The Political Culture of Rights

Postwar Germany and the United States in Comparative Perspective

HUGH DAVIS graham

I

In comparing the development of rights-based policies in postwar Germany and America, we are confronted at once with the unique phe­nomenon of two Germanys.

Let me start by listing political variables. The first political similarity is formal and structural: Both nations are constitutional republics. In the postwar era they have been characterized by representative policy-making branches, a federal system of shared powers, a broad voting franchise, written guarantees of citizen rights, and an independent national judiciary with authority to review the constitutionality of legislation.

The second political similarity concerns procedures and values: Both nations are effective democracies, characterized by broad agreement on the legitimacy of government and its fundamental procedures, periodic elections and regime changes determined by political party competition, civil liberties guaranteed by independent courts, and postwar expansion of citizen rights, especially concerning women.

The third and fourth similarities are economic. One again is structural: Both economic systems are capitalistic, featuring competitive market systems, collective bargaining in industrial relations, government regula­tion, and independent central banks. The other denotes economic per­formance: Both postwar economies have been successful, producing growing abundance and a prosperous middle class while struggling in recent years with global economic competition.

Fifth, both nations experienced heavy postwar immigration. This strengthened the industrial workforce but was accompanied by rising ethnic and cultural tensions and disputes over immigration and refugee policy. Sixth, in foreign policy, both nations have shared in a successful military alliance of North Atlantic democracies facing threats from the Soviet bloc.

This is a short list of core similarities, limited to a half-dozen chief characteristics. It lacks the qualifications all such broad generalizations demand, but the shared attributes it describes are powerful. They produce a great magnet of commonalities that would suggest German-American convergence over time.

Consider, by contrast, the major differences: First, and most obviously, the Federal Republic arose from the ashes of a lost war, a state and economy destroyed, followed by foreign military occupation, war-crimes trials, and a legacy of war guilt. The calamity of Nazi totalitarianism rein­forced the negative distinctiveness of Germany’s Sonderweg, a special path of historical national development marked by the comparative weakness of democratic traditions, that is, the lack of a liberal bourgeois revolution, a robust civil society, strong democratic institutions, and a liberal intel­lectual culture.¹ This tradition contrasts sharply with the Tocquevillian tra­dition of American exceptionalist claims.^{[460] [461]}

Second, the splitting off of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) created an irredentist prospect of reunion that set Germany apart from most nations.

Third, the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1949 created in West Germany a kind of instant, modern constitution, mirroring in intensified form the democratic and egalitarian standards seen in the United Nations Decla­ration of Human Rights. German traditions and practices relevant to rights-based claims that differed sharply from American equivalents include the system of codified law and inquisitorial judiciary, as opposed to the case-law tradition and adversarial system of Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a comprehensive system of social welfare, as opposed to the minimalist American tradition.

Fourth, the Federal Republic developed a tradition of social partner­ship in industrial relations that muted tensions between capital and labor. German unions, unlike their American counterparts, maintained a powerful voice in a kind of neocorporatist power structure. American business management, however, gravely weakened labor in the postwar years by banning the closed shop. In the United States, after the Repub­lican 80th Congress in 1947 passed the Taft-Hartley law over President Harry S Truman’s veto, American firms disciplined union bargainers by threatening to shift operations to more business-friendly states in the South or the mountain West, where right-to-work laws discouraged union membership.^[462]

Fifth, large-scale guest-worker immigration in Germany created prob­lems of minority rights and assimilation, complicated by the legal tradi­tion of jus sangui, or citizenship by blood or ancestry, by liberal refugee policies conditioned by war guilt, and by the return from the diaspora of ethnic Germans.^[463] As Christian Joppke observes in his chapter in this book, in Germany the tradition of ethnocultural nationhood (until recently) denied citizenship to aliens and hence entry into the polity, and this denied most immigrants voting rights and hence effective political participation.

Sixth, the revolution of 1989 and the commitment to German reuni­fication created opportunities and problems without precedent in the experience of modern democracies. There is no body of experience in political economy to provide guidance for transforming a socialist com­mand economy into a regulated market economy or for absorbing into a democratic polity millions of citizens and workers conditioned by com­munist rule.

