Dilemmas for the Democrats
Meyerson, Harold
his should be the Democratic moment. Well before October's crash, the Reagan administration had shuddered to an overdue halt, its own agenda unenactable and its viable agenda—arms control, last...
...Yet creeping immobility is the dirty little secret of American life since 1973, so much so that the party would do well to appropriate more of the Citizen Action model, and more of both groups' populist perspectives...
...But surely the Democrats can organize among the third wave, so many of whom prop up the McDonald's economy —though it requires renewed attention to bread-and-butter issues of wages and working conditions, and more on-the-ground outreach than the party has done in decades...
...PACs are perhaps the chief funder of the permanent government —those preponderantly Democratic members of the House whose seats are safe and whose power over legislation is considerable...
...That is why the Carter administration's failure to enact labor law reform and universal voter registration is so unforgivable: these were not trade-offs, but opportunities to arrest the decline of the Democrats' base with no great risk of alienating middle and uppermiddle class voters...
...Farmer is right...
...If previous campaign finance reforms have not produced the desired result, that is in large part because capital-intensive campaigning is finally, after all, just a substitute for a mass-based politics that has collapsed...
...With the definite exception of Jesse Jackson, the Democratic field operates within a rather narrow consensus (and even Jackson is disinclined and unable to stay outside the consensus on a number of issues...
...It is time to be the party of fairer taxes and heightened progressivity...
...60 million in 1986...
...It is clear from the speeches of the Democratic candidates that they understand the renewed appeal of a competent and activist government...
...But there are parties within the party that impel that policy in other directions...
...For the approaching end of hard right rule has done nothing to resolve the Democrats' doctrinal crisis, nothing to free the party from the paralyzing embrace of money and its politics, nothing to reassemble and reinvigorate the institutions whose decline has shriveled the party to a hard core of politicians, donors, and campaign technicians...
...In the normal course of American politics, after all, the kind of scandals that hit various Democratic campaigns in 1987 need not have proved fatal...
...Foremost among the major donors being pursued by the Democrats are the Political Action Committees (PACs...
...Confirming the Farmer Theory of Uneven Development is Marshall Ganz, organizing director for the United Farm Workers in their glory days, and mastermind of the Get-Out-TheVote campaign that saved Alan Cranston's senate seat in 1986...
...According to data compiled by political scientist Martin Wattenberg, the Democratic advantage over the Republicans among the poorest 10 percent of the electorate doubled between the 1956 and 1984 elections, growing from 18 to 36 percent...
...Some of these accommodations will not outlive the Reagan Age...
...What the Democrats have done in the 1970s and 1980s is develop a series of mechanisms that acknowledge rather than challenge the demobilization of their base, and express rather than alter the class stalemate within the party...
...We will abandon our historic commitment to the working class, shun populism, ignore the unregistered, raise oodles of money, bend all efforts to winning the enlightened portion of the upper-middle class, and we will win...
...Indeed, if the essence of capital-intensive politics is the substitution of media for mass participation, that substitution is most glaring in district election campaigns, which consist chiefly of the raising of funds and the production of targeted mailings...
...The question is, how does it all play?—this new regime of capital-intensive campaigns pitched at some indistinct emerging majority with politics that are liberal on social issues and mush on economics...
...If ever it was viable, 1986 was the year...
...It is no longer the state and county chairs to whom the media go for reaction to political events (with the rule-proving exception of those in Iowa and New Hampshire...
...This would go some of the distance to freeing the Democrats from their paralysis, but only some...
...Had the unions organized the South, the Democrats' "Southern White Male Problem" would also be diminished...
...For years, labor's decline was obscured by its relative successes at the insider game—at lobbying, at writing the party rules, at funding political campaigns...
...At a time when the business of America was said to be business and was actually speculation, the Democrats worshipped at the same shrines as the Republicans...
...Tammany's 1943 sale of its Hall to the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was a sign of things to come: the unions, not the party, turned out the vote in 1944 and 1948...
...In this regard, perhaps one of the best things that can be said about the current Democratic field is that while they may lack a positive identity, at least they are so obscure that they are free to invent their politics in accord with changing times...
...At the instigation of then-Democratic National Chairman Charles Manatt, the Democrats established their own Business Council in the early 1980s to bring business input and business money to party councils...
...It is not that by so assiduously courting money the candidates cut themselves off from the world of the activists...
...The 1986 tax reform sham shows how out of touch the Democrats have become on these issues...
...Moreover, the continuing decline in voter participation is now steepest within those groups with relatively higher rates of participation: the other groups have already hit bottom...
...On social issues in particular, the Democrats are a liberal party...
...It was an experience that produced people who gave their lives to politics...
