ON THE 1976 ELECTIONS
Harrington, Michael
For other analyses of the Carter phenomenon, representing various views among the editors of Dissent see our last issue, Summer 1976. —Ens. First, let me free myself of certain...
...he is at least as difficult to predict as Franklin Roosevelt was in 1932 or John Kennedy in 1960...
...The rich could help finance jobs for the unemployed by having their tax welfare abolished...
...But there is, of course, a huge qualification at work: whether one adapts to that given or tries to transform it...
...so are national health, government lastresort hiring, and public ownership and development of some energy resources...
...I find it difficult to even imagine that there is a question of choice...
...There is no easy label that fixes these paradoxes...
...Without them, it would probably come up with a new version of "trickle down," i.e., on the side of profits as against wages...
...Full employment is shaping up as a decisive litmus...
...the unemployed could promote price stability for the rich by staying unemployed...
...Stephanie Harrington captured that aspect in an inspired image: he is, she said, a political Rorschach blot, and everyone sees their own fantasy in him...
...Events have already shown Carter to be a more complex politician than most...
...it could be sincere conservatism (or rather, stand-patism, since it takes a fairly left-wing liberal to go for the capital gains jugular...
...he must be better...
...It also cautions the analyst to be a bit provisional...
...Unlike everyone else, we have held the line for the last two years...
...He is not, obviously, a socialist candidate, or, for that matter, a representative of the democratic left even though he moved in the latter direction during the months between his conquest of the nomination and his acceptance of it...
...there may be some surprises, perhaps unpleasant ones...
...The potentially inflationary effect of a federal budget generating new jobs could be offset by reducing the tax expenditures—"welfare payments"—for the rich...
...and he/she would reply like Hubert Humphrey—or a left critic of Humphrey...
...I intend to vote for Carter and to work as hard as I can for his election...
...the opponent of Vietnam "amnesty" is an advocate of Vietnam "pardon...
...There is no reason for high hopes—or despair...
...But what direction will he take...
...One possible answer would be the tax reform Carter has made his most radical plank (and even before his acceptance speech...
...And this fact—that Carter owes more to luck than to any organized social or political forces—allows him the luxury of a certain indeterminacy, the ability to be enigmatic...
...We pushed for the AFLCIO position that attacked both the tax gains exemptions, worth $13 billion for 1977...
...creating jobs for minorities and/or women...
...328...
...Ask, What shall we do about health, or unemployment, or the energy crisis...
...Carter's election could be a point of departure...
...Reduce the national level to "3 percent adult unemployment"—the H-H goal—and, depending on your definition of adult, you will save between $48 billion and $80 billion in these outlays...
...The luck of that draw is not determined or even influenced by the emergence of the New South, or the alleged right turn in American politics, or the "Sun Belt" trend, or any of the other big abstractions...
...Now, to the more serious, taxing work: some first anticipations of a theory that places Carter in a historic context...
...If one accepts the present structure of the economy as a given, they are right on the main points even though they overdraw their case...
...An income policy—controls—will be the only way to deal with this threat...
...The spokesman for "ethnic purity" had Martin Luther King, Sr., lead a civil rights rally from the podium at the Convention's end...
...Those who believe that there is "no difference" between a president who would sign a bill for planned full employment and one who would veto it can retell the tale of Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
...Normal political opportunism explains some of his shifts and contradictions, but it goes beyond that...
...However, what is needed is wariness, not outright rejection...
...the ritual affirmer of "free enterprise" makes a populist assault on wealthy elites and promises some tax reform...
...These last, usually unwittingly, point toward structural change...
...WITH my escape hatches thus firmly in place, let me begin with a generalization that might seem to be, and perhaps is, a partial contradiction of all these self-imposed caveats...
...That is what we must watch...
...The political fact, which should determine our vote, is that he cannot possibly be worse than Nixon-Ford...
...It is not a program for government...
...Carter will not make history under circumstances of his own choosing...
...Small is beautiful" is popular...
...Washington now intervenes in many cases, but always on the side of corporations and in the service of their priorities, e.g., the investment tax credits help companies flee New York or develop labor-displacing technology...