In what ways has the American experience differed most significantly from that of postwar Germany? First, the American government functions under an eighteenth-century Madisonian constitution that has fragmented state power to a degree unmatched in any other industrial nation. Despite the postwar expansion of the “imperial presidency” in the United States during 1932-74, the relationships among the three federal branches of government and between the national, state, and local governments have been contested and confused. Since the 1960s the growth in the United States of public law litigation, independent counsel investigations, execu­tive-legislative tension, judicial involvement in policy-making routines, and antifederal sentiments contrasts sharply with the relatively smooth administrative functioning of the Federal Republic.

Second, as comparative scholars of the state-building process have pointed out, the United States developed a political tradition character­ized by decentralized institutions, weak administrative capacity, patronage­based party politics, low tax burdens, and antistatist predispositions.^[464] In the German analog, the American political tradition has a pronounced Bavarian ring.

Third, in the realm of political culture, most Americans have tradi­tionally valued individualism over collectivism, and hence liberty over equality. Socialism has lacked appeal, union affinity has been weak, and welfare provision by the state has been niggardly. Bourgeois America has neither a Marxist nor a Bismarckian tradition.

Fourth, in the realm of civil-rights problems and policies, the American history of African-American slavery, the U.S. Civil War, racial segregation, and the postwar black civil rights movement has no real counterpart among industrial democracies. Germany’s legacy of racial pathology is of a different order.

The fifth difference is the American “rights revolution” itself. The success of the black civil rights agenda in the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren (tenure: 1953-69) sparked an extraordinary surge of rights-based public law litigation on behalf of women, Hispanics and other minorities, the disabled, students, the elderly, environmentalists, consumer advocates, gays and lesbians, and other groups. This phenomenon has counterparts in Germany and other democracies but nowhere else ap­proaches the American use of litigation to shape public policy.^[465]

Finally, there is the issue of immigration in a nation built by immigra­tion. American immigration, unlike German, has followed the law of jus soli, or citizenship by birth, and hence has led to rapid political mobiliza­tion by immigrant communities. Mass immigration to America, essentially halted by World War I, was reopened in 1965 by the Immigration Reform Act and since has added more than 25 million new Americans, three- quarters of them members of protected classes according to post-1960s affirmative action policies. The sheer volume, multicultural variety, legal status, and civil rights implications of post-1960s immigration to the United States has produced political tensions on a scale unmatched in the West.

ii

Such a survey of similarities and differences is useful in addressing many of the salient themes for this book, but overall it is intellectually unsatis­fying. As a crude form of taxonomic triage, it is closer to journalism than social science.

To produce verifiable generalizations about the postwar development of rights policies in the United States and Germany, we need a system­atic framework for comparison. Because the two national histories are so distinctive and the policy-making processes so complex, we need a theory that is simple and that centers on political behavior, because in democ­racies conflict over rights claims are expressed through political bargain­ing and electoral choice.

To provide such a model I turn to the work of Byron Shafer and his colleagues.^[466] I briefly summarize their method and findings, then apply them to my own topic of rights-based claims.

Their book’s comparative model is captured in its subtitle: “Orders and Eras in Comparative Perspective.” Political eras are periods when politics in democratic states revolve around the same substantive issues. These dominant issues in turn fall into two clusters. One is chiefly cultural, cen­tering on issues of national and cultural integration. In the post-Civil War United States, for example, politics revolved around issues of national identity and loyalty, regional integration, the nature of racial citizenship, immigrant ethnicity, and religious culture. In that era, roughly 1865-1932, these issues privileged the Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln, national union, continental expansion, industrial growth, sanctity of contract, and Protestant morality.

The other cluster centers on issues of economic distribution and social welfare. Again using an American example, in the United States follow­ing the start of the Great Depression in 1930, issues of material redistri­bution and welfare provision dominated the New Deal agenda and privileged the Democratic Party - the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, business regulation, union legitimacy, social security, welfare legislation, and economic recovery.

Whereas political eras are keyed to substantive issues, political orders are keyed to structural elements that shape political behavior aimed at influencing substantive concerns. Three such structural elements are of greatest importance. The first is the underlying social base of political life - the dominant social cleavages and coalitions, including class, racial-ethnic, and geographic patterns. The second is the intermediary organization of politics, chiefly political parties and organized interest groups. The third structural level is government itself, the electoral and policy-making institutions that produce outcomes.