...Babbitt's world and that of his fellow candidates is a smaller one than that of his predecessors, and it has grown more uniform as mass-based politics has vanished...
...The polling has shown consistently ambivalent attitudes towards big business: anger at the favoritism it receives, support for the role it has been presumed to be taking in the revitalization of the American economy...
...By 1987, no institutions (excepting IMPAC) could plausibly offer enough support to recruit their favored candidates into the race...
...Finally, however, no Democratic realignment is possible without the recontrolling of an internationalized economy...
...If the Democrats have any bedrock identity at all, it is as the party that defends the common good against private greed, the average citizen against corporate power...
...Focus-group studies with voters such as these suggest, however, that alongside a sometimes virulent racism exists a strong populist streak: a conviction that government favors the big operators and the corporate interests, an anger that government fails to defend their interests against banks and insurance companies and utilities and the like...
...Having denied the existence of any populism within the native-born working class, it is easy to deny its existence among immigrants...
...Beyond these inner circles lies the world of national Democratic finders—thousands of Democrats, generally quite liberal on social and foreign policy issues, centered in a few major cities, New York and Los Angeles above all...
...The gains and losses the party has experienced over the 1980s flow rather clearly from capital-intensive campaigning, from liberal social policy and tepid economics...
...That is to say, they were well within the mainstream of a party that has come to view advocacy of a cause or constituency, in the manner of an Edward Kennedy or Jesse Jackson, as prima facie evidence of unelectability...
...The Democrats' victory in 1986 occurred despite collapsing voter participation: it was at one and the same time a triumph and an indictment of capital-intensive campaigning...
...Asked which party they favored to give "people such as yourself a better break on taxes," respondents favored Democrats over Republicans by the very narrow margin of 46-42...
...He had to tell the mayor, "Sorry—no one knows how...
...Of course, we are told, the new immigrants are culturally conservative —but then, so were the Eastern and Southern European peasants and their children who became a major part of the New Deal coalition...
...That deference was wearing thin before the crash, but among the Democratic candidates, only Jackson and in lesser degree Simon were tapping into it...
...Another third of his time is to be spent in Iowa and New Hampshire, with the balance occupied by debates and debate preparation...
...The current period in Democratic politics bears some striking similarities to that at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, and not simply because of the crash...
...In what is still Ronald Reagan's America, these donors are the activists...
...The center has not held...
...Almost half of Babbitt's scheduled time is to be devoted to fund-raising, chiefly in New York and Los Angeles, with additional forays to Chicago, San Francisco, Texas, and Florida...
...indeed, arose faster due to 38 • DISSENT television...
...They personified no identifiable cause, appeared to no constituencies as champions worthy of defense...
...Promising Proposals Herewith, then, a few modest proposals, shortterm and long, first to get us through the night, 42 • DISSENT then to keep the sun shining...
...Yet politicians must stand for election whether or not there is a party...
...In 1985, a collection of one-time Mondale money men, hailing primarily from the lands of real estate and arbitrage, formed IMPAC, dedicated to bringing the party back to a more "moderate" position and funding those candidates who passed the moderation tests...
...The Democrats' dilemma is that almost all their mechanisms of survival through hard times—their increasing dependence on money and PACs, their focus on the uppermiddle class electorate, their silence on questions of corporate abuses and tax regressivity — undercut their prospects for a return to health in better times...
...The ideology and program of the Democrats this year (again, with the exception of Jackson) are expressions of class stalemate...
...To a rather amazing degree, Caddell made strategy out of autobiography...
...Similarly, capital-intensive politics has transformed the world through which candidates move...
...If the 1984 presidential election were replayed with the rate of unionization at its 1955 high, the Democrats would have picked up an additional 4 percent of the vote...
...It has placed limits on such traditional Keynesian policies as raising the social wage and creating public-sector employment, posing a problem for today's Democrats in much the same way that the destruction of patronage jobs fatally undermined the credibility of the pre-New Deal urban machines...
...There remain five days on which he speaks to or meets with groups to enunciate policy and seek support that is not purely financial...
...Capital-intensive campaigning, then, often affords no mechanism for accountability...
...The fundamentalists cling all the more fiercely to the yet-unrealized, thoroughly unrealizable, tenets of the Reagan Revolution...
...The demobilization of the American working class and the slow demise of its institutions is the central fact in the recomposition of American politics and the many contortions of the Democratic party...
...Correspondingly, the margin by which they trailed the Republicans among the wealthiest 10 percent grew from 22 to 33 percent...
...The one area in which Democratic candidates are actually willing to pledge an increase in spending is education...
...As befits California, this is a new-age machine: no patronage, no people...
...As I write this piece, for instance, I have before me the advance schedule for Bruce Babbitt for October and November...
