"REPUBLICANIZING" THE DEMOCRATS: THOMAS B. EDSALL'S STUDY OF POLITICAL TRENDS

...Fair enough...

...Mondale twenty years ago would have been unacceptable to business because he was a starry-eyed liberal . . . but he's learned a lot since then...

...it also developed a capacity for applying pressure through "grassroots" lobbying...

...While local businesspeople organized on the city and congressional level, the Business Roundtable brought together the Fortune 500 companies on a national level...

...We should resist the simplification to which Kristol lures us here: it's not that he, necessarily, is indifferent to school lunches and false teeth—though he may in fact be—but that he believes there are "greater" issues, those that have occupied political philosophers through the ages...

...LBJ's son-in-law, Virginia's neoliberal Governor Charles Robb, complains that being a Democrat at a suburban cocktail party is like announcing you have an "incurable disease...

...Faced with an often vicious competition for jobs and dismayed by the temporary prosperity of unionized workers with indexed wages, they were calling for a revival of economic growth by any means possible...

...Eugene J. Gangarosa of Emery Medical School "testified that thousands of American farm workers suffered levels of parasitic illness rarely found in developed countries...

...The baby boomers, part of an enormous demographic clot that entered the job market in the 1970s, were undergoing a major shift in attitude...

...If Keynesian economists could no longer guarantee prosperity, maybe venture capitalism could...

...Between 1972 and 1976, every major white political figure in the Democratic party and a passel of Republicans saw fit to visit Wallace and pay homage...

...If Reagan is capable of stripping away his ideology . . . he could be the new FDR, because it would work, and there would be no reason to turn to the Democrats...

...but as the British Labour party's inability to exploit high unemployment under Thatcher makes clear, left liberals can recoup only if they can present a credible economic alternative...

...Were they simply bought off...

...The drive to break the power of the generally conservative Southern committee chairs had traditionally been a liberal initiative...

...The congressional elections of '74 and '76 solidified the reformers' control...

...Even before the substantial Democratic gains in the 1974 election, and despite the presence of a Republican in the White House, Congress by 1974 "had already enacted into law the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Products Safety Commission . . . the Mine Safety and Health Administration," and substantial Food Stamp and Social Security increases...

...Surely, as a civilized man, he would prefer the farm workers to have toilets rather than not...

...The book makes scant mention of George Wallace or Jimmy Carter, but surely the stream of Southern conservatism these two men represented in their different ways deserves discussion in any account of the right's triumphs...

...Frightened by the prospect of downward mobility, these were the people for whom real estate and investment opportunities were the chief topics of conversation...

...where it is against the law to spank your child, before we say 'no' to the bureaucracy...

...When Cade11 conducted in-depth interviews with Wallace voters, he discovered that they were not marginal but often solid middle-class types whose latent populism had taken a ferocious turn...

...This produced ideological havoc among Democrats who previously depended largely on labor and liberal fund-raising...

...New York Times, April 10, 1985...

...Anybody who would reform" the Democratic party "by dropping the white ethnic," wrote Mike Royko, "would probably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach...

...He then listed every group, from optometrists to CocaCola bottlers to funeral directors...

...The Democrats' post-Watergate gains—between '73 and '77 they increased their House majority from 50 to a commanding 149 seats—obscured McGovern's failure and left the party content to live off the scandal's fallout...

...Well before the antigovernment business offensive made itself felt, the Democrats had to heed broader currents of antiWashington sentiment...

...When these "grass-roots" organizations put out a blizzard of literature complaining that big government was (a) producing a capital shortage, (b) undermining individual initiative, (c) leaving America prey to foreign competitors, their message was echoed by complaints in Congress that federal regulation had gone too far: "Must this country be like Sweden...

...Almost all the innovations of Reagan's 1981 tax bill were foreshadowed in the 1978 Revenue Act proposed by Carter and passed by a Democratic Congress: "The legislation marked a complete reversal of Democratic tax policy by skewing reductions toward the upper income brackets and seeking to spur investment through major reductions in business and capital gains taxation...