What gives this model its political dynamic is change over time. Why do political eras end and others begin, displacing established authorities and empowering new ones? Who are the winners and losers in these transformations and why? In the United States we are familiar with these historical shifts through the party-systems paradigm, the sun-and-moon model of majority and minority parties exemplified, for example, by the New Deal system.^[467]

The scholarship that produced the American party-systems model was historical but not comparative. Our understanding of the New Deal party system, for example, produced few useful insights about Germany. But the political model of orders and eras does yield comparative insights, par­ticularly when one factors in the sequence of national issues. Under what conditions, and with what consequences, have dominant issue patterns in various countries been challenged and displaced - for example, in France during the Gaullist Fifth Republic of 1958, when cultural politics and issues of national integration associated with decolonization in Algeria dis­placed economic redistribution and social welfare issues. Or vice versa, as when Franςois Mitterrand brought the socialist left to power in France in 1981.

Consider the sequence of issue dominance in the postwar Group of Seven (G-7) nations. In three of the seven - the United States, Canada, and Britain - victorious wartime governments returned to prewar, depression-era agendas of economic redistribution and social welfare pro­vision. In this environment parties on the left were empowered and sought to expand social and economic rights. A fourth nation, France, shared this pattern but coupled it with the cultural and national integrationist need to repudiate the wartime Vichy government and begin anew with a Fourth Republic.

In all four nations postwar prosperity eased class tensions.Within a gen­eration, however, new circumstances arose that helped opposition parties and conservative interests to use cultural issues to displace economic issues and the governments they sustained - thus ending one political era and inaugurating a new one. And although the traditional left-right dichotomy, which works well with economic issues, is problematic when applied to cultural politics, a defensible generalization is that the more conservative regimes of the new eras placed property rights over social and economic rights.

This first occurred most dramatically in France, with the Gaullist Fifth Republic in the late 1950s. At the same time, but with less discontinuity, conservatives broke the liberal hegemony in Canada. In the United States it happened in the late 1960s with the Republican victory of Richard Nixon. And in the late 1970s in Britain a new political era was inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher. The last to arrive, the Thatcherite revolution, was arguably the most profound.

The three remaining G-7 nations - Germany, Italy, and Japan - lost the war and suffered massive destruction in the process. For them, issues of national reconstruction and politico-cultural purification were inescapably primary. Democratic institutions and their constitutional underpinnings were reconstructed under the stern tutelage of the victors, working with conservative, anticommunist governments dominated by Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy, and by Liberal Democrats in Japan - governments often led by bureaucrats-turned-politicians, with close ties to business interests.

In these unique circumstances, questions of civil, social, and economic rights were addressed in a clinical, top-down fashion rather than in a political, grassroots context. They were constitutional abstractions, given meaning gradually as economic recovery, national sovereignty, and growing self-confidence permitted the re-emergence of suppressed polit­ical conflict over economic distribution and social welfare.

The resurgence of economic and redistributionist politics happened first in Italy in the early 1960s, then in Germany in the late 1960s, and in Japan in the early 1970s. The losers, then, reversed the pattern of the winners. And perhaps, in the process, they lost the war and won the peace, as the old canard has it, in more than just the economic realm. Germany and Japan especially show a continuity of political development and legit­imacy that eased transitions to new political orders and eras.

The postwar transition of political orders and eras in Germany is described in the Shafer book by J. Jens Hesse. According to Hesse, when the Social Democrats began a new political era in German politics in 1969, it was an era not of significant socialist transformation but of “expanded incrementalism,” of “adaptation and consolidation” by a social­liberal coalition that had successfully disarmed its Marxist heritage.^[468] Dif­ficult new social cleavages in Germany, such as the status of guest workers, resisted solutions. But much of the coalition’s domestic reform agenda dealt with problems of urbanization, the environment, and regional dis­parities, problems that brought few radical departures. In 1982, when the CDU government under Helmut Kohl brought a new political era, accompanied by Thatcherite rhetoric, West Germany was nonetheless “striking,” Hesse observed, “for its lack of new policy initiatives.”^[469]

Conflicts over rights policies in postwar Germany were similarly restrained. The detailed Basic Law pre-empted much of the terrain; together with the German tradition of business-labor cooperation through “codetermination,” it therefore dampened conflicts over social and eco­nomic rights that would sharply divide politics elsewhere, for example, in Britain in the immediate postwar years and in the United States in the 1960s.

III

What then of the United States? What does the comparative model of political orders and eras tell us about postwar political change in the United States and its affects on the culture and politics of rights?

