RACE: THE MISSING ISSUE OF 1980

...He stood on "high ground," campaigning in favor of economic growth, a strong defense...

...As Paul Weyrich put it bluntly, "We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime...

...The best thing to do would be to get rid of all these people...

...The civil rights movement, in a way, now was in the government and tied to Carter by patronage if not affection...

...THE RACE ISSUE never appeared on the surface of the campaign because Reagan was able to quietly reap what Wallace and Agnew had sown...

...Why, asked one of my white students in a class of trade unionists, are Jamaicans so successful...

...Richard Scammon has quipped that there is nothing wrong with the Democrats that a 12 percent unemployment rate can't cure...

...The obvious contrast between the good life in official Washington—which was there well before Nancy's dinnerware problems—and the decay of our older cities and suburbs made it easy for Reagan to appeal to the worst instincts of the workaday citizen...

...The clear-cut issues of the '60s were increasingly clouded by the growth of competing groups— women, Hispanics, the handicapped, gays—who also claimed victimized status for themselves and the right to government-supported redress...

...But even areas not touched directly were affected...

...He is partly mistaken...

...Without the benefit of a coherent party capable of being responsive to voters and of providing a forum for debate and internal conciliation, Carter was operating without a clear sense of priorities, often merely appeasing the constituencies that hounded him most...

...The frightening difference between a court action and a political action," said Richard Neely in his engaging defense of judicial activism, How Courts Govern America, "is that the courts give no warning...

...Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's chief domestic adviser, was as troubled as Califano...

...They were one of a number of traditional constituencies floating around unattended that were pocketed by the Republicans...

...Ever since the 1930s, when Al Smith and the Liberty Lobby were making goo-goo eyes at each other, shrewd conservatives have dreamed of uniting social and economic conservatives...

...The election then was a Democratic debacle rather than a Republican triumph...

...Students of the election, such as William Schneider, writing in the American Enterprise Institute's publication (1981) The American Elections of 1980, and Gerald Pomper of Rutgers University, in The Election of 1980: Reports and Interpretations (Pomper, ed., Chatham House, 1981), contend that what was most notable about the pattern of returns was the "consistency of results across the country...

...The simultaneous growth of a black middle class and of a desperate underclass that was apparently beyond redemption ripped apart the arguments for social reform at both ends...

...If key liberals felt this way, is it any wonder that Reagan was able to convince so many Americans that if they looked down their gunsights they would see all the domestic problems along a single line, labeled Big Government...

...Kennedy didn't seem to realize, somewhat to his credit, that, for the time being, after the shattering events of 1968 the coalition of blacks and bluecollar Democrats on which his brothers had thrived was no longer possible...

...A hint of racism began to slip back into the private discussions of middleclass liberals and even former '60s radicals when they spoke of the black lumpen they had come to fear...

...In Los Angeles and Maryland, areas once liberal strongholds were shifted rightward by the protracted conflict over court-ordered busing...

...They were undermined by the collapse of liberalism and not by NCPAC, which was roundly criticized by Steven Simms and Dan Quayle, the men who beat Church and Bayh, as having been counterproductive...

...Where once as candidate for governor he had agitated for busing he was now being singed by the fires he had stoked...

...How was this possible...

...What of the NCPAC hit squads that went after liberal senators...

...But get a chance to talk casually with most Northern ethnic voters, and they will tell you what the trained ears of the political scientists were unable to pick up...

...By the mid-70s the underpinnings of the racial reformation, a belief in the efficacy of social science, the moral pageantry of the civil rights movement, and the sense of a debt to people unjustly oppressed had largely dissolved...

...Without NCPAC it's unlikely that any of these men, except Church, could have survived...

...Yet, after some dramatic and seemingly effective campaigning directed squarely at the menace of unemployment, Kennedy lost every precinct in Anderson to Carter...

...Big business has trouble selling under its own label...

...Exit polls make it clear that voters who said that their economic fortunes were on the decline were far more likely to vote for Reagan...

...Since the 1980 election, there has been a good deal of discussion about whether, as Pomper puts it, the Democrats suffered from a lack of "ideas...

...Carter was almost a helpless bystander in all this, hurt by the issues that had brought him to power...

