in Faisal of the Hashemite family been awarded present day Syria as a kingdom to rule over under French suzerainty as a League of Nations mandate in March 1920. Fearing that Faisal I would use his new kingdom as a base to establish an Arab superstate the French forced him out in July 1920.

To placate the still powerful Hashemite family, the then British Colonial Secretary (who was a staunch monarchist) Winston Churchill arranged for the creation of the kingdoms of *Jordan and Iraq in 1921. Faisal I became the new king of Iraq while his brother (and sometime family rival) became king of Jordan.

(*Jordan was then known as Transjordan but will be referred to by its contemporary name, Jordan).

The short-lived Kingdom of Syria was supported by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni which resulted in his life long antipathy toward the rival Jordanian branch of the Hashemite dynasty. This was an important reason why the British Governor of the newly created British Mandate of Palestine Sir Herbert Samuel helped engineer Amin al-Husayni to succeed his brother as Mufti (the Sunni Islam spiritual leader) of Jerusalem in 1921. Even though he was not qualified for the position of Mufti of Jerusalem, the British mandate authority also had al-Husayni declared Grand Mufti of Palestine the following year.

The British support for the Grand Mufti helped create a Palestinian sense of nationalism so that the Arab people of what became Palestine might not develop an allegiance for the Kingdom of Jordan whose king, Abdullah I desired that Palestine belong to his realm.

The paradox of Britain supporting a Palestinian identity was so that the Jewish people (both ancient inhabitants dating back to the Roman expulsion and migrants from the Diaspora) could have a Jewish homeland. The British intention to establish a Jewish homeland in November 1917 had been foreshadowed by the Balfour Declaration named after the then British Foreign Secretary Sir James Balfour.

The Balfour Declaration was reflected of a strong pro-Jewish sentiment within the British establishment which was due to the influence of the late Queen Victoria. Matters became more complicated from a British perspective because the Arab Revolt of 1916 led to a strong pro-Arab orientation in the British Foreign Office (Whitehall) which endures to this day.

Initially there was a sense of direction with regard to British Mandate rule in Palestine because both the Jewish and Palestinian communities had a common and almost shared desire to develop an identity for Palestine as a territorial entity. In this context the Grand Mufti seemed to have been an inspired choice because he was encouraging a sense of Arab Palestinian identity while being open to establishing cordial relations with the Mandate’s Jewish community.

All might have been well had the Grand Mufti taken up the opportunities for self-rule to be granted to Palestine as a *Mandate as a prelude to independence. The major impediment to this development was the hostile intransigence of the Grand Mufti. The reasons for the Grand Mufti’s opposition to self-rule were two-fold.

(*Mandates as opposed to colonies were supposedly subject to the overriding authority of an international organisation – in this instance the League of Nations- as territories that were to be administered in trust until they were prepared for full independence).

Firstly, the Grand Mufti did not want to create legislative institutions which would dilute his power which made him the virtual uncrowned king of Palestine who, by the 1930s had become a prestigious figure throughout the Arab world in his own right. This opposition to political reform of the Mandate caused great tension between the Grand Mufti and most of the leading Arab land owning families.

Secondly, the Grand Mufti did not want to share a future Palestinian state with the mandate’s Jewish community. The historical irony in the 1920s was that Palestine’s Jewish community under the leadership of its peak labour organisation, the Histadrut was ready in the 1920s to recognise a leadership role of the Grand Mufti in a future joint independent Jewish/Arab Palestinian state.

The Grand Mufti was able to resist demands within his own community for political reform by diverting attention by instigating an increasingly violent campaign against increased Jewish migration to the Palestine Mandate as Jews fled Europe due to the prospect of Nazi German domination of the continent. The Grand Mufti did not use the influx of Jewish refugees to reach an accommodation with the Jewish community regarding home rule and eventual independence. He instead utilized anxiety to instigate an uprising against the British Mandate in 1936 which lasted until eventually crushed in 1939.

The consequences of the failure of the 1936 Uprising were catastrophic for the Palestinian people and still afflict them to this day. The major adverse consequence was that so many nationalists’ leaders lost their lives in the revolt that there was a vacuum in the leadership which could have negotiated the details of implementing a British proposal that Palestine be divided into separate Jewish and Arab states. This proposed division of the Palestine Mandate into *respective states was the consequence of the Grand Mufti’s opposition to political accommodation in the 1930s.

(*The British proposal of the 1930s to divide the Palestine Mandate into future Arab and Jewish states was the basis for the UN General Assembly voting in 1947 to divide the then British UN Trust Territory into two such seats).

Lose-Lose: The Nexus Between Intransigence and Failure

The Grand Mufti was forced into exile in Syria in 1937 but even though he was never to return to his homeland he would maintain his detrimental political dominance over the Palestinian people until 1948. This was partly due to the leadership vacuum in his community’s ranks as a result of the crushing of the 1930s revolt.

Even though he was soon to be far away in Europe, the Grand Mufti would soon inflict further colossal harm on his people by causing understandable Jewish wariness about negotiating with them. This was because the Grand Mufti made his way to Nazi dominated Europe to support the German war effort and Hitler’s holocaust against the Jewish people.

Although the Grand Mufti was apprehended by the Allies at the end of the Second World War, the French actually later facilitated his departure for Syria in 1946 from where he proceeded to Cairo. From the Egyptian capital, the Grand Mufti performed his last great dis-service to the Palestinian people by making radio broadcasts calling on support for the Egyptian led Arab League invasion of Israel when the British trusteeship came to an end on the 14th of May 1948.

At the time of the expiration of the British UN Trusteeship in Palestine in May 1948, the Histadrut moved into the void by declaring itself to be the provisional Israeli government. In the case of the Palestinians, there was no corresponding equivalent authority due to the previous impact of the Grand Mufti’s intransigence creating a fatal power vacuum at the crucial stage.

Had what was effectively a joint but uncoordinated Egyptian-Jordanian invasion succeeded in destroying an incipient Israel, a truly independent Arab Palestinian state would not have been in place. With Israel winning its War of Independence in 1949, the West Bank and East Jerusalem became a part of Jordan which most but not all Palestinians acquiesced to. The Gaza Strip which could have been a component of an independent Palestinian was occupied by Egypt at the cessation of hostilities in 1949. This territory was placed under the nominal authority of the Egyptian created ‘All-Palestine Government’ which was notionally headed by the Cairo based Grand Mufti.

However the ‘All-Palestine Government’ was neither fish nor fowl. This government was more ornamental than actual as its members were composed mostly of the Grand Mufti’s relatives. The purpose of the ‘All-Palestine Government’ was so that Egypt’s King Farouk would have a basis to deny the Jordanian claim to rule Palestine and Jerusalem.

West Bank Palestinians and those in the Gaza Strip under de facto Egyptian rule seemed relatively content in that there were no demands by them for the creation of a genuinely independent Palestinian state. Palestinians who were discontented with the status-quo were those that had due to the hostilities of war been compelled to flee from their homes in what had become Israel proper. Many of these Palestinians settled in refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan and Lebanon.

Palestinian refugee camps have been unnecessarily maintained too long (with some still existing). The consequence of the maintenance of these refugee camps has been that resentments have been maintained and subsequently manipulated which only serve to perpetuate conflict.

The counter productiveness of maintaining these refugee camps has been illustrated since Israel secured its independence in 1949 in that many other Palestinian refugees made their way to the Gulf states where they established thriving and influential communities. Despite the relative recency of the Palestinian identity these communities established a strong sense of identity while they maintained cordial relations with the Arab peoples in the host Gulf states. This cordiality reflected the impact that the establishment of Israel had had on the Arab consciousness throughout the Middle East.

The impact of Israel winning its War of Independence had a profound on Arab nations. The corruption and incompetence with which the Egyptian war effort was conducted was a crucial contributing factor that led to Colonel Gamal Nasser’s July 1952 coup which overthrew the monarchy. The immense prestige that Nasser gained in the Arab world from defying the British and French for nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956 were crucial contributing factors in the Baath Party coming to power in Syria in 1963 and Iraq in 1968.

The ramifications for the Palestinians of Nasser’s domination were similarly profound. It will never be known if Yasser Arafat’s rise as the pre-eminent Palestinian leader was a direct consequence of being the Grand Mufti’s nephew or a coincidence. It may not have been a coincidence that the Grand Mufti closed up his sham government at Nasser’s request and relocated to the Lebanese capital Beirut where he died in relative obscurity in 1974. The end of the All-Palestine Government coincided with the foundation in 1959 of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) Party in Kuwait by Yasser Arafat.

Important components of the initial Fatah Party were young Palestinian professionals based in the Gulf States, such as Arafat, who managed a civil engineering business in Kuwait City. Although these professionals helped ensure that Fatah had the backing of the conservative Gulf monarchies, this new party had a radical component due to support from Nasser. The different types of Arab regimes backing Fatah helped transform it into more of an umbrella organisation than a political party.

Foregone Opportunities: Nationalism Without A Nation

Fatah became a broad based party within an umbrella organisation with the formation of the PLO in East Jerusalem in 1964. The PLO was in essence a Nasserist creation which included other Egyptian backed militant organisations. These in turn maintained their independence from Fatah due to the rival backing they received from the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria.

It is interesting to note that at the time of the foundation of the PLO in 1964 no move was made by the new organisation to have either the United Arab Republic (as Egypt was then officially known) or Jordan to respectively withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to facilitate the establishment of an actual Palestinian state. Instead the focus of the PLO was on destroying Israel as opposed to taking more immediate steps that could have actually advanced the interests of the Palestinian people.

As the leader of the PLO, Arafat (who officially became Chairman of the organisation in 1969) displayed a similar penchant to the Grand Mufti of regressing his people’s interests while advancing his own political position. After refugees had streamed into Jordan following the Six Day War, a result of Israel taking the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the substantial numbers of Palestinians were swelled so that they became the kingdom’s majority.

Fatah/PLO fighters (Fedayeen), which had already previously based in the kingdom, had launched terrorist raids into Israel which increased in number that they eventually posed a threat to Jordanian sovereignty. Tensions between the PLO and King Hussein erupted into outright civil war in September 1970. After establishing military superiority over the PLO that month, an offensive by the Jordanian army was launched in March 1971 in which Arafat’s army was expelled from Jordan.

The PLO however had a fallback in that they were able to infiltrate into a militarily weak Lebanon, where was it not for *Syrian military intervention in 1976, Arafat and his Lebanese Muslim allies would have completely taken over the country. The PLO still maintained a military presence in southern Lebanon that reached Muslim West Beirut. Utilizing south Lebanon as a virtual state within a state, the PLO launched terrorist attacks into Israel.

(*Hafez Assad invaded Lebanon in 1976 to prevent Arafat from gaining control of the country because he was aligned to Saddam Hussein’s rival Baath regime).

The June 1982 *Israeli invasion of Lebanon so forced the PLO out of Lebanon that Arafat relocated his headquarters to the Tunisian capital Tunis. Remaining PLO forces in Lebanon were forced out from Tripoli (a northern city in Lebanon not to be confused with the Libyan capital) in 1984 by pro-Syrian Palestinian forces, thereby seeming to end Arafat’s capacity to be politically relevant in Middle East politics.

(*The Israelis were initially welcomed by the predominately Shiite Muslim population of southern Lebanon as liberators from heavy handed PLO rule. Had Israel expeditiously withdraw from southern Lebanon in favour of an allied military force the pro-republican Iran Hezbollah army would not have eventually filled the vacuum to constitute a new military/terrorist threat to Israel).

Arafat may have become a political irrelevance had the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip not launched an Intifada (uprising) in December 1987. The outbreak of the Intifada was testament to Israeli leaders having previously made a mistake in not having granted Palestinian self-rule as a prelude to achieving a two-state solution without the PLO. King Hussein had renounced Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank in 1974 and stopped paying the salaries of Palestinian officials there in 1988.

Although King Hussein had recognised the PLO’s claims to the West Bank there was sufficient ambiguity for Israel to have utilized His Majesty’s renunciation of sovereignty to have initiated self-government to bolster a Palestinian third force. President Anwar Sadat on his historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 urged Israeli leaders to grant Palestinian self-rule. The Egyptian president wanted a future Palestinian state aligned with his country to help change other Arab countries into accepting the 1979 Camp David Accords.

Sadat’s successor Hosni Muburak praised the 1982 Reagan Plan which advocated Palestinian self-rule as a prelude to a two state solution. Had the Reagan Plan been implemented, a pro-Egyptian Palestinian state might have emerged which accepted Israeli’s right to exist.* As it was, the Intifada broke out in 1987 due to a sense of Palestinian despair that there was no other option.

(*President Muburak personally helped assemble the United Arab List, an alliance of Israeli political groups for Israel’s 1996 elections).

The Palestinian despair that precipitated the outbreak of the Intifada probably would have led nowhere due to Arafat’s aversion to negotiating with a state he ultimately wished to destroy. Pressure from the Gulf states and elements within the PLO under their influence caused Arafat to acquiesce to the secret Oslo negotiations between his organisation and Israel which led to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) headed by Arafat and headquartered in the Gaza Strip in 1994.

The Arafat regime controlled most of the Gaza Strip and some of the West Bank which Israel ceded to the PNA. As previously mentioned, Arafat played the duplicitous game of engineering on-going violence to pressure Israel into withdrawing from all of the West Bank without a political settlement so that he could have a basis to continue to wage an alternating military and political struggle against Israel with the final objective of destroying the Jewish state.

