Political Shift

...Republican unity has also provided the Right with an effective party organization that has been able to channel PAC money to strategically important candidates and races...

...The new structures also include the technological revolution which is altering America from within, replacing high-paying jobs with low-wage nonunion work and substituting automation and robotics for human labor...

...Business has been able to block progressive legislation such as the Labor Law Reform Bill of 1978...

...In Harrington's estimation, forty to fifty million Americans live in poverty...

...But the poverty of the 1980s is not the poverty of the past...

...Edsall claims that this is partly the result of the changing nature of campaign financing, which in recent years has come to be dominated by corporate and trade association political action committees (PACs...

...Although poverty in the 1980s is more intractable than in the 1960s, when Harrington wrote The Other America, he still sees a ray of hope in the possibility of rekindling a progressive politics aimed at securing fundamental economic change...

...Today's poverty, he writes, is rooted in "new structures of social misery...

...Edsall is not a clairvoyant but a skilled investigative reporter who has covered the intrigues of Capitol Hill for approximately a decade, first for the Washington bureau of The Baltimore Sun and currently for The Washington Post...

...In many ways, Michael Harrington, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), begins his latest book, The New American Poverty, where Edsall's ends...

...This process of defection has left the Democrats with the very poor as their most loyal constituency and has yielded an electorate that has become, in Edsall's words, increasingly "class-skewed" in its voting behavior...

...As labor slept, however, the business community, more conscious of the changing economic environment, rediscovered class struggle and stepped up its funding of conservative causes and candidates...

...In the case of the Democratic Party, the economic crises of the past decade have discredited its reliance on Keynesian palliatives and eroded the party's New Deal coalition of ethnic minorities, blue-collar workers, and professionals...

...Unlike the Democrats, moreover, the Republicans have had little difficulty in articulating a program for their conservative constituency and in exploiting television and direct mail to advance that program...

...In a similar vein, Harrington points out that, popular stereotypes aside, more than half the recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children are white and more than 70 per cent of such families have only one or two children...

...If you are looking for a thoughtful postmortem on the 1984 election, search no farther than Thomas Edsall's The New Politics of Inequality...

...Unlike many leftist and liberal analysts, Edsall does not see Reagan's extraordinary personal popularity as the source of the nation's drift to the Right...

...Labor long ago renounced class politics in favor of a strategy of accommodation...

...For the Republican Party, these same developments have proven a windfall...

...These include the globalization of the American economy and the outsourcing of industrial production, which have robbed the nation's industrial heartland of both jobs and vitality...

...Until the Left masters those dynamics, or until American conservatives exhaust their own resources and credibility, Harrington's ray of hope will become ever dimmer...

...Bill Blum (Bill Blum practices law in Los Angeles...

...In fact, the office's combined budget during the height of the "war" (1965-1968) was less than $6 billion...

...According to Edsall, "The delicate balance of power between elites and larger groups seeking representation in the political process has been changing in all quarters, including the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the business lobbying community, organized labor, and the intellectual establishment...

...But what is altogether missing from Harrington's book is an examination of the financial and organizational dynamics that, as Thomas Edsall argues, have tilted the entire political spectrum to the Right...

...The resurgence of business activism has paralleled the rise of conservative think tanks and foundations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which have provided the theoretical rationales for Reagan's assault on the welfare state...

...However, the most distressing aspect of his analysis is his contention that even if the Democrats win back the White House in the near future, they would only slow the conservative initiative because the forces pushing the national agenda to the Right are so inordinately strong and exist within the Democratic Party itself...

...While his chapter on economic alternatives is less detailed than his salutary disquisitions on the topic in other books and articles, he sketches the outline of a new political agenda based on democratic economic planning, plant closing legislation, tax reform, income redistribution, and national health insurance...

...Harrington also stresses that in contrast to Western European nations, which allocate up to 30 per cent of their GNP to social welfare programs, the United States allocates no more than 14 per cent...

...Contrary to the claims of Gilder and his ilk, Harrington explains, there never was a welfare "ex^ plosion" during Lyndon Johnson's ill-fated "War on Poverty...

...The anecdotes give The New American Poverty a hurried, slapdash quality, a problem exacerbated by poor editing...

...To be sure, Reagan has altered governmental policy more than any chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt, but, in Edsall's view, the President has simply been the catalyst for such change...

...During the course of that decade, he argues, there has been a "major shift in the balance of power in the United States" and a corresponding shift in Federal economic policy that has injured the poor and the working and middle classes while lining the ample pockets of the rich...

...Harrington does, however, offer a good deal of useful data, particularly when he debunks the work of such New Right pundits as George Gilder...

...What makes these developments so damaging for progressive politics is not only the fact that the poor tend to vote less regularly than their affluent counterparts but that the Democratic Party itself has drifted to the Right and shows little inclination to promote the kind of bold social programs capable of energizing the working class...

...For example, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which financed the "war," never received as much as 1 per cent of the Federal budget in a given year...

...Edsall contends that even the fallout from Watergate, which postponed the swing toward conservatism, harmed Democratic unity in the long run, paving the way for the emergence of a new generation of "procedural reformers" and neoliberals who are often at odds with the aspirations of the poor who make up the party's base of support...

...17.95...

...The roots of ascendant conservatism, Edsall suggests, lie in a unique combination of changes in the institutional framework of American political life, which all but ensured the triumph of Reaganism, with or without the Great Communicator himself...

...Unfortunately, after a fine introduction, Harrington's exploration of these BOOKS themes is filtered and finally lost through a series of anecdotes about laid-off steel-workers and deinstitutionalized mental patients...

...While Edsall's focus is on our increasingly class-skewed voting patterns, Harrington's is on our increasingly class-skewed social structure...

...Few can expound upon the virtues of the democratic socialist creed with Harrington's persuasion and agility, and he is undoubtedly correct in recommending innovative programs as the only long-term antidote to the present malaise...

...The immediate effect of the changes Edsall so carefully documents has been the amalgam of regressive programs referred to as Reaganomics...

...Almost without exception, these changes have benefited the conservative cause...

...Although released before Ronald Reagan's romp to a second term, Edsall's study offers more insight into the New Right's rise to political prominence than any commentary published since the election...

...First and foremost, Edsall writes, Republicans have benefited from the class-skewed bias in voter turnout which has given increased leverage to the rich...

...Democratic doldrums are compounded by the evolution of political parties away from direct voter mobilization toward reliance on television and direct-mail technology, both tools which the Democrats have been slow to appreciate and which may not be adequate for the task of organizing a grass-roots movement centered on the underprivileged...

...The poor are not only still with us, he points out, their numbers are increasing...

...As the prospects of a constantly expanding economic pie receded before the reality of what Lester Thurow has dubbed a "zero-sum process" (whereby one interest group's gains represent another's loss of Government benefits), the more affluent members of the coalition have jumped ship...

...Edsall explains that the balance of power between business and labor has shifted as drastically as that between the parties...

...Although business PACs generally favor Republicans, Edsall marshals an impressive array of statistics to demonstrate that corporate donors have been anything but stingy with Democratic incumbents willing to roll with the conservative tide...