HOW CRITICAL IS OUR CONDITION? A LOOK AT THE LEFT AND LIBERALS IN AMERICA
Wrong, Dennis H.
I do not recall a time when the prospects for the left in America have looked quite so dim. By "the left," I mean both the relatively small group of intellectuals and perpetual activists who...
...419 whole society, a party of the left wins an election and enacts at least its minimum program...
...If my assurances lack sufficient authority, I can cite two well-known pundits of quite different political persuasions to the 417 same effect...
...He thinks that "sometime in the 1980's . . . there will be a breakthrough into a new political epoch, a new conviction of social possibility" centered on the "detonating issues" of inflation and energy...
...If there was one Reagan slogan that moved many voters, it was his suggestion that they compare their present economic situation with that of four years ago...
...the degeneration into unstable clerical fascism of the Iranian Revolution...
...On examination, it turns out that there have been only two realigning elections in American history (since at least the Civil War): in 1896 and 1932...
...Three times before in the past 30 years Republicans have won landslide presidential elections...
...I agree that there is no conservative tide if what is meant by this contention is that the 51 percent of the electorate that voted for Reagan were not voting for dismantling the welfare state, repealing civil rights legislation, or in favor of the goal of the Moral Majority to abolish reforms affecting women, sex, and family life enacted in the 1960s and 1970s...
...But the ambiguity of his ideological coloration could very well become the norm for future Democratic candidates...
...The 1980 election marks the "end of the '60s" in the same sense that, as Michael Harrington once remarked, 1948 was "the last year of the '30s...
...It would be fatal to liberalism if it should come to pass that conservatives and Republicans seemed to monopolize even the most determined efforts to cope with these problems...
...Did anyone really think that the abandonment of so many traditionally sanctified customs and attitudes could be accomplished without evoking strong resentments in some segments of the population...
...The drift is leftward not because a permanent majority is won over to the support of the more liberal party, but because the achievements in office of that party (or coalition of parties) become part of the status quo preserved by the conservatives once they return to office, as inevitably they do...
...Senator Kennedy's eloquent speech at the 1980 Democratic convention reaffirmed this heritage...
...But it now looks as if the Watergate scandal may have only temporarily blocked a Republican upsurge animated to a considerable extent by a reaction or "backlash" against changes ascribed to liberalism that took place in the 1960s...
...homosexuality was legalized in some jurisdictions and accepted de facto in others...
...However, the alternation of parties in office is not the essence of the left/ right rhythm of democratic politics...
...Ronald Reagan, 1980," one must wonder why the journal's editors apparently see this as a selfevidently silly, deluded, or vicious query...
...For the first time since the 1930s, a sizable segment of left-liberal opinion reverted to an essentially isolationist rejection of American involvement in world politics...
...The assumption that conservative eras will give way to new periods of innovation from the left presupposes the existence of a continuing reservoir of potentially discontented voting groups ready to support new egalitarian reforms once the attraction of issues favoring conservatives diminishes...
...has drawn on a famous essay of his father's, which also was one of my sources in arriving at the idea of a "rhythm" in democratic politics, to present a more optimistic reading than seems to be justified.' Schlesinger, Jr.'s statement appeared before the Reagan victory, but, more realistically than others on the left, he at least acknowledged the existence even then of an ascending conservative mood...
...But this, too, happened before, in the 1950s...
...The McCarthyism of the 1950s had no such deep roots: it had its origins in the bitter partisanship of Republicans who had lost five straight presidential elections and in the worst tensions of the Cold War...
...Whatever real gains they may achieve, all major efforts at reform fall short of their goals, leaving a legacy of "unfinished revolutions...
...The belief among liberals that the failure of his economic policies will immediately result in a swing back to the Democrats is entirely too comfortable an assumption...
...The election outcome strengthened doubts that the poor, the victims of racial discrimination, and the unemployed are numerous enough, or that their plight is shocking enough to rally large numbers outside their ranks...
...In striking contrast to Eisenhower, Reagan has chosen to present his Administration as aiming at a thoroughgoing transformation of the role of government in American life...
...Yet Eisenhower turned out to be the very model of a modern conservative president fully in tune with the "rhythm of democratic politics...
...In this case, one would have to conclude that the leftward drift of the rhythm of democratic politics is counterbalanced over time by a rightward tendency in which each era of left ascendancy reduces the social base remaining available for a future turn to the left...
...Denial of the reality of a "conservative tide" by liberal and left publicists amounts to whistling in the dark...
...intolerance of premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality, and drug use...
