What the Democrats should do:

...Finally, since at least the Goldwater campaign of 1964, they have developed a far larger group of small givers than the Democrats have...

...The last defense of old-time liberals, it seems, is their claim that government can't really change all that much in American life, anyway, and that "reality" will overcome Reagan...

...In fact, it is a long-standing weakness of those who run the national media to label those positions they happen to share (conservative economics, liberal social policy) as being "pragmatic" and those with which they happen to disagree as being "ideological...

...Whether Reagan's politics result in successful realignment or not, a realignment does not end history.ment or not, a realignment does not end history...

...If their choices are Republican choices, let them go to the Republicans...

...One is reminded of a phrase by a member of Total Womanhood a few years ago who was attacking Norman Lear's TV shows as presenting an unreal image of the American family...

...We often overlook that the most successful "New" politician in America is Ronald Reagan...

...The presidential possibility on the Democratic side who seems most aware of this possibility is Jerry Brown...

...The problem that the Democrats face is that it is hard to find issues where they can draw solid party lines...

...The Left Democrats are in disarray, lacking a clear spokesperson or a clear program...

...The nature of this argument is a rather odd one for a self-professed ' 'liberal" to use, and one that reminds us again that liberalism as a serious political force on the national level seems to have vanished somewhere in the early years of the Carter administration...

...Republican victories partly reflected the fact that the Senate is the last bastion in America of rotten-borough politics, so that the twenty Republican Senate seats out of the thirty from the fifteen least populous states in the Union more than cancel the thirteen Democratic seats out of the twenty from the ten most populous states...

...Sixteen years after McKinley's 1896 election Progressivism and Woodrow Wilson were in the saddle...

...How...

...What should they be: peace, environment, stop the Moral Majority, left economic issues...

...The Republicans have the majority, as they used to say to the Democrats: it's their job to find the votes to govern...

...Whichever ones work would become the thrust of party fundraising, even though some ox of a party minority will be gored...

...They cannot be seen to be obstructing the Reagan program, which must be given a "fair chance.'' (It is not clear that there is enough strength or will among congressional Democrats to oppose Reagan in any event, but they cannot allow Reagan to blame his failures on their non-cooperation...

...perhaps the same may be true of congressional leaders - we should remember that Mansfield, Byrd, McCormack, Albert, and O'Neill have none of them been a great congressional leader...

...but that's not a luxury their party has any more...

...Twelve years after Jackson's election in '28, the opposition Whigs, led by "Old Tippecanoe" William Henry Harrison, swept to power...

...The last four Democratic presidential candidacies include two (Humphrey in 1968 and incumbent President Carter in 1980) who most certainly would have been nominated under an unreformed system and two (McGovern in 1972 and Carter in 1976) whose nominations can clearly be laid at the door of the "new" political rules...

...You get corporate money if you have corporate politics, but there's no way the Democrats can ever compete with Republicans on this score, especially because following the same corporate priorities loses them a good proportion of their voters...

...he seems more comfortable personally with the worst specimens of "old politics" rather than with any popularly-based movement...

...The party reforms are a symptom, not a cause, of the Democrats' political problem...

...Conservatives, on the other hand, seem now to be suggesting that what in fact will turn out to be relatively marginal shifts in the allocation of government spending and in its size (as Russell Baker pointed out, Reagan proposes to cut that 67-mile pile of thousand-dollar bills to something like 64½ miles) will somehow bring a new paradise...

...They must recognize the "new realities...

...Surely Carter's performamie demonstrated this "pragmatically...

...So if "pragmatism" is defined as picking the winner, there's no evidence that party bosses did better in 1968 and 1980 than the party electorate did in 1972 and 1976...

...but Ted Kennedy, the man who might clearly and strongly articulate such a program, seems oddly astraddle the old and the new...

...5. For activists in the countryside, in the words of William Seward: "Organize organize organize...

...First, the Republicans get the majority of corporate money, as they have since the Civil War...

...Technical expertise in modern politics depends upon money...

...The Democrats have to learn to abandon the habits of an automatic majority party (consensual blur), or they won't be a majority party much longer...

...The discussion about the technical side of politics has taken on a tone - classically American - which separates technique from ideas...

...Nothing like that happened this time, even though the Republicans now hold a fair share of Southern seats...

