BEYOND RED AND BLUE: POLITICS OF "BETWEEN-NESS" AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE

Whereas standard accounts posit the expansion of the national welfare state from the 1930s to the 1960s and its subsequent retrenchment beginning in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, Bertram points to the intermediate years (after Great Society and through the early 1970s) as decisive to the change in public assistance.\n 69) and racial and gendered hierarchies.6 From the 1930s through the 1990s, Southern actors are shown to persist in their advocacy of these political values, suggesting not only an enduring constraint by their regional political culture but also the unchanging character of that regional ideology. [...]middle-class workers are the main beneficiaries and low-wage workers are protected by a "second class safety net"-while poor families outside the labor market have "simply slipped off the radar screen" (pp. 252-53).8 Taken together, the books make clear the deep-seated tradeoffs involved in American state development wherein the existence of a robust associational state coexists alongside a more submerged administrative state, and an agenda of political expediency, pluralistic access, and protection of local autonomy, on the one hand, comes at the expense of equality, transparency, and programmatic coherence, on the other.