MIDWAY TO THE ELECTION

...In foreign policy, he is at least as clear as if not clearer than any other candidate...

...His style mirrors America's plurality and may give it lasting expression...

...These are matters of image, not of program...

...And how appallingly threadbare and impoverished is his "message": "honesty in government," attacks on "Washington bureaucrats," a startling absention 229 from political or social issues...

...This, while an obstacle to the party chiefs, seems to meet with approval from broad sectors of the Democratic electorate...

...but maybe all it shows is that the sort of people fired up by the thought of losing the Panama Canal (there's a cause for you in the 1970s...

...Still, a few of us from Dissent want to put down some reflections on the political situation, which right now means, mostly, the Democratic primaries and Carter's victories...

...They represent internationalist liberalism, combined with a sophistication about Soviet aims and Western limitations...

...Such a program cannot solve our problems of jobs, housing, and energy...

...As he becomes exposed to broader leadership circles, Carter will "learn" and amend his position, but his basically conservative stance is unlikely to change, for his electoral strength derives from it...

...One can, however, characterize them as apolitical, a wish for "leadership" and "unity" under a charismatic leader...

...Since the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have made remarkably little progress in that direction...

...win or lose, he represents something in American politics that is worth discussing...

...For the point is that instead of asking the electorate to choose him because of his ideas and proposals, he will now be issuing ideas and proposals after it has, presumably, chosen him as the candidate...

...Carter does not require unity...

...It also tends to elevate the status quo to a religiously willed element of the community for which all yearn, and to which yearning Carter appeals with considerable emotional power...

...But that misses the point entirely...

...Now, Carter...

...He will probably turn out to be an "activist" president but his activism will bear the stamp of the first-term presidency of Richard Nixon...

...One can speculate as to what the nature of a Carter administration would be and there I have a few educated guesses to work from...

...And Carter's credentials here are good: he—unlike then AFL-CIO candidate Jackson—did not yield to the temptation of engaging in antibusing demgagoguery where it counted, in Boston during the Massachusetts primary race...

...Carter probably has the most sophisticated and articulate black political leaders in his camp or at the very least not particularly hostile to him...

...Where's the evidence...

...Carter followed President Ford's post-Watergate script, and played the role better than Ford himself...

...Carter's ability to draw both black and antibusing votes symbolizes his political technique: a studied insistence on avoiding to stir up divisions among interest groups...

...On the whole, Carter's appeal is more cultural and personal than social or ideological...

...Blacks are left to respond to other sides of Carter...

...In Syria, Palestinian politics is rigidly controlled...

...it is too early to say...

...Carter resembles the candidate in Altman's film Nashville, and although New York voters, and intellectuals particularly, fear Carter because he is alien to them, he is familiar to millions more...

...It looks, at the moment, as if Carter will win the nomination...

...Domestically, Carter stands in the center of Democratic party politics, committed as he is to a broad expansion of federal responsibility for welfare, the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a number of other measures that don't particularly distinguish him from the rest of the Democratic aspirants...

...in Lebanon, they have come into sharp and sometimes deadly conflict...

...and he has proposed a federally underwritten insurance scheme for municipal bonds, a minor reform that would protect investors...

...Whether Carter will prove capable of fulfilling the role in which a large part of the electorate is casting him, and to which he evidently aspires, cannot be foretold...

...Unemployment, poverty, social inequality are all tied to an evolving structure of industries and technologies that, unless planfully controlled and channeled, spells the ruination of the cities, the continued degradation of many of their people...

...the crossover in some states creates confusion...

...Rather, it is reasonably clear that the liberals have learned almost nothing from the McGovern defeat...

...Carter's triumph was based on a media appeal to the masses rather than on a concentrated organizational effort...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...Only on the West Bank, under military occupation, is there a freely elected Palestinian leadership genuinely responsible to its own people...

...Those of us who have considered Humphrey the best possible candidate under the circumstances did so because we saw in him a continuation of the social interventionist, Fair Deal policies at home, and a rejection of the grotesque new consensus that "less is better...

...Just as George McGovern's suburban rock-music antiwar coalition fell short of a majority in 1972, Carter's hymn-singing countrymusic ensemble may prove to be too narrow...

