Worries about the Democrats

...These are the decades that book-end the New Deal Order, and they have more in common with each other than with the decades in between...

...To the many who now decry the rise of identity politics, we must remind them that it did not rise in a vacuum, but rather, on the ashes of an organized working class...

...The deeper problem is that their last offensive— their own legislative agenda of 19931994—failed so utterly...

...In the twenties, the Republicans were the party of Northern Protestants...

...The agenda in American politics today is set by Gingrich & Company, and Democrats are defined not by their own programs but by their degree of disagreement with the Republicans: a liberal opposes the de-entitlization of welfare, a moderate favors only some cutbacks, and so on...

...Labor's new leadership is at once more self-reliant and assertive in organizing, and better positioned to forge a common liberal agenda...

...nothing short of the Great Depression was required to move the party beyond its civil wars...

...some recent polling in the Deep South has shown roughly 75 percent of whites voting for virtually any Republican and roughly 75 percent of blacks voting for virtually any Democrat...

...Senator) Paul Douglas demonstrated, productivity gains went to profits, dividends, and investments rather than wages...

...q 16 • DISSENT...

...J. discussions that dwell on our separateness, on how utterly devoid we are of any common points of reference, on how the epistemologies of race delimit what we see...

...The second track is to improve this dismal set of options by strengthening the movements of the left—a task made no easier by the fact that since November 1994, the movements of the left have grown depressingly more insular, or catatonic, or both...

...In the twenties, the Scopes trial and the Sacco and Vanzetti case divided America along cultural and ethnic lines, much as the Simpson trial divides America along racial lines today...

...They go back to a parting of the ways on strategy that became irrevocable in the summer of 1994, when the Federation's last stab at changing the pro-management tilt of the laws on organizing was strangled in its crib...

...Unions, he now insists, are indispensable to reversing the concentration of wealth...

...While overall union membership was shrinking to a paltry 15.5 percent of the workforce, the SEIU was growing from 625,000 to 1.1 million members...

...When Bill Clinton first won election, AFLCIO chieftains Lane Kirkland and Tom Donahue came up with a stratagem...

...Moreover, even if the Democrats hold the White House (a plausible prospect if Bill Clinton can be kept from making further late-night speeches or phone calls) and regain the Congress (a more remote prospect, particularly in the Senate), it is unlikely that they will be able to retake the offensive— and not only because they will have run almost entirely against Newt...

...It was a viewpoint with which Robert Reich in particular was identified...

...In the late seventies and early eighties, L.A...

...It is difficult to imagine, for instance, how any liberal administration can deliver on the promise of rising incomes in the absence of unions—although a couple of years ago, the only liberal administration we have still seemed indifferent to unions' demise...

...the Democrats, the party both of big-city Northern Catholics and Southern Bible-Belt whites...

...During the twenties, as then-economist (later U.S...

...Our current political conflicts and alignments are reminiscent of the twenties, too: this is hardly the first period in American history when politics chiefly meant identity politics...

...But there is a plausible strategy, even if it's not all that emotionally compelling, and it comes complete with two tracks...

...It was, in short, the consequence of a relatively high rate of unionization—and when those rates subsided to the levels of the twenties, we reverted to an earlier set of economic laws...

...Perestroika on 16th Street The roots of the revolution in the AFL-CIO actually antedate the blowout of November 1994...

...Buchanan will never be the nominee of the upscale, laissez-faire Republican party, but his antipathy to the state, to minorities, to liberal elites and to globe-trotting corporations could make him a distinct and potent third force in American politics—a deregionalized George Wallace, thriving not on sixties-style civil disorder but on nineties-style economic decline...

...The Clinton administration took office with a stated belief that increased training was the key to ending Americans' wage stagnation, and it seldom if ever adduced unions as even relevant to the income conundrum...

...Under these conditions, an election is scarcely necessary...

...Republicans of the Gingrich era have built their party on yet another rock of ethnic uniformity: as nearly as possible, they seek to be the party of the whites (a task that's easier now that Colin Powell has abandoned his flirtation with them...

...The immediate beneficiary should be the centrists clustered around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), whose program of incremental retrenchment may well be enactable precisely because it embodies rather than challenges the great American stasis...

...To the dismay of the presidents and organizing directors, though, it called as well for repealing one of the most fundamental bases of American unionism—Section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act, which outlawed company unions...

...And if we can't all get along in Los Angeles today, the fate of the UAW may have something to do with it: it's not here anymore...

...The most thorough survey of organizing we have, taken by Marshall Ganz and Richard Rothstein in the mid-eighties, showed that a scant 2 percent of the seven thousand union officials and staffers in California were engaged in anything even resembling organizing Not every union had gone gently into that good night, of course...

...The progressive planks of Clinton's 1992 campaign—national health insurance, universally available college loans, increased investment in education and infrastructure— were either whittled down to pilot-program size or defeated altogether...

