Politics/The Party's Over

...As yet the impetus for such reform comes mostly from the rank and f i l e - - t h e laity, or here and t h e r e a parish priest, a nun, a minister...

...at its ugliest, a constantly shifting coalition of "warlords and ayatollahs...

...Its effect was to deprive state and local party organizations of the power to select their own nominees for office...

...I know one church well, from the inside, and that is the Catholic Church...

...here and t h e r e , it has even begun to c o u n t e r a t t a c k . Like the branch in the beak of Noah's dove, John Paul l I ' s accession to the papacy has revived religious spirits, not only among Catholics, but among Protestants and Orthodox as well...

...bitterly divisive issues replace party identification as the principal voting cues for increasing numbers of us...

...It would be true poetic justicc if the antiwar media's Parthian shot at General Westmoreland should backfire and turn into a devastating challenge to the veracity, motivation, and ethics of CBS's conduct throughout the Vietnam war...

...Here is a man matured in a country only God, it seems, would not despair of...

...Professor Galbraith, in The New IndustrialState, declared that the role of the intellectual was "strategic...

...Volunteer workers today flock to the candidate's, not the party's, banner...

...economic and social policy interest groups, disdaining collaboration with the gravely weakened party organizations, play an ever larger role in both primary and general elections...

...Today, halfway without realizing it, Christianity is regaining some of the lost ground...

...There is something close to consensus on the view that the party system of the last hundred-plus years is set inalterably on the path to extinction...

...The modern s u b s t i t u t e is...

...The most important was the coming of the direct primary, instituted in the early years of the century and gathering momentum in each decade since then...

...Sexual ethics were drastically revamped, church-going dropped precipitously, and the pluralism of tolerant b e l i e v e r s changed into an " I ' m OK, You're OK" relativism...

...Second, each new crop of young people coming into the electorate since 1952has been less inclined toward partisanship than its predecessor...

...My memories, t h e r e f o r e , will be largely Catholic, and although Episcopalians or Methodists or Lutherans or P r e s b y t e r i a n s will have their own stories to tell, t h e r e is enough common ground for reasonable generalization...

...For another, the proportion of the American people traumatized by Vietnam and Watergate was always far smaller than what "opinion leaders" along the New York Times-Washington Post axis wanted us to believe...

...In the bad old days of relatively strong and effective parties, both major parties were ideological shambles...

...or even if it earnestly wishes to do so, it is unlikely to have at its disposal enough in the way of either manpower or money to make much of a difference...

...In sum, the two major p a r t i e s have not only been losing partisans at an alarming rate...

...The greatest force for political change, he predicted, would be the intellectual community and its influence over the new educated class that would come to dominate all spheres of American life--business, government, the professions, the mbdia, culture...

...candidates operate more and more often as free agents...

...Most of the n a t i o n ' s y o u t h - - t h e headline-grabbing segments of it, at l e a s t - - b e t r a y e d little i n t e r e s t in Christianity...

...Why all this happened is a subject I leave to better qualified analysts of the American psyche...

...And this means that even if the trend-line were to flatten out in the future (though it gives no sign of doing so), as the older voters die off the proportion of independents overall will continue to rise...

...Today by contrast both parties are ideologically more coherent than they have ever been--and yet are falling apart...

...And those m i s s a l e t t e s , monthly service booklets-that replaced missals in the early post-Vatican II period of almost weekly liturgical changes...

...These were presented on the watershed religious occasions: First Communion, Confirmation, or wedding...

...But it would be a mistake to see those events as decisive in this connection...

...Of course this reflects the great cultural and social change in America during the postwar period: the explosion of higher education, the democratization of the world of thought and opinion...

...Our most distinguished scholar of parties, Walter Dean Burnham, wrote in 1975 of "the astonishingly rapid dissolution of the political party" and s a i d we are now at " a point in time at which we close a very old volume of history and open a brand new one...

...do not use that word in the crystal ball-gazing sense: This magazine's predictions, like most, have been sometimes right, more often wrong...