...I share the general belief on the left that the Reagan economic program is unlikely to reduce inflation, and unlikely to markedly increase investment or productivity, or even in the end greatly to reduce nonmilitary government spending...
...Schlesinger presented a broad generalized description of American political history from the decade preceding the American Revolution to the present rather than a true "theory," for he made only ad hoc efforts at causal explanation of the pattern he identified...
...attributes the present conservative trend to the need for an interlude of "recuperation" similar to those that followed other reform eras in which "the changes wrought in the previous activist period are digested by the social organism and penetrate the framework of society...
...The identification with the Soviet Union that had so damaged the left and the larger liberal community in the early years of the Cold War was repeated in the late 1960s and 70s, though more weakly and diffusely, with respect to Cuba, Maoist China, and North Vietnam...
...The latter may turn out to be conventionally rather than 418 radically conservative, dampening the hopes of its doctrinaire monetarist and supply-side supporters and the revanchistes of the New Right, as well as the fears of alarmists and pessimists on the left...
...But it is too early to read long-range significance into these findings, which may reflect temporary high anxiety over inflation...
...so why, we might ask, should Reagan's victory by a margin less impressive than that of Eisenhower twice and Nixon once be taken as evidence of an unprecedentedly grave "crisis" of the left and/or liberalism...
...The experience of the Thatcher government in Britain, which was also determined to adopt policies at variance with the shrewd, essentially managerial conservatism of previous postwar Tory governments, is likely to have a cautionary effect on Washington...
...Campaigning by television, the decline of local patronage, the rise of single-issue groups, and the unanticipated effects of new election laws have resulted in the much-discussed "decomposition" of political parties, reducing the significance of the candidates' party affiliation...
...ERA will probably not pass but neither will constitutional amendments banning abortion or permitting school prayers...
...American radicals nurtured by the New Left of the 1960s have since 1975 experienced an unprecedented series of traumatic shocks comparable to the earlier effects of revelations about Stalinism culminating in Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956: de-Maoization in China and the discovery that the country had virtually stood still economically for two decades...
...they also cast a backward light in suggesting that Reagan's election was far from reflecting a collective will to fracture the rhythm of democratic politics by giving free rein to a militant, even radical, conservatism...
...mand nor even hope for the speedy reform of these conditions...
...This provides the Administration with a further political hedge against economic failure, for the South and the West are increasingly Republican bastions at the presidential level...
...The revival of traditional isolationist sentiment in the interwar years ended when Roosevelt prolonged the left-liberal momentum of the New Deal era by opposing fascism abroad and eventually leading the nation to victory in the Second World War...
...American participation in both world wars occurred during reformist Democratic administrations...
...Those who question that the voters gave Reagan a "mandate" to abandon the social policies introduced in the 1960s, as opposed to merely refraining from extending them, appear to accept the rhythm model at least as it applies to the electorate...
...Until the present century, avoidance of "entangling alliances" and overseas involvements was the American tradition...
...Too many on the left continue to rely on the old anti-Cold War sloganizing about "U.S...
...Groups on the right have far greater control over all politically relevant resources except the right to vote itself, and this enables them to mobilize more fully their constituency and to conduct more intensive election campaigns...
...But there are signs that the Reagan administration is already beginning to discover that the break with the '60s does not mean it is possible to refurbish as an effective counterideology the short-lived consensus that was challenged by the protest movements now in decline...
...2 Anyone whose memory extends back a mere 15 years can testify to the reality of sweeping changes in the laws governing divorce, abortion, capital punishment, and the censorship of obscenity and pornography...
...If the left adheres to such a line, it will be isolated even from the liberal wing of the Democratic party...
...On the other hand, the Republicans may benefit from just plain luck with the economy, the energy crisis, and in foreign affairs...
...Since it is not clear what causes the pattern, why should we expect it to persist...
...414 the conservative eras do not result in abolition of the reforms achieved by the left-liberal administrations, there is, over time, a "leftward drift" inherent in democratic politics...
...But sooner or later, often as the result of an economic or foreign policy crisis affecting the 5 My fullest and most recent statement of the "theory" is in chap...
...capital punishment was virtually discontinued...
...And as Reagan himself reminded us—apparently without irony—in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, FDR promised to reduce federal spending and intervention in the economy...
...Yet] the liberals, more than their adversaries, have shaped what America is today...
...Efforts by some analysts to explain away this trend by excluding the results of supposedly "exceptional" elections (as in 1952 and 1972) are just another version of the "maintaining/ deviating" typology I have here criticized...
...in his 1939 article updated several times both by himself and his son...
...Since practically nobody foresaw the movements that emerged within a very short time, it would be rash indeed to assert today with any degree of confidence that new impulses toward reform are unlikely to spring up in the foreseeable future...
