Special issue: crisis of the Old Order.

• Position: Column

About This Issue

By The Editors

When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published the first volume f his Age of Roosevelt series in 1957, he titled it The Crisis of the Old Order. He devoted a considerable portion of the book to a description of that Old Order in crisis, including chapters with such titles as: "The Politics of Frustration," "Protest on the Countryside," "The Stirrings of Labor," "The Struggle for Public Power" and "The Revolt of the Intellectuals." Together, they rendered a portrait of a domestic status quo under severe challenge. That status quo could not hold, and thus did a new order emerge in American politics based on a far greater concentration of power in the federal government than the country had ever before seriously contemplated.

Schlesinger did not complete his multivolume FDR project, but had he done so, he also would have probed the global status quo under a similar severe strain. The Old Order--based on Europe's global preeminence, British naval superiority and financial dominance, and a balance of military force on the European continent--had been destroyed with World War I, and no new structure of stability had emerged to replace it. The result was a period of flux culminating in World War II, which yielded a new order based on America's global military reach, the strength of the dollar, and a balance of power between the U.S.-led West and an expansionist Soviet Union positioned in the ashes of war to threaten Western Europe.

Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most powerful figures in his country's history, essentially remade the American political structure. And then he remade the world. The result was a new order of relative stability, Western prosperity and global development. It has been called Pax Americana, and it lasted nearly seventy years.

Now the new order that Roosevelt created is the Old Order, and it is in crisis, much as the Old Order at the time of FDR'S emergence was in crisis. The status quo, like the status quo in Roosevelt's time, cannot hold. We are living in a time of transition.

Domestically, Roosevelt's concentration of power in Washington has yielded over time a collection of elites that has restrained the body politic in tethers of favoritism and self-serving maneuver. Wall Street has captured the government's levers of financial decision making. Public-employee. unions utilize their power to capture greater and greater shares of the public fisc. Corporations foster tax-code provisions that allow...