...Companies like Raytheon or Squibb, for example, "each have networks of 301 plants, suppliers, retail outlets, subcontractors, salesmen, and distributors in every congressional district in the nation, as well as dispersed stockholders...

...By late 1974, in a Pat Cadell/ Kevin Phillips 302 survey, 18 percent of the country's voters were willing to put Wallace in the White House, while another 17 percent wanted to cast a protest vote for the Alabamian, doubling his 1972 total...

...Everybody knows them...

...The nearly moribund Chamber of Commerce revived by repositioning itself as a voice for the "victims of big government...

...Although Edsall doesn't discuss this, it's in fact clear that the politics of the neoliberal president avant la lettre, Jimmy Carter, did a great deal to heighten racial tensions...

...And, crucial for the Carter administration, with five economists in the cabinet, Keynesian economics stood helpless before the specter of stagflation...

...The watershed was 1978, the year of Proposition 13, and of a liberal drubbing in the midterm elections...

...Ultimately," he argues, "economic decisions are made by and on behalf of those who hold political power...

...Even," notes Edsall, "with the federal government in the hands of the Democrats, organized labor proved weaker than a revived business lobby...

...we care, or should care, about those as well...

...There is a good deal of substance to Kennedy's quip...

...As a result [writes Edsall], the reform of the seniority system led not to the transferring of power from a recalcitrant, conservative old guard to the party's liberal wing: rather, much of the transfer of power was away from the party's liberal elders . . . to an ideologically mixed, if not confused, collection of junior members...

...In Pertschuk's book Revolt Against Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Consumer Movement, which can be read as a companion piece to Edsall's book, he notes that — In the mid-'70s, there were gestating within the womb of the FTC alone as many as thirty proceedings, each as potentially significant— and as threatening to some segment of business— as the truth in the lending bill or the fair packaging and labeling bill, business causes caebres of a decade earlier...

...A serious recession might temporarily derail the entrepreneurial political express...

...New Deal Democrats...

...McGovern's cam299 paign manager was Gary Hart, and one of his main economic advisers Lester Thurow...

...Edsall's argument implies that economic liberalism was solely a function of the Democrats' lower-class voting base...

...With the Republican look of the West and Southwest, the Democrats had no choice but to pick a candidate acceptable to conservative white Southerners, though even Jimmy Carter was unable to carry a majority of the white Southern vote...

...but many of the same Democrats who were sympathetic to Naderism in the early '70s deserted that coalition later in the decade...

...Lukewarm for the Humphrey-Hawkins FullEmployment Act, his Administration supported racial quotas while ordering that even incompetent black and female federal employees were not to be dismissed...

...On the corporate side, Cornell Maier, the chair of Kaiser Aluminum, responded to the regulatory initiatives by declaring, "This is war...

...The growth of business PACs was an ironic outcome of the Watergate revelations about millions of dollars in illegal corporate contributions to the Nixon campaign...

...The irony was that having failed to deliver the economic goods to either race, Carter's symbolic purchases were repaid in the coin of antiblack sentiment by a white public now convinced that blacks were the federal government's "favored sons...

...The New Politics Democrats sought to avenge "the crime of '68," which consisted of Humphrey's political cowardice on Vietnam and the pressure of a powerful party machine that stole the nomination from the rightful prince, Eugene McCarthy...

...As one of the Yuppies Daniel Yankelovich interviewed for New Rules put it, "Virtually all of us presumed that our economy would continue to function automatically and successfully, as sure as the sun would rise each morning, without effort on our part...

...It is unlikely, for instance, that the Chamber of Commerce's assault on the FTC as the "national nanny" could have been so successful if it didn't play off parallel currents of hostility to Washington's social engineering...

...The experts without answers were in no position to legitimate new government initiatives...

...The new Democrats were often fiercely independent ambassadors from suburban principalities who owed allegiance neither to Carter (he ran behind virtually all of them) nor to the Democratic party...

...Where once, secure in their own skills, as Kenneth Arrow put it, "mainstream economists had been prescribers of rationality to the social world," Carter's treasury secretary spoke of an "economic profession that is close to bankruptcy...

...Labor, the neoliberals argue, had its chance with Mondale and failed to deliver...

