Waiting for Lefty

...Kennedy and his aides approached each of these issues almost flawlessly...

...they are simply assumed to be public means to private ends...

...In 1986 predictions of a liberal revival began in earnest with "Hands Across America," a celebritystudded walk to dramatize poverty...

...q 180 • DISSENT...

...Through what was described as "low-cost social justice," the use of targeted or dedicated spending, selffinancing programs, off-budget expenditures, and mandated benefits, the Kennedy agenda managed to address a broad range of needs and constituencies without stirring up the standard fears about liberal activism...

...Faced with the Iran-contra scandal, the closing of the cold war, and the bitter recriminations over Bork, conservatives, complained former White House staffer Aram Bakshian, were behaving "like Siamese fighting fish, colorful scrappy little creatures who reserve their best efforts for maiming each other rather than taking on enemy species...

...A new alignment seemed at hand...

...In some cases, as in Philadelphia, those cuts plus a generous helping of local incompetence have sent cities into near bankruptcy...

...By 1987 Reagan no longer had a domestic agenda, while in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal, Speaker of the House Jim Wright seized control of American policy toward Nicaragua...

...today it is 25 percent...

...He found that a finger-waving state government dominated by suburban Democrats and rural Republicans and egged on by disaffected ethnic Democrats refused to help...

...Estimated to include as many as twenty million people, these covenanted communities generally establish "one dollar—one vote governments" that recreate the pre-industrial world of power to the property holders...

...Again, if the United States was still demographically and socially the country that had elected JFK, the 1988 elections could have been the start of something big...

...Something like the reverse has now occurred...

...Membership may have now bottomed out at roughly 15 percent of the work force (only 12 percent in private industry), the lowest percentage among the major industrialized nations...

...176 • DISSENT Wafting for Lefty If the 1988 contest had been carried out on the same playing field on which John Kennedy had won in 1960, the Democrats would have been able to gain enough public support to win the White House...

...New York Mayor David Dinkins likes to speak of urban America as "the heart and soul of the nation...

...And while Reagan was being humiliated by the rejection of Robert Bork as his nominee to the Supreme Court, even his SPRING • 1991 • 175 Waiting for Lefty very successes in foreign policy seemed to be working against him...

...They insisted on the need not just to spend more but to set priorities...

...With Reagan facing the end of his effectiveness, conservatives seemed lost...

...It is these sorts of sentiments, what one recent survey described as "the astonishing indifference to politics and elections," that makes a full-scale liberal revival seem unlikely in the near future...

...The suburbs are not so much Republican as anti-urban, and thus anti-Democratic...

...He predicted that a populist push for "community minded reform" was not far off...

...American liberalism is these days experiencing its own "Waiting for Lefty"— waiting to forge a bond between political actors and the electorate...

...For at least a decade the suburban shift has had enough momentum to feed on itself...

...In the 1940s the CIO's "Operation Dixie" tried to unionize the textile mills of the South in order to liberalize southern politics...

...The notion that governments, and government employees, are "in business for themselves" is simply taken as a fact of life...

...Instead the anti-Philadelphia coalition—even more antiblack than anti-urban—has been only too happy to see Philadelphia's collapse as an example of liberal failure...

...What happened...

...Government itself is sometimes directly complicit in this growing privatization...

...Government and the public arena are not regarded by most Americans as vehicles to achieve worthwhile common goals...

...It's some measure of the cynicism now surrounding race relations that the changes being made garner support from both the Republican governor pushing Learnfare and one of McGee's prominent supporters, Polly Williams, who is promoting a plan to dismantle the public schools...

...The liberal resurgence of the late 1950s was largely labor driven, and the liberal victories of 1986 were similarly sustained by the unions, which, despite their loss of membership, had become more important than ever in a Democratic party largely without organizational muscle...

...When Governor Jim Florio of New Jersey tried to use a progressive income tax to rejuvenate inner-city education, he became the most unpopular governor in recent memory...

...With the collapse of communism, anticommunism, the one issue that had kept libertarian and communitarian conservatives in harness, was fading away—as was the probability of continuing big budgets for the military, the Republicans' chief source of patronage...

...Governor Thompson sees the opportunity to interject market mechanisms into education by giving out vouchers redeemable at a school of choice, public or private...

...But the rest, including such reasonable measures as giving workers advance notification of plant closings and requiring unpaid parental leave, were beaten back with presidential vetoes...

