The Democrats' identity crisis

...The Democrats cannot arrest the downward slide of most American incomes by training alone...

...Unfortunately for Clinton, and the Democrats, and the nation, the party may have reached the point where those forces arrayed behind policies that promote income growth— above all, unions—are too weak to sway the party in its basic policies...

...Last November, it skidded to 37 percent...

...For whatever small consolation it affords the left, that's not quite right...

...He sees that their first priority for government, by a margin of 64 percent, is to protect Social Security and Medicare...

...By a 56-percent-to-27 percent margin, Bush votes said it creates more jobs...

...In 1993—the second year of a recovery—the average annual household income fell by $312...

...It's in the Democrats' interest to pursue Gephardt's proposal to link corporate tax cuts to a corporation's treatment of its employees...

...They must attempt to shore up the other three legs on which their economic security platform rests: • The Fed: Alan Greenspan is up for reconfirmation in 1996...

...but it's both good politics and sound economics to wrest the Fed from this Ayn Rand acolyte and place it in more Keynesian hands...

...Which means that if they confine their efforts to training alone, the Democrats have no way to arrest the middle-class slide and allay the attendant anxiety that the right will surely exploit...

...but much of the non-financial business community—certainly, construction and manufacturing—will join labor in opposing him...

...This year in California, the percentage of insured residents enrolled in HMOs is at 47 percent and rising fast...

...The policy changes that November engendered are surely Reaganesque, but that's not what the voters were opting for...

...Most critically, they no longer seem able (or in some cases, willing) to use government to spread the growth more equitably...

...For in several crucial aspects, America has reverted to a pre-New Deal condition...

...As I write, Gingrich has begun to go after Medicare as a dinosaur— a one-size-fitsall, inflexible government behemoth...

...maintain the balance of prevention, police, and prison funding in the 1994 crime bill...

...They wanted economic nationalism and got a dash of nationalism in a cauldron of corporate globalism...

...But political reform fell victim to the Democratic barons of the Hill...

...And Democrats can only pray that Republicans decide to push such items on the corporate agenda as denying overtime rates to full-time "temp" workers forced to put in more than forty hours a week...

...He sees that their second priority, by a margin of 60 percent, is to cut government spending...

...Ironically, as union membership wanes, the effect of membership on political consciousness waxes...

...But they are not enough...

...From 1986 through 1992, white male support for Democratic House candidates ranged from 47 percent to 49 percent...

...What 1994 demonstrated was that Republicans could scapegoat in a world without communism...

...Clinton has made some shrewd proposals in this area...

...Moreover, neither training nor job creation nor a strong recovery, even in durable-goods manufacturing and construction, has made a dent in the what is emerging as the most immutable element of the New Age economy: stagnating wages...

...so has Dick Gephardt...

...This clearly isn't the moment to enhance social insurance directly, but neither is it the moment to cut back on a popular universal social insurance program, which is precisely what the Republicans are proposing to do with Medicare...

...What these voters crave, our Nixonite concludes, is some unworthy them against whom these cuts can safely be made: immigrants, welfare recipients, foreign nations...

...an HMO patients' bill of rights is a good place to start...

...Between 1990 and 1993—that is, through most of Wilson's first term as governor— average annual household income in California declined by a stunning 14.5 percent...

...in the two heavily black Los Angeles city council districts where competition with Latino immigrants is the fiercest, the measure passed with 51.5 percent support...

...The Democrats have precious few solutions...

...Economic growth is concentrated within the wealthiest fifth of the nation...

...By 1994 though, the Republicans had resurrected some enemies within —and none more ably than California governor Pete Wilson...

...The Democrats have always been the world's preeminent cross-class party—but in a period of rising inequality and declining SPRING • 1995 • 157 incomes, that may be less a blessing than a curse...

...The GOP has its divisions over some of its more egregious wedge campaigns—Jack Kemp, William Bennett and the Wall Street Journal opposed Proposition 187—but in its war on welfare and affirmative action, it is effectively united...