...Smallish minorities can be decisive in choosing candidates...

...There seems to be some evidence of that, but it is much too early to be certain...

...Like Ford, Carter does not favor the government as employer of first, or last, resort...

...Insofar as Carter has said anything on the issues where his religious background could pose a problem, what he said is not so bad: he supports the ERA, he's against legislation that would prohibit abortion—although personally opposed to it—and he seems to be at least reasonably capable of maintaining a distinction between church and state, so much so that some hard-shelled southern Baptists have been denouncing him as a renegade...

...To be sure, clarity has never characterized primary politics in the U.S., particularly within the 2 30 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Democratic party, but this image of Carter seems to be more a creation of the media and Carter's opponents than anything he has said or failed to say...

...His "Marshall Plan" for the cities, while vague, was generous...

...Carter does not reject any group...

...Survey data indicate that the Governor's chief early appeal was to voters who had previously exercised little national political power—the less-affluent suburbanites, workers not strongly identified with labor's leadership, and to two organized groups that have achieved only partial recognition: the southern moderate Democratic establishment and blacks...

...As could have been expected, now that Carter has come close tq winning the nomination (though it's still not certain he will), he is also starting to issue programmatic statements...

...We're far from the demagogy of the old southern rednecks or northern city bosses...

...The reintegration of a new South, a South with a massive black vote, a South that is increasingly industrialized, makes the Democrats again the natural majority party in the U.S...

...He allows his disparate audience to feel that their existence is recognized and even approved...

...Many black politicians act as immigrant ward heelers used to...

...These results were not entirely surprising, given the economic and political changes on the West Bank since 1967, but they make for a strange and striking situation...

...It may be difficult to forge a majority out of this welter of images, secondary establishments, and disaffected individuals, for American culture itself is too fragmented...

...Cutbacks in defense spending are more likely to stir apprehension about his economic security than approval...

...The elections were by no means a simple PLO triumph...

...Why the unease about Carter...

...In town after town, the enlarged electorate (including women for the first time) turned out in record numbers and voted out the traditional leadership, the old notables whose authority dates back to Jordanian, British, and even Turkish times...

...It claims that personal bearing matters more than political content...

...The success of Governor Brown and Senator Church in late primaries suggests that the low-intensity bonds 232 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS keeping together the elements of Carter's ad hoc plurality can be easily severed...

...It is a defeat that brings home again the need for American liberalism to organize and to retool programmatically for an era in which the old slogans and programs no longer seem to catch fire...

...Sa'iqa, the terrorist group, and the Palestine Liberation Army are both in effect organs of the Syrian regime, their leaders handpicked, unable to act independently...

...Do the primaries show a turn to the right, politically...

...How closely these three groups can work together is uncertain...

...Insofar as anyone tries to guess what a Carter presidency would be like, how can one know...

...West Bank politics is complicated, and both the Baathists and the Communists did well in certain towns...

...But Humphrey's willingness to engage in what can only be seen as last-ditch maneuvering to stop Carter at any cost by making sympathetic noises at Governor Brown of California encourages the view that there is no principled issue separating the major candidates who have a chance at the nomination...

...It's mostly active partisans, people with distinct views, either on the right or left, who vote in the primaries...

...Without such changes, major reforms are subverted...

...The primary system, no doubt better than having candidates picked by political bosses, has been shown to have major flaws...

...Sometimes it works...

...But first, a few notes of caution...

...If anything came through clearly in the past four years, it is that the Democrats can lose only when their two major wings—the middle-class liberals and the trade union movement—are at odds...

...Although Carter's triumph was not ideological, his candidacy represents modern corporate liberalism—of a less developed sort than Rockefeller's, perhaps, but a less backward version than that of President Ford...

...True, the wish has always been there, but rarely has a politician emerged who fitted it...

...On energy, Carter—like Ford, Jackson, and Rockefeller—favors government support of the oil companies, subsidizing their profits and assuming their risks by underwriting research and development costs...

...The unease about Carter's cultural style and his unabashed religious commitment is in good part a reflection of the insularity of the liberals who had much the same objection to John Kennedy's Catholicism...

...At the same time, Carter's media strategy, his smile and platitudinous talk, encouraged people to project on him their hopes and needs, just as intellectuals projected their fears on him...

