Going local

...But in order to defend them we must reconceive them in ways that take account of the deep reservoir of distrust that has built up in the society as a whole...

...they have captured a number of high-profile governorships and state legislatures...

...Self-questioning rather than self-righteousness...

...Their talk of self-reliance masks a barely veiled politics of ethnic and racial resentment directed against such "threats" to American decency as immigrants, criminals (read urban African-Americans), gays and lesbians, arrogant Eastern "intellectuals," and, in the case of the Christian Coalition, those who threaten the "Christian" character of the nation (particularly Jews but often Catholics and Muslims as well...

...The result is that the most vulnerable men and women in an increasingly volatile global economy suffer from fiscal austerity and drastic cutbacks...

...Only a more modest, localist democracy now makes sense for the democratic left in America...

...Instead, the democratic left must try to make democratic empowerment real...

...The Democrats, whose NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement)-centered economic policy is little different from Bush Republicanism, have done little to address this discontent...

...Post-election gloating to the contrary, the Republicans are a deeply divided party...

...But it does mean that they have discovered a way to tap long-standing American notions of "grassroots" politics...

...It is important to say that no one ought to be left helpless before the vagaries of the market, and that public assistance for the vulnerable, poor, and disadvantaged is democratic and just...

...Civic initiatives are being undertaken by feminists, trade unionists, ecologists, and minority groups to redress longstanding grievances like sexual violence, corporate downsizing, environmental racism, and urban neglect...

...What, then, is to be done...

...Consider the Republican "social contract" promoted by Gingrich...

...The reality of the "Contract With America," in other words, gives the lie to its rhetoric...

...The so-called "battle for the soul" of the Republicans waged in Virginia over the Oliver North candidacy symbolizes this division, which will deepen once the Republicans are placed in the position of having to govern and can no longer rail against a Democratic Congress...

...We need to take more seriously the rhetoric with which Republicans rode to power...

...But most people on the democratic left have known for some time that New Deal politics— social democracy, American-style—is at an impasse...

...The democratic left needs to shift its focus...

...As many have observed, popular disaffection with the Democrats does not necessarily translate into strong Republican electoral support...

...These values need to be more systematically articulated and connected with a politics of democratic empowerment that builds from the ground up, and that sees a more localist politics as a strategic and an ethical imperative...

...Such a politics is no doubt more improvisational, fragmented, and melioristic than a unifying social demoratic vision, but it is also more realistic, given the current state of affairs...

...Unfortunately, it is the right that has demonstrated this...

...But the rhetoric is important...

...The weakness of genuinely democratic political agencies should lead us indeed to a pessimism of the intellect, but also to a tempering of the will...

...Rudolph Giuliani's defection to the Cuomo camp is simply one symptom of a broader division between centrist Republicans, many based in major urban areas, and right-wing conservatives like Gingrich and Jesse Helms, who, while appealing to anticongressional sentiment, have managed to parlay their congressional seniority into a national power base...

...And it is SPRING • 1995 • 187 Right Turn precisely this activity that, in the present period, is dramatically absent...

...These are powerful themes, more powerful than the banalities typically purveyed by Democratic politicians (it was Clinton's strength in 1992 that he projected some of these themes...

...The last election suggests that much discussion in the first two areas is quixotic, because there does not seem to be any political support for social democratic public policies or much energy available for the social democratic coalitional strategies traditionally supported by the democratic left...

...The Republican "Contract With America," drafted by that avatar of Jeffersonianism, Newt Gingrich, also articulates this sentiment...

...This helps to explain why constituents seemed so willing to turn out of office even such powerful, successful pork barrelers as Tom Foley of Washington and Jack Brooks of Texas...

...This does not mean the wholesale abandonment of the welfare state or the politics of redistributive justice...

...Congress has become too entrenched...

...it is his enormous failure that he failed to push any of them once in office...

...local governments...

...The result: the Republicans control both houses of Congress for the first time in almost fifty years...

...I am not saying that democrats should pander to such people...

...But the idea of an alternative mass political party of the left seems equally hopeless, not only because of the inhospitability of the American electoral system to third parties, but also because there is no significant constituency for such an alternative...

...But this needs to be articulated in terms of a conception of civic responsibility and democratic empowerment and linked to grass-roots community organizations and local forms of government through which citizens can really make a difference...

...There is a great danger in this kind of grass-roots politics, the danger of what Margaret Weir called in these pages "defensive localism" ("Urban Poverty and Defensive Localism," Dissent, Summer 1994...

...It can only be realized by the autonomous activity of the people...

...But it does mean that these commitments need to be recast in more democratically accountable ways, and justified in a language of civic responsibility and solidarity...

...But few expected the landslide that occurred...

...Harry Boyte is organizing a new network called the American Civic Forum, which seeks to connect them...