...The Reagan Revolution, by contrast, was premised on a base nowhere near as nebulous...
...Not one of them had any experience putting together a political organization or the slightest idea how to do it...
...By its very nature, it also fails to renew itself, to bring new people into the system...
...On the strength of very careful targeting of • resources and with the Reagan agenda spent, the Democrats recaptured the Senate—but with a total vote considerably down from their total four years earlier...
...The Democrats' advantage among the next 20 percent grew from 22 to 29 percent...
...More particularly, the Democrats must be careful in their zeal to be responsible in the wake of the crash not to convert themselves into the party of Herbert Hoover...
...The conflicting tugs of class, at first glance, should be diminishing within the party, not growing stronger, for in each successive presidential election, the class tilt of the party grows more pronounced...
...It is simply the most available form of participation...
...At issue was not simply the flawed character of one or another presidential candidate, but a pervasive absence of political identity common to flawed candidates, exemplary candidates, and their party alike...
...Of course, we are told, they are opposed to an activist government, to the welfare state, to every program, just coincidentally, that Democratic conservatives have opposed and the party in toto has refrained from presenting...
...While the costs of Senate campaigns were rising five times in the past decade, PAC contributions were rising nine times (and seven times in the House as against four times for overall costs...
...But it was precisely these classes that the Democrats declined to address in the 1980s, and in this perspective, all of Caddell's emerging forces—the baby-boomers, the ranks of the disaffected and unaffiliated—can be seen as substitutes for the base the party had chosen not to cultivate...
...Asked by Mary McGrory why so many made the donation, Farmer replied, "There are 234 million Americans in this country, and most of them have never been asked to participate in a presidential election...
...Bolstered by sharpened skills at drawing district lines, by an increasing capacity to provide constituent services, and a bottomless pit of PAC money, incumbents need not worry about serious opposition...
...The Democratic consensus is defined by the triumph of the center-left on social and foreign policy, the center-right on economic policy...
...As the designated Democratic fund-raiser for WINTER • 1988 • 35 House Democrats through most of the 1980s, California Representative Tony Coelho managed simultaneously to preserve his party, mortgage it off to business interests, and get himself promoted to the position of Democratic Whip...
...Not only presidential but Senate and House candidates spend a great deal of their time ensnared in this world of shnorring and brie...
...The cost of winning a Senate seat has risen on average five times in the past decade (winning Senators spent $20.1 million in 1975-6...
...The question of who goes on a slate card, of course, involves a range of political considerations, and when parties decide who's on and who's off, they do so in conventions or in primaries or in backrooms — and in any one of these venues, there would be more room for popular pressure and public accountability than there is in the substitute party of politicians and consultancies...
...Turnout was THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE IN ALL HOUSE CONTESTS (in percentages) Category of Voter 1982 1984 1986 Over $50,000 yearly income 37 39 47 Unemployed 71 70 63 Blue Collar 64 58 55 Under $12,500 yearly income 73 63 56 WINTER • 1988 41 lower outside the South than at any time since before the institution of universal manhood suffrage, a mere 160 years ago...
...For the Democrats, the 1920s was a time much like the 1980s—record low voter turnouts, the destruction of unions and the marginalization of progressives, the growing dominance of business in party circles...
...So crafting an economic policy that satisfies the Democrats should have been growing easier, but it has not—for this is the party at high tide, the party defined as those who vote Democratic in presidential and other general elections...
...The worldly faction, represented by George Bush and Bob Dole, is gingerly beginning to acknowledge that there may be a proper role for government after all in restoring the nation's competitive edge...
...Despite polling from the liberal Democratic Study Group that showed majority opposition to the bill precisely because of its waning progressivity, the Democrats passed and trumpeted legislation whose chief political utility, one year later, is to afford Paul Simon a sure-fire applause line every time he recounts how he opposed it...
...Taking the point on this mission was Pat Caddell, the first strategist to grasp how extensive was the decay of the traditional Democratic institutions...
...WINTER • 1988 • 43...
...For Democrats can win no more than occasional victories if the political terrain is tilted so steeply against a working-class politics...
...By every normal index—Democratic consensus, Republican divisions, the exhaustion of the Reaganite agenda, the cyclical nature of American politics, the widespread anxiety that the Reagan recovery had failed to allay and the Reagan crash has greatly exacerbated—this should be the Democratic moment...
...As the party fine-tunes its managerial image, its identity slips away...
...Where distinct publics persist outside the mainstream —as, say, with black America—it is not because they lack access to television...
...The increased voter participation of Southern blacks has destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the party...
...It has altered the political terrain, forcing the left no less than the right to justify social 34 • DISSENT programs by their effect on national competitiveness...
