Democrats in Disarray
"THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, ITS INTEL- lectuals, idea brokers and activists are in total disarray, a situation that has in fact been underway for years," wrote Walter Dean Burnham in 1982. ' The...
...Their corrective will be an emphasis on diplomacy and negotiations-whether with the Soviets or in Central America-and a slower growth in defense spending...
...The degree to which it can be incorporated into the Mondale campaign and the Democratic Party will be seen during the presidential campaign and after...
...election-the three central questions of the 1984 contest are: 1. What is the best way to guarantee long-term economic growth and prosperity...
...See Finlay Lewis, Mondale: Portrait of an American Politician (New York: Harper and Row, 1980...
...Jewish investment bankers, excluded from the dominant circles of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant power, were enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal and have maintained their support throughout the past 50 years...
...Neoliberals' most fundamental accusation is that traditional Liberalism is insensitive to the needs of private enterprise...
...Business Week magazine, which gives interested coverage to the neoliberal phenomenon, has argued the case for labor-management agreements...
...among blacks, only 49.5...
...His "New Realism" suggests no new blueprint for the cities, no more money for training and manpower programs, no new social welfare initiatives...
...Hubert Humphrey, embodied the zenith of Liberalism, Mondale represents its sluggish end...
...9. Ibid., p.137...
...The old Will Rogers joke-"I don't belong to an organized political party: I'm a Democrat"--resurfaces every four years when the party once again pulls together its disparate coalition of forces...
...The women's movement is younger, more amorphous in composition and more varied in class, with few leaders of national stature...
...Neoliberalism wants to get American capitalism working again, while rejecting the laissez faire approach of the Right as a threat to social peace and environmental health...
...while they are reconciled to the inevitability of the East-West conflict, they view it as a given which U.S...
...On international issues, the Democrats will hope to make the label of warmongerer stick to President Reagan...
...Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Campus Crusade for Christ and the recently formed American Coalition of Traditional Values...
...Others still were troubled by the clash that erupted between the Jackson campaign and major Jewish leaders...
...44REPORT ON THE AMERICAS E a 0 CREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 44Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, 1964 On Vietnam, he affirmed the reflexive anti-communism of his liberal roots and followed Humphrey's lead in support of the war, a decision that he now claims to regret...
...THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, ITS INTELlectuals, idea brokers and activists are in total disarray, a situation that has in fact been underway for years," wrote Walter Dean Burnham in 1982...
...Neoliberalism is heir to that tradition...
...And in today's Democratic Party, there is no shortage of challenges...
...In 1964, after the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater as their candidate, the corporate coffers were opened almost exclusively to the Democrats...
...At best, it is an incipient doctrine whose future influence hangs in the balance...
...The week after the July 1984 Democratic Convention, Business Week was emphatic: "The Democratic Party that Mondale is leading into battle is badly split along generational and racial lines and this growing factionalism is making it difficult for the party to come up with the fresh approaches all sides agree it will need to defeat the Republicans in 1984 and beyond...
...Clearly, to win in November, the Democrats must bring more voters, including many first-time voters, to the polls...
...Its concerns are liberal democratic: individual rights and individual freedom...
...But the cleavages' within the party are real and deep...
...Since the economic recovery seems dynamic enough to sustain itself through the November election, the Democrats will be unable to base their campaign on the issues of unemployment, inflation and the standard of living...
...He will argue for a tax increase-for upper income brackets-and has already challenged Reagan to accept its inevitability...
...The essence of neoliberalism is a call to new enterprise...
...Since Roosevelt, however, the Democratic Party has been a multi-class party, embodying an alliance of business, working-class, minority and certain geographical interests...
...Southern capital, alienated from the Republican Party since the Civil War, has been able to exercise disproportionate influence both within the party and the government through more than 100 years of Democratic rule in the South...
...Mondale was in on the ground floor in the early 1970s when international business and political elites attempted to chart a new course for Western capitalism...
