COMMENTS: The End of Ideology?

...The "neoliberalism" of this group is heavily represented among younger Democratic politicians, both in Congress and in the statehouses...

...they tend, however, to be less liberal on the average than the typical Democrat and less conservative than the typical Republican...

...There are certainly no signs on the horizon of an imminent youth or generational revolt like that of the 1960s...

...But the Mitterrand government looks like a loser in the forthcoming election, and its function recently seems to have been to render more palatable some policies of austerity that might have been bitterly fought by the left, had they been imposed by a right-wing government...

...Surveys have long shown that nonvoters divide politically in much the same way as voters...

...This was said not by an ardent hi-tech enthusiast of neoconservative or neoliberal inclination, but by Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader of the British Labour party...

...Their influence in both parties is likely to be considerable for some years to come...

...People on the left have not been realistic in facing up to the reality of these trends...

...The repetition of this pattern in 1984 strongly suggests that when presidents are reelected, the advantages of incumbency also help congressional office-holders regardless of party or ideology...

...One new group with an apparently distinctive political-cultural profile is the large baby-boom cohort of highly educated professionals, the 146 Yuppies...

...The proposals put forward by the neoliberals in the Democratic party might reverse that party's fortunes, especially if the Republicans turn out to be too inhibited by their traditional antigovernment outlook or too bound to the golden parachutists of the business world to take forceful measures to deal with the economic troubles ahead...

...The original authors of that phrase did not intend it to refer only to left ideologies, as was often charged by their critics on the left, for they also had in mind the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and the more recent discrediting of McCarthyism...

...However, in this as in other areas, our expectations have been deformed by the sudden, apocalyptic transformations that 144 marked the first half of the century...

...There has been no return to pre-1930s attitudes in this respect, any more than to isolationism or even noninterventionism in foreign policy, as those on the left who overestimated the historical importance of Vietnam have been forced to realize...

...The disappearance of the old Democratic "Solid South" always carried with it the likelihood that the Republicans would eventually emerge as the majority party in the region...

...In policy terms, the neoliberals address themselves directly and forthrightly to the economy's new structural problems to which the welfare-state liberalism of oldline Democrats no longer seems relevant...

...The Republicans have been acting like a normal governing party since Reagan's reelection...

...The facts, though unpalatable, are undeniable...

...Left or reformist initiatives in the past have come from the activation and entry into politics of new, previously passive, disadvantaged groups: farmers, industrial workers, urban immigrants, blacks, women...

...The recession presently anticipated may very well result in Democratic gains in 1986, including possibly winning control of the Senate, and even the capture of the presidency in 1988...

...New forms of occupational organization and representation may emerge in our postindustrial society, but they are likely to differ as much as they resemble the labor movement created by the bluecollar working class over the past century and a half...

...THERE HAS BEEN MUCH TALK in recent years about party "realignment...

...Its Republican leanings are rooted in its conservatism and not merely a response to the monolithic allegiance of blacks to the Democratic party...

...But technological change not the business cycle, the survival of jobs not the wages and working conditions attached to them, foreign competition and saturated demand, not underconsumption, have weakened the unions to a point from which they are unlikely fully to recover in view of the changed composition of the labor force...

...It is hard to discern any new groups that are substantial enough in size or sufficiently homogeneous in political outlook, even potentially, to be capable of sparking a turn to the left or a revival of liberalism in the near future...

...Fascism remains a dead tendency of entre les deux guerres, nor has there been any revival of the indiscriminate antiCommunist mud-slinging made famous by Senator McCarthy...

...Past inflation and fear of its recurrence, declining economic growth, doubts about the effectiveness of some antipoverty programs, dislike of the higher taxes required to support greater welfare expenditures, and objections to the bureaucratic centralization and standardization their administration requires, all have contributed to reduced enthusiasm for new ventures and to acceptance of the Reagan administration's cuts in existing programs...

...Not only is the movement toward a twoparty South favoring the Republicans still far from complete, but economic and population growth is increasing the South's political and electoral weight in the nation, reversing the trend of the years when the Solid South swelled national Democratic majorities...