...But to acknowledge this is a different matter from assuming that the Democrats can expect to win future elections if they make the interests of the poor and the minorities their sole or even their primary cause...
...This conception may provide some guidance, although I am now prepared to entertain serious reservations about it that are, in fact, the grounds for my pessimism about the future of left-liberalism...
...If the left tries to rally behind the old flags and slogans, it will find itself deservedly condemned to political oblivion...
...422 "Third World," a term acquiring unmistakable eschatological overtones...
...sexual relations among adolescents and living together without marriage by older men and women become commonplace...
...Ultimately, perhaps the best reason for reserving judgment about the decline of liberalism may be simply the sheer weight of the liberal tradition in American history...
...5 Parties of the left propose egalitarian reforms in order to mobilize the potential majority of those in the population who are relatively socially and economically disadvantaged...
...The inflation crisis and the belief that it was partly caused by government spending were genuine new concerns in 1980...
...People who are still inclined to support it on economic grounds are pulled in the opposite direction by moral and "lifestyle" considerations...
...so were the conservative if not reactionary positions adopted by the Church on most political and social issues...
...Reagan may end up looking 415 like a much more conventional post-New Deal Republican president in what he actually achieves...
...The same polls indicated much greater workingclass conservatism on "social" issues...
...His cultivated identification with FDR is meant to underline his determination to change course, as is the priority he has given to his economic program over both foreign policy and the "social conservatism" upheld by important voting groups behind him...
...The results have been just as disastrous...
...Moreover, he has left himself plenty of time to change course, even to the extent of confirming Robert Lekachman's prediction that within two years he will introduce mandatory wage and price controls...
...The upheaval within the Catholic church during Pope John's pontificate also deserves to be mentioned...
...The drastic cuts in welfare spending and taxes proposed in the new Administration's first months in office unmistakably distinguish it from the pacifying conservatism favored by Eisenhower and then again by Nixon in 1968 with its assurances of continuity with the recent past...
...I shall return to this inadequacy later, but let us first look at the present situation in light of the cyclical pattern itself...
...8 of Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (New York: Harper & Row, 1979...
...These terms were introduced in the 1950s to explain, or explain away, Eisenhower's two victories, which were defined as "deviating" rather than "realigning" elections because they did not fundamentally alter the partisan alignments that had made the Democrats the majority party since 1932...
...Much of the passion behind the Reagan candidacy, on the other hand, came from the Moral Majority and the New Right...
...The making of a major political cause out of veneration for the flag and declared opposition to public homosexuality— the conversion of these and similar sentiments into the canons of an impassioned mobilizing ideology—are the raw material for a crypto-fascist movement...
...But there was a widespread sense at the time, expressed even by wholly sympathetic listeners, that the speech amounted to a "Last Hurrah," not only for Kennedy's 1980 presidential candidacy or for the Democrats' chances in the election, but also for the majorities won in the past by appealing primarily to a constituency of social and economic underdogs...
...Particular election outcomes, especially when there is a change of party, are always influenced by conditions affecting the whole society as well as by the variable mobilization of the major constituencies regularly supporting the left or the right...
...Still, that woman in Newark struck me as pathetic because her hopes for restoring the America she knew as a child are so unlikely to materialize...
...421 such an attitude encourages a version of "the worse, the better" thinking...
...The confrontational phase of the Cold War kept McCarthyism alive for an indecently long time, but it became a spent political force not long after Stalin's death and the end of the war in Korea...
...The post-Vietnam mood of the smaller radical constituency, however, amounted to a near-total rejection of American power as inherently "imperialistic," and to support for left nationalist regimes and movements in the 6 As quoted by Richard F. Hamilton, Class and Politics in the United States (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972), pp...
...4 "Reagan and the Republican Revival," Commentary, October 1980, p. 31...
...Its effects may be more consequential than its causes...
...A more fundamental reason for questioning Schlesinger's confidence in a liberal revival in less than a decade is his conviction that the cyclical pattern identified by his father makes such a swing to the left inevitable...
...There is a good deal of evidence that in many parts of the country the Democratic party is now perceived as the party of abortion, sexual license, opposition to the family, coerced racial integration by busing and quotas, tolerance of crime, and indifference to religion, rather than the party sympathetic to welfare measures and the needs of the economically hard-pressed...
...If no group that might play such a role today is readily discernible, there remain plenty of "missed or compromised revolutions," in Paul Goodman's phrase, left over from the past...
