Outline of a New Liberal Coalition

...According to Robert Goodman in The Last Entrepreneurs (Simon and Schuster, 1979), nearly a third of all manufacturing jobs are now in rural areas, most of them below the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Mississippi...

...True to Phillips' curve, moreover, enough city proletarians shed their Democratic habits to assure Republican victories in nearly all the industrial statesof the North and East...

...How shall we do that...

...It has merely gone underground, a fugitive from the desperation of the Sixties and the pessimism of the Seventies...

...It is true that Bryan, like the members of today's Moral Majority, was a toter and quoter of the Bible...

...I mean only to say that in our defeat we liberals have an opportunity now to organize on a more solid base, one comprised chiefly of blacks and Hispanics, urban and rural workers, Western anti-establishmentarians, and the politically disaffected (many of whom are young and ready for bold experiment...

...My own reading of the current liberal dilemma is that it doesn't matter whether Reagan beat Carter or Carter beat himself...

...Another such moment will occur when Congress gets around again to debating the labor reform bill, a proposal that was filibustered to death two years ago...

...As he saw it, Hubert Humphrey's near-unanimous black support had been a downright handicap, "a major source of Democratic loss...

...The old FDR coalition of urban ethnics and Southern Protestants, he observed with undisguised satisfaction, was in full retreat before an all-new conservative alliance of suburbanites, Sun Belters and blue-collar workers disenchanted with the Democrats' "ambitious social programming...

...a half century after Roosevelt oratorically anointed "the forgotten man at thebot-tom of the economic pyramid," our legislation and political policies continue to neglect the poor and pamper the rich...

...In William Jennings Bryan's day the rural West and South were as solidly Democratic and populistasthey seem now to be Republican and conservative...

...and if it seemed to work for a time, it never exactly set the world on fire...

...let us rejoice...

...To Phillips the future of the Republican Party looked both bright and white...

...It seemed to us that his ardent wish had been father to his frightening thought, and that Humphrey's defeat had been less a consequence of Right-wing revanchism than of Left-wing disgust with the growing debacle in Vietnam...

...Their indifference constitutes a sharp indictment of both parties and poses a genuine threat to our two-party system...

...In the eyes of voters in the South and West, Jimmy Carter was urban...

...A little imagination of the liberal stripe might well be appreciated all around...

...As C. Vann Woodward has commented, Bryan "had an intuitive grasp of the deep mood of protest that stirred the mass of voters, and he expressed that mood in a moral appeal to the conscience of the country...

...It is an old rural custom to buttress political argument with religious chapter and verse, but there is nothing in the Bible to suggest God is a Republican or that he banks at Chase Manhattan...

...And let us build a new coalition in its place, one based on some new realities as well as some old friends...

...They are not a bad political base on which to rebuild...

...General Motors has located a plant in rural Louisiana, Michelin in rural South Carolina, Reynolds Aluminum in rural Arkansas...

...Scanning the racial architecture of Richard Nixon's 1968 victory, he flatly concluded that "the GOP can build a winning coalition without Negro votes...

...It was not a savory arrangement, that marriage of big-city Pendergasts and small-town Talmadges...

...they also forget that in 1976 the Democratic rank-and-file chose Jimmy Carter over a half-dozen liberal rivals, including Birch Bayh and Morris Udall...

...With some diligence and a little luck, these voter groups could be mobilized in ways that would give the lie to Kevin Phillips' smug prophecies of yesteryear...

...In the Deep South black voters won big for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and managed even in 1980 to salvage a few scarce electoral votes for him...

...I do not mean to suggest that any of this will be easy...

...So let the old coalition die a dignified death, taking with it a long list of unrealized dreams and a record that combines the tawdry with the noble in about equal parts...

...It is begging the question to inquire whether Reagan's electoral success signifies a genuine conservative ground-swell?an epochal shifting of national gears"—or merely a genuine irritation with Jimmy Carter and his largely ineffectual sojourn in the White House...

...In the liberals' wooing of rural America, where the hearts of one-third of the electorate are to be won or lost, it is possible to take the Bible away from the "New Right" and give it back to the Bryans of today—to those who harbor "an old faith in social justice" and are ready "to protest against a generation of plutocratic rule...