...This may be unduly pessimistic_9 Yet it is certainly true that almost all the omens of the last fifteen years point to an accelerating enfeeblement of the party system: Party loyalties con34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 tinue to erode...

...9 The crumbling away of the historic parties would l e a v e p o l i t i c a l power in America concentrated in the adventurers, in the interest groups that finance them and in the executive b u r e a u c r a c y . . . Without parties, our politics would grow angrier, wilder and more irresponsible...

...All of which means that candidates now require nothing of the parties other than their labels...

...I f changes in the legal environment have had a debilitating effect on party organizations, changes in the psychological environment have been positively crippling...

...in 1952, the figure was 21 percent...

...Ellen Wilson is a contributing editor of the Human Life Review and author o f An Even Dozen (Human Life Press...

...All of which suggests that, whatever the contours of our political landscape by the end of the century, the familiar American party system is not likely to be a prominent feature in it...

...And those who do retain a party identification will do so with markedly decreased enthusiasm...

...In my view that is a reversal of cause and e f f e c t - - i f indeed it makes any sense at all to talk about an American political consensus that once flourished but has now gone to seed...

...Nor do party leaders have anything like the near monopoly on campaign expertise they were once assumed to have...

...That year, 17 percent of Americans called themselves independents...

...And those are won in primary contests, with the parties themselves in most cases sitting helplessly on the sidelines...

...Since 1952 at any rate we can trace three concurrent indices of erosion: the rise in the proportion of self-styled independents...

...Flower child Charles Reich popularized the idea in The Greening of America, acknowledging his debt to Galbraith...

...Neither we nor the Chinese have yet fully recovered from our respective cultural revolutions...

...Not only that: The loss of patronage also cost parties both essential manpower and financial clout accumulated through the mandatory "contributions" public employees were required to make to the party organizations that got them their jobs...

...In 1952, 26 percent of the youngest group of voters called themselves independents...

...It is clear, at a minimum, that a major change took place in the social composition of the American journalistic profession in the generation after World War II...

...But by 1980 no fewer than 54 percent of the comparable group disclaimed partisan attachment...

...The party organization may or may not get involved in any significant way...

...Those stick-figure, stylized religious drawings mass-produced for Good News paperback Bibles, Sunday-school books, church walls, felt-decorated banners, and monthly missalettes...

...The operative system throughout the nation is that ambitious candidates offer themselves to the voters on their own motion or at the behest of interest groups, and then the party is blessed or stuck with whoever emerges with the nomination...

...Two broad answers strike me as most persuasive, though each itself is far from being an uncaused cause...

...As recounted by S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman in the October/November 1981 Public Opinion, a comprehensive survey of leading reporters, editors, producers, and news executives from the major national news organizations revealed that 81 percent of them had voted for George McGovern in 1972...

...And Arthur Schlesinger, J r . , writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1979, summoned up a vision of what the "politics without parties" of our future might look like: Political adventurers will roam the countryside like Chinese warlords or Iranian ayatollahs, recruiting personal armies, conducting hostilities against some rival warlords and forming a l l i a n c e s with o t h e r s , and . . . s t r i v i n g to govern through ad hoc coalitions in legislatures...

...And more and more Americans find less and less reason to affiliate themselves with either...

...Having then won the nomination, you will continue to rely on your primary campaign staff to carry out the general election effort...

...Those majoring in s p i r i t u a l i t y looked East instead of West, testing this or that exotic sect of Eastern mysticism, seeking crash courses in e n l i g h t e n m e n t . Meanwhile, the p r e s s - - f r o m the newsweeklies to Sunday sections in newspapers to picture magazines like Life or Look--wrote obituaries of the family and marriage-as-we-know-it and organized religion and the rest of the baggage of traditional American life...

...There was a time when one's image of journalists was out of The Front Page: the brash, graying, streetwise, poker-playing, lower-middleclass city reporters covering crime and local politics, which usually overlapped...

...What accounts for this apparently terminal weakness in the party system...

...that America wasted the world's resources, exploited the Third World, sustained tyrants in power, provoked the arms race, and either deliberately courted conflict or constantly missed opportunities for peace...

...every indication is that this trend will continue and even accelerate...