...It is not clear whom one calls to get close to Carter...

...Song follows song, and we only pay attention when our favorite tune is played...

...To make federal stimulus of the economy effective, Carter would make the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board an appointive post, appointed by the president...

...P.S...

...The reasons for the breadth of support Carter enjoys are known, and I need not recite them...

...Regardless of whether Carter is elected, left-wing forces in the Democratic party, including progressive and mainstream trade unions as well as middle-class liberals, suffered an unprecedented defeat that will take years of organizational efforts to overcome...

...We listen to Carter as we listen to the car radio...

...But if we bring to bear certain ideas about democracy—the premise, say, that a democratic society requires sustained discussion of political and socioeconomic issues—then Carter's "style" (which is pretty much his substance) becomes disquieting...

...And that is not a minor criticism...

...Perhaps we were too involved in the internal politicking of the Democratic party—involved vicariously and emotionally, forgetting that the good guys were really not all that good, and that our allies are for the time being a small minority...

...foreign policy...

...However, before belaboring the liberals for a lack of concrete political strategies and programs, socialists have to do some serious thinking about what is possible in COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 231 American politics today...

...Nor is Carter building an LBJ "consensus," because "consensus" tried to force Americans to unite around the twin crusade against Communism and poverty...

...but he does not relate these audiences to each other...

...In retrospect, the country-western music craze and the growing social conservatism among the black leadership may be seen as having foreshadowed the triumph of "reborn Christianity," antiurban moralism, and the work and business ethics Carter represents...

...Niebuhr also wrote that "American Christianity tends to be irrelevant to the problems of justice because it persists in presenting the law of love as a simple solution for every communal problem...

...If he does, then he will be far less subject to the ordinary pressures of politics on which many leading spokesmen now jumping on his bandwagon count...

...It is not merely that the liberals, with their instinct for political suicide, came into the fray scattered, too late, and with a program that didn't seem to focus on any of the basic political and social issues disturbing the Democratic electorate...

...If the losers are easily identifiable, the victors are less so...

...He asks no one to change his or her behavior...

...Still, inside the party, Carter's victory is a defeat for liberals...

...That is a fairly radical step toward government economic management, though it certainly need not be a progressive one...

...Jimmy Carter is no peanut farmer—or, if he is, he's of the agribusiness variety...

...Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted by Arthur Schlesinger in the Wall Street Journal (April 28), wrote that "Religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm"—but this is a charitable use of the passage: Carter is using religion to gain the presidency...

...consequently, widely different people can feel they are winning with him...

...In Lebanon, the PLO operates without restraint (and intervenes on a large scale in the Lebanese civil war), but its various member groups exist by virtue of the force they can muster and iivide the refugee camps by mutual agreement: even where they have most room for maneuver, they have not constituted themselves as representative organizations...

...2. Bogdan Denitch J immy Carter's breakthrough occurs at a point when the general liberal retreat in the Democratic party seems to be turning into a rout...

...Less deluded people may not...

...Already tension has 234 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...

...But even as he persists in this worn tradition (which has the disadvantage that once a candidate wins an election he has to have some policies)— even while exploiting the antipolitical strand of American politics, Carter seems also a clever and sophisticated man, keenly attuned to the 20th century...

...What is different about Carter is that he is a liberal southern governor who has, for all practical purposes, wiped out Wallaceism as a force to be reckoned with in the Democratic party...

...Instead of spending the past few years trying to hammer out programmatic and organizational bridges between these potential progressive allies, the liberals continued a fratricidal vendetta that resulted in no less than four liberal candidates being fielded in the early primaries...

...Country music is sweeping through Catholic working-class areas, but Carter's success there may be more ephemeral...

...He continues an old tradition in America: the politics of antipolitics...

...Wrongly billed by some as a "populist," he will not be a continuator of the traditions of the Democratic party initiated by Roosevelt— traditions that opened up possibilities for social justice and that Humphrey would have made efforts to safeguard...

...It may well be that the roots of his miscalculation lie in changes in the social base of the Democratic party...

...In the case of New York he has referred tritely to its "fiscal irresponsibility," not bothering to define what that meant...