...Ironically, while Gingrich is launching his bogus attack, bureaucratization and cutbacks in care are absolutely rehsaping American medicine—but it's happening in the private sector, where HMOs, currently drowning in profits, have clearly become the dominant player...

...Anticorporate rhetoric, let alone anticorporate reform, was squelched by economic adviser (now Treasury Secretary) Robert Rubin...

...Other elements of the Republicans' agenda, including much of their Contract with America, may prove less popular...

...The House leadership at least, Gephardt and David Bonior, have made clear that they know the party must pursue class-based policies only, drawing a line between their working- and middleclass constituents and the wealthier beneficiaries of the Republicans' largesse every bit as clear as the lines the Republicans draw between the races...

...How many Democratic-run states or cities can liberals point to with pride...

...It was one thing to be the party of Averill Harriman and Walter Reuther in a time of shared prosperity, quite another to be the party of Robert Rubin and Richard Trumka in a time of investment boom and wage stagnation...

...Finally, the Democrats must append a fifth leg to their economic platform that wasn't so necessary during their New Deal ascendency because the economy was still largely national...

...that Democrats across the land last November drifted themelessly toward oblivion...

...It has little to do with the third wave, and everything to do with the manipulation of resentment at a time when the Democrats are unable to arrest the downward drift of the middle class...

...It was Nixon's...

...And then the subject changes, and that understanding seems to recede...

...It was nowhere in evidence in Clinton's deliberations on the Mexican bailout...

...Americans want to retain the ban on assault weapons, preserve the National Service Corps...

...The prospects for a Nixon revival have never been better...

...that Mario Cuomo had no rationale for serving one more term...

...Suppose, for instance, that a neoNixonian chances upon a DLC-sponsored poll of independent voters taken just after the November vote...

...For all but the unionized sector of the white working class, the Democrats are the party, and the unions the movement, that have abandoned them to the market while championing virtually everyone else...

...It is in the party's longterm strategic interest to block the Republicans' coming attempts to relegalize company unions and end the payment of prevailing wages on federal construction projects...

...Even before November's landslide, the economic and political terrain was becoming unrecognizable—though for some, it may have had a ghostly familiarity...

...And given the differential in voting between union members and nonmembers, there is no evidence the Democrats can win many elections with a movement of that size, either...

...And if ever a left-wing campaign was made for talk radio, it's the war on the Fed—this secretive, semipublic, semiprivate, and utterly unaccountable agent of finance capital...

...q 158 • DISSENT...

...And among white males, who increasingly saw the Democrats as the tribunes for every group in American society except themselves, the party's support collapsed...

...that Tom Foley, Dan Rostenkowski, and Jack Brooks, with 110 years of congressional seniority, couldn't coax more than a handful of foot soldiers to walk their districts...

...the Republicans have none, but they're masters at exploiting the resentments that simmer in a solutionless world...

...African-Americans rejected the measure by a narrow 53-percent-to47-percent margin...

...The Democrats know no such unity...

...The meaning of November, the Republican right contends, is that the Reagan Revolution has been validated...

...The financial community will support him...

...exploiting anxieties the Democrats seem unable to address through economic programs...

...At best, Clinton got some of the words right in his approach to the Perotistas, but none of the music...

...The herd included the Democratic Leadership Council [DLC], which argued that winning the Perot voters was the sine qua non of Democratic strategy—except when it conflicted with the wishes of the DLC's corporate benefactors...

...If there were any doubts that Republicans could navigate through hard times more adeptly 154 • DISSENT Right Turn than their post-New Deal Democratic rivals, Wilson's campaign against Kathleen Brown should have dispelled them...

...The Democrats' dilemma is that they can currently pursue policies of greater economic opportunity and security with only one of these strategies...

...One thing is certain: if the Democrats cannot deliver prosperity anymore, the Republicans will not hesitate to promise purity—to divide the nation between worthy and unworthy recipients of state support...

...The Federal Reserve, depending on who ran it, was a buffer against too sharp an economic downturn...

...A number of the Republican tax proposals currently being floated, such as Dick Armey's flat tax on wages and pensions, exempting all income from interest, dividends and capital gains, seem vulnerable even to inept Democratic attack...