...imperialism," "progressive Third World revolutions," and the like—the mechanical negation, as Henry Pachter argued in one of his last, alas, contributions to Dissent, of the global anti-Communism that foundered in Vietnam...
...It is hard to believe that it will not be renewed in a society that remains riddled with so many inequalities and imperfections...
...the genocide practiced by the Cambodian Communists...
...Democrats who act on the assumption that unemployment has the same kind of effect on people's lives as it did in the 1930s or the 1950s are going to come up with policies that make no sense to the voter...
...Liberals and social democrats need their own strategic experts, capable of recognizing 423 the Soviet threat and at the same time of criticizing unwise military and diplomatic responses to it—even if this should entail, as I believe it does, favoring the reinstatement of a peacetime draft as an alternative to the preference of the "military-industrial complex" for expensive hardware like the MX missile...
...As the 1980 Michigan Survey Center preelection polls revealed, there was a marked decline to the point of virtual disappearance in the correlation between class and attitudes regarding welfare spending and government intervention in the economy in general...
...By 1960, Richard Nixon was insisting in a private meeting at the Republican convention that "If you ever let them [the Democrats] campaign only on domestic issues, they'll beat us—our only hope is to keep it on foreign policy...
...Theories, cyclical metaphors, trend lines— none of them are infallible guides to the future: "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors, / And issues...
...The concerns of the Moral Majority supporters, however, are rooted in personal experiences touching the most intimate domestic aspects of daily life...
...This condition itself is the result of the welfare programs and civil rights legislation of the Kennedy-Johnson years and their influence throughout the society...
...Are there reasons for holding that the prospects of the left are even worse today than in those distant days that were, after all, succeeded by new protest movements and farreaching reforms...
...For the first time since 1917 there is no country anywhere in the world to which radicals can point with any credibility as a model for either advanced or underdeveloped societies to emulate...
...So] when liberals persist in seeing the United States in a perspective which is sharply critical, and which is not longer accurate, they risk being seen not as idealistic reformers but rather as anti-American cranks...
...That description was accurate enough in 1936 and it was not too far off as recently as 1963 when Michael Harrington wrote The Other America...
...The main achievements of the "sexual revolution," however unliberating some of them may now appear to be, are not going to be reversed at the level of actual conduct...
...New York Times Magazine, March 30, 1980, pp...
...The "deep" sociological explanations of McCarthyism, such as the "status politics" theory advanced by Hofstadter, Bell, and Lipset, began within a few years to look like intellectuals' typical overinterpretations of transitory events...
...When the Moral Majority organized triumphal rallies in several New Jersey cities a few days after the election, I happened to see a television newsclip in which a reporter asked a middle-aged woman why she supported the movement...
...This was not therefore a return to the older isolationism founded on belief in the superior morality and progressivism of America as compared to corrupt and wily foreigners mired in ancient quarrels...
...It is particularly ironic that liberals persist in believing that poverty is widespread, because the main reason it is not is that liberal programs have worked...
...But this will in no way ensure that Reagan will be followed by a return to power of a restored left-liberal coalition representing yet another turn of the leftright cycle consistent with the pattern of the past...
...If the Republicans make significant gains in the 3 New York Daily News, October 15, 1980...
...But eventually the party of the right returns to office, accepting the permanence of the reforms the left has instituted...
...But what of the Moral Majority and New Right, crusading against abortion, pornography, homosexuality, and women's rights— "social" rather than economic conservatism...
...The demonstrations against the war in Southeast Asia helped turn public opinion against it, but they also left a legacy of bitterness, especially among blue-collar workers, against the flamboyant anti-Americanism of the protesters and their open rejection of any world role for the United States...
...the brutal Vietnamese expulsion by water of their large Chinese minority...
...6 The Vietnam War delegitimated American power throughout the world in the eyes of much of the American left, extending well into the ranks of the liberal Democrats...
...One is reminded also of 1972, although to a lesser extent, since McGovern was perceived as an atypical Democratic candidate and Nixon's overwhelming victory had little or no effect on the congressional elections...
...This is doubtless a correct assumption, but activist government is not in itself liberal and many analysts have noted the possibility of a conservative "corporatist" alliance between government and big business aiming at the stabilization of prices and the planned allocation of energy resources...
...the flight to the United States at the risk of drowning by fully one percent of the population of Cuba...
...Conversely, foreign policy has often favored the Democrats since 1940...
...To doubt that the voters wanted Reagan to do all sorts of reactionary things amounts therefore to little more than a debating point...
...Kennedy's narrow presidential victory in 1960, for example, began a turn to the left, although Eisenhower could probably easily have been reelected had it been legally possible for him to run again...
