The New, New Politics

...The Brown-Carter formula, then, can most succinctly be summed up as follows: 1) compassionate rhetoric, liberal and minority appointments, and support for consumerism and environmentalism to please the liberals and the media...

...His persona as a peanut farmer whose values are rooted in his small-town, south Georgia upbringing could hardly be more at odds with Brown's comparatively rootless, urban California background...

...The specific elements in the new political posture adopted by Brown and Carter can be readily enumerated...

...And New Left attacks on the "Establishment" no doubt contributed to the growing distrust of government that had begun to show up strikingly in opinion poll data before Watergate...

...Carter is almost a generation older than Brown...

...It is not inconceivable that in slightly altered circumstances--say, a Reagan vs...

...He is also consulting editor of The Public Interest...

...Did you know that you have 24 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977...

...It is not a politics that compromises ideological differences in the search for a safe middle ground, but one that incorporates some unquestionably liberal and some unquestionably conservative features to form a distinctively new pattern...

...The crushing defeat of George McGovern in 1972 confirmed that a candidate who was perceived as an agent of radical social change and as a spokesman for the New Left assault on traditional middleclass values could not win a national election...

...It is also what has made it possible for so many liberals to convince themselves that Carter is "really" a liberal, while so many moderates and conservatives are equally convinced that Carter's heart is really with them...

...A convenient diagnosis...

...Another report I have before me asserts that the 95th Congress, which was"supposed to be a liberal, Democratic" one, has turned out to be "surprisingly conservative...

...Admittedly, Tom Wicker still discerns a comforting glimpse of wickedness in our midst, and every week he will busily fan with his quill the cooling embers of our inequity and iniquity...

...This was the fatal flaw in the analysis of anti-McGovern Democrats like Scammon and Wattenberg, who had argued that if the Democratic Party turned its back on the New Left and thus forestalled Republican exploitation of the social issue, it could reconstitute the old, New Deal coalition on the basis of the economic issue...

...I need hardly add that the combination of fiscal conservatism and opposition to big government means that liberal rhetoric sympathetic to the poor is in no way matched by costly government programs to aid them...

...Nary a crisis in sight...

...Insofar as these trends seemed to discredit the way of life of middle-class Americans and to threaten their social and economic status, they were regarded as clearly unacceptable...

...Marc F. Plattner The New, New Politics The Carter-Brown formula blends liberalism and conservatism with an anti-politician style, and signals the emergence of a new political type...

...Foremost among these is fiscal restraint, an old-fashioned regard for balanced budgets and limited government spending...

...It pleases them to construe their own warped psyches as a disease rampaging across the body politic...

...First, beginning with those borrowed from the liberal side, there is rhetorical sympathy for the plight of the poor, "minority groups" (blacks, Hispanics, etc...

...Next, there is support for the consumer and environmental movements...

...The final touch is a discreet admixture of private spirituality, reflected in Carter's born-again Christianity and Brown's personal blend of Catholicism and Oriental religiosity...

...Yet there was something to the notion that voters on both the Left and the Right shared a certain common dissatisfaction with the traditional Democratic approach, as Jimmy Carter proved by uniting elements of these dissident factions behind his candidacy in 1976...

...Leon Shull of the Americans for Democratic Action (a group that caters to "specialinterests") is said m be "considerably distressed...

...The popularity of this conservative posture showed that the traditional, bread-and-butter programmatic liberalism of the Democratic Party no longer retained its former appeal...

...then found that this did not, as advertised, land them in personal utopia--far from it...

...that more than justify regarding Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown as exemplars of the same political trend...

...For example, I believe that in many cases such people sampled the new liberation, acquired new wives and new lifestyles, did their own thing, embraced the new "morality," and generally acquiesced to whatever current folly came their way...

...As the 1972 general election showed, this theory was clearly overdrawn: The differences between McGovern and Wallace supporters outweighed whatever similarities there might have been, and the great bulk of the Wallace vote subsequently went to President Nixon...

...distemper...

...By proclaiming that he sought for America merely "a government as good as its people," he reassured the citizenry that he did not view them as corrupt, or racist, or in need of moral instruction from the uppermiddle-class liberals of the media and the universities...

