Why the Democrats Keep Losing

...The deficit is a Republican panacea: It renders purely symbolic the rewards of the political sphere (which flow disproportionately SUMMER • 1989...

...One reason why blue-collar participation, although still under the norm, so exceeds participation by those in the new service economy is the far higher rate of unionization among blue-collar workers...

...Today, we have to do a lot better than that...

...The 1988 election confirmed that control of the party has decisively passed from its industrial working class to its suburban reformer wing...

...For the Sam Nunns, Chuck Robbs, and other conservative critics of minoritarian liberalism, repudiation of liberal doctrine has been the centerpiece of Democratic resurgence...

...Like every other center-left party in advanced industrialized nations, the Democrats have suffered from the diminishing scope of government that has accompanied the globalized economy...

...It was unendorsed, totally unfunded, and ignored in Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) campaigns by Democratic leaders, at the very moment when the Dukakis campaign, quite commendably, was pouring an unprecedented $4.5 million into a field operation to ensure a high turnout among the very voters Prop...

...So a populist revival is by no means assured—and populism itself is only a halfway house on the road to Democratic recovery...

...103 is ultimately a cautionary tale, illustrating the insularity and resistance to populism among Democratic 308 • DISSENT Why Democrats Keen Losing officeholders...

...It used to be the Democrats carried the state if our members voted 65 percent for the Democrat," one UAW leader comments...

...The problem was that with few exceptions, California Democratic politicians were beholden financially to the trial lawyers or to the insurance industry itself, each of whom had rival measures on the ballot...

...Difficult though it may be, until the Democrats revive the projects and institutions of a mixed economy, they will be doomed to a succession of nominees unable to articulate a compelling basis for their candidacy...

...They forget only the raison d'être for their candidacy —why they wish to be president...

...Class clearly emerges as a decisive factor in voter participation rates—more so, for instance, than race...

...Where mass-based party structures and unions once provided, however imperfectly, a politics to millions of Americans, today most vehicles of political expression are absent from workingclass America, and the contemporary political discourse muffles working-class concerns...

...103 was an orphan initiative before its enactment...

...The three key figures of neoliberal Democratic politics all first won major statewide office in 1974: Jerry Brown and Michael Dukakis were elected governors of California and Massachusetts respectively, and Gary Hart won his Senate seat...

...The political significance of the double decline of parties and unions becomes strikingly apparent in the 1988 election figures from the Latino communities...

...As economic power has reverted from the state back to the corporate sphere, Democratic economics is increasingly directed at pressing corporations to provide the services and augment the living standards to which the welfare state would have addressed itself in earlier times...

...it is something deeper and more ominous...

...Despite a widespread desire for renewed government initiatives in housing, education, health insurance, and the environment, the Democrats in 1988 (with the honorable exception of Jesse Jackson) were unable to offer anything beyond symbolic programs...

...Dukakis's nomination marked the triumph of a generation of leaders schooled in the New Class reform politics of the sixties, but who cast sixties egalitarianism aside in cementing their suburban bases...

...Turn-of-the-century big city machines cultivated a base among working-class and poor immigrant populations not all that politically dissimilar from today's Latinos...

...In this light, the themelessness of a Carter, a Mondale, a Dukakis is neither an aberration nor a betrayal of Democratic tradition...

...The parties are gone, the unions have not figured out how to organize the new sweatshop economy, and the Democrats suffer...

...To a plurality of respondents to another Analysis Group poll taken last fall, such programs as national health insurance and day care, far from being liberal, were deemed centrist...

...The even more establishmentarian wisdom that clustered about the National Economic Commission counseled a politics of universal take-away—of deficit reduction through across-the-board austerity...

...By the mid-seventies the Democrats had come to the end of an epochal project through which they defined and commended themselves to voters for nearly half-a-century...

...Indeed, the Massachusetts campaign for comprehensive health insurance aligned its Democratic champions with big businesses (which already provided health insurance) against the small (which did not...

...Had the deficit dominated the mid-nineteenth century, public education might have been established as a private responsibility...

...Although it probably mobilized more voters than any single issue on the California ballot (the presidential contest included) and even though its supporters included disproportionate numbers of working-class and poor voters likely to vote Democratic once at the polls, Prop...

...From the point of view of the typical Democratic incumbent, a popular mobilization disturbs in-district political tranquility and is utterly unnecessary to assure re-election...

...There was nothing with which a conservative could take issue, wrote Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal's reactionary columnist, in the Dukakis education proposal or in what the New York Times called "Mr...