Prior to 1968 the Democrats enjoyed a majority coalition based on the New Deal’s redistributionist policies on economic and social welfare issues. The social turmoil of the 1960s raised new cultural issues - crime and punishment, abortion, family values, the work ethic, religious moral­ity in education - that favored Republican appeals to traditional values and patriotism. The realignment of the late 1960s, however, did not reverse the sun-and-moon pattern of party dominance from the previous era. Republicans did not dethrone Democrats in the elected branches of national government. Instead, the clash of cultural and economic issues created two distinct, competing opinion majorities in the United States. And crucially, the new alignments did not coincide with class divisions or party ideology. Blue-collar workers, the backbone of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, were liberal on redistributionist economic issues, but were traditionalist on cultural issues such as feminist challenges, antiwar protest, racial job preferences, and saving the environment at the cost of jobs. Conversely, affluent suburbanites embraced the Republican Party’s tax-cutting, budget-balancing, and deregulation policies. But highly edu­cated suburban voters were repelled by the intrusive morality of the Reli­gious Right, which included demands for library and media censorship, religious education in the public schools, and banning abortion and birth­control services.

Faced with these two socially cross-cutting opinion majorities, the parties polarized, Democrats on the left on both economic and social issues, Republicans on the right. Activists used the primaries to drive both parties toward the extremes, Democrats toward McGovernism, Republi­cans toward Reaganism. Single-issue interest groups multiplied, reinforc­ing partisan polarization.

The result of this confusing mismatch was surprisingly rational: divided partisan government. The Republicans were dominant on cultural issues. These included attacks on draft dodging, flag burning, sexual promiscu­ity and abortion, permissive parents, teachers, and judges, and racial and gender preferences. Republicans also dominated on issues of national inte­gration, which included nationalist positions on projecting American power and values in foreign affairs - including using military force against Libya, Grenada, and Iraq. As a consequence Republicans won primacy in competing for the presidency, where the bully pulpit of the White House maximized the president’s role in symbolic politics and global leadership.

However, the Democrats, traditional custodians of welfare and service provision, prospered in Congress. There, constituent-service and “iron tri­angle” bargaining rewarded close ties to well-organized clientele groups and agency bureaucrats. In the new order of divided governance, Repub­licans seemed the natural party of the presidency, Democrats the natural custodians of Congress. Between 1969 and 1993 Republican control of the White House was interrupted only by Jimmy Carter’s single term. During the same period Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, with the exception of the Senate from 1981 to 1987.

But a heavy price was paid for this partisan, functional specialization by branch: The lubricating oil of party unity was gone. James Madison and his colleagues had set the two elected branches against each other. To prevent tyranny, they purposely fragmented the American state. But by the 1840s a two-party system had developed that, by routinely award­ing control of both branches of the federal government to the same party, created a quasi-parliamentary solidarity that for more than a century eased power struggles between the legislature and the executive. Majority party legislators naturally jealous of White House authority were reluctant to risk losing political patronage or their own re-election by attacking their national party leader. By the same token presidents resentful of congres­sional micromanaging in executive-branch affairs were reluctant to risk party disunity by quarreling with party leaders in Congress. After 1968, however, split governance removed the lubricant of party commonality and substituted partisan poison. Madison’s institutionalized conflict was accelerated by party resentment and score-settling.

iv

What have been the chief policy consequences of the new era in American politics? In many ways it has been a frustrating system, one stripped of accountability by partisan finger pointing, proliferating special prosecutors, congressional subpoenas of executive-branch officials, and cir­cuslike confirmation hearings. Twice since 1968 the war between the elected branches has led to congressional impeachment proceedings against the president. In 1973-4 this conflict pitted a Democratic Con­gress against a Republican president and forced the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. In 1998, when Republicans controlled the Congress and Democrats the presidency, the House passed articles of impeachment against William J. Clinton, but the impeachment resolution failed in the Senate. In economic and social policy the results under divided, partisan governance have been mixed. On the one hand, the soaring budget deficits and debt-service obligations of the Reagan-Bush years were trans­formed into budget surpluses by the robust economic growth of the 1990s. On the other hand, popular tax-cutting policies combined with middle-class entitlement growth (Social Security pensions, Medicare, home mortgage deductions, college tuition aid) to depress social welfare expenditures in the face of a widening income gap. That the two elected branches switched party labels in the 1990s does not seem to have altered the basic dynamics of the divided governance system, where cultural politics fracture the New Deal coalition and economic issues center on the defense of middle-class entitlements.¹¹