...In the light of these numbers, George Meany looms as a key figure in the Democrats' decline, not so much for his foreign and social policy as for his resistance to new organizing—with "honorable mention" going to those Democratic senators who opposed labor law reform...
...The first of these is the party that votes in primaries, which outside the South is a party rooted disproportionately in the upper middle class...
...And, yet, it's not—at least, not yet...
...To be sure, television constricts the "retailing" of messages, the tailoring of themes to special audiences...
...Jackson's populist economics have helped him win support among white working-class voters—not enough, by a long shot, to win the nomination, but enough to demonstrate there is a constituency for whom "competence" is not enough...
...It is more that virtually every organization that has done the work of mass politics over the past half century—unions, the civil rights movement, the feminist movements, the middle-class reformers—has experienced considerable decay...
...Democrats from the wealthiest third of the electorate declined over that same period from 32 to 29 percent...
...Of course, any revival in the union movement has to be centered here as well...
...The institutional problem for the Democrats, though, is: What comes after the ILG...
...The hollowing of the Democrats' mass-based organizations is by no means confined to unions, as Walter Mondale was to discover in 1984...
...No working-class organization, no voter participation...
...Until that latter politics is revived, Democrats will perforce seek funding wherever they can get it...
...That stalemate is at the base of such oxymoronic proposals as Bruce Babbitt's progressive sales tax...
...The second sub-party that sends the Democrats conflicting signals is the party of money...
...Still, if we look to "Other" as the heading under which would come the production of materials to be disseminated by volunteers, we find it made up a scant 2.2 percent of all Senate race funds and 9.6 percent of all House race funds...
...A new Democratic administration will likely enact some form of campaign finance reform and public funding of campaigns...
...The Democrats were the party of government from 1933 through 1968 because they used government to wring from the economy an unprecedented level of mass prosperity...
...The Politics of Stalemate For the Democrats, 1987 was a year of good feelings, albeit punctuated by periodic selfdestructions...
...Well, sometimes...
...The Democrats' distinct dilemma emerges not simply from a new economic order, but from the superimposition of that order over conditions peculiar to the Democrats themselves...
...Fine...
...For the Democratic presidential candidates (with the partial exception of Jackson), all 1987 is divided in three parts: Iowa, New Hampshire, and fund-raising, and fund-raising is the largest of the three...
...IMPAC and the Business Council have no great influence on specific policies (as some PACs do...
...The deficit inhibits any moderately forthright social democracy, and in this not-quite-yet-post-Reagan period, the welfare state returns only by virtue of being contracted out...
...The much-ballyhooed fifty–nine months of unbroken recovery never alleviated, and eventually succumbed to, a pervasive anxiety that the nation no longer controls its economic destiny...
...The question this raises, of course, is whether the leadership of the party that holds office by virtue of accommodation to the conservative order can provide the effective leadership the party needs as conditions become more friendly...
...The crash may be enough to bring us to the Democratic moment...
...In 1987, the thousand-dollar contribution has little to do with influence and less to do with access...
...asked which party was "better able to put the interest of the country over those of business," they gave the Democrats a relatively narrow plurality, 46 percent to 35 for the Republicans and 10 for neither...
...The New Left failed to outlive the hollowed-out institutional legacies of the Old...
...In his book The New Politics of Inequality Edsall concludes that for every "left-wing" PAC dollar (from unions and liberal groups) that the Democratic congressional delegation received in 1981-2, it received a matching "right wing" PAC dollar (from corporations, trade associations, and conservative groups...
...After twenty years in which conservatives have set the terms of debate, the Democrats seem to have forgotten how to appeal to any populist, anti-establishment instinct—at the precise moment when the conservatives must finally bear the onus of being the establishment...
...104 million in 1985-6...
...Ganz interviewed canvass directors, campaign field directors, officials of community-based organizations, union organizers...
...others will be more intractable, and none more so than the current mode of campaigning: a politics without people...
...The AFL-CIO could not convince Mario Cuomo, nor NOW Pat Schroeder...
...a House seat, four times...
...One of the reasons capital-intensive campaigning is vulnerable is that politicians hate it: all they ever seem to do is ask for money...
...But Ronald Reagan has conclusively demonstrated that television does not always mandate an ideological blandness...
...The problem is not so 36 • DISSENT much that the old party machinery ceased to function some decades ago...
...In 1984, however, the effect of the Jackson candidacy and the AFL-CIO endorsement was to diminish this class tilt somewhat...
...But the triumph of the center-right on economic issues has blocked any clear populist response to these Reagan Age frustrations...
...The Caddell band of outsiders, as Jimmy Carter discovered over four long years and Gary Hart and Joseph Biden found out over two short weeks, is no base at all...
