CAN REAGAN KEEP THE PROMISE OF LIBERALISM?

...Even Reagan's campaign slogan...

...As Louis Hartz pointed out in The Liberal Tradition in America, the liberal promise of economic and political freedom has been a basic premise of American politics from the beginning...

...And without the willingness to go beyond Cold War liberalism and to build a popular majority for a new direction, Kennedy like Carter would be forced to back down under overwhelming pressures from the corporate establishment and skepticism from the public...

...Turnout has steadily declined from 61.8 per cent in 1964 to 52.3 per cent in 1980...

...The task of labor and the Left is to build a movement that will insist on democratic, responsible planning...

...We're likely to be out of power for the next decade...

...rick Moynihan says, "and we'll deserve it if we don't pay attention to what the Republicans did...

...Carter was justly accused by Reagan of using a recession to fight inflation, allowing the deficit to climb to near-record proportions, and failing to curb inflation or unemployment...

...Each of the last four Presidents has experienced it, and it was the principal factor in Cartels defeat...

...His vacillation partly reflected personal irresolution, but it also reflected the paralysis of Congress, labor, and business, who would have had to support any new Carter moves...

...Liberalism remains the only game in town, but it has become a game in which all the players lose...

...Instead, it signifies—along with the Democratic landslide of 1964 and the Republican landslide of 1972—a continuation of massive political instability which has destroyed the capacity of both Democrats and Republicans to build long-term majority coalitions...

...Reagan's campaign was squarely within the liberal tradition...

...A Chicago voter quoted in a Chicago Sun-Times Election Day interview The Reagan victory and the Republican capture of the U.S...

...It is an essential point if we are to understand Reagan's victory and Carter's defeat...

...The Reagan Administration, like past Republican administrations, will undoubtedly inspire Democrats and the Left to forget their own priorities...

...See "No Place to Go" in the October 1980 issue of The Progressive...

...In the early 1970s, the New Right got started on several fronts at the same time: lobbying (the Conservative Caucus), intellectual development (the Heritage Foundation), and grassroots electoral organization (National Conservative Political Action Committee...

...This created a crisis for liberalism...

...Last summer, the AFL-CIO conducted a poll among its members that confirmed the prevalence of social conservatism, distrust of the state, and militarism among union members...

...There is, of course, a possibility that a Walter Mondale could defeat a vulnerable Ronald Reagan or George Bush in 1984, but this seems little basis for rebuilding a majority coalition around CETA programs or energy price controls...

...It would have to be grounded on the real or conceived threat of war, and its proponents would have to be willing to go to war—even to risk World War III—to make it work...

...It seems quite likely that even if Kennedy himself had won the Democratic nomination and then, by some miracle, had upset Reagan, he would have faced in his first term the same intractable problems that Carter did...

...In contrast to Carter's dark murmurs about complexity and "no easy solutions," which accurately reflected the policy crisis Reagan will inherit, Reagan projected cheery small-town optimism...

...And the Republicans, besides capturing the Senate for the first time since 1954, picked up four new governors, 33 House seats, and 218 new state legislators...

...But neither Kemp's supply-side tax cuts nor the old Republican remedies show much chance of reducing unemployment or inflation...

...Echoing John Kennedy, Richard Nixon took office in 1968 publicly committed to American nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union...

...three years later, Vietnam was reunited under Communist rule...

...In short, it is quite likely that Reagan will end up in 1984 exactly where Jimmy Carter ended up in 1980...

...Senate has predictably traumatized Democratic politicians as well as labor, minority, and feminist leaders...

...Reagan will have no more success in balancing the budget than Ford and Carter had...

...These issues come to be perceived as the overriding concerns of voters...

...Such a strategy could conceivably lead to victory in 1984, if Democratic candidates managed to fool the public as effectively as Carter did in 1976 or Reagan did in 1980...

...Such an interpretation could hurt rather than help the development of a Democratic opposition...

...At the same time, Reagan consciously broke with Barry Goldwater's 1964 strategy of right-wing militance...

...For instance, Heather Booth, the director of CLEC, has been planning a political action committee that would unite unions with such statewide organizations as Massachusetts Fair Share or Illinois Public Action in training organizers and recruiting candidates in primaries...

...it also became plagued by stagflation, a declining dollar, and a sharp decline in overseas prestige...

...They see it as the emergence of a new Republican majority that will control American politics with the same authority the Democratic majority wielded after 1932...

...The tragic mistake of the convention," one labor official says, "was that the President and his advisers had the chance to embrace a program that was very meaningful to blue-collar workers and didn't do so...