...In Jordan, where a majority of the people are Palestinians, every expression of Palestinian nationalism is brutally repressed...

...It is also a defeat, however, for those who have overestimated the extent of a drift to the right in American politics...

...Carter altogether lacks social vision, and where Humphrey was at least restless about the status quo, Carter's electoral strategy caters to it...

...The "black issue" is dead...

...antibusing voters know Carter won't challenge that...

...Perhaps by July the Carter balloon will have burst...

...At best it is one more arena in which socialist politics and socialist alternatives can be argued...

...His main program, so far, is .. . Jimmy Carter...

...rush to the primaries...

...Moreover, Carter's early supporters may drift away as their antiestablishment candidate woos the Democratic leadership...

...they reward past favors instead of future promises, recognizing that the former Governor appointed blacks to state office...

...A hope or a disaster...

...Bring together, now, a sophisticated man with a contrived public face that exudes religious piety and political imprecision—isn't there reason for suspicion...

...But the whole thrust of his public appeal has been to come forward as a man beyond "mere" program, a man who deserves to be trusted...

...It's an American posture, mixing a bit of Thoreau with a pinch of Gary Cooper...

...For people who work primarily in the Democratic party there may in fact be no choice but to act this way...

...His advisers, who include Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Gardner of Columbia University, are certainly not what one could call outsiders in terms of U.S...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 233 Humphrey believed that the primaries would result in deadlock, giving him the chance at his party's nomination for the presidency...

...money turns out to be even more important than in an election...

...Jackson's candidacy would have been a disaster—not only because of his rigid Cold War foreign policy, but because he would have split the Democratic party again...

...Taking Wallace head-on as he did in the southern states and defeating him, defanged what was after all a malignant growth in the Democratic party both in the South and the North...

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...he has committed himself to a major emphasis on rebuilding ties with Western Europe and Japan, to more attention to the Third World, the maintenance of detente combined with wariness about Soviet aims, and a $7 billion cut in the defense budget...

...Carter has had nothing substantive to say about this problem of problems, displaying a vast ignorance of it...

...Carter's sophisticated supporters—there are some—tell us he has a program...

...The point these unionists and liberals have in mind is simply this: Carter is likely to get the nomination, his politics are little known and remain to be specified, and whichever of the competing wings of the Democratic party can exert the greatest pressures is likely to have the greatest influence upon him...

...The introduction of Christianity into the campaign is not just irrelevant to problems of justice, it obfuscates them...

...At least Humphrey had some sense of needs...

...The impression is thereby created that a strong show for Reagan (like a strong show for McGovern four years ago) indicates a new political trend...

...Its foreign policy will have very familiar, distressingly familiar, features: the eastern foreign policy establishment will be back in...

...He has abstained from analyzing, let alone attacking, the roots of these inequalities in either the corporate system or the government policies deliberately pursued these past eight years...

...3. David Bensman and Luther Carpenter The Carter victory is not altogether disastrous— it eliminated Wallace as a national force—but it is bad enough...

...For a southern governor, who would certainly carry the South for the Democrats in November, that is little short of a miracle...

...A figure of measurable charm and self-proclaimed integrity announces he will throw aside those cheapjack politicians (and also, it's now obligatory to say, the Washington bureaucrats...

...This technique may become a dominant political style in the coming years...

...Carter, it must be admitted, is an original: pious yet modern, uncluttered yet complicated, a thoughtful leader without thoughts...

...But not many candidates in the past have pushed it quite so far...

...And so the middle ground in the Democratic party was abandoned to Carter and Jackson...

...It would probably not have worked because Humphrey did not envision structural changes, e.g., a shift in the power to make investment decisions along lines beneficial to cities and their people...

...Given the way the Democratic party and the American system work, this is understandable, if not quite exemplary...

...The classic Democratic coalition—of the South, the urban blacks, suburban liberals, trade unionists, and the poor whites—is shaping up around Carter and so perverse are some of the liberals as to consider the broadness of Carter's appeal to be an argument against his candidacy...

...Humphrey, a man of good will, probably never saw the problem that way, and would have lacked the hard will to tackle it if he had...

...The municipal elections held on the Israelioccupied West Bank this April resulted in a decisive victory for a new generation of Palestinian nationalists...