Because Arafat had to appear as the injured party so that Israel could be internationally isolated, he belatedly agreed to intermittent international negotiations. The most infamous international negotiation that Arafat personally participated in was the meeting, at July 2000 Camp David with President Clinton and then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. At this Camp David meeting Arafat was effectively offered a state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a discreetly sanctioned Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem. As generous as these proposals were, they did not offer what Arafat actually desired-Israel’s destruction.

Having avoided a peace settlement which would have guaranteed Israel’s right to exist, Arafat resumed his strategy of trying to destroy Israel while simultaneously isolating that nation by portraying the Israelis as being intransigent. While presenting himself as the underdog against Israel, Arafat established a corrupt and repressive regime in the areas under his control.

Why A Two State Palestinian Solution Will Hopefully Lead To A Two Party Democracy

Arafat’s death in November 2004 led to the succession of Mahmoud Abbas who was confirmed in office as president of the PNA in January 2005 by popular vote in carefully controlled elections. Legislative PNA elections in January 2006 were conducted in fairer conditions as reflected by Hamas defeating the ruling Fatah Party. The national unity government that was subsequently formed was dissolved in June 2007 which led to Hamas seizing control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah and the latter consolidating its power in the West Bank by persecuting Hamas.

Cynics have described the division of control between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a version of a ‘two-state solution’. The real accomplishment of a two-state solution will ultimately have to be between Israel and the Palestinians if there is to be peace and progress in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, an accommodation between Fatah and Hamas will have to be arrived at for a real two state solution to be made which applies to Israel and a future Palestinian state. The prospects for either Fatah or Hamas to reach a compromise with each other and then negotiate with Israel will be influenced by external forces which influence the two main Palestinian political parties.

The post-Arafat Fatah is strongly influenced by the Gulf States and President Abbas’s previous influence within his party and the PLO was derived from him being a conduit with these monarchies. Fatah due to Arafat’s off-again/on again alliance within the PLO with far left organisations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Fatah and previous reliance on the Soviet Union became quasi-Marxist.

In lieu of there being a strong secular pro-market Palestinian political party in the context of PNA politics, Fatah is a major default reference point for moderate secular Palestinians. Consequently, Fatah is becoming a social democratic party but this is still very much a work-in-progress that could be aborted if the peace process fails.

The transformation or more to the point the adaptation of Hamas is probably the most important dynamic in Palestinian politics that will determine if a win-win peace settlement is achieved. Hamas was originally the Gaza Strip branch of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood which formalized (but did not split from) its Egyptian counterpart.

The Gaza Strip since the era of King Farouk has been an area in which Egyptian influence in relation to Palestinian matters has been exercised. It was therefore a mistake on the part of former President Hosni *Muburak that he did not establish a political base amongst the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and if possible in the West Bank.

(*Come to think of it there are so many mistakes that Muburak, for all his wiliness, should have avoided).

Egyptian Democracy: A Sphinx Without A Riddle?

Due to the political ties between Hamas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, whether a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians will be reached might well depend on whether Egypt becomes a democracy. Presently it would seem that the Egyptian military are continuing with the ‘Ruling without Governing’ model which they adopted in May 1971 by supporting Anwar Sadat’s Corrective Revolution. In this context, Dr. Mohammed Morsi has assumed the trappings of presidential office since being sworn in but just that – the trappings.

At the time of writing, Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SACF) has not restored the previous Muslim Brotherhood National Assembly and the constituent assembly that the legislature had previously appointed. Currently, Egypt does not have a prime minister or a government, with SCAF having claimed executive and legislative powers.

Although the dangers of political turmoil are acute, it should not be forgotten that Egypt more often than not has been one of the more stable countries of the Middle East. Indeed, Egyptian political stability has vitally helped steady a region that has been at times dangerously volatile. Therefore, it does not take a huge leap of logic to deduce that, if political stability is not formulated by a newly emergent Egyptian establishment, then the consequences for the world could be dire.

Thankfully, Egypt has one way or another since 1923 managed to find socio-political contracts that have delivered political stability due to elite compromise. The first modern Egyptian revolution was in a middle class one in 1919. This was precipitated by nationalist outrage that Britain had effectively denied the Egyptian delegation a place at the Treaty of Versailles.

(* In 1914, the occupying British officially severed the nation’s link with its then nominal overlord, Ottoman Turkey).

The accreditation of an Egyptian delegation at this 1919 international conference had been widely expected amongst politically aware Egyptians. This expectation had led to a general acquiescence amongst most Egyptians of the formalization of British rule in 1914 because there was an expectation that, after Ottoman Turkey had been finally defeated, full independence would follow.

Probably the most important ramification of the 1919 revolution was the formation of the fascinating Wafd (‘Delegation’) Party. This party was very successful in mobilizing mass (mainly middle class) support for full Egyptian independence. When an impasse was reached in 1922 between the governments of Sultan Fuad and Britain over independence, the latter took the unorthodox step of unilaterally declaring Egypt independent.

This unusual granting of independence was less generous than it seemed because Britain maintained control of the Suez Canal zone, continued to station troops in Egypt proper and effectively ruled The Sudan which had supposedly become an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. But with formal Egyptian independence in 1922, the nation was converted from a sultanate into a kingdom with the adoption of a constitution the following year.

Even though the 1923 Constitution bestowed substantial power upon the king, the power of the monarchy was mitigated by the popular support of the middle class backed, land-owning-elite-led Wafd Party. The Wafd Party often became popular among the poor (who made up the overwhelming majority) when this party was in open conflict with the British.

However, in the period of constitutional monarchy between 1923 and 1952 (which is arguably the most interesting period in modern Egyptian history), there were times when the Wafd Party was aligned with the British against the monarchy and vice versa. A political wag described the Kingdom of Egypt’s political structure as a three legged stool with each leg respectively representing the king, the Wafd Party and the British ambassador.

The upshot of this three way struggle was that the Wafd Party was powerful which was then unusual for a political party in a predominately monarchist Middle East. A general pattern of governance ensued in which the king dismissed the Wafd Party government and appointed a year long caretaker government that held elections in which a palace backed party overwhelming won due to the former ruling party invariably boycotting the poll. Then after relations between the king and the British had reached a breaking point the former would re-call the Wafd to office and the process would later re-commence.

Ironically, it was the British who humiliated the pro-Italian King Farouk in 1942 by forcing him to appoint Wafd leader Pasha Mustafa Nahhas as prime minister who courageously supported the allied war effort. With victory over the Axis all but assured in 1944 the British did not protect Nahhas from dismissal by King Farouk.

The immediate cause of this dismissal was a dispute between the king and prime minister over who should exercise Egyptian influence at the Arab League. This squabble was ironic because Egypt was a powerful in the Arab world (whose major rival was Hashemite Iraq) even though its sovereignty was undermined by a domestic British presence.

Out of King Farouk’s success of ousting the Wafd Party in 1944 came colossal failure because of the key role that Egypt fulfilled in trying to destroy the new state of Israel in 1948. The humiliating defeat that came in 1949 was partly due to the glaringly apparent corruption and war profiteering by the king’s entourage. The military debacle led King Farouk to appoint a new caretaker government in 1949 with a difference – one which helped the Wafd Party win elections in January 1950.

Pasha Nahhas’s return to power led to protracted negotiations between Britain and Egypt in 1951 over the evacuation of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone. The shooting of Egyptian police on the Canal Zone by British troops in January 1952 precipitated massive riots in Cairo in which much of the capital was engulfed in fire. Emboldened by the very recent birth of a male heir, which made His Majesty determined to preserve the Ali dynasty, King Farouk again dismissed Pasha Nahhas as prime minister.

Although King Farouk acted with energy and resolution to restore order in January 1952 His Majesty perhaps acted too vigorously by kicking away the Wafd leg in Egypt’s political stool. This was because the king lacked the capacity to finally force the British from his country. The realization by His Majesty that he ultimately could not meet the formidable challenge of ending the British presence led him to prepare for an exile that he self-fullingly expected.

In a spasm of rapacious irresponsibility, the king appointed four governments in six months (between January and July 1952) to gain as much money as possible before his anticipated fall. For all the king’s faults during this most unedifying period of his mixed reign, His Majesty was alert. Colonel Gamal Nasser, the chief organiser of the semi-clandestine Free Officers Union, moved swiftly on being warned that the king was rousing from his lethargy to energetically have the conspirators arrested after been informed of the planned coup.

Free Officer Rule Facilitates Dictatorship

Nasser brought the coup forward to the 23rd of July 26th 1952 which operationally succeeded because communications between the King’s Summer Palace in Alexandra and Cairo were cut which meant that the loyal units could not be counter-mobilized. The outpouring of demonstrations in support of the coup, due to the disrepute in which the deposed and soon departed King Farouk had fallen, also ensured the rebellion’s success.

It is often forgotten that there was also support for the coup because it was known that the Free Officer’s nominal leader General Muhammad Najuib was a committed democrat. There was consequently a widespread expectation that democratic elections would be held under a President Najuib. The main contenders undoubtedly would have been the Wafd Party and a Muslim Brotherhood backed party. But this was not to be because Nasser established a one-party state after assuming the presidency in November 1954, having previously been the military strongman.

The Nasser regime might have fallen for having reneged on its promise to bring in a republican democracy had it not been for Nasser achieving what the Wafd had promised but never been quite able to deliver on – ending the British presence. This finally eventuated following the aborted 1956 Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone in response to Nasser’s nationalization of that zone.

The Free Officer regime consequently became entrenched due to Nasser’s massive post-1956 popularity. The government’s land reforms and imposition of rent controls also ensured its acceptance and popularity amongst the poor that the middle class supported Wafd and the Muslim Brotherhood’s then restricted base could not effectively compete against. The outpouring of massive demonstrations against Nasser’s resignation also secured the regime’s survival following the 1967 Six-Day War debacle such that no ambitious officer dared stage a coup.

The anti-Nasserist military coup that probably would have come Egypt’s way after Nasser’s death in September 1970 might have occurred had it not been for President Anwar Sadat moving from being what was effectively a titular head of state to the nation’s actually leader by peacefully purging Nasserist officers. The consequent evolution of political rule under Sadat and his successor Hosni Muburak (1981 to 2011) was essentially one premised on a politically apathetic population accepting a military backed government.

Both Sadat and Muburak were politically shrewd but perhaps the latter was too clever because he overstayed his welcome. The massive January/February 2011 demonstrations that brought Muburak down essentially represented the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberal secular political forces which included the New Wafd Party and ironically enough, contemporary neo-Nasserists. The role of students and young people in adeptly utilizing social media was also crucial in ensuring Muburak’s fall.

The military (which stood the most to gain from Muburak’s fall) might have rallied to support the regime by undertaking massive oppression if the government had had a stronger and more extensive support base. But the durability of the Muburak regime had previously been crucially underpinned by political apathy that the government’s support base (such as it was) was only mobilized during campaigning for carefully controlled elections.

The Need for Egypt to Re-Assemble a New Three Legged Stoll

The Egyptian military are now in a position where the Muslim Brotherhood and the secular parties have substantial but not overwhelming public support. SCAF is disadvantaged because support for a military regime would at best be 5% of the population. Were SCAF, under Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, to resume outright political control, support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Sulfist Muslims could massively increase to threaten the socio-political stability of Egypt, the Middle East and the world.

The only prospect for the military to impose (or re-impose) a repressive regime would be if there was support from secular democratic forces –but for understandable reasons, such support will not be forthcoming. Alternately if President Morsi were to attempt to establish an Islamist dictatorship, then a Wafd-Nasserist alliance, possibly encompassing Muburak loyalists, could crucially support a military backed regime.

A similar alliance-between the liberal/socialist and secular National Front Iran and the military in Iran against Khomeini-might have worked had this party not turned on its leader Shapour Bakhtiar who was prime minister between January and February 1979, after previously obliging the Shah to depart into exile. Even though the National Front instead crucially supported Khomeini against *Bakhtiar, Iran’s new ruler subsequently dispensed with this party.

(*Bakhtiar’s party rival Medhi Mazargam initially and stupidly served as Khomeini’s prime minister).

In an Egyptian context, the nation’s secular political forces would be best served by fulfilling a balance of power position between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military represented by SCAF. A national unity government representing the Muslim Brotherhood and secular political forces with military representation is Egypt’s best option of achieving a win-win scenario.

Important issues regarding the reconvening of parliament can be addressed by the legislature serving as a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution. In this context an ambiguity (ambiguities are excellent during times of crisis and for interim power-sharing arrangements) can exist with an open question to who a national unity cabinet is responsible – the constituent assembly or SCAF?

History has repeatedly shown that transitions to democracy (particularly in nations where democracy, has not really existed in living memory) are established in the transition to drawing up a new constitution. For *Egypt to make such transition to democracy the nation will probably need a new three legged stool representing the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and secular political forces.

(*It would have been advantageous all round had Egypt had a four legged stool composed of the above mentioned parties with the addition of a reinstated monarchy under the intelligent and honest Fuad II who is unfortunately domiciled in Switzerland as opposed to His Majesty’s homeland).