...The suburban-procedural Democrats, whose rise he's chronicling, came to power in opposition to the very Great Society/ social-democratic programs that might have been able to unite black and white...

...Chairs no longer inherited their jobs for life but had to submit to a secret ballot of the House Democratic caucus every two years...

...Economic problems could be solved and the environmental apocalypse staved off if people— particularly the lower middle class, which was accumulating frivolous baubles—simply reduced their expectations and hence their consumption...

...At a hearing last year Dr...

...Funding reforms, passed by Congress and enlarged by the Supreme Court (with its newly expanded concept of corporate free speech), legalized direct business contributions to political campaigns...

...This uncritical faith, Pertschuk has pointed out, was "nowhere more manifest than among advocates of consumer protection and environmental legislation...

...Finally, Edsall misses the fact that the suburban Democrats were under pressure from a source he never mentions, their college-educated baby-boom constituents...

...Instead, like Carter, they focused on projecting their own personalities or on rationalist appeals to the "general interest...

...Wallace's anti-Washington appeal grew dramatically in the wake of Watergate...

...This past April there appeared a modest announcement that the Reaganite Labor Department, through Robert Rowland, an assistant secretary, had decided it would not require farmers who hire migrant labor to provide toilet facilities and drinking water...

...It was in order to halt Wallace that the UAW threw its support behind Carter, toppling Wallace in the crucial Florida primary—only to discover that there was then no way to stop Carter...

...The farm unions had long been campaigning for them...

...Where the "behavioral revolution" of the social sciences once promised to authorize new social programs for racial equality, as outlined in Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Howard University speech, by the mid-1970s it was suggesting, as in the Coleman report, the limits of the bestdesigned and best-intentioned integration efforts...

...Similarly, faith in government-guided and social-science-inspired school and prison reform collapsed before the disheartening daytoday advance of incivility and crime...

...but his argument suggests otherwise...

...But, as Edsall shows, by 1977 three-fourths of the chairs were economic liberals highly rated by the AFL–CIO...

...When his budgetary conservatism came under strong black criticism, Carter responded with a series of symbolic gestures...

...It was out of this renewed popular concern for growth and not just big-business agitation about federal interference that the neoliberal Democrats took up the entrepreneurial ideal as the hope for the future...

...The 1976 primary victories of that authentic Bible-belting Southerner Jimmy Carter were a tribute to the agenda-setting powers of George Wallace...

...But from the '30s to the '70s, reform initiatives came from a coalition of trade unionists and intellectual and middle-class reformers...

...Thomas Edsall's The New Politics of Inequality picks up the story in the mid-1970s.* Edsall, formerly with the Baltimore Sun and now with the Washington Post, is one of the nation's best political journalists...

...Business not only induced funding schizophrenia among Democrats...

...But survey after survey showed that Humphrey then was far and away the choice of rank-and-file Democrats, while the party machinery was in an advanced state of decay...

...His book fails only in omission...

...Others, such as Timothy Wirth, a rising star in the House, represent traditionally Republican districts...

...The converts were by no means a majority of the "New Politics" Democrats, but they swelled the ranks of the party's reform warriors, generally well-heeled young professionals who would ultimately turn off old-line voters who didn't measure up to the party's new ethical (not to mention monetary and cultural) standards...

...The Administration was paying off its pals...

...The third and perhaps most far-reaching reform-induced disaster was the growing dependence on business for campaign financing...

...When the FTC moved to regulate funeral fraud, a plaintive congressman explained, "you know a funeral director can kill you . . . he decides whether you sit next to the window or at the back of the room...

...it should step aside and make way for the new wave...

...The battle is over our political system...

...They've got their own party going," said an old-time Democratic leader, "and they haven't invited me...

...Business organizations were quick to take advantage...

...It is likely," argued Pat Moynihan, "that increasingly the role of the social scientist will be to assert the absence of knowledge with respect to many of the most urgent issues...

...Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who has been close to David Stockman, and Sen...

...FOR THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT, which had been losing more than half of its representation elections to a renewed business militancy, the full strength of corporate activism became apparent in 1977 and 1978 when business lobbyists waylaid labor-law reforms designed to facilitate union organizing...

