The higher immorality, 2000

...Pundits fixed on his personality to explain both his modest successes and his embarrassing failures, and the insecure president was not inclined to disagree...

...Rank-and-file Democrats, in Florida and elsewhere, mobilized to stop the specter of Reaganism redux...

...This activist coalition was full of energy—and reasonably well financed and remarkably free of internal disputes...

...Few Dissent readers will need convincing about Republican offenses...

...But he bequeathed no liberal vision or coherent policy agenda for either his uninspiring vice president or Democratic candidates for the House to run on...

...Uncomfortable in the role of crusading populist, they played it quite badly...

...This jeremiad was clouded by nostalgia...

...What Mills called public relations no longer disguises events...

...Ralph Nader, to his credit, at least protested the domestic outrages...

...Until the 1940s, this meant equality for white men only, but the movement for black freedom and then the upsurge of feminism forced party activists to accept a broader, more tolerant meaning of the term...

...MICHAEL KAZIN teaches history at Georgetown University...

...According to exit polls, all the squabbles about plans to "save" Social Security, improve education, and subsidize pharmaceuticals for seniors blurred rather than sharpened the differences between Gore and Bush on these issues...

...Bush the Younger realizes the day of conservative "revolution" has passed...

...Most of the Democrats who lost (Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Gore, but also those justifiably forgotten nominees, Alton Parker and John W. Davis) touted their managerial skills and experience...

...At last, our famously nonpartisan Supreme Court chose a winner...

...As such, he is a fitting chief executive for that majority of voters who oppose new federal programs but don't favor eliminating any that benefit them...

...Like Nader in 2000, Mills refused to make distinctions between those crackpot elitists who could be helpful to progressive causes (mostly labor, in the mid-fifties) and those who blocked their way...

...ow, AS THEN, the centrist rhetoric of both parties barely masks the intensity — of closely matched partisan combat...

...it is the event, an unending contest of spin and counter-spin that enthralls journalists and others in that select group of Americans who consume politics on a regular basis...

...There is, of course, no simple path to reviving a liberal left...

...But his portrayal of public life midway through the Eisenhower era rather accurately matches our sorry class of politicians early in the reign of Bush the Younger...

...few expected their nominee to do more than preserve the status quo...

...The ninety-three thousand Floridians who voted Green helped bring on five weeks of ruthless legal combat, in which each side sanctimoniously assured us that its loophole-hunting was in the service of democracy while the opposition was out to thwart the popular will...

...For all their ardor, labor, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League have neither the numbers, the resources, nor the public credibility to lead a popular insurgency that can do more than play defense for the next four years...

...Mills thundered, "They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations...

...Its members gave Al Gore more help than his miserable campaign deserved...

...His clumsy opponent didn't fare much better...

...My plan gives you free prescription drugs on weekends and holidays...

...Thus, Clinton's clever strategy of "triangulation" after Democrats lost the House in 1994 blocked the growth of the right, both as a movement and in Congress...

...Back in 1956, C. Wright Mills's depressing critique hit bookstores just as thousands of black citizens in Montgomery, Alabama, were walking to work instead of paying bus fares to a city that violated their human rights...

...In a year when millions of voters longed for a candidate who could inspire some civic fervor (if he'd been nominated, John McCain would likely have won with ease), Gore's vow to work like hell if he gained the White House lacked a clear statement of a noble goal or two that all that diligence was supposed to achieve...

...he seeks to build a new coalition on the right by muffling old controversies rather than sharpening them...

...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 33...

...Al Gore tried to "go populist" against companies from which he and Bill Clinton had earlier solicited millions of dollars in contributions, then essentially retreated to the fiscal conservatism and free-market dogma that were always closer to his heart...

...But they still need leaders...

...But his fury at Gore and Clinton lured him into the unethical trap inhabited by radicals who prefer the rule of a principled enemy to that of a capricious ally...

...the capacity to elaborate alternatives and gauge their consequences with the executive stance...

...respect for public debate with unshrewd notions of psychological warfare...