...A few issues of social policy, chiefly those of individual liberty vs...
...From polling commissioned by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in early 1987 that showed high public irritation at government's favoring major corporations and the rich, to poll after poll showing at least two-thirds support for more steeply progressive taxation, the issue of government on whose behalf stands out—and goes largely unaddressed...
...Farmer established a pyramidal network of thousand-dollar donors, many of them first-timers...
...the reform movements of the 1950s and 1960s did not long outlive the vestigial machines they were pledged to destroy...
...To be sure, television has helped erode distinct publics—but so has the increased mobility of postwar American life...
...A liberal party in a conservative time faces two conflicting challenges: to adapt sufficiently to survive, and to rebuild its base for a return to power when the moment comes...
...As a distinct grouping, the primary party is more liberal on social issues and less populist on economic issues than the broader party...
...Contested elections are increasingly confined to nongerrymanderable cities and states, jurisdictions often too large to conceive of effective field campaigns...
...The cycle deepened with Carter's defeat of Ted Kennedy in the 1980 primaries, and may have hit bottom when the 1984 Democratic platform failed to commit the party, for the first time in the postwar period, to full employment or national health...
...With two exceptions, at the base of the party today there is no organizational life, just disaggregated individuals whose only opportunity for political participation comes in the form of the direct-mail fund solicitation...
...Waxman and Berman, I hasten to add, are not the problem...
...Unfairness has been partially forgiven in deference to the need for efficiency, a tenuous balance that may well come unstuck in the wake of the crash...
...As four of the last five presidential elections attest, Republicans are the natural party of national government in a demobilized nation...
...It was the goal of the Raskobs and the Davises to build a party for conservative times, and they prefigure the Manatts and Coelhos and IMPAC of the 1980s...
...Of paramount importance, their base is shifting...
...Not merely the substance but the structure of capital-intensive campaigns precludes such experiences today...
...Al Gore is attempting to break out of the pack by magnifying rather marginal dissimilarities...
...Gary Hart and Joseph Biden, longtime national politicians, one the frontrunner, had none...
...The nonunionized 89 percent gave Mondale 23 percent of their vote...
...With the Reagan era ending, Republican unity is starting to crumble...
...Nor does television create a nation of political couch potatoes: the civil rights and antiwar movements and the New Right all arose in the television age...
...and where the question of which race shall control a city remains heated, the northern Wallaceites, the Rizzos and Vrdolyaks, have joined the Republicans...
...For 1988, some populism...
...Well before October's crash, the Reagan administration had shuddered to an overdue halt, its own agenda unenactable and its viable agenda—arms control, last year's tax reform— lifted without acknowledgement from the center...
...But the Democrats' dilemma was more political than personal...
...On issues such as fairer taxes, where there is broad support save at the uppermost end of the economic spectrum, the candidates are silent—due in part to the Mondale debacle, in part to wariness in the aftermath of the crash, and in part to capital-intensive politics...
...As the late Jesse Unruh once counseled incoming members of the California Assembly on the subject of lobbyists, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, and then vote against them on the floor, you've got no business being up here...
...But labor's inability (and for many union leaders, unwillingness) to organize ultimately undercut its ability to play the inside games, and, more seriously, greatly weakened the social democratic component within the Democratic party and injured the party at the polls...
...I talked to nearly a hundred people," Ganz says...
...By the calculations of the Washington Post's Thomas Edsall, in the mid-1950s, 34 percent of Democrats came from the poorest third of the electorate...
...The Reagan Republicans understood and delivered for their base—if not entirely for traditionalists over modernists, then decisively for rich over poor, white over black and brown...
...Among the reasons the Democrats retook the Senate in 1986 was the "comeback" of the national campaign committees and the unions—not as mass participatory entities, but as institutions whose polling, fund-raising, targeting of races and recruitment of candidates were highly effective...
...As the demobilization of the working class grows steadily more profound, the defenders of a workingclass economics have been driven from the field...
...Their consultants draw the lines that become the boundaries for California's districts, wage mail campaigns, and mail millions of slate cards across Southern California that voters take to be the endorsements of the local Democratic party—an organization which in fact exists but which lacks the resources to get its own slates widely distributed...
...If that means higher taxes are on the agenda, as indeed they should be, the Democrats need to be somewhat fastidious about the way they present themselves...
...The most nearly complete of California's substitute parties is the Waxman-Berman machine—a machine that pols of the old school might not recognize as a machine at all...
...As the Casino Society collapses, the Democrats would do well to appropriate some of Jackson's tone, his advocacy, and indignation...
...recent Times-Mirror polling suggests that the boomers are really four distinct groups...
...Capital-intensive politics has changed the identity of the party leaders...
...By inclination and calculation, the Democrats are adjudicators, not advocates...