...The worker or middle-class professional residing in the suburbs is likely to be more interested in preserving what he has job, home, a reasonably good life—than in solidarity with those in the inner cities...

...But also the sense that he has packaged himself with a remarkably shrewd appreciation of what will get across on "the media"--get across to middle-class Americans (including some black ones too...

...Carter has evidenced much quasi-religious fervor in stressing decency and honesty in government, but he has shown no passion whatever for social justice, for the elimination of poverty, for the radical reduction of military expenditures and the threat they pose to peace and progressive economic development...

...It was always clear that liberals and labor would fail if they did not unite, but Republicans were supposed to benefit, not another Democrat...

...Some people will therefore say, "Look, he does have a program...

...Carter was playing to a "lonely crowd" instead of creating a coalition...

...But the one thing that might conceivably make such a course tolerable would be the continued presence of a principled criticism...

...The Democratic party is far from being a labor or social democratic party in disguise...

...What must be said first of all in such criticism is that the kind of campaign Carter has run, with its slick and barren "personalization" of politics, is inherently damaging to democratic norms...

...He is an outsider to the liberal and trade union establishments that have dominated the Democratic party since the '60s...

...Meanwhile, some of the trade union leaders and liberal spokesmen have started switching to him...

...President Carter's "lonely crowd," like Nixon's "silent majority," ought to dissolve when conflicts resume over the distribution of goods and services...

...After all, that used to be the winning coalition before the civil rights legislation of the '60s and the Republican breakthroughs in the South...

...The bulk of the working-class vote, which largely goes to moderate liberal candidates, does not make itself felt in primaries...

...If the politics of antipolitics is what seems traditional in Carter, its slick packaging for "the media" is what seems new...

...That alone, given the nature of the political base of black politicians today, will mean an Administration more sensitive to the urban poor and to the problems of the inner city...

...Maybe it does...

...Beyond this, all that one can say is that the Carter administration, although far short of the optimal liberal programs of the ADA and the left trade unionists, will be an enormous improvement over the conservatism of the Ford Republicans, not to speak of the nightmarish alternative of a Reagan administration...

...Carter is also supposed to be vague and imprecise programmatically...

...In other times, such an approach would fail, but it succeeds now that Presidents Nixon and Ford have destroyed Americans' expectations...

...Carter's appeal to love and Christian morality imparts a sort of righteousness to achieved status, the more so since the achievement seems forever threatened by rising prices and rising taxes...

...And his support from less affluent suburbanites may not translate into support from suburbanites as a whole...

...He keeps them so separate that they do not recognize the competition they are in...

...Domestically, I suspect that this Administration will have an unprecedentedly large number of blacks in office...

...He has yet to take issue with our deep inequalities in income and wealth and give rise to forms of apartheid...

...Blacks have been put in their place by suburbanization and depression...

...But for the moment they are united in opposition to Israeli rule, and that opposition, newly legitimated by the Israeli-run elections, will make the occupation more and more difficult...

...THE EDITORS 4. H. Brand I t is hard to see why socialists should support Carter for the Democratic presidential candidacy, or for president if nominated...

...Liberals and leftists naturally doubt that Carter's images can stand on their own in defiance of reality and the genuine conflicts built into economic issues...

...Watching him on TV gives one the sense that he is among the most literate candidates for President we've had in some decades...

...For democratic socialists, the Carter candidacy would restate a lesson that seems at times to have been lost: there is a great difference between socialists and the mainline active Democratic voters...

...As president, Carter would seek to achieve full employment—by which he means 4.5 percent unemployment, or 9 percent unemployment in real terms—by fiscal and monetary stimulus of the private sector...

...And yes, of course, this isn't unprecedented in American politics...

...But America will remain vulnerable to the pseudopopulist appeal of Reagan, Wallace, and Carter as long as the liberal-labor forces are unable to create viable political communities and fail to mobilize the emotional energies of the masses of the American people...

...He will restore good will, openness, and truth to government...

...No doubt: hidden away among the peanuts...

...The black masses, with little to lose, respond to cultural and religious appeals...

...Most significant perhaps, he has adopted an altogether negative position on the most crucial internal problem facing the country, the future of its cities...