...Before Roger Mudd's interview, before the Iranian crisis, ward leaders unaffected by Kennedy's glow were reporting his surprising weakness among working-class and middleclass Catholics, describing him as "extremely unpopular...

...Here again, wild exaggeration...

...And, he concluded sadly, foul up they did...

...Their vote for Carter actually increased slightly, while the Democratic vote among all whites dropped by 8 points to 40 percent...

...Robertson's claims and others like them seemed to be confirmed by the early analysis of pollster Louis Harris, who attributed the Reagan win to the power of the electronic preachers...

...But if Carter's unpopularity was based so directly on the economy, how do we explain his primary victories over Ted Kennedy...

...If the Democrats do ride back into power on the back of Reagan's ineptitude, they will find that the principles raised by such issues as busing and the power of the courts, Affirmative Action, and the rights of individuals will still be there...

...A federal ruling on violent teen-agers made in bucolic Idaho can be applied suddenly by a judge in embattled Cleveland or Canarsie...

...The influence of such organizations as the Moral Majority has been more a projection of liberal fears than a reality...

...For those cosmopolitans who, in the all-too sincere words of a friend, "thought all those questions were settled," the shock of a New Right, which had been active for some time, led to an extraordinary credulity...

...Economic issues can take the Democrats only so far...

...As Kathleen Frankovic pointed out in her article on "Public Opinion Trends" (part of Pomper's collection, The Election of 1980), between January '78 and November '80 the percentage of voters describing '60s programs as having made things worse jumped from 14 to 20 percent...

...Moreover, in the eight months before the election when the preachers were supposedly reshaping the polity, their ratings were sharply declining...

...But however feeble it was in dealing with the sheiks, it managed to threaten Iowa's enormously popular six-woman basketball team with the possibility of a sex discrimination suit, thereby undercutting both itself and women's rights...

...But as these older antipathies subsided and racial justice became the storm center of American politics, a hitherto impossible unity was achieved in the common response of both Main Street and street-corner conservatives to black advances and the government power behind those advances...

...Of the 65 percent of the voters who thought there was too much busi482 ness regulation, only a small percentage were businessmen...

...But the estimates of the preachers' influence were wildly exaggerated...

...Whites aware of liberal racial etiquette as preached on television are loath to express themselves when questioned...

...At the same time the arrival of new immigrants, many of them dark-skinned, who seemed to be prospering relative to the mass of poor blacks, reinforced the old arguments that the poor are so because they choose to be...

...The gradual elimination of the corporate income tax, ever burgeoning Social Security taxes, the huge mortgage deductions of the wealthy, and the rising sales taxes have shifted the burden of government revenue-raising onto the backs of salaried and wage-earning workers who are unable to dodge the tax code...

...IF THE REPUBLICANS weren't swept in on a tide of conservative sentiment and if the economy was less of a direct factor than it was supposed to be, we have to turn to what was hidden and virtually undiscussed about the election—questions of race and government—to explain the Democratic collapse...

...Carter won primary after primary while presiding over a deepening slump, with 20 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates...

...The frightening growth of street crime, the replacement of the civil rights mystique with bureaucratic muscle, and the decline of public institutions ranging from prisons to schools—all this after a quarter-century of social engineering—left reformers and radicals alike on the defensive...

...Yes, they're emotional issues, but that's better than talking about capital formation...

...This disparity was more than most liberals and middle-of-the-roaders were willing to bear...

...Even the conservative Heritage Foundation report on "Trends in the 1980 Congressional Elections" argues that NCPAC faces a growing backlash...

...The only groups whose political clout was proba479 bly genuine were the antiabortionists...

...one group, black Americans, sensing what Reagan represented, stood alone, isolated, as they had not been for 20 years...

...White ethnics, now better off economically and more jaded politically than when the Kennedy legend was created, were stung by quotas, busing, and rising crime...

...And how, despite the continuous decline in public respect for big business, was the most probusiness Administration in half a century swept into office...

...But as William Martin pointed out in a classic piece of debunking, the carefully calculated Nielson rating suggested audiences of 7-10 million, most of whom were members of conservative churches...

...Many workers and middle-income whites didn't buy the spiked Kool-Aid Reagan was selling but still couldn't bring themselves to vote for Carter...

