COMMENTS: Reagan and the Left
Howe, Irving
Say what you will about Ronald Reagan, he seems never to have supposed that we live in a time marked by "the end of ideology." It's also true that he may never have heard of the phrase. But...
...What they mean, I suspect, is something a bit like what intellectuals mean when they talk about ideology—a world view, a vision of things, an encompassing political "philosophy...
...That it fits nicely onto an index card hardly diminishes its effectiveness...
...The social-technological changes in this country, still unmeasured, will force a new relationship between the unions and their various allies—and if the unions recognize this in time and acknowledge it with a certain graciousness, everything will be decidedly better...
...And it confirms our view that sustained organizing can yield positive results...
...His campaign is likely to be a thing of patches, good here and weak there, but without much coherence...
...Not one has felt it would be politically advantageous to call himself a liberal in the open way that Reagan calls himself a conservative...
...It has also recharged chauvinist and crude anti-Communist sentiments, leading to the worst relations in decades with the Soviet Union, a frightening prospect of a nuclear arms race, and the real possibility that American troops will be sent to complete the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government...
...Under Lane Kirkland's leadership, it's fair to add, there have already been significant signs of greater sensitivity to the interests and feelings of the other groups that are essential to the politics of liberal-labor coalition...
...so will the serious divisions within the political alliance that will have elected Mondale...
...Whether the Reaganite counterrevolution will leave a permanent mark on American society, we do not yet know...
...but it would be hard to conclude from their campaigns that any one of them, or all three together, communicated a vivid sense of another America to be set against Reagan's hokey, nostalgia-laden, but obviously effective "free enterprise...
...Let the National Review and its cousin Commentary provide the husks of ideology...
...It would be foolish to deny that behind Gary Hart are new political forces, energies, perhaps even ideas...
...Perhaps more so than that of 1932, since at that time the candidate Franklin Roosevelt bore little resemblance to the President Roosevelt of 1935-36, when the major New Deal measures were introduced...
...Some will drop away, others grow weary...
...Reagan has forced the issue, defined the ideological confrontation, and millions of Americans, however they may put it into language, feel this to be true...
...But with those intuitive political skills of his that even opponents have been forced to recognize, the president has sensed that ideology, symbol, myth, dream, vision—those clusters of emotional yearnings and half-formulated systems—still play a major part in our political life...
...Millions of Americans apparently felt that at the center of Carter lay a stark emptiness, and surely that was one reason he lost the 1980 election...
...Mondale, Hart, and Jackson have said many things, some useful, some rubbishy...
...It has labored to bring the country back to the society and politics of the years before the New Deal...
...I feel this tension myself, often growing irritable with the tendency of these people to behave as if they were put on earth as an elite ordained to rule, while they in turn grow bored, no doubt, with what they regard as the out-of-date loyalties to unionism held by people like me...
...Not one among the final trio of Democratic aspirants for the presidency has dared to stress—dared to make his main demand—a program for full employment...
...At first, rather little...
...391...
...Mondale will then have to look around for some policies...
...But when people say they want a candidate who stands for something, I doubt that they have primarily in mind opinions about such specific matters as jobs, free trade, and Central 389 America...
...If Reagan wins, it's not the apocalypse and it's not fascism...
...He'll have enough trouble getting out from under the inherited burdens of Central America and budget deficits...
...That means to help spur into new life an assertive liberalism, serving it as both ally and critic...
...I'm afraid that some of them might now feel that if Mondale wins, everything is back to "normal...
...THE 1984 ELECTION will be the most important and ideological since the election of 1932...
...In all friendliness, one wants to say to the labor leadership: it never will be, it's most unlikely that the unions can reestablish the domination they had within the liberal political coalition in recent decades, and it's certainly not desirable that there ever be a return to the push-and-shove outlook characterizing the era of George Meany...
...In its own way, then, the Reagan administration has been the most ideological of any American administration since the days of the New Deal...
...Directly after this problem will come another at least as serious: the frightful possibility that Ronald Reagan will determine the composition of the Supreme Court for the next few decades...
...Reagan has done something more valuable for the right, he has "translated" ideology into warm sentiments and stirring slogans...
...For the first time a woman is running for high office as a candidate of a major party...
...Others will conclude just the opposite: that socialism has become utterly irrelevant on the American scene, and what needs to be done is to dig in deeply in the trenches of current politics...
...In his four years as president, Reagan has done more to transform the social climate of this country than any president since Franklin Roosevelt...
...0 P S. No MATTER what the motives for nominating Geraldine Ferraro, and brushing aside the cheap cynicism it has elicited in some quarters, I think this is an event of major importance in American political life...
...Carter failed, not even (apparently) seeing any need to try...