...They promise to bring dramatic change to U.S...
...Among white voters, the turnout was 61.4...
...In a 1976 survey, 30.4% of people in lower working- class occupations said they had never voted, com- pared with 20.2% of craftsmen and service workers, 13.5% of white-collar salaried workers and 6.0% of the property-owning middle class...
...A Mondale victory will certainly strengthen Kirkland's hand within the AFL-CIO and give his views real weight in a new administration...
...3. What social and cultural values will ensure domestic harmony and social peace...
...flat rate taxation and a consumption tax...
...Mondale's relationship to organized labor has been controversial throughout the campaign...
...One is the black people's movement, the other the women's movement...
...They urge a strong defense, but criticize strategic obsolescence and Pentagon waste...
...policy in Central America and the Caribbean made him the first major political figure since 1948 to break with the East-West paradigm that has dominated foreign policy discourse...
...Neoliberals' "new ideas" tinker with the economic and political system in the hope that they will trigger a new era of growth and prosperity like that which followed World War II...
...Burnham, "The Current Crisis," p.1 2 4 . 12...
...Kirkland is traditional Liberalism incarnate, and has long been a key actor in defining the Cold War stance of organized labor, which it has steadfastly maintained since the progressive/liberal wars of the late 1940s...
...As an initial stab at a new national strategy, it was fraught with contradiction and conflict, but its overall effect was quite successfuleven inspiring...
...Randall Rothenberg, The Neo Liberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp...
...NTERNATIONALLY, NEOLIBERALISM ADvocates free trade, but is prepared to use the federal government to subsidize U.S...
...This less affluent amalgam of groups, alienated by the trends of the previous two decades, has been organized through the various political, cultural and religious components of the neo-populist New Right, among them the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the Eagle Forum, the Rev...
...So does its concern to meet basic social needs and preserve the environment, for this class would prefer to maintain its privilege within a framework of social harmony...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 43Are the Democrats Different...
...Jesse Helms in November) and former governor of California Jerry Brown...
...In 1960, 65.4% of the electorate voted, the highest percentage since 1908...
...Like the Jackson campaign, it raises far-reaching questions that affect an entire society...
...But among the Yuppies-who feel that these "hard times" leave no room for the inefficiency, sloppiness and charity of the affluent 1960s-his calls for renewed growth, leaner and more efficient government, individual initiative, the post-industrial miracles of high-tech, labor/management agreements, worker re-training, military reform, and restraint in Central America struck a resonant chord...
...Governors Bruce Babbit of Arizona, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and James Hunt of North Carolina (who challenges Sen...
...It speaks to a complex set of cultural, political and economic issues whose articulation as a program is still in need of refinement...
...3. See Robert Armstrong, "Reagan's Uneasy Alliance," Report on the Americas (July-August 1981), pp...
...To counter Soviet and Marxist influence in the international student movement, Mondale and Allard Lowenstein-later noted as an anti-Vietnam War activist, worked together to form the National Student Association, which was revealed in the mid-1960s to have been a recipient of extensive CIA support...
...4 Throughout the post-war period corporate America has kept its eye and its money on the Democratic Party, lest it drift toward a more social democratic shore...
...progressive" whites and even the white working class...
...5 Old patrician families in the Northeastern states and heirs to the "mug-wump" tradition- a reformist tendency among the urban "gentry" during the late 19th Century-have been another source of subsidy, as well as political leadership...
...They are skeptical of intervention and urge a "neo-realism" that accepts certain adjustments to traditional postwar notions of U.S...
...Both seek full equality and the extension of democratic rights...
...In its early days, Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign had all the earmarks of a classic liberal "interest group" campaign, whose ultimate objective was a larger slice of the pie...
...It also aimed to keep the restive labor rank and file and an emerging generation of new leaders committed to traditional strategies and established personalities...
...both have an expression-though not their only one-in the Democratic Party...
...DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY 1. Burnham, The Current Crisis, p. 2 6 8 . 2. Business Week, July 30, 1984...
...The Jackson campaign-like Mel King's in last year's Boston mayoral race-has offered a new model of progressive politics in the United States...
...The Democrats' own economic programs emphasize traditional management of demand, a better balancing of fiscal and monetary policy and tax reform-in essence the "New Economics" of Liberalism's heyday...
...T HE 20TH CENTURY REPUBLICAN PARTY, by contrast, has been predominantly a oneclass party of the rich and the established...
...The reciprocal loyalty between Mondale and labor is the result of his leadership role in the network of institutions-Americans for Democratic Action, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the League for Industrial Democracythat have defined post-war Liberalism '7 But the most intriguing unknown is the man's character...
...political life over the next decade...
...Neoliberal ideas also emanate from the Gallatin Institute, a Washington-based public policy institute...
...But even if the Democrats win in November, the pressure from below may be hard to resist in the decade ahead...
...6 Labor's clout within the Democratic Party has in fact diminished, in part because of changes in the structure of the economy and composition of the workforce, and in part because unions have done little to forestall declining membership...
...They include: "* a commitment to high-tech industry...
...HALLENGING MONDALE AND TRADItional liberalism from the right of the party is neoliberalism, a new tendency whose most visible leader is Gary Hart...
...For the short term, they are an essential counterweight to the pull from the right of the party...
...Mondale's tight relationship with the top leadership of the AFL-CIO also suggests that it will be hard for him to break away from the anti-communist paradigm in foreign affairs...
...Ramparts, March 1967...
...Since the late 1960s, though, labor has found it difficult-at least, in national elections-to rally rank-and-file support behind its chosen candidate, and its financial assistance to candidates is dwarfed by the contributions of business and other interests...
...In 1984 two mass movements in the United States challenge the limits of accepted definitions of equality and democracy...
...With the Republicans dominated by the militant Right, those attitudes resonate today as neoliberalism: graciously meritocratic but responsible...
...In the absence of a socialist tradition or a labor party, the Democrats have historically acted as one of the principal political vehicles for movements to expand democratic rights and protest injustice...
...The Democrats' San Francisco platform most di- rectly challenges the Republicans on the cultural is- sues, with its advocacy of the Equal Rights Amend- ment, reproductive freedom and-more cauti- ously-homosexual rights...
...Leaving aside questions of personality and the candidates' "goofs"--factors that are frequently decisive in a U.S...
...The Election and After," The New York Review of Books, August 16, 1984, p. 3 3 . 14...
...Dying industries would be allowed to go under...
...The Democratic Party, then, ostensibly the party of the working class, has suffered worst from the decline in voter participation...
...Black leadership of major cities and the possibility of black political power in the South are dynamic factors in the Democratic Party's future capacity to mobilize mass support...
...For society at large, it raises questions of essential priorities and values and the viability of political and economic systems...
...OVER THE LONG TERM, THE PARTY HAS depended on wealthy backers in certain industrial sectors-from the entertainment and communications industries, the consumer-oriented merchandise fortunes (Sears, Macy's, Jewel Tea, City Federal Stores) and several Southern oil fortunes...
...The conservative and business media might lead one to believe that organized labor is the real power behind the Democrats, as it is behind the social democratic parties of Europe...
...It has also been a very important campaigner for abortion rights, including funding for poor women...
...exports to compete on equal terms with other countries which use similar devices...
...Only 3% of the population, it is well-organized, politically cohesive and clear about its interests...
...23-24...
...M ONDALE'S HISTORY, THEN, IS AMBIguous...
...Urban political machines are a second means of mobilizing and sustaining the party's mass base...
...How much of the Mondale of 1984 is anti-communist cold warrior, and how much the "managerialist" of the early Carter years...
...role abroad and lowered defense spending...
...Big business, for one, is not unsympathetic to the Democrats...
...1, 1980...
