A Politics in America?

...This was a populism without program or working-class organization, a populism confined largely to supporting the "outs" rather than the left, a populism wide open to racism...

...There was a voter revolt at work in the 1990 elections, but it was neither populist nor conservative in character...

...In Massachusetts Democrats anointed Boston University President John Silber, that terrifying combination of Hilton Kramer and Andrew Dice Clay—only to return in record numbers in November to defeat Silber once they had gotten to know him...

...Phillips then situates Reaganism within a cyclical theory of Republican rule, in which Republicans come to power as the tribunes of the middle class (Lincoln, McKinley, and Nixon) and flame out as the agents of speculative wealth (Hoover and, presumably, Bush...

...The political geography of this fall's populism tends to confirm Edsall's critique...

...October was the turnaround month...

...But of those wealthiest 17 percent, nearly 75 percent turn out to vote...

...In my district [in Windsor], with around 30,000 voters, we regularly put 100 canvassers into the field...

...The final obstacle to any sustained populist resurgence, then, is this new and more virulent form of American exceptionalism—by which I mean not merely the absence of a social democratic party...

...By the fall, for the first time since 1965, liberals were starting to define the domestic political agenda in America...

...In Louisiana, the Senate candidacy of Klan leader David Duke mobilized poorer white voters to such an extent that he captured 44 percent of the vote in an open primary...

...That is, it rises, peaks, and falls in direct correlation to the rate of unionization...

...That possibility is a legacy of an organized working class—and of the absence of the divisions of race...

...In a September 1990 survey undertaken for the Times/Mirror Corporation, the percentage of the "partisan poor" —those poor who have historically supported the Democrats—that currently identify themselves as Democrats fell from 89 percent in 1987 to 57 percent today...

...speak before gatherings other than high-dollar fundraisers...

...Still, in an election conducted on the brink of a recession, what's striking is the small number of contests in which Democrats ran economically progressive campaigns before the October budget crisis—and the concentration of those campaigns in states with small black populations...

...The rate of participation starts rising around 1930, peaks in the mid-fifties, and has been declining steadily since the early sixties...

...And the Wall Street Journal reports that 38 • DISSENT A Politics in America...

...No editor ever having lost his job as a consequence of foreign competition, the press worships faithfully at the church of free trade...

...Democrats may no longer know how to make a populist speech, but by the end of October, the least of them were quoting Kevin Phillips...

...He was lambasted by the press, both for the suddenness of his conversion and for the politics he had converted to, which the press ridiculed as "protectionism...

...But the debate over taxes—though not the taxes themselves— positioned the Democrats as champions of equity, while the Bush administration adamantly and suicidally resisted any deal that included a surtax on persons with annual incomes over $1 million...

...The unions' shop stewards campaigned in the workplace, and the environmental movement waged a parallel campaign against the [incumbent] Liberals and on our behalf...

...But the skepticism is both real and in many cases clearly warranted...

...In the 1990 California gubernatorial campaign, Democratic nominee Dianne Feinstein had no field campaign whatsoever, and, with the rest of her party, stood idly by as voter turnout plummeted...

...Consider, by contrast, the most heartening victory the left has won in North America in years—last summer's triumph by Canada's socialists, the New Democratic party (NDP), in the elections in Ontario, the province comprising around one-third of Canada's population...

...Seven of the eight taxingandspending limitation measures on state ballots lost, including the two key tax-cutting propositions in the nation, Massachusetts's Question 3 and California's Proposition 136...

...For all the talk of the revolt against taxes, this was not a rerun of the antitax heyday of Proposition 13 and the Reagan ascendancy...

...Think of it this way: alone among the East bloc nations in the post-Soviet period, Rumania and Bulgaria are so politically underdeveloped that they have yet to produce an alternative to communist rule...

...Clearly, his scenario for a populist ascendancy presupposes an economic downturn amid which a campaign takes off, much like the one Richard Gephardt waged in the 1988 Iowa primary...

...Phillips devotes his book's longest chapter to how Reaganomics weakened the American economy and benefited other nations, chiefly Japan's, in the name of free trade and the cause of global speculation...

...Indeed, Democrats tend to do best—and voter turnout is highest—among those voters who experience government programs as universal— that is, among the elderly, recipients today of Social Security and Medicare, as once they benefited from GI college loans and FHA mortgage subsidies...

...We do flat-out foot canvassing," says Vicki Cross, an NDP aide, "aiming for five voter contacts, three of them face-to-face, in the course of the campaign...

...If the average age of voters is creeping steadily upward, it is largely because the rewards of government remain tangible for the elderly, where they often seem remote to younger voters for whom the Democrats have been unwilling and unable to formulate programs...

...Among the remaining 83 percent, voter turnout is nearer to 30 percent...

...The first is public skepticism at the capacity of numerous governmental agencies—schools in particular—to accomplish their mission, no matter how much funding they receive...