...Reagan's call may have meant an end to OSHA for a manufacturer, but for many mainstream whites it meant an end to busing and quotas...

...BLACK INTERESTS were increasingly looked upon as just that—one of a number of bureaucratically protected claims, without any exceptional call on one's moral obligations...

...IF THE NEW RIGHT preached mainly to the converted, can the election be explained largely in terms of economic downturn...

...Fully 62 percent of those surveyed thought that the 481 programs either had no effect or had made things worse, while only 30 percent of all races thought they had made things better...

...but there was more to it than that...

...It was Reagan's political genius to take advantage of that new unity to piggy-back a program of obeisance to business onto the often racially based social issues...

...if these agencies foul up, it has grave and widespread public repercussions...

...In a society in which the government is now, of necessity, at the center of national life, a democratic coalition of interest groups that is not tied together by some larger sense of community is bound to be torn apart again by the interest-group conflicts that led to its 1980 downfall...

...In Missouri, where a NCPAC assault was not combined with the efforts of the antiabortionists, Thomas Eagleton survived the election despite a 9 percent jump in support for the Republicans...

...In a sense, the election results were foretold in first the Bakke and then the Weber Affirmative Action cases...

...they saw little reason to link themselves to a candidate who had championed government intervention on behalf of black causes...

...Moreover, he covered himself against accusations of racism by campaigning among blacks, less to secure their votes than not to lose white moderate ones...

...Figures given in such authoritative sources as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and UPI suggested weekly audiences of 115-130 million viewers...

...The visible success of college-educated blacks seemed to belie the need for government protection, while the fear of lumpen criminals undercut feelings of sympathy for the plight of the worst off...

...Before I could talk about the selective nature of the migration, a second student, a black himself and a fairly recent arrival in New York from North Carolina, asked if it was fair for Jamaicans to get jobs set aside for American minorities —to which one of the white students replied with Schadenfreude, "well, now you're getting a taste of your own medicine...

...but by the late '70s the genuine successes of the Great Society in reducing poverty were increasingly overshadowed by a social pathology that spread in the wake of the "the Age of Aquarius...

...They failed, in part because of the religious and ethnic divisions between the sticks and the slums, Protestants and Catholics...

...The federal regional offices," Humphrey told President Carter, "are zilch...

...The result was a sharp drop in the already low estimate held of '60s programs...

...The difference between NCPAC and the antiabortion groups is that while NCPAC draws on and appeals to the conservative faithful, antiabortion groups draw on middle-of-the-road Democrats, many of whom are attracted to the Republicans largely on the antiabortion issue alone...

...In Indiana, the state where, in the '68 primaries, Bobby had brought together the black and bluecollar coalition that had electrified a good deal of the left, Ted Kennedy, in '80, concentrated his by then smoothly running campaign in such towns as Anderson, where high interest rates and declining car sales had led to the shutdown of the two largest factories and a 25 percent unemployment rate...

...Taxes, as Bob Kutner and others noted, have become increasingly regressive...

...Former Carter voters were four times more likely than Ford voters to sit out the campaign...

...Polls indicated that a great deal of his seemingly large support was "soft...

...In the '60s the black movement had benefited from the radical cultural criticism that had challenged established institutions...

...The great liberal oaks—McGovern, Church, Bayh, Culver—were all far more liberal than the areas they represented...

...And it was Secretary of HEW Joe Califano, a self-described bureaucratic son of the '60s, who sounded like a neoconservative when he complained that Intricate federal regulations . . . encourage even lengthier and more specific rules as state, local, and private institutions scramble to comply...

...When Reagan talked about "getting the government off our backs," his message meant different things to different audiences...

...The New Right Moralists, Lipset suggests, may even have hurt the Republicans in that "the country had moved farther to the right on regulatory issues than on moral ones where trends are ambiguous...

...When TV evangelist Pat Robertson boasted that "we have enough votes to run the country," he was taken literally by cowed liberals...

...On election day, as Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out in the March 1981 Commentary, "A slightly smaller percentage of born-again white Protestants (61 percent) than of other white Protestants (63 percent) actually voted for Reagan...

...Or, as Jules Feiffer put it sarcastically, "We need a better class of victims...

