One-Party State?
Dionne, E. J. Jr.
CHRISTMAS TO CONE The issue of Commonweal, is haunted (we hope) by the ghost of Christmas-to-Come, disguised as a small return envelope for gift subscriptions. This envelope has been designed to...
...It remains an important form of cultural expression for some Jews and Catholics...
...And what is important is that the success of the Democrats was not simply the result of a conscious strategy to ape Republican calls for austerity...
...Other Democrats have different notions of what new ideas should emerge from their party—ideas like national health insurance, a national oil company, tax increases for the well-to-do (it used to be called tax reform), government sponsorship of cooperatives and the like...
...In the mid-term elections of 1934, 1946 or 1966, party victories pointed in a clear direction...
...And the party won key governorships in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and swept the board in Minnesota, picking up two Senate seats (including Hubert Humphrey's) and the governorship...
...But the Democratic congressional contingent is also coming to include more and more northern and western representatives who have a middle-class skepticism about the value of big government...
...These Democrats are closer to the traditionalists, and have Ted Kennedy as their leader...
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...And there are the cultural issues like abortion and gay rights, which arouse the passions of many urban Catholics, who share both the old conservatism of the pre-New Deal party and the welfare state liberalism of the later party...
...In the main, two groups made the party their political home: Southern whites, animated by a hatred of the Republican party and an insistence on the segregation of the South...
...with a respectable base from which to launch its 1980 assault on Jimmy Carter...
...It is a fight over the role of the public sector...
...And help a friend to a year of what we are determined to make a better magazine than ever...
...This envelope has been designed to fall out of the magazine, slide itself under your pen, and leap into the nearest mailbox...
...J. Dionne, Jr., is a member of the staff of the New York Times...
...The important battles over the nation's future were between the progressive and stand-pat business wings of the Republican party...
...In fact the Republicans suffer from the simple fact that they are the minority party, a position the Democrats held before the New Deal...
...But as the minority party, they'll just have to wait for the catastrophe no one wants, or for the Democrats to decide what they will pull out of their bag of principles next...
...The Democratic battle cry this year seemed to be, "I have principles . . . and if you don't like these, I have other principles...
...E. J. dionne, jr...
...Yet in many ways, the new factions are concerned about issues well-removed from those of the traditional Democrats, just as New Dealers often had little in common with Southern Democrats—or partisans of the northern machines...
...Many neo-conservatives have argued that the real fight in the Democratic party is around the cultural issues, This they sa'y is a pitched battle between members of something they call "the new class''—approximately the college-educated middle class—and the old working class, which on these matters often allies itself with the business elite...
...They also remain a formidable force in presidential election years...
...Paul Tsongas, who defeated Ed Brooke in Massachusetts , is quite far to the left on almost every issue, though his low-key style may have suggested to voters that he was more conservative than his record...
...Lots of the Democratic winners on Tuesday were anything but right wing...
...As they have since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats proved that they find their opportunities and take 'em, even when this means stealing the Republicans blind...
...Meanwhile, the Republicans were where the action was...
...after the Civil War, the Democrats were the party of the "provincials...
...The Republicans will have to be content with watching all this from the sidelines...
...The New Deal party was a party of the public sector...
...But exactly what voters were trying to say by voting Democratic was unclear, because the Democrats have rarely been less certain as to what they were about...
...On these issues, the "new class" is split, while working class voters— especially trade unionists—and blacks would be closer to the Kennedy wing...
...The party gained about a dozen seats in the House and three in the Senate...
...So on election night, Jerry Brown was talking about the need "to reverse the cycle of excessive government spending and activity," and calling for "a more disciplined, more austere approach to the public sector...
...STEALING THE GOP'S ISSUES The election was listless from the start and lumbered to a conclusion on Tuesday night that neither greatly pleased nor seriously dispirited any of the contending battalions...
...On this model, it is the Browns and McGoverns against the Moynihans and the Jacksons...
...In the party system that dominated the U.S...
...and northern urban Catholics, spurned by the Protestant moralists inside the party of Lincoln...
...It was hardly a brilliant performance for the mid-term elections, but some of the victories had special significance...
...The New Deal changed all that, and Watergate reinforced the Democrats' paramount position...
...In one sense, it is the very looseness of the Democratic alliance which robbed election night this year of any dramatic power...
...They can be confident that they are not about to disappear...
...And it piced up a half dozen governorships...
...A lot of liberals won, including many who ran under the protective coloration of austerity...
...If it does not, please help it...
...All told, it was not a bad showing for the Democrats...
...This year, things were so unresolved that no one really knew what to make of the returns...
...But the real fight is probably between the Browns, the Gary Harts and their middle-class supporters on one end, and the Ted Kennedy-Walter Mondale Democrats on the other...
...Because each party had been forced by circumstances to stand for some specific set of ideas and programs, the voters were able to send a clear message through the ballot box...
...Complicating the picture are out-and-out conservatives like King and Robert Short in Minnesota (who lost on Tuesday...
...Because the majority party had the best chance of holding on to the reins of power, competing factions naturally flocked to it in search of real influence...
...The fact is that a lot of the Democrats who won from the right—notably Ed King in Massachusetts—ran as conservatives because they were conservatives...
...For a lot of voters, voting Democratic still means what it did two, three, four decades ago...
...In state after state, even very liberal Democrats promised tax cuts and talked of "leaner budgets" and making "tough decisions...
...Tuesday's elections provided few clues as to how this fight will turn out...
...The election leaves the G.O.P...
...Like the heirs of the abolitionists who kept voting Republican long after slavery and the Civil War were at the center of popular concern, these Democrats cannot bring themselves to abandon the party of their great-grandparents or of FDR...
...But the main story remains the remarkable pliability of the Democratic party...
...At the other end of the spectrum, Charles Percy survived a tough challenge in Illinois...
...If the Republicans cannot rise when issues like inflation and high taxes are on the voters' minds, these Republicans ask, then when can they...
...Mid-term election___________ ONE-PARTY STATE...
...Yet the Jerry Brown Democrats are talking about, in Brown's election night words, "self-reliance and mutual aid in the private sector" as "a very legitimate and timely idea...
...The Republicans were left holding Kemp-Roth...
...Indeed, said Brown of the Democrats, "perhaps now, for the first time in 50 years, a new idea is about to emerge from this party...
...At least for the short term, the battle for America's politicalfuture is going on inside the Democratic party...
...But it's worth recalling the Democratic party of the olden days, if only to remind ourselves that there's nothing unusual about one party being subordinate...
...This, plus some old-fashioned welfare statism...
...Thad Cochran's victory in the Mississippi Senate race—he was the first Republican to be popularly elected to the Senate in the state's history—confirmed a trend in Deep South politics that began with the Goldwater sweep of the cotton belt in 1964...
...What did it really mean to vote Democratic, if doing so, as in Massachusetts, meant voting for both strong liberals and strong conservatives...
...To be sure, the elections were not a complete disaster for the G.O.P...
...And it still represents a kind of truncated class consciousness for many urban workers who agree with the famous New Deal slogan: "If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic...
...Interestingly, President Carter, who can feel fairly good about Tuesday's election results, stands somewhere between the two factions...
...It is these regular voters who make the Democratic party such an important prize for the competing ideological factions...
...They simply want to cut the public sector down...
...The Republicans counted in their ranks both ardent defenders of private capital and reformers whose views often looked very much like those of the Socialists...
...For some Republicans, the need to have to sit on the sidelines while the Democrats fight the important battles with each other is a sign of a fundamental sickness that ails their party...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