...And even though President Nixon's personal popularity fell sharply during the worst days of Watergate, the level of loyalty to the Relaublican party stayed nearly constant throughout the mid-seventies, eroding no faster than that of the Democrats...

...For one thing, in order to win your party's nomination for almost any office today you have to put together your own campaign apparatus...

...Prior to that, prospects must often have seemed bleak, and it is in such bleak times that prophets .must usually ply their trade...

...How sadly t h e i r cheap paper and flimsy, dog-eared covers contrasted with an earlier generation's missals...

...What seems obvious to me at least is that powerful strains on the consensus have always existed but until recently these were contained within a strong, resilient two-party system...

...But it was made to last a lifetime--as was one's faith...

...No longer can it accommodate these strains, which after all are no more severe than those it faced during such periods as 1896-1912 and 19301940...

...Another triumph of the reform movement, contemporary with the spread of the direct primary, was the adoption of civil service and merit systems of public employment, stripping the parties of much of their traditional patronage and leaving them with hardly any way to reward or discipline the rank-and-file party workers...

...in 1967, 30 percent...

...From beginning to end...

...The first has to do with changes in the parties' legal environment brought about by the efforts of three generations of reformers...

...aplenty in this...

...Academics, reformers, and the better class of journalists never tired of pointing with a mixture of pity and horror to the fact that Northern urban liberals sat side by side in the Democratic party with Southern rural reactionaries, while Taftites and Goldwaterites shared the Republican mantle with liberal Eastern internationalists of the Dewey-Lodge-Rockefeller persuasion...

...as the polls always showed, the great majority of Americans wanted victory in Vietnam...

...This is what organized religion has begun to do, in more or less organized fashion, and of course the results have begun to spill over into public life...

...A huge gap opened up between these elite attitudes and the traditional convictions of most Americans...

...In neither case will it be conducive to the selfgoverning of a free people...

...And campaign contributors, individuals as well as interest groups, by and large prefer to give money to candidates rather than parties...

...Here is a good man, confident in his faith, unpoisoned by the pseudo-"existential" self-doubt which has sapped the spirits of so many twentieth-century men, religious and secular...

...There are irony and paradox Karl O'Lessker is a senior editor of The American Spectator and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...

...America seemed to be rejecting large portions of traditional Christian teaching in both faith and morals...

...If CBS, as reported, hopes to put the war on trial, the good general has an opportunity to put CBS's war coverage on trial...

...A showing of systematic antiwar bias would not, I assume, be irrelevant to the required proof of legal malice...

...During the past fifteen years The American Spectator has been hard at work performing the role of political prophet...

...But he has not despaired--and we, it turns out, have not despaired either...

...Perhaps it was the debasement of religious style that most confused the unbeliever, and most insidiously demoralized the believer...

...Practically everyone now agrees that the traditional American twoparty system is in an advanced state of dissolution...

...We can look at the first of these through Gallup Poll results in 15-year increments going back to 1937...

...Instead, a whole new profession of people called campaign consultants has come into existence, offering services ranging from comprehensive management to direct mail, polling, telephone banks, fundraising, and the recruiting of block captains--not to mention the myriad tasks related to radio, newspaper, and television advertising...

...and this year, 34 percent...

...Galbraith was no fool...

...A consequence at least partly attributable to these changes in the legal environment has been the shift from party-centered to candidatecentered campaigns...

...After the flood there is the cleaning up to do--the shoveling of mud and carting away of debris and raising of roofs...

...And practically everyone believes that this has come about as a result of the prior dissolution of the century-old American political consensus...

...Under the blows of profound social change, however, that system is now crumbling...

...But it has more consistently fulfilled the prophet's true function, which is to point out where the world is going wrong and suggest "alternative modes of b e h a v i o r . " How attentively the political world has listened is another matter, although the 1980 presidential election was a heartwarming episode for any conservative prophet...

...Only now can we begin to glimpse the outlines of the old system's replacement: at its comeliest, something like the multi-party system of the French Third Republic...