...Demographic trends are now increasing the numbers of old people in the population, which may very well make the reform of social security funding, national health insurance, and legal and moral questions pertaining to medical life-support systems into issues whose time has come in the 1980s...
...One ominous difference is that Eisenhower, whatever his expedient timidities, was not even a closet McCarthyite and became the Republican candidate by defeating the right wing of his party to which McCarthy and his supporters belonged...
...Certainly, Reagan and many of his advisers cherish an obvious nostalgia for the vanished bipolar world of the late 1950s and the confrontational rhetoric associated with John Foster Dulles...
...the revolt of the Polish workers under the banners of free trade unionism, Catholicism, and nationalism rather than for a vision of "socialism with a human face...
...This is surely belaboring the biological analogy to the point where metaphor does the work of explanation...
...They are subordinated more readily than in the past to other issues on which conservatives and Republicans fare better...
...Nor was it even a revival of the "natural" priority accorded by the left to domestic reform in preference to foreign policy...
...Since 1 "Is Liberalism Dead...
...So it is by no means impossible that the Democrats might recapture the presidency in 1984...
...It will, in effect, be making a free gift to the right of the issue of resisting Soviet expansionism, an issue that enhances the appeal to nationalism that is the right's traditional trump card...
...McGovern represented this tendency in the 1972 presidential election...
...Even if the effects of Reagan's economic policies are uniformly negative, their impact on the Sunbelt and the West will be more cushioned than that on the old industrial and urban centers...
...The cyclical rhythm is a physiological process," he contends, "like the systole and diastole of the heart...
...Though the issues are quite different, there is a real similarity or at least a "functional equivalence," between these groups and the "politics of revenge" in the early 1950s against the New Deal and the Second World War of which McCarthyism was the most notable manifestation...
...Besides, the Reagan budget cuts are likely to be most harmful, as Felix Rohatyn and others have argued, to the Northeast and the Midwest, regions declining in population and political strength...
...The inflation of the "threat" to El Salvador aroused criticism well beyond the doctrinaire left, compelling a playing down of the situation and scarcely veiled efforts to curb the more extravagant talkers in the Administration, including the Secretary of State...
...I shall try to answer this question by examining the present situation in relation to a conception of the "rhythm of democratic politics" that I presented in Dissent in the Winter 1974 issue...
...But Reagan also profited from the state of the economy, usually the issue working to the advantage of the Democrats...
...Though shrugged off or mocked as archaic relics by all who considered themselves enlightened, there was no visible political de2 An exception is Fred Siegel, who makes some exceedingly perceptive observations on both the mentality of the New Right and on the incomprehension of it exhibited by many liberals in "Notes on the New Right," Commonweal, May 8, 1981, pp...
...The ideologues of neoconservatism, moving toward full affiliation with the Republican party and the Reagan administration, have greatly exaggerated its influence in the Carter administration...
...424...
...Yet the Reagan administration clearly overestimated the depth and political meaning of such feelings when it initially made so much of El Salvador and echoed the most indiscriminate anti-Communist slogans of the early 1950s...
...It amazes me that so many liberals and leftists seem surprised by the emergence of something like the Moral Majority...
...The most extensive periodization of American political history into cycles of alternating liberal and conservative ascendancy is that of Schlesinger, Sr...
...There will, of course, be some legal trimming and perhaps a few successful campaigns in small towns and a few less metropolitan states to undo recent trends to "permissiveness...
...Like John Anderson in 1980, he was what Henry Fairlie called the "candidate of the quiche eaters...
...Nor would it be wise to count on Reagan's economic policies pushing large numbers of people back below the poverty line or augmenting the ranks of the unemployed...
...Even if there is little improvement in the economy, it is worth remembering that the New Deal never fully put an end to the Depression and Roosevelt was nevertheless twice reelected before the defense boom brought a decisive economic upturn...
...The availability of abortions will be reduced—it already has been for the poor—but there is unlikely to be a return to the condition in which abortion was illegal throughout the United States that prevailed before the mid-1960s...
...If Reagan chooses to follow the most extreme policies of the right wing of the Republican party, he can claim that the voters authorized him to do so with rather more justice than FDR could with respect to the first 100 days of the New Deal, if only because Reagan himself had long been the preferred candidate of the right wing...
...parietal rules were abolished at most residential colleges and coeducational dormitories were widely established...
...I remember noticing early in the 1976 primaries that the most conventional liberal candidate in the field, Morris Udall, seemed to be carrying all the college and university towns while trailing his opponents everywhere else...
...A change reducing the salience of left/ right issues, even if class alignments with respect to them remain much the same, can be seen as a movement of the electorate to the right...