...Polling conducted this summer, at the presumed peak of our economic well-being, with official unemployment beneath 6 percent and the market still soaring skyward, showed the public's primary concern to be the specter of renewed recession...
...Television is at the center of capitalintensive politics, but surely television is as much the symptom as the cause of what ails our politics...
...They cannot change their positions on abortion rights and affirmative action to take back Hamtramck, Michigan, or the working-class suburbs of Chicago, or the Southern white working class...
...IMPAC played a central role in recruiting Albert Gore to the Presidential race...
...Representatives Henry Waxman and Howard Berman and their allies are among the most liberal members of Congress, and their pet causes—national health insurance, stricter clean air standards, farm worker rights—are causes whose only rewards are those of conscience...
...But on economic and foreign policy questions, divisions of class, race, culture, gender, and region splinter this tenuous majority...
...The FEC's breakdown on all spending in 1986 Senate and House races did not include "Field" as a category, and surely some field expenses were subsumed under salaries...
...The Democratic epoch is a more difficult proposition...
...If history was running against the Republicans in 1987, biography seemed to have it in for the Democrats...
...His cutting edge forces, his emerging majorities, were always engaged in struggles similar to his own: first, the outsider majority contesting the corrupt Beltway establishment (the Carter campaign), augmenting this as time passed with a generational majority seeking its destiny and held back by stodgy elders (the Hart and Biden campaigns...
...it is the new technicians— the pollsters, media consultants, donors and fund-raisers who make up the brave new party...
...The poll tax is gone, but there is now a fee for political participation—indeed, the fee is the participation...
...It is the safest of choices, the foremost priority of a corporate leadership that recently discovered its workers cannot read, and it is, according to AFSCMEcommissioned polling taken last winter, a higher priority for the upper half of the economic spectrum than the lower half...
...Which is to say, there can be no lasting Democratic revival without a new mobilization of working-class forces...
...The 1980s have also seen the Democrats develop their own instrumentalities for tapping the business and development communities...
...Electoral politics in California, for instance, consists of little more than a number of politicians able to raise great amounts of money, which they invest in the races of their allies, and in advertising, mailings, and slate cards across the state...
...But the polling showed more than that...
...Inevitably, capital-intensive campaigning invests in the politicians and technicians who control funds and mailings the powers traditionally reserved for the party...
...The primary party in the South, by contrast, is disproportionately black and stands to the left of the rest of the Southern party on both social and economic questions...
...Three factors—the internationalization of the economy, the party's internal class conflict, and the long-term demobilization of the American working class— define and delimit the terrain on which the Democrats operate...
...If they are not a constituency, even less are they a political base...
...Its fortunes rise with the cost of campaigning— that is, they rise steadily...
...Among congressional Republicans, the ratio was thirty–three rightwing dollars for every one from the left—one reason the Republicans have had a clear ideological thrust throughout the 1980s while the Democrats have not...
...But Cleveland, Nixon, and Jackson each had a base...
...Like the machines and unions of yore, both the Rainbow and Citizen Action usually are rooted in ethnically homogenous working-class neighborhoods...
...At best, 1988 will be an interregnum, a transition between periods...
...Some 98.4 percent of congressional incumbents seeking reelection were returned in 1986, seven-eighths of them with more than 55 percent of the vote—both all-time records...
...Consider, for instance, the theory of political involvement promulgated by the Democratic technician who arguably had the most successful 1987: Dukakis's campaign treasurer Robert Farmer...
...PAC donations constitute an increasing share of the Democratic dollar...
...The AFL-CIO and ADA voting records for those candidates who have served in Congress range, during the 1980s, from the low eighties to the mid-sixties...
...Roosevelt, we should recall, was invalided and recovering during the most reactionary times of the 1920s, winning New York's governorship quite narrowly in the last election of the 1920s (1928), winning reelection handily in 1930 as the world began to move his way...
...At best, we are moving from a time of error to one of confusion...
...By the mid1970s, the rise of the primary and the Democratic victories in historically Republican districts as a consequence of Watergate produced a generation of office holders who faithfully reflected those politics, which have become, as we shall see, the dominant Democratic politics...
...Ganz was recently asked by the incoming mayor of a large sunbelt city to find someone who could put together a mass-based political organization in that city...
...It is time to be the party of government...
...Labor law reform and universal voter registration are linchpins of any strategy for Democratic reconstruction...
...Leaving Leaders Behind As the miniparty of the 1920s grew into the mass party of the 1930s, as its working-class base grew in size and militance, the one group that did not come along with it was its 1920s national leadership...
...It is also clear that by and large they have not yet made a part of their message a third theme that the polling reveals: a tempered populism, a growing resentment toward a government by and for the rich...