...It is worth careful note, though, that the biggest jump in independency during these three 15-year periods was that of 1.952-1967--having little if anything to do with Vietnam and nothing to do with Watergate...

...General Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS promises to be a major event...

...He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed...

...and the decline of partisan attachment among those who still claim to be either Democrats or Republicans...

...For one thing, as noted, each of the factors contributing to party decline originated long before 1967, and all the windy academic/ news media social psychologizing we have endured for the past decade or so cannot alter that fact...

...As Abraham Lincoln observed in 1858, " h e who molds public sentiment goes deeper than h e who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions...

...The racial and sexual revolutions, the sharp rise in educational levels, the upsurge in geographical and job mobility, the nearly incalculable impact of television on political campaign styles and perceptionsmall in all they provide as much hard causality as the most exacting observer would require to account for t h e erosion of traditional party loyalties...

...Even the strongest bastions of "machine" politics now have crumbled, and today not even the late Mayor Daley's heirs and assigns can dictate the outcome of a Chicago Democratic primary...

...All of which means that the very bedrock of political party strength--the partisan loyalty in the breasts of American voters--is crumbling away...

...And this is understandable, for in the midto-late sixties, when the churches in America faced t h e i r g r e a t secular challenge, it was the leadership m progressive priests and ministers, some bishops actively, others pass i v e l y m t h a t caved in...

...the growth of independency among each newly eligible group of young voters...

...There is the emergence of the Moral Majority, the coalitions of Catholics and evangelical Protestants against abortion, the growth of alternative religious schools, and the opposition to "neutral" sex education classes, which not only " n e u - trally" advise youngsters on the use and procurement of contraceptives, but " n e u t r a l l y " describe acts of bestiality and incest...

...The wonder of it may well be that so many of us remain so set in our political ways...

...But as many observers from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Joseph Kraft have noted, these changes created a new media elite, and the new elite, for a variety of psychological and sociological reasons, became a champion of what Moynihan called the "adversary c u l t u r e . " It became an article of ideological faith of this new elite that American power was a source of much of the world's problems: that American corporations determined American foreign policy...

...So the proportion of independents has doubled in the past 45 years and risen well over a third since 1952...

...But with the 1960s came the Harvard Crimson generation: the hotshot, upwardly mobile, sophisticated analysts of the world scene-not police reporters but aspiring intellectuals...

...But the incessant and pervasive propagation of the fashionable opinions was bound to have its effect...

...Where then are we headed...

...The sixties and seventies were a bleak time for religious prophets as well, particularly those from traditional, "mainstream" Christian churches...

...But this is where compromise with the age first made i t s e l f felt to the worshipper in the pew, and where, even now, it continues to make itself felt...

...I will begin with what may seem t r i v i a l , with style and matters of form...

...Candidates meanwhile have discovered other sources of aid and nurture...

...It's a long way from Ernie Pyle to Anthony Lewis...

...The central fact here is the erosion of party loyalties among the American people that began not long after the end of World War II...

...Finally, in 1952 those who said they were strongly attached to one party or the other made up 40 percent of the voting-age population_9 Today fewer than 24 percent maintain that kind of allegiance...

...After years of use, the leather cover would be worn, the gilt edges fading, the pages distended with holy cards and memorials of the dead...

...The most reasonable inference to be drawn from all this is that whatever deep social changes acted to cut Americans loose from t h e i r traditional party moorings before 1967 have continued to work since then...

...Certainly the Vietnam war and Watergate dealt what looked at the time to be hammerblows to Americans' confidence in t h e i r political institutions...

...some heaped contempt on its adherents...

...It is perhaps a little hard for us to remember how bad things really were--how strong the back-againstthe-wall feeling got for the true believer, how insidiously the relentless doom-saying led one to doubt, almost to despair...

...Those modern church buildings!--all awkward angles and exposed joints, like an adolescent suffering growing pains...

...Hgw much of this is attributable to the events of the past fifteen years...

...During the Vietnam era, the liberal media and liberal Congress developed a symbiotic relationship, with exposes in one forum feeding new investigations in the other--Senator Frank Church's intelligence investigations being one glaring, and damaging, example...