...And through his pledges to cut social spending, he signaled to employed white workers and the middle class that he was aware of their resentments against "welfare cheaters...

...This is what the Republicans were able to do in 1980...

...It would require the use and threat of military force to win concessions from trade rivals and from Third World resource-producers...

...It is quite likely that within three or four years Reagan will find himself despised both by his right-wing supporters, who will resent his budget deficits, his inevitable acquiescence to Soviet nuclear parity, and his unwillingness to appoint their leaders to high positions in his Administration, and by the Democratic Left, which will be predictably furious about high unemployment, prices, declining social services, and rising defense expenditures...

...It has served as an alternative to absolutism and fascism on the Right, and to socialism and communism on the Left...

...At the same time, Reagan will push for new increases in military spending...

...The other direction combines elements of European fascism with traditional Republican economics...

...But some credit for the Reagan victory also must go to Reagan and the Republican strategists, who saw the potential for a coalition based on these factors...

...In his 1980 campaign, Reagan muted his opposition to the ERA, but he refused to back down on abortion...

...He has already indicated as much by surrounding himself with advisers from the Ford and Nixon Administrations who, while dangerous enough to human welfare, are not yet ready to make America the Sparta of the Twenty-first Century...

...And there was nothing inflationary about his tax cut: "Why is it inflationary to let people keep more of their money and spend it the way they'd like, and it isn't inflationary to let him [Carter] take that money and spend it the way he wants...

...He repudiated his earlier stands against aid to Chrysler and New York City, against the minimum wage, OSHA, and the Davis-Bacon Act...

...In the absence of any socialist or social-democratic tradition in the United States, most Americans have blamed the Government for betraying the promises implicit in the liberal tradition...

...There is a growing agreement that to succeed, left-wing Democrats will have to follow a course similar to the New Right, which in turn, of course, adapted its strategy from the old labor Left...

...On Election Day, Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter's 49...

...It grudgingly acknowledges a role for the Federal Government in easing the business cycle, while more eagerly affirming a Government role in building highways and tanks and defending American interests abroad...

...Some Texas Democrats and other concerned observers saw the rudiments of such a military command economy in John Connally's programs for America...

...Renewed inflation will force Reagan to face the same dilemma that confronted Carter: whether to initiate wage-price controls or a recession...

...And it certainly left such Democrats as Senators Frank Church and George McGovern, who had long championed imperial resignation, in an extremely defensive situation from which they were unable to extricate themselves...

...But on a common-sense level, this interpretation ignores such self-described liberals as Moynihan or Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington...

...For anyone committed to the original American promise of political liberty and economic equality, shorn of its imperial trappings, there is simply no alternative to developing a politics that goes beyond liberalism...

...This would involve economic planning to control wages and prices, conserve energy, encourage growth industries, and aid workers in declining sectors and regions...

...Their defection has created a political universe increasingly dominated by upper-middle-class voters, in which a candidate need capture only about 26 per cent of the potential vote to win by a "landslide...

...Within the perspective of Cold War liberalism, one has to choose between resignation and anger in response to these events...

...That sort of liberalism has gradually won the support not only of Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans, but also of such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Arthur Burns...

...The thrust of this approach is that to solve today's problems, policymakers will have to go beyond liberalism toward some form of economic planning...

...And unlike Richard Nixon in 1972, who failed to carry other candidates with him in his landslide victory over George McGovern, Reagan did carry other Republican candidates...

...Finally, there is a third direction, which has found some support among progressive trade unionists, left-wing intellectuals, minority leaders, and the staffs of some citizens' organizations...

...Within the policy framework that liberalism provided, there was no way for politicians to keep their promises— and there were no other promises worth making...

...We have to put America back to work," was a take-off on Kennedy's "We have to get America moving again...

...The Reagan victory was significant, but it doesn't yet signify realignment...

...Given this prospect of continued policy paralysis and public disillusionment, what should be the role of the Democratic Party...

...There is now some talk of developing left-wing political action committees that would perform a similar function...

...There are two directions an administration could take to solve the current crisis of liberalism—one toward the Left, the other toward the Right...

...They want to create Democratic replicas of George Bush and Howard Baker, just as Republicans after 1932 made Republican copies of New Deal Democrats...

...If we fail, this will not turn out to be a significant election...

...The liberal tradition has periodically been redefined and brought up to date—during the Civil War, when the westward expansion of slavery threatened free labor...

...It would stress the redistribution of wealth toward business as a means of encouraging new investment, a massive growth of arms spending, and anti-inflationary reductions in social spending...

...He surrounded himself with such respectable Republicans as Ford, Howard Baker, and Henry Kissinger...