...Echoes of the Jazz Age In many ways, the nineties are the twenties come again...

...Today's liberal agenda-makers are only just beginning to grapple with the even more vexing challenge of constructing a global mixed economy absent a global state...

...The revolution at the AFL-CIO is not merely the one piece of good news to which liberals can cling as the conservative tide washes over them...

...Rather, it will mark the settling ofAmerican politics onto a rather grim and unstable ground zero—with the forces that would dismantle government checked by the public's support for universal programs, and the forces that would expand or enhance government checked by both the power of business and the public's ideological predilections...

...And like their predecessors in the twenties, today's Republicans are better positioned than the Democrats to prevail in an increasingly ethnicbased politics...

...In recent months, my own city, Los Angeles, has been WINTER • 1996 • 15 American Questions deluged by post-O...

...One of the more depressing bits of current political intelligence is that Bob Kerrey, the anti-liberal Nebraska Democrat who heads the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, has recruited halfadozen center-right DLC business-types to run for the Senate in 1996...

...Now as then, the market is ascendant, government increasingly powerless, and politics tribalized...

...The unstated premise here was that the benefits of growth were shared by a clear majority of Americans...

...Curiously, neither Kirkland nor Donahue was present...

...In the South in particular (and the Gingrich revolution is rooted in the realignment of the white South), the identification of party with race is reaching new heights...

...As befits a city where history is just an obstacle to reinvention, hardly anyone has recalled that a mere twenty-two years ago, Los Angeles was considered a beacon of racial harmony, a city only 17 percent black that had nonetheless elected a black mayor (and re-elected him for the next twenty years...

...Indeed, with the exception of the 1890s and the 1930s and its aftermath, American politics is normally identity politics...

...With one notable exception...

...As a consequence, the UAW's Western region, which had been headquartered in and around Los Angeles since World War II, was abolished last year...

...George Bush's jobless recovery has become Bill Clinton's raiseless recovery...

...In some ways, the parallel with the twenties may be too hopeful...

...The first track is to derail the Gingrichites by any means available, which is to say, the Democrats...

...But as the stalemate con12 • DISSENT American Questions, tinues, as government fails to deliver on behalf of an angry electorate whose incomes have stagnated, the longer term beneficiary may well be the nationalist right that Pat Buchanan currently heads...

...By the same token, Sweeney & Company take a far less sectarian approach to grassroots political activity than Kirkland and his purist band...

...In the wake of the Dunlop debacle, during the fall of 1994, Sweeney called on Kirkland and asked him to free up Federation reserve funds for new organizing efforts: if the law wasn't going to be changed, there were still some proven, if irregular, strategies by which labor could organize...

...But Kirkland said no...

...Correspondingly, the defeat of much of the Gingrich program or even of the Gingrichites themselves at the polls next November will not mean that the idea of government has been revalidated...

...Indeed, the 1995 election was the first in over sixty years in which Samuel Beer's famous formulation— that the Democrats are the sun of American politics and the Republicans the moon—had to be completely reversed...

...In the twenties, black America despaired of coalition and turned to the self-help hype of Marcus Garvey, even as a sector of black America has turned to Louis Farrakhan today...

...Perhaps most crucially, liberals of the twenties had already formulated, ifpartially and imperfectly, many of the economic remedies they were to set in place beginning in the thirties...

...They induced the incoming administration to establish a commission, chaired by former Labor Secretary John Dunlop, that would strike a grand bargain: American business would consent to a more equitable labor law if the unions would embrace a more cooperative workplace...

...It's a stalemate that's likely to benefit two political groupings...

...The nearest regional headquarters is now in St...

...Throughout the decade, the Democrats threatened to split apart on the questions of religion and ethnicity embodied in the candidacies of Tammany Hall's Al Smith...

...14 • DISSENT American Questions For Kirkland's absence was emblematic of any number of larger absences—most fundamentally, of labor's withdrawal from the organizing wars...

...He believed that organizing could not proceed without broad-based support from outside the movement for changing labor law, but that labor's political action programs should eschew the taint of coalitions whenever possible...

...An equivalent list for the nineties is not easily adduced...

...The good news is that the Democrats prevailed— and that in poll after poll, respondents reject the Republican revolution in most of its particulars, though they continue to support an assault on government waged on the level of generalities...

...In the twenties, an older, "native-stock" America lashed out at a distinct group of relative newcomers and the more cosmopolitan culture that came in their wake...

...The bad news is that American liberalism has been reduced to rebuttals, that the liberal base is both shrunken and scattered, and that the Democratic project has become little more than arresting a rightward gallop by acquiescing in a rightward drift...

...Later that fall, after November's electoral disaster, McEntee also approached Kirkland and asked him to support Project '95, a labor alliance with Citizen Action and other groups directed at retaking the House two years hence...

...From public power to minimum wages, from social insurance to greater aggregate purchasing power (though not yet deficit spending), the litany of New Deal remedies existed at least as talking points among liberal thinkers...