...a federal capital budget...
...By the end, however, the Rainbow Coalition held out the prospect of the first mass-based politics of the Left since 1948...
...a special class of corporate stock to raise money for new plant, equipment and research...
...For millions, however, the Jackson campaign revitalized the principle of political participation...
...8. Ibid...
...Several tendencies coexist within the women's movement...
...8 Those identified as leading neoliberal intellectuals include Lester Thurow, an economist at MIT, Robert Reich, also an economist and an advocate of industrial policy, Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly magazine and James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic...
...Voter registration drives and intense efforts to get out the vote on November 6th are the sine qua non of a Democratic victory...
...Did Mondale in fact move beyond the failures of the traditional liberal framework to embrace some of the new elite strategies for national and global management that took shape during the 1970s...
...But its ability to deliver the female vote is still an unknown quantity...
...It is still quite inchoate, and for that reason hard to characterize...
...T HE YEARS SINCE HUMPHREY'S DEFEAT raise many questions about how Mondale would act if elected president...
...5. G. William Domhoff, Fat Cats and Democrats (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972), chapter 1. 6. Michael Barone, The Almanac of American Politics (Washington D.C.: National Journal, 1983), pp.13391343...
...It is the Vietnam War, not Munich, that colors their perception of how to run foreign policy, just as it is the perceived failure of Johnson's Great Society that shades their domestic analysis...
...He has been a pivotal supporter of such institutions as the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which helped design the Salvadorean agrarian reform program and has been a frequent conduit for CIA funds in Latin America...
...During its first four years, the undisguised objective of the Reagan Administration has been to halt the fight for sexual equality and restore the traditional patriarchal structure of the family...
...Three dominant figures of the liberal era-Humphrey, Mondale and the 1968 peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy-were all from Minnesota...
...AMONG IMMIGRANT-AMERICANS, THE Jewish Community has a special place...
...Their numbers have increased in the last 15 years, both numerically-because of the post-war baby boom-and proportionately-because of the expansion of professional and managerial jobs...
...The second "democratic" current within the Democratic Party confronts this challenge head-on...
...As the dominant party since the Great Depression, its twin tasks have been to ensure the conditions for business growth and to mitigate class, racial and-recently-gender conflict through reform...
...also Business Week, July 2, 1984...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...It looks to a trimmed-down, toned-up future, faithful to the post-war objectives of growth, domestic harmony and global hegemony...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...Together, they have the potential to deliver a large anti-Reagan vote...
...Now, in the November election, its central issues of concernthe ERA and reproductive freedom-face their first directly national test...
...Yet one of the candidate's key foreign policy advisers is David Aaron, a hardliner on Carter's National Security Council...
...The world management orientation favored by the Trilateralists in the early 1970s had surrendered to a strategy for restoring U.S...
...The less Mondale is challenged, the more likely he is to indulge his traditional liberal instincts (including his anti-communism...
...Their electoral coalition, forged during the New Deal, threatens to come apart, its identity strained by the contradictory demands of its members...
...Nonetheless, it is of great importance in the creation of an effective political alternative to challenge the emerging hegemony of the Right...
...Peter Thompson, "Bilderberg and the West," in Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism, p.157...
...Post-war prosperity weakened the party machines as development capital went to the suburbs and the children of the Irish, Italian, Polish and other migrants followed...
...the message, "be a capitalist, but a capitalist with heart...
...The Rainbow Coalition must also find institutional forms to sustain itself between elections: that, too, remains an unanswered challenge...
...In the suburbs, other forces have channeled their energies, sometimes for the Democrats, but increasingly for the Republicans...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...Is he an ineffectual bumbler or a deft politician with a special gift for reconciling opposing interests...
...Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980...
...THE "DEMOCRATIC" TENDENCY WITHIN the party is its most volatile and least developed...
...That setback, coupled with the Vietnam disaster and the upheavals of the 1960s, shook the cOnfidence of many liberals, perhaps irreparably...
