The Democrats After Clinton

...Left-liberals can be the majority in a minority Democratic Party, or one of several constituencies of a Democratic majority...

...In an otherwise stable two-party system, the party that wins will be the one that has the most babies...

...For various reasons, universal health care failed to inspire the populists...

...In fact, Clinton, as a "New Democrat," went out of his way to distance himself from the Jesse Jackson wing of the party by attacking Sistah Souljah's antiwhite rhetoric...

...Recent talk of "balanced-budget liberalism" suggests the form the strategy might take...

...Once elected, Clinton the populist found that he had to work with a Democratic Party in Congress dominated by left-liberals...

...Even if a representative from, say, Cambridge or Berkeley wanted to move to the political center to help out fellow Democrats in Arkansas or Arizona, such a move would only endanger his or her own renomination...

...Unfortunately, he is just about the last prominent New Democrat in the national party...

...The New Democrats would be the majority party...

...Were he able to serve a third term, Clinton might have proved strong enough to replace race-and-gender quotas with classbased outreach programs, and to back down from some of the problematic demands of establishment feminism (like women in combat...

...The turn-of-the-century Populists denounced millionaires and paupers alike as parasitic classes living off the labor of the workers...

...In the longer term, the only way the Democratic Party can be rebuilt is by splitting the present Republican majority coalition and picking up one or more of the pieces...

...Such a strategy, however, would require the Democrats to permit opposition to abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, and welfare among their candidates, as well as among their voters...

...The Hispanic vote seems destined to repeat this pattern...

...Neither one can gain political power, except by building coalitions with groups that share some of its objectives...

...But this estrangement is not going to last, for two reasons...

...That is why Clinton's fate really does not matter...

...To the political descendants of the New England Puritans and Yankee pioneers, deficits symbolize political corruption...

...The Concord Coalition/Reform Party progressives, like their Mugwump and Progressive Party predecessors, are concerned, if not obsessed, with good government...

...At the same time, he has tried to replace the political economy of left-liberalism—based on Old Left unionism and New Left welfarism—with a new political-economic program that fuses progressive and populist values...

...There is a third course, however: The Democrats could learn from Clinton and devise a strategy that appeals to both progressives and populists...

...Thinking Aloud THE DEMOCRATS AFTER CLINTON By Michael Lind One leitmotif has been completely neglected in the Wagnerian media chorus' nonstop recital of the events surrounding President Bill Clinton's latest purported liaison: its impact on the fortunes of the Democratic Party...

...The dilemma facing the McGovernite Left is similar to the dilemma facing the Reaganite Right...

...They have to worry more about winning their party's primary than winning on Election Day...

...By balancing the budget, Clinton has cunningly hammered a wedge between the deficit-hawk wing of the Republican Party and the Reaganite conservative wing...

...Within the confines of the balanced budget so dear to fiscally-conservative progressives, the Democrats might be able to raise taxes on the rich to promote higher spending on programs that unite populists and left-liberals (like child-care subsidies and the earned-income tax credit...

...As the Democratic Party shrinks by losing marginal moderate seats in the South and in the West, it is becoming proportionately more Northeastern—more black, more urban, more college-town, more Left...

...With the exception of the blacks, all of these groups have relatively low fertility...

...Even Franklin D. Roosevelt would have failed had he been the one New Dealer in the Democratic leadership...

...He has sought to appease them by defending aff irmative action and promoting the feminist agenda...

...Some Democratic strategists, whistling past the graveyard, speak of converting Hispanics (chiefly, Mexican-Americans) into a voting bloc as loyal to the party as black Americans have been since the '60s...

...To reach out to the Republican populists or progressives, the Democrats would have to at least downplay either their social liberalism or their economic egalitarianism...

...It is time for the Democrats, most feel, to stop being the party of the healthy nonworking poor and to start being the party of the working man and woman...

...That means going for great numbers of white voters...

