Harold Meyerson on Chain Reaction

...But even if you assume that the political consequences of the Democrats' racial and cultural politics are the chief culprit, does it follow that the Democrats' foremost response should be to renounce those politics...

...Like The New Politics, Chain Reaction contains some stunning data on Reaganism's distributional consequences...

...The first is that over the past quarter century, the Democratic party and American liberalism abandoned a broad economic agenda in favor of the agenda of the Warren and early Burger Courts...

...Finally, Edsall never clearly states that the Democrats cannot return to the kind of Roosevelt-era party in which racial justice was simply off the agenda...

...Finally, there were too many women who wanted access to abortion...

...Edsall offers no specific recommendations...

...Those were the votes that Richard Gephardt drew in 1988's Iowa primary, that Albert Gore won in the South on Super Tuesday in 1988, and that even Dukakis won over in the final days of the general FALL • 1991 • 585 Books election—in each case, after a sudden, forced candidate conversion to populist rhetoric...

...Both a salutary work and a deeply problematic one, Chain Reaction will be a more influential book than The New Politics—which is too bad, since even if the Democrats respond to Chain Reaction's promptings and shuck their more marginal social policies, they will still need to reinvigorate the kind of class politics toward which the earlier book pointed...

...Dump gay rights...

...Might not the AFL-CIO's indifference to organizing during George Meany's long and disastrous stewardship also be a culprit...

...In 1984, Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall authored The New Politics of Inequality, a groundbreaking work that is still the single best study of Reagan-age politics and that established Edsall as one of the nation's foremost political analysts...

...Edsall's third point is that the great tax and spending revolt of 1978-81, which led to a radical upward redistribution of wealth, took shape when racial backlash augmented the traditional conservative attack on the state...

...Welfare cuts affected 2 percent of white households, 10 percent of Hispanic and 15 percent of black...

...Indeed, the passage in which Chain Reaction grows most insistent on the appeal of populist class politics doesn't come from Edsall, but from his interview with the late Lee Atwater...

...The Democrats cannot shift from race to nothing...

...You have for the first time two establishments," Atwater told Edsall...

...The Democrats played this game better than the Republicans in the years from 1932 through 1964...

...surely, the absence of economic politics failed to attract...

...The New Politics is a combination Cook's Tour/Class Analysis of the forces that led to the Reagan Revolution—the rise of right-wing oil-patch money, the conversion of Congressional Democrats to a more suburban-based and business-funded party, the decline of labor and working-class voting...

...At another level, Chain Reaction shows an almost neocon Edsall who gleefully rummages through the detritus of cultural politics to uncover liberal excesses...

...Edsall cites a study of disaffected Democrats in suburban Detroit's McComb County (which went 63 percent for Kennedy in 1960 and 67 percent for Reagan in 1984), who blamed blacks and a pro-black government for their status anxieties and career frustrations...

...As Edsall notes, "race provided conservatism with an essential ingredient in overcoming class differences between segments of the white electorate...

...Edsall's certainly right that modern liberalism seems crafted to the needs of primarily noneconomic groupings and has lost its class component...

...The only politics the Democrats can profitably play are the politics of class, q 586 • DISSENT...

...Events compel the party to adopt a fundamental strategy of renunciation...

...Exit polling from 1988 showed that blacks and Jews — America's two most self-conscious minorities—were the nation's most liberal groups...

...Wallace's contribution was to supplant his outmoded "Segregation forever...

...the Republicans have played it better in the years since '68...

...But even Donohue's remarks suggest that the problem is partly that he sees the government investing in targeted rather than universal programs: "We are tired of paying for the Chicago Housing Authority," he tells Edsall, "and for public housing and public transportation that we don't use...

...Spiraling inflation and "bracket creep" kicked the revolt into high gear, but the growing perception that government was directed to serving the needs of blacks had prepared the terrain...

...there is as yet no satisfactory explanation of why—though there's considerably more of one in Edsall's earlier volume, The New Politics, with its emphasis on the changing class composition of Democratic voters and the sources of Democratic funding, than there is in Chain Reaction...