...The problem is the declining rate of unionization...

...The first instance came in Iowa in January, when Richard Gephardt closed from third to first in the Iowa primary by appropriating Jesse Jackson's corporation-bashing...

...If health insurance and child care are to be universally provided, many Democrats have concluded, employers will have to do it...

...There was only one "normal" defeat among the more than four hundred races...

...The most prevalent of today's populisms — really a neopopulism— enables the Democrats to sidestep the political constraints imposed by the deficit...

...At the other end of the spectrum, some within the Democratic Leadership Council have begun to champion, at least generically, the kind of universal social programs that unite the middle class with the poor, though they remain lamentably mute about changing the tax structure or taking on the corporate culture or doing anything to suggest they are serious about funding these programs...

...Increasingly, the Italian and Polish communities of Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are voting Republican at the bottom as well as the top of the ticket—though there is evidence that unions can arrest the rightward drift...

...Correspondingly, it will require a serious commitment to the policies and institutions of economic populism for the Democrats to be able just to redefine the terms of political engagement...

...The poll's correlation between liberalism and class or income ranged from small to nonexistent: The percentage of liberal, blue-collar workers matched exactly that of liberal professionals, and the rate of liberalism among the poorest Americans exceeded that among the wealthiest by a mere 5 percent...

...The specter of the L-word grew only more terrifying after neoliberalism had stripped from it the last vestiges of majoritarian economic content...

...he would cry at the end of his speeches, begging the question of ready-for-what...

...The candidacy of Carter's 1980 primary challenger, Ted Kennedy, never recovered from the dumbstruck silence with which Kennedy greeted Roger Mudd's question as to why he sought the presidency...

...A globalized economy has substantially nullified the power of government and unions to improve living standards...

...Thirty-seven percent of the respondents to the CBS/New York Times exit poll identified themselves as Democrats this past November—down from 46 percent in 1980 and 53 percent in 1964—while 35 percent identified themselves as Republicans...

...The problem, of course, is that the number of Democrats is steadily waning...

...Liberalism today is that body of thought that defends the one against the many—not the many against the powerful...

...Yet, according to Teixeira, Latinos voted nationally at a rate of only 23 percent in November...

...310 • DISSENT...

...My quadrennial best-of-allpossibleworlds rerun demonstrates that if the 1988 election had been conducted with a unionization rate at its postwar high (35 percent) rather than at its current low point (17 percent), the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket would have picked up an additional 4 percent of the vote and likely have won the election...

...Ultimately, no Democratic (or national) renaissance can be assured without an expansion of any number of public programs, without, that is, the resurrection of progressive taxation—the issue in American politics on which mass and elite opinion are most clearly counterposed...

...As the eighties end, they have yet to define a new project...

...Polls taken for the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project show Dukakis winning 83 percent of the Latino vote in Texas and 74 percent in California...

...Dukakis's Modest Housing Plan...

...What has shuddered to a halt is the Democrats' capacity to use government to induce a more widely shared prosperity...

...Correspondingly, the two groups must heavily identifying themselves as liberal on the CBS exit poll were America's two most self-conscious minorities: Jews and blacks...

...They can favor public-interest advocacy without public-sector expenditures...

...One measure of Democratic decline is that the party keeps losing while holding more and more of its base...

...Nor was this the full extent of the Democrats' resistance to mass-based politics...

...The victory in particular of Proposition 103 over an insurance industry that in the closing months outspent the proposition's proponents by a margin of $50 million to literally nothing testifies to the depth of public indignation at corporate arrogance...

...What is the once hegemonic party of American politics doing in a place like this...

...the L-word was reserved almost entirely for defenders of minorities...

...Two Analysis Group surveys of white members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Michigan reveal an electorate that was giving only 47 percent of its votes to Dukakis (and 26 percent to Bush) in August, but that ended up voting 62 percent Dukakis, 33 percent Bush in November, after the UAW waged a carefully constructed populist campaign for Dukakis...

...Democratic candidates, by comparison, are masters of detail...

...At first glance there need be nothing populist about campaigns to mandate an employerprovided welfare state...

...The normal Democratic presidencies, we have come to think, are those of Roosevelt through Johnson—administrations that used state power to mitigate the harshness of the market and, however imperfectly, to equalize opportunity...

...The Democrats over the past several decades have abandoned the kinds of universal social programs, in such areas as housing and health care, that unite middle-class and poor voters, and they have been stunningly indifferent to the disorganization of politics in the bottom half of the socioeconomic spectrum—that is, to the collapse of organized politics in their own political base...

