Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974–1994 by Patrick Andelic

Abstract

Reviewed by: Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974–1994 by Patrick Andelic Marjorie Randon Hershey Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974–1994. By Patrick Andelic. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. Pp. xxvi, 274. $37.50, ISBN 978-0-7006-2803-2.) Patrick Andelic writes about the American presidential election of 1972, “The people had spoken, but it was not immediately clear what they had said” (p. xiv). That is a central challenge of democracies; voters can use their ballots only to select candidates, not to tell the winners what to do. As a result, elected officials, pollsters, and historians spend years after the election trying to clarify what voters meant. Andelic’s answer is that the period from 1974 to 1994 is not just a simple story of liberal collapse and conservative ascendancy after Democrat George McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972. Instead, Andelic argues, Democratic strength in Congress, which lasted until 1994, helped protect the size and scope of government from the conservative resurgence—but also hampered the Democratic Party’s ability to respond. The author argues that the Democratic congressional majority during this time served as a bulwark of liberal sentiment and programs. But due to the very nature of both Congress and the party, its effectiveness in parrying the rising strength of organized conservatism was limited. The size of the House of Representatives and the structural forces that slow its work made it tougher for the Democratic House majority to hold its own, especially without strong presidential backing. So did the diversity of the party, including the Democrats elected in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The fact that so many “Watergate Babies” were elected from marginal districts meant their main concern had to be reelection rather than generating public policy (p. xxi). The flowering of subcommittees fragmented the party’s congressional power. Its congressional leadership (which is, of course, chosen by the congressional party itself) was often more committed to internal party reform than to developing a coherent programmatic agenda. Although Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 helped unify the House Democrats as the last bastion of Democratic strength in Washington, it did not help them clarify what they stood for. At the same time, as Andelic points out, the institutional difficulties that “frustrated the efforts of congressional Democrats to create a public philosophy for the post–New Deal order also enabled the Democrats to fight in defense of the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society” (p. 146). So the congressional Democrats did succeed in protecting the party’s existing social programs, middle-class entitlements in particular. In addition to the institutional constraints on Congress, there could be many other possible explanations for the relatively slow and uneven advance of the [End Page 157] conservative agenda. For instance, the strength of Democratic Party loyalties among southerners contributed to the exceedingly slow pace of the secular party realignment in the white South. The challenge of adapting conservative thought to a political culture in which racial conflict played a prominent role was substantial, at least until Republicans reconstructed their bundle of ideological principles to combine fiscal conservatism with evangelical positions on abortion and women’s roles. In fact, Andelic does provide a clearer and more convincing argument late in the book, especially in the too-short epilogue. Here he notes that it may be too much for analysts to expect the Democrats—or the Republicans—to define a public philosophy coherent enough to guide government action in a political culture that is fundamentally ambivalent. He notes that in U.S. politics, conservatism has not replaced liberalism so much as it has generated an often puzzling combination of Republican hostility to big government alternating with Democrats’ defense of government social services. That, in turn, reflects a public hoping to reduce the reach (and taxing power) of big government while also demanding extensive public services. This fundamental ambivalence is at the heart of American political culture. Marjorie Randon Hershey Indiana University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association