...paperback $5.95...

...Many of the neoliberals, including two of the most prominent, Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley, are former Republicans...

...Tony Coelho, a California neoliberal and chair of the Democratic Campaign Committee...

...He is not Bounderby, Dickens's gross "entrepreneur...

...287 pp...

...Five aides in the Labor Department wrote a letter of protest saying that recent hearings provided conclusive evidence of the need for such minimal facilities...

...Coelho argues that the outcome of the '84 congressional races, a mere 14-seat gain for the Republicans, vindicates his strategy of courting big business—but at what price in policy...

...In the mid-1960s reform, Democrat Joe Clark of Pennsylvania asserted that "the salvation of the party's reform lay in freeing the congressional Democrats from the viselike grip of party leadership, discipline, patronage, seniority...

...In organizational terms, the center of liberal political gravity had shifted from the ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), with its mix of Reutherite social democrats and good-government reformers, to Common Cause, an outfit singularly devoted to the goodgovernment tradition of procedural reform...

...However, the vanguard of business regulation was not Congress but the Federal Trade Commission under Michael Pertschuk...

...Reflecting environmentalist enthusiasm and disdain for middle America, they advocated what might be called "economic orientalism...

...Faced with stagflation and exaggerated claims of a capital shortage, they were overwhelmed by the combined assault of 303 business lobbyists and crusading neoconservative intellectuals...

...Was Ted Kennedy's new-found interest in transportation deregulation a product of PAC contributions...

...While 80 percent of the Republican campaign contributions came in small individual donations of under $500, more than 60 percent of the Democratic National Committee's contributions came in big sums...

...This was only the first of a series of disasters spawned by "reform...

...If so, salvation seemed at hand in 1973 when what Edsall calls the party's suburbanprocedural wing broke the back of the seniority system...

...Edsall is among the few to recognize the second disaster: while the party was given new life by Watergate, Watergate also allowed the Democrats to avoid dealing with the deep splits between its white working-class and black constituencies...

...The regulars were so conciliatory that, as Eli Segal, a counsel to the commission, put it, "we were always waiting for some people to wake up and say, 'Hey, they're stealing our party from us.' " McGovern and his supporters did not so much capture the Democratic party as displace it...

...They are big joiners, they join the Kiwanis, the Rotarians...

...I. H. 304...

...Now where does Irving Kristol come in here...

...Edsall finds his answer almost solely in the halls of Congress and in the new "reform" mechanisms for the Democrats' presidential nominating process and their postWatergate campaign financing...

...By sticking so closely to the mechanics of intraparty Democratic and congressional politics, he slights both the broader culture of presidential politics and the dramatic changes in the intellectual and social life of the middle classes, which paved the way to Reaganism...

...In the absence of effective party fundraising—at a time when the Democrats were reduced to depending on charity performances by rock musicians—Democratic candidates turned to businesses and trade associations to back their campaigns...

...Edsall, a hard-nosed reporter, is too quick to dismiss intellectual battles...

...While Wallace waxed, faith in social science and particularly in Keynesian economics, which underlay the middle-class reform initiatives of the 1960s, waned...

...As R. Larry Heath of the National Association of Manufacturers put it candidly, the key to the political resurgence of business was "the decline in the role of the party, yielding a new spirit of independence among congressmen—independent of each other, of the president, of the party caucus...

...It doesn't require a paranoid imagination—it requires only political realism—to surmise that this Labor Department ruling came in response to pressure from the big agribusiness operators...

...In a sense, Tsongas gave the game away when he admitted to a reporter that "the greatest danger to the Democrats is a rational Ronald Reagan...

...But there was surely something else—ideology (fanatic "free marketry"), and a sociopsychological sentiment that tags after the ideology (the mean-spirited Reaganite contempt for the poor as the other side of their celebration of "the Age of the Entrepreneur...

...It was the year domestic social spending hit the peak, from which it continues to decline...

...It is the neocons who in their own not inconsequential way have helped create the political atmosphere of Reaganite triumph—as well as its consequences, of which the Labor Department ruling is a revealing instance...

