The Greening of the Democratic Party
Olson, Kevin S.
Kevin S. Olson The Greening of the Democratic Party (MIAMI BEACH) - It is true that the real business of a convention goes on in seventeenth-floor hotel suites, in smoke-filled rooms where nervous...
...but there is an incomparable sense of exhilaration gained from jostling about in the absolute bedlam of the convention floor, the inhabitants of which read like a Who's Who of the liberal left...
...This strange and fearful species - a curious amalgam of the arrogant collegiate, the militant minorities, Beautiful People, Ugly People and academicians .- is the McGovernite, and it is in full force everywhere...
...Tell all the people, indeed...
...Sitting in the creek with me on this particular day was a cross-section of youth from all over the country: students from New York, hippie girls from Montana, a worker from Kokomo...
...The mind boggles...
...The McGovernites leave no stone unturned in their ideological battle, interrogating every delegate, canvassing every section of the convention floor, fighting ferociously when backed into a comer by the credentials committee...
...In the aisle next to New York stand two well-dressed, middle-aged men - holding hands...
...stronger defense and weaker defense...
...no clear sense of mission animating the statement...
...During this 31-state odyssey I made a point of talking with the locals, attempting to gauge the political atmosphere of the city, the town, the farm...
...Monday dissolves into Tuesday, into Wednesday - on the floor it is all the same, a classical debauchery deafened by an endles parade of unintelligible speakers...
...Over in Virginia an Indian, replete with beads, fringes and headfeathers, reads delegate totals into the microphone...
...more welfare and less welfare...
...sheer good against sheer evil...
...Just tell everyone you see...
...What makes the McGovernite run...
...more equality and more inequality...
...Paul H. Weaver is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University...
...Gloria Steinem attacking the chauvinists...
...The talk got around to politics, and it turned out that every single one of them was working, in one way or another, for George McGovern...
...Or is that Larry O'Brien telling the delegates to shut up and clear the aisles...
...But such moments are rare, and it is obvious that this is their last hurrah, for they are vastly outnumbered by a new species of political animal which has invaded and conquered the Democratic party...
...And it is a powerful appeal...
...I discovered that many citizens, possibly a large majority, are indifferent or hostile to McGovern...
...At one point I am told by a turtleneck medallion that ninety per cent of the delegates are new and innocent, and I reply that, after all, it is much nicer to bump into a Gloria Steinem or Mario Thomas than a sweaty Daley delegate, but the force of his point does not hit me until a few minutes later, when I feel a tug at my coatsleeve: "Excuse me, were you in my Pol...
...In every sense of the phrase, the platform is an expression of endless liberalism - and that is something which all of us should worry about...
...And on and on it goes, a sybaritic soiree extending from prime time through the wee hours of the morning...
...more bureaucracy and less bureaucracy...
...The Senator is a deity, albeit a humble one, and his supporters are thoroughly solifidian...
...Mix these two, add a dose of capriciousness to the ennui of the American populace, and we have a formidable and unpredictable brew...
...Certainly this is not a platform that will in fact give the people "their country back again" (whatever that means), let alone a clear sense of national purpose...
...It all adds up to nothing more than the sum of its contradictory parts...
...I wonder...
...They do not take into account, however, the piety, the evangelism of his movement...
...In the next aisle over Norman Mailer is interviewing Gloria Steinem, and a few yards down Abbie Hoffmann and Jerry Rubin are interviewing a bewildered midwestern senator...
...The impact of this struck me, not in Miami Beach, but far, far away, as I camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon...
...The proselytism, the intolerant self-righteousness, the spiritual ardency of the convention are all suddenly explained: McGovernism is a religion, a faith which promises salvation...
...The effervescence does not mask the political import of what is happening, however...
...Most political analysts assert that McGovern is a reverse Goldwater whose party will swing back to the right after a crashing defeat in November...
...more employment and less employment...
...But it is much less difficult to believe that I have witnessed the most important political convention of the twentieth century...
...She is a California delegate...
...Oh, they are there when Wallace is wheeled to the podium - leaping up and cheering from the Texas and Alabama delegations, waving red-white-and-blue placards...
...The party continues to advocate liberal programs but has lost faith in the liberal vision of their purpose, as is illustrated by its fantasized picture of American society and, most sordidly, in its advocacy of race and sex quotas in hiring...
...A few yards back John Galbraith gazes at his surrounding Massachusetts delegation, then confers with an excited Arthur Schlesinger, perhaps over Mc-Govern's latest economic convolution...