...Though Caddell's diagnosis of the decay of the traditional party was thoroughly accurate, his new majority was unready at best, nonexistent at worst...
...The cost of all candidacies for the California State Legislature has risen ten times between 1970 and today ($6 million then...
...If neighborhood organizing is not on the party's priority list, that is partly a result of the eclipse of the contested district election...
...They are the Democrats' dilemma, and while the Democrats with some difficulty can recapture the White House without resolving them, they must ultimately solve these problems if they mean to stay...
...By a margin of 55 percent to 41 percent, respondents to an ABC/Washington Post poll favored "a president who can set the nation in a new direction" over one who would "keep the country moving in the direction Ronald Reagan has been taking us...
...All twelve presidential candidates had fundraisers in Los Angeles this past October...
...Labor's Collapse The most serious collapse that has demobilized the Democrats is that of the labor movement, whose share of the work force has been effectively halved over the past thirty years...
...Reaganism grew from a base that can be described in class and race terms with the utmost precision...
...That television tends to trivialize political discourse is surely true, though the same can be said of the most popular forms of earlier political expression—the torchlight parade, the party papers and the penny press...
...It might win them white working-class votes that Jackson himself could never secure, and that the Democrats have failed to seek for the better part of the decade...
...The rightward pressure on foreign policy from the AFL-CIO and Beltway cold warriors has diminished with the changing balance of forces within the labor movement...
...They command the allegiance of their participants (the Rainbow doesn't really have members) through the urgency of local struggle or through charismatic leadership...
...To be sure, full employment has reentered the Democratic candidate's phrasebook after six years on the list of proscribed words, and Jesse Jackson is advancing an off-budget program for funding it through the use of government employee pensions funds...
...It showed an explicit, pre-crash rejection of Reaganism...
...The consensus candidate of all Democratic organizations, Mondale ended up with a vote not much higher than that given George WINTER • 1988 37 McGovern, candidate of the Democratic fringe twelve years earlier...
...The Democratic agenda, then, is not only one of working-class remobilization but of international solidarity as well...
...That television makes campaigning more expensive is incontestable, but the costs of contested district campaigns that do not use television have been rising just as steeply...
...They not only recruit candidates and raise and dispense the funds they need...
...The party's long-term strategic objective must be to drive money from politics and replace it with people...
...So is a program of outreach to a vast new constituency to which the Democrats seem to have devoted no strategic thought at all: the third wave of immigrants, the millions of new Americans from Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific...
...Michael Dukakis, in the words of one Massachusetts observer, would bring to the White House "the city manager form of presidency," an assessment that says as much about Democratic substance as it does about Dukakis style...
...it explains the marvelous phrase "human capital" (we're for labor, we're just afraid to say the word...
...The problem is not merely one of identity lost but of opportunity squandered...
...But then, Unruh was an idealist...
...they simply add the clout of money to efforts such as those of the Democratic Leadership Council to route the party in a more conservative direction...
...The Democratic National Chairman during the Hoover administration was John J. Raskob, an industrialist with close ties to Du Pont and General Motors...
...The High Price of Winning • Capital-intensive campaigning (the phrase is Marshall Ganz's) has been the dominant, and now the pervasive, form of campaigning in America for several decades, but only in 1986 could the Democrats claim to be as proficient in it as the Republicans...
...One could argue that the communities they represent are exceptional —characterized by uncommon levels of solidarity and immobility...
...The problem is a system that amounts to the privatization of the nomination process...
...The old divisions have faded, so much so that the nonentrance of Mario Cuomo and the withdrawal of Gary Hart worked chiefly to benefit one and the same candidate, Michael Dukakis—for in 1987, the political spaces occupied by the respective champions of establishment liberalism and neoliberalism had grown so close that a single candidate could fill them both...
...The Substitute Majority By the mid- and late-1970s the demobilization and shrinkage of the Democratic base set party strategists on a hunt for a new majority...
...WINTER • 1988 • 39 To begin with, there is considerable question whether Caddell's baby boomers are a distinct constituency...
...The past year has seen a modest relegitimation of government, but on an economic and ideological terrain misshapen by the legacy of Reaganomics...
...For the past decade, millions of Americans have suppressed whatever resentments and misgivings they have felt about the growing polarities of the American economy in deference to the notion that this was how wealth is created...
...The Democrats' ultimate challenge thus becomes one of policy and power: How do they achieve mastery over an economy that has outrun the capacity of the nation-state to bend it to the public good...
...Fifty percent of unionized Southern white males supported Mondale in 1984, but they comprised only 11 percent of Southern white males...
...By 1936, the party's Jazz Age presidential candidates, Davis and Al Smith, along with Raskob and other national leaders, were among the leaders of the anti-New Deal Liberty League...