...For that matter, we are told that not only FDR but Calvin Coolidge, of all people, is one of the past presidents he most admires...
...My reading of the immediate prospects for liberalism and the left is a pessimistic one, but I am constrained at the same time to recall the fate of those political diagnoses so widely advanced in the late 1950s that virtually wrote finis to the long historical journey of American society toward the fuller realization of its own liberal and egalitarian ideals...
...But an election may initiate a decisive shift in the public mood rather than simply reflect an earlier change of mood...
...His cyclical—really, spiral—conception may have encouraged both Roosevelt in 1940 and Kennedy in 1960 to become presidential candidates, which would make his idea partially self-fulfilling, something that seems to happen sooner of later to most widely disseminated theories of the political process...
...As an individual, Jimmy Carter was undoubtedly something of a political sport, a minor regional politician able to win a surprise nomination by taking advantage of new primary rules in 1976...
...Yet within a few years all these ancient bulwarks had crumbled: nonadversary divorce, abortion, and even "hard-core" pornography became legal nearly everywhere...
...Yet when the Nation distributes an advertisement emblazoned with the quotation " 'When did the cold war end...
...Even so, five of the seven presidential candidates chosen primarily because they were military heroes were nominated by the more conservative political party...
...The recurrence of this sequence of events constitutes the rhythm of democratic politics and exhibits the leftward drift inherent in it...
...Some lessons seem to have been learned from Vietnam and Iran...
...The long overdue return to power of a center-left government in France as a result of Mitterrand's election and the deepening unpopularity of the Thatcher government in Britain will not only influence American opinion in ways not easy to measure...
...Perhaps this was the face of a "fascist beast," but it seemed more pathetic than menacing...
...She answered that she wanted the country to become again what it had been when she was a girl growing up, when "there was respect for the flag and homosexuality stayed in the closet...
...Turns to the left in American politics have nearly always been sparked by the protests of groups that had long been ignored or had remained politically mute: abolitionists in the 1850s, poor farmers at the turn of the century, industrial workers in the 1930s, Southern blacks in the late 1950s, women a decade later...
...My own version of the rhythm of democratic politics suggested that the pattern reflected the cumulative effects over time of political equality in the form of universal suffrage on the social and economic inequalities that continue to prevail in democratic capitalist societies...
...9-10...
...The prospects of the left therefore are a separate matter from the successes or failures of the Reagan administration...
...And the longest period of conservative dominance, in the decades following the Civil War, was sustained by the Republican tactic of "waving the bloody shirt...
...Goodman enumerated fully 27 in Growing Up Absurd, written in the late 1950s, without even mentioning race relations and feminism, which both loomed so large in the 1960s...
...The failure of Barone's candidates—all but five of those he advised lost in November, including senators Church, Culver, and Nelson— perhaps leads him to exaggerate when he writes that "poverty largely has been conquered...
...269-72...
...Yet no less a spokesman for liberalism than Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...It also recognizes that conservatives have genuine popular issues favoring them in patriotic and moral or religious sentiments rather than merely capitalizing on a periodic need for tranquillity after bouts of reforming zeal directed by the left...
...This formulation amounts at best to what philosophers would call an "explanation sketch" of the cyclical pattern rather than a full causal account...
...The rhythm of democratic politics involves the alternation of periods dominated by protest and policy initiatives from the left with periods of conservative retrenchment...
...The rhythm would then slow down and even cease at a point far short of full social and economic equality—a disheartening conclusion both for those who cherish this as an ideal and even more for those reduced to permanent minority and lower-class status...
...The decline since 1945 in class voting suggests that there has been a long-run trend to the right underlying the two (really one-andahalf) cyclical shifts between left and right over the same period...
...If fewer than half of the last eight elections can be regarded as "normal," the labels just don't seem very useful...
...Even if the Democratic party were to return to power in 1984, it does not follow that it would necessarily win under the leadership of liberals responsive to the concerns of the smaller community of left-wing intellectuals and activists...
...While any group calling itself a majority is invariably far from constituting one, this group cannot be too readily dismissed as a force in the Reagan administration...
...Schlesinger's expectation that inflation and energy will eventually favor liberals rests entirely on the assumption that conservatives will be unable to solve these problems by following their traditional preferences and reducing government intervention in the economy while reposing their faith in the market...
...But what if this reservoir shrinks in size at the end of each period of reform...
...Nevertheless, both elections and surveys over the past two decades show that working- and lower-middle-class citizens remain predominantly left of center on economic issues, and the 420 center itself has, of course, shifted to the left...