...It offers a possible common core around which the many distinct struggles for social justice and international peace can coalesce and mount a credible alternative to the Right...
...0o These are the now-famous young urban professionals or "Yuppies"-the term which stuck to them during the 1984 Democratic primaries...
...The Rainbow Coalition is still little more than an idea, but it is an idea of extraordinary power...
...Not only the Right, but also Democratic contender Gary Hart, have characterized Mondale as labor's pawn...
...Since 1952, the mean percentage of the two-party vote received by the Democrats has been a meager 47.6...
...Certainly, the Democratic Party platform-largely a reflection of Mondale's wishes-is less aggressive on international issues than the Republicans...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 41Are the Democr Ats Different...
...Jackson's call for deep cuts in the defense budget reflected an understanding that justice at home requires a new U.S...
...It is, however, only one actor among the many interests that make up the party...
...Today's Democrats are in crisis...
...Constitution and reproductive freedom, as well as its organizational skills, will mobilize working-class and poor women, whose principal concerns in a time of recession and budget cuts are economic ones...
...The National Organization of Women (NOW), a predominantly white middle-class body, has pulled the movement into the Democratic Party, where it has led the fight for the ERA...
...This happened again in 1976, when the multinational business community, anxious about the political and economic crises of the Nixon years, gave broad backing to Jimmy Carter...
...Yet one characteristic at least seems evident from the primaries and the convention...
...The Jackson campaign put the question of the Third World on the political agenda on its own terms as an issue of mass concern...
...N EOLIBERALISM ALSO REPRESENTS A generational challenge by younger Democratic politicians who took part in neither the New Deal nor the liberal/progressive wars...
...Besides the strain of holding together the party's diverse constituent groups, three ideological tendencies now contend for dominance: traditional liberal, neoliberal andto coin a phrase-"democratic...
...Neoliberals are not obsessed with the Soviet Union...
...their workers--or "human capital" in neoliberal parlance-would be guaranteed re-training in skills appropriate to the post-industrial high technology world of the late 20th and 21st centuries...
...That year, blue-collar and service workers represented 75% of the "party of non-voters...
...NOW's political clout within the party was decisive in securing the vice-presidential nomination for Geraldine Ferraro in San Francisco...
...The choice of Geraldine Ferraro suggests a willingness to go toe-to-toe with the Right on social and cultural questions in a real, and potentially ugly, grassroots fight...
...The shift is due in part to the post-war affluence of this community, conflict with the political agenda of its traditional allies in the black community and its absolute support for the State of Israel...
...However, the Rainbow Coalition has a long road to travel before it becomes a real political force...
...Walter Mondale represents what could most accurately be called traditional Liberalism, whose fundamental vision was summed up in the previous article...
...On nuclear policy, neoliberals favor a mutually verifiable freeze and a renewal of talks with the Soviet Union...
...Mass support and grassroots financial backing for the Democratic Party, meanwhile, are organized according to class, ethnic and gender interests...
...women, gays and lesbians...
...Hart argues for a revitalized Navy and the retraining of combat officers to give them greater flexibility...
...Neoliberalism has attracted attention in the business community as a possible alternative to the risks of polarization inherent in the strategy of the Right...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 47Are the Democr Ats Different...
...Behavior like this contributed to his reputation for caution, especially when dealing with entrenched interests...
...As Jerry Sanders has brilliantly described in his book, Peddlers of Crisis the Right exploited the continuing wave of revolutionary upheaval in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East during the Carter Administration to such a point that it forced a total retreat on Carter's two key foreign policy initiatives...
...In 1980, union membership stood at only 23% of all employed workers...
...As yet, it is 46REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 46 REPORT ON THE AMERICASE m Uueens, New York, 1965 hardly a fully formed ideology...