...Wilson, by contrast, was busily arguing that the money diverted to illegal immigrants was the major factor in the schools' failure to produce a generation of Einsteins and Kants...

...That leaves training as the one area where the Democrats still attempt to promote the general welfare—making it easier to attend college, improving access to job training, and the like...

...The only impediment to the rightward leap of white males remains unions: union household members voted 14 percent more Democratic than nonunion household members last year, and white male union household members 18 percent more Democratic than their nonunion counterparts...

...The specter stalking the November vote wasn't Reagan's...

...Many of Nixon's greatest hits—racial backlash, wedge issues that split the Democratic base, identification of Democratic elites with dangerous elements—loomed large in 1994, and are likely to loom larger in 1996...

...The GI Bill and federal aid to education provided more avenues for training and mobility...

...Those equivalents, according to polling conducted for the AFL-CIO, make up the demographic group most hostile to unions and unionizing...

...He even won an implausible 20 percent of the black vote—a clear spillover from the vote on Proposition 187...

...In a globalized economy and a de-unionized America, wages and incomes have simply decoupled from other indices of economic strength...

...The Fed has raised interest rates seven times in the past year, and has yet to experience a presidential rebuke...

...The Wilson-backed Proposition 187 passed by a 59percent-to-41-percent margin, cutting deeply into the Democratic base...

...They must tilt their trade policy away from banks and corporations that have an interest in depressing wages abroad, toward policies that enhance wages abroad—vesting transnational labor bodies with greater power, placing more emphasis on human rights and workers' ability to organize...

...It may be a harbinger of Republican failure, but that may merely open up space for some other right-of-center forces...

...The Democrats preside over a recovery in which average household income continues to decline...

...It had been touch and go for a few years there, what with the evil empire crumbled to dust and new foreign menaces like Saddam Hussein too ephemeral to affect voting behavior...

...By a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent, exit poll respondents said they preferred current economic policies to Reagan's...

...Among high school grads, though, their vote fell by 10 percent...

...When he promotes his Middle Class Bill of Rights, Bill Clinton seems to understand the necessity for drawing class lines, too...

...The Democrats are holding their own among the symbolic analysts: there was no falloff from 1992 to 1994 in the level of support for House Democrats among college graduates...

...Even as Sons-of-187 move into other states and Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour touts anti-immigration efforts as key to Republican campaigns in 1996, the California right is readying another killer initiative for that year, this one intended to end state affirmative action and minority set-aside programs...

...Accordingly, hard times no longer mean that voters turn to the Democrats for solutions...

...And unions, abetted by wage-and-hour legislation, guaranteed that the benefits of economic growth would be widely distributed throughout the society...

...Unions have weakened to the point where wage increases seem a thing of the past...

...There is no evidence that the Democrats can arrest the decline of national incomes with a union movement that comprises just 11 156 • DISSENT Right Turn percent of the private sector...

...It wasn't much of an argument, but it was enough of one to provide a pretense of respectability to voters who simply didn't wish to continue the public funding of illegal immigrants at all...

...Greenspan and Clinton have been engaged in the most delicate pas de deux since shortly before Clinton's inaugural...

...This meant that the Democrats' outreach to the Perot forces consisted of deficit reduction only—which the DLC's own polling had concluded was far from the Perotistas' foremost concern...

...Like Democratic voters, Perot supporters told pollsters they mistrusted corporations...

...They wanted resolution and got endless chatter...

...But it was hardly Clinton's doing that Kathleen Brown changed identities every week...

...Like Democratic voters, they greatly desired political reform...

...In fact, Medicare offers its users complete freedom of choice in physicians and facilities...

...And last November, all their rage was mobilized by the right...

...Medicine is being collectivized—and we have the opportunity to raise the issue of who controls the decisions...

...and create public sector jobs for people going off welfare if no private sector jobs are available...

...On fundamental economic questions, the Democratic party has become a house divided against itself...

...In the Good Old Days of the New Deal Order, when economies were national and rising incomes the rule, the Democrats could promote economic opportunity and security in four ways...