...Besides universal programs, there's another way Democrats can win swing constituencies that doesn't entail repudiation of cultural liberalism, and that's through unionization While nonunion Southern white males were voting for Reagan over Mondale by a margin of 77 percent to 23 percent in 1984, their unionized counterparts—who comprised only 11 percent of them, to be sure—were voting for Mondale over Reagan by a 50-49 margin...

...Ironically, it was a Southern Democrat, George Wallace, who taught the Republicans how they could take the issue North...

...It's clear (even if you only read Chain Reaction and skip The New Politics) that Edsall believes in the latter as well as the former...

...Understandably enough, though, it is a conflicted call to action...

...Universal government programs may not make racists any less racist, or affirmative action any less controversial, but they can build a bottom-up Democratic coalition...

...and the relegitimation of government through universal programs still requires a Democratic victory in the first place...

...Other recent polling has shown that to a majority of Americans, liberalism conjures up gay and lesbian rights and the ACLU...

...Consider that the Democrats are weakest among white voters aged 18 to 29: do we think they are the most racist, the least sympathetic to cultural variation...

...Appearing amid the Bush administration's demagoguery on quotas, and in the early stages of a presidential year sure to feature a Democratic debate on "demarginalizing" the party, Chain Reaction will doubtless become the definitive volume of Democratic shock therapy...

...John Rankin's contemporary Northern equivalent—vastly more genteel, to be sure—may be Marty Russo, the Democratic congressman from ethnic Chicago who is promoting a Canadian-style health insurance program for the U.S., and who was one of only three Northern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Restoration bill...

...The enduring Republican issues exploit the anger against programs targeted to more finite and marginal constituencies— blacks above all...

...These are questions he answers only with a question: "At what point does a political party abdicate its responsibility to seek power on behalf of its constituents and at what point—if ever—does its commitment to a substantive moral position supersede its obligation to win...

...Goldwater's core supporters from the North were surprised at this development—the race issue had not figured greatly in their own motivations or political calculus—but for all the conservative presidential strategists who followed them, race was the key issue...

...Remarkable as its embrace of the Warren Court agenda may seem, more remarkable is the party's abandonment of its successful, preexisting agenda...

...Indeed, both in California after the passage of Proposition 13 and nationally during the first wave of Reagan cutbacks, the only programs that a majority of voters favored reducing were welfare and public housing...

...Should the Democrats axe affirmative action...

...At one level—the one, I suspect, that provided the impetus for the book—Edsall is the indignant social democrat/liberal who sees only calamity ahead if the Republican ascendancy persists...

...It's instructive that Atwater and Kevin Phillips, the two preeminent Republican strategists in their period of postwar ascendancy, the period since 1968, both view electoral politics as primarily a question of identifying and isolating an establishment...

...Having myself once managed a campaign on behalf of California Chief Justice Rose Bird, it's a voice I know intimately...

...battle cry with an attack on a new establishment of "pointy-head bureaucrats...

...Over subsequent decades, the ethnics' mid-Sixties trickle away from the Democrats turned into a flood as bastions of Democratic working-class support like building trades unions and police and fire departments were ordered first to integrate and then meet ethnic quotas...

...His new book, which he's written with his wife Mary, is at once more ambitious and less startling...

...In the 1950s, Edsall notes, white Southerners were the nation's third most liberal group on economic matters, after only blacks and Jews (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who remembers the left economic populism of John Rankin, Mississippi's vehemently racist congressman...

...A sympathetic reader can infer this, but Edsall's polemical purposes have managed to keep such a statement out of the book...

...That had been true in the South for generations...

...The rage and resentments of the ethnics and Southerners were further fueled by the fact that the small if steady economic advances they had known shuddered to a halt around 1973 and have not been seen since...

...There is, for starters, another (if not entirely contradictory) analysis of the Democrats' decline over the past quarter-century: it's not that they have oriented themselves too much around race, but not enough around class...