...Beneficiaries of the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society reform programs, leaders of these communities are influential both as this generation's urban power brokers-Birmingham mayor Richard Barrington, Detroit's Coleman Young, Atlanta's Andrew Young-and as advocates of expanded democracy and a new era of reform...
...By contrast, since the 1950s the Democratic Party has also attracted many men and women who have benefitted from post-war prosperity as members of a burgeoning class of managers and professionals...
...A Mondale defeat in November will probably mean changes in the top echelons of the AFL-CIO...
...Liberalism, the de facto ideology of the party since the early 1950s, no longer compels unity...
...It is elitist but reformist-from the top down...
...But if Mondale's mentor, Sen...
...Many early New Deal policymakers had been part of the "progressive movement" and found Theodore Roosevelt an attractive figure, with his "Bull Moose" conception of national planning and top-down reforms...
...He led important battles for school integration and bussing and tried to stimulate interest in migrant workers' and children's rights, but disappointed fellow liberals when he won a highly prized seat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee and then failed to challenge its conservative leadership...
...policy must move beyond...
...It must win back the working-class and minority vote, and bring out the women's vote as a new kind of bloc...
...Gary Hart is the expert in this field...
...years as vice-president...
...His proposals include adoption of a new "grand strategy" that relies on military maneuver, not military might, to overcome the enemy...
...economic superiority will ultimately carry the day...
...7. Hacker, UIS: A Statistical Portrait, pp.125, 137, 139...
...Schooled in the battles which Humphrey led against communists and progressives in Minnesota's Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party during the late 1940s, Mondale went to Washington as executive secretary of the Students for Democratic Action, student arm of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action...
...At the same time, the neoliberal call for initiative, its emphasis on reward for merit and its promise of new opportunities for those capable of taking risks all appeal to a younger managerial class...
...It proposes a new alliance of the Left, made up of blacks, latinos and other minorities...
...M ANY OBSERVERS ON THE LEFT SAW the extraordinary potential of the Jackson campaign, while others were hesitant to break with Mondale when faced with the prospect of a Reagan victory and the untried quality of the Rainbow Coalition...
...From there, he oversaw and encouraged campus battles against Henry Wallace, the progressives and the CPUSA...
...freedom for pension funds to invest in venture capital endeavors...
...This suggests that if opposed from Right or Left, Mondale will adapt his position to accommodate the challenge...
...The 1980 U.S...
...Only with the Reagan Coalition in 1980 did the Republicans seriously offer small businesspeople, petty professionals and workers a place in their councils of power...
...For the Democrats to win in November, both movements-black and feminist-must feel that their needs will be addressed by a Democratic administration...
...With the triumph of the Right in 1980, this liberal feminist program has come under direct attack...
...It demands that the Democratic Party rededicate itself to the principles of equality and justice, renew its commitment to rebuild the nation's cities and recognize the full extent of unemployment and poverty...
...It opens the possibility of supplanting traditional Liberalism, and might potentially even attract some who see the appeal of neoliberalism...
...A number of rising politicians, in addition to Gary Hart, are included in the list of notable neoliberals...
...Allen Hunter, "In the Wings: New Right Organization and Ideology," Radical America (Spring 1981), p.113...
...But the following year he was selected as running mate by his fellow Trilateralist Jimmy Carter, and served four SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 45Are the Democrats Different...
...As a national force, this new black movement demands that its concerns be placed on society's agenda...
...The early support that Walter Mondale received from the AFL-CIO reflected an effort by the labor leadership to re-assert its agenda within the party...
...NOW's agenda has a primarily middle-class appeal, and it remains to be seen whether its platform of an equal rights amendment to the U.S...
...If he cannot overcome the widespread perception that he is an insipid personality, then his political skills are obviously too subtle for his own good...
...The welfare state is necessary-even essential-for social harmony, but it should not stifle business interests...
...But the Jewish community displays a growing conservatism that threatens the re-alignment of major Jewish organizations with the Republican Party...