...for chance, luck, and a host of transitory and ephemeral events usually contribute to the outcome of an election...
...Conversely, both in Europe and America the raison d'être of the left has been to call for domestic reforms promising greater equality and therefore to view with suspicion the elitism and relative insulation from popular control of armies, foreign offices, and secret intelligence...
...Even if Reagan's early aggressive efforts to improve the economy fail, he may earn (as FDR did) credit with the voters for having at least tried, or given the appearance of trying...
...Garry Wills some weeks before the election reported in his syndicated column that he had tried to convince a group of worried foreign journalists that the extreme conservatism they thought they were observing was "vastly exaggerated" and actually represented a coming to terms with "the drastic social revolution we all went through in the 1960's...
...42-43, 70-73, 79...
...The moral and religious issues promoted by the New Right and the resurgence of patriotic feeling resulting from the protracted Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the evidence of increased Soviet military strength certainly contributed to the 1980 Republican victory...
...But it is not an accurate description of the United States today, and the voters know it...
...The rejection of the Administration's plans for enormous and unselective increases in the military budget are other signs in the wind...
...Nor has his son done any better...
...Yet liberalism, even the most moderate kind, has become sufficiently unpopular to have lost the political initiative it began to reacquire in 1960 and maintained, though more haltingly in the face of increasing opposition, through the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations...
...As a political poller he is confined to reporting people's perceptions rather than economic realities, and one of Harrington's main contentions in his book was that poverty in America was relatively "invisible...
...By contrast, parties of the left suffer from a "mobilization lag" because their potential majority consists of poorly informed, traditionally subservient people, more parochial in their attachments and with less free time to devote to politics...
...Socialism" itself (as distinct from social democratic reformism) may have suffered mortal wounds as the name for an ideal alternative society...
...It is also worth observing that political tendencies in the Western world are rarely confined by national boundaries or even by the Atlantic Ocean...
...As Michael Barone, a political consultant who worked for over a dozen 1980 Democratic senatorial candidates, wrote last November 22 in the New Republic: If you listen to much Democratic oratory, you get the idea that we have a nation that is, in Franklin Roosevelt's phrase, one-third illclothed, ill-housed, and ill-fed...
...But Reagan's age limits him to one term in office and it is doubtful that he can transfer his popularity to a successor...
...All of these changes came about very suddenly, often as the result of decisions by the courts or even by bar association committees...
...The replacement after the war of Germany and Japan as overseas antagonists by the Soviet Union and China, revolutionary states claiming to incarnate the essential vision of the left, weaned the right wing of the Republican party away from its isolationism...
...There is no inherent reason why there should not be an indefinite succession of fluctuating or ambiguous elections, a protracted period of stalemate between the parties...
...Since involvement in wars and international power politics has long been central to the experience of European nations, their conservative parties have been able to claim an identification with the national past itself, indeed with the very existence of the nation, long antedating the birth of democracy and the rise of the left...
...I submit, however, that it is a good deal more illuminating than the invocation of physical or biological metaphors about tidal flows or the rhythm of heartbeats...
...Yet the essence of the Reagan program may well turn out to be little more than the fanfare with which it has been presented, for significant parts of it will be trimmed in Congress...
...She was gray-haired and gaunt-faced, looking rather like someone out of a photograph in one of those books of the 1930s documenting the plight of the Southern share-croppers, such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or You Have Seen Their Faces (readers with gray hair will remember that time...
...McCarthyism assailed the Democrats with the demagogic charge of "twenty years of treason," but it also bridged the transition to a new Republican nationalism that accepted foreign alliances and a world role for the United States...
...A major strategy of parties of the right has been to emphasize foreign policy in order to overcome the potential left majority inherent in the class division on which the left/ right polarity is based...
...What if there is a progressive increase in the number of people who are relatively satisfied with the positions they have achieved in the prevailing distribution of power, privilege, and prestige, and are therefore less responsive to appeals for further egalitarian reforms, although considerable social inequality remains...
...Within a year or two, the civil rights movement began its assault on segregation and released the reforming energies that were soon to flow into numerous other channels...
...If we consider only the eight presidential elections (leaving out 1980) since the Second World War, three were "deviating" (1952, 1956, 1972), three were presumably "normal" or "maintaining" (1948, 1964, 1976), and two were too close to classify (1960, 1968...
...As recently as 1965, traditional norms and 18th-century legal statutes were taken for granted even by most liberals and radicals as immovable social furniture...
...But homosexuality is not going to be forced back into the closet nor women into the kitchen...
