Last Hurrahs for the New Deal

...Exactly what Hart meant is open to debate...

...Max Baucus of Montana that would make the agency self-destruct after seven years if it is not specifically renewed...

...Until Brown’s election in California, in facti there was little evidence of a public debate over the idea of post-New Deal liberalism...

...In his first year, he faced the prospect of an $SOO-million deficit and was little able to afford new social programs...

...Wattenberg asked...

...Barbara Jordan of Texas acknowledged that “the cornerstone of all our Democratic thinking-our fundamental belief that the federal government could do all things, for all people, at all times, has cracks in it...

...Now there is one, and virtually every week brings a new article about Brown’s relentless questioning of all the things liberals assume government should provide...

...Alan Ehrenhalt is political editor of Congressional Quarterly...

...The Democrats shouldn’t seek votes on the premise that they have replaced coherent New Deal programs-even failed ones-with a new policy of endless inquiry...

...And when it has failed as a program, it has shown remarkable resilience as a slogan, still winning votes in 1974 for people who were not even born when Roosevelt died...

...No one answered Wattenberg directly...

...Jimmy Carter of Georgia frequently sounds skeptical of government, in a generalized way...

...Senator Gary Hart probably should have attracted more attention in his 1974 campaign when he said of himself and other Democratic newcomers, “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys...

...The crazy eight are not crazy, and they did not do it out of love for Walker...

...There were very few other proposals as constructive or as interesting at Louisville...

...Wattenberg, speaking reverently of the New Deal tradition, seemed to mean the entire Roosevelt-Kennedy-Johnson commitment to better living and social justice...

...They are on to an idea with some political potential, and one that the Democratic Party need not abdicate to the Republican right...

...Since his election, Governor Jerry Brown of California has been making news with them...

...The Democratic Forum is not part of the regular party structure...

...It is striking, therefore, to hear liberal Democrats talking about the New Deal not only as an anachronism but as a dangerous piece of ideological baggage the party will have to discard if it wants to win elections from now on...

...In Illinois last month, eight of the most liberal-minded Democrats in the state Senate named themselves the “crazy eight” and voted to sustain Governor Daniel Walker’s veto of an $81-million school aid bill...

...There has grown up, especially in the last six months, a strong antigovernment, anti-bureaucracy, antinew agency phenomenon in this country...

...It is a promising idea for a post-New Deal liberal campaign, but it is only a start, awaiting further specifics...

...like pollution and occupational safety on a reward and punishment basis, using the tax structure or other financial incentives to reinforce behavior which the government deems to be in society’s interest...

...You can’t call Fred Harris of Oklahoma a New Dealer...

...What did become clear, however, is that some Democrats are beginning to define the ’New Deal in much narrower terms...

...Just how many of them will surface during the campaign was not apparent from Louisville...

...They talked that way in Louisville a few weeks ago, at the first National Democratic issues Convention , organized by a group called the Democratic Forum...

...The best progress on health is to do nothing,” he added later, “unless we change the fee-for-service payment method...

...There were no decisions made at Louisville...

...to justify the cost...

...In the decade since Medicare and Medicaid have appeared,” he said, “we have poured billions into the health care delivery system of this country, without, as far as I can see, improving materially either the level of he,alth care or its availability for m’ ost Americin ’families...

...But Dukakis, too, can be explained in individual terms...

...Seven of the contenders for the Democratic nonlination spoke at the convention, but none put particular stress on the post-New Deal approach...

...But a political party does not sell out its ends by debating means...

...He argues convincingly that four more years of refining the questions are preferable to four years of promising to change people’s lives and failing because the answers were wrong...

...Action in both the Senate and the House this year indicates others in his political generation are thinking the same way...

...He suggested handling problems...

...Waiting for Some Answers That was a serious shortcoming, and Wattenberg seized on it in a debate that included Dukakis and Van Dyk...

...George Wallace should not be the only Democrat in next year’s presidential primaries talking about big government...

...In Illinois and in other states, Democratic legislators are beginning to ask whether proposed new chunks of government are worth the money...

...No votes were taken, and in fact only a small percentage of the party’s famous names were