The Mcgovern Phenomenon

...The white lower middle class, particularly in urban areas, is the key to the politics of the future...

...There is not enough feeling for and with people...

...The enlightened are bigoted regarding the unenlightened: that is our major strategic problem...

...though by now, a few months later, there are already signs that the McGovern people, or some of them, have understood the urgency of what Novak says here...

...but since the primaries play so important a role in the American political system, they had better consider the implications of their weakness in the primaries...

...No doubt, they remain the largest sources of electoral support for candidates like Humphrey, but it seems almost impossible that McGoverncould have won in these two states as handily as he did if he had not begun to make inroads into these crucial segments of the electorate...

...He voices the views of the educated class, highly mobile, traveled, its members more in touch (by journals, books, films) with each other than with local cul ture...

...If McGovern's welfare proposals were enacted, taxes would go up unbearably (whereas a serious man might have pointed out the weaknesses in those jerry-built proposals while endorsing their general thrust...

...Surely the "pragmatism" for which the union leadership has so often been praised ought to suggest that, like him or not, McGovern is a candidate with whom alliances can be cemented and his movement a force with which coalitions can be organized...

...Isn't it time they stopped deluding themselves with notions that such phenomena as the McGovern movement are "just a bunch of kids," or "a flash in the pan...

...Certainly, more so than any visible competitor...

...There is too much moral superiority, arousing of guilt feelings, preachment...

...The enlightened mean well, they are capable of change, but they have a longstanding contempt for paro chial, rough, direct, ordinary people...

...Could anything be shabbier than Humphrey's television campaigning...

...Bigger and bigger chunks of the working-class vote, for reasons both good and bad, split off from the old-line liberal Democrats...

...But what matters is that there is movement, hope, change, energy: the scene does not appear as dead as it did a year or two ago...

...The alternative is likely to be a posture of sullenness, leading to a still further loss of prestige for the unions—and a victory for Nixon...

...It takes two to make possible a victory, only one to ensure defeat...

...McGovern may have reason to court the unions, but they now have at least as much reason to court him...

...Housewives and college kids, it now seems, can organize political campaigns at least as well as party professionals and union officials...

...Whatever may happen in the immediate future, one thing is clear: the McGovern phenomenon has already had a major impact on American politics...

...And, it must be said, the behavior of the official trade union leadership, as well as its candidate, Hubert Humphrey, does little to prevent that crack-up...

...All these were supposedly Humphrey turf, by piety and tradition, debt and habit...

...Commonweal, March 24, 1972] Well-said...

...California and New Jersey—but especially New Jersey—are states with significant trade union, black, and Jewish electorates...

...Apparently there was lack of enthusiasm for such shopworn goods as Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey...

...In Michigan, alarmingly, demagogy on bussing and other issues led to a victory in the primaries for Wallace—Michigan, stronghold of trade unionism, home of the UAW, which so long has claimed a powerful machine within the Democratic party...

...and despite all the innuendos that have been spread about frivolity and lack of persistence, these "amateurs" can be as tough, enduring, and committed as anyone else in politics...

...For what he has succeeded in doing is to bring together, more through doggedness than brilliance, that loose range of political energies which combines a desire for social reform, a vague but strongly felt populism, a wish for a more moderate or modest foreign policy, and a sense that the United States is in trouble to an extent requiring extraordinary measures...

...Writing in March 1972, before it was clear that McGovern would sweep the primaries, and therefore putting the matter a bit more sharply than he might now, the Left Catholic journalist Michael Novak said: So far McGovern is chiefly a spokesman of the national liberal culture...

...In other states, an as-yet-undetermined minority of the working-class vote went to McGovern, while a good many trade unionists simply did not bother to vote in the primaries...

...The crack-up of the liberal-labor-ethnic coalition, which for several decades was a central support of whatever social progress we have had, proceeds with seeming inexorability...

...By the standards of American politics as it exists in reality —by such standards as hard work, competent organization, the articulation of program, and a certain moral seriousness—McGovern deserves the nomination...

...NOW, as we enter the presidential campaign, the crucial question is whether a McGovern candidacy will be able to broaden its social support while maintaining its politics of reform...

...The key to a campaign that . . . leads the nation forward is that the national liberal cul ture identify with the pain and necessities of those toward whom it is now bigoted: the white lower middle class...

...A man in panic who was ready to say almost anything in order to get votes, Humphrey resorted to coarse reactionary appeals: If the defense budget were cut to $55 billion, as McGovern proposed, the country would be reduced to "a secondrate power" (one might have thought that the Vietnam policies of Johnson—Humphrey and then Nixon had already gone a good way toward doing that...

...What will the trade union leadership do now...

...If McGovern's proposals for reconverting war industry to civilian uses were put into effect, California workers would Iose their jobs (did this mean that Humphrey proposed to maintain the present defense budget indefinitely...

...Otherwise, the nasty predictions that McGovern will prove to be the "Goldwater of the Left" might yet come true...

...Now that Senator McGovern has won the California and New Jersey primaries, only some unpredictable surprise or some very predictable skullduggery can keep him from getting the Democratic nomination...

...But if some hard thinking is needed on the part of the McGovern people—and surely they see the folly of running their campaign along lines that John Mitchell and Jerry Rubin would equally approve—then some equally severe reconsideration is required by the trade union leaders...

...q...

...At least so far...

...Young workers may be more responsive, in many instances, to generational appeals and cries for social change than they are to the political prodding of union leaders for whom they feel no special affection...

...The McGovern campaign in the primaries seems also to have picked up a certain amount of support from constituencies that were supposed to be locked into the palms of the trade unions and the black political leaders...

...Mostly middle-class in composition, drawing heavily upon students, linking elements from the old liberal constituency with those vaguely called "the New Politics," the McGovern movement has proven itself to be a serious force...

...No doubt, this trend may be reversed in the election itself, but it remains a disgrace and worse than a disgrace, an ominous sign for the future...

...True, the unionists are much better at getting out the vote in the election itself than in the primaries...

...I put the matter in these dry terms intentionally, since the kind of presidential campaign McGovern might undertake or the kind of presidency he might create is by no means clear as yet...

...Whatever hopes we have of fundamen tal economic change depend upon the insight, anger, and power of that class...

...Given the growth of the educated segment of the middle class, the leisure and affluence it enjoys, its capacity for developing concern (sometimes profoundly, sometimes faddishly) with issues beyond immediate interest, there is every reason to believe these new political activists will count heavily in the coming years...

...This is a fact, and it is a major fact...

...One hopes the rumors are mistaken that suggest Meany and his friends will join a movement to "stop McGovern" at all costs—that can only signify an alliance with the most unpalatable elements in the Democratic party...

...Blacks and Jews, though still largely devoted to the old liberallabor coalition, show increasing signs of in ternal political differentiation, especially among their younger elements...