...Similarly, Hispanics and blacks in Sunbelt cities are more likely to be adversaries than friends...

...The left-liberals do not understand that Clinton— the most able politician the Democratic Party has had since Lyndon B. Johnson —has been trying to isolate the hard-core conservatives in their Southern ghetto by creating a national left-liberal/populist/ progressive coalition...

...But the Democrats cannot limit their appeal to Americans who are liberal both on social issues and economic issues—unless, that is, they want to wither away on their Northern, urban and college-town electoral reservations...

...The dominant left-liberal coalition that controls the Democratic Party has watched Clinton perform all of these intricate maneuvers with a combination of bafflement and horror...

...I favor the third course...

...It makes more sense to divide the GOP into three camps: conservatives, populists and progressives...

...a populist wing...

...And in the secure left-liberal districts the challenge to the incumbent always comes from the activists of the Left...

...The GOP, having lost many of the business-professional elites of the Southern suburbs and the populists of the Southern hill country, would find itself trapped in the moldering plantation house of the Deep South...

...Still, in the opinion of virtually all Americans other than the ideological Left, any workfare program is better than handouts...

...By progressives I mean the political heirs of the old Northern Protestant Progressives and Mugwumps—not graduates of SDS using the term as a euphemism for multicultural identity politics...

...In their lexicon, anyone who is not a left-liberal of the Cambridge-Madison-Berkeley school is a "conservative" or a "Republican...

...But as matters stand the Democrats in Congress and the states are incapable of doing what Clinton, a solitary political virtuoso, has managed to do...

...When Clinton appealed to populist voters by helping to eliminate subsidies for the able-bodied poor, the left-liberals, failing to recognize that deficit-hawks are really a species of old-fashioned progressives, denounced the balanced budget for betraying the ideals of liberalism—defined as the Massachusetts version of Swedish social democracy...

...Today all of the whites in the House from Georgia are Republicans...

...Democratic representatives do not...

...Paul: "He that does not work, neither shall he eat...

...But they cannot rebuild a majority unless they lure either the mostly Northern progressives or the largely Southern populists (and the somewhat similar Northern white Catholics) out of the Republican column into their own...

...The neglect is wholly justified, because the party's prospects will not be much affected by whether Clinton ultimately is driven out of office or stays on and maintains the astonishingly high approval rating he has at the moment...

...Until I am proven wrong, I will continue to believe the Clinton Administration has interrupted an era of Republican Presidential dominance, as did the Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson administrations...

...They would rather lose than compromise...

...Conservatism, populism and progressivism are not so much three ideologies as three distinct old-stock white American political subcultures...

...The two have to make a decision...

...Left liberals are hoping Hispanic immigrants will be the New Blacks...

...Throughout the South, white Democrats may soon be as rare as white Republicans once were...

...Multimember Congressional districts using one or another form of proportional representation might eliminate the conflict between two important goals: increasing the number of black representatives and retaining multiracial liberal electoral precincts...

...Indeed, even before the current Clinton troubles, experts were predicting that white Southern Democrats would suffer massive losses this November...

...The recent battle between former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina pitted an archetypal Yankee progressive Republican against a Southern conservative Republican from central casting...

...Whatever happens to the President, the Rump Democrats appear destined, in the immediate future, to be a minority party—with its greatest regional strength in the Greater New EnglandWisconsin-Oregon belt, and its most loyal constituencies among Yankee Protestants, Germanic prairie progressives, blacks, and Jews...

...Few of the party's elected politicians in Washington have any incentive to arrest this hemorrhaging...

...The answer appears to be at least a few more...

...The so-called "deficit hawks" are mostly neo-Puritan progressives from New England and its demographic colonies in the Upper Midwest, Northern prairie and Pacific Northwest...

...Alternately, the Democrats could emulate Clinton the progressive, write off the populists, and try to win over Concord Coalition/Reform Party deficithawks who despise the Reaganite conservative wing of the GOP...