...ELECTORAL DEMOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHY are obviously not the whole story and liberals may find comfort in the idea, still upheld by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that our politics are subject to the cyclical alternation of periods of reforming activism and conservative retrenchment...

...As Tyler shrewdly observes of the 1984 campaign, "To employed and reasonably well-satisfied voters, Mondale's message seemed to be 'I will hike your taxes to take care of those poor.' " The claim that since the late 1930s a "liberallabor coalition" has been the foundation of the Democratic party is only a slight exaggeration...

...Nor are our economic difficulties, intermittent since the middle 1970s, likely to encourage a revival of labor militancy as an appropriate or even relevant response to them...

...Conversely, the most overwhelming Democratic defeats have come when there was no Southerner on the ticket, as in 1972, 1984, and 1968 if one totals the anti-Democratic vote...

...According to the New York Times series in which I came upon the quotation from Hattersley, trade unions are suffering declines in membership, inability to win wage increases and even to resist wage cuts, and general loss of both economic and political power in all European industrial countries, including even Sweden, with the single exception of West Germany...

...Why should politics be a more simple, linear realm...

...If we follow the general practice of periodizing by decades, this century displays a strikingly regular pattern in which decades of protest and liberal-radical ferment were succeeded by transitional decades (often marked by foreign wars), followed by conservative decades, after which the whole cycle began again...

...One remembers Nixon's failed welfare program (FAP) and his Administration's successful promotion of legislation protecting the environment (EPA), setting health and safety standards (OSHA), and providing training for displaced workers (CETA...

...Carter in 1980 had faced a unique combination of inflation at home and humiliation abroad (the Iranian hostage crisis) that was enough to defeat him, even if this was not quite comparable to the challenge from a popular former president of his own party confronting Taft in 1912 or to the Great Depression that doomed Hoover in 1932...

...There is also the risk that success might accentuate Democratic splits dividing the new neoliberals, the survivors of the New Deal coalition, and the waning movements of the 1960s...

...A few have even conjured up visions of the mobilization of nonvoters by a new socialist party or a thoroughly revamped Democratic party, realizing at last the left's ancient dream of a restructuring of the American party system along class lines that would give the left party inherent demographic advantages...

...It is virtually a definition of a major or governing party to note that domestic and foreign issues are articulated and fought out within its ranks rather than in impassioned ideological confrontations with its electoral rival...

...Today the decline of the unions by just about every conceivable index means that this is no longer the case...

...Despite Reagan's antigovernment rhetoric, the public has clearly taken him at his word in his promise not to touch the "safety net" provided by the New Deal and supplemented by the reforms of the Johnson administration...

...But perhaps the left/ right distinction itself is becoming obsolete as a way of understanding politics and political possibility...

...It has become a cliche to attribute the Democratic decline to the dissolution of the "New Deal coalition...

...The major exception, of course, is France...

...This, rather than the strong Democratic showing in the face of Reagan's landslide, may be the real harbinger of the future...

...Of course, no one foresaw the emergence of most of the groups that have played such a role in the past—history rarely fails to surprise us...

...To a degree, as I have indicated, general acceptance of the continuation of high wages, minimum welfare entitlements, and government responsibility for the economy has itself helped undermine trade unions and parties of the left at a time when labor militancy and redistributive social policies seem quite irrelevant to the international structural dislocations the advanced industrial economies are experiencing, essentially a crisis of production rather than distribution...

...in precincts further to the left, the neoliberals arouse suspicion because of their frequent preference for market incentives over statutory regulation, for businessmen over bureaucrats, and because of their general failure to adopt the proper adversary attitude toward "capitalism" itself...

...One can discern a slow but definite trend toward the establishment, or restoration, of the Republican party as the dominant or "governing" party, at least at the presidential level...

...Of 13 incumbents before him who ran for election in this century, only four were defeated...

...But, ironically, what the "end of ideology" writers were mistakenly accused of conjecturing 25 years ago now appears to be coming to pass...

...The plight of the Democratic party today is most apparent when we consider what has happened to the groups that were crucial to the old coalition...

...Like the welfare state, the unions have been victims of their own success, for they have made a major contribution to our high-wage, high-consumption economy, which represent now that we have all become Keynesians a permanent achievement no longer perceived as requiring strong unions to maintain it...