...It sometimes seems that the new liberal idol is the great god PAC (Political Action Committee...

...American families were different," she said...

...Clinging ignominiously to the tatters of the robes of power is the best way to lose even those tatters...

...There has been much talk in the last decade or so about the erosion of the power of congressional leaders as well as of presidents...

...And if Reagan starts the country on an anti-Communist crusade, in which El Salvador is only the first salvo, he will find neoconservatives like Jackson and Moynihan (not to mention their allies in his own administration like Jeanne Kirkpatrick) marching right with him...

...Even the shrunken liberal bloc in the Senate comJIM CHAPIN, national director of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, taught history at Yale and Rutgers...

...Pushing "social issues" has been an important glue for the New Right, and the thrust of the New Right has not been an unimportant contributing factor to the new Republican position...

...In 1954 the Democrats recaptured Congress...

...A long-time Democratic party activist, he was an alternate delegate to the 1980 presidential convention...

...but it does mean that on issues that involve the basic integrity of the Democratic coalition, members have to make a choice...

...If none of the major presidential candidates can necessarily be expected to be sources of new ideas, what about Congress...

...So his duty is to hold his party together at all costs to vote as a bloc as much as possible in a way to exacerbate Republican divisions...

...Not detailed alternatives, just clear ones...

...Carter's politics last year were labeled "pragmatic" as against the "ideological" positions of Kennedy...

...The same people who complain that the Democrats have no ideas will be most vigilant in attacking any ideas they do develop as outside their limited assumptions for American politics...

...You get small contributors by having politics that appeal to them, above all issue-oriented politics...

...And fourteen years after FDR and the New Deal came the elections of 1946, which opened a dozen years of Cold War conservatism in which the dominant national figures were Senator Joseph McCarthy and President Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...pares favorably in size to the tiny remnant of Senate liberals left in the early 1950s...

...It is to some degree uncertain why this is so...

...He offered ostentatious support to Ike, who didn't really need it, at the same time doing his best to cut the GOP president off at the knees when no one was looking...

...And Eisenhower's coattails that year were far longer than Reagan's this time...

...On the face of it, there was nothing pragmatic about Rockefeller's politics, either by the standard of winning national elections or of carrying out effective policies, and certainly nothing pragmatic about Carter's politics by either standard (i.e., he neither won reelection nor made a dent in the nation's economic troubles...

...Is this new Congress conservative...

...Resistance to the "Moral Majority" aspects of the Republican party - with the major exception of abortion - unites almost all Democrats...

...That decision alone shows much of what has been wrong with the Washington Democrats for the last few years...

...In a politics which is largely, and increasingly, conducted without the lower classes , the party of the Right has a number of built-in advantages...

...Carter was the only Democrat who could have won the 1976 election, and Carter was certainly one of the weaker candidates the Democrats could have put forward in 1980...

...What about the minorities, the eighty percent of the workforce that is not now unionized, the expanding "pink-collar workforce...

...Unfortunately, Brown has isolated himself from key left constituencies by his support of the budget-balancing constitutional amendment and by the cultural gap between his style (the man who seems to believe that everything is process) and that especially of Easterners...

...Now the vast majority of elected Republicans at all levels of government have similar positions as supporters of the Human Life Amendment and the death penalty...

...Whether Reagan's politics succeed or fail, such an alternative-that-is-no-alternative will not sell...

...Put the thirty-five conservative Democrats to the test - either they are primarily conservatives or they are primarily Democrats...

...Working within the range of positions enjoying healthy majority support (say, at the midterm convention), sample a wide variety of direct fundraising appeals with different themes and different signers...

...Reagan seems to be demonstrating that the decline of the presidency is overstated...

...Of the potential presidential candidates, Walter Mondale seems to be offering an uneasy mixture of Tsongas, Carter, and old-style liberalism...

...SO intelligent Democratic strategy at different levels of the party would be something like this: 1. At the senatorial level, a consciously minoritarian strategy that stresses voting as a bloc in ways designed to splinter the Republican majority...

...That an incumbent president was defeated by such a margin at this particular moment was indeed significant...

...This does not mean that you follow an all-out liberal course and start expelling people who don't toe the line...

...2. In the House, if the paper Democratic majority is not a real one, admit it...

...This new state of affairs has led to an odd reversal of roles...

