Supply-Side Liberalism: Fiscal Crisis, Post-Industrial Policy, and the Rise of the New Democrats

A new generation of liberals emerged in the 1970s, a decade of stagflation, deindustrialization, global capital flight, and public sector fiscal crises. Prevailing interpretations of New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis explain their emphasis on entrepreneurialism and post-industrial sectors as the byproduct of cynical electoral strategies of “triangulation,” that is, primarily as a reaction to the rise of Reagan Republicanism. This article instead positions their political economy as part of a much longer history of liberals’ efforts to restructure the economy in order to stimulate new jobs and tax revenues that might also generate public revenue and support a progressive policy agenda. With roots in local, state, and regional industrial policies inspired by the New Deal, “supply-side liberalism” reemerged with force in the 1970s and 1980s, revealing heretofore unappreciated continuities that contextualize and clarify the origins of New Democrats’ promotion of a set of seemingly “neoliberal” economic policies.

The Newest Southerners: Generational Differences in Electoral Behavior in the Contemporary South

Young voters contributed disproportionately to Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2012. In fact, if the electorate had been limited to those over 30 years old, Mitt Romney might be in the White House today. Obama captured 60 percent of the vote of those under 30, compared to 49 percent of those over 30, according to the national exit polls (Schier and Box- Steffensmeier 2013, 86). A similar pattern characterized the 2008 presidential election: Obama won 66 percent of the vote among those aged 29 or less, but under one-half of voters older than 45 (Pomper 2010, 53). The tendency for younger voters to be disproportionately Democratic emerged in the 2004 presidential election. Prior to that, Democratic presidential candidates did not consistently do better among younger voters. In 2000, for example, Al Gore did as well among older voters as he did among younger voters, and in 1992, Bill Clinton did his best among older voters, as did Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 (Pomper 2001, 138; Pomper 1989, 133).

Learn Now, Pay Later: A History of Income-Contingent Student Loans in the United States

The idea of financing higher education with the income that comes afterward has been formally proposed and implemented in the United States, in various permutations, since at least 1971. The attractiveness of the concept is exemplified by the political diversity of its proponents, ranging from Senator Ted Kennedy to President Ronald Reagan, and from presidential candidates Michael Dukakis (Democratic governor who ran in 1988) to Jeb Bush (Republican former governor who ran in 2016). This article examines the design of the various proposals over time, the arguments in support and opposition, and the current state of affairs.

Nerves as a Problem

In 1996 the Wall Street Journal noted, “The nervous breakdown, the affliction that has been a staple of American life and literature for more than a century, has been wiped out by the combined forces of psychiatry, pharmacology and managed care. But people keep breaking down anyway.” Indeed they do keep breaking down. Kitty Dukakis, wife of former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, remembered lying in bed doing nothing. “I couldn’t get up and get dressed, but I couldn’t sleep either.” What was the matter with Kitty Dukakis and millions of sufferers like her? Depressed? What does psychiatry think? In psychiatry there are a few distinct, sharply defined diseases that would be difficult to miss, such as melancholia and catatonia. These tend to be psychotic illnesses, involving loss of contact with reality in the form of delusions and hallucinations, though not always. Then there is the great mass of nonpsychotic ill-defined illnesses whose labels are constantly changing and that are very common. Today these are called depression, oft en anxiety, and panic as well. These are all behavioral diagnoses, suggesting that the main problem is in the mind rather than the brain and body. Yet there is a tradition, now almost lost, of viewing psychiatric symptoms as a result of body processes, and it has always been convenient to speak of these as “nervous” diseases, even though much more of the body than the physical nerves may be involved. Writing in 1972, English psychiatrist Richard Hunter directed attention toward the body as a whole. “Many diseases are ushered in by a lowering of vitality which patients appreciate as irritability and depression. The mind is the most sensitive indicator of the state of the body. An abnormal mental state is equivalent to a physical sign of something going wrong in the brain.” The term symptom cluster is popular today, but that is jargonish, so let us call these patients “nervous.” Their distinguishing characteristic is that they do not have the “C” word, as Eli Robins at Washington University in St. Louis used to call it, meaning that they are not “crazy.”

Differences in Responses of Blacks and Whites to American Leaders

How do members of different ethnic or racial groups differ in their responses to the same political events? Previous research has shown that when leaders are seen on television, the viewers' episodic emotional and cognitive responses can influence their attitudes and subsequent voting behavior. In an experimental replication, using excerpts of all candidates in the 1988 American presidential election, episodic emotions elicited by facial displays were again found to produce positive attitude change in white viewers. For blacks, however, the emotions felt while watching leaders—including Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis, who elicited highly favorable responses—did not influence posttest attitudes. This contrast between black and white viewers' emotions and attitudes differs from the effects of nonverbal behavior associated with personality or gender. These findings suggest that nonconscious factors may play an important role in the way blacks perceive and react within the American political system.

The Seven Dwarfs and Other Tales How the Networks and Select Newspapers Covered the 1988 Democratic Primaries

This study of newspaper and television coverage in the 1988 Democratic primaries before Michael Dukakis established himself as the front-runner suggests that the media covered this election differently than they did earlier ones that featured a clear leader. For instance, all those actively campaigning for the presidency in 1988 received relatively equal amounts of coverage and the nominal leader, Dukakis, enjoyed favorable coverage throughout the race.