...But Jesse Jackson and the embryonic Rainbow Coalition have defined a tangible left pole within the Democratic Party, and challenged the entire left side of the political spectrum to engage in the political process and fight back...
...It made substantive contributions to the national political agenda, and powerfully established the link between foreign policy and domestic needs...
...Congressmen such as Timothy Wirth of Colorado, Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Leon Panetta of California...
...The struggle for civil rights and black power in the 1960s has matured into real political control for blacks in many of the nation's major cities...
...But that is too extreme...
...Many of the Carter Administration's initial proposals, especially in foreign policy, reflected Trilateral Commission thinking...
...Ibid., p.125...
...This time, however, the problem seems much more serious...
...During the past 20 years, black, Hispanic and other minority communities have come to play an increasingly important role in the Democratic Party...
...power, with the confidence that U.S...
...1 4-18...
...The impact of these demands, as we have seen, is still uncertain among non-middle-class and minority communities...
...The starting point of neoliberalism is a critique of traditional liberalism, its centralization, macroeconomic theory and interest group politics...
...The Jackson campaign was weak on the economy, and any serious political alternative must offer an economic program that distinguishes itself from both traditional Liberalism and the Right...
...Built within the immigrant communities of the great Eastern and Midwestern cities at the turn of the century, their power is not what it was in the days of Frank Hague of Jersey City or Richard Daley of Chicago, "bosses" who made sure everyone voted-even some who were dead...
...Both within the Democratic Party and within society as a whole, it is less well-defined and internally less coherent than the black movement...
...Organized labor is the most prominent of these mechanisms, backing its favored candidates and getting out the vote...
...Most grew up during the 1960s...
...SN NOVEMBER THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY will seek to hold together and expand its massbased coalition, while at the same time trying to convince the business community that it has the program and the popular support to govern...
...They include Senators Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut...
...4. Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism (Boston: South End Press, 1980...
...The Municipal Assistance Corporation, the agency created to rescue New York City from its debt crisis, is a model of this "corporatist" intention...
...In the long term, their challenge extends beyond the Democratic Party to the greater need of articulating a political and economic project capable of defeating the Right...
...ELECTION RESULTS OVER THE LAST 20 years show a continuing erosion of voter turn- out...
...Mondale presumably agreed with those initiatives, for Carter himself recalls that he participated more actively in key decisions than any other vice-president in history...
...Ibid...
...Between 1970 and 1980, employment in industrial production and transportation, where union membership is greatest, fell from 33% of the workforce to 31.7%, with a 24.8% decline among factory workers...
...Tripartite agreements among management, labor and government would contain class conflict and introduce a measure of rational planning into the economy...
...During the Nixon Administration, Mondale steered clear of the Vietnam issue and focussed on domestic questions...
...coming upheavals in the AFL-CIO may well push the Democratic Party in a more radical direction...
...By his final year in office, Carter had adopted foreign policy positions barely distinguishable from Reagan's...
...Ibid., p.162...
...But what Mondale thinks today about those efforts is less than clear...
...This smacks of the strain of patrician reformism that has always been present in the Democratic Party...
...Vol.II, no...
...Within business circles, there is an undercurrent of support for more direct intervention in the economy to bring the current crisis under control...
...2. What is the most appropriate role for the United States as a world power...
...T HE IMAGE THAT APPEARED ON TELEvision screens from the Democratic Convention in July was one of unity...
...AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland is a powerful figure in the Mondale campaign and has staked his personal reputation on Mondale's success by having his organization endorse the man even before the primaries...
...Another vital new force is the women's movement: above all its largest organized force, the Na42REPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42West Feliciana, Louisiana, 1964 tional Organization of Women (NOW...
...power that was based on militarism and realpolitik...
...The party councils of the Democrats have always granted full participation to the leadership of groups engaged in that conflict...
...But it is still a more coherent force within the party than the "democratic" tendency that challenges Mondale from the Left...
...Mondale learned his skills in the bubbling political cauldron of Minnesota, one of the most dynamic states in the country...
