The Politics of Change
TYLER, GUS
Countdown '92 THE POLITICS OF CHANGE BY GUS TYLER All of the Presidential aspirants seem to agree on one slogan: "It's time for a change." Their speeches are larded with the key concluding word...
...Bad times breed bad tempers...
...Where once the preoccupation was soup, now it is status...
...A society whose economy is shrinking can provide neither the necessary motivation for students nor the equipment (the materials and personnel) for quality education...
...Some 35 deadlines for issuing the rules of compliance have passed...
...They shared a common concern for the economic well-being of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "common man...
...The restructuring of a collapsing infrastructure takes money...
...Yet good folk would not have to turn to evil ways to survive, and some unpleasant souls might behave a bit better...
...Because, it said, enforcement was too expensive...
...James Madison's everlastingly fresh Federalist Paper No...
...And its centrality now as well needs to be recognized if a unifying philosophy is to emerge that can achieve the goals of many worthy activist organizations...
...Perhaps the present recession that refuses to go away—despite the many proclamations by President Bush that it went away sometime early last year—will cause many Americans to again recognize the centrality—the primacy—of the economic issue...
...There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society...
...The nation has been re-enacting collectively the pattern that psychologist Abraham Maslow described in terms of the individual who has successfully satisfied certain basic needs...
...The man in the White House, the insider posing as an outsider, even dares to invoke "revolution...
...Recently, the Labor Department issued regulations banning several hundred toxic substances from the workplace...
...Their speeches are larded with the key concluding word or more vigorous versions of it...
...Similarly, the Clean Air Act signed by the President in 1990 has gone unimplemented...
...But what these movements have in common, the desire for reform (or revolution), does not unite them...
...Change" is the perfect word for the politician in this period of national malaise because it is subject to multiple interpretations...
...Relations among different races and ethnic enclaves have never been without their tensions...
...Freedom itself—our civil liberties—is imperiled when desperation turns humans into a pack running behind a demagogue preaching a genocidal xenophobia...
...In bad times the society becomes a primitive plot where dog eats dog and the devil takes the hindmost...
...A coalition rests on the coming together of different interests that, while continuing to fight for their special objectives, recognize the desirability of joining with others in a battle that affects all...
...10 broadly suggests the answer...
...Viewed organizationally, the acceptance of this common denominator would provide the rationale for a coalition that could strongly influence—become?—the governing majority...
...But in good times the cruelest individuals show some kindness...
...He would have to add to his list "associations" for gay rights, women's rights, civil rights, civil liberties, education, the environment, street safety, health care, senior citizens, gun control, housing, child care, peace, et al...
...They were simply natural allies...
...Not that we lack "movements" at the moment...
...Fewer people steal when they don't have to steal to stay alive...
...Crime...
...On the contrary, it tends to divide them as they compete for funds, followings and frontpage attention...
...As for gays, those carriers of aids, they should be kept out of contact with the rest of humanity...
...In the 20th century, the movements concerned with the plight of the dirt farmer and the sweated worker coalesced around the Democratic Party...
...Critics, meanwhile, speak derisively of "special interests"?meaning, as a rule, some interest other than their own...
...Granted, the centrality of the economic factor does not mean it is everything...
...The "regs" were countermanded by the Office of Management and Budget...
...In the early part of the 19th century, those who feared the rising capitalist class of the North coalesced to form the Jeffersonian Republicans, later the Democratic Party...
...If everyone had a job, a decent home and a few amenities all the "meanness and viciousness" would not disappear...
...Rightly or wrongly, whenever there are fewer legitimate ways for persons to survive, many invariably find illegitimate ways to do so...
...Civil Rights...
...That could produce the missing grand coalition we have been talking about—and have an unforeseen impact on the November balloting...
...The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man," Madison maintained...
...Indeed, in the three epic watersheds of American history—the Revolution, the Civil War and the New Deal—economics was the central element...
...In the United States, associations are formed to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion...
...The big question for proponents of different—albeit not necessarily contradictory—liberal and progressive objectives is how to compose a coalition that will turn their passionate convictions into public policy...
...Because the Bush Administration says the environmentalists' actions have been stifling economic recovery...
...Education...
...Beyond petty passing matters, however, the "most common and durable source of factions," insisted Madison, "has been the various and unequal distribution of property"—that is, economics...
...They imply that the pleaders are per se evil and therefore unworthy of serious attention...
...In mid-century, the antislavocracy people coalesced around Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party...
...It substitutes motion (emotion) for a movement...
...Movements focusing on a specific issue—abortion, child care, the aged, etc.—would not have to give up their identities...
...This can hardly be checked at a time when more and more people are unable to make a living...
...Way back, Plato wrote in The Republic: "Wealth and poverty: The one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness...
...Schools require proper funding, and what motivates most of their students to stick to their studies is the promise of a job, a career, at the end of the scholastic rainbow...
...Even "the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle unfriendly passions and excite violent conflicts...
...Of course, there will always be crime...
...Because the White House is unwilling to adopt any standards entailing new costs...
...Let the jobless rate go to 30 per cent, as it did in the Great Depression, and many male voices will shout that it is morally wrong for a woman to take a job that a man should be holding...
...The same is true in the case of relations between men and women, or between heterosexuals and homosexuals...
...Standing by itself, though, it is a dynamic without direction, a societal id without ideology...
...The Environment...
...Americans continue to congregate for causes, even more than they did in the 1830s when Tocqueville wrote: "In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used...
...The New Deal, World War II, and America's supreme economic position in the postwar years seem to have given new generations the sense that economics no longer has anything to do with the various societal problems that have captured their attention...
...But in the final decade of the century, with a Presidential election on the horizon, there is no overarching coalition revolving around an economic axis...
...Viewed logically, therefore, the many movements now in motion have a stake in a sound, a growing economy...
...In a failing economy money is in short supply...
...But historically the extent of what Plato called "meanness and viciousness," assaults on property and persons, has reflected the ups and downs of the economy...
...An 85-year-old ordinance that enabled environmentalists to slow down or stop the sale of timberlands has also been revised to make future delays more difficult...
...The broad spectrum of forces that made its presence felt in the New Deal days never even established a formal umbrella organization...
...Consider, briefly, the economic dimension of some of their major areas of involvement...
...Generally, coalitions of this kind do attach themselves, more or less, to some party...
...Today Tocqueville would no doubt look upon his earlier statement as an understatement...
...Yet, as Tocqueville noted, dedicated advocates of an ideal are the very heart of a democracy that seeks to avoid a "tyranny of the majority...
...Gus Tyler, a frequent contributor, is Assistant President of the ilgwu...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