...There was no energy crisis, according to Reagan: "This nation has been portrayed for too long a time to the people as being energy poor when it was energy rich...

...The strategy was virtually the same one he used in 1980: Hold the Right and attract blue-collar voters through social conservative appeals to flag, family, and neighborhood, while moving to the muddled center on the principal policy issues...

...But these alternatives lie outside the parameters of Cold War liberalism—and, to some extent, of liberalism itself...

...Viewed through the prism of Cold War liberalism, which assumes an imperial role for the United States, the rise of OPEC, the Soviet achievement of nuclear parity, and the rebellions against U.S.-backed regimes around the world have created deep disquiet among voters...

...In 1977, Brock had astounded Republicans by inviting Jesse Jackson to address the Republican National Committee...

...We voted in a new President...

...Four years later...

...They will expend their energies on holding military spending increases to 5 per cent rather than 7 per cent, or to defending the windfall profits tax against total deregulation...

...The most likely outcome of supply-side tax breaks will be an increase in overseas investment, the further deindustrialization of the North, rampant speculation in real estate, gold, and art, and higher prices...

...It would entail a realistic, modest, and pluralistic approach to the rest of the world, based upon the recognition that the United States will have to use economic planning rather than imperial coercion to solve its resource and market problems...

...The defection of lower-income voters was particularly dramatic in such northern cities as Cleveland...

...People have not turned their backs on the social problems, but they are weary of the old New Deal approach," Hart says...

...On the assumption that the election was a direct repudiation of liberalism and the likely beginning of a new Republican majority, these Senators counsel Democrats to mimic the Republican approach...

...In the absence of successful Republican policies, American voters could easily swing back to the Democrats in 1984 or 1988 in disgust with "Republican incompetence...

...There is no evidence that corporations or wealthy investors will invest additional funds any more responsibly than they have invested their substantial existing surplus...

...The most obvious consequence of the crisis of liberalism has been periodic revulsion among American voters against their elected office-holders...

...But it holds no promise of building a long-term majority...

...According to the poll, 72 per cent of AFL-CIO members opposed cuts'in military spending, 65 per cent favored a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, 60 per cent opposed the Panama Canal treaties, 44 per cent opposed legalized abortion, and 66 per cent thought there was too much government regulation of business...

...It was just in me...

...The Republicans still lack one essential ingredient for a realignment: a set of policies that could successfully sustain a shift in political loyalties...

...Representative Jack Kemp, the most candid and interesting of Reagan's supporters, has spelled out Reagan's and the Republicans' post-election problems: "We'll be a majority party when we implement the policies that will bring about the prosperity and the full employment without inflation that we have promised...

...There are alternatives that might work for Reagan just as there were alternatives that might have saved Carter...

...The success of the Cold War liberal program was based on the absolute economic and military supremacy of the United States, which enabled it to profit from the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan and to dominate Third World markets and raw materials...

...Aspects of such an alternative have already been advanced by financier Felix Ro-hatyn, by such left Democrats as Representative John Conyers, and by progressive labor officials...

...The election returns provided definite indications of political realignment: Reagan won about half of the blue-collar vote, 40 per cent of the union vote, 60 per cent of the Catholic vote, and 35 per cent of the Jewish vote...

...The current variety of liberalism, which dates from Harry Truman's 1948 synthesis, promises Americans a continually rising standard of living and citizenship in the leading world nation...

...It came out...

...The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages made many Americans feel angry and frustrated...

...We have to come up with more market-oriented solutions...

...At a post-election press conference, Moynihan voiced similar sentiments and warned against a takeover of the Democratic Party by leftists who believe that "government should be powerful and America should be weak...

...The inability of successive candidates to make good on their promises has not only created support for their opponents...

...This anger was an important ingredient in pulling many blue-collar and middle-class Democrats away from Carter...

...He astounded political experts by defeating California Governor Pat Brown by a million votes in 1966, beating Brown in such blue-collar towns as Milpitas and South Gate, where Brown had trounced Nixon four years earlier...

...There are three directions that Democrats can and probably will take in response to the Reagan victory—each predicated on a certain interpretation of the election results...

...Carter lost New York by only 160,000 votes and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Holtzman lost by half that number...

...This is not simply a question of semantics...

...But it will be difficult to pull this effort off...

...Largely through the efforts of Republican Chairman Bill Brock, the Republican House, Senate, and state candidates followed a similar strategy of appealing beyond the narrow Republican Chamber of Commerce base to blue-collar workers and even blacks and Hispanics...

...abortion, busing, school prayer, pornography, respect for the flag, and gun control in our time...