...This current is the women's movement...
...Its integration into the Democratic Party came about as a result of the financial support it gave to the Roosevelt Coalition, through trade unions in the Northeast and through the important role that Jewish intellectuals played in defining ideological and strategic questions for the party...
...relations with Israel and the Arab countries and U.S...
...2 Divisions in the Democratic Party are nothing new...
...Jackson's positions on Palestine, U.S...
...They included downgrading the obsession with anti-communism and paying new attention to the problems of the Third World...
...Deborah Huntington and Ruth Kaplan, "Whose Gold Is Behind the Altar?," PressOn...
...When he arrived in Washington in 1964, Mondale operated in the shadow of the volatile Humphrey, whose presidential campaign he co-chaired in 1968...
...Until the 1960s, its populist and socialist currents and intense political struggle gave the lie to the stereotype of the dull Midwest...
...Mondale also joined the informal and somewhat secretive association of capitalist leaders known as the Bilderberg Group.' 6 In 1975 Mondale considered running for the presidency but withdrew-reportedly because of his disinclination for a protracted campaign...
...59,000 American Deaths Though Jesse Jackson has been successful in re- gistering blacks and other minorities, Mondale of- fers them little beyond hopeful words and positive support for affirmative action...
...Bilderberg meetings, named for a Dutch hotel where the first meeting took place in 1954, are regular annual gatherings of top leaders of the United States and Europe to discuss common problems...
...labor/management agreements to modernize troubled industries and encourage new development...
...Conservative on economic issues but more liberal on cultural and international questions, the Yuppies will be a swing constituency in the decade ahead...
...The deteriorated state of rela- tions with the Soviet Union, the Lebanon debacle and the war in Central America will all be used as evidence...
...Mondale's economic arguments will focus on the dangers of federal budget deficits...
...Hart's "new ideas" seemed chimeras to many during the primaries...
...Census indicates that 27.3% of the workforce are part of this professional/managerial class...
...In stereotypical liberal fashion, Mondale instinctively tries to harmonize competing interests...
...The Roosevelts, the Biddle family and Averell Harriman have been prominent...
...an encouragement of venture capital...
...W HEN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY dropped support for the Equal Rights Amendment from its 1980 platform, it threw down the gauntlet to 20 years of cultural change in the roles of men and women and the character of the family...
...The party's function has been to accommodate those groups and manage the socially disruptive...
...In 1973 he became a member of the Trilateral Commission, the most serious attempt to formulate an economic and political strategy for the United States, Japan, Canada and Western Europe that would enhance multinational corporate and banking interests worldwide...
...Are the Democrats Different...
...Defense is a particular obsession with the neoliberals and "military reform" the therapy...
...Some have called the neoliberals "Republicans with a human face...
...Ever since then, the percentage has declined quadrennially, with the sharpest decline among poor and working people...
...48REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 48 REPORT ON THE AMERICASThe driving force of the Rainbow Coalition is the ongoing-and vitally revived- struggle of black Americans for full participation in American society...
...After the Goldwater victory in 1964 and Nixon's takeover of the Vietnam War, many liberal Republicans abandoned their party for the Democrats...
...One area where neoliberals talk of moving beyond the East-West matrix is in the Third World...
...Within the framework of the Rainbow Coalition, their respective struggles for democracy and equality offer a new basis for a meaningful and effective politics of the Left...
...There is nothing fair about Reagan's brand of laissez faire," says Gary Hart...
...7 Employment in service and clerical sectors, where union membership is weak, grew over the same period from 30.7% to 31.9...
...pro-business but sensitive to social injustice...
...Ibid., pp.24, 170, 230...
...Although some of its program resembles the "welfare statism" of Europe's Washington, D.C., March on the Pentagon social democratic parties, its vision and rhetoric are a sui generis expression of "American exceptionalism...
Vol. 18 • September 1984 • No. 5