Syria: Why it is Smart to Help Smart People

Another very important Arab nation that is struggling toward democracy is Syria. It is difficult not to believe that the Syrian people will not prevail against the Bashar Assad dictatorship. The international community is hopefully providing the fighters of the Free Syrian Army with weapons (the provision of stinger missiles would make the difference) to help end the regime.

As important as it is for the international community to support the struggle for freedom and democracy in Syria, diplomatic efforts are and will still be important. The international peace monitors that former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been trying to organise will hopefully become the personnel who will be trusted by all Syrians (including Baath Party supporters) to be the impartial observers for future democratic elections.

The success of future democratic elections in Syria will probably depend upon there being in place a capable provisional government similar to the high quality that Hector Godoy provided the Dominican Republic with between 1965 and 1966. Hopefully, a future provisional president of Syria will be an *Alawite to help re-assure this community that no retribution will be taken against this community and to ensure that they will fulfil an important role in transitioning the nation to democracy in which everyone’s rights are respected.

(*The regime has instigated harsh oppression by Alawite, Christian and Druze troops so that their communities will be obliged to support Bashar Assad out of fear of later retribution. This cynical strategy has, to say the least, placed these communities in a very difficult situation. However, Lenin cynically observed that the success of a revolution is often dependent upon a section of the elite defecting, which was the case with regard to Menshevik traitors led by Leon Trotsky betraying the interests of Russian democracy and their party in November 1917.

While defections from democracy to dictatorship are to be condemned, senior figures that move over to help bring in democracy are to be praised. It may well be a question of time before Sunnis troops defect so senior Alawites, Christians and Druze should pre-empt this by withdrawing their support from Bashar Assad.).

It is probably premature, if not presumptuous, to analyse how the Assad regime will fall and the prospects for Syrian democracy were this to occur. A hallmark of Bashar’s father Hafez Assad’s (who ruled Syria from 1970 until his death in 2000) formidable skill set was a capacity to plan contingencies for possible emergencies. The fact that the regime has lasted sixteen months in the face of overwhelming opposition is testament to the value of planning and its brutal but realistic assessment of its actual repressive capability.

For all the regime’s shrewdness, the one calculation that it has foregone is that of compromise. Therefore, the Assad clique will not let go of power unless and until it is absolutely necessary for them to flee into exile. A signal to senior regime officials and Baath Party officials to leave the country or to arrange for their interests to be accommodated in a new provisional government would be made if *Russia and the *People’s Republic of China (PRC) publicly withdrew their support for Bashar Assad in favour of a provisional government with Baathist Party representation in it.

(*The Assad-Baathist regime is an archetypal long ruling authoritarian -as opposed to a totalitarian- dictatorship that squanders its entrenched support base by refusing to utilize the opportunities to adapt to a democracy. In Spain for example many figures associated with the Franco later prospered politically because they had previously prepared for a post-regime democracy.

The PRC is arguably a quasi-totalitarian/authoritarian regime that could later become a democracy to guarantee future national unity by having two amicably competeting major parties with respective national reach. In this context the removal in March 2012 of Chungking party boss Bo Xilai helped China dodge many bullets because he had the potential to be the Yuan Shi Kai of the twenty first century.

With the political eclipse of Bo the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will hopefully now not squander the opportunities that the Egyptian army previously did under Muburak of supporting a before time transition to democracy or at least a transition to a more adaptive leadership. The eighteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2012 provides the PLA with a golden opportunity to support an intelligent and adaptive new leadership assuming office.

An important reform that the PLA could consider supporting would be the adopting of Sun Yet Sen’s idea of an Examination Yuan as an independent branch or agency charged with fighting corruption. Such an organisation could initially be staffed by the military on a professional basis to help ensure that the nation’s leadership retains the public’s trust while also bolstering the armed force’s prestige as the protector of the people’s interests.

Because so much depends on the PLA and the CCP’s senior leadership making astute leadership selections at the eighteenth National Congress of the CCP in October this year, nations such as the United States and Japan should avoid unnecessarily antagonising the PRC at such a crucial juncture in modern Chinese history.

Although Russia is less authoritarian than the PRC the latter is in a relatively stronger position because it distanced itself from a Marxist approach to economics more of its own accord. It is therefore ironic that President Vladimir Putin is consolidating a personal dictatorship instead of moving to a full democracy in which the interests of his supporters could easily be accommodated and Russia internally strengthened. This is particularly because the main opposition party originally commenced essentially as a regime creation even though it now has a genuine voting base).

Even if the Assad regime was to survive, Russia’s and the PRC’s prestige and power in the Middle East would only plummet by associating with such an odious government. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten by policy analysts in Moscow and Peking that it is smart to help smart people as unexpected benefits can accrue. Syrians are not stupid and will not forget those nations that helped them in their hour of need and those that did not.

Libya: Why Democracy is the Antithesis of Anarchy

Libya is a nation that is making a transition to democracy that Syria will hopefully undertake. The tremendous sacrifice of the Libyan people made in overthrowing the regime of Muammar Qaddafi between February and August 2011 was inspirational. In contrast to Syria, the Libyan people received more prompt international air support. Whether foreign air support should be similarly provided to the fighters of the Free Syrian Army is a matter between the mainstream opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) and the international community.

An SNC request for air support should be seriously considered on moral grounds on the basis that the Syrian people’s aspirations for freedom and democracy are as valid as those of the Libyan people’s. The dividends for having a democratic Syria will be as important as those of Libya leading the way toward democracy for North Africa to counter al-Qaeda hopes to ultimately take power in the Maghreb region by first causing anarchy.

Libya will however demonstrate that democracy is the antithesis of anarchy. Contrary to foreign media reports, Libya is moving toward democracy as opposed to anarchy. This was reflected by the high and peaceful turnout for the July 7th 2012 election for a constituent assembly and transparent honesty with which the ballots were counted.

Under the monarchy (1951-1969), Libya had competitive elections in which political parties were formally banned. This prescription against political parties was counteracted by the importance of tribal clans sponsoring independent candidates. The lack of coherently organised political parties placed King Idris in a powerful position to guide but not dictatorially dominate the nation’s politics. His Majesty’s tendency toward engineering rapid turnovers of governments also militated against the development of a de facto party system with coherent parliamentary blocs.

The apathy that had crucially helped underpin King Idris’s power that was crucially linked to poverty began to dissipate after the discovery of massive oil reserves in the 1960s. This helped transform Libya from one of the poorest nations in Africa and the Middle East into one of the potentially wealthiest.

Increased political awareness in the mid-1960s was a direct challenge to King Idris’s authority which wearied His Majesty’s inclination to continue on the throne. Libya by the time of Qaddafi’s September 1st 1969 military was a nation in political transition from being an underdeveloped constitutional monarchy with substantial freedom moving toward a bi-polar political system divided between republican inclined pan-Arab nationalists and monarchist inclined traditionalists.

The previous divisions between the provinces of Cyrenicia, Fezzan and Tripolitania were never that strong under the monarchy even though these regions dated back to antiquity as political entities. The abolition of the three provinces by royal decree in 1963 was smooth because the power of local clans was transferred to ten new regional councils.

The relative political stability of the Libyan monarchy had been predicated upon the nation’s clan leaders accepting the authority of King Idris. The king’s departure in August 1969 and move to abdicate from abroad was an ambiguous action. There was a belief that the king departed so that he could overcome the clamour that His Majesty remain on the throne that had occurred in 1964 when his abdication was announced. This outpouring of support was as much a manifestation of respect for the king as it was to widespread apprehension concerning the capacity of the Crown Prince Hasan.

Alternatively there is a theory that His Majesty moved to abdicate from abroad so that a republican coup could be undertaken by officers personally sympathetic to the king who would allow him to return as an influential and honoured citizen. This coup might have occurred had it not been pre-empted by Qaddafi’s coup.

Libyan Republicanism and the Qaddafi Dictatorship

The new Qaddafi regime was initially very popular due to its avowed pan-Arab nationalism which struck a chord with many Libyans who did not appreciate the substantial but undramatic strides toward nationhood that had been achieved by King Idris. There was also disenchantment with the king because the advances in education that had been made had not yet been accompanied by available employment.

The initial popularity (among pan-Arab inclined Libyans at least) of the new government was also due to the expectation that there would be a union with Egypt, which was then known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). Qaddafi was sincerely favourable to a Libyan union with Egypt because he intended to rule such a new nation. The prospects of Egypt and Libya uniting under eventual Qaddafi rule were effectively ended by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat consolidating his power in May 1971.

Qaddafi’s pan-Arabism was really reflective of his megalomaniacal desire to rule a future super-Arab state. As such, Qaddafi never really concealed his contempt toward Libya as a nation that was unworthy of his ‘greatness’. His unrealistic ambitions did not negate Qaddafi’s shrewdness as he absolutely ruled Libya after a failed military coup in August 1975. To achieve the common objective of most republican Arab dictators-engineering a hereditary succession- Qaddafi by the early 1990s had virtually replaced the institution which had brought him to power, the army.

The Libyan army was eventually replaced by a predominately force of (well trained and well paid) mercenaries which seemed to offer the best chance of ensuring a hereditary succession to Qaddafi’s son Saif, although other siblings were in contention. In relative fairness to Saif, he was intelligent and broad minded. His diplomatic skills were considerable which was reflected by Libya becoming an internationally respected nation following the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks.

Saif Qaddafi’s international successes and his role in creating a reformist faction within the regime which was open to new ideas suggested that, as his father’s successor, he might have introduced democratic reforms that were beyond Bashar Assad in Syria. In retrospect, time beat Saif Qaddafi. The senior Qaddafi’s insecurity that had been manifested by the creation of a foreign mercenary force was also manifested by a brazen downgrading of services and conspicuous enrichment of a narrowing entourage as the Qaddafi regime consolidated its transition to sultanism.

The underlying tension of the fortieth anniversary of the Qaddafi coup in September 2009 implicitly conveyed the regime’s lack of popular support. This was despite two generations of propaganda and incredible oil wealth. Indeed, the national rumour mill had widely communicated the fact that Qaddafi had used the impact of falling oil prices and international sanctions as an excuse to allow the national standard of living to drop at the same time as oil funded investment enriched senior regime officials and their families. Had Qaddafi maintained adequate social spending and more adroitly devolved power to different clans instead of concentrating it with his Qadhafa tribe, then the 2011 revolution might have been averted.

The regime had previously attempted to institutionalise itself and co-opt clan support by creating Basic People’s Congresses (BPCs). BPCs were local committees which were suppose to act on local grievances and be the building blocks for Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya (‘State of the Masses’) which was officially proclaimed in 1977. The proclamation of the Jamahiriya made Libya the world’s first official anarchist state and represented Qaddafi being relatively realistic by conceding that his ambition of leading a super Arab state was something of a forlorn hope.

Qaddafi might have benefited by genuinely devolving a degree of power to the nation’s clans through the BPCs, thereby increasing people’s thresholds to endure the regime. It was interesting that, during the eight month 2011 revolt, the opposition groups and clans that supported the National Transitional Council (NTC) refused to countenance any negotiations with Qaddafi family members. This aversion was a reaction against the ruling family’s concentration of power and corruption. Ironically, Saif Qaddafi’s genuine efforts to bring about reform rebounded on the regime because most members of the NTC were reformers that had defected.

Democratic Elections: The Foundation of Democracy

Libya is therefore in the probably historically unique situation of intelligent reformists leading a revolution against a reviled regime that they once served and subsequently applying their political skills to ensure that democratic elections were held. With regard to this latter aspect, the interim government of Prime Minister Mahmmoud Jibril has fulfilled the main function of provisional regimes – holding fair and democratic multi-party elections.

Interim Prime Minister Jibril’s electorally victorious National Forces Alliance (which received 48% of the vote) is a configuration of democratic political groups which could be similar to Czechoslovakia’s Civic Forum. This Czechoslovak party was initially formed in late 1989 as an umbrella group and held together for multi-party elections the following year so that democratic forces could be consolidated. The stratagem was invaluable because the social democrats within Civic Forum were able to later amicably separate from the umbrella group and therefore be in a stronger position to hold the ground of the centre-left/ left against the continuing Communist Party.

Due to the relatively strong performance of Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood backed Justice and Construction Party (which received 21% of the vote); there is a strong incentive for the National Forces Alliance to remain together. Libya’s July 2012 election results might be in keeping with a pattern that could emerge in a future democratic Middle East- a two party system with a religious based party (or configuration of parties) and a secular equivalent*. Such a development is viable because it would reflect societal dynamics on the ground. Furthermore, there is of course scope that factors peculiar to a particular country will influence party formation.

(*There is also the strong possibility that ethnic/religious minority political parties will fulfil an important role).

The major issue that could affect future political party formation in Libya is that of federalism versus centralism. The failure of regionally based parties to do well in the July elections suggests that foreign media commentary that Libya will split along regional lines is grossly *inaccurate. Nevertheless, due to Qaddafi’s political crime of over concentrating power within his family, regional sentiments, particularly in Cyrenaica, are probably now paradoxically stronger than what they were when Libya was a federal kingdom between 1951 and 1963.

(*A fundamental problem that Libya is confronted with is that of the multiplicity of militias and armed gangs that were spawned in the struggle against Qaddafi. Western media commentary that Libya is a failed state due to the continuing existence of these armed groups is premature. The relatively smooth running of the July 2012 elections was reflective of the power of the nation’s clans and the strong public determination that the nation have a functional democracy.