...Not only was Carter able to appeal to conservatives without using Agnewesque rhetoric, he was able to do so while stressing his compassion and concern for the poor and for blacks...

...He succeeded in reclaiming the moral force of the civil-rights movement and identifying it with his candidacy, and even conceded some measure of moral validity to the anti-war movement...

...Wicker of the Times, and probably a good many other of our contemporary gloomy liberals...

...This is why the politics of Brown and Carter seem so mysterious and unpredictable...

...The hallmark of this new trend is its ability to appeal simultaneously to liberal, moderate, and conservative opinion, not merely on the basis of personal style or charisma, but by means of a political strategy that blends seemingly disparate ideological positions...

...Despite some superficial resemblances, this strategy does not represent a return to the cautious, middle-of-the-road politics of Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Why are we all supposed to be so traumatized...

...I believe that the answer, as suggested in my January 1976 Alternative article, lies in the shrewd way in which Brown and Carter have understood and exploited the complex response of middle-America to the New Left politics of the 1960s...

...It would be difficult to see in Brown's deepest political vision anything other than a call for a fundamentally new turn in the American way of life...

...They are nowhere identified in Mary Russell's article, nor are there any unattributed quotations...

...I have long entertained the theory that American liberals of the "selfloathing" variety can be satisfactorily understood only through resort to the argument ad hominem...

...But it is apparent that the conservative theorists over-estimated the depth of middle-American hostility to the new cultural-political trends of the 1960s...

...Carter and Brown skillfully adapted the antiWashington, anti-big-government theme that had occupied so prominent a place in Wallace's rhetoric...

...The most conspicuous, and apparently the most politically resonant, expression of this new style has been a voluntary renunciation of some of the perquisites and ceremonies of high office--a policy that President Carter seems to have unabashedly copied from Governor Brown...

...Around the time of the 1972 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, some commentators put forward the theory of "the two Georges," according to which Senator McGovern and Governor Wallace were attracting similar types of "alienated" voters away from "Establishment" candidates like Senators Humphrey and Muskie...

...2) fiscal conservatism and efforts to improve government efficiency to please the conservatives and a general public which is increasingly skeptical about big government...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 23 stressing their fiscal conservatism and their determination to make government work more responsively and less inefficiently...

...It remains to be seen whether this formula, which so clearly fits the temper of the present moment, will stand the test of time...

...When these words were first written in the fall of 1975, Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign had not yet impinged upon the public consciousness, and it appeared that the new type of political figure that I saw as the wave of the future was unlikely to emerge at the presidential level before 1980...

...Believing that this development would not clearly benefit either the Right or the Left, I concluded with the prediction that "we will probably be seeing more political figures like California's Governor Jerry Brown who combine liberal and conservative impulses in strange new ways...

...And the nature of many of those initiatives does not inspire confidence that Carter's policies will be anywhere near as successful as his rhetoric has been...

...Does it auger a time when we will have no excuse to go on loathing ourselves ?--a deprivation that would surely leave Mr...

...Why was Carter able to succeed in attracting much of the Wallace vote (and even the endorsement of Wallace himself) where McGovern had so totally failed...

...To some extent, this theme had also appeared in the arsenal of the New Left, in the form of support for community control and criticism of unresponsive bureaucracies...

...Although they are extremely shrewd political strategists, each has successfully presented himself as an "anti-politician," a man who stands apart from and above the shabby wheeling and dealing of ordinary politicians...

...and women...

...Udall race--this strategy might have worked in 1976...

...Carter's deepest political vision seems, at least in part, to aim at a restoration of America to the harmony and simplicity of a past which has somehow been lost...

...This conservative country has apparently been manifesting its symptoms by repudiating government programs and beneficence, and for those who administer such programs, or undertake public relations work on behalf of them in the Washington Post and the New York Times, this is indeed an ill-humor, a testiness, a disorder, or disturbance (cf...

...Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas Doe Carter arrfved in Washington and was instantly Naderized...

...Finally, Carter took great pains to show that his friendliness to minorities and his espousal of various liberal positions should not be interpreted as a challenge to the way of life of ordinary Americans...

...The lesson that conservative strategists like Phillips and Rusher drew from this fact was that a new right-wing majority could be consolidated by exploiting popular hostility to the New Left...

