Eminentoes/Woodstock Democrats
Terzian, P. H.
WOODSTOCK DEMOCRATS by P.H. Terzian iiot since Hendrik Hertzberg's "Beloved Community" have the Democrats furnished such eloquent testimony about their capacity to govern. Sometime around Memorial...
...It was three in the morning then...
...It is impossible to say that the Democrats are dead as a governing party, but it is equally impossible to detect the higher forms of political life...
...and after all, first impressions are usually most revealing, and working titles tell an interesting story...
...Terzian is an editor at the Los Angeles Times...
...So with a "Vigil for America" —although I can guess a less condescending note will be struck before it goes on the air...
...It could be easy for the Democrats and difficult for the country...
...Seizing the political advantage, they were prepared to do anything...
...Consider the "Beloved Community...
...benefit from the disunity of the Left: never the majority party in American politics, they remain the executive talent at a legislative disadvantage...
...Gary Hart, well groomed and garrulous, promises two computers in every garage...
...The only party discipline they have invoked was to expel one errant member from the House...
...Always content to destroy one another in caucus, they remain as divided and embittered as the night they pushed George McGovern onto the convention podium in 1972...
...Alas, he may wait in vain, for the technicians are not very technical...
...But it is also true that the Democrats might prove a familiar axiom...
...no one can imagine what they might do...
...Our national insecurity is answered by a familiar credulity about the Soviet Union...
...Burgeoning steel mills and spreading day-care centers are things of the past...
...Sometime around Memorial Day, it has been revealed, Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter's statistician, and John Y. Brown, Jr., the governor of Kentucky, intend to produce a "Vigil for America"—"a veritable Woodstock of television," says Caddell in a memorandum, that would "attract the greatest array of talent assembled in a decade to put on a national concert that would be heavily promoted throughout campuses, rock stations, etc...
...They are not even lively, their great joy in the past...
...Relieved of responsibility, they have fallen back into reliable refuge: fear, as they know from experience, is what sells newspapers, and they have trafficked in it shamelessly...
...Two decades ago he was strapped into a rocket and propelled around the Earth...
...Numbers keep it deluded...
...It was rejected as the theme of the Carter Administration, but only just...
...The Republicans, meanwhile, can only P.H...
...Clearly, the two parties are headed into a kind of perverted competition...
...We now know that anything is possible, and the challenge is to keep the improbable at arm's length...
...a candlelight parade is not the stuff of which governments are made...
...It was Jimmy Carter's genius to personify the void: a man who could appoint Andrew Young to high office and admonish federal workers to cease living in sin surely deserved a nomination...
...After all, it is the Republicans who provide the opportunity...
...Once upon a time the Democrats supposed they could be the party of "the poor, the black, and the young...
...It is true that Reagan might spoil the prospects for conservatism...
...The Democrats, riding on Watergate, hitched themselves to Jimmy Carter...
...the dawn remains to break...
...A nation is not a "community" and a community, surely, cannot be a nation...
...that is, that exploitation wins elections, even if it fails to govern...
...The helpless appointee is a prisoner of civility...
...it is a perilous state of affairs for them...
...And the Republicans—while they may not be on the side of the angels—nonetheless must behave like angels until the spell is lifted...
...Now they are the standard bearers of the apolitical college students and the audiences of rock stations...
...A rejuvenated Tip O'Neill is the closest they come to charisma...
...What can be said to a senator whose question precludes an answer...
...Even the players are bound to repeat their lines...
...No one can now say whether that will come to pass, but the larger question is to judge the greater peril...
...And a good advertiser can express the same idea a thousand ways...
...A beloved community is just the sort of onanistic fraternity the American public neither needs nor wants...
...There is a danger in a Democratic resurgence...
...The trouble, of course, is that passion is not yet the same as leadership, and while emotion sustains the faithful through elections, it can lead to a painful disappointment in the morning...
...In truth, the Democrats could have appropriated the political middle and resumed the leadership role they played from the time of the Crash to Vietnam...
...Walter Mondale, basking in fatuous applause, pledges to make an appointment with Yuri Andropov the morning after Election Day...
...Indeed it would—and, perhaps, Caddell is wiser than he suspects: the Democrats are expert at vigils, and they've got the candles, all right...
...Of course, the Democrats have never flourished in a vacuum...
...Politics is the art of the probable, not the possible...
...For that matter, they have exploited a passive ritual— congressional confirmation—for their abundant theatrics...
...But the question is the identity of the deceased...
...The Democrats are still wrestling with demons...
...Opposition gives it a reason to be alive...
...It is as though the lunatic theorems of Jerry Brown were respectable now that he has been consigned to the political dustbin...
...It would become an event," he adds, "that would bring in substantial revenues and would give us access to a huge segment of normally apolitical young people...
...The consent of the governed should be not to mourn but to exalt, yet the Democrats will wail and lash themselves insensible if that is what power requires...
...Let us just say they are comatose...
...But, in national terms, they have chosen to remain in resolute isolation, dividing and subdividing into political vacuoles, promoting the careers of rump parliamentarians, waving the bloody shirt of class warfare...
...A "Vigil for America" may seem capricious, but it is an ominous kind of caprice...
...Consider the legislature...
...It is an easy thing to oppose the nuclear holocaust, or condemn poverty...
...The curious thing about the Democratic party is that it has neither diagnosed its illness nor even admitted it is sick...
...A "veritable Woodstock" was injurious enough in its original form, but when mob law sets the agenda of a major political party, we should be blessed if Woodstock is all we get...
...Only John Glenn keeps his peace, smiling his bashful smile, and offering a good grip with every handshake...
...Just as Richard Nixon and his minions squandered their electoral triumph, so Ronald Reagan will learn that the Democrats must profit from his mistakes...
...The Democrats have failed at everything except bemoaning Ronald Reagan...
...What did it mean...
...A politician who can reconcile the worst political instincts is bound to succeed, and a statesman who can stir his audience deserves a place on the evening news...
...Alan Cranston, his protrudent jawbone righteously grinding away, intends to devote his every waking hour to the passage of SALT II...
...Like Chesterton's atheist, they have rejected something in order to believe in anything...
...their manifesto is a contradictory brew of trade unionism and high technology...
...The Democrats, unfortunately, are bankrupt...
...And if our electoral process is condemned to a weary quadrennial trade, the range is too open, the standards too porous, for the safety of the Republic...
...It is a discouraging thing, and dangerous, too...
...There is a recurrent shuffling of familiar faces, and while the vocabulary has changed, the issues remain the same...
...Now he has buckled himself into the Democratic capsule and waits for the technicians to send him into a second orbit...
...Our economic travails were not born yesterday, but the Democrats can prescribe the same old nostrums...
...Not since they dismembered themselves under Lyndon Johnson have the Democrats identified the parts of the whole...
...It meant that the Democrats had painted themselves into a lachrymose corner, and there they remain...
...A vigil is scarcely what gladdens the political heart...
Vol. 16 • May 1983 • No. 5
