Editorials
commonweal THE POLITICS OF DISTRUST ONCE UPON ATIME, before the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler, the Cold War, and nuclear weapons, the historic function of political conventions was to provide...
...The Democrats promise to make Ronald Reagan the issue...
...There is apparently nothing wrong with America that less taxation and government intervention at home, and more guns and government intervention abroad, cannot cure...
...Ronald Reagan: The Republican convention was noteworthy for two events: the choice of George Bush as Reagan's running mate and the rhetorical effort of the candidate to make his conservatism a legitimate successor to FDR's New Deal...
...The Republicans promise to make Jimmy Carter's performance in office the issue...
...Distrust of the New Reagan was the uniting element for the Democratic convention, and obviously will be the leading theme of Carter's campaign...
...that is why the demand that the candidate spell out his differences with the party's platform before nomination...
...The Democratic convention was deceptive in this regard: it took place at a moment when the fright of a twenty-percent inflation rate was receding and the unemployment rate, especially in sectors whose unions were heavily represented at Madison Square Garden, was increasing...
...But it is also true that the conventions point up what Anderson lacks—a political party...
...The outcome of the election could hang on whether partisans of that liberalism see the best hope for its future in a vote for Carter or a vote for Anderson—or even a vote for the "new populism" of Ronald Reagan...
...The Big Question in this election seems to be, Whom do you distrust least, and on which issues...
...The politics of distrust are certainly dispiriting, but this year they are also the only realistic politics in view...
...But the stakes have become too high—the impact of an American administration on the lives of Americans and on the peace of the world, too great—for the amusement to last...
...Already the inflation rate is jogging upward again, and prices and government spending may soon be the issues putting liberalism once more on the defensive...
...And whatever could be said for allowing greater opportunity for future delegates to vote their consciences, these delegates were not chosen on the basis of their capacities for deliberation and conscientious choice...
...The reason to distrust Anderson is that he is the Jimmy Carter of 1980...
...They would have had no trouble carrying out that task in 1980...
...It is partly a matter of Reagan's long-held ideological views, but it is also a matter of the Republicans' present platform...
...And even the ludicrous MX missile and the half-baked registration scheme address problems that are real and that opponents often prefer to ignore...
...Personally Kennedy was the election campaign's first victim of distrust...
...But his political viewpoint elicits considerable distrust as well...
...Many of the failures ascribed to Carter are in fact the failures of Congress...
...The "open convention" was a highly debatable notion: since the primaries, virtually nothing has transpired, excepting the silly business of Billygate, that Democratic voters were not fully aware of—so why set aside those commitments...
...But so did Jimmy Carter in 1976: remember zero-based budgeting...
...For instance: John Anderson: The convention period has not been easy on Anderson...
...Can we trust Jimmy Carter...
...That is why the insistence on a $12 billion figure in the jobs plank...
...Four years ago the Carter candidacy promised to end the distrust dominating American politics ever since Watergate had been piled upon Vietnam and assassinations...
...was the underlying motif of the Democratic convention...
...But if that liberalism is far from dead, it is also far from flourishing...
...It was one of many promises the president has been unable to keep...
...It's worth noting that his convention speech contained very few specifics as to actual programs for carrying out the liberal agenda...
...We have no choice but to plunge into the usual gaps between substance and symbol, reality and rhetoric, that the political conventions exhibited so exuberantly, and make the best sense possible...
...But that will occur eventually—after tax relief disproportionately for the privileged...
...Most discouraging of all he has failed to address persuasively the question of inflation...
...It has, as yet, demonstrated no hold in the institutions of U.S...
...Despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses, Carter was never able—indeed, didn't even try—to build a popular movement that would support administration policies in the halls of Congress...
...that is why the penalties urged on Democrats who don't support ERA...
...The first was meant to signal Reagan's openness to compromise, the second his concern for the working people and minorities whom Republicanism has seemed to shun...
...The fact remains that inflation consistently ranks higher on the public's list of concerns, and that no full-employment strategy can succeed unless it is convincingly linked to an anti-inflation strategy...
...There are ample grounds for distrust here...
...In foreign policy, too, Anderson is today what Carter was in 1976: a penitent supporter of the war in Vietnam who 29 August 1980: 451 advocates cutting the military budget...
...Despite the fact that None of the Above appears to be the first choice of the American people, no such creature will be on the ballot in November— nor in the White House during the years leading up to 1984...
...Why believe that Anderson, any more than Carter, can maintain that position in the face of domestic and international pressures to do otherwise...
...Anderson has some ideas—the gasoline tax, for example, and a leaning toward an incomes policy based on tax incentives...
...Carter's position on abortion is surely closer to the public's sentiments than either the GOP call for a constitutional amendment or the Democratic platform's demand for Medicaid funding...
...Both steps are necessary to the creation of a New Reagan...
...And the reason, again, is distrust...
...Commonweal: 452...
...But the agitation on each of these issues expressed the fear that Jimmy Carter is a man with no ideological anchor and, once again in the White House (without even the reckoning of a second-term bid), accountable to nothing in the Democratic party tradition...
...Kennedy's speech and the feelings he stirred should lay to rest the cliche that the so-called old liberalism is dead...
...His "national" candidacy still appears to be a sort of water bug skittering on the very surface of American politics, kept there, in some ways, by its very lightness and fragility...
...But no post-convention analysis can ignore the phenomenon of a defeated candidate who nonetheless dominated a nominating convention...
...The politics of 1980 are the politics of distrust...
...politics...
...He is a fresh face who combines integrity, associated" with small-town or rural America, and efficiency, expressed in his emphasis on "hard truths" and innovation...
...The Reagan tax policy is no doubt genuinely viewed by his followers as a means of assisting the disadvantaged...
...The revived New Deal coalition that Carter momentarily assembled at the '76 convention was frittered away while the president sought to establish himself with Washington and the business world...
...As well as a fresh face...
...Issue by issue, there was as much to be said for the administration's case as for its critics...
...indeed they would have had additional raw material in the self-importance, drama-mongering, and instant higher wisdom of the television commentators...
...Why should Anderson, lacking even that initial base and not known for his cloakroom skills either, fare better...
...Teddy Kennedy: Kennedy, of course, is no longer a presidential candidate...
...The liberal emphasis on employment is crucial, and it is to the credit of a supposedly dying creed that "jobs, jobs, jobs" is, for the moment, the leading theme of the campaign...
...Jimmy Carter: Here we come to the heart of distrust territory...
...In short, which scares you the most, a Carter whom people fear cannot be measured by his words or a Reagan whom people fear can be...
...It is natural to attribute his drop in the polls to the concentration of media attention on the conventions...
...commonweal THE POLITICS OF DISTRUST ONCE UPON ATIME, before the Great Depression, Adolf Hitler, the Cold War, and nuclear weapons, the historic function of political conventions was to provide a Peter Finley Dunne or an H. L. Mencken with opportunities for documenting the more ridiculous aspects of human nature...
...Likewise the Carter case against wage-price controls and against a specific dollarfigure for a jobs program has substantial merit...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