...His most recent book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s...

...If the Democratic Party, as Bill Bradley recently claimed, "remains a vibrant institution holding out real hope for social and political change," then it's mainly the grassroots forces who make it so...

...George W. Bush, the first president with an M.B.A., exudes the easy confidence of a CEO who has nothing very important to sell but is blessed with an efficient staff and a tested marketing strategy to help him sell it...

...Now, as then, a long spell of macroeconomic success allows candidates and officeholders to neglect yawning inequalities and mass suffering, to ignore the problems of people who are not mobilized to fight for themselves...

...Now, even more than in the fifties, national politicians strive to avoid giving offense rather than to inspire participation...

...He gained an edge in the popular vote because of the persistent cultural divide between crowded oceanside metropolises (where he scored a landslide) and the rest of the country on such matters as abortion, gun control, and whether a president who lies in public about his sex life should stay in office...

...Figures like Ashcroft, Jesse Helms, and Tom DeLay have real clout, of course, but the administration's public face is full of "compassion," "inclusion," and, yes, "diversity...

...BILL CLINTON did little to encourage Democratic hopefuls to view the party as a vehicle for promoting a reform agenda in any area but cultural tolerance...

...In the century since William Jennings Bryan captured the presidential nomination of 1896 with his scorn for the trickle-down economics of Wall Street and the trusts, the party has burnished an image of itself as the champion of egalitarian reform and corporate regulation...

...George W. Bush purred about "compassion" while he planned to block an increase in the minimum wage, cut funds for protecting the environment, and spend billions to "defend" the nation with a technology that doesn't work against a threat of foreign missiles that doesn't exist...

...Neither Gore nor Bush made more than a passing reference to problems of great significance and some urgency: the rising number of Americans without health insurance, the widening economic gap between people who write big campaign checks and those who clean their houses and wait on their tables, the billions of dollars still being spent on nuclear weapons, the twenty-five million Africans with HIV, or the encroaching crisis DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 31 PLAN B of global warming (despite Gore's having written a book about it...

...And the antiglobalization left is, at least so far, visible mainly as a roving demonstration...

...On the other hand, Democrats adopt a business strategy at their peril...

...Every Democrat who gained the White House in the twentieth century (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton) spoke for lofty liberal ideas, even if his performance in office inevitably fell short of the promise...

...Forty-five years ago, during another era of self-satisfaction, C. Wright Mills concluded his book The Power Elite with a furious indictment of "The Higher Immorality" "Crackpot realists," he dubbed politicians and their handlers from both parties who, "in the name of practicality . . . have projected a utopian image of capitalism...

...Watching the two candidates speak about their rival plans," wrote David Brooks (the nation's wittiest, least predictable conservative journalist), "was like watching an ad war between cellular phone rate plans: My plan gives you more choices...

...Even by the low standard we've come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest oozed with verbal immorality and bad faith...

...African-American voters, organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, exposed the structural barriers to an equal franchise...

...As ever, the only reliable response to the higher immorality is the higher ethic of ordinary people on the move...

...Since Eisenhower, sober-minded Republicans have recognized the power of this mass opinion and, conservative rhetoric aside, usually have governed accordingly...

...Yet, one should never underestimate the potency of the ideal of egalitarian justice, which unites the fragments of the American left, at least in spirit...

...The real scandal of the 2000 race was a joint sin of omission...

...Absent such convictions, the GOP feasted on the image of a man alone with his fundraisers, his celebrities, and his undisciplined libido...

...My plan gives you more minutes...

...Fortunately, in the campaign and the battle for Florida that followed, rank-and-file Democrats demonstrated how vital the party's ideological heritage remains...

...Pro-choice, gay rights, and environmental organizers reminded their supporters (including many who flirted with Nader) of the difficult and defensive legal battles to come if Bush were victorious...

...Unionists of all races gave Gore a twenty-two-point advantage in the national vote and put him over the top in close Midwestern 32 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B states, with strong warnings about the GOP's fondness for union-busting and privatizing Social Security...