Abstract James MORONE

James MORONE (Chair Department of Political Science, Brown University): « American Democracy Today : Race, Morality, and the Rebellion Against the State ».

“No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly then the equality of conditions.” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That equality held both promise and peril for the young republic.

The dangers are as familiar today as when Tocqueville described them: Fierce racial animosity; economic greed (“a breathless cupidity” threatened to subvert equality and create a “manufacturing aristocracy”); and a distrust of the state that simultaneously promoted civil society and subverted great national projects.

All three of Tocqueville’s warnings –racial tension, the rise of economic inequality, and state bashing-- have been aggravated by the election of President Barack Obama. At first, President Obama’s election seemed to signal a post racial America. But just the opposite has happened. Race now inflects every issue. The great health care debate, for example, became intertwined with feelings about race and about “foreignness.” At the same time, the effort to address economic problems aroused a fierce conservative populism that blamed the economic trouble on elites, on foreigners, on the left, and on the state itself. Racial animosity, nativism, and fear of the state have all surged.

At bottom, the United States is locked in a battle between two factions. On the one side, cosmopolitans celebrate diversity, stand ready to deploy the state to combat inequality, and search for international alliances organized under the banner of economic liberalism. The other side fears racial and ethnic diversity, celebrates empire, reads politics in morally unambiguous (often religious) terms, and despise the federal government as an anti capitalist engine of equality. The two sides are evenly matched: 7 of the last 14 elections saw a change in at least one house of Congress and in 3 of the past 5 presidential elections no candidate got a majority of the vote (which is very unusual in a two party system).

My talk analyzes the state of American democracy and places it in historical context. The key dimensions all have a long legacy in the United States: Racial tension, moral fervor, a rebellion against the state, fierce partisanship, and an assault on democratic representation in the name of the people. Underlying these old tensions lie new institutional forces. I pay special attention to what is simply the reappearance of old American themes; and what is genuinely new on the American political scene.