...Come home, America" - the words which ring through the auditorium are spellbindingly evangelical, piercing to a need for faith that lies deep in the American soul...
...But (c) again, like true believers, McGovern's followers believe quite strongly in miracles...I cannot believe that the American people would be so foolish as to elect George McGovern...
...For a long time, liberalism had an admirable sense of the location and urgency of needless suffering and injustice in our society and a clear idea of its own political purpose - to reduce suffering and as liberals came under the late 1960s as liberalism discovered that it and its programs were sometimes the source of public problems and private such suffering and as liberals came under attack from their former allies and from the beneficiaries of their reforms, its heart was broken...
...Observers began to write of the death or end of liberalism, and liberals found themselves confused and uncertain...
...2) McGovern's appeal is not to reason (the hard facts of his radicalism, if broadcasted, would deflate him instantly), but to the emotions, the soul and the spirit...
...I converse with several of them and conclude that the passions by which they are motivated are only partially ideological...
...PUBLIC DISCOURSE (continued from page 4) reforms and admonitions there is - nothing...
...102 class last quarter...
...But: (1) many, many people in this country are dissatisfied with the status quo...
...Even the bleary eyes of the journalist can see that the Old Guard, the traditional Democrats who moulded the party and ran it for decades, are suddenly no longer around...
...Finally, on the last night of the convention, I discover the missing link...
...Jimmy Breslin swears at a reporter...
...That's what I'm doing, and it's working...
...Is that Fred Harris attacking the rich...
...Their ideological battle is in truth a holy war...
...For this reporter, the Democratic convention came as a strange interlude in the middle of an eleven-thousand-mile journey 'round the country...
...Most indubitaably, but who - it is Laura G...
...And this, to judge by the fervor in their eyes, is only the beginning...
...It comes to me as I listen to McGovern's acceptance speech, for the words, the tone, the plaintive voice are not those of a politician, but of a prairie preacher...
...no underlying unity among the disparate parts...
...no intelligible vision of what a good or ideal America might look like...
...Discontent is not the sole property of the Left, it affects everyone from Des Moine to Cape Cod, Biloxi to Phoenix...
...John Lindsay sits dejectedly in the front of the New York delegation, dreaming of what might have been...
...Kevin S. Olson The Greening of the Democratic Party (MIAMI BEACH) - It is true that the real business of a convention goes on in seventeenth-floor hotel suites, in smoke-filled rooms where nervous delegates are laid on the rack...
...more economy and less economy...
...And in all directions is an endless clamor, a sea of jubilant faces, a chaotic saturnalia of fashion...
...Not content with unceremoniously deposing the old, traditional Democrats, they relax only when they have succeeded in nominating for President the most radical serious candidate in our nation's history, a man comparable, in recent times, only to old Henry Wallace and his rosy-colored Progressives back in '48...
...And it is just possible that (a) the radicalization of the Democratic party will be permanent, and (b) barring further miracles, the Democrats will become the minority party and the following years will be Republican ones...
...It has been repackaged for the seventies, clothed in the latest political fads, but in reality the Greening of the Democratic Party is the same Utopian dream, the same dangerous mixture of collectivism and romanticism that has historically victimized the Left...
...The 1972 Democratic platform shows that this crisis has not yet been resolved...
...The sight reminds one of a king-sized Bernstein cocktail party, for everywhere, famous or nondescript, is radical chic: adolescent longhairs, dashiki'd blacks, middle-aged men in turtleneck medallions, alienated professors, rich matrons with "Boycott Lettuce" buttons...
...No clear sense of the purposes and goals to be achieved by these programs...
...In one way or another, the platform is for more centralization and more decentralization...
...higher taxes and lower taxes...
...It is, however, 110 degrees in the summer, so most of one's daylight time is spent sitting in a creek that flows into the Colorado River...
...Yet I cannot place the missing quality, the sociological characteristic that can explain the Mc-Govern phenomenon...
...It is simply an amalgam of old Great Society type liberal policies, to be applied like bandaids to the body politic at random...
...Tell all the people that you see," said a student, "to work for McGovern...
...The bottom of the Canyon is a sort of summer mecca for the young, offering unparalleled scenery and the total absence of the Establishment...
...The delegates will not clear the aisles, they are having too much fun: Michigan visits Indiana, Texas says hello to Kentucky and that man over there is drunk...
...Up front in the California section, hell hath no fury like two women arguing - especially when they are Bella Abzug and Shirley McClaine screaming about feminist strategy...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