...he's just feminist-bashing...

...The Democratic party as it is currently constituted is in danger of losing its stature as a major competitor in national politics," he writes...

...The answer, of course, is that young white voters experience the government as an agency that taxes them regressively and gives its rewards to someone else—while they struggle to find the bucks to get through college and give up on being able to buy a home...

...This is union-bashing that dare not speak its name...

...Wallace's "fundamental strategy," Edsall notes, "of creating the specter of a coercive Democratic liberal establishment . . . reached its full dimensions in the Reagan campaign of 1980...

...Chain Reaction analyzes the conservative ascendancy that began in 1968, chiefly by documenting how the Democrats' commitment to a series of civil and minority rights causes busted up the New Deal coalition and enabled the Republicans to assemble a victorious top-down alliance in presidential politics...

...But if they get to the point where they say that rich people aren't paying their taxes, that the Republicans are protecting the realtors and so forth, then I think the Democrats are going to be in pretty good shape...

...Still, no Democratic strategist can assume that reunionization lurks around the corner...

...To survive and prevail, Chain Reaction argues, the Democratic party must abandon much of its core identity of the past 25 years...

...Southern whites began to turn with the enactment of the civil rights legislation— FALL • 1991 • 583 Books overwhelmingly popular with virtually everyone else—and Northern ethnics with the mid-Sixties rise of inner-city violence, crime and social disorder and with attempts to realize an integrationist vision...

...it is primarily a call to action, to Democratic reassessment and retrenchment...

...Most of the time, though, Edsall's voice seems that of an alarmed campaign manager, whose efforts are repeatedly thwarted by his candidate's unerring instinct for the wrong side of the wrong issue...

...In a volume purporting to advocate a revived bottom-up coalition, this kind of unexamined top-down economics seems curiously out of place...

...Fourth, in what is the most analytically and historically valuable part of the book, Edsall demonstrates how the reaction against the rights revolution is the linchpin of modern Republicanism, dating back to the rise of the Goldwater wing of the GOP in the Deep South during the Kennedy administration...

...So it's which one of those establishments the public sees as a bad guy [that determines whether conservative or liberal egalitarianism is ascendant...

...Chain Reaction's analysis of the Republican ascendancy consists of four basic points and a somewhat muffled conclusion that is strewn across the book...

...Liberalism and the Democratic party are heading for a wrenching period as the political process—particularly, the incentive to win the presidency—forces explicit reconsideration of race and rights...

...It's also clear he decided to come in with an unbalanced book because he felt the pressing need was to make the case for renunciation...

...In those rare recent instances where they do play anti-establishment class politics, Democrats have actually won back ethnic and Southern swing votes...

...The rout continued as affirmative action programs became widespread, as Food Stamps and AFDC greatly expanded, and as the Democrats made more of a place in their party structures for blacks and bohemians than they did, say, for Mayor Daley (whose delegation the 1972 McGovern convention chose not to seat...

...In the first pages of Chain Reaction, Edsall introduces us to Chicago carpenter Dan Donohue, a representative Democrat-turning-Republican over what he sees as the Democrats' policies of racial preference...

...If the people are thinking that the problem is that taxes are too high and government interferes too much, then we are doing our job...

...He knows that changing the way the party is "constituted" is terribly difficult, not only politically but morally...

...The problem, not one of Edsall's making, is that many Democrats are finding it easier, say, to backtrack on affirmative action than to oppose the establishment of worldwide free trade, though the free trade chimera will continue to depress working class America, black, brown, and white...

...Here, too, there's another strategy...

...It's bound to be the strategic bible for those forces around the Democratic Leadership Council and the (centrist) Progressive Policy Institute seeking to have the party renounce many of its social policies of the past quartercentury...

...while the rate of liberalism among the poorest Americans exceeded that among the richest by a mere five percent...

...Under Reagan, Edsall shows, 18 percent of white households were in the lowest income quintile, which bore the brunt of increased federal taxes, compared to 29 percent of Hispanic households and 36 percent of black households...