...What Edsall describes is necessary, but it is not sufficient to explain the triumph of Reaganism...

...Edsall's The New Politics of Inequality was written before the 1984 election, but the power of Edsall's argument is illustrated in the Democrats' growing dependence on business PACs, a point of pride for Rep...

...Edsall clearly has produced the best analytic account of the conservatives' rise to power...

...Cloth, 15.95...

...For the moment the entrepreneurialism that Robb favors is an irresistible political as well as economic tide...

...Kentucky Senator Wendell Ford wrote wryly to Pertschuk, "You [the FTC] have managed to alienate the leading citizens of every town and city in Kentucky...

...Liberals whose focus had been on the environment were unprepared to deal with the economy...

...He said that hepatitis, dysentery, diarrhea, and other intestinal diseases caused by exposure to feces were widespread among farm workers...

...The destruction of the seniority system led to a proliferation of subcommittees, a godsend for the young veterans of the McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and McGovern campaigns looking to make a name for themselves, but a disaster for economic liberalism...

...He wants to know why, despite the enormous congressional majorities the Democrats enjoyed in the wake of Watergate and the election of a Democratic president, the country moved sharply to the right in the late '70s...

...Naderism had business running scared in the early 1970s...

...The '72 Convention was probably the besteducated and wealthiest group of Democratic delegates ever assembled...

...q Of Toilets & Reaganite Politics Irving Kristol, the intelligentsia's gift to corporate America, once said that a nation "whose politics revolves around such issues as day-care centers or school lunches or the 'proper' cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics is squalid, mean-spirited, and debasing...

...Good...

...The idea—as Irving Shapiro, the CEO of DuPont, explains in his memoir-tract America's Third Revolution— was to impress Congress by having not just lobbyists but top corporate leaders appeal directly to congressional representatives and the White House...

...Look at Mondale, as vicepresident, says Shapiro: "The Business Community lived in his office...

...While a substantial number of working-class Democrats deserted their party to vote for either Nixon or Wallace, the Democrats picked up the support of silk-stocking Republicans attracted by environmental, antiwar, or civil-rights issues...

...But what if, as all too often happens, this "philosophical" concern with the "greater" issues masks support for political forces that deny school lunches and false teeth to those who need them...

...The '72 Convention, which nominated McGovern, succeeded in including more women and black delegates at the cost of excluding blue-collar and tradeunion representatives...

...Insofar as these reformers had a passion, it was not for particular causes (anti-interventionism aside) but for reforming the mechanisms of government...

...Gary Hart, who borrowed some of his economic views from Gerald Ford's adviser William Simon, are in many ways indistinguishable from their high-tech colleagues across the aisle...

...Not likely...

...To understand how the United States became endowed with two "Republican" parties, we have to return briefly to the tumultuous days of 1968, the year of the great inversion...

...New York: W. W. Norton, 1984...

...While Maier was declaring war, the Democrats were busy dismantling their party machinery...

...Edsall implies that had the party turned its attention to the divisions between what have been harshly described as tax-pay300 ing and tax-eating Democrats, the chasm could have been bridged...

...After the election, Humphrey and many of the regulars made a point of reaching out to the Kennedy and McCarthy supporters who staffed the McGovern commission, which was giving a New Politics spin to its revisions of the party rules...

...he is Gradgrind, the Dickens ideologue who justifies Bounderby...

...He wrapped himself in the moral rhetoric of the civil rights movement...

...Consumers of agricultural products are, of course, also endangered by the lack of sanitary facilities on the farms...

...Edsall relates how political representatives of business proved equal to the danger...

...They tended to disdain the voteswapping and special pleading on behalf of disadvantaged constituents represented by • The New Politics of Inequality, by Thomas Byrne Edsall...

...Rather, for most politicians, their funding and their convictions moved in tandem as the experimental certainties of the 1960s were shattered...

...The battle is not over our economic system...

...The middle class," said Cadell with some overstatement, "was coming unhinged...

...Still others, such as Rep...

...Edsall shows that, after the reforms, the contributions to Democratic House and Senate campaigns were almost evenly split between labor/liberal and business/ trade-association contributors...