Democrats' silence

...The accord stipulates that no domestic programs can be started or enlarged out of funds from reductions in defense or foreign programs, that the funds must come either from cuts in other domestic programs or from new taxes...

...That's the party in a nutshell," one congressional aide sighed...

...Indeed, an increasing number of the Democrats' leading progressives — Minnesota' s Paul Wellstone , Iowa's Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle and Kent Conrad from the Dakotas—come from effectively all-white states...

...environmental protection, and the like...

...A silent party has few adherents...

...Most of their potential presidential candidates are either busy at the state level destroying the very programs that build a Democratic base (New York's Mario Cuomo may be the saddest example here, but Virginia's Douglas Wilder is surely the worst) or sitting in Congress and failing to create such programs...

...The Illinois Democrat has also been a leading enforcer, along with Foley and Senate Finance Chair Lloyd Bentsen...

...A growing division of labor—or more precisely, 326 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions of mission—has emerged in recent elections between the executive and legislative branches, coinciding with the political divisions between the two parties...

...Twenty-six Democratic senators voted No on Moynihan's motion, and the congressional leadership, Foley especially, caved in to administration demagoguery about protecting the Social Security fund...

...What makes the Democrats' silence so excruciating is that it is plainly their turn to speak...

...As Richard Rothstein has noted, no one would think California's economy would benefit if Mississippi could slash its minimum wage to $1 an hour—but when we relocate California factories just across the Mexican border, that's supposed to generate a huge Mexican market for our advanced postindustrial products...

...In 1991, the Democrats can be distinguished chiefly by their failures to address basic policy questions, among them the following: nthe reluctance of the congressional leadership to move on national health insurance, an area where even the American Medical Association has now taken a position in advance of the party...

...The preconditions for a Democratic resurgence would seem to be in place...

...It creates public programs that serve city and suburbs alike...

...its momentum is clearly spent...

...But the Democrats, taking their lead from the wizards of the economics profession, have neglected to consider the European model, or any model of SUMMER • 1991 • 327 Comments and Opinions international economics save the purest form of Friedmanite reverie...

...It is not funded by AT&T...

...And yet, there are signs that candidates ranging from the DLC's Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the right to Jesse Jackson and Tom Harkin on the left to Jay Rockefeller in the middle believe that progressive taxation, national health insurance, and some slight strategic appreciation of other universal programs may not be totally absent from the '92 campaign...

...q 328 • DISSENT...

...And yet .. . The Democratic Congress is disinclined to challenge Bush...

...It is also incomplete...

...Which is to say, with attention to defining an international strategy that goes beyond just saying No, and with emphasis on reviving an American economy, the Democrats should not be totally out of the game...

...What is astonishing, if not surprising, about the Democrats' decline is not that they are vulnerable on defense issues, but that they have squandered their edge on domestic issues...

...The foundations of Reaganism look ever more rickety...

...His poll standings have already collapsed once, during last October's budget debacle, when they tumbled twenty points in one month...

...This spring's fundraising dinner for the Democratic National Committee brought several thousand lobbyists, major donors, and other fixtures of the permanent government to the Washington Hilton...

...Except, that requires the Democrats to take positions on domestic affairs...

...For one thing, the perception of national security is changing...

...They show that for all the reluctance to raise taxes, a greater number of Americans feel threatened by internal decay than by foreign powers...

...Failing to promote any other pieces of legislation, they present to the 1991 Congress the Civil Rights Restoration Act—a moderate bill which the Republicans successfully campaigned against in 1990 and plainly cannot wait to campaign against in 1992...

...The party committees emerged $2 to $3 million richer...

...Absent any universal employment, education, or industrial policies, they have clung to the particularistic, remedial programs of affirmative action...

...Their support for the "fasttrack" approval process for the proposed U.S.Mexican Free Trade Agreement is Exhibit A. The premises of the Free Trade Agreement are those of a laissez-faire fantasyland...

...If Gramm-Rudman paralyzed the Democrats from the waist down, the budget deal immobilizes them clear to their forelocks, dooming any response to the recession...

...It leans on every lobbyist in town, raises three million bucks, and has absolutely nothing to say...

...It is the polar opposite of the kind of economic integration practiced by the European Community, in which aid and development flow from the richer nations to the poorer as a prelude to a continental social charter establishing Community-wide minimum standards for wages, environmental protection, and the like...

...Finall y, the Democrats face one killer problem on the domestic side that is not a product of their timidity, and that is race...

...It funds them through a far more progressive tax system than our current one...

...Certainly, after a year in which the end of the cold war had left them politically adrift, it provided conservatives with a foreign policy issue with which to club the Democrats...

...George Bush is at most a custodian of the Reagan legacy, and the right wingers in his administration have been reduced to advocating implausible transplants of Thatcherite policies—such as the buyout of public housing projects—to American soil...

...Supremely indifferent to the waning of a cross-racial union movement, they have watched as a race-based politics has come to dominate cities and campuses...

...It's the war, conventional wisdom has it, that revived the GOP's prospects...

...Problem is, the Democrats' ability to conceptualize programs that benefit and unite the bottom two-thirds of the nation has atrophied even in off-budget matters...

...As I write, the congressional leadership, under pressure from the Democratic right, is beginning to scale back the not-overly generous provisions of the Civil Rights bill...

...As I write, the Democratic delegation seems to be awakening to an understanding of how devastating the deal really is...

...With last year's budget agreement," says Democratic congressman Richard Durbin of Illinois, "we have very little ability to respond to significant economic challenges...