...Likewise, Edsall writes that "Its obligations to institutionalized special interests . . . have locked the party into an alliance with forces of reaction . . . 584 • DISSENT Books conducting largely futile efforts to resist, among other things, the consequences of economic change...

...Of course not...

...In recent years, many—make that most—Democrats have forgotten how to play it at all, as the antipopulism of party leaders such as Michael Dukakis, such vaunted "reforms" as the change-nothing tax reform of 1986, and the party's failure to notice the current recession all attest...

...Much of the material and analysis in The New Politics was new, and Edsall presented it with clarity and force...

...Secondly, the transformation of liberalism and the Democratic party, Edsall demonstrates, has alienated two constituencies critical to a nationwide Democratic or populist coalition: the working- and middle-class Catholics of Northern cities and working-class Southern whites...

...The central tragedy of liberalism," he writes, "is that its commitment to oppose racism, prejudice and oppression . . . has carried within it some of the seeds of its own debilitation...

...In fact, the reasons for the Democrats' demise can be drawn from both paleo-Edsall and neo-Edsall: surely, some cultural politics alienated...

...Somewhere between the Thirties and the Seventies, the representative American liberal activist changed from an organizer into an attorney, and the arena of liberal activism from the legislature to the courts...

...But suppose they don't...

...Consider, for instance, that the Democrats' strongest support among white voters considered by age comes among those over 65...

...National health insurance, by contrast, is a centrist concern...

...This Edsall sees liberalism paying for its virtues, its desire for social justice creating just the reverse...

...Save in its somewhat incongruous neoconservative passages, the problem with Chain Reaction isn't that its analysis is off-base, but that it is overbalanced toward the need to renounce the particularistic and gives insufficient weight to the party's need to reconstruct class politics and advocate universal programs...

...Edsall doesn't need to adduce "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm" to explain the rightward drift of McComb County...

...Instead of being seen as advancing the economic well-being of all voters, including white mainstream working and middle class voters," Edsall writes, "liberalism and the Democratic party came to be perceived in key sectors of the electorate as promoting the establishment of new rights and government guarantees for previously marginalized, stigmatized or historically disfranchised groups, often at the expense of traditional constituencies...

...Chain Reaction is not intended simply as a work of history or political science, of course...

...Conversely, the group over 65 are the only white voters who have experienced government as something that works for them—not just now, with Social Security and Medicare, but throughout their lives, beginning with the WPA, and then through the GI bill and federal mortgage assistance...

...Do we really believe that the oldest white voters are the least racist, that they have less fear of crime and violence than their younger counterparts, that their cultural estrangement from the new Democratic constituencies is less than their children's...

...With these figures in mind, it's hard to argue that the Democrats' original sin was entirely their embrace of a minoritarian politics...

...My italics.] Indeed, it's intriguing to note that some Democratic policies that started life as marginal and have become more universal—I have abortion rights in mind—have been dropped by Republican strategists as issues to use against the Democrats...

...Race and cultural policies certainly pushed Edsall's swing constituencies away from the Democrats, but it's hard to,find Democratic economic policies that would have pulled them back...

...Can't the Democrats' failure to enact labor law reform during the Carter administration—which would have effectively relegalized organizing—be viewed at least as a minor form of suicide...

...In the 1980 campaign, we were able to make the establishment, insofar as it is bad, the government...

...But even in the less than huge number of instances where a strategy of renunciation is morally justifiable and politically possible, that strategy would be imperiled by a failure to advocate universal programs in its stead...

...Chain Reaction explains that this happened...

...Edsall delves into the annals of ward voting to show that Illinois Democratic Senator Paul Douglas's 1966 defeat was brought about by mass defections in those areas of ethnic Chicago where Martin Luther King had led demonstrations for housing integration...

...In the Democrats' quarter-century in the wilderness, they have watched passively as taxes have grown more regressive, as American industry closed its doors, as industrial unionism fell apart, as homes and college tuition and health care became unaffordable—the list goes on and on...