...Bland general appeals for the party are not pragmatic...

...Half the American electorate is not voting...

...Sixteen years after Jefferson's victory for agrarian democracy in 1800, came the neo-Federalist Monroe administration (a tariff, big navy, National Bank, internal improvements...

...In 1952 the Republicans did not seriously contest the quarter of the congressional seats inihe South, but they swept two-thirds of the remaining House seats...

...So even if there does emerge a new Republican majority, the Democrats should remember the history of Reagan himself from 1964 to 1980...

...Even if the worst is true, and Reagan's politics begin a new alignment, remember that the minority party usually takes command of the political system (either directly or in terms of the drift of national policy) halfway through an alignment...

...On the face of it, then, the troubles of the Democratic party look far less than the media has been making of them...

...So, though he has moved to increase the representation of Southern conservative Democrats on key committees, he has satisfied neither wing of his theoretical majority...

...These "pragmatic" advisers masterminded the issueless first two months of the Kennedy campaign that took him from sixty percent to thirty percent in the Democratic polls...

...But Humphrey in 1968 was a weaker candidate than Gene McCarthy would have been, while any candidate (not just McGovern) would have lost in 1972...

...4. For the leaders running for president, articulate clear alternatives now...

...But as at least the white population is melting into a suburban media-dominated culture, traditional Democratic affiliations are vanishing or weakening...

...The social linkages for this atomized society are media images of community...

...In fact, only in the election of 1972 have the Democrats come near matching the Republicans in "small" contributions...

...It could be possible to integrate new themes, such as rein-dustrialization and environmentalism, into a coherent program of positive government action...

...3. At the Democratic National Committee, choices must be made...

...The media are arguing that there is a division in both patties between "pragmatists" and "ideologues," represented in the one party by, say, Baker and Helms, and in the other by, for example, Tsongas and Kennedy...

...As one Eastern left-wing woman said of Brown, "Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're one of us...

...They are the first party this century to retain a majority of the nation's governorships in the year that the other party gained the presidency...

...A number of saving formulas have emerged: the party reforms have "gone too.far," the Democrats need expertise on the technical side, they heed to have a wider fund-raising base, and they must again become "the party of ideas.'' Almost all these formulae are either wrong or they beg the question...

...What about the fact that the plans of the Moral Majority alienate large proportions of the politically active middle classes, that the economic program of the Reaganites writes off nearly half the country, that their racial and linguistic biases alienate groups which will be the majority of the California population before the end of the century, and that their foreign policy runs the risk of once again sending American boys to die in foreign climes...

...Second, the Democrats are now facing a Republican party which is largely united around the propositions put forward by Senator Goldwater in 1964 as to economic and defense policy, while the Democratic party itself has no such consensus...

...His defense of Great Society programs seems more elegaic than practical in tone...

...We can quickly dismiss the "insights" of people like Paul Tsongas, whose "new liberalism" so far seems indistinguishable from the old conservatism: to be specific, unions should sign productivity contracts, oil profits are o.k., we need nuclear power, Bella Abzug is bad (not "pragmatic...

...Yes, it is...

...Reagan's sweep helped the Republicans gain twelve Senate seats and a majority in that chamber, but their party actually received a minority of the votes cast nationwide for senators...

...The bastion of this politics was Southern California, the "newest" part of the country...

...But the general perception that the Democrats are in trouble is accurate all the same...

...So far, the Democratic leadership there decided which of all the programs that Reagan wanted to cut was most vital: synthetic fuels...

...Traditionally, Democrats matched the Republican advantages with the power of unions and political organizations (both weakened by TV), traditional ethnic affiliations (Catholics, Jews, blacks, Southerners), and the rising support of the educated classes...

...The masterful example here is the performance of LBJ as Senate minority leader when last the Democrats were in a minority (1953-4...

...Consider: in the 1960s there was no consistent Republican position on such issues as the death penalty, abortion, etc...

...Whatever it is, it had better not be a watered-down version of Carter's ' 'pragmatism'' (at least on economic issues) or "Reaganism with a human face...

...It is significant that the Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate for at least the first half of this decade, and even more significant that unabashed conservatives now control all the major national institutions (president, Congress, Supreme Court) for the first time since 1954 and perhaps 1930...

...At the best, then, we can expect Congress to provide a masterful delaying and cutting job on the worst Reagan excesses...