...The Democrats' identity crisis is every bit as profound at the bottom as at the top, maybe more so...

...Indeed, a January Los Angeles Times poll finds that on many pending issues, the public takes the Clinton, not the Gingrich, position...

...The wars on welfare, affirmative action and immigrants give the Republicans three strong wedge issues they can run on two years hence— splitting the Democrats' base, vexing the Democrats' candidates (is there a position they can take on affirmative action that won't cost them votes...

...Indeed, millions of Americans are still over-qualified for the jobs they hold...

...among voters with some college, by 11 percent...

...Union membership, however, continues to decline: in the 1994 network exit poll, respondants from union households constituted just 14 percent of the sample, down from 26 percent in 1984...

...On one key question in the 1992 exit polls, they provided an identical profile to Democrats: asked whether they thought foreign trade tended to create more jobs or destroy them, Perot voters and Clinton voters, by identical 49-percent-to-35-percent margins, said that it destroyed more jobs...

...The Federal Reserve has become a relentless foe of higher wages...

...Which is why the most downwardly mobile economically are the most rightwardly mobile politically...

...The Social Security Act created old-age pensions and unemployment insurance to SPRING • 1995 • 155 Right Turn bolster purchasing power...

...And I'm not suggesting that the unions would be any stronger if they left the party and started one of their own...

...But derailing some or even much of the Contract is still no guarantee of Democratic success...

...Blue-collar white male union members view government more favorably than their nonunion equivaSPRING • 1995 • 153 Right Turn lents...

...It still will stand—for election, anyway—but until it tilts decisively toward a wage-earner's perspective, there's little likelihood that it will more than occasionally prevail...

...For the Perot voters, as for the stagnant or downwardly mobile middle and working class, the Democrats had offered no solutions...

...A foreign trade policy that placed the interests of workers first was trampled by the elite stampede to the North American Free Trade Agreement...

...The tragedy here is that the strategic basis for a progressive Democratic-Perot alliance was clear—and clearly ignored...

...These antipathies are even greater among Perot voters—the distinct if overlapping group with whom the Democrats had to forge some alliances if they ever entertained notions of converting the '92 victory into a lasting realignment...

...The handiwork of the Social Security Act itself looks safe, but there's no opportunity to expand social insurance with such policies as national health, and little prospect of preserving other safety nets, like AFDC...

...And beyond Clinton lurk still fuzzier figures like Bob Kerrey, convinced that the role of the party should be to de-emphasize class distinctions and to scale back universal and universally popular entitlements the better to calm the deficit nightmares of financial elites...

...Exploiting the crime and immigration issues, and his opponent's ineptness, Wilson overcame a twentypoint deficit to win reelection by fifteen points...

...In 1994, with economic growth roaring ahead at 4 percent, wages and benefits rose by a mere 3 percent, the lowest annual increase since the government began measuring it in 1981...

...As Republicans have already recognized, there is little public support for increased defense spending...

...Even if the Toffler-babble is cleared away, the foundation of the Republican ascendency remains...

...Like all party leaders, Clinton has reached the top in part because he straddles many of his party's internal divisions, because he reflects in his priorities the balance of power within party ranks...

...All the antibureaucratic rhetoric that was adduced against the Clinton Plan should be turned against the HMOs, and their green-eyeshade CEOs, who are shortening hospital stays and cutting back on care in the cause of greater profits...

...But—and Gephardt and Bonior seem to understand this—if they can only offer training incentives to their newfound working class, their appeal will be sadly muted...

...But Brown never convinced voters that Wilson was responsible for this decline (and indeed, he largely wasn't) or that she or any Democratic governor could use the government to turn the economy around (as indeed they largely couldn't...

...Then again, people supported the key particulars of the Clinton health plan—universal coverage and employer mandates—which, of course, were never enacted...

...The notion of restarting Star Wars to defend against an army that has taken months to shoot its way into downtown Grozny seems downright eccentric...

...Beyond that, the Democrats must insist on reforming labor law the next time they're in power to enable unions to organize again, just as unions must learn again both how to organize and how to reconnect with a public that supports their purposes, but cringes at their institutional face...