...He made two appearances before right-wing evangelicals...

...And this disillusionment has been concentrated especially among lower-income, blue-collar, and minority voters, who have suffered most acutely from liberal policy failures and who have had no party to represent their interests...

...It is likely that Reagan will also vacillate and, in the end, refuse to embrace the war-liberals and neo-fascists on his right...

...H The new militarism...

...The crisis of liberal capitalism has, therefore, fostered the bizarre notion that the "free enterprise system" is being held in check by the very same state that had to rescue it from self-destruction half a century ago...

...But the question remains: Can the Republicans develop policies that will permit their 1980 coalition to grow and endure as did the Democratic coalition of 1932...

...But there are other side-effects of the crisis of liberalism that figured in the election results on November 4: 1f Declining turnout...

...For such opposition to have any prospects of long-term success, it will have to form on the Democratic left rather than at the center, and it will have to move forward beyond current Democratic and Republican politics...

...The crisis in liberalism also corresponds to a crisis in America's international position...

...This notion has lent undeserved support to Republican economics that would emphasize freeing business from the shackles of government taxation and regulation...

...Workers' real income declined in the 1970s...

...Kemp thinks he knows what policies Reagan should implement: supply-side tax cuts which will encourage new domestic investment and raise productivity while making up for initial revenue loss and undercutting inflationary pressures...

...It would call for sacrifices from workers and the poor in the name of militaristic nationalism...

...Two years later, they were equally astounded by his decision to hold the Republican convention in Detroit...

...On this level, the 1980 election was fought, won, and will eventually be lost within the axioms of liberalism...

...1i Distrust of the state...

...Traces of such plans can also be found among retired generals and admirals who presently advise Ronald Reagan...

...Carter, of course, went in neither direction or in both directions at once...

...In 1976, Jimmy Carter attacked Gerald Ford for using recession to fight inflation and promised, if elected, to create full employment, a balanced budget, and low prices...

...In periods of liberal crisis, the absence of plausible economic alternatives tends to bring social issues to the fore—Prohibition in the 1920s...

...And on a broader historical level, it ignores the dominant undercurrents that have shaped both Republican and Democratic politics in the last thirty years...

...And they draw the political conclusion that for Democrats to regain power, they will have to mimic rather than challenge Republican economic and foreign policies...

...during the early years of the Twentieth Century, when the rise of corporate capitalism undermined the dream of universal property ownership, and in the 1930s and 1940s, when the role of the Federal Government expanded to sustain a private economy no longer capable of self-regulated growth and when the United States became the leader of world capitalism...

...These periods of redefinition have corresponded roughly to periods of political realignment—the rise of the Republicans in 1860, the triumph of corporate Republicanism and the destruction of Populism in 1896, and the rise of the New Deal Democrats in 1932 and the Cold War Democrats in 1948...

...These battles are unavoidable, but they tend to obscure the need for long-term coalition building...

...Reagan, of course, is no political amateur...

...And he called for a future arms control treaty that would be more favorable to the United States than SALT II...

...They conducted a brilliant overall campaign that took perfect advantage of the Democratic weaknesses...

...He dominated the South against a Southern incumbent...

...While these moves did not win the Republicans sizable black support, they did create a credibility for the party as one that could govern the entire people...

...But these efforts have been limited to lobbying and public protest...

...Senators Gary Hart of Colorado Reagan and his advisers will probably accept a recession as an inevitable remedy for inflation and Pat Moynihan of New York have already announced the direction they will take...

...In 1972, he pledged "peace with honor" in South Vietnam...

...It was initially rooted in the widespread dissemination of private property and in the principle of limited, representative government...

...The inability of politicians to make good on the promises of liberalism accounts for the political instability of the last twenty years—the defeat of two incumbent Presidents in a row, and the withdrawal, resignation, and assassination of three others...

...But when European and Japanese capitalism developed as formidable rivals, when the United States was defeated in Vietnam, when OPEC began to assert its cartel power, and when the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, the United States did not only lose its absolute economic and military superiority...

...1 What carried the Republicans to success in 1980 was not positive acceptance of their program but massive disillusionment with Democratic officeholders...

...New York Senator PatJohn Judis is the political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...And the voting booth gave it to us...

...Kemp's main fear is that Reagan will pursue these policies in a timid, piecemeal fashion—as Ford-Nixon advisers like George Shultz, Alan Greenspan, and Arthur Burns would prefer...

...But many of these leaders have also tended to exaggerate and distort the meaning of the Reagan victory...