...The Democrats approached the current session of Congress with vows to pursue the fairness issue and to craft governmental programs benefiting the working and middle classes...

...And the only nonmusical part of the program was a brief announcement from Virginia Senator Charles Robb that there would be no speeches...

...The Edsalls are part of what Ron Brownstein calls a "post—affirmative action left," with members ranging from William Julius Wilson to Cornel West, a number of whom still support affirmative action programs but understand their political and programmatic limits: affirmative action both fails to address the worst needs of the inner city and likely sunders any possible progressive majority...

...With its plan not just for the Mexican treaty but for a hemispheric free-trade zone, the Bush administration is proposing a new world economic order that proceeds by leveling downward...

...AT&T, and TRW—also has decried any opposition to the free-trade agreement and attacked as "special interests" the unions fighting against it...

...The electoral advocacy of government programs in biracial states becomes increasingly difficult...

...Just eight months before the Iowa caucuses, no serious Democratic presidential candidates have emerged...

...the inability, chiefly at the federal level but also in statehouse after statehouse, to generate any countercyclical response to the current recession...

...This is admittedly a murky political terrain for the Democrats to navigate...

...The only president whose polling ever stood as high as Bush's—Harry Truman— saw his ratings go from 87 percent to 35 percent between June 1945 and December 1946...

...The cold war is over...

...the passage of a 1991 budget in which Democrats managed to rearrange only $13 billion out of Bush's $1.45 trillion—an unprecedented acquiescence to a GOP budget...

...the reluctance to investigate the allegations of Gary Sick, the Carter administration national security official, that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign impeded the release of the U.S...

...Even here, their abandonment of a class perspective has rendered them (and the nation) vulnerable to the much more vexing zero-sum politics of race...

...of last year's budget deal...

...nthe defeat by a 38 to 60 margin of New York Senator Pat Moynihan's proposal to slash the regressive Social Security payroll tax...

...A Gallup/ Times-Mirror poll taken in late March—admittedly, still in the flush of the Persian Gulf victory—showed that 36 percent of respondents identified themselves as Republicans, while a mere 29 called themselves Democrats...

...Polls show more Americans apprehensive about the economic threat posed by the Japanese than the military threat posed by the Soviets or anybody else...

...By this analysis, the Democrats, denied national security experience by their exile from the executive branch, are at a permanent disadvantage in presidential elections: and their only hope to recapture the White House is to nominate a defense maven along the lines of Sam Nunn or, more recently, a supporter of the Gulf War, such as Al Gore...

...It also showed 50 percent sentiment for a Republican Congress and just 40 percent for a Democratic one...

...And still nothing happened...

...Even at the war's height, with Bush's overall popularity in the high eighties, his approval rating on domestic issues was 43 percent positive...

...In the debate over budget and taxes, the Democrats' defense of tax equity, however qualified, and the clumsy Republican embrace of tax privileges for the rich sent the Republicans into a brief free fall...

...This analysis is partly true: a sizable number of swing voters do weigh candidates' national security policies and experience in their decisions...

...43 negative...

...Then the war came—and ended...

...The president is charged with national security, the Congress with domestic equity...

...Scrapped at the outset was the Democrats' pledge to re-raise the millionaires' surtax issue—a proposal so popular that it wins the support of 80 percent of Republican voters...

...and the slowness in criticizing the administration's initial nonresponse to the plight of the Kurds, presumably out of the conviction that opposition to war with Iraq rendered any such criticism politically impossible...

...Merely to claim coequal ownership with the Republicans of the standard of "universalism" through an abandonment of quotas is ridiculous...

...The Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC), for instance, has come out in flat opposition to quotas and in support of the Moynihan tax cut, but—at a national convention financed by such ardent working-class adherents as RJR Nabisco...

...As recently as last autumn, they seemed to have gleaned a rudimentary understanding of governance and politics...

...Politicians scurry from the anti-abortion cause...

...National health, advises House Speaker Tom Foley, "is going to require more than one session and more than one Congress" —many more, at the rate at which Foley himself is proceeding...

...But if they take the right's lead, they will avail themselves nothing but an embittered black leadership...

...Republicans generally and the Bush administration in particular may have even less to say than the Democrats about domestic affairs, but they are at least "the party of national security...

...But, at least for now, they are...

...The wreckage of deregulation is strewn across the economic landscape...

...in deference to the sensibilities of Ways and Means Chair Dan Rostenkowski...

...The very fact that race, not class, dominates American political discourse is, in partisan terms, a Republican triumph...

...Poll after poll demonstrates the gulf that exists between whites and blacks on race-based preferential hiring, and, as Thomas and Mary Edsall demonstrate in their forthcoming book, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, it is the Democratic voting base that the fault line splits in two...

...Nor is Bush's popularity an unassailable Everest...

...Had their forebears been as attentive to the economics profession in 1935, there would have never been a New Deal—or a New Deal coalition...

...Recession is upon us...

...Senate Majority leader George Mitchell and House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt are rumbling that changes may be necessary—though Foley, Bentsen, and Rostenkowski still seem disposed to honor the agreement no matter its cost...

...The only certainty is that if they fail to move toward a much more class-based politics, the Democrats will remain adrift in the decades-long Thermidor they both suffer and abet...

...hostages held by Iran...

...Democratic universalism must be class-based, building a voting bloc around such programs as universal health insurance and day care, affordable housing, jobs and education, and industrial programs...

...Those numbers should change as the war recedes and as attention turns again to economic and domestic affairs...

...It is rooted in a powerful union movement...

...The conservative epoch has all but ended...