...Progressives tend to be socially moderate fiscal conservatives...

...For if it succeeded, the Democrats would gain two of the three voting blocs that currently make up the Republican coalition...

...He has reached out to independent and Republican populists as well as progressives...

...It was not...

...If Clinton was shrewd in reaching out to the populists with welfare reform, he was equally clever in appealing to the deficit-hawk progressives by supporting a balanced budget...

...How many elections must the Democrats lose before they finally reconsider their left-liberal orthodoxy...

...The other reason that Hispanics are unlikely to become loyal Democrats is cultural...

...Consistent left-liberals and consistent conservatives are both minorities in the American population...

...The Southern-Catholic-Hispanic alliance would be deeply religious, patriotic, macho—and fecund...

...Personally, I am for universal, single-payer, portable healthcare and campaign finance reform, plus a liberal regime with respect to abortion, gay rights and school prayer...

...FDR's New Deal coalition, which included not only prohibitionists but segregationists, was based on a modus vivendi far more questionable than any compromise that might create a left-liberal/populist/progressive alliance...

...The choice is not between good and evil so much as it is between an approach that ranks goals in order of feasibility, and a rival approach that endangers every goal by assigning the same value to each one...

...Or even a Broad Church coalition of left-liberals, populists and progressives who agree on a few economic issues and agree to disagree on most others...

...and a good-government progressive wing...

...Conservatives believe in social inequality, laissez-faire and a strong military...

...Hispanic immigration, then, is not a panacea for the Democrats, though it may help in the short run...

...In the Northeast, yesterday's Irish Catholic workingclass Democrats are today's Irish Catholic middle-class Republicans...

...They would have to minimize or abandon ambitious income redistribution and welfare schemes...

...They could, for example, emulate Clinton the populist and try to lure away bluecollar Reagan Democrats and Buchanan Republicans...

...It is possible for the Democrats to be an economically liberal party with socialliberal and Right-leaning populist wings...

...The first is that the big-business wing of the GOP is going to squash the nativist-protectionist wing...

...When they are poor, Hispanics may vote their economic interests, but as they move up in society their tendency is to vote their values—which are much more Republican than Democratic...

...This is the most difficult strategy— but the one with the biggest payoff...

...The motto of the old Populist Party was a quote from St...

...There was no Leftist candidate in 1992...

...it keeps wages low for entry-level workers and provides linguistic and cultural obstacles to unionization...

...The greater the number of white Democrats who desert the party, the further Left it moves on issues like affirmative action and multiculturalism and welfare—resulting in new waves of defections...

...If we can work, why can't they...

...The American Left does not understand this sentiment, but Clinton does...

...Although Ross Perot is a Highland Southern populist, his constituency consists largely of Greater New England Progressives...

...The best welfare reform would have been a national workfare program, along the lines suggested by Mickey Kaus and others—a new CCC or WPA, instead of the decentralized, state-based programs Clinton and the Republicans retained...

...Or a socially liberal party with economically liberal and fiscally conservative (deficit-hawk) wings...

...Probably not...

...It is also not hard to envision, in the 21 st century, a socially-conservative coalition of white Southerners, white Catholics in the Northeast and middle-class Hispanics in the Southwest teaming up against the remnant liberal Democratic coalition of white Northern Protestants, blacks and Jews...

...In states such as California and Texas, it is not difficult to imagine alliances linking suburban white moderates and conservatives with urban Hispanics, at the expense of urban blacks...

...The left-liberals who control the Congressional and state Democratic parties will not do this...

...Although you still hear talk about the "Clinton-Gore wing" of the Democratic Party, it is fouryears out of date...

...Working-class Americans resent being taxed to subsidize able-bodied people who do not work...

...Republicans are usually described these days as being either of the social conservative or economic conservative variety...

...Perot did better in places like Maine and Yankee-settled Oregon and Washington State than he did in his native Texas...