The influence of the clans combined with the election of a legislature creates the scope for differences to be peacefully resolved in a democratic constitutional context. Therefore, the factors are in place for the armed groups to be dismantled and for law and order to be restored).

Because the National Forces Alliance encompasses a wide spectrum of ideas and philosophy, there could be differences as to whether Libya should constitutionally restore the three former provinces. If there is such a reinstatement, western media will imply that the NATO intervention to vitally assist in the struggle to bring Qaddafi down was a mistake because Libya will inevitably break up. For reasons that have already been outlined, this is an improbable scenario; indeed the nation’s prospects for democratic transition are bright.

How Will the Senussi Family Again Serve Libya?

There is however the question of whether the Libyan monarchy will be reinstated. The Libyan royal family were almost unique in that the Senussis were, and are possibly still the nation’s largest clan. For this reason, Qaddafi released the Crown Prince following the completion of his ‘sentence’ in 1974 and freed most but not all, members of the royal family. Although Qaddafi did not wish to cause a blood feud with one of Libya’s biggest clans, this did not save him from the Libyan’s people’s wrath. Ironically, Qaddafi was killed in October 2011 by locals in his supposed home support base of Sirte.

As terrible as Qaddafi was, he at least spared the Libyan royal family who remained in their country. Nevertheless, members of the royal family were compelled to remain in Tripoli under constant surveillance as they were forbidden to travel to their former home base of Cyrenaica. Intending to end the link between the royal family and the Senussi clan Qaddafi allowed Crown Prince Hassan (along with His Highness’s immediate family) to depart for Britain in 1988 where he died in 1992.

The fact that the Senussi legacy had not completely disappeared into the ether was touchingly manifested during the February/March 2011 revolt in Benghazi where residents defiantly rallied to the horizontal *red, black and green flag that was adopted upon independence in December 1951 and officially abolished by Qaddafi in 1969. It was touching that the flag-which had been noted by vexillogists (flag experts) as that epitome of a bygone era became a rallying point for the Libyan people against an avowedly populist revolutionary regime.

(*Three colours respectively represented the provinces of Fezzan, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania).

The official reinstatement of Libya’s flag augers well for an objective assessment of Libya under King Idris which was politically underdeveloped but substantially free. The re-emergent power of the Senussi clan is currently reflected by Prince Ahmed Senussi’s (who was imprisoned between 1970 and 2001) membership of the NTC. Whether the influence of this clan (which crucially supported the National Forces Alliance) will result in a reinstatement of the monarchy under Crown Prince Mohammed Senussi is an open question.

Ironically, by advocating a reinstatement of the monarchy, the Senussi clan (all of which is not monarchist per se) could squander the good will and influence that they now have in a post-Qaddafi Libya. Nevertheless, there seems to be such widespread respect for the memory of King Idris across Libya that a return to a constitutional monarchy cannot be automatically discounted.

In Cyrenaica there is strong monarchist sentiment which has been misconstrued by some of the foreign media as support for succession. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that there is precedent for royal families reigning within federal republics.

Uganda: Monarchy within a Republican Federal Framework

The most famous example of monarchies existing within a federal republic was (and again is) Uganda. This important East African nation upon receiving independence from Britain in 1962 was initially a Crown Realm within the Commonwealth with King Freddie (or Kabaka Mutesa II) of Buganda serving first as Governor-General of Uganda.

The republican inclined prime minister, Milton Obote of the northern based Uganda People’s Congress Party (UPC), helped ensure that the new nation became a republic in 1963 with King Freddie serving as the nation’s first president. With the benefit of hindsight, a Malaysian system of government should have been adopted with the respective five kings of the southern kingdoms of Uganda (Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga and Toro) serving as a federal king on a rotational basis.

The republican inclined north and east would have been placated under a Malaysian type system because regional electoral support for the UPC in alliance with the ‘King Only’ (Kabaka Yekka, KY) almost guaranteed that a northerner served as federal prime minister. The KY was a Bugandain monarchist party which siphoned votes away from the southern based Democratic Party (DP). The predominant republicanism of the *DP ironically came from Bugandian republicans. This was in spite of a strong monarchist base within the DP which represented the interests of the other four non-Bugandian kingdoms.

The bizarre alliance between Bugandian republicans and monarchist supporters of the other kingdoms to constitute the DP led to the similarly strange situation of the UPC and the KY forming a government in 1962 following elections in April that year. All might have been well had Prime Minister Obote not deposed (albeit peacefully) King Freddie as president in February 1966 and then resorted to military force to precipitate the Kabaka’s flight into exile in May that year. President Obote consolidated his dictatorship the following year by establishing a unitary republican state and formally instituting one-party rule in 1969. These actions foreshadowed the darkness that was to descend on Uganda following General Idi Amin’s coup in January 1971.

The unpopularity of the subsequent Obote dictatorship and Amin’s bloody tyranny (1971 to 1979) resulted in a strong resurgence in support for the deposed southern monarchies. This state of affairs went against the usual historical pattern of the support bases of deposed dynasties receding with the elapse of time. Nevertheless, even monarchist Bugandians voted overwhelmingly for the predominately republican DP to consolidate southern unity against the northern based UPC in the December 1980 elections.

The 1980 elections were rigged by the occupying Tanzanians (who had driven Amin into exile the previous year) in favour of the UPC which resulted in Obote’s return to power. To maintain power following the 1981 withdrawal of Tanzanian troops, the second Obote regime resorted to Amin style terror against southern Ugandans. This terror was effectively concealed from the international community by Obote maintaining the trappings of a multi-party state. The DP was never to recover its support base for acquiescencing to this sham in return for its senior leaders accessing extensive parliamentary perks.

By contrast General Yoweri Museveni was a former politician defeated in the rigged 1980 elections who refused to be co-opted. He waged a southern based insurgency against Obote between 1981 and 1985. The publication of an Amnesty International (AI) report in July 1985 alerted the world to the fact the mass murder had again been undertaken in *Uganda. Consequently, one of Obote’s strongest supporters General Tito Okello deposed the discredited president in a coup in July 1985 to achieve the interrelated objectives of the army avoiding international opprobrium and conciliating the nation’s southern region.

(*There were estimates that between 100,000 and 300,000 Ugandans died under the second Obote regime).

To placate the nation’s south, the Okello regime brought DP leaders into the new cabinet. However this action was at best symbolic and at worst counterproductive because the DP had by then forfeited its popular base. Due to the popular base that Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) had, he was able to take the capital Kampala in late January 1986.

The Museveni regime has since ruled Uganda to be the second longest lasting government in Africa after Robert Mugabe’s kleptocracy in Zimbabwe. In contrast to Mugabe, the Museveni regime has political legitimacy because it has earned the lasting gratitude of most southerners by providing sound government and engineering consistent economic growth. These achievements are widely appreciated in the context of what had preceded the Museveni government.

(Northern acceptance of the Museveni regime is another matter but, despite guerrilla insurgency in this region, brutal repression has not been resorted to).

Southern support for the Museveni government has also been considerably bolstered by the reinstating the former kingdoms in and after 1993. The republican orientated Museveni was somewhat belated in conceding to this policy which has been very popular in the south. Indeed, an integral aspect of the campaign conducted by the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) for a full transition to democracy has been to upgrade of the constitutional powers of the kings of the five sub-national kingdoms.

The FDC has a strong inter-tribal and cross-regional basis for support similar to the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM). The development of Uganda’s political system since the 1995 formal legalization of parties and the reinstatement of the five sub-national kingdoms augers well for Uganda to fulfil the high hopes that had existed at the time of independence in 1962 when the nation was often referred to as the *Pearl of Africa.

(*This accolade had been previously given in the late nineteenth century to Buganda by a visiting British newspaper correspondent named Winston Churchill).

Libya and Uganda: Similar Pasts, Similar Futures?

The prospects for Libya are now similarly bright as those of Uganda. Both nations paid dearly for fundamental mistakes which are now being redressed with determination and rational analysis. A major mistake in the Ugandan context was the KY’s ill-advised alliance with the UPC in 1962 which established the groundwork for the horrendous Obote-Amin era. Similarly, the botched abdication of King Idris in 1969 precipitated the horrors of the Qaddafi republic.

Libya and Uganda are now both at the cross-roads of fulfilling their potential by becoming fully-fledged democracies. The skill with which Libya’s clan leaders conducted the revolt against Qaddafi is an indication that the nation has the capacity to make a transition to democracy. Even with NATO air support, it seemed improbable that the freedom fighters would be able to liberate the capital in August 2011.

With the rebels approaching Tripoli, mass rallies were held in the capital which conveyed the impression that the Qaddafi regime still had a substantial support base. This apparent support combined with a well trained and equipped foreign mercenary force indicated that Qaddafi would prevail. Instead, clan leaders who had previously deceived Qaddafi by having people show ostensible support for the regime in large demonstrations gave the go-ahead for another revolt as rebel troops came close to the capital. This popular revolt tipped the balance in favour of the freedom fighters, thereby resulting in the end of the republican regime.

Similar shrewdness and fortitude will again have to be provided by Libyans to consolidate their nation as a peaceful democracy. That generally peaceful conduct of the elections held July 2012 in establishing the beginnings of a viable two-party system are promising developments. The scope for further positive nation re-building would be advanced by Libyans giving serious consideration to reinstating their previous constitutional monarchy. At the very least, the option of the Senussi family being returned as a royal dynasty in Cyrenaica as a sub-national kingdom should be considered.

Contemporary Uganda is illustrative of how sub-national kingdoms within a federal republic are conducive to national unity. Had Uganda’s DP given its support to such a framework in the 1960s, this nation could have been a beacon of hope to Africa as a success story. A reinstated Senussi dynasty in Cyrenaica could promote national unity and be a practical model for Gulf monarchies to transition to becoming fully fledged constitutional electoral democracies.

The fact that the Senussi family once provided a royal dynasty for all of Libya would mean that their reinstatement in Cyrenaica would complement national unity. Many monarchist Libyans living outside Cyrenaica would accept a Libyan republic because of its accommodating the Senussi royal family reigning in a sub-national kingdom. Furthermore, the current royal claimant Prince Mohammed Senussi is well-connected to the extensive networks of the royal courts of Europe. This would help ‘open doors’ with regard to Libyan influence in international affairs.

Ultimately the issues of constitutional status for a post-Qaddafi Libya are matters for Libyans to work out in a pilot democracy. The Obama administration’s 2011 crucial involvement in the NATO air campaign demonstrated respect for the sovereignty and good sense of Libyans by striking an appropriate balance between supporting a people in dire need with practical external military assistance and avoiding the United States becoming unduly immersed in a potential quagmire.

The Post 1992 Ebbs and Flows of American Politics

It was with the objective of avoiding a quagmire that President George HW Bush short-sightedly refused to help the Iraqi opposition in March 1991 through the provision of air support bring down Saddam Hussein’s hideous regime. The American led international coalition which liberated Iraq in 2003 ended Saddam’s tyranny which the Iraqi people lacked the capacity to do, due to his regime’s sheer cruelty and repressive effectiveness.

Prior to President W Bush commencing the military campaign in January 1991 to liberate Kuwait, he struck a deal with the Congress in November 1990 to increase taxes. President Bush did this to end the spiral of borrowing and spending which was a carry over from the Reagan era. Although the budget deficit financing approach of the preceding administration had led to high sustained non-inflationary growth, a point had to be reached when steps were taken to rein in debt and borrowing.

For President Bush the impending military victory in the First Gulf War offered him the opportunity of maintaining his political base by politically incapacitating the Democrats for the 1992 presidential elections. The non-candidacies of then New York Governor Mario Cuomo and then New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley apparently vindicated President Bush’s gamble that the success of Desert Strom in 1991 would ensure that there would be a relatively weak presidential Democratic field to ensure that the president’s base would be held.

The Republican incumbent probably would have won the 1992 presidential race had it not been for the maverick independent candidacy of Texas billionaire Ross Perot (who received nearly 19% of the vote) siphoning votes from President Bush. The Democrat candidate, then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, probably would not have won the Democratic Party nomination had it not been for party heavy weights not entering the race because they had believed President Bush’s re-election was inevitable as a result of the 1991 military success in the First Gulf War.

For all the controversy surrounding the early 1992 primary season, the Clinton presidential nomination was all but assured because of the stalwart support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) transferred to him in the March 8th Super Tuesday primary. A swag of Southern states voted for Clinton on Super Tuesday to make him the front runner.

The major achievement of Governor Clinton up until Super Tuesday had been to remain viable after disappointing results in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Even after Super Tuesday, the Democrat front runner did not clinch his party’s nomination until he had defeated former California governor *Gerry Brown Jnr in his home state’s June primary.

(*It was a tribute to Governor Brown’s tenacity that, despite been dismissed as a fringe candidate on entering the 1992 race, he remained competitive until the last primary).

The Clinton campaign galvanized into action with a spirited Democratic Party nominating convention in New York in July in which the Arkansas governor consolidated vital southern support by selecting another southerner as his running mate, Tennessee Senator Al Gore. The nominating convention bolstered vital southern support while also galvanising the party’s liberal base. The general press bias toward the Clinton-Gore ticket (which received 43% of the popular vote) assisted in delivering the Democratic Party’s voting base to their party nominees.