...The forty-two incumbents who sought re-election in California were returned to office with an average vote of 71.5 percent— this in a state that George Bush carried by a scant three points...

...In company with dozens of Democrats who first entered Congress in that Watergate year from historically Republican districts, they stressed a politics of procedural reform, environmental concern, a post–cold war foreign policy, and an opposition to new social spending—in particular, to the universalistic programs Democrats had historically advanced...

...Of the more than four hundred congressional incumbents who stood for re-election last November, only six were defeated, and of these, five were embroiled in major scandals...

...I'm ready...

...Jackson is the least electable of potential Democratic nominees, but he played a signal role in restoring the populist impulse to Democratic discourse in 1988, and his impact is not likely to diminish in the years immediately ahead...

...Michael Dukakis was only the latest in a line of Democratic nominees to flounder in search of a theme...

...For the liberalism that emerges from recent polling of both its critics and its adherents is a doctrine centered around the defense of minority rights: an indispensable component of any civilized society, but absolutely not a basis for organizing a majoritarian political party...

...In 1980 Jimmy Carter galvanized the electorate around the idea that he was better able than Ronald Reagan to grasp the complexities of the modern world...

...Barring a sharp veer towards populism, it is likely that any Democratic administrations over the next several decades will in economic outlook resemble less the presidencies of the New Deal coalition than they will the presidencies of the half-century preceding it, when presidents of both parties—Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Harding, Coolidge— saw their task as doing as little as possible to impede the normal workings of capitalism...

...On a range of questions small and large—the date of Pearl Harbor Day, whether nuclear missiles can be recalled, their own whereabouts in the shipping of arms to Iran—the Republicans are remarkably unretentive...

...A move to a more conservative cultural politics will in itself not yield very much...

...it simply harks back to pre-1932 Democracy when, as today, there existed neither the base nor the vision to modify the new corporate order...

...And even if the Democrats amazed expectation and sided with the mass on this question, there would remain the challenge of extending the standards of the mixed economy throughout the new world economic structure...

...The atrophy of parties and unions also places the Democrats at considerable disadvantage among many of the northern urban ethnics who have come to see the Democrats as representing a politics of favoritism to blacks...

...However, the UAW doesn't have the number of members in Michigan that it had before...

...In the January–February Public Opinion Ruy Job Category % of Voting Age Population % of Actual Electorate % of Over/UnderRepresentation in the Electorate Professional, managerial and teacher Blue collar Sales, technical, services, administrative (BLS)/White collar (CBS) 17% 18% 28% 36% 13% 11% 211% 72% 39% 306 • DISSENT Who Democrats Keep Losing Teixeira estimates November's white voter turnout at 52 percent, the black at 46 percent...

...The point is not that Democratic politicians in the top echelon are exceptionally selfdestructive...

...Thirty-five years later, the parties had begun to wane, but unions had supplanted them in the wake of the New Deal, bringing into the process millions of industrial workers of Southern and Eastern European descent who had never voted before...

...It is only corporate resistance to these initiatives that forces Democratic politicians into defending public interests against the corporate sector...

...Dukakis went Mondale one better by drawing a higher share of registered Democrats than any candidate in decades—by some exit polling, nearly 90 percent...

...Among Democratic leaders only Jesse Jackson champions the entire panoply of reforms, including the globalization of social democracy...

...But the Democrats are not simply innocent victims of macroeconomic forces, for there are strong elements of self-slaughter in the Democrats' decline...

...The third instance came woefully late, in the fall campaign's last two weeks, when Michael Dukakis, finally succumbing to the entreaties of his aides, declared himself to be "on your side" against ill-defined economic powers, thereby narrowing George Bush's margin from 13 to 8 points...

...But the story of Prop...

...More disabling than the loss of the South or any other single factor is the disorganization of the party's working-class base...

...After a generation of intraparty warfare, Walter Mondale succeeded in uniting the elites of the old politics (the AFL-CIO) with those of the new (the National Organization for Women, the Freeze) in 1984...

...The disparity grows to 15 percent when white union members are measured against the overall white electorate...

...With the Bush administration likely to jettison the politically counterproductive hard-right social policies of the Reagan White House, and with the cold war closing up shop, the lines of demarcation between the two parties come down to economics and cultural liberalism...

...A February Gallup/Times-Mirror poll showed 82 percent support for raising taxes on individuals with incomes over $80,000 — an 18 percent increase in nine months—not that you'd ever know this from listening to congressional Democrats on taxes...