...The exception is apparent rather than real because most of George Wallace's votes in 1968 would have gone to Nixon...

...Liberals have sought to find solace in Democratic Senate gains and retention of control in the House...

...Are there sizable segments of the population that are not poor enough to be fit objects for compassion yet not rich enough to be expected to feel compassionate toward those poorer than themselves...

...The Jews have never been numerous enough, most blacks were still in the South and disenfranchised until the 1960s, and labor's strength peaked in the 1940s...

...The persistence of the cyclical rhythm is not selfexplanatory and any explanation must presuppose some underlying conditions that have remained constant, as I have argued in Dissent before...

...At what income level, one wonders, ought people to be moved by compassion for those below them...

...Reagan's electoral victories strongly suggest that extension of the welfare state, associated primarily with the orientation of the Democratic party, has lost political appeal...

...The old one-party Democratic monopoly was based on the maintenance of the racial segregation that was overthrown by federal reforms in the 1960s...

...Based on a spatial metaphor, space itself, let us remember, is not that one-dimensional: it includes up and down, before and behind, round and about, near and far...

...They are inclined to reassure themselves that at least the "core" members of the old coalition— Jews, blacks, and trade unionists—remained loyal to it in 1984...

...Tyler pointed out that movements and parties of the left have in the past 147 nearly always made their most fundamental appeals to the voters' self-interest rather than to their charitable impulses...

...But short of a cataclysmic economic disaster comparable to 1929-32, such Democratic victories are unlikely to initiate a new political era or do more than slow up, especially in Congress, the present trend favoring the Republicans...

...Even if there is a cessation or slowing up of the alternating left/right rhythm in our politics, genuine two-party democracy ensures the occasional victory of the opposition party, whether it is more liberal or more conservative than its usually dominant rival...

...They are consistent, however, with a number of long-run trends that are distinctly unfavorable to the future electoral prospects of the liberalism so long dominant in the Democratic party...

...Most discussions of the declining electoral turnout since the early 1960s, a trend checked rather than reversed in 1982 and 1984, fail to take into account the lowering of the voting age to 18 in 1970...

...In the United States as elsewhere, old people have been the welfare state's major and most secure beneficiaries...

...The disappointed Republican right may storm back in full force in the next four years and precipitate bitter divisions within the party...

...But as the Mondale-Hart contest revealed, there are tensions between the neoliberals and such traditional Democratic interest groups as the unions and the blacks...

...The causes of the weakening of liberalism and the left differ, however, from those suggested at that time...

...There one can speak of realignment as having already partially taken place...

...The world has changed, and with it the economic culture, based on mass-production factories, in which the unions thrived...

...The Right to Life movement and the Moral Majority are recent cases in point, and their fervent support for Reagan in 1980 contributed a good deal to the militantly conservative, not to say reactionary, tone of his first Administration...

...But the continuing popularity of the major federal social programs has ruled out any serious effort to eliminate them...

...The only two presidents the Democrats have clearly elected since 1952 were Southerners (I don't count Kennedy because his 1960 margin was so infinitesimal...

...More important, the Administration has preempted a major Democratic issue in proposing tax reforms that are far from favorable to the interests of business or the higher income groups...

...In foreign policy, the reopening of arms-control negotiations with the Russians is also a "pragmatic" move likely to win credit with the American public...

...Much left-liberal keening over the iniquities and vulgarities of the Reagan administration has tended to overlook this, failing to remark that "Reaganism," for all its flag-waving at the level of campaigning, is far from being a peculiarly American manifestation, but is consistent with political and economic trends at work in other major Western democracies with advanced industrial mixed economies...

...The trouble is that there are just too many nonvoters—amounting to over 40 percent of the electorate...

...The moves by the Reagan administration are even more significant because Reagan came from the party's militantly antigovernment right wing...

...Ever since the first oil crisis in 1973, Marxist voices have predictably been raised in excited announcements that the "crisis of capitalism" is once more at hand...

...The assumption is that nonvoting reflects a political apathy or alienation that would be dispelled if the electorate were offered a "real alternative"—a forthright egalitarian, anticapitalist program...

...Agrarian protest and radical agitation, chiefly involving small farmers, were more important than labor militancy in the early years of the Depression and the New Deal...