...The legislation the GE veep was referring to was coming out of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, where the new chair, Ted Kennedy, was, thanks to his collaboration with organized labor, ready to launch some new initiatives...

...The conservative cycle that had been powered by a distaste for racial minorities was about to be replaced, argued both Phillips and Time, by a new cycle set in motion by disgust with growing disparities of wealth and privilege...

...This is not exactly good news, but it is, I fear, the truth...

...The net effect, writes John Dilulio, is that "we're moving away from a system that registers concern for general equity in the distribution of government services, toward a market system where citizens are treated very differently within the same jurisdiction based on their ability to pay...

...Detroit lost nearly 20 percent of its people...

...Had the two strongest sources of liberal and Democratic electoral support—the trade unions and the cities—represented the same proportion of the population in 1988 as they had in 1960, Dukakis probably would have won narrowly...

...Money for Special Education, that is, education for children deemed to be handicapped with severe learning, physical, or emotional problems, now covers 12 percent of all students and 23 percent of the school budget in New York City...

...Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor argued that "the axis of resentment" was now shifting from "big government to big business...

...Baltimore, which once cast almost one out of every two presidential votes in Maryland, now accounts for little more than one in ten...

...In the nearly ten years since the high-water mark of "The Reagan Revolution," Lefty's return has been predicted not only by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., inheritor of his father's well-known theory that American history goes through alternating cycles of conservatism and liberalism, but repeatedly by others writing from a wide variety of perspectives...

...Ronald Reagan, elected with overwhelming suburban majorities, moved effectively to weaken the ties between city and federal government, central to American liberalism since FDR enraged the nation's governors in 1933 by directly funneling highway funds to the cities...

...Operating under court protection, Special Education has spawned a bureaucracy of psychologists, paraprofessionals, social workers, and teachers who need not account for their efforts...

...It goes on, it functions, but I don't feel like it really directly affects us...

...In Waiting for Lefty, the radical play of the 1930s, Clifford Odets's characters suffer not only from poverty but also from disintegrating families and a decline of individual honor...

...When Philadelphia's African-American mayor, William Goode, turned to the state for relief from a crisis initiated in part in Washington and Harrisburg, he was rudely rebuffed...

...Initially the comparison with Eisenhower's second term seemed to hold...

...Yet its benefits are at best uncertain...

...But, short of a revival of our cities and other institutions of social solidarity, there is little reason to assume that the next set of social shocks— whether they come from a severe recession or military setbacks—will produce Lefty's long-awaited return...

...At least right now, the outlook for America seems best described not as a cycle of renewal but as a slow drift downward...

...But the new political center of the country is in the generally anti- or apolitical (but presidentially Republican) suburbs— settlements defined by secession from the common concerns of the cities...

...The strong liberal showing suggested to Reichly the beginnings of a post-Reagan politics...

...The "special service districts" can be seen as a metaphor for the political system as a whole...

...The whites, decreasingly Democratic, support the Republican governor's Learnfare program, which penalizes parents on welfare whose children are truant...

...Some of the new agenda, like self-financed catastrophic health insurance for the elderly, failed in part because of poor legislative craftsmanship and old-fashioned interest-group greed...

...The full extent of this decline has been masked in part by the growth of unions among government employees, whose interests in redistribution are often at odds with the growth-oriented emphasis of unionists in the private sector...

...Referring to the big buildup of unmet needs, a General Electric (GE) vice president acknowledged, Schlesingerlike, that "there was a pent up need to legislate...

...Yet even those defeats seemed to contain the seeds of future victories...

...It's now common in the big cities for middle-class neighborhoods — whether black, white, or, as in my own, integrated—to rely on private police, private bus services, private schools, and private recreation...

...But even that 10 percent figure overestimates Baltimore's clout, because its residents earn on average less than half of what their suburban counterparts make...

...Trade unions have lost roughly four million members since 1975...

...Reagan's revenue-sharing program sent money once earmarked for the cities to the suburbandominated state governments that have by and large proceeded to cut the cities' share of federal monies...

...The "new agenda for social progress in America," tagged as "workers' rights legislation," included plantclosing notification, job-hazard notification, minimum-wage increases, minimum health benefits for all employees, and mandatory unpaid parental leave when a child is born or adopted...

...Williams, a black nationalist, wants to put public monies to parochial ends by creating Afrocentric academies funded by the vouchers...