...Over the past thirty years both the rates of working-class voting and unionization have been halved...

...For if there is one massive impediment to revival of a Democratic populism and a massparticipatory politics, it is that district-based Democratic politicians (Republicans, too) no longer face competitive elections...

...Yet the only major organizing among today's new immigrant population is that undertaken by the Catholic Church and affiliated community organizations...

...Their memory lapses are of a highly rarefied type...

...This, indeed, is the new model president that centrist Democrats are commending: a leader unimpeded by a mass base, able to compete with Republicans for elite support, adept in political symbolism, bereft of political substance—a diminished Democrat for an age of pipsqueak presidents...

...For all their flaws, union political action programs "work": as in every presidential election since 1964, with the exceptions only of 1972 (which the AFL-CIO sat out) and 1980, this November's union household vote for the Democratic nominee was 12 percent higher than the nominee's overall vote...

...In California last fall a series of initiative campaigns set forth the terms under which the battle for the new "corporate responsibility" will be fought...

...103 would bring to the polls...

...Should the Democrats resist the promptings of populism and join in a policy of kinder, gentler impoverishment, they are ensuring that the defining issues of the next campaign will be such surefire winners as . . . crime and punishment...

...A comparison of the CBS/New York Times exit poll on the composition of November's electorate with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' November figures on the composition of the actual voting age population (adjusted from BLS figures on workforce composition) illustrates clearly the extent of working class depoliticization (see table below...

...From Carter to Mondale to Dukakis, they have become and are likely to remain the party of unhappy warriors...

...What is notable in the Democrats' failure to mobilize the Latino vote is how meager their efforts are when compared to those of their predecessors in analogous situations...

...Neither was there very much to excite voters...

...No party of government can long maintain its base if the living standards it seeks to improve are undermined by a transnational corporate order...

...The unprecedented inflation of the late seventies derailed such Democratic policies as full employment and health insurance...

...By all accounts the $4.5 million GOTV drive, which saw tens of thousands of precinct leaders working the state as it had not been worked in thirty years, elicited remarkably little interest or cooperation from members of Congress and state legislators...

...There is no reason whatsoever to think that the Democratic response to the globalization of the corporation will unfold with greater, or even equivalent, speed...

...In its political consequences the deficit is the Republicans' continuation of inflation by other means...

...There is no surer prescription for Democratic disaster than a bipartisan austerity program...

...Before Walter Mondale flung himself into the bottomless pit of deficit reductions through tax hikes, his overarching theme was his own experience...

...305 Why Democrats Keay Losing to Democratic sympathizers) while the rewards of the marketplace (which accrue disproportionately to Republican sympathizers) remain altogether tangible...

...But on each of the three occasions when conservative Democrats returned to the Democratic fold during the 1988 campaigns, the call to which they responded was not conservatism, but populism...

...But, in fact, thirty years elapsed between the turn-of-the-century creation of a national corporate economy and the development of a Democratic response...

...Which is to say that the Democratic revival is at best a highly iffy proposition...

...The second instance came in the South in the two weeks before Super Tuesday, when Al Gore won the support of conservative Democrats only after dropping fiscal and foreign policy conservatism and getting in his own anticorporate licks...

...It removes economic options from political discourse and leaves in their stead a largely cultural politics—sure to bring Democratic disaster...

...By the late eighties, inflation had long since ceased to spell death to all government programs, but in its stead, the Reagan administration had erected a deficit that had a similarly fatal effect on public sector initiatives...

...With Political Action Committees investing huge sums of money in the permanent government and with computer technology bringing a new vigor to the fine art of gerrymandering, the district election has beDemocratic National Convention, 1988 Donna Binder/IMPACT VISUALS SUMMER • 1989 • 309 Why Democrats Keep Losing come an anomaly in American politics—and the district politician, increasingly an obstacle to efforts to build bridges of program and organization between the party and its base...

...The insurance, tobacco, and supermarket industries poured well over a hundred million dollars into three separate campaigns against initiatives that threatened them with regulation (the insurance industry) or increased taxes and fees for designated social purposes (tobacco and supermarkets...

...The coolness of the neoliberals toward the SUMMER • 1989 • 307 Why Democrats Keay Losing old social democracy and their allegiance to a more carefully targeted, pinch-penny liberalism had the effect of further marginalizing liberal doctrine...

...a move to an even more explicit economics of "enlightened austerity" will prove a disaster...