...But the decline of the farm population means that there just aren't enough farmers left vitally to affect election outcomes...

...Last and far from least is the white South...

...Two of the three Democratic victories in the same period were very close...

...The big test for the Republicans will come in 1988, as it would have in 1976 had it not been for Watergate...

...For whatever its recent skepticism about the enlargement of some government activities, the American electorate continues to hold the government primarily responsible for the fate of the economy...

...After achieving their minimum objectives through the responsiveness of the party system such groups, often calling themselves "movements," lose their forward momentum, sometimes as a result of arousing resistance in the form of traditionalist countermovements...

...But if so, this is further evidence of how low the Democrats have fallen when their prospects depend on what happens within the Republican party...

...Economic strains and the risk of a 148 decline in living standards confront us today rather than the stable growth that was so powerful a solvent of political and economic conflict in the early postwar period...

...Today neither party dares to tamper very much with Social Security or Medicare...

...The best hope for a renovation of the Democrats' fortunes may lie in winning strong support from this constituency: there are solid grounds for thinking that even in 1984 Hart would have improved upon Mondale's performance had he been the candidate...

...The personnel changes, both within the Administration and in the Senate leadership, have given little comfort or even recognition to the party's hard-line ideologues...

...It used to be the other way around...

...As late as 1948, the Farm Belt gave Truman the election by shifting to him late in the presidential campaign...

...They produced one of the few real surprises of the 1984 campaign in the support they gave to Gary Hart in the Democratic primaries...

...Yet congressional Democrats benefited from incumbency just as Reagan did...

...IT HAS BEEN a standard liberal charge that the Reagan administration aims to "dismantle the welfare state...

...But the full implications of this are faced less often, least of all by liberals or people of the left...

...Yet none of these groups, not even labor, was central to the original New Deal coalition formed in the 1930s...

...If, by the Eisenhower years, the unions had become less militant, less radical, and more inclined to "interest-group" liberalism, they continued to provide a bedrock of mass support from which any rebuilding of Democratic liberalism necessarily had to begin...

...A party that sees itself as the "natural" party of government is disposed to set aside its ideological prejudices and class loyalties in order to deal practically, which is to say politically, with real problems demanding new policy initiatives...

...A more decisive and longer-range consideration may be that the very successes of the welfare state in ensuring minimum levels of economic security and restraining deflation in times of recession has induced many people to resent state-imposed limits on the discretionary spending of their incomes...

...But there is no reason to assume that American society will always produce new blocs of discontented voters mobilized to support political demands that keep alive a spirit of egalitarian protest from the left...

...Unemployment, the decline of smokestack industries, wage cutbacks, and reductions in welfarestate benefits have been just about universal...

...Arthur Schlesinger's complaint that Jimmy Carter was the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland may have drawn, unwittingly, the profile of Democratic presidents in eras of Republican ascendancy—such as that in which Cleveland was twice elected to the White House a century ago...

...The right-wing tub-thumpers, so in evidence at the Dallas convention last August, have scarcely been visible...

...This view is the mirror image of the old claim of right-wing Republicans who used to argue that if only the voters were given "a choice and not an echo," they would flock to the polls to reject the liberals' collectivist blandishments...

...That two of the latter were Reagan's immediate predecessors perhaps accounts for the spurious air of uncertainty created even by interpreters of American politics who should have known better...

...What if the underlying conditions have been eroded by the recurrent workings of the cycle, reducing the probability of its future recurrence, a possibility I suggested in the Fall 1981 Dissent after Reagan's first election...

...The present situation is obviously a good deal more complicated than implied by either the consensual assumptions of the old "end of ideology" writers or leftists' wishful anticipation of transforming conflicts...

...Politically, right-wing parties or coalitions have since 1980 won elections in Britain, West Germany, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and, most recently, Canada...

...None of these developments means that the Democrats won't win any elections in the near future...

...Indeed, the Democrats' best chances for 1988 may lie in a Republican split, or in the victory of the party's most rigid, revanchiste "conservatives...

...Too pat to be altogether convincing, surely...

...Under such circumstances recent liberal appeals to "compassion" have proved ineffectual...