...It remains an article of faith in the economic mainstream that the uptick in productivity that the economy is at long last experiencing will at some point translate to higher wages...

...But with many of their supporters and potential supporters now downwardrather than upward-bound, that mantle has worn perilously thin...

...It was the consequence not of some immutable economic law, however, but rather of the fact that unions were winning costofliving adjustments, annual productivity increases, and higher wages generally...

...The great issues around which twenties politics revolved—the drive to shut down immigration and preserve an old-stock American culture, the rise of a violent racist and nativist right—have their obvious current-day counterparts...

...In the November elections in Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, and elsewhere, the Democrats did not run on a program of their own...

...Since the white backlash first entered national politics in 1964, the Democrats have forestalled this possibility by clinging to their mantle as the party of social security and upward mobility...

...Surely, they are also indispensable to any effort to revive a multiracial liberalism...

...Louis...

...The Sweeney/ Trumka/McEntee alliance that prevailed at this fall's AFL-CIO convention believes that deemphasizing organizing until Congress amends the law is tantamount to acquiescing in labor's demise...

...No one was more furious than AFSCME president Jerry McEntee, who reached for a marker, scribbled something on the report's back cover, and held it up for all to see...

...That multiracial liberalism was rooted in particular institutions, and nowhere more deeply than in the United Auto Workers, which in the course of a few short years in the 1960s had set up the main communitybased organizations in both black and Latino L.A., come up with the early funding for Cesar Chavez's Farm Workers, and provided the shock troops for that most multiracial of presidential candidacies, Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign...

...Political scientists and political junkies, for instance, have long believed that the best predictor of a president's reelection was the direction and rate of economic growth in the spring before the election...

...The Democrats, by contrast, remain dependent on broad-based multiracial support if they are to succeed...

...It is, in short, a grand moment to succumb to the politics of moral witness—to offer critiques in the absence of plausible strategies...

...These are strategic assumptions that the new regime at 16th Street has reversed...

...in recent years, it's lost much of its aerospace...

...That is the economic reality that has resurfaced over the past couple of years...

...Again, Kirkland demurred...

...During this time, a number of other unions, most especially the Clothing and Textile workers in the South, also developed a guerilla organizing culture, working around a dysfunctional law by enlisting both veteran rank-and-filers and new recruits in successful organizing drives...

...They ran against Newt Gingrich and the fine print in his Contract, and more particularly against the proposed Republican cuts in Medicare, education, and environmental programs...

...In the summer of 1994, the first copy of the commission's report reached the AFL-CIO, and the Federation's legal staff called in the presidents and organizing directors of their largest unions to discuss it...

...He had written two words: "Where's Lane...

...lost its auto factories...

...an ethWINTER • 1996 • 13 American Questions nic census will suffice...

...Over the past fourteen years, for instance, the Service Employees (SEIU)—the union headed by John Sweeney, now the AFL-CIO's new president—had devoted 30 percent of its program budget to organizing campaigns among such presumably unorganizable workers as janitors and home health care employees...

...When the only electoral options are a desultory defense of a flawed status quo and a headlong descent into barbarism, the left has little choice but to throw in with the desultory defenders...

...Some of the most basic indices of the past sixty years no longer apply...

...That was indeed the normal course of events in post–World War II America...

...Over the past two years, though, as productivity has risen and the income even of skilled workers has stagnated, Reich seems to have altered his views...

...Over the next few minutes, a sickening realization spread through the room: we can't even control our own goddam commission...

...to whatever degree elections do come to resemble an ethnic census, the Democrats are doomed...

...But it was also a consequence of the movement's utter abandonment of organizing...

...And to those who wish to move liberalism off the defensive, the revival of American labor is just about the only game in town...

...The report did call for stronger sanctions against corporations that violated the organizing rights of workers...

...Certainly, labor's decline was in large part the result of factors over which the movement had no control—the decimation of American manufacturing, the willingness of corporations to violate the NLRA in order to defeat organizing drives...

...Plainly, that is no longer the case...

...It will not mean that the forces for a liberal resurgence have grown...

...In the nineties, many Americans are reacting to the freezing or decline of living standards by lashing out at a bewildering array of targets—at newcomers, non-white oldcomers, and a government they see as taxing them to benefit these other groups, while doing nothing to arrest the nation's moral and economic slide...

...Labor's comeback is also the sine qua non for a renaissance of American liberalism, and the linchpin of any efforts to block the further tribalization of our politics...

...Thirty percent of the new Federation budget will go to the training and deployment of a new cadre of organizers, and additional resources to the development of strategic campaigns against anti-union corporations...

...as recently as two years ago, the Secretary of Labor authored a Labor Day op-ed piece on the maldistribution of income that didn't mention unions once...

...In the twenties, after all, liberalism still had a number of prominent champions: George Norris, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert La Follette come to mind...