...The Carter people bought the closing of the overseas loophole but rejected the much more progressive assault on capital gains...
...Whether this was a conscious choice or simply the chance rendezvous of a personality and a historic moment favorable to it, I don't know...
...In the intervening period, it has been subjected to a devastatingly effective attack by liberal economists under the direction of Charles Schultze...
...Beyond that, I prefer only to set up the criteria for a historical evaluation: watch Carter's position on Hawkins-Humphrey...
...This is not because liberals, or socialists, "sell out...
...If one is talking not simply about lesser-evilism but about a point of departure, as I am, this is a critical area...
...But rising costs simply give us no choice...
...Schultze and company made a left-right assault on Hawkins-Humphrey...
...In any case, this will be a crucial test, not simply in terms of wealth redistribution, but also in relation to full employment...
...If he wins, this political Rorschach blot will have to go representational...
...That could have been campaign strategy...
...By the time the corresponding platform affirmation of it was adopted in New York in July, it was questionable how many of the delegates voting for the bill really believed in it...
...In his acceptance speech, he resolved these antinomies by moving toward a fairly coherent Democratic-party liberalism...
...That done, I think the analysis can be made much more candidly...
...Probably more so...
...We know our readers will understand the necessity for this increase and will continue to support Dissent, as in the past...
...The latter are torn between the forces of technocratic co-optation of popular pressures, and the popular pressures themselves...
...and he/she would sound like Ronald Reagan...
...Those of us who understand that some gains can be won under Democrats and that gains, rather than defeats, hold out the possibility of energizing millions of people will fight to elect Carter...
...and it will be revealing in the extreme to see which fork Carter takes...
...One factor that made it possible—not necessary, but possible—for Carter to win the Democratic nomination was that he mirrored, or incarnated, the nation's confusion...
...Carter, whether you take him as a Machiavellian or the honest tribune of popular confusion, was as inconsistent as the electorate...
...This, I suspect, will be a basic litmus test for leftright in what I hope will be the Carter administration (which, even if it took a rightist stance on the issue, would be left of Ford-Reagan, i.e., would have some custodial job programs, extended unemployment benefits, and other measures to soften the cruelty of the status quo...
...Carter almost certainly will not...
...There are a total of $106 billion such expenditures in the'77 budget...
...If the controls extend, as the AFL-CIO has always insisted, to dividends, executive compensation, rental income, etc., they could even be redistributionist—but then only if the government were willing to take a much more socially interventionist attitude toward investment...
...It is a consequence of the fact that the corporations dominate the investment process and can argue that profits, which reinforce their elite power and maldistribute the rewards of society, are socially virtuous and superior to wages because, in a capitalist economy, they finance new investment, which is to say, new jobs...
...Ask the average citizen, What about the federal government...
...Only, income policies in capitalist economies have a built-in penchant for favoring the rich (profits) and disciplining the majority (wages...
...If one of the liberal candidates had won the nomination, it is not in the least certain that he would go as far as is needed...
...However, there is no doubt that the problems envisaged by Schultze and company would persist even despite such "savings...
...public enterprise, like a TVA-type oil corporation (rather than the $100 billion in cheap credit for oil malefactors proposed by Ford and Rockefeller) or nationalization of railroads...
...Then Carter was forthright, in a general way, in the acceptance speech and very fuzzy at a meeting with businessmen in New York a week later...
...There is much we don't know about the man, personally and politically...
...allocating credit (anti-redlining laws...
...He was, as Jim Chapin noted in a shrewd article in the Newsletter of the Democratic Left,fortunate that the primary chronology allowed him to be the center-right candidate in New Hampshire, centerleft in Florida, and center-center in Pennsylvania...
...The fact remains that the question posed for the left is, Which holds out more hope for the future, a Carter or a Ford administration...
...At the time of the Democratic national platform hearings in May, the HawkinsHumphrey bill for planned full employment was an article of faith...
...I concede all this, and more...
...Rediscovering the reserve army of the unemployed, they held that inflationary trends would develop in skilled labor markets when unemployment drops to 5.5 percent—i.e., at that moment when we start to reach out to the minority, female, and teenaged jobless...