...It dropped 16 points among Hispanics, 11 among Roman Catholics, and 21 among Jews...

...When they were asked what should be done, about half supported the balanced-budget proposals of Jimmy Carter, a little less than a third plunked for Kennedy's wage and price controls, and only one out of seven supported the "supply-side" proposals of the man who went on to a landslide victory...

...Virtually every ethnic group in the country filed briefs on behalf of Bakke, while in the 480 Weber case the challenge to union seniority and the possibilities for corporate manipulation presented by Kaiser Aluminum's Affirmative Action program drew rank-and-file fire around the nation...

...Let us try to unravel these crucial anomalies by looking, first, at the influence of the Moral Majority and the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) on the 1980 election...

...And though this was generally accompanied by praise for hard-working black yeomen, it was tinged as well by annoyance with the rhetorical excesses of black leaders who were always calling for the government to do more at a time when the government didn't seem able to carry out its basic functions effectively...

...These antiabortion Democrats had been "reformed" out of the party...

...Kennedy's best showings came after the Illinois primary, when Carter had the nomination sewed up and a ballot for Kennedy could be cast as a protest vote...

...Their states had all gone for Republicans in every presidential race since 1964...

...This was in part caused by Chappaquiddick and his lack of flair when compared to his flamboyant brothers...

...The Republicans played upon the widespread anger over taxes, and it's no wonder that throughout the country, and particularly in the Northeast, Reagan's major primary gains over Ford came from middle-income families with salaries between $15,000 and $20,000 a year...

...When Reagan said the problem with the economy was inflation and the source of inflation was excessive social spending, he was telling the voter that, in the words of a Brooklyn character, "there would be no more free ride for the blacks...

...Reagan won everywhere, in areas prospering as well as declining...

...If by ideas he means the ability of a party to give a coherent account of its course, then, indeed, the Democrats did suffer from this lack...

...Even within his own party he aroused what the pollsters call a high unacceptability quotient: there were people who would not vote for him under any circumstances...

...People trying to help each other feel suffocated, frustrated . as their freedom to act on matters they face each day is increasingly circumscribed...

...In sum, Carter managed to retain only a little more than a third of his '76 supporters...

...483...

...Some of them were Catholic antiabortionists, like the man who snapped, "He's a Catholic, he ought to know better...

...It was Hubert Humphrey and not George Wallace who warned Carter that there had been a total breakdown of the bureaucracy...

...Most public contact with government, he said, came through the Post Office and the IRS...

...Kennedy's problem was not just the Ayatollah or the media, which perniciously ambushed the most principled of the brothers as part of a misdirected effort to make up for their earlier, often uncritical stance on Jack and Bobby...

...A third of Carter's '76 supporters switched to Reagan but, as William Schneider points out, the Democrats lost more voters to abstention than to Reagan and Anderson combined...

...The fascist beast, it seemed, was in our midst after all...

...And so middle-income earners, such as the UAW tax rebels in Flint, who through the effects of tax-bracket creep were being asked by the Democratic Congress to finance government, saw this government as increasingly remote from their interests, and unable to come to grips with the inflation that was taking money from their pockets...

...The same government that was unable to halt inflation, or free the hostages, or aid the victims of Love Canal was, in contrast, able to sweep into a school district with a court order to prosecute an all-boys choir or require large-scale busing even if there was little public support for it...

...The distorting effect of Watergate was to give these men a reprieve in '74 when the conservative shift was actually taking place, while exaggerating the degree of rightward drift in '80...

...If the declining economy weakened blue-collar support for the Democrats, it was the gap between the oversold promises of social reform and the daytoday dystopian functioning of the courts and the schools that provided the opening through which the Republicans marched...

...On matters of grave national importance such as oil and OPEC, Carter's Administration turned in circles like a giant ship whose rudder was stuck...

...so, concludes Schneider, "the most prominent single characteristic of the 1980 election was the universal decline in support for the Democrats...

...But that decline was not universal...

...and] Carter lost less support among his fellow born-again Protestants than among others...

...Watergate, in the long run, had only fueled the fires of discontent with a government that seemed alternatively a rogue elephant wandering loose across the countryside and a passive bystander to the great events affecting the country...