...Theirs was a secret horror show...

...All that may still be close to the surface," Wicker adds, "since traumas go on affecting people...

...It is surely humanly and politically understandable that Governor Brown, witnessing something very like his own political formula propelling Carter to glory, and watching the erosion of his own position as the herald of a new brand of politics, felt compelled to make a late entry into the primaries in a futile attempt to stem the Carter tide...

...How can the coherence and the wide appeal of this new political stance be explained...

...What is the cause of this unexpected conservatism...

...But then came the astonishing success of the Carter primary campaign--a success based in large measure on transcending traditional definitions of liberalism and conservatism and appealing to much the same wide spectrum of voters as Brown did...

...Yet all this has been accomplished without offending many of the same voters who could not stomach the politics of George McGovern...

...Accompanying this is a new skepticism about "big government" and the ability of massive spending programs to solve social and economic problems...

...It is precisely this that Jerry Brown and especially Jimmy Carter have accomplished, by showing that the heritage of 1960s social protest could be accommodated to middle-class respectability in the 1970s...

...No doubt this was Jerry Brown's calculation as well, as the young California governor, with a long political career ahead of him, initially seemed prepared to sit out the 1976 presidential race...

...It appears that, with such reassurances, many social conservatives were not averse to backing a candidate who was closely identified with the family and former associates of Martin Luther King...

...Finally, it is necessary to consider some aspects of the political "style" common to both Brown and Carter...

...A number of observers have commented on the contrast between Brown's ascetic Jesuitism and Carter's family-oriented Baptist fundamentalism...

...As a result, they have gained considerable good will among the upper-middleclass liberals who are so powerful in the media and the universities, and whose support is of no small importance in practical political terms...

...This effort to maintain republican simplicity and democratic informality is complemented by a rigorous devotion to long hours of labor at the public's busi22 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 ness and a careful attention to the details of running a complex government...

...This is bad news to those beneficiaries (who are also the devisers) of programs aimed at alleviating the nation's quotient of "injustice," but for the rest of us no news from Washington must be counted as good news...

...I do not mean to suggest that Jimmy Carter's political vision, strategy, and style are similar to Jerry Brown's in all essential respects...

...Part of the answer, of course, is that Carter is himself a Southerner, but there is much more to it than that...

...Yet part of the New Left critique of American society-that we had mistreated our minority groups, that we had insufficiently protected our environment and the interests of consumers, that we had not adequately checked the power o f " special interests," that our government had grown too bureaucratic and unresponsive, that our policy-makers had not been attentive enough to ethical considerations--struck a responsive chord with many ordinary Americans, and they were willing to accept it once the threatening elements had been muted or eliminated...

...The New Left had all but disappeared as an independent political force, and yet many of the attitudes that it fostered had gained a considerable hold over public opinion...

...Yet, despite these differences, there are striking similarities Marc F. Plattner works for the Twentieth Century Fund in New York...

...In regard to some of the most controversial questions-amnesty, abortion, busing, etc.--he staked out finely calibrated "half-way" positions that protected him from the ire of the Right...

...A further corollary to these propositions is a hostility to cumbersome government bureaucracies and a highly vocal concern with improving the efficiency of government...

...Finally, there is a moralistic emphasis on the limits to economic growth that, combined with friendliness to consumer groups and environmentalists, imparts a certain anti-business tinge to the new posture...

...Brown was strongest in the West, and one suspects that he would have made his weakest showing in the South had he campaigned there...

...But such liberal candidates as McGovern were prevented from successfully playing upon the anti-big-government message by their commitment to interventionist schemes like busing and to large-scale social spending programs...

...Such a strategy called primarily for taking a hard-line on the "social issue"--i.e., resolutely opposing "permissiveness," minority-group demands, amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, "welfare chiselers," the liberal media and intellectuals, etc...

...Both men have filled prominent posts in their administrations with minority-group members and former I960s activists...

...to denounce the whole system as being rotten to the core, and impute their personal traumas to an entire nation, which is instructed to mend its ways or soon come to a calamitous end...

...Given this skepticism, coupled with resentment at high taxes and continuing inflation, the public mood seems receptive to tight fiscal management, which it hopes will at least prevent further economic deterioration...