...Still, there are parties far to the left of the Democrats in nations more completely enmeshed in the transnational economy that have survived, if not 'exactly flourished, in better shape than the Democrats over the past fifteen years...
...But Waxman-Berman and their allied consulting firm are the nearest thing to a working Democratic party in the nation's largest state...
...In sum, even as the lower-class character of the Democrats' voting base grows more pronounced, the Democrats scurry ever more vigilantly after major donors—a sure-fire prescription for an identity crisis...
...The eclipse of the old party machines at the hands of the substitute parties began with the rise of the CIO...
...Beyond question, the Democrats are becoming more adept at playing the game on fundamentally inhospitable terrain...
...by 1980, the figure had risen to 38 percent...
...To be sure, if the crash leads to recession, the Democrats can probably win no matter what they say, but sooner or later they must confront the question of whether this new party they are both crafting and drifting into is a viable one...
...Today's best consultants," Ganz points out, "entered politics as volunteers on the McGovern, McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy campaigns...
...The Democrats, by contrast, seem to have called a halt to the Twenty Years War between Establishment and Insurgents that has been a regular feature of their presidential campaigns...
...God forbid that the Democratic party should become a mere gathering of the unsuccessful...
...Beyond perpetual temptation, what message in aggregate do the Democrats receive from the PACs...
...But a succession of Harris polls taken last summer suggests that even on these issues, the Democrats have forfeited their edge...
...The cycle began with their defeat in the Carter administration on full employment and national health insurance, and on two proposals 40 • DISSENT that would have strengthened the party in general and its working-class component in particular: labor law reform and universal voter registration...
...In theory, of course, a PAC contribution need not have a corrosive effect...
...communitarian traditionalism, split clearly along generational lines (such as the 1986 vote on retaining California Chief Justice Rose Bird...
...Whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee in 1988 will probably run a somewhat more progressive campaign than Mondale in 1984 or Carter in 1980, but the structural conditions of a conservative epoch will clearly limit his liberalism, and Monday's progressive pronouncement is likely to be followed by Tuesday's conservative one...
...They have developed a politics rooted in that stalemate, pitched to a new majority based neither on class nor race nor reality, and campaigned for by an organization that takes in money and turns out a message, with no use for institutions and volunteers should any wander in...
...Post-crash polling shows extremely high support for the never-yet-enacted Democratic agenda—full employment, guaranteed medical care, federally sponsored day care...
...Except for the Rainbow—a kind of marginalized social democracy that is more a force than an institution—voters within the bottom half of the economic spectrum who comprise more and more of the Democratic electorate in general elections have less and less of a voice in the Democratic party and thus in national political discourse...
...For the Democrats, then, the Reagan Revolution was a time of a corollary unpursued— for if the Republicans had consolidated a party out of the upper and uppermiddle classes, surely the Democrats could direct a message and strategy to the classes beneath...
...Money and Class Problems • The internationalization of the economy, of course, has posed serious problems for every left-of-center party in the West, substantially freeing the economic realm from the kind of national political control to which these parties had subjected it in the decades after World War II...
...There is no greater index of Democratic disorientation than that this solipsistic strategy became the centerpiece of the party's strategic thinking...
...Except for the Rainbow and Citizen Action and some institutional remnants, the Democrats have no troops...
...The Democrats won 57 percent of the vote cast for House members in 1982 (admittedly, a recession year), and 52 percent in 1986, yet their gains in 1986 were much more significant...
...To cite just three highly dissimilar candidates, Grover Cleveland (who fathered and abandoned an illegitimate child), Richard Nixon (in the "Checkers" fund scandal of 1952), and Jesse Jackson of "Hymietown"WINTER • 1988 • 33 Farrakhan days, all survived worse...
...Two forces that have resisted these entropic tendencies are the Citizen Action groups and the Rainbow Coalition...
...In 1984, Gary Hart waged the party's first successful anti-institutional campaign: he was not opposed to the unions' positions, he was opposed to the unions' involvement...
...Health insurance, for instance, has been resurrected, though the role of the government in these proposals is to require that employers provide it...
...cautioned John W. Davis, the Wall Street lawyer who was the party's 1924 presidential nominee...
...The populist appeal of Richard Gephardt's trade policy is largely negated by the bland centrism of the rest of his politics...
...The party is awash in debates without differences...
...As this composite of CBS/New York Times exit polls demonstrates, the Democrats in the 1980s have gained at the peripheries and lost at the core...
...With both whimpers and bangs, the Reagan age is ending, but this is a fact the Democrats are not yet fully able to exploit...
...That is, the Democrats gravitate most naturally to advocacy for cross-class causes...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