...All these excuses are true, but they are excuses, not explanations, and to that extent they are beside the point...

...What might distinguish a more genuinely democratic politics from the Republican "Contract with America...

...One is consideration of alternative public policies in such diverse areas as foreign and military policy, corporate regulation, and even market socialism...

...I am saying that the only way to counter such initiatives is to take seriously their Jeffersonian rhetoric (for an interesting attempt, see Staughton Lynd's "A Jobs Program for the '90s," in Social Policy, Fall 1994...

...And their talk of Jeffersonian democracy masks a commitment to free markets that, in the era of the global, transnational corporation, routinely displace and disenfranchise those local sources of power that were the bulwark of Jefferson's vision...

...Advocates of a "New Party" make a convincing case that the Democrats have become hopelessly entrenched and corrupt...

...It seems to me that there is simply no other way to think realistically about how to advance democratic politics...

...If commentators agree on one thing, it is that the election signaled a profound dissatisfaction with the political system as a whole...

...Kevin Phillips's recent book, Arrogant Capital, gives voice to this sentiment...

...We need to think more about what distinguishes xenophobic civic initiatives from legitimate democratic disputes about social boundaries, and a politics of resentment from healthy argumentation about the limits of different forms of social provision and civil justice...

...Talk of labor-law reform, for example, is certainly important, but such reform requires a political party committed to reformist strategies, with some chance of winning governmental power...

...The same could be said about welfare reform, comparable worth, or innovative forms of public investment...

...The third is the elaboration of a moral vision of democratic pluralism that is relevant to the crisis of the welfare state and the reemergence of "civil society," the rise of "multiculturalism" and the intensification of identity politics, and the serious crisis of race relations in the United States...

...Yet the project of constituting a "left wing of the possible" within the Democratic party, pursued with enormous energy by Michael Harrington and still the official position of Democratic Socialists of America, seems equally naive...

...Genuine civic responsibility rather than recrimination and resentment...

...There are many good reasons to resist what I am saying in the name of more traditional conceptions of social democratic politics...

...This does not mean that the Republicans have reshaped the political landscape...

...What are its main concerns...

...The party, it is said, did not campaign effectively enough: it failed to bring out African-American voters, who might have tipped the scales in key races such as the gubernatorial contest in New York, or to mobilize traditional supporters such as blue-collar workers...

...Its social democratic vision needs to be enriched by a more radically democratic understanding of the legitimacy crisis of the welfare state and of social democratic politics more generally...

...Cornelius Castoriadis, in a recent Dissent essay ("The Crisis of Marxism, The Crisis of Politics," Spring 1992), observes that the historical conditions of the socialist project no longer obtain, and that the new conditions pose tremendous obstacles to the politics of the democratic left...

...This is perfectly explicable, because the consituencies on which this left liberalism relied have been decimated by the decline of the labor movement, the impasse of the civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of the "left" by the politics of racial, gender, sexual, and ethnic identity...

...The Democrats seem congenitally unable to project a moral vision or indeed even to use moral language...

...And more common still is mass cynicism and indifference, ripe for demagogic exploitation...

...For it seems to feed into a politics that, at least since the first Reagan administration, has sought to scale back public provision and economic regulation, and to throw profound problems upon largely powerless state and A Note to Our Subscribers Dissent occasionally allows other magazines and organizations to mail promotional letters to our subscribers...

...Talk about civic initiative and grass-roots participation, long a staple of the left, is insufficient, if we are to distinguish between such participatory "initiatives" as California's Proposition 187 or the Christian Coalition's conquest of local school boards and genuinely democratic political activities...

...On the one hand, it requires us to shift away from many of our traditional concerns— centering around a social democratic-type party and the use of state power to redress injustice— toward a more grass-roots, localist, volunarist conception of democratic politics...

...The traditional trade union support for Democrats had little effect because the union movement is in dramatic decline, a long-term political process that Democratic centrism has abetted...

...A second concerns new strategies for the labor movement, linkages between ecology and sustainable economic growth, and public policies—like labor-law reform and new kinds of social provision—that might empower constituencies of the democratic left rather than simply create new bureaucratic structures...

...It may be that the last election will be of only a passing significance, and that it would be mistaken to draw any serious conclusions from it...

...It is a rhetoric of civic initiative and political empowerment, a vision of what we might call participatory democracy...

...and the public policy agenda has been moved drastically toward the right...

...we need to restore the Tocquevillean spirit of voluntarism that made America great...

...But these are still oases...

...When one considers the problems confronting the nation, and the depth of public cynicism about the political process, it is not hard to foresee trouble ahead for the Republicans...

...A number of points stand out: the federal government has become too bureaucratic...

...Even if there were a chicken in every pot—and there is not...

...We do so sparingly, and we screen their material carefully before granting our permission...