...Take the chance that Reagan's politics won't work, and say what you would do in power...

...A slightly more humane version of conservatism not only won't work economically but has no political appeal...

...Second, they have a larger core of motivated middle-class activists (as true in 1940 or 1952 as today...

...Contrast the thrust of this active group to the dull pragmatic -group of Republicans who (like the last four "pragmatic" presidents) have mostly been losing their elective positions: Brooke, Javits, et...

...There is hardly any major constituency in the country that cares about synthetic fuels: it was a politically (not to mention morally) bad choice...

...We are not often told what these "new realities" are and how to distinguish them from "old" realities...

...By 1954", after the death of Taft and the performance of McCarthy, it was possible for Johnson to get a nearly unanimous vote (absent only John Kennedy - "more profile than courage") against McCarthy...

...For, despite all the cries of crisis, it must surely be admitted that the troubles, economic and otherwise, of the American people are slight compared to those which led to the similar defeat of Herbert Hoover in 1932...

...But the choice of those issues means you make enemies...

...He has the appearance of power without its reality...

...The job of the Democrats in Congress is not an easy one...

...They should not be surprised if the Democrats in Congress say "no" to their program at first and if the media say it's not "pragmatic...

...WHAT about the Democratic National Committee and the party structure...

...And even the least favorable national poll still shows them with an eleven percent lead in party identification over the Republicans...

...But the Republican's advantage in fundraising - both from small sources and large sources - is not just an artifact of the campaign laws and is not just technical...

...The materials for such a program are everywhere to hand...

...and many of the bright young men around him feel the same pressures to be "pragmatic" that other people of their class do, and want to show that Teddy is in favor of deregulation, a new crime bill, etc...

...Although Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, the Democrats hold a higher percentage of elected offices now than they did in 1952 or 1968, the last two times they turned power over to the other party...

...Jesse Helms is of course an' 'ideologue,'' but like his fellow "ideologue" senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, he has shown throughout his political life in North Carolina a very good ability to forge ahead in mainstream politics...

...The basic propositions of the "moderate" or "pragmatic" wing of the Republican party of 1980 are the same as the propositions which the media labeled "ideological" as against the "pragmatism" of Rockefeller in 1964...

...What else remains...

...It should be remembered that the average giver of "small" sums - $10 to a few hundred or so - is still someone from the top ten percent of the American income structure...

...In fact, there is no such division...

...But it is possible, as Reagan has demonstrated, for continuous activism around an agenda to finally become part of their mainstream...

...Why are the Democrats in trouble...

...Well, you know, like a Doris Day movie...

...Finding issues that attract contributors is not hard...

...He is clearly in the minority...

...Opposition to Republican efforts to repeal environmental, civil-rights, and social programs unites most Northern Democrats, but the Southerners go their own way on these questions...

...The image of the America to which we want to return is the image purveyed by Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s of a small town America of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Shirley Temple (not coinciden-tally, all conservative Republicans...

...Money depends on your politics...

...Yes, the poor will be squeezed and the rich will get more subsidies, but there's little new in that...

...Well, first, a purely personal factor...

...In fact, it will soon be the conservatives who will be muttering "radical" complaints that even though they have just about all the power, somehow it still isn't quite enough to do all the good things they could do if only they had a little more...

...The Democrats, we are told, now face a choice between "ideological" and "pragmatic" politics...

...O'Neill has the problem of a paper majority, since the thirty-five or so most conservative House Democrats, now an informal caucus, really control the key votes in the House...

...In this respect, Byrd in the Senate has an easier job than O'Neill in the House...

...The Republican appeals mesh with the central thrust of a capitalist individualist society dominated by the media, and in that sense these appeals are easy to write and easy to believe...

...What is most likely and most necessary is that some group or groups within the party will develop and push a new agenda - perhaps at the Democratic midterm convention in 1982...

...Most likely the Democratic leadership will try to say "none of the above'' or "a little bit of all the above...

...Ronald Reagan appears to be the first president since John F. Kennedy who knows that public speech and the projection of the likable persona are the keys to the modern presidency...

...The Democratic percentage of the two-party presidential vote last year (i.e., not counting third or fourth party returns) was almost the same as that of Stevenson in 1952...

...But it is far less conservative than the string of Congresses in the years 1946-58...