...He vacillated between rudimentary economic planning (wage-price guidelines, the Energy Department) and the use of recession to stem inflation, between a genuinely pluralistic approach to the Third World and the new militarism of Presidential Directive Fifty-nine...

...These will not lead to American superiority over the Soviet Union and will not increase American prestige overseas, but they will divert capital from civilian production and enlarge the growing deficit...

...pollution, potholes, and industrial cancer have steadily increased...

...Reagan and his advisers will be even more likely than Carter to accept a recession as an inevitable remedy for inflation...

...But while the election results confirm the disintegration of the Democratic coalition, they do not necessarily confirm the emergence of a new Republican majority...

...This poll helps explain why the Republicans were able to make such dramatic inroads among union members and blue-collar workers...

...This instability is rooted in the crisis of liberalism...

...The second Democratic direction is being proposed by some labor Democrats who are convinced that an Edward Kennedy-type liberalism, if it can find a charismatic exponent untainted by scandal, still has a healthy future in America...

...An administration could move toward an alternative that resembles European social democracy but enjoys the support of enlightened corporate leaders...

...A need for an outlet...

...In answer to a CBS-New York Times question, the greatest number of respondents said they voted for Reagan because "it's time for a change"—not because they saw any positive qualification on Reagan's part...

...When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, one liberal defeated another...

...Four years later, he signed the SALT treaty...

...There have, of course, been differences within and between the parties, reflecting the various constituencies that politicians represent, but these differences have been framed within a broad consensus about the Government's responsibility for economic health and imperial defense...

...He was often criticized for advocating a "politics of nostalgia," but his nostalgia did not go back to pre-New Deal times but to the Kennedy Administration...

...The task of labor and the Left is to build a movement for democratic, responsible planning...

...The crisis of liberalism corresponds to a crisis in capitalism...

...His stimulative economic program recalled Kennedy's 1963 tax cut and his program for "rebuilding America's defenses" was intended to recreate the nuclear superiority that allowed Kennedy to outbluff Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis...

...In the NBC-Associated Press poll, 25 per cent of voters listed "values" as a key concern in their choice of a Presidential candidate...

...There have been some tentative steps in the last four years toward building such a movement—the creation of the UAW-sponsored Progressive Alliance, the formation of the Machinists-sponsored Citizens/Labor Energy Coalition (CLEC...

...These centrist Democrats argue, in effect, for a more competent version of the Carter Administration, as if Carter's principal problem were the execution of policy and not his unwillingness to contemplate the kind of policies that could surmount the current crisis...

...The need to do this—rather than watering down already wilted programs—should be the lesson of the Reagan victory...

...it has also driven disillusioned, alienated citizens away from the polls...

...With considerable justification, they fear that the next four years will see a rollback of affirmative action, civil liberties, health and safety regulation, and jobs programs—and a sharp acceleration in military spending...

...The crisis of liberalism corresponds to a crisis in capitalism f Social conservatism...

...Like Carter, Reagan has pledged to balance the budget, but in trying to make cuts from social spending, he will find that as much as 74 per cent of the budget consists of "uncontrollables" that rise along with prices and the unemployment rate...

...That's what came out of all of the people on Election Day—frustration...

...It is predicated on the view that the Reagan victory did not provide the basis for an emerging Republican majority...

...If one defines liberalism narrowly— as support for Federal funding of abortions, huge increases in CETA, SALT II, busing, and affirmative action—the 1980 election was certainly a repudiation of liberalism...

...Each effort complemented the others, but the crucial component, as experience has now shown', was the development of a campaign strategy aimed at getting the New Right's ideas across in House and Senate races and building a base within the Republican Party and the nation...

...Such, an attempt to echo Kennedy's goals and themes might be misguided, but it is misguided liberalism...

...According to a Des Moines Registerpoll, 10 percent of Republican Senate candidate Charles Grassley's vote was based on his support for (and John Culver's opposition to) a constitutional amendment banning abortion...

...northern cities became increasingly uninhabitable...

...Will the ironies never cease...

...Reagan promised—with the help of Ford's former advisers—to "put America back to work," balance the budget, and curb inflation...

...This threw middle-class doves into an uproar, but was predictably popular among many blue-collar voters...

...Against what would seem like conclusive evidence, they argue Carter's defeat was partly attributable to his failure to embrace a jobs program at the Democratic convention...

...New York, and Philadelphia...

...He assured the American Legion that he had not forgotten "our boys in Vietnam...

...In short, Reagan must make good on the promises of liberalism, or he will suffer the same fate as his predecessors...

...In New York state, voting was down by 500.000 from 1976, and most of the decline was reportedly concentrated in New York City's poorer districts...