...enforcing a ban on abortions...

...How should the democratic left respond to this situation...

...There are, to be sure, oases in the political desert...

...Americans, it seems, like neither incumbent politicians nor governmental institutions...

...Egalitarianism rather than the Social Darwinist legitimation of hierarchy...

...The "social contract" taps into a widespread sentiment that Americans have lost control of their country and that something needs to be done to right this wrong...

...This constitutes a double challenge...

...it has not learned to "master the media" in the way that the Republicans under Reagan had done...

...Otherwise, defenses of social welfare will simply fall on the deaf ears of people who would rather support initiatives like Proposition 187...

...Much more common are pseudo-democratic efforts like United We Stand, Proposition 187, and the Republican "social contract...

...Discussion about how a democratic left could be reconstituted tends to focus on three areas...

...The success of these groups seems to prove that concerted civic action can make a difference in politics...

...Quite the contrary...

...Public opinion polls reveal a widespread and deep distrust of politicians and of the legislative process in general, a cynicism that helps to explain the continuing appeal of Ross Perot...

...There is little or no support for such programs...

...it is not clear that this would compensate for the pervasive sense that things are not right...

...More deeply, people are simply fed up with politics as usual...

...The magazine Social Policy, for example, regularly reports on community organizing efforts...

...On the other hand, Republican triumphalism is illusory...

...The Democrats were in disarray, suffering from powerful anticongressional sentiment and from too close an identification with their president, Bill Clinton, a man plagued by bad political judgment and even worse press coverage...

...For all their talk of bureaucracy, they wish dramatically to strengthen the bureaucratic state, expanding the military-industrial complex, the prison system, and the policing powers of the state...

...They appeal deeply to an electorate long subjected to powerful forces beyond its control, The irony, of course, is that for the Republicans these commitments are rhetorical rather than real...

...But for those of us not yet ready to bow before the idol of political success, the question is how might a more genuinely democratic politics be strengthened...

...and, in Gingrich's more utopian reveries, instituting a punitive welfare policy that would remove poor children from the care 186 • DISSENT Right Turn of their "derelict" parents and effectively make them wards of the state...

...In this sense the electoral vicory of the Republican party is only the tip of the political iceberg...

...The Democrats have abjured any serious commitment to reforms, and Clinton has squandered whatever credibility —and support—he could claim among the 184 • DISSENT Right Turn forces of the democratic left...

...it did not exploit the economic "prosperity" that Clinton's policies have helped to sustain...

...A commitment to liberal values of toleration and free expression rather than a blunt majoritarianism...

...Democratic politics, he notes, "is not a political endeavor like any other...

...Surely such a "defensive localism" should be challenged, and many of the policies of democratic liberalism need to be defended...

...This is one reason why they are in such bad shape...

...And yet it is hard to have sympathy for the Democrats or for Clinton...

...What passes for the democratic process is seen as removed from the citizenry, responsive to entrenched and corrupt forces beyond popular control...

...but next time they may be the victims of the same negativism...

...It would be foolhardy to dismiss this rhetoric of empowerment...

...Prosperity" failed to swing the election because "prosperity" rings hollow in an economy increasingly dominated by nonunion, lowwage, white-collar, and service-sector employment...

...For all their talk of entrenched political interests and congressional gridlock, the party of Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms is as entrenched as the Democrats, expert in the arts of pork barreling and logrolling...

...The challenge for the democratic left is not to mimic the right, but to mobilize the rhetoric and the reality of a genuinely democratic politics...

...But if you would prefer not to receive such mail, please drop us a note at Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10017...

...More ominously, the electorate has been mobilized by organized and interconnected conservative groups, including the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association, and the increasingly right-wing Republican National Committee...

...For all their talk of voluntarism, they support an economic policy that enriches wealthy Americans and bureaucratic corporate institutions at the expense of ordinary citizens, and a social policy dictated by privileged elites and entrenched interests like the insurance industry and the NRA...

...For the Democrats have abandoned even the trappings of social democracy, American-style...

...African-Americans did not turn out because the Democratic party has done little or nothing to respond to their interests...

...American politics seems poised for a period of prolonged stasis...

...The typical Democratic response—to treat the dramatic defeat as a tactical failure—is simply oblivious to what is going on...

...On the other hand, we must clarify what we mean by the idea of democracy itself...

...A cynic might suggest that the answer to this question doesn't much matter, given the obvious weakness of even traditional liberalism SPRING • 1995 • 185 Right Turn in the United States at this time...

...This time the Republicans benefited from low turnout of traditional Democratic voters, and from a tidal wave of animosity toward incumbents...

...q 188 • DISSENT...

...we need to retrieve our Jeffersonian heritage of local, self-reliant citizenship—a citizenship supported by disciplined moral character rather than by a politics of victimology and resentment...