President Bush (who received 37% of the popular vote) managed to hold the core of the Republican Party’s voting base but forfeited predominately middle class Reagan Democratic support to Perot who received 18.9% of the vote. Perot between February and July had topped the polls which indicated that he might even have won the presidency. His weak excuse for withdrawing his candidacy in July resulted in many political insiders wondering on what basis he would later re-enter the race. Whether deals were undertaken or not between Perot and the Clinton campaign, his re-entry into the race in October denied President Bush a viable chance of narrowly winning re-election.

President Bill Clinton was inaugurated president in January 1993 with popular enthusiasm among most committed Democrats but with healthy but not necessarily hostile scepticism amongst most politically uncommitted Americans. The chances of his presidency being a success were significantly improved by holding a virtual presidential summit in the Arkansas state capital of Little Rock in December 1992 in which the president-elect repudiated his big spending promises on the basis that the economy was in worse condition than he had originally realized. Had these avowed promises (which included massive spending) been pursued, economic dislocation may have ensured which could have ruined the Clinton presidency.

The virtual repudiation of election promises did not harm the new president among his base because they mostly welcomed the end of Republican dominance in the White House. The ‘big ticket’ item of the new Clinton Administration was the attempt to introduce public health care under the leadership of the First Lady Hillary Clinton. The failure to achieve this ambitious goal did not result in the Clintons losing support among their base because a sincere attempt was made.

Nevertheless, the non-passage of healthcare reform created a void which the Republicans under House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich filled with their ‘Contract with America’ helping ensure that the GOP won the 1994 congressional elections. This was a stunning result because forty years of a Democratic congressional majority was ended. Such a result indicated that the Republican Party was on the way to possibly ending this party’s de facto status as a minority party with the distinct possibility that the GOP could become the majority party.

This American equivalent of campaign manifesto promised to cut spending to end the deficit while stimulating economic and employment growth by tax cuts. When it was all said and done, the Gingrich agenda was successfully achieved with vital support from President Clinton who combined a technical capacity to understand and amend necessary legislation combined with an uncanny sense of political timing.

Because the ‘Contract with America’ (and not the ‘Contract on America’ as political opponents cynically dubbed it) was still a work in progress, President Clinton’s 1996 re-election was not a certainty at the beginning of the year. There were however eerie parallels with the presidential election of four years earlier which would ensure the president’s re-election. The Democrats base remained solid with Clinton (who received 49.2% of the vote) due to general satisfaction with him as president and partisan based hostility toward Speaker Gingrich.

Another important factor which vitally contributed to President Clinton’s 1996 re-election was that *Ross Perot’s candidacy again siphoned enough votes away from the Republicans to help ensure that they consecutively failed to win the White House. Had Perot (who received 8.4% of the vote) not run in 1996, President Clinton might yet have won re-election in his own right due to the relatively weak position of his Republican opponent Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.

(In contrast to 1992, when Perot ran as an independent, in 1996 he was a candidate of the Reform Party which was founded the year before).

The GOP Majority?

The relatively weak team of Republican aspirants for their party’s presidential nomination in 1996 was surprising considering that the GOP had won a congressional majority over two generations in the preceding mid-term elections. This state of affairs may have been due to the unpopularity against the Republicans that was galvanized by the austerities of implementing the Contract with America platform outlined two years earlier.

Senator Dole easily won the Republican presidential nomination due to his strong party base. Perhaps some party insiders regarded a Dole candidacy as a holding action to maintain and improve the Republicans political base in 1996 to go after the White House in 2000. The Bush machine was still very much intact in 1996. This was apparent when the former president’s son George W was elected Texas governor in 1994. Although George W’s younger brother lost in Florida that year, he would still be elected governor of the sunshine state in 1998.

Republican unity behind a Dole candidacy was also bolstered by Jack Kemp being his running mate. As highly respected as Bob Dole was among his party base and among much of the public, there was also a widespread perception (despite the Reagan precedent) that the senator was not really serious about winning the presidency because he was then 73. There was speculation that Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential bid was really a dry run for the Senator’s politically powerful and astute wife Elizabeth (‘Libby’) making her own presidential bid four years later or being selected as the vice-presidential running mate of the next GOP presidential nominee.

For all the apparent certainty of a Clinton-Gore re-election, the Doles still ran an impressive campaign which vitally contributed to the Republicans retaining their congressional majority. This GOP majority was retained two years later in congressional elections but, due to Democrat gains, Republican enemies of Newt Gingrich were able to compel him not seek another term as Speaker in 1998.

The effective political departure of Speaker Gingrich created a political vacuum in the Republican Party. The former speaker had effectively been Ronald Reagan’s ideological heir. Due to the peace dividend that came with the end of the Cold War, fundamental tenets of Reaganism such as a balanced budget were actually achieved. This was because the necessity for massive defence spending was no longer required.

The political departure of Newt Gingrich was probably a relief to many Republicans because a political lighting rod was removed but at the cost that the Democrats were better positioned than they might otherwise have been to take credit for the prosperity that had ensued from the implementation of the Contract with America agenda. President Clinton could take substantial credit for modifying the implementation of this agenda to help facilitate better outcomes.

The ambiguity as to which of the two major parties could take credit for economic prosperity in 2000 led to the paradox of a polarizing presidential race which is not expected in times of plenty. Vice-President Al Gore was able to reinforce his position as a centrist by beating off a liberal challenge from Senator Bradley which never seemed to take off because the Democratic base remained consistently satisfied with the Clinton Administration.

By contrast the Republican presidential nomination was a more rambunctious affair. Although no comparison was made during the 2000 campaign, the two-candidate struggle was essentially a re-run of the Bush-Reagan rivalry for the 1980 presidential nomination. Texas Governor George W Bush, for all his at times populist flamboyance, was essentially the Republican establishment candidate. Senator John Mc Cain of Arizona approximated the Reagan tradition due to his strong stand on national defence and potential to attract Democrat voters over to a GOP presidential candidate.

Although Senator Mc Cain ran with an anti-establishment message by supporting campaign funding disclosure reform, Governor Bush’s folksy style and the partisan loyalty to Republican Party regulars effectively denied his party rival the capacity to achieve an upset election victory. The Texas governor’s father’s previous association with Ronald Reagan also diminished the prospects for a Mc Cain upset.

Post-New Deal Coalition Voting Shifts

The eventual closeness of the 2000 American elections (both in a presidential and a congressional context) was reflective of GOP advances of breaking with the New Deal legacy of being America’s minority party. Due to the contemporary importance of party voting allegiances in the upcoming 2012 presidential election, a re-cap overview of post-New Deal voting shifts would not go astray.

As previously mentioned, FDR’s New Deal Coalition essentially remained intact in 1968 even though RN as the Republican presidential candidate won the election that year. The strength of the New Deal Coalition was such that, had Senator Muskie won the 1972 Democratic Party nomination, he almost certainly would have won the presidential election later that year. This would have been despite RN’s impressive domestic and international achievements during his first presidential term of office.

The Democrats ill-advised nomination of Senator George Mc Govern allowed RN to legitimately appropriate massive and traditional Democrat voting blocs. The continuing durability of the New Deal Coalition in the 1972 elections was still manifested by the substantial Democrat congressional majority that was increased that year. A consolidation of the New Deal Coalition was similarly achieved by the Democrat landslide in the 1974 congressional elections due to the Watergate beat-up.

Nevertheless, Gerald Ford, who was a competent but overall mediocre president (1974-1977), achieved a victory of sorts by almost winning the 1976 presidential election. This was because many once stalwart Democrats who had shifted to RN in 1972 supported President Ford’s election bid. Indeed, had the so-called ‘Deep South’ not narrowly opted for Carter as a native son of Georgia, then he would have lost the presidency to Gerald Ford.

Had Jimmy Carter achieved the same balance of his predecessor of being competent but mediocre, he would have safeguarded his party’s majority support base to win re-election in 1980. However, because President Carter was highly intelligent with some ideas that were ahead of their time, he paradoxically lacked the requisite mediocrity that can often facilitate competence.

The American people might have given President Carter the benefit of the doubt had he not blundered in foreign policy, particularly with regard to Iran. The Carter Administration’s mistakes arising from the ramifications of previously undermining the Shah of Iran highlighted to the American people the fundamental inadequacies of President Carter’s defence and foreign policies.

The advent of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential candidacy saw the phenomenon of the so-called Reagan Democrats, i.e. blue collar and lower paid white collar employees voting for the Republican presidential nominee. Despite winning landslide election victories in 1980 and 1984 as the GOP candidate, Ronald Reagan’s victories did not transfer to the Republicans gaining a majority in the House of Representatives. The electoral preference for ‘divided government’ was also apparent in the 1980s with the Democrats maintaining a majority of the state governorships. This reflected that the New Deal Coalition remained intact.

The point at which the Republican Party began the possible transformation into a new majority party commenced with their victory in the 1994 congressional elections. This 1994 upset was facilitated by former Perot voters instead of voting for the Democrats at a congressional level (as they predominately had in 1992) instead transferring their support to the Republicans.

The effective role that President Clinton fulfilled in affecting the Gingrich agenda politically confused analysis of electoral patterns of the 1990s because the Democrats remained politically competitive with a resurgent Republican Party. This was manifested by the closeness of the controversial 2000 presidential election.

Back to the Centre: The Democratic Majority?

Analysis of electoral competition between the Democrats and Republicans was complicated in the 2000s by the impact of American led intervention in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The high level of public support for military action abroad was apparent in the Republicans slightly increasing their congressional majority in the 2002 mid-term elections. This result was impressive because such elections usually adversely affect the party of the White House incumbent. Consequently the President Bush was well placed to win re-election in 2004.

The Democrats might have faced a re-run of the 1972 scenario in 2004 in which stalwart supporters transferred their support to the Republican incumbent due to national security concerns. This was a distinct possibility in 2004 because a strong ‘anti-war’ sentiment in the Democrats could have resulted in the party’s presidential nomination going to the former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dr. Dean’s exuberance at a press conference following an adverse primary helped ensure that the Democrats rallied to support Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to become their 2004 presidential nominee.

Senator Kerry (who gained just over 48% of the vote) managed to maintain the support of his party’s liberal base and a substantial component of moderate non-aligned voters. However, President George W Bush (who gained just over 50% of the vote) similarly retained his party’s support base but had the edge in relation to non-aligned voters who supported him as the incumbent with regard to national security and defence issues. This was despite Senator Kerry running strongly on his record as a Vietnam War veteran.

The continued involvement of American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time of the 2006 congressional elections was no longer (to put it mildly) an asset for the Republicans. The decisive Democrat victory in these elections seemed to herald a judgement that the Bush presidency was a failure and that the 2008 Democrat presidential nominee was to be the next president.

It seemed almost inevitable that the Democrat presidential nominee would be the former First Lady and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. The Clinton years, due to successful but acrimonious political collaboration with Speaker Newt Gingrich as Speaker, had been prosperous. This memory of good economic times, the Clinton’s formidable base within the Democratic Party and the popularity of the former First Lady made Hillary Clinton the front runner for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

As often happens with seemingly almost certain scenarios, unexpected obstacles arose. The groundwork for Barack Obama’s emergence as Hillary Clinton’s major rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination can be traced to his address at the Denver party convention. The speech that the aspiring senate candidate made helped establish him as the heir to the Kerry network in 2012 were the Massachusetts senator to lose the 2008 presidential election. This role might have been assumed by Senator Kerry’s running mate North Carolina Senator John Edwards had Barack Obama not also gained the backing of supporters of Howard Dean’s 2004 bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

The Obama campaign had a competitive edge with regard to utilization of social media technology that helped the Illinois Senator win an upset victory at the Iowa caucuses. The strong support that Hillary Clinton received from women voters at the subsequent New Hampshire primary saved her campaign therefore making for one of the most exciting nomination races in recent American political history. The edge that Senator Obama gained in the February Super Tuesday primary provided him with the invaluable momentum to narrowly win his party’s presidential nomination.

Considering the at times bitter nature of the 2008 Democratic Party primary struggle there was a strong prospect of the Clinton camp sufficiently lapsing their support for Barak Obama that he would have lost the 2008 presidential election. However, the Clintons were too shrewd to have endangered their party base by lapsing support for Barak Obama in such an historically important presidential election.

Senator John Mc Cain Galvanizes the GOP

Democratic unity was needed due to the strong challenge from Arizona Senator John Mc Cain. The strength of the Mc Cain challenge was surprising considering the deep unpopularity of outgoing president George Bush. In keeping with the pattern of the runner up in the party’s previously contested nomination entering the next competitive race for the nomination as the front runner, Senator Mc Cain was the candidate to beat for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Senator Mc Cain’s primary victories in New Hampshire and on Super Tuesday ensured that the 2008 Republican Party nomination was his. Nevertheless, his nomination victory seemed to be something of a poisoned chalice due to the unpopularity of President Bush and the massive momentum that Barak Obama had gained by winning the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

Due to the widespread expectation that Barak Obama would win the 2008 election, the position of runner-up was an important political prize with regard to potentially gaining the status of the party front runner in 2012. This virtual sub-race for 2012 front runner was won by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The former’s decision not to run for the Republican Party nomination in 2012 by default made Mitt Romney the front runner for his party’s presidential nomination that year.