...Indeed, with Republican moving vans lumbering into Washington, significant portions of Phillips' fantasy appear to have become fact...

...The liberal coalition needs to take into account rural disillusionment with the centralized, citified welfare state, to coax traditional anti-Establishment feelings into more useful political channels...

...Certainly the Sun Belt shined on Ronald Reagan last November...

...In either case liberals were the losers...

...Our great task in the Eighties will be to restore it to light, to renew the American public's faith in a liberal future...

...the two groups already comprise more than 15 per cent of the total population, and they are increasing in number at double the national rate...

...His real service was to awaken an old faith in social justice and to protest against a generation of plutocratic rule...

...States of the Union OUTLINE OF A NEW LIBERAL COALTnON BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS In his 1969book, The Emerging Republican Majority (Arbor House), Kevin Phillips, that shrewd day-dreamer of the Right, noted "an epochal shifting of national gears" and predicted hard times ahead for the Democrats...

...The workers there are prime prospects for the new liberal alliance...

...Big business was the perceived enemy back then just as big government is the perceived enemy today...

...For openers, there are the blacks and Hispanics, who have emerged now as the Democrats' two most loyal constituencies...

...That's how Bryan won the West...

...Labor reform would make it easier for workers to organize, particularly in the Sun Belt, a territory that corporations have been invading in droves as they forsake the unionized North in favor of the open-shop South and West...

...For in their thinking no less than in their rhetoric, both major parties have gone discour-agingly stale...

...The Socialists swept Oklahoma before World War I by holding thousands of camp-meeting revivals, where Amos and Hosea were more frequently cited than Marx and Engels...

...surely this, too, would pass...

...Some of us back then dismissed Phillips' breezy predictions as pure fantasy...

...Those who argue that liberals had no real choice this time around conveniently forget the failed challenge of Edward Kennedy...

...Phillips has casually made a gift of those sections—of the whole Sun Belt, in fact—to the GOP, but the liberal coalition need not despair...

...To add salt to the wound, those triumphs were achieved in the teeth of strong Democratic turnouts among black and Hispanic voters...

...To begin with, we should probably grant Phillips his major boast, and be glad of it: The New Deal coalition is finished...

...Finally, as we ring out the old coalition and ring in the new, special attention should be paid to the millions who have opted out of the democratic process altogether—the 52 per cent of eligible voters who did not visit the polls last November...

...A well-organized Chicano electorate could eventually reverse the Republican drift in Texas and the Southwest...

...What these electoral lolligogs yearn for, one guesses, are not necessarily new answers to the many problems that beset us, but new questions, and a Rooseveltian willingness to invent and improvise...

...For the liberal coalition, this will be a decisive moment...

...We are the only country in the Western world still waiting for national health insurance ("the Lost Reform"), and one of the few industrialized nations that has not seen fit to enact a minimum income plan...

...That imagination—which among other things has brought us the Bill of Rights, the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the graduated income tax, Social Security and Medicare—is by no means dead...

...Wouldn't that be worth the effort...

...in either case, too, Democrats are now free of the Carter millstone and in an excellent position to reshape their party in ways that will once again kindle the country's liberal imagination...

...Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and some of his Republican colleagues have served notice of their intent to kill the measure and thereby restore Southern politics to a condition of pristine whiteness...

...Not only did he capture the entire West, he also succeeded in stealing much of the once-solid South from his Georgian opponent...

...As voters we don't always get what we want, but we usually get what we ask for...

...in many sections of the nation...

...he had ceased to be a country boy from Georgia and had become instead a politician from Bureaucracyville, a sprawling city of the mind located somewhere between Washington and New York...

...For better or for worse, it was our record...

...and quite clearly of late, we have been asking for conservative leadership...

...A challenge to this old element in the new coalition will come early in 1981 when Congress considers renewing the 1965 Voter Rights Act, the law that enfranchised Southern blacks for the first time since Reconstruction...

...Today we are having anxious second thoughts...

...Surely Nixon's ascendancy was merely an aberration, an annoying but temporary detour from the inevitable advanceof liberalism...