...The fastest growing form of government in the suburbs is the homeowners association presiding over covenanted communities— essentially private towns operating outside the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...The mass political movements of this century, beginning with the rural revolt of the Populists and moving on to the New Deal insurgency of the industrial unions and the cities, were based on strong identities of interest created by a nexus of common work and communal concerns...

...In 1987 historian Robert MacElvaine caught the new spirit in his book The End of Conservative America: Liberalism After Reagan by quoting Governor Michael Dukakis on how "this second Reagan term reminds me so much of the second Eisenhower term that it's almost uncanny...

...As in the late 1950s, the conservative collapse was matched with a liberal revival...

...The custodians are essentially public entrepreneurs who in the name of city services are in business for themselves...

...Kevin Phillips, a student of political cycles, argued that periods of conservative ascendancy tend to produce "capitalist blowoffs" that accentuate inequality...

...When the superintendent of a New York school district was asked why in the midst of recent layoffs additional money had been appropriated for a school drop-out prevention program that had proved to be an abject failure, he replied anonymously: "This money is just to feed fat cows and let them get fatter...

...Part of the "Rights Revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, Special Education became mandated in 1978 after a federal judge, citing the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1973, ordered a customized response to children with special problems...

...The distance between the populace and its purported representatives is summed up by a San Franciscan who complained that government "seems like another world to me...

...The ostentatious inequalities of the Reagan years haven't brought on a progressive politics, in part, because the fight over racial issues in general and hiring quotas in particular has limited the possibilities for political renewal...

...In 1960 Chicago, crucial to JFK's election, represented more than 40 percent of the Illinois vote...

...In the eighties, as poverty became more firmly implanted in the big cities, ten of the eleven cities with large black communities experienced sharp population declines...

...The net effect is that at a time when teachers in New York are being laid off, Special Education teachers are still being hired—as in a Brooklyn school where, despite overcrowded classes, a full-time teacher fluent in Cambodian is being hired for a single Cambodian student...

...It suggests, in effect, that no matter what changes take place, a turn in the wheel of fortune can be counted on...

...The audiences, caught up in a felt connection between their own plight and the play's version of the country's political failures, would often join the actors at the end in shouting "Strike...

...The problem with the country, said Richard Gephardt on the 1987 presidential campaign trail, was that the fat cats "reward themselves with huge bonuses during the good times, but console themselves with layoffs as soon as times turn bad...

...Protected from public scrutiny and democratic debate by having been juridically defined as an absolute right, the money mandated by the federal government for Special Education has become a swamp of nonaccountability...

...The southern problem has come North and racial divisions that for so long held back southern progress now hold the entire country—and for that matter the political cycle—at bay...

...but many suburbanites are as separatist as any black nationalist, only more subtly so...

...People don't feel any sense of ownership over the federal government," says Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin...

...Citing Yankelovich polls, Time wrote in March 1987 of a ground swell of support for shifting money "away from the military and toward the unsolved problems of health, housing, homelessness and education...

...Union membership declined by nearly three-quarters of a million in 1984-85 alone...

...Strike...

...The net effect is that despite their clout in the low-turnout off-year congressional elections, the unions are a much diminished force when it comes to defining the national political agenda...

...These jobs, he explains, cannot be abolished unless the judge who ordered the program modifies his ruling...

...Dukakis and Babbitt weren't entirely off the mark...

...In the New York City school system, for instance, it is widely understood that the schools are opened and closed not in accord with the needs of students and neighborhoods but at the pleasure of the custodians "union...

...The 1986 elections, wrote James Reichly, "have lifted the Democrats out of the morass of depression that has beset them since 1978...

...Milwaukee is by no means unique in seeming to have given up on both integration and public institutions...

...The dynamics of social resentment set off in the sixties, said Phillips, were running out of steam...

...Plantclosing and parental-leave legislation, both broadly popular, promised to provide a platform for contesting the 1988 presidential elections...

...Increasingly cut off as we are from one another not only by the sharpening social stratification of the Reagan years but also by the therapeutic "politics of personal identity," there is not much reason to assume that the near future will bring a return to a liberal politics based on common concerns...

...In return for erecting a bastion against the problems of the metropolis, "citizens" of the private towns agree to a "covenanted conformity" that dictates everything from the size of their mailboxes to the type and number of visitors permitted...

...the suburban secession grew from 36 percent to 48 percent of the presidential vote...

