The Public Discourse
Weaver, Paul H.
Endless Liberalism Few things in American politics are quite so dispensable as the platforms of our national political parties. In general, they are laborious unreadable compendi-ums of platitudes...
...I even propose to ignore the astronomical - and conveniently unspecified - cost of the entire democratic program and the tax increases and socio-economic distortions it would surely engender...
...as if full employment and zero inflation and high growth and radically increased government spending were well within the demonstrated ability of modern economic management to attain simultaneously...
...These resources were on hand at a moment of unusual opportunity...
...There is a serious case to be made for (and against) each, and only a mindless partisan would dismiss them out of hand...
...They were also advocates of truth and honesty in politics, and presumably in platforms as well...
...The virtue of these two sections is that they are informed by a clear and realistic sense of purpose, state honestly the problem and choices involved and make realistic policy proposals that are presumptively worth what they cost...
...The platform committee and its staff included several very talented experts on public policy and American politics...
...as if overpromising and verbal hysteria had been shown to be a good thing...
...Now in all fairness, I must admit some parts of the platform do begin to live up to the promises of these circumstances...
...Most notable in this respect is the Section on the environment...
...There are whole sentences that are literally meaningless (e.g., "What do the people want?...They want a life that makes us all feel that life is worth living," or "We believe in hard work as a fair measure of our willingness to achieve...
...The document reads as if the 1960s had never occurred-as if experience and social science had never called traditional liberal social policy into the gravest question...
...For of all of its characteristics, what is most striking and dismaying about this document is not the specifics of its parts but the spirit or tone which suffuses the platform as a whole...
...Neither do I propose to discuss the obsessive and often illiberal egalitarianism which forms a major motif of the platform...
...Thus, what one encounters in this document is the politics of fantasy-out of touch with reality, inchoate, reckless, surging with passionate anger and aflame with Utopian hope...
...It even advocates what nearly every professional economist now holds to be the cornerstone of any serious and balanced attack on pollution - imposing a tax on each polluter's discharge into the environment-but which is now entirely absent from federal pollution policy which the Democrats have played the leading role in enacting...
...A second part of the platform which reflects a degree of learning from the 1960s (and the election result of the 1970s) deals with crime...
...One would be tempted to call this a spirit of demagoguery were it not for the fact that it is born of sincerity rather than cynicism...
...or childishly sentimental ("We believe that war is a waste of human life...
...Indeed, they professed to be doing just that...
...In general, they are laborious unreadable compendi-ums of platitudes and nonsense...
...It actually admits that cleaning up pollution has cost - in reduced economic growth, in increased public expenditure, in higher unemployment levels- and that these must be balanced against the goal of clean environment...
...This condition is reflected in the platform's abysmal level of discourse...
...As soon as they appear they quietly fall off the edge of the world and are never heard of again...
...The extraordinary thing about the 1972 platform of the Democratic party is that it is no exception to this general rule...
...Its principal recommendation is direct and sensible: improvement of the system of law enforcement, from police to court and prison, so that more criminals are caught and convicted...
...The political alliances and traditional programmatic commitments of the party were in disarray or disgrace after the shattering experience of the 1960s...
...The Democratic party has finally begun to take crime seriously as a public problem in its own right, rather than as a nonphenomenon invented by demagogues or an epi-phenomenon of poverty and injustice...
...as if the sharp limits on government's ability to improve society in chosen ways had not long since been demonstrated...
...There seemed to be no limit constraining its end product...
...For as one reads and re-reads this platform, one suddenly realizes that beneath and beyond the carload of programs, policies, (continued on page 14...
...This section makes no glowing promises, holds forth no Utopian vision of an immaculate future and even manages to make no dishonest attack on the current administration...
...the final document contained over 20,000 words...
...This fantasy spirit is also reflected in an almost wilful disregard of our recent national experience...
...This must surely be a first for any party platform and is an admirable expression of competence and intellectual honesty in politics...
...There was reason to expect that it might be different...
...Even so, this section is on balance a serious one...
...and others so blatantly ridiculous ("We must recognize and fulfill the social contracts that exist between the family-farm producers of food and the non-farm consumer...
...I make no specific reference here to any one particular item in the platform's bulging arsenal of policy and program proposals...
...Nobody seems to object or even notice...
...In 1972 there was no incumbent Democratic administration to defend...
...A majority of its members were McGovern delegates and felt no need to defend the approaches of earlier decades...
...They had abundant time and information: the committee held twenty hearings in a dozen cities over a period of six weeks, after which there were further meetings for discussion...
...The rest of its recommendations, alas, are more dubious - there is no reason to think that better-paid and better-educated police are better police, and it seems profligate to propose huge expenditures on addict and criminal rehabilitation when nobody knows how to rehabilitate such people successfully, etc...
...They could admit errors of the past and profit from them...
...that one can only wonder whether anyone was in charge at all...
...I myself do not find it attractive or justifiable, but I can see how others might...
...But these are only symptoms of a deeper and more serious disorder...
...The rest of the platform is almost wholly lacking in these characteristics - and that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with it and with the convention that sired it...
...But this is not the plact to take them up...
...The nation was clearly in need of a new political formula- and the 1972 platform committee was not in a bad position to create one...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