...Socialism" provides no credible solution to these dislocations, which has helped to undermine still further its fading attractiveness as an ideal...

...Aid to the poor is obviously a fundamental and deeply moral responsibility of government, but to make it the centerpiece of a political program, as liberals and even some Democratic politicians have often seemed to do in recent years, is a doubtful strategy...

...But the racially liberalized South remains the most morally traditionalist, religiously funda145 mentalist, militarist, and in foreign policy interventionist region...

...His statement serves to recall that the decline of labor and the left has not been limited to the United States...

...Old people wanting pensions, some of them mobilized by the Townsend movement, were another powerful voice to which the New Deal was a response...

...There is therefore little point in reading much ideological significance into the 1984 election results...

...Many liberals and leftists have looked hopefully to the enormous population of nonvoters consisting disproportionately of minority and low-income groups who represent potential Democratic voters...

...Perhaps liberals took it less seriously, although that was not apparent at the time, because Eisenhower had defeated the bitter anti-New Dealers in his party whereas Reagan came from their ranks and thus is seen as an "ideologue" rather than a "pragmatist" like other recent Republican presidents...

...But in the 1980s the crisis of the left, of both the moderate and the radical left, seems far more acute with the end of consensus on the welfare state, trade unions, and government management of the economy by Keynesian methods...

...In 1956 and 1972, when Republican presidents also won second terms by landslides, the Democrats actually lost fewer seats in Congress than they had lost when losing the presidency by smaller margins four years earlier...

...ONE MAY CONCLUDE that the "end of ideology," prematurely proclaimed in the late 1950s, is upon us and this time is real...

...The Republicans may not oblige by letting the Democrats steal the march on them in initiating new economic policies...

...Nor, should economic adversity return the Democrats to power in the late 1980s, is it likely that increases in entitlements, expensive new programs aiding the poor, or redistributive policies in general will be the order of the day, as they briefly appeared to be in the early 1960s...

...Nonvoting is much higher among those who are 18 to 21 years old, an age group that also disproportionately favored Reagan in 1984...

...As for Gerald Ford, he was the only president who had never previously been elected even to the vice-presidency, a by-product of the scandals of the Nixon administration that also largely accounted for Ford's defeat...

...The level of unemployment remains a crucial political issue and a rise in that level, already higher than in previous postrecession periods since the war, will spell trouble for the Republicans...

...Significantly, the Republicans last year won most of the congressional and gubernatorial contests in which there was no incumbent...

...If realignment means that the weaker of the two parties suddenly becomes the stronger for some time to come by decisively winning a crucial election at all levels of government, as the Democrats did in 1932, then obviously this hasn't happened since then...

...The turnover of seats in Congress has steadily declined in recent decades...

...Their varied socioeconomic composition, even if weighted toward the Democratic-voting lower classes, ensures that they include many potential Republican voters, as the Republicans seemed well aware in 1984 when organizing rather more effective registration drives than the Democrats...

...If this sequence should hold, we may expect another turn to the left in the 1990s in the aftermath of the conservative 1980s, which were preceded by the transitional 1970s after the radical 1960s...

...As Gus Tyler observed in the New Leader, "In general, Americans resist the idea that elections are an eleemosynary exercise...

...The Administration doubtless contains free-marketeers who would like to do so, as did the Eisenhower administration, whose addiction to impassioned free-enterprise and antistatist rhetoric, at least in its early years, seems to be forgotten...

...And any new proposals the Democratic neoliberals advance are likely to be denigrated as movements to the center or the right by conventional left-liberals...

...Government transfer payments have, moreover, played the role of Keynesian "built-in stabilizers" they were expected to play, limiting the effects of the recent severe recession and of persistent unemployment caused by changes in technology and international trade...

...The Republicans have won twothirds of the presidential elections since 1952 and all but once by comfortable margins...

...There was never good reason to believe that the overadvertised "gender gap," or registration campaigns among blacks and the poor, or fears of nuclear war aroused by the anti-Soviet rhetoric of the Reagan administration during its early years in office would make much difference...

...At present, the Republicans hold just under half of the South's Senate seats and about a quarter of its House seats, a situation that is bound to change to their advantage as party competition spreads to the local level...