...The first attack—on the legitimacy of gridlocked and corrupted legislatures—is an issue that at least some progressives have already embraced as their own by supporting term limitations and voter-targeted taxes in states with initiatives...

...Republican Jim Edgar, who favored higher taxes to fund schools, defeated antitax Democrat Neil Hartigan for governor of Illinois...

...Latinos, who constitute fully one-quarter of the state's population, made up 5 percent of the state's electorate this November...

...By failing to come to terms with the politics of race, Phillips also refuses to grapple with his own legacy...

...Most alarmingly to GOP insiders, the private polls of the National Republican Congressional Committee showed that the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans declined by 10 to 12 percent in October alone...

...The plausibility of Phillips's scenario—and, more broadly, the viability of progressive populism—has been called into question by Tom Edsall's important review of Phillips's volume, in the New Republic...

...And alone among the Western democracies, the United States is so politically underdeveloped that it can no longer generate a democratic alternative to the market, a public sphere, a politics...

...The exceptions came in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Massachusetts, and in each state, turnout soared...

...In America, deunionization and the decline of working-class politics and organization renders these prospects ever more remote...

...In Oklahoma, voters enacted a term limit on their legislators...

...Still, if the populist project is to prevail, Democrats must overcome a delegitimation of government that has at least four distinct facets...

...In September, Paul Goldman, chair of the Virginia Democratic party, brought a resolution before the Democratic National Committee insisting that congressional Democrats oppose any new taxes—progressive, regressive, or in-between...

...In 1989, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the Republicans led the Democrats by 10 percent on the key question of which party was better equipped to manage the economy...

...Finally, he proclaims that the current Republican cycle is coming to an end and that the populist moment is virtually upon us—with all due allowances for the usual Democratic ineptitude...

...On the Senate side, Minnesota's Paul Wellstone, mentor to many DSA members at Carleton College, campaigned successfully on a platform of national health insurance and raising high-income taxes to 38 percent...

...In 1988, moreover, Jesse Jackson ran best among white Democrats in those states with the smallest black populations...

...It might not have arrived at all were it not for the publication this summer of Kevin Phillips's The Politics of Rich and Poor—a volume that by late October had become a strategy guide for Democratic candidates...

...Primary turnout, according to a preliminary survey from the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, sunk to a predictable all-time low, with three notable exceptions in which voters were effectively tendered a referendum on their state's political establishments...

...congressional Democrats are planning to push for an increase in the tax rate on highest income Americans and a surcharge on millionaires when Congress reconvenes in January...

...This may amount to blaming the victim: public education at the K-12 level has long been underfunded in America and the education of young people within our disintegrating inner cities would be a daunting project today even with vastly increased funding...

...The effect of such Republican solicitude for wealth was immediate and substantial...

...rage against government-from-on-high that contributed to the NDP's victory...

...by the end of the tax-and-budget debacle, they had fallen 5 percent behind the Democrats...

...But there are two impediments even in this scenario, the first of which becomes evident simply by recounting what happened to Gephardt after Iowa...

...Ron Brownstein, political correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, notes that wherever he went in 1990, he found one hollow, underpopulated campaign after another...

...Gephardt came from behind to capture Iowa after redirecting his fire against policies promoting American capital flight—a whitebread version of Jesse Jackson, wrapped in the flag...

...q WINTER • 1991 • 41...

...The behind-closed-doors Meech Lake agreement made by Canadian Prime Minister MuIrony and the provincial premiers to grant a limited autonomy to Quebec fueled a 40 • DISSENT A Politics in America...

...Politics of Rich and Poor...

...The NDP represents something that has all but disappeared in the United States—a political party...

...Gephardt also failed to expand his contributor base significantly despite his victory in the first round of the contest: Democratic money, centered in the bicoastal service sectors, was particularly cool to his politics, preferring the combination of social liberalism, economic neoliberalism, and freetrade othodoxy espoused by Michael Dukakis...

...Goldman was acting as an agent of Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, the conservative Democrat who, said Goldman, personified "the new mainstream where budgets are balanced by cutting government waste and unnecessary spending, and reordering priorities...

...Moreover, the near-absence of competitive races channeled the revolt into a relatively small number of races...

...And at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, the Democrats' hold is growing understandably tenuous...

...With Republican National Chairman Lee Atwater sidelined by a brain tumor, the Bush administration was left with no political brain at all...

...There were a number of successful left candidates among the congressional Democrats' Class of 1990: Hawaii's Neil Abercrombie, Oregon's Mike Kopetski, Connecticut's Rosa DeLauro, Maine's Tom Andrews (not to mention Vermont's independent socialist Bernie Sanders), to name just a few...

...The last, and most troubling, attack is white opposition to programs designed to remedy racial inequities, be they affirmative action programs or spending equalization mandates between inner-city districts and other workingand middle-class communities...

...Surprisingly, the political prophecies are the weakest link in The Politics of Rich and Poor...

...Governors of both parties who had sponsored tax increases were defeated—but those increases characteristically were not progressive, and often were enacted despite the governors' previous pledges to oppose them...