...The ideologies in confrontation—one put forward openly, the other muffled...
...But I think it's a good politics, the way of dissent and the way of Dissent...
...Each of us is likely to do what he or she does best or cares about most, but as a political community we must try to see things whole, to encompass our fragmentary interests within a central animating vision...
...For the immediate moment, the most urgent question will be whether this country deepens its outrageous intervention in Nicaragua...
...There's a lot of cultural tension—differences in style, language, and so on—between the labor people and the kind of younger technocrats who 390 formed the base of Hart's campaign...
...Some of our liberal friends, already wobbling, will wobble themselves off into neoliberalism or neoconservatism...
...At that point, the democratic or liberal left will have an opportunity, provided the leadership of the labor movement, the women's groups, and the resurgent black community presses for at least a few of the ideas that have been advanced in these pages by Bob Kuttner, Michael Harrington, and Robert Lekachman (as well as in our new book Alternatives...
...I have no objection to doing most of the things people on the left propose, from community organizing to utopian projections, from strengthening unions to fighting against intervention in Nicaragua...
...FOR THE DEMOCRATIC LEFT itself, a Reagan victory will probably bring unhappy consequences...
...If Mondale wins, what's likely to happen...
...It was only after the 1932 election that its ideological significance became clear...
...The changes wrought by the Reagan administration in domestic policy have been damaging enough, but more important still is the fact that Reagan has succeeded in creating among many Americans, especially the young, a notable increase of confidence in the workings of capitalism (sometimes quaintly called "the free market") and an equally notable shift toward a hard-spirited, snobbish, and Social Darwinist style of public discourse...
...No matter...
...Reagan has succeeded, in part...
...When Hart first won some primary victories, the managers of labor's political campaigns were badly shaken...
...One mark of a president's success is whether he can determine the agenda for political debate, forcing the opposition to operate on his chosen terrain...
...But Reagan grasped the truth that voters still respond strongly to stance, attitude, tone of voice, the sum of which may not be the same as ideology but does reflect a certain connection to it...
...But still, we must look for paths of at least partial reconciliation if we're to avoid a long period of right-wing domination...
...The democratic left—scattered, weak, but with some renewed intellectual energy these past few years—will still have its place and its tasks...
...Not only will the country's problems remain...
...We are experiencing a clash between two sociopolitical outlooks, two significantly different ways of running a capitalist society (whose legitimacy is not, for the great bulk of Americans, in question...
...The terms of public discourse have shifted to the right these past few years—indeed, they have been largely set by the right, with both liberalism and the democratic left forced to engage in defensive responses...
...Mondale, continuing to confuse caution with dullness, may repress those humane impulses that trusted witnesses say he possesses...
...A strident advocate of renewed cold war will confront a cautious spokesman for controlling the nuclear race...
...But then, if there hadn't been the bank crisis, Roosevelt would probably not have been so bold either...
...A bold spokesman for laissez-faire (or as much of it as you can get by with at this point in history) will confront a hesitant defender of the welfare state...
...Some people on the left will conclude that immediate politics is hopeless and all they can do is project socialist utopias for the future...
...In saying all this I don't mean to suggest that Americans have suddenly been seized by a passion for ideology...
...It is a triumph, and well-deserved too, for the whole feminist movement...
...What I'm talking about isn't, of course, an easy sort of politics...
...Still, political and social conflicts will continue, into the congressional elections of 1986 and beyond...
...Reagan is very vulnerable on specific issues, but he alone among the leading candidates has melded his various positions into an overall vision...
...and it also means to keep working away at our own intellectual tasks, patiently and undogmatically reestablishing the thought of the democratic left...
...Suppose, however, that there's "only" a moderate recession in late 1985...
...I object only to doing these things exclusively...
...Now everything is clear enough before the election, and nothing the candidates say or don't say— a blur here, a shuffle there—is likely to affect the ideological division...
...A measure of Reagan's impact is to be seen in the falterings and hesitations of the opposition...
...Unless we're suddenly hit with a severe economic crisis, it's hard to suppose Mondale will respond to the problems of the country with anything like the boldness into which Roosevelt was forced by the bank crisis that erupted soon after he took office...
...No MATTER WHO WINS the election, life will continue...
...If there's anyone to be associated with "the end of ideology," it's Jimmy Carter...
...but knowing that it's not politically feasible to destroy the entire welfare state, it has shrewdly settled for slashing its flanks...
...And the same, of course, holds for Jesse Jackson...
...But it would of course be a heavy blow to all the ideas, causes, and values in which most readers of Dissent believe...
...I worry about the dangers of dispersion, the growth of "special interests" among ourselves...
Vol. 31 • September 1984 • No. 4