...Before turning to what seems to me to be the most revealing antinomy—full employment/ price stability—some historic limits must be defined...
...For several years, the nation has been moving left, right, and center...
...It will be as false as always...
...Starting October 1976, our prices will be: Single Copy — $2.50 Year's Subscription — $10 Two Years' Subscription — $17 Student Subscription, One Year — $6 For foreign subscriptions, including Canada, add — $1.00...
...but there remains the tightening of labor markets when the jobless rate comes down, a trend identified by Karl Marx somewhat before Schultze...
...The gross impact of a budget that would fund some jobs is one problem...
...In the jockeying over the Democratic platform, the Labor Coalition (the more progressive unions, such as the UAW, AFSCME, and IAM, which had come together against the war and for McGovern and developed a formal organization for this campaign) and Democracy '76, the issue coalition I helped organize, both emphasized this point...
...I insist on the extremely tentative nature of this enterprise for a reason...
...It is not totally clear how successful the Nixon administration was in "zapping" labor with its 327 controls, but it probably did a fairly good job of it...
...That will be a crucial litmus...
...But even assuming a liberal administration—or a social democratic one, like Denis Healey's exchequer in the present Labour government—there is a disposition to favor profits...
...The devotees of "vulture politics," who believe that defeats and humiliations radicalize people, can state their usual analysis...
...So I think the Wall Street Journal editorial page—normally the most sectarian, dogmatic spot in the country this side of Trotskyist splinters—was right when it argued that Carter did not suffer so much from lack of specificity as from contradictory, liberal and conservative, specifications: balanced budgets and full employment, national health and less government, anti-Washington and federal interventionism...
...Carter 325 has not even begun to sit for his historical portrait...
...First, let me free myself of certain political constraints in this brief speculation about the Jimmy Carter phenomenon...
...many, but not all, handouts to the wealthy...
...The trade unionists, minorities, feminists, and reformers would be in movement the day after a Carter victory and in paralysis the day after a Ford victory...
...BUT EVEN supposing a new Democratic administration would make the right—which is to say, left—decision, the inflation specter would still not be exorcised...
...extends from shamefaced corporate collectivism by Republicans to an avowed, but contradictory, corporate collectivism under the Democrats...
...The wariness of American unions in this area is well-advised...
...This is obviously a crossroads...
...If Carter wins, the big historical question and the immediate policy issues will converge: which basic, and long-range, tendency does his short-run program promote...
...The possible—as it is politically and economically circumscribed under these circumstances (and need I add that I favor transforming the circumstances and redefining the possible...
...This is not simply because of Nixon's corporate bias, though that was a factor...
...I insist rather starkly on this point because I don't want to sneak it into my analysis proper, playing down the negative in the situation so as to lead the reader to my political conclusion without stating it clearly...
...In part, Hawkins-Humphrey would fight inflation on its own, a point not stressed in the Schultze 326 An Announcement Like everyone else, we now have to raise our price...
...That might be an eminently functional mode for a candidate seeking a nomination...
...If he wins power, it will be in the era of state-integrated, multinational-firmdominated, late capitalism...
...They pointed out that a decently paid "last resort" program of federal job creation would subvert the private market of poverty ($2.50 an hour) jobs...
...THE EDITORS critique...
...It would involve restricting investment credits to socially approved outlays (helping a region like the Northeast...
...Each percent of joblessness costs $16 billion in direct federal expenses for unemployment compensation and other ameliorative programs...
...This tendency is, of course, exacerbated by the monopoly power of giant corporations, which, by means of administered prices, pass the cost on to the consumer...
...With such weapons, the government could resist corporate blackmail in an incomes policy...
...To shift this prejudice would be an even more radical move than abolishing tax bonanzas...
...Ford's election would be a catastrophe...
...Moreover, I think there was a great deal of the accidental, and not too much neo-Hegelian or Marxist necessity, in Carter's nomination...
...But he still evokes seven types of political ambiguity and if he wins—which seems likely in this summer of 1976—the question will be, How does he resolve them in governmental action...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
