Michael Lind: Why American Politics is Stuck in the 1980s

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."

The 2012 campaign promises to be a debate about bold and contrasting ideas. Unfortunately, they are mostly the bold and contrasting ideas of the 1980s.

Whoever the eventual Republican nominee proves to be will recycle the claims of Ronald Reagan in 1984 that the formula for prosperity is more tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Meanwhile, Barack Obama combines the emphasis on deficit reduction of Walter Mondale in 1984 with the claim to cool technocratic expertise of Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Meanwhile, most of the "bold new ideas" put forth by pundits and policy wonks are actually the stale ideas of a generation ago. No doubt there are fresh waves of college students who, for example, find the idea of improving our educational system by means of charter schools and national testing unfamiliar and provocative. But those of us over 30 remember that the bold new ideas about school reform were also the bold new ideas of 2001 and 1991 and 1981....

The 25-year lag has existed throughout American history. When Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Republicans dominated the government during the Civil War and Reconstruction in the 1860s, they rammed through Congress a version of Henry Clay’s "American System" of tariff-based protectionism, federal aid to internal improvements and national banking, which Clay had promoted decades before.

By the 1900s, the Clay-Lincoln program was obsolete. Most major American industries protected by infant industry tariffs no longer needed them, and the U.S. would have been served by a turn toward more liberalized trade. But the Old Guard Republicans defended the old policy for three decades after it had become obsolete, until they were dislodged from power in the Roosevelt revolution of 1932. In the 1920s the Old Guard was still stuck in the mind-set of the McKinley era of the 1890s.

And so it goes. When Lyndon Johnson, an idealistic young liberal of the 1930s, became president in the 1960s, he naturally tried to finish the New Deal of his mentor Franklin Roosevelt. American foreign policymakers of his generation tended to act on the basis of the "lessons" they believed that they had learned from the 1930s: the Lesson of Munich (appeasement doesn’t pay) and the Lesson of Smoot-Hawley (free trade is always good, tariffs -- it was claimed -- cause depressions and world wars).

Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Exactly 25 years earlier, in 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. had founded National Review, the magazine that became the center of "movement conservatism." The movement right rallied behind Barry Goldwater in 1964, when Reagan launched his political career, first as governor of California and then as president of the United States, by giving what was called "The Speech," a rehash of the themes of the 1950s conservative movement....