On Kuttner's The Life of the Party

...The error that unites the otherwise dissimilar neoconservative and neoliberal communities is to take these numbers as immutable constants of American politics...

...If many resist Kuttner's cure, it is because the balance of class forces within the Democratic party has tilted disastrously upward...

...Through his writings on economic policy in the New Republic, Business Week, this, and other journals, in his columns, and in his 1984 book The Economic Illusion, Kuttner has steadily assailed the fundamental assumption underlying the shift to the right: that policies promoting equity inevitably impede growth and must be sacrificed to attain it...

...That is, we'll know we have arrived at the Democratic moment when Bob Kuttner is no longer the refuter of prevailing policies but their formulator...

...There was nothing there to offend working-class voters, but nothing to address their daily concerns, either...

...No one has more effectively attacked the conventional wisdoms of a mean time...

...The most intriguing thing about Gephardt's appropriation of Jackson's anticorporate line was that it enabled him to reach the very same white workingclass vote that Jackson was supposed to drive into the Republicans' arms...

...What Gephardt did in Iowa was to borrow a series of compelling populist themes from one of the party's less electable candidates, Jesse Jackson...

...The issue here is not merely the resistance of some within these elites to a populist economics, but the failure of almost all within these elites to apprehend its centrality to a Democratic renaissance...

...He contends that 238 • DISSENT Books The single most important area for real leadership in domestic policy is that closely interconnected set of issues involving education, labor-market policies, employment opportunities, and related family supports...

...Social Security, national health insurance, all kinds of subsidy and regulation tend to make neoclassical economists uneasy," he writes...

...Indeed, this reaction demonstrates that at bottom many neoliberal Democrats are more comfortable attacking their own core constituencies as "special interests" than they are attacking the corporate core of Ronald Reagan's America as a vested interest...

...nor does it veer toward the search for a new generational majority that has proved stubbornly nonexistent...

...No wonder that working-class voting, low to begin with, continued its sickening decline during the 1980s, so that by 1986 voter turnout outside the South reached its lowest level since 1798...

...Kuttner is also chary about the party's growing SPRING • 1988 • 237 Books dependence on the socially liberal elites of New York and L.A...

...But the neoconservative strategy has had little success in holding the white working class even in the South, as John Glenn discovered in 1984...

...Their surveys turn up more than the Archie Bunker of Polo Lounge imagination— or, rather, even when they do turn up Archie, they find that he's concerned about his job, his health insurance, affordable housing for his daughter and "meat-head" son-in-law so that they can move out, and ensuring fair and adequate pay for Edith, who has long since gone into the job market...

...The Democrats are never going to win Archie's vote on social issues, but they could reach him on economics—if only they had a program...

...The creation of an international mixed economy and a national managed trade policy is essential to defending the interests of Democratic constituents, the national economy, and the debt-devastated Third World...

...For Archie's generation, at least, the Democrats provided affordable housing and education through FHA loans and the GI bill "and the whole de facto social contract that worked to serve popular wants...

...Ironically, the Democratic neoconservatives arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s urging the party to shun its foreign policy preoccupations and to focus instead on bread-and-butter economic concerns in the Roosevelt-Truman tradition...

...For both, American politics will forever unfold against a shrunken and demobilized electorate...

...What is beyond question is that there is no other plausible strategy—neoliberal, neoconservative, Caddell-generational, what have you—that is adequate to the task...

...Kuttner reports that a mid-1980s Census Bureau survey showed 79 percent of college graduates voting, but only 44 percent of those who had not finished high school (and this second figure, Kuttner demonstrates, is probably high)—a class tilt unknown elsewhere in the industrial West, where social democratic parties ensure against such erosion...

...The foremost factor inhibiting the Democrats' ability to deliver the economic goods as they did in their heyday is, of course, the rise of an internationalized economy that undercuts the capacity of governments to subject the economic realm to political control...

...Gephardt is manifestly not the ideal test case for a populist politics—everything about him suggests service to rather than defiance of the governing establishment —but his early success nonetheless confirms the electoral viability of Kuttner's strategic vision...

...Standing stubbornly between the Democrats and these policies, however, is the entire Democratic economic establishment, who, Kuttner notes, have never fully reconciled themselves even to the purely domestic strain of Keynesianism...

...In terms of voter participation, we have regressed beyond the Jacksonian revolution, indeed, beyond the Jeffersonian...

...Indeed, in each successive 1980s election, as I pointed out in the winter 1988 Dissent, the Democrats have done progressively better among more affluent voters and progressively worse among their core constituents in less affluent communities, both in terms of the percentage of their vote and of voter turnout...

...The Life of the Party provides a useful compendium of the research undertaken among white working-class and "new-collar" voters by Ralph Whitehead, Stanley Greenberg, and others...

...Kuttner finds the strategic views of the neoliberals equally constrained...

...Now, in The Life of the Party, Kuttner takes on the prevailing Democratic orthodoxies that counsel acquiescence to Reagan Age verities if the Democrats are to retake power...

...Against the alleged necessity of rising inequality as an engine for growth, Kuttner has hurled an array of alternatives from the American past and the international present...

...Kuttner demonstrates the corrosive effects business and PAC money often have on the Democrats and discusses two other increasingly problematic sources of party funding: the pro-Israel nexus centered around the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the socially liberal money of Manhattan and West Los Angeles...

...Our thanks to Luther Carpenter, who edited it for the past three years...

...Playing to the social liberalism of the suburbs does help some centrist Democratic governors," he notes, "but it is lethal to the long-term fortunes of the Democratic coalition...