...In the late 1980s corporate America, which had enjoyed a 70 percent approval rating a decade earlier, plummeted to a mere 35 percent, according to a Harris poll...

...In New Jersey middle- and upper-middle-class white separatism is expressed both in terms of partly legitimate distrust of government's effectiveness and an unwillingness to share tax revenues with "them," the poor from whom they fled in the first place...

...While the cities are pitted against the suburbs, city dwellers are increasingly divided against themselves...

...In Milwaukee, a city with a long liberal and even socialist tradition, black and white blue-collar workers devastated by the decline of heavy manufacturing seem to have moved into separate realities...

...Pointing to social decay in the cities and the loss of economic competitiveness, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt exclaimed that "it almost scares me to think how much the current period is like the late 1950s...

...Jack Pollack, principal of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, notes, "If the results justified the expense and the paper work it would be all right, but nobody has verified whether it does...

...In 1980 Schlesinger foresaw that "sometime in the 1980s" the "dam" holding back "commitment and uplift will break" and issue forth in a new burst of civic energy...

...But the precipitous drop in American manufacturing employment—the United States lost two million manufacturing jobs in the 1980s—came largely in districts dominated by Democrats...

...They avoided a call for new or enlarged bureaucracies...

...Reagan, argued pollster William Schneider, had ironically "restored faith in government," setting the stage for a revival of activist liberalism...

...But compared to the suburbs, which saw employment jump by 25 percent in the 1980s while urban areas lost 30 percent of their jobs, the cities are a rapidly shrinking political force...

...The drop-out prevention patronage program of the New York schools was protected because of the political clout of its backers, but the nonaccountability now routinely associated with government spending is sometimes imposed for the best of reasons...

...Blacks are reviving the separatist spirit of Malcolm X. Mike McGee, a born-again Black Panther complete with Castro-style beard and revolutionary regalia, has, to great media fanfare, threatened violence if "changes" aren't made...

...Voters, as repeated surveys suggest, believe, and with reason, that their choices count for less and less...

...And now, 1992 is likely to be the first election with a suburban majority...

...The privatization of public life has been attributed in part to the ability of the wealthy to simply buy their way out of public services, but the privatization extends far beyond the suburban and the wealthy...

...Yet Lefty hasn't arrived...

...Despite a record low turnout, liberal victories in the 1986 congressional elections were hailed as proof that the pendulum was set to swing...

...Business, caught by surprise, seemed reconciled, after its sweeping antilabor victories in the Reagan years, to losing a few rounds...

...In New York developers despairing of the city government's ability to provide that most basic of public services—safety on the streets—have built vast new developments like Battery Park City, which are in effect limited-access private cities, the urban counterparts of the covenanted suburbs...

...Williams argues, with some justice, that the white suburbs are already operating what in effect are white private schools with public money...

...The disparity between personal prosperity and public poverty is driven home daily to residents of big cities who search and search to find a public phone that's working even as others cruise by in cars talking on their hand-held cellular phones...

...A politics purged of public purpose by self-serving government and court-ordered insulation has helped to sever the connection between the populace and the political process...

...It isn't them, and it SPRING • 1991 • 179 Waiting for Lefty isn't theirs...

...It's now been almost forgotten that 1987 and 1988 did seem like a reprise of Eisenhower's second term...

...They didn't demand new spending and thus new taxes...

...SPRING • 1991 • 177 Waiting for Lefty Separatism initiated by blacks is subject to censure...

...Perhaps even 178 • DISSENT Waiting for Lefty more important is that the residents of middle-class neighborhoods are also protected by private health and social insurance systems, benefits that come with their jobs, so that the collapse of public hospitals is another crisis from which they've largely insulated themselves...

...On a small scale, neighborhoods have turned to "special purpose taxes," for "special service districts" —in effect, limited private governments to provide services like street cleaning and police protection that the city itself is unable to supply...

...There is something inherently optimistic about the cyclical theory of American politics...

...While careerist conservative activists were bailing out of politics to cash in on their White House connections, true believers were dismayed to discover that after seven years of Reagan the culture had remained "resolutely liberal and permissive...

...Among the dependent individualists of the suburbs, community is defined not so much by close ties with one's neighbors and community organizations—those have eroded rapidly over the past quarter century—but by who is kept out...

...It was time," said Dukakis, "for something new, some energy, some vitality...

...Between 1968 and 1988 millions fled the disorder of the cities...