...Yet if winning requires choosing priorities, I would rather see the Democrats win back Congress by making support for economic liberalism the one nonnegotiable issue—with tolerance for differences of opinion within the party on social issues and political reform...

...Only on the social issues— abortion, affirmative action—is there any continuity between the McGovern Democrats and the Clinton Democrats...

...On issues like family subsidies, the privatization of Social Security and trade with China, Christian social conservatives like Gary Bauer sound a lot like union leaders...

...In the 1992 election, Clinton played the populist to Bush the conservative and Perot the technocratic, good-government progressive...

...For now, though, the Democrats in Congress with the safest seats tend to be either blacks (from majority-minority districts created by lumping together white liberal and conservative voters) or left of center whites from solid Democratic strongholds...

...In short, they would have to follow the lead of former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and the late Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts...

...They might—just might—be able to appeal to both...

...opposition to them has less to do with economic management than with civic virtue...

...Clinton has showed them how...

...If the Democrats were actually New Democrats, they would be able to create the Congressional equivalent of Clinton's remarkably broad-based Presidential coalition...

...By the year 2000 the party would have three wings: a left-liberal wing (itself a synthesis of the pro-labor Old Left and the pro-quota New Left...

...Again, the Democrats would rather lose than compromise...

...The Democrats have been shut out of both Houses of Congress since 1994, and—whether Bill Clinton limps through to the finish or not—there is a good chance they will be shut out of the White House again in 2001...

...The President has not forgotten that the left-liberals compose the Democratic Party's base...

...Catholic immigrants in the North were political rivals of their black economic competitors in the cities...

...Ideological conservatives can be the majority in a minority Republican Party, or a minority in a majority Republican Party...

...The 1994 midterm elections took their heaviest toll on Western and Southern moderate Democrats...

...Will the Democratic Party in Congress attempt the third strategy to enlarge its dwindling numbers...

...Democratic candidates for governor, senator or President have to reach out to centrist and in some cases conservative voters...

...In their present shrunken form they constitute a coherent left-liberal party that is pro-affirmative action, pro-labor, pro-abortion, pro-welfare...

...It is now the Rightwing Reaganites, with theirplans formassive, budget-busting tax cuts, who frighten the progressive deficit-hawks...

...So it is in the interest of business to promote a cheap-labor-high-immigration policy —disguised, of course, with suitable references to Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty...

...But the unions, whose importance in the party grows as it shrinks, are not enthusiastic about fiscal conservatism and lukewarm about campaign finance reforms...

...Most members of Congress are re-elected with substantial majorities...

...In collaborating with the Republicans on welfare reform, he returned to the populism of his campaign...

...Throughout history...

...They are more likely to be the New Irish or the New Italians...

...It ought to be possible for these factions to unite in Washington on a few issues, while they battle over others (perhaps in the state capitals...

...The handicapped should be given a helping hand—and the lazy should be handed a shovel or a broom...

...More ominously, the states in the Democrats' new home region of Greater New England lose Congressional seats after every census to the Sunbelt, where the Republicans are strong...

...What did prove to be an issue with populist appeal was welfare reform...

...Don't count on it...

...Business (particularly agribusiness) loves large-scale immigration...

...The Democrats can write off the conservatives...

...the only GeorgiaDemocratic representatives are blacks occupying racially-gerrymandered seats...

...Northern puritanism gazes in horror at Southern improvidence...

...As was noted above, Perot's Southern yeoman populist persona should not confuse us—he has more in common with the Concord Coalition than with the Buchanan Brigades...

...Universal health care struck many strategists as an issue that could unite them with the populists...

...Populists are Rightwing in their values but hostile to banks and big business...

...Clinton really is a "New Democrat...

...In this case the Democrats would have to reinvent themselves as the party of fiscal conservatism and campaign finance reform...

...Yes, the clumsy nativism of the Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party has alienated a lot of Hispanics, particularly in California...