...Like the 1990 elections in the United States, the Ontario voting marked the repudiation of a political elite...

...Jim Florio's supporters make the point that only the wealthiest 17 percent of New Jerseyans will suffer higher taxes under his reforms...

...In his earlier work, particularly in The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), Phillips's political trend-spotting was buttressed by a rich and detailed account of shifting voting patterns: of white flight from the Democrats in the south and the ethnic suburbs, or, years later, of the Yuppie-Pacific-college town counter-drift to the Democrats...

...Some 7.5 million of California's 30 million residents voted in November's gubernatorial election-600,000 fewer than voted in the 1982 BradleyDeukmejian race, when the state population was only 24.5 million...

...Phillips begins his book with an analysis of the economy that Dissent readers will recognize from the works of Kuttner, Reich, Harrington, Lekachman, Faux, et al.—an account of Reaganomics's immiseration of the poor and squeezing of the middle class to benefit a new class of absurdly overpaid paper shufflers...

...The impediment, writes Edsall, is the politics of race: that in states with large numbers of blacks, white voters increasingly shun the Democrats, liberalism, populism—even if frequently at their own expense...

...But it's the weakness of working-class forces—which is precisely what makes legislation like domestic content so hard to achieve in the first place (it's standard throughout most of Europe)—that remains the most profound obstacle to this kind of progressive transformation...

...The Politics of Rich and Poor, by contrast, suffers from the past decade's scarcity of populist campaigns...

...These latter programs tend to be ordered by courts rather than mandated by legislatures, but they pose a political problem to which the only progressive realpolitik response has been to advocate social programs that are targeted universally rather than narrowly and remedially...

...Just five weeks later, facing a choice between raising taxes in a moderately progressive direction or hiking Medicare fees and delaying unemployment benefits, the congressional Democrats, including four of the five Virginia congressional Democrats—and two of the five Virginia congressional Republicans— voted for the higher taxes...

...Moreover, Gephardt registered his gains among self-described conservative Democrats, the voters the Democrats historically have lost to the politics of race...

...By late October, respondents identified Democrats as the better party to safeguard middle-class interests, by a margin of 47-18 percent...

...The second attack, on the fairness of taxes, is either an issue of the left or it is not an issue at all...

...By accommodating themselves to ever smaller turnouts, the Democrats subvert any turn to populism they may make...

...The full extent of Republican decline was not reflected in November's voting, in part for the very reason that Republicans frequently adduce when complaining about the Democrats' control over Congress: the noncompetitive nature of most congressional races (although the number of winners who received 55 percent or less rose sharply...

...Phillips has not directly answered his critics—events have been moving so swiftly to confirm some of his predictions that he could claim he needn't bother—but two answers are implicit from The WINTER • 1991 • 39 A Politics in America...

...To be sure, the tax and budget package that Congress enacted was no revolutionary document, amending a tax code that was outrageously unfair into one that was merely maddeningly so...

...The first is that the populist moment follows a major economic downturn that for a time renders racial divisions of secondary importance...

...The two remaining attacks are more vexing for progressives, and they make up much of the underlying problem that New Jersey's Jim Florio encountered...

...In the 1988 general election, Dukakis ran well in the nonindustrial states hugging the Canadian border—and failed to carry the majority of white male voters in any state with a sizable black population...

...Still, the terms of debate are starting to shift in a populist direction...

...What now distinguishes our political culture is the virtual absence of any political mobilization at all...

...Indeed, the revolt of 1990 was directed more narrowly against elected officials per se, against the legitimacy of a corrupt and insular political process, against politics as a vocation...

...In their new book, Politics By Other Means, authors Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter include a graph of voter participation rates from 1892 through 1988...

...The difference, of course, is that the NDP offered Ontarians a change not simply of players but of policy...

...Gephardt's newfound nationalist populism ran afoul of two critical groups in the nomination process...

...Except for a few fleeting moments—Michael Dukakis's belated turn toward populism at the close of his campaign, Ted Kennedy's belated populist surge in his 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter (the only populism Democrats feel comfortable with is belated populism)— there's nothing there for Phillips to examine...

...The 1990 election results point to a voter revolt in which neither the left nor the right can take great comfort...

...Of perhaps greater importance, the populist turn arrived with the Democrats woefully unprepared—having failed to tend to such details as registering workingclass voters or teaching their candidates to WINTER • 1991 • 37 A Politics in America...

...Moreover, Edsall notes, the Republicans' southern strategy, as propounded by Phillips and first pursued by Nixon back in 1968, was central to destroying the prospects for cross-racial populism...

...So, is the populist project doomed by the politics of race and the limitations that they in turn place on governmental action...

...The indifference of Democrats to the increasing disorganization of their own base remains one of the wonders of American politics...

...The second is that Phillips is not counting simply on populist economics to turn the tide but rather expects populism to be swept in on a nationalist current...