...But it is also true that almost immediately upon taking office, Carter was remarkably successful--just as Brown had been--in extending his popularity, especially among conservatives...

...In the January 1976 issue of The Alternative, I contended that Kevin Phillips' and William Rusher's prognoses of the emergence of a new conservative majority were misguided because these authors continued to view the ideological divisions among the American people from the perspective of the late 1960s...

...Unlike Brown, who prudently introduced a relatively small amount of new legislation upon assuming the California governorship, Carter has begun his presidency with a flurry of new policy initiatives...

...Happily, no...

...Despite their hostility to the more militant expressions of black resentment in the late 1960s, most Americans still accept--as Jimmy Carter discerned--the moral legitimacy of the civil-rights movement...

...Wicker with a good deal of time on his hands...

...We have just experienced, he writes, "the kind of Fourth that was commonplace, even predictable, before the long successive traumas of Vietnam and Watergate brought America a decade of self-doubt, serf-criticism, self-loathing on the one hand, and responding denials, anger and chauvinism on the other...

...Nonetheless, my own guess is that Brown and Carter have discerned and helped to promote a political trend that is likely to have a lasting impact...

...It appears, however, that the electorate has lost confidence, not only in the efficacy of the old, New Deal economic remedies, but in the ability of any President to achieve a meaningful improvement in the economic situation...

...In this way, Wallace voters and other blue-collar Democrats could be combined with traditional Republicans to form a coalition that would easily triumph over the McGovernite remnant of the Democratic Party...

...Oh, worrisome Fourth...

...Shame on you, out there in Indiana...

...Both these tendencies are given their strongest concrete expression in the appointment of minority-group members, women, and liberal activists to important and highly visible government posts...

...The polarization that characterized that period was a thing of the past, I argued, and formerly clear-cut ideological lines were becoming increasingly blurred...

...But apart from the social issue, there is another set of factors that helps to explain why political figures like Carter and Brown have been so successful in gaining support among "alienated" voters of the sort who might previously have been sympathetic to Wallace...

...Brown has gone even further in this direction, proudly citing his own support for the civil-rights movement in the early 1960s and for Eugene McCarthy's anti-war candidacy in 1968, and closely allying himself with Cesar Chavez' efforts to organize California farm workers...

...Moreover, his well-publicized born-again Christianity doubtless convinced many social and cultural conservatives that deep down Carter really belonged to their camp...

...I suspect that such an analysis might well apply to Mr...

...Carter's political appeal proved strongest in his native South and weakest in the West...

...Listen to Mary Russell, a writer who is employed to interpret the news for the benefit of the Washington Post's readership: "Some say the House, subject to election every two years, is simply a barometer of the public mood and the House is responding to a malaise, an uneasiness, a distemper in the country...

...and 3) an anti-politician style to appeal to a public mood of "alienation" and distrust of government common to liberals and conservatives alike...

...Resentful at having been so easily duped, they now presume Tom Betbell is Washington editor for Harper's and contributing editor to the Washington Monthly...

...Who are these "some" who say this...

...Brown and Carter, by contrast, were burdened by no such commitments, and hence were able to make the anti-Washington theme their own...

...These liberal elements, however, are balanced by a number of distinctly conservative themes...

...But you get the idea, I am sure, even if it is only Mary Russell making it: A conservative country is one affected by distemper...

...In the first place, Carter was careful to avoid being identified with a full-fledged liberal stance on the social issue...

...So it is surely possible that the failure of those policies might wind up discrediting the entire Brown-Carter approach...

...Readers will be pleased to hear that not much is happening in Washington these days...

...They did this in part by adopting the antipolitician style referred to earlier but also, substantively, by * It is true that Carter, like Brown in the I974 California gubernatorial race, ran a cautious general election campaign which reduced a large early lead in the polls to a narrow victory margin on election day...

...This was the strategy followed by Senator Jackson in the Presidential primaries, but in 1976 it worked only in the older cities of the Northeast, apparently the last bastion of the ethnic and labor union politics that had for so long dominated the Democratic Party...

...In fact, it may well be that in retrospect Carter's 1976 victory will come to be viewed as one of the watershed elections in American history...