Senator Mc Cain was in broad terms the Bob Dole of the 2008 campaign – the party loyalist who runs as the fill-in candidate until party bigwigs run in the next presidential election. Nevertheless, Senator Mc Cain galvanized his party’s base to make the presidential race an exciting one which was reflected by the impressive 63% election turnout. The reasons for Senator Mc Cain’s strong campaign performance were two-fold:

Firstly, the delegates at the September Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota enthusiastically rallied to support him as their nominee. This may have been because Senator Mc Cain had previously challenged the unpopular George W Bush (who addressed the convention by televised video instead of actually attending the event) for the party nomination eight years previously. Although an American party presidential nomination convention is the place for hyped enthusiasm, the real gauge of success is whether the delegates return to their states to galvanize the base and this St. Paul delegates did with gusto.

Pawn or Queen? The Enigma of Sarah Palin

The other major reason why Senator Mc Cain was a formidable challenger to Barak Obama in 2008 was due to his selection of then Alaska governor, Sarah Palin as his running mate. This contention is now controversial, if not revisionist. The attacks that she was subjected to were horrendous but ensured that the Alaska governor would leave her mark on the 2008 race.

Sarah Palin probably would not have had the wherewithal to have assumed the presidency were a President Mc Cain died early in office. However, a consistent theme in Governor Palin’s life and political career has been that of adaptation. She seems to be the sort of historical character that in the process of being transformed by events actually transforms the situation.

The former Alaska governor’s transformative capacities were demonstrated by her going through the rough and tumble of what had been a politically staid state from when she was first been elected a local city councillor in 1992 to state governor in 2006. Even had Sarah Palin not been selected as Senator Mc Cain’s running mate in 2008, the drama of her Alaska political career is fascinating.

The ridicule that Sarah *Palin was subjected to by pro-Democrat mainstream media might have derailed the 2008 Mc Cain-Palin campaign had she not emerged as a political force in her own right. This was due to her later breaking free from her campaign handlers to engage with contemporary Reagan Democrats.

(*The future role of Sarah Palin in American politics is an interesting question. Her role in galvanizing the Republican base in 2008 was crucial in helping facilitate the formation of the Tea Party which importantly contributed to the Republican victory in the 2010 congressional elections. It was also noteworthy that, in the 2010 political season, Sarah Palin vitally helped Senator John Mc Cain fend off a serious challenge for the Republican nomination for Arizona senator.

The question concerning Sarah Palin is whether she will help transform the Tea Party base into a political force that actually advances their interests. The Tea Party is still fulfilling its intended role of being a Lasch operation that ensures that lower middle class and/or economically vulnerable Americans are manipulated into supporting Republican establishment candidates.

As important as was the role that Sarah Palin fulfilled in helping the Republicans win the 2010 congressional elections, she did not call in - as RN did after the 1966 congressional elections- political debts that would have made her politically stronger in 2012. The former Alaska governor might have been a future presidential contender had Newt Gingrich won the presidency in 2012, by first serving as a senior official in his administration.

However, her avowed non-endorsement of Newt Gingrich while calling on voters to support him in the primaries was so tepid that it was possibly counter-productive. Due to Mitt Romney being the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, it is probable that Sarah Palin will fulfil the role of being the vote-getter to ensure that contemporary Reagan Democrats support establishment Republicans. If Sarah Palin was to undertake another personal transformation, the future of American politics might be fundamentally altered).

Diversity Ensures Strength

As decisive as the Obama-Biden victory (with 53% of the popular vote) was in the 2008 election, there is the acute and current danger in the United States that race will become too important a factor in deciding election outcomes such that long term national unity will be challenged. It is for this reason that I respectfully disagree with Barak Obama’s contention in his address to the 2004 Democratic Party Convention that the United States should not be divided along party lines between blue (i.e. Democrat) and red (i.e. Republican) lines.

Yes, currently ethnically based party divisions are dangerous. However, a point can eventually be reached in which party divisions reflect a contest of ideas and values that the dichotomy between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ America is a positive dynamic that facilitates cross-community purpose of unity. Therefore the United States will hopefully reach a point in the future where African Americans are amicably polarized with 50% of blacks again supporting the GOP instead of 90% of them voting for the Democratic Party.

As important as it is in the short-term that President Obama wins re-election in 2012, the longer ramification will hopefully be that future party divisions will be based on a contest of ideas and values. The positive policies and/or principles that President Obama outlines with regard to addressing the contemporary challenge of the GFC could help determine the future nature of the American party system.

It is important that President Obama not be yet locked into a narrow circle of interest on whose behalf he will conduct an ethnically based re-election campaign. Such a scenario is currently in motion because the president’s senior campaign advisor David Axelrod is orchestrating a specific anti-Romney campaign. The attacks over Mitt Romney concerning his previous management decisions at Bain Capital, refusal to disclose earlier tax returns and the prospect of his having foreign bank accounts are legitimate.

But unless these attacks result in *Romney’s candidacy imploding, they will be insufficient to secure President Obama’s re-election. If the election predictions are close approaching 2012 Election Day, then this will be an ironic indication that Romney will win. This will be because the Republican voting base is stronger than the Democrats.

(*If Romney cannot provide satisfactory answers to questions concerning his financial concerns and past management decisions. he should consider making way at the 2012 Republican National Convention in August in Tampa for a candidate with a proven track record for job creation).

The Acute Danger to America of Racial Division

There are already disturbing signs that the Romney campaign and/or its backers are waging a subliminal race-based election campaign. Consequently, there is scope for the fatal shooting on 26th of February 2012 of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman to acquire racial undertones that could impact on the dynamics of this year’s presidential election. The history of the United States has shown that patriotically inspired national unity is as much the secret to the nation’s strength as ethnic dis-unity is a potential source of great weakness.

There is never a good time for any nation to be adversely racially divided, but for a nation as super important as the United States to acrimoniously split along ethic lines, is dangerous in the context of the GFC as too dangerous a scenario to contemplate. The question that therefore needs to be asked is how could the Republican Party be a potential source of national discord given its great historical contribution to the United States?

The answer is that the GOP as the traditional party of the middle class and the entrepreneur has been a proponent of volunteerism which can be traced back to the Federalist Party of the 1800s. Volunteerism is a source of strength because it has been an ethos through which the talents in civil society have been utilized instead of the state to achieve amazing results in American history, such as the nineteenth century settlement and consequent rapid industrialization.

The potential problem with volunteerism is that people who have not kept up with socio-economic progress can be left behind to the point where they become an entrenched marginalized minority. High rates of homelessness and street crime in American cities is testament to unattended social problems due to government neglect or public indifference. This phenomenon is a manifestation of the weakness of volunteerism in not addressing socio-economic gaps.

The Need to Stop Creative Destruction Becoming Destructive

In the contemporary American context, there is a danger that the negative potential of volunteerism will significantly undermine national unity. This risk has been increased due to the continuing impact of the GFC and Joseph Schumpeter’s 1950s concept of creative destruction having very negative consequences because technological advances (such as the internet) will not create more employment opportunities but instead substantially undermine them. This negative version of creative destruction has been given impetus by the GFC precipitating a restriction of credit and facilitating the onset of austerity to safeguard financial solvency.

Congressional Republicans have shown an inclination toward cutting spending and imposing austerity measures which will thwart the prospects for growth of the American and indeed the world economy. The Republicans have correctly identified the dangers of mounting foreign debt being precipitated by non-stop borrowing and printing of the American dollar. However, the Republican advocacy of deflationary policies will consolidate and probably expand high levels of unemployment which will undermine social harmony.

The consolidation of high levels of unemployment/underemployment could well institutionalize a two-tier society divided between those with access to full-time employment and those who do not have such access. In this inter-connected world of on-line communication, there is considerable scope for hard-left activists to organise disruptive socio-political campaigns that undermine the fundamental basis of a market economy.

The above scenario is terrible enough but it should not be forgotten that, in an American context, socio-economic divisions could reflect ethnicity. The United States could be at a point similar to what Britain and France were confronted with in the 1760s. Due to the onset of technological change and the new ideas that came with the Enlightenment, established economic patterns and power structures were challenged.

Britain and France: A Tale of Two Nations

In the French context, for all their talent the national elite failed to adapt to socio-economic change. This was partly because Louis XIV (who commenced his actual rein in 1661 which lasted until His Majesty’s death in 1715 at the age of seventy-seven) had ensured that most of the leading noble families resided for substantial periods of time at the royal Versailles Palace just outside of Paris. The long-term consequences of this policy were that French nobles eventually became so detached from their tenants and from the ebbs and flow of commerce and industry and general social change that they collectively fell victim to the French Revolution of the 1780s-1790s.

The British aristocracy by contrast were grounded in the 1760s because many noblemen had seats in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Even though there was a very narrow property franchise, British nobles by being involved in parliamentary politics were connected to the concerns of tenants and more often than not fulfilled a crucial role in local government. This did not make eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain a democratic state by any means but it meant that there was a resourceful elite that was adaptive in the face of tremendous challenges.

An important policy failure of the British elite-where geographical distance contributed to political disconnection-was with the then American colonies. This led to the outbreak of military hostilities in 1775 and eventual British military defeat in 1781. Nevertheless, for all the stereotyping of British snobbery and class division, Britain’s eighteenth failure in America was the exception to the rule for a nation which had a remarkable sense of national purpose.

France was a similarly talented nation in the eighteenth century but was tragically divided because two nations in one had simultaneously developed between the 1760s and the 1790s due to deep but unaddressed class differences. The United States in 2012 could be headed in a similar direction as eighteenth century France due to the socio-economic impact of the GFC politically dividing the United States.

The Power of ‘How’

Although the election of a black American president in 2008 was historic, this does not mean that the United States could not still subsequently regress into a nation where there are deep socio-economic class differences based on race. Such a scenario it is frightingly plausible but avoidable if political will is exercised. This is particularly the case because Barak Obama was elected on a basis of ‘Change We Can Believe In’ and ‘Yes We Can.’

The inspirational rhetoric of the 2008 Obama campaign therefore warrants an overview of the Obama presidency. In very broad terms, the Obama Administration’s notable overall achievement has been to avoid a catastrophic socio-economic cataclysm by successfully safeguarding the fundamentals of the American economy. This has been reflected by economic stimulus packages, industry assistance to the American automobile sector and effective financial regulation including the vital application of reform with regard to mortgage foreclosure procedures.

The economic achievements of the Obama Administration have therefore essentially being that of preventative maintenance as opposed to socio-economic transformation which was implied in the 2008 campaign. Nevertheless, the general economic policy direction of the Obama Administration has been sound in both the short and long term. This is because there is a focus on achieving economic growth which is crucial to employment creation and essentially seeing the United State’s massive public foreign debt depreciate to where it is serviceable.

For the United State’s public foreign debt to eventually become serviceable, there will have to a tax increase (similar to the one that President HW Bush supported in 1990) to spike the dangerous borrowing and note printing spiral which is currently viable while the American dollar is effectively the world’s reserve currency. Closely related to the current practice of printing money (quantitative easing)is capitalizing smaller banks and Savings and Loans institutions to safeguard their solvency and promote business activity by lending.

While quantitative easing is currently a successful practice, it is essentially a stopgap policy which cannot be indefinitely sustained because insufficient employment is being generated. An important test of whether an Obama re-election is inherently worthwhile (as opposed to being a comparatively better alternative) is whether or not a second Obama Administration will achieve a nexus between credit formation and desperately needed job creation.

The Obama Republicans?: The Need for Contemporary Federalists

Because Treasury Secretary Timothy *Geithner has very unfortunately foreshadowed that he will not serve after the first Obama Administration’s ends, the American public is entitled to know what the general economic policy of a second Obama Administration will be, should there be one. There is possible scope under a re-elected Obama presidency for there to be a linkage between credit formation and job creation.

(*Mr. Geithner’s technical and strategic skills are mainly responsible for the United States and the world so far avoiding a financial meltdown in the context of the continuing GFC).

The United States Federal Reserve Bank has representatives on its governing board of large private corporate banks, the equivalent of state reserve banks which protect the solvency of banks in local state economies. This latter aspect of the Federal Reserve Bank Board’s representation is reflective of the capacity to enhance the capacity of smaller banks and S&Ls to continue to help facilitate the creation of new credit lines to simulate economic activity.

The current Geithner strategy of safeguarding the big ten American banks has crucially helped stave off financial collapse. However, the long term viability of this policy direction is questionable because of the danger of financial overexposure if nearly 80% of America’s capital is concentrated in its top ten big banks. Furthermore, the current practice that is integrally connected to the policy of quantitative easing is not facilitating sufficient employment growth.

Japan is a nation to which countries such as the United States can now look with regard to banking policy providing hope with regard to breaking with the contemporary threat of the still threatening GFC. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Japanese state has pursued a policy of supporting the existence of smaller banks to promote the interests of small and medium business as the essential generators of employment.

It is true that the wide range of financial institutions has created financial imposts that have slowed the Japanese economy down since the 1990s. However, even Japan’s big banks support the smaller banks despite a resulting economic slowdown that this has contributed to. This is because there is a consensus among business and the state bureaucracy that Japan must be overwhelmingly self-sufficient in domestic credit formation so that a naturally resource deprived nation can generate satisfactory employment growth by having strong credit lines.

It is not advisable that the United States emulate the Japanese banking system to the extent that there could one day be a slow down in economic growth (which the Japanese state is still adequately handling). However, the Japanese principle of recognising the interconnection between credit capacity and employment creation in the American small and medium business sector is not misplaced.

