THE FONDA-HAYDEN SHOW
Wechsler, James A.
The following comment, slightly abbreviated, is reprinted with the author's permission from the New York Post. In their new incarnation, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda talk brightly of "a new political...
...Asked whether there were "areas in which your views may have changed," he replied: "Oh, everybody's views change...
...The contradictions and incoherences were painfully evident during a joint Fonda-Hayden performance on Meet the Press in which Miss Fonda was reminded of her statement that Gov...
...Where are "the new solutions...
...They are echoes of the phrases that tired and disenchanted ex-liberals have long been reciting and writing in many public symposia...
...There was a comparable colloquy in which Hayden conveyed the image of the faded young rebel approaching mellow middle-age...
...The real question is what is "new" about this "new era" message...
...I am more skeptical than perhaps I was 10 years ago about the role of programs like the Great Society program, or social programs...
...Brown's call for "limits on the federal budget...
...The welfare state is a bandaid, and we have to invest our nation's money in productive sectors that will create more jobs, keep the money in the United States, not in the Middle East or Indonesia...
...I now see these as expensive clean-up operations for corporations that move away to South Korea or the Philippines...
...Brown "as far as I can see, is the only politician who represents that new era, who has vision for the new era...
...I have more skepticism about busing than I did when I was a high school student and I supported Gen...
...In their new incarnation, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda talk brightly of "a new political era" in which California Gov...
...At first she sought to dismiss the question by noting Brown's proposals for "taking some of the profits of the oil companies and investing them in mass transit, solar energy...
...It professes to forsake the "welfare state" and "Great Society" banners (without defining concrete areas in which existing programs would be abandoned or rolled back...
...After enumerating the varied social programs (health, education, guaranteed jobs, mass transit, grants for consumer advocates) embodied in the platform of the Hayden-Fonda "Campaign for Economic Democracy," a questioner asked Miss Fonda how this prospectus could be reconciled with Gov...
...But the crusade on which they have embarked seems to reflect much of the muddled doublethink that has increasingly characterized Brown's own bid for national eminence...
...At the same time, however, it offers an elusive mix of populist rhetoric with the neoconservative economics now deemed politically fashionable...
...It is in part an attempt to revive the passions of their earlier antiwar movement by permanently halting all uses of nuclear power (as if it were forever beyond mortal imagination to harness such energy for the elevation of the human condition...
...Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, in Little Rock...
...Whatever else may be said about them, these can hardly be called unconventional remarks...
...Jerry Brown—subject to change without notice—is apparently their highest hope...
...At the very least the response—on which unfortunately no elaboration was sought— sounded more like old-fashioned Republicanism than new politics...
...The people who voted in California for Proposition 13 are middle Americans who can't afford to bear the burden of more taxes...
...I have been active now for 20 years.' have changed my mind about a number of things...
...36...
...I believe in free enterprise capitalism, the family farm, the small solar energy businessman," Hayden said, "but I think that the problem with the system today is that the very large corporations are not under the control of supply and demand, nor under the control of government...
...The interviewer persisted: Q: But he [Brown] is also in favor of cutting back on federal spending...
...Fonda: Well, it is becoming clear, isn't it, that the New Deal kind of liberalism, the welfare state approach, isn't working...
Vol. 27 • January 1980 • No. 1