What have been the chief consequences of divided government for American civil rights policy? I identify six. First, the new era has not slowed the rights revolution. Expressed another way, one consequence not produced by divided government in America since 1968 is policy grid­lock, even in legislation. As the Supreme Court modestly slowed the expansion of constitutional rights for minorities during the years embraced by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies (1969-89), Congress and the federal agencies more than compensated for judicial caution by significantly expanding statutory and administrative rights.^{[470] [471] During the 1980s the conflict between the Reagan administration and Congress, especially the Democratic-Ied House of Representatives, over social secu­rity, welfare spending, and government regulation led critics of the Reagan “revolution” to complain that divided partisan control produced policy gridlock and paralyzed government.[472] The “gridlock” thesis has been chal­lenged, however, by empirical studies showing slowed activity in some policy areas but significant growth in others.[473] In civil rights policy the power and effectiveness of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a liberal umbrella association coordinating the lobbying efforts of more than 180 organizations, continued to grow after the 1960s. Moreover, most of the legislative and administrative expansions of rights protections since the 1960s have occurred under Republican presidents.}

Nixon, the father of affirmative action, inaugurated minority hiring preferences under the Philadelphia Plan of 1969 and signed pioneering legislation for environmental protection, women’s equality in education, and disability rights. Ford signed the age discrimination act and his admin­istration enforced bilingual education requirements. Reagan approved minority set-aside requirements in defense and transportation contracts and signed effective fair housing enforcement legislation in 1988. Bush pushed through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, adding new protections for 43 million Americans. Bush also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which made sexual harassment a federal crime.^[474]

Second, because Washington’s coffers have been drying up in the era of divided government, the chief benefits of the rights revolution have come not from the federal treasury through agency appropriations but from regulatory agencies and courts, entities characterized by small staffs and large coercive authority to require spending by others. Thus we have the paradox that social regulation has expanded since the 1960s even as the size of the federal government, relative to population and to state and local government, has declined. In the civil rights field, for example, the federal courts continued to require school integration long after Congress prohibited federal agencies from requiring busing. Although the federal bureaucracy after 1970 generally declined in personnel and in real-dollar appropriations, federal coercion grew in the form of rules issued by relatively small regulatory agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Civil Rights, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, and the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department.

Third, the new political order has nurtured two-tiered politics. Amer­ican voters generally understand the bargains associated with traditional New Deal-Great Society programs, for example, Social Security retire­ment pensions, Medicare coverage, and federal aid programs to build highways, airports, and dams, and rebuild areas hit by natural disasters. American voters do not understand, however, the federal rule-making process, where intense lobbying by well-organized interest groups shapes obscure language published in indecipherable documents buried in the Federal Register. These arcane rules, binding on all recipients of federal dollars (meaning virtually all state and local governments, school systems, hospitals, universities, and large employers in the commercial sector) require city transit systems to buy buses with wheelchair lifts, pharma­ceutical companies to design bottletops difficult to open, employers to hire or promote a workforce containing a certain mix of race, ethnicity, or gender, and school districts to teach math and science in native lan­guages other than English. The mass electorate is “weakly articulated and greatly baffled,” one expert observed, while “the world in and around the centers of government is dense with organized interests and policy advo- cates.”^[475] Regulatory politics is an inside-the-beltway game, wherein the benefits are concentrated on mobilized clienteles and the costs are dis­tributed among uncomprehending taxpayers and consumers.

Fourth, the whiplash of cultural politics has left the nation polarized over competing claims to justice, especially as concerns racial preferences under affirmative action. On the one hand, African-American leaders point out that despite the tripling of the black middle class since the 1960s, median family income for blacks has never reached 60 percent of white median family income, and the median wealth of white households is more than ten times that of black households. On the other hand, by the 1990s, 80 percent of white men and women objected to minority preferences as unfairly penalizing individuals for immutable characteristics they were born with, or for offenses committed in generations past. In the 1960s the moral weight of social justice was monopolized by minori­ties and women mobilizing against generations of systematic discrimina­tion. By the 1990s, however, opponents of minority preferences attacked the injustice of temporary antipoverty measures becoming permanent racial entitlements for advantaged minority interests while racially exclud­ing working-class whites in economic distress.