...In Ronald Reagan's America, Bob Kuttner has emerged as the Great Refuter...

...As mass participatory politics have collapsed, the Democrats have substituted money for people as their primary means to power and have altered their policies accordingly...

...In The Life of the Party, Kuttner bemoans the paucity of Reagan Age journalists attempting to "influence the mainstream debate from the left...

...In today's stagnating economy, he writes, "Democrats can regain their status as a majority party only by building a majority coalition of ordinary wageand salary-earning people, whose political and economic interests are not identical to those of the wealthy...

...They haven't, Kuttner points out, since 1965 —an even greater problem when it comes to winning the votes of Archie's understandably unnostalgic kids...

...The Kuttner program, by contrast, is to rebuild the ties between the Democrats and their battered constituents through a series of universal programs that seek to remedy the dislocations of an economy in transition...

...q SPRING • 1988 • 239...

...What the party cannot be," Kuttner writes, "is an awkward alliance between rich eccentrics and the dependent poor...

...Yet Dukakis's ads passed without notice, while Gephardt's ran smack against the free-trade orthodoxy and dismissal of working-class concerns that suffuse media and establishment thinking...

...The social democratic balancing act can be maintained politically," he writes, "only when masses of nonrich voters remain in a high state of political mobilization and institutions of mass participation and social democratic values remain in good working order...

...In sum, whether the Democrats will choose to save themselves by embracing the Kuttner program of progressive populism is still very much an undecided question...

...Dukakis's Iowa ads focused on ending aid to the contras and increasing aid to the homeless— commendable concerns both, but neither one a point of contention within the Democratic field, and both of them targeted at the consciences of middle and upper-middle class voters...

...By contrast, frontrunner Michael Dukakis—at least at the time of this writing—remains blissfully adrift in the themeless Democratic mainstream...

...He observes that the logic of AIPAC funding—support for all members of Congress with pro-Israel voting records—has in recent years led to significant rifts between Jewish funders and Jewish voters, with funding going to such egregiously reactionary incumbent senators as Wisconsin's Robert Kasten and New York's Alphonse D'Amato, while Jewish voters overwhelmingly favored their equally pro-Israel, more liberal opponents...

...This is the neoliberal harvest, and like Ninotchka analyzing the effect of the purges, the party powers seem to be entranced by the fact that there will be fewer but better Democrats...

...reversal I identify with the party's deciding to enroll in the Kuttner school of progressive populism...

...EDS...

...What it is that the Polo Lounge left cannot glimpse is the majority of working and middle class Americans whose incomes have stagnated since the first OPEC embargo fifteen years ago...

...In the years since the enactment of Medicare, though, the Democrats have offered programs targeted primarily at the poor (in the late 1960s), then fiscal policies targeted chiefly against the economic interests of its own working-class base (the Carter administration), and then an across-theboard tax hike to close the deficit (the Mondale campaign...

...Instead, Kuttner reasons that during the period of Democratic hegemony from 1933 through 1969, the Democrats must have been doing something right, which he proceeds to identify and commend to today's party...

...What are the prospects for reversing this slide—a Changes With this issue Mark Levinson and Brian Morton become editors of the book review section...

...To the contrary, as Kuttner points out, from Roosevelt and Huey Long through Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, the South has responded to a populist politics...

...Having condemned the Democrats to perpetual failure, each then proceeds to prescribe for the party a politics focusing on cultural and foreign policy issues, though they are on opposite sides of these questions...

...By the mid-1980s, it is the neoconservatives who place cultural and foreign policy issues at the forefront of their proposed Democratic agendas (to whatever degree neocons still concern themselves with Democratic prospects at all), while many of the veterans of the 1960s have long since turned, via Citizen Action and other avenues, to the very issues that early neocons originally commended to their attention...

...these PACs could play an increasingly important role as the American Jewish community divides over the proper approach to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict...

...For Kuttner, the road to the Democratic comeback veers toward neither the hawkishness of neoconservatives nor the benevolent austerity of neoliberals...

...Kuttner alludes to the establishment of more liberal, multi-issue PACs in the Jewish community as a counterweight to AIPAC's single-minded priority of foreign aid...

...Those same suburbs voted heavily for Reagan, while the Democratic base sat on its hands...

...Centered in the Brookings Institute, the establishment economists, bolstered by the party's increasingly influential business donors, have foisted on the party policies that demand the most from the unaffluent middle and working classes and, correspondingly, that cut the legs off Democratic candidates when they approach those classes for their votes...

...Our electorate is being winnowed down to Federalist party dimensions —and a Federalist party socioeconomic composition...

...Kuttner is the preeminent exception to his own rule...

...As I write, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, it appears that a brand of populist politics has been resurrected by a most unlikely candidate, Missouri's Richard Gephardt...

...As Kuttner virtually alone has pointed out (at least in journals read by nonspecialists), the international order created at the end of World War II initially sought to extend a moderate Keynesianism to the global economy, an order that the transnational corporation and international banking has now all but smashed...

...Counseled, then, by economists and funders, by neolibs and neocons alike to shun a populist economics, the Democrats have staggered to the end of the 1980s with their identity a mystery to the general electorate and to themselves, perhaps, most of all...

...No wonder the 1980s were Republican...

...Nothing is more profamily than a good public school or a good training program or a career opportunity that offers a living wage...

...Gephardt carried the selfdescribed "conservative" vote—the voters who did not go beyond high school, the union household vote—by inveighing against the multinational corporate establishment, calling for a militant trade policy, and suggesting farmers should determine their own production quotas...

...Kuttner sees the decay of the labor movement as a leading cause of the Democrats' decline...