How Will Change Be Achieved?

If President Obama wants to win re-election, the most important question that he has to answer is how? Barak Obama offered the American people change that they could believe in 2008 but he did not detail what this ‘change’ would be and how it would be achieved.

The Democrats in 2012 are heading into the trap of campaigning too negatively without clearly outlining what change is on offer for the United States to overcome the serious danger of the GFC and how such change will be achieved. An important change that could be placed on offer by the Obama Administration is to broadly detail how smaller banking/financial institutions can either be created or enhanced to increase the scope for credit to be lent to help facilitate small and medium business development and thereby vitally assist in employment generation.

Small and medium business growth will be the determinant of whether creative destruction will be either a negative or a positive phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Should the American federal government put the policy settings in place to support smaller financial institutions, there obviously would have to be strict guidelines and transparent processes in place to monitor and effectively regulate the flow of funds.

Recent technological advances have been such that there is now capacity for capital to be expeditiously and responsibly transferred to facilitate credit and employment creation. Indeed, very important American corporations such as General Electric (GE) and Apple could (with government regulation providing a necessary framework) lend money to businesses that want to utilize the amazing technological advances to help turn creative destruction into a positive employment generating process.

The United States should not be afraid to contemplate adopting new approaches to capital/credit provision. In contrast to the Great Depression following the 1929 Stock Market Crash, the central problem that confronts the world in the context of the 2008 GFC is not a lack of available capital and credit but a coherent means by which credit and capital can be productively utilized.

America is probably better placed than any other country in the world to utilize the entrepreneurship, access to credit and natural resources that its private sector, has to positively harness the processes of creative destruction. What is required is a financial framework to be established for such a utilization and application of capital to be safely and productively undertaken. Should this occur, then resulting American *economic growth will vitally assist in the United States stopping the spiral of endless public borrowing while helping create a context within which the amount owed will depreciate to help America pay off its foreign debt.

(*The strength of the American private sector in the 1980s under President Reagan allowed the United States to first finance its budget deficit and public debt leading to this sector’s resurgent strength in the 1990s under President Clinton/Speaker Gingrich which ensured that these imposts were paid off).

The challenge for President Obama (and Mitt Romney should he have the necessary authority to really change policy direction) is to broadly but coherently articulate how the financial system can be re-configured. Such an explanation could identify the viability of how the existing danger of the contemporary GFC context could be converted into a positive means of making creative destruction an employment generating process.

The 2012 Campaign and the Power of How

History has consistently shown that sustained high economic growth rates, education opportunities and social mobility have in combination enabled nations and peoples to overcome poverty. The United States has been such a prominent exemplar of the effectiveness of this approach that it would be a pity if the next presidential administration did not take the necessary policy measures to achieve this outcome, particularly in the contemporary context of the grave threat that the GFC still poses.

The United States has been able to achieve incredible transformative outcomes due to its exceptional comparative advantage in relation to swift communications. This was prominently displayed by Paul Revere warning that the British were coming precipitating the American Revolution in 1775. Similarly, for President Obama to win re-election he would need to use all his communication skills to communicate during his re-election campaign the ‘how’ of changing the American financial system so that the GFC becomes obsolete.

A clear overview during the election campaign of ‘how’ effective change could be facilitated by a second Obama Administration would be enhanced by bringing on board citizens (particularly in electoral swing states) who are prepared to assist in future financial reform while helping the president win re-election. In effect, the president by reaching out to business people during the course of campaign could vitally and practically help engineer his re-election.

It should not be forgotten that Ronald Reagan as the novice GOP California gubernatorial candidate in 1966 ran a grassroots campaign which not only crucially helped him win that election but allowed the governor-elect to recruit a neophyte but very talented state administration. Consequently Ronald Reagan always had a loyalist base in both his California and White House administrations which provided him with the necessary leadership capacity to implement his agendas in often adverse circumstances.

In the current high tech communications age, it is not beyond the realms of possibility for the president to create a new political demographic of *Obama Republicans during the course of the campaign to help win re-election. The articulation of a practical vision could not only help President Obama to gain a needed voter base but a subsequent capacity to actual implement transformative election promises.

(*That is GOP supporters, centre-right inclined independents and blue collar social conservatives).

The current state of affairs is such that the substantial Democratic base is still insufficient to overcome a more extensive and committed Republican base. The recent failure in June 2012 to effectively dismiss the GOP Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin (which has a strong union base) is testament to the Democrats currently lacking the capacity to win this year’s presidential election (unless the Romney campaign implodes due to unanswered financial questions).

The uncertain economic conditions in the United States combined with uncertainty as to President Obama’s second term agenda has created a scenario in which the president’s re-election is improbable. Furthermore, although the president’s support base is essentially intact but the transformative change that he previously promised is still too much of a work in progress that enough undecided voters will either stay away from the polls or vote for Mitt Romney.

The need for the president to quickly create a new demographic without forfeiting his base could be facilitated by selecting a new running mate in the contemporary mould of an Alexander Hamilton or a Teddy Roosevelt. Such an action would not necessarily constitute a repudiation of Vice-President Joe Biden who could still gain considerable support from within the Democratic Party and the President’s support (were he to be re-elected in 2012) for a run for the White House in 2016.

Positive steps that President Obama takes to win re-election in 2012 could be undone by a possible financial contagion in Europe occurring before or after the November 2012 presidential election. Such a financial crisis could be possibly economically and socially irredeemable. Although there are substantial political and economic differences between the United States and Europe, there is an underlying frustration in that there is sufficient available credit to avoid a socio-economic crisis.

How German Support for Decentralization Will Save Europe

The German model of a top-down/power over fiscal union has the potential to deflate economic European growth. Although Germany under the fiscal union is engineering higher economic growth for itself, the socio-political dislocation that is being caused for other European Union (EU) nations will eventually catch up with the Germans with a vengeance. Nevertheless, there are positive indications that all is not doom and gloom in Europe and that the so-called fiscal union will be rendered obsolete by non-compliance.

A bright spot in Europe has been the priority that has been given to the provision of more capital to European banks by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB). This is crucially helping protect the financial solvency of European banks while creating the potential for them to stimulate economic growth by increasing their credit capacity. Any practical steps and fiscally responsible measures that can be taken in Europe toward engineering economic growth are welcome.

The two prime dangers in Europe are of course a banking contagion and a European nation defaulting on its foreign debt. These two threats would considerably reduce if Eurobonds were issued which were financed by EU nations. The reluctance of the German government of Angela Merkel to support Eurobonds goes beyond disingenuous arguments that Germany does not want to carry an undue financial burden. The deeper reason is that there are German civil servants and German backed EU bureaucrats that want to impose a structured system on European nations which they will be able to effectively centrally co-ordinate.

Centralization is the bane of modern German history. Although the German empire created in early 1871 was notionally federal (four kingdoms and a range of duchies), in actual fact the Kingdom of Prussia was politically, economically and militarily dominant. This centralized domination was a crucial precipitant cause of the outbreak of war in 1914.

The Weimar Republic was also a federal state but Prussian dominance continued as this state then constituted two-thirds of Germany’s population and territory. Therefore, the dismissal by President Paul von Hindenburg of the Social Democrat-Centre Party government in July 1932 was a crucial precursor of Hitler coming to power six months later. After exactly one year in office (January 1934) the Hitler regime created a unitary and, for all the at times shambolic nature of the Nazi state with competeting personal political fiefdoms, there was sufficient centralization for the German nation to wage an aggressive war.

The German Federal Republic that was established in 1949 as its title suggests was a carefully constructed decentralized state which achieved the correct balance between central authority and devolution. The amazing successes of the Federal Republic were also due to this republic supporting the achievement of European unity within a decentralist framework.

Germany therefore of all the nations in Europe should appreciate the terrible pitfalls of bureaucratic centralization which is why it is incredible that the Merkel government is trying to foist fiscal union on the EU while blocking the creation of Eurobonds. Even the moves toward crucial supporting of banking solvency by capital injections are being undermined by the Merkel government insisting that a banking union take the form of ECB replacing the central banks of EU member states.

The ECB should take a leading role in lending (or, if need be, injecting) funds into European banks (particularly the smaller ones) and financial institutions. Such financial assistance legitimizes and indeed necessitates that the ECB have both monitoring and regulatory roles. These two roles can be best facilitated by the ECB liaising with EU central banks which have grounded knowledge to co-ordinate financial flows with Brussels.

A balance between the industrial and the service orientated economies of the EU can also be achieved by the former helping stimulate economic activity in the latter. Even though Britain is a major economic industrial power, the 2012 London Olympics will still provide this nation with an ideal opportunity for having vitally needed economic activity due to the influx of *tourists. The economic benefits that will accrue to Britain from the Olympics is reflective of the fact that the GFC is a paradoxical phenomenon in which there is sufficient capital that is being underutilized due to powerful interests counterproductively wanting to centralize their power.

(*The German Federal Republic would immensely benefit from helping Greece by the German government encouraging tourist tours by its citizens to that nation).

From an Australian perspective, the GFC is a frustrating phenomenon because there is every possibility that the horrors of this crisis will catch up with Australia if (or hopefully when) the world regains financial security. This is because Australia is economically and politically on course to transition to a rentier state in which power will eventually be concentrated within a mining backed corporate elite integrally connected with the PRC.

A Rudd Return: A Done Deal or a Dud Deal?

The underlying motivations and political machinations of transitioning Australia to being a rent-seeking nation have been previously detailed in other Social Action Australia articles. However, Australia is now approaching a crucial turning point with regard to whether a transition to a rentier state will be achieved by the impending replacement of Prime Minister Julia Gillard with her predecessor Kevin Rudd when the federal parliament resumes in August.

The dark irony of this transition to a rentier state is that, for it to be successfully undertaken, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) must, to use a crude expression, ‘cut off its nose to spite its face’. If a majority of the ALP federal parliamentary caucus members believes that they must depose Prime Minister Gillard, then so be it. However, so that there will be no later excuses, the probable ramifications of such an action are hereafter analysed.

If Kevin Rudd is returned as prime minister, he will not be more powerful than the rent-seeking leaders within the ALP who effectively engineer his return. These rent-seeking leaders include Anthony Albanese, Senator Doug Cameron and Joel Fitzgibbon. There is also the very probable scenario that ostensible supporters of the prime minister, such as Foreign Minister Senator *Bob Carr and Simon Crean will ‘defect’ to support a Rudd return.

(*Canberra political insiders know that the so-called Rudd challenge of February 2012 was undertaken to clear the way to make Bob Carr foreign minister so that the New South Wales Right could be dealt into a post-Gillard regime).

Should the former prime minister return to The Lodge, he may think that the Shakespearian scenario of greatness being thrust upon him as has previously occurred is being re-visited. The reality will be (as it was previously) that Kevin Rudd will again be used as a political pawn by those who put him into power. As Mr. Rudd is probably aware, pawns as chess pieces can, if they make to the other side of the board, become very powerful.

The Abbott Ascendency: 2009 – 20??

There were times during Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership when it seemed that he would emulate the former Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, of being a puppet that pulled his own strings. But the advent of a political dynamo such as Tony Abbott becoming Opposition Leader in late 2009 fundamentally changed the political dynamics so that Kevin Rudd failed to assert his leadership authority. If Mr. Rudd were to return to the prime ministership, he would have a non-existent capacity to be an independent political actor. This will only leave the way for Abbott to subsequently win the next election.

The secret to Abbott’s high political effectiveness is that he is prepared to advance by retreating. That is, he will, if need be, politically forfeit an immediate advance in return for achieving a longer term political advantage. This approach was manifested by him ‘losing’ the 2010 federal election but gaining the tremendous political dividend of the passage of the carbon tax in November 2011 which he ostensibly opposed.

For those in the ALP and the Greens who are prepared to treat with Abbot (and/or his backers), they should appreciate that, after he wins the next federal election, there will be no more need on his part for anymore ‘advancing by retreating’. There are senior officials and powerful Liberals who know that the 2007 federal election was thrown which delayed the achievement of their agendas such as the imposition of an anti-arbitration/enterprise bargaining industrial relations system.

Due to the urgency of the current situation in Australia, dwelling on the probable horrors of an Abbott government is counter-productive. This is because, for an Abbott government to implement its draconian agenda without risking a backlash it is necessary for the ALP to do some further preliminary work with Kevin Rudd again serving as prime minister.

A Rudd Return: Rent-Seeking Resumed?

A returned Rudd government will undoubtedly replace the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) which applies to iron ore with a more extensive Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT). This will help ensure that, the three big mining companies - through an unconstitutional super profits taxation regime - can minimize the tax that they pay.

While tax minimization on the part of big companies is as old as the hills it is arguably a legitimate practice. However, the consequences of a transition to a super profits mining tax regime in Australia’s will be the creation of an oligopoly that - with its close links to the PRC - will be able to effectively exclude other investors in this vital sector.

The corporate connection between Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd and Clive Palmer’s Mineralogy Private to the big three mining companies of BHP-Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata should be carefully monitored and analysed. This is because these three public companies could achieve economic and political agendas through business links to Rinehart and Palmer’s privately owned companies that they might not otherwise achieve because they are publicly owned companies.