...My sketch does not, to be sure, account for the outcome of any single election, since it gives primary attention to the constants underlying the appeals of parties of the right and left and the different class constituencies responsive to them...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Roosevelt was elected in 1932 by almost exactly the same percentage of a relatively, as well as absolutely, smaller electorate...
...No doubt, "respect for the flag" can and will return —if, indeed, it ever really departed...
...The national Democratic party since at least 1936 has strongly identified itself with the interests and concerns of the more deprived segments of the population: manual workers, the poor, racial minorities, women, the unemployed...
...The Democratic party neither can nor should abandon its representation of the interests of the poor, the blacks, women, and the unemployed...
...Anxiety over the alleged spending-inflation link amounted to considerably more than mere nostalgia or utopian hankering for a nonexistent laissezfaire past to which many on the left attributed it...
...1982 congressional elections, talk of realignment will undoubtedly become louder as Roosevelt's off-year gains in 1934 are recalled...
...3 James Q. Wilson, the Harvard neoconservative, after expressing considerable sympathy for the religious and moral concerns of the New Right, nevertheless concluded that American history indicated that in every preceding period of religious revival and broad cultural change, the forces of tradition have ultimately lost . . . [and] every such period . . . has sooner or later been dominated by young, educated activists who have left as their legacy the values implicit in liberal higher education.4 Even in conventional political terms, talk of 1980 as a "critical" or "realigning" election is wildly premature...
...The attempt of some on the American left to reactivate the anti-Vietnam protest movement is likely to prove even less successful than attempts to rebuild the old New Deal coalition on the domestic front...
...Yet the decline in class voting can be interpreted to mean that left/ right issues have become less decisive in influencing the vote...
...Yet the Moral Majority, the New Right, and the issues they are concerned about represent a much more real "fascist potential" than McCarthyism ever did...
...This is especially true of the tax cuts, so dear to the supply-side theorists but feared to be inflationary by the more conventional economists and corporate managers within the Reagan administration...
...416 A popular movement rallying people behind "traditional" values against forces identified with modernity and cosmopolitanism is at least the seedbed of fascism...
...Parties of the right compete by stressing issues that are not class-linked, such as nationalism, moral values, and ethnic or religious rivalries, striving thereby to offset the larger class constituency susceptible to appeals of the left...
...The wonder is that it took so long for something like the Moral Majority to appear...
...and, whatever the fate of ERA, in the status of women and relations between the sexes...
...The line about "getting the government off our backs" has conformed, after all, to standard Republican rhetoric for a long time...
...Finally, there is foreign policy...
...True, publicopinion surveys reveal little change over the last 40 years in the left/ right or liberal/ conservative class alignments on economic and welfare issues...
...It may even aggravate the situation it is intended to remedy, leading to abandonment and reversal within a fairly short time...
...Chinese and Vietnamese military aggressions in Southeast Asia...
...The overdone patriotic orgies welcoming home the Iranian hostages provided a release for pent-up emotions, manipulated, to be sure, by Carter in his reelection campaign and exploited by the media...
...Does anyone recall Eisenhower in 1952 holding up an egg and indignantly enumerating the taxes on it, managing to suggest that even the chickens were fiscally oppressed by the welfare state...
...Should they do so, they will risk permanent minority status by becoming, in effect, a special-interest lobby failing to address itself to the system problems of inflation, energy, and economic growth, which are to an ever larger extent the main concerns of a majority of the population...
...Yet the growing strength and aggressiveness of the Soviet Union and its client states worked against Carter in the 1980 election even though he had already moved to increase defense spending, which after the invasion of Afghanistan was also strongly supported in a reversal of their previous position by the most "dovish" liberal Democratic senators...
...This is indeed a fundamental prerequisite for the persistence of the rhythm of democratic politics...
...However, the dangerous illusions such a view represents are not effectively overcome by denying the reality of increasing Soviet military power and by automatically denouncing any American efforts to contain it...
...In 1980, furthermore, inflation and energy were issues working against liberals, largely because they were perceived as "system problems" affecting everyone—as opposed to unemployment and welfare spending, the standard Democratic issues increasingly stressed during the campaign, which are far more selective in their impact on the electorate...
...By "the left," I mean both the relatively small group of intellectuals and perpetual activists who have been responsive to Marxian or at least socialist ideas and the liberals who have led the Democratic party's "New Deal coalition" that has been a major force in American politics since the 1930s...
...Both those who applauded it and those who deplored it believed in the reality of the "end of ideology," although the institutions of racial segregation in the South still stood in violation of the Constitution...
...There are certainly a great many similarities of mood, rhetoric, and expectation between 1952 and 1980...
Vol. 28 • September 1981 • No. 4