Fifth, massive immigration to the United States, both legal and illegal, has stimulated the economy and fostered cultural diversity, but at the same time it has fueled the fires of multicultural discontent. The rise of cul­tural politics in America since the 1960s has combined Republican support for a larger and cheaper workforce and Democratic support for expanding minority-group constituencies. But as a consequence, low- skilled blacks as well as whites have been supplanted by low-wage job competition from immigrants. White Americans by large majorities resent affirmative-action laws that exclude whites while privileging millions of immigrants from Latin America and Asia as protected classes on the basis of ancestral discrimination in the United States. If California is the window of the American future, we see whites and Asians coalescing behind “color-blind” policies of merit competition, while tensions grow between blacks and Hispanics over the zero-sum demographics of affir­mative action, because Latin American immigrants threaten to shrink black quotas in civil rights jobs.^[476]

A final consequence is the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the United States. Between 1929 and 1969, the large income gap sep­arating the top and bottom fifths of the American population was mod­estly narrowed by the class-based politics of the New Deal. Inequality in family income, always greater in the twentieth-century United States than in any other industrialized democracy, was narrowed significantly during the 1930s and 1940s, and more slowly in the 1950s and 1960s.Then, after 1968, the wage gap rapidly widened again.^[477] Between 1975 and 1995, the share of aggregate household income received by the nation’s poorest fifth of families declined from 4.4 to 3.7 percent, whereas the share of the best-off fifth increased from 43.2 to 48.7 percent.^[478] Since 1968 the Amer­ican labor movement has atrophied, mass immigration has flooded the country with low-wage workers, and multiculturalism has fragmented the New Deal coalition.

In recent years the most penetrating critique of multiculturalism has come not from the stale cliches of the Right, but from the Left — from the pages of Dissent and from such left-progressive writers as Todd Gitlin, Lawrence Fuchs, Michael Lind, Katha Pollitt, and David Hollinger.^[479] As Gitlin observed in The Twilight of Common Dreams, the multiculturalist obsession with group differences destroyed the commons in America by fracturing working-class solidarity. It allowed the Right to seize the White House in 1980, Gitlin said, while the Left seized English departments!^[480] Of all the consequences of divided government in the United States, the one most damaging to the dream of equal rights and justice in America is the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Ironically, but unintentionally, it has been worsened by the rights revolu­tion’s fragmentation of class solidarity.

V

Comparing the German and American experiences since 1945, I acknowledge that both societies have made unprecedented progress in expanding and fulfilling their peoples’ rights. This is arguably the main conclusion we should draw from a postwar German-American compar­ison. What were the rights of Germans in 1945, especially minorities and women? What kind of equality was enjoyed by black and female Amer­icans in 1960? Clearly, rights fulfillment is much richer in Germany and America today than it was then.

However, from an American perspective the grass looks greener across the ocean. Both German and American societies since the 1960s have faced stiffening global economic competition, rising hostility over immi­gration, persistent legacies of racial and ethnic tension, and persisting pat­terns of women’s disadvantage despite significant reforms. Yet Germany’s postwar climb since the collapse of the Third Reich has been vastly more epic, especially in light of the forty-year division between the democra­tic West and the communist East. Germany today, uniquely shouldering the burden of national reunification in an era of tightening economic competition, nonetheless enjoys the advantages of a strong economic base, the growing protection of equal rights under the Basic Law, and the con­tinuity and coherence of a social policy provided by unified partisan control of the elected federal government. The Federal Republic was advantaged by having to deal at its founding with profound issues of cul­tural and national integration and then shifting to issues of economic redistribution in the 1960s, when the political economy had recovered.^[481]

The United States, by contrast, emerged from the war victorious, unified, and strong, but it made a fateful turn in the late 1960s. When insurgent social movements became radicalized in a war-poisoned envi­ronment, the resulting cultural catharsis led to the new system of divided government. That system has brought intensified conflict - between the ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans, between the Con­gress and the presidency, between frustrated public opinion majorities and insider interest groups, and between the affluent and the poor. This has occurred within a social context that emphasizes multicultural group dif­ferences and widespread distrust of government itself. The American polit­ical system, effective for a century and a half under a norm of unified partisan government, was jolted by the culture shocks of the 1960s into a hostile equilibrium that, despite the balm of economic prosperity in the 1990s, appears likely to persist into the twenty-first century.

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