The anti-union political agendas of Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart are well known but - that they may both be in a position to re-shape Australia to their respective social and economic prescriptions - is disturbingly under appreciated by the Australian public. Before a caution is sounded with regard to the Palmer and Rinehart agendas, it should be pointed out that corporate business (including mining interests) have often fulfilled an important role in financially supporting struggling think tanks and fringe groups. This has vitally contributed to political diversity and pluralism that might not otherwise have existed in Australia.

However, powerful business people are not always political philanthropists who will go on forever contributing money without a powerful dividend. The dividend - that Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer will gain from the ALP with Kevin Rudd as prime minister losing the next federal election in a landslide - will be an Abbott regime that will inherit the conditions necessary for the infrastructure of a rentier state. The conditions and/or attributes for an Australian rentier state are as follows:

- a controlled press
- an anti-union/anti employee industrial relations system
- Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF) as a crucial determinant of economic power and activity
- high levels of precarious employment due to an over-reliance on a mining sector that is disadvantageously integrated with a mercantilist PRC
- large agribusinesses replacing traditional farms as a food source to a mercantilist PRC
- consolidation of a retail duopoly to further undermine the bargaining power of local primary producers
- abolition of state mining royalties
- transfer to Canberra of state jurisdiction over land titles to achieve the two immediately preceding ‘reforms’
- eventual abolition of Australian states by the processes of ‘regionalization’ and GST clawback
- massive environmental degradation due to an over-reliance on mining
- high levels of public foreign debt to create a dependence on foreign credit
- increases in the GST rate to bolster the mining sector at the expence of economic diversity

Rent-Seeking and a Regulated Press

The most immediately dangerous of the above scenarios is establishing the prerequisites for Australia having a censored press by implementing the recent recommendations of the Finkelstein inquiry into the press, particularly the advocacy of a government funded press council. The threat to press freedom is real and an even graver threat to Australian democracy than what the passage of the Work Choices legislation was in late 2005. It is therefore imperative that Prime Minister Gillard not adopt any measures that restrict press freedom.

It is probably calculated that News Limited CEO Kim Williams has flagged a High Court challenge to any laws that restrict press freedom. However, this could be a case of pre-emption to ensure that an effective High Court challenge to press regulation is not undertaken by someone more genuinely concerned about press freedom. Again, it should be emphasised that the safest course of action to safeguard Australian press freedom is for a Gillard government to refuse to pass any laws that put in place processes for press regulation. Current Australian anti-defamation laws are sufficient.

Because bi-partisan and cross-bench co-operation is required (until the election of an Abbott government) to establish the fundamentals for a future rentier state, the Greens have been complicit in facilitating a transition to having a regulated (i.e. censored press). The Greens have advocated that journalists be licensed and that such regulation encompass internet sites and blogs.

Julia Gillard or Gina Rinehart? :Who Leads Australia?

The advocacy of such policies is reflective of a desire by a would-be rentier-elite to regulate technological advances so that freedom of the press, which is crucial to protecting liberty, can be effectively controlled by them. Already, the moves by Gina Rinehart to gain a determining influence over the Fairfax Press will help her establish a rentier state. Fairfax newspapers such as The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have, since the early 1970s, being left-liberal and pro-ALP. As such, the Fairfax Press has often been in broad competition with the more right-wing orientated Murdoch owned News Limited press.

News Limited newspapers, with the exception of The Australian, have been in tabloid form as city based newspapers which appeal to a different reader base than the Fairfax press. The Australian as its name suggests is a nationally distributed ‘quality’ newspaper that has often run at a loss that in aggregate terms is not detrimental to News Limited because of the profitability of its tabloids (which often pursue a populist political line).

The value of *The Australian to Murdoch is that this newspaper has provided him with a capacity to profoundly influence the nation’s political direction in pursuit of his specific business agendas which often involve a political context. Furthermore, there have been times when Murdoch’s impact on Australian domestic politics has in turn bolstered his overall international influence.

(*The model of concentrating a distinctively minority press perspective in one media organisation to have a massive influence on the right-wing side of politics is a model that Murdoch has also successfully applied in the United States with Fox News).

Because Prime Minister Gillard is an encumbrance to establishing a rentier state, The Australian in July and into August 2012 will step up the tempo to create a context for her to be replaced by Kevin Rudd. He then in turn-as a returned prime minister will be influenced by the Murdoch and Fairfax press to implement policies that are co-conducive to rent-seeking-including implementation of a censorial regulatory framework as foreshadowed in the Finkelstein enquiry.

The moves that are now underway to convert The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald into tabloid newspapers will ensure that they lose critical mass to the Murdoch press such that their viability will become questionable to say the least. In this respect, federal coalition front bencher Malcolm Turnbull is incorrect to say that Gina Rinehart will not benefit if the circulation of Fairfax hard copy newspapers plummet. This will be because an important source of political diversity in Australia will weaken to the point of possible extinction or non-threatening marginality. The question therefore emerges of why would Fairfax correspondents do what imperil their careers if not their professional viability?

The answer is that senior Fairfax staff and the management of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) have a deluded expectation that implementation of the Finkelstein enquiry will create a regulatory environment which will specifically accommodate them. This may be so- but only for a limited time. A Murdoch press aligned with an Abbott Liberal government will eventually overwhelm left-wing journalists who previously counter-productively collaborated in creating a censorial regulatory media framework that restricted diversity.

The Abbott Liberals have a longer term capacity to apply a Lasch type strategy which will eventually engender a hatred toward the ALP and the Greens such that these two parties will eventually become either aspirants for patronage from a rentier elite or politically irrelevant. The virtual elimination of the ALP in New South Wales and Queensland at a state political level in relatively recent elections was a tale foretold because of the short-term approach of rent-seeing elements within the Labor Party who somehow believe that ‘regionalization’ (sic) will eventually enhance their power.

Why Advance by Retreating Won’t Work for the ALP

The discreet support that some state ALP leaders are giving to the campaign to replace Julia Gillard with Kevin Rudd is a manifestation of their desire for a transition to ‘regionalization’ (sic). But even the most astute political leaders do not always realize the extent to which voters can be manipulated to vote a particular way. The recent by-election for the Victorian state seat of Melbourne was an integral part of the strategy to create the momentum to depose Julia Gillard as prime minister.

Melbourne was the one seat in Victoria where the Greens stood a viable chance of winning in their own right so long as there was not a Liberal candidate standing preferencing the ALP. If the truth be told, had the retiring ALP state member Bronwyn Pike not resigned (no-one has asked the question why she resigned nor has she clearly explained why did), the ALP could have comfortably held the seat at the next state with Liberal Party preferences.

To cut to the chase, rent-seeking elements within the ALP engineered the Melbourne state seat by-election with a hope that the Greens would win the seat so that Julia Gillard could be replaced by Kevin Rudd. Wheeling and dealing had been previously undertaken by senior ALP operatives to get the balance right so that they could be covered after the seat was lost to the Greens.

For all the machinations concerning the Melbourne by-election, political insiders did not (and probably do not yet) appreciate that voters can make up their own minds when it comes to voting. Economic circumstances are not yet so dire that a sufficient number of Labor Melbourne voters were prepared to shift to the Greens (and why should they have when the Greens were more culpable for the introduction of a carbon tax?). However it is probable that approximately half of Liberal Party voters in the Melbourne state electorate did vote Green.

The Melbourne by-election result is an important indication that Australians have not yet moved to the political extremes because economic conditions are still acceptable. This creates a lag for rent-seeking insiders and operatives with regard to their timing calculations and scope for inter-party collusion. By retaining Julia Gillard as prime minister until the next election, the ALP at a federal level can still frustrate the Abbott Liberals with regard to the ALP not doing the dirty work of foisting rent-seeking on Australia and then being severely punished for it.

Most of the criticisms that can legitimately be made of the prime minister are related to her struggling to adapt to the political settings that Tony Abbott has in effect put in place to engineer a transition to a rentier state. The truth is that most Australians do not want Abbott to be their next prime minister but will overwhelmingly vote him in if the carbon tax inflicts massive socio-economic damage.

Because some brilliant minds (some of which have devised anti-union industrial relations agendas) associated with the coalition that come from the mining sector helped devise the carbon tax, political calculations have gone into the formulation of this impost. A very important calculation was to ensure that the carbon tax did not hit too fast so as to not scare the ALP from proceeding with *the carbon tax. In this context, it is important to rent-seeking coalition leaders and strategists that a balance be achieved of on the one hand, preventing ALP survival actions kicking in but, on the other hand, not forgoing the opportunity to highlight the dangers of the carbon tax.

(*Trade Minister Craig Emerson’s jigs and ditties concerning the supposed non-detrimental impact of the carbon tax could become material for future Liberal Party commercials at the next federal election similar to the adds that were run in the 1996 election campaign showing senior ALP figures celebrating their generally unexpected 1993 election victory).

Australia’s Rent-Seeking Equivalent of Cotton Whigs

Consequently, senior Liberals such as federal front bencher Sophie Mirabella have visited small and medium businesses that are imperilled by the carbon tax. While it is Mrs. Mirabella’s role as coalition industry spokeswoman to visit factories and manufacturing sites, it is disingenuous to apply a Lasch strategy of condemning a tax that your leader (i.e. Abbott) did so much to have introduced. In this regard, Abbott and Mirabella are the contemporary moral Australian versions of Cotton Whigs.

The Cotton Whigs of the Southern states of the United States in the 1860s mis-used their talents to engineer secession by deliberately manipulating their supporters and constituents into taking actions that were actually contrary to their interests. Had it not been for the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, then the South’s brilliantly devious Cotton Whigs would have got away with their treason. However, considerable suffering could have been avoided had white southerners been more astute in realizing that their leaders were conning them.

In the Australian context, Abbot Liberal rent-seekers are going to get away with conning the people they purport to support due to the short-term outlook of some ALP power brokers. There may be senior ALP political leaders such as Bill Shorten who erroneously believe that, a part of an inter-party establishment means that deals can be done which will eventuate in the Labor Party returning to power.

However, the rent-seeking Abbott Liberals and their backers (such as Gina Rinehart) know that, when the coalition is elected to federal office, it will have the economic and political power to re-shape Australia to their specifications. Rent-seeking Liberals such as Abbott, Mirabella and *Clive Palmer have a better idea than most of what is before Australia if the nation becomes a rentier nation.

(*Abbott and Palmer inadequately concealed their joint underlying mirth with regard to their supposed public spat).

The fact - that there can be no turning back with regard doing a deal so that the ALP is later returned to power or its faction leaders advance their power from ‘regionalization’ - is probably appreciated by New South Wales Senator Arthur Sinodinos who is perhaps the smartest political operative in Australia. His nine year stint as then Prime Minister John Howard’s chief of staff between 1997 and 2006 were crucial in ensuring the Howard ascendancy. Sinodinos’s departure as prime ministerial chief of staff was possibly a blow from which Howard never recovered.

Senator Sinodinos - as a strong supporter of the Opposition Leader, who will utilize his considerable skills to ensure that an Abbott government is politically successful. It is difficult to envisage that Senator Sinodinos will give any free-kicks to a decimated federal ALP. Such is Senator Sinodinos’s political effectiveness that it is improbable that, between now and the next federal election, the coalition MPs will defy Abbott to legislate for an immediate *Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that rescinds both the carbon tax and the ludicrous version of an ETS that the tax is supposed to clear the way for.

(*The term ‘trade’ does not necessarily mean bartering or exchange but can generically refer to business. A new version of an ETS can be legislated which actually intends to reduce carbon emissions. An ETS that grants tax breaks to businesses that have legitimately taken steps to reduce carbon emissions should be supported. Tax concessions should also be granted to businesses that can honestly show that they have achieved lower carbon emission.

Furthermore, for a government department to effectively implement a genuine (‘fair dinkum’) ETS, it should be staffed by scientifically qualified public servants instead of by bureaucrats from Treasury who can adapt to the election of an Abbott government by continuing in their roles as rent-seeking policy makers and administrators).

It is difficult to envisage how the federal ALP can escape the rent-seeking paradigm that it is enmeshed in. However, senior Labor officials should objectively realize that federal Liberal Party MPs are not as regimented as they might believe. In a minority parliament, MPs have more latitude to be critically thinking. It is therefore not necessarily possible for the Abbott leadership team or coerce of co-opt all coalition MPs into supporting rent-seeking until the results of enquiries into how the Speaker Peter Slipper has been treated.

For the ALP at a federal parliamentary level to have the requisite capacity for a degree of hard-headed independence, Julia Gillard’s continuance as prime minister should be supported. The election of an ALP federal government in 2007 was due to internal Liberal Party sabotage in pursuit of establishing a rentier state. What capacity the ALP has had since 2007 to act independently of this Abbott Liberal Party rent-seeking agenda has been due to the impact of Julia Gillard as a senior minister and as prime minister.

The rent-seeking Liberals have only made temporary concessions to the ALP (such as allowing them to win the 2007 federal election). No more concessions will be made by the Abbott Liberals to the ALP. However, the ultimate strength of a political party is internally derived. Under Julia Gillard as prime minister, the ALP has a narrow chance of winning the next federal election by paradoxically being independent of the rent-seeking framework that Abbott and his backers are foisting on Australia.

Alternately a Rudd return to the power will be crucial to the ALP doing a dud deal with the Abbott Liberals which will consign Labor to a political wilderness from which there will be no return.

Dr. David Paul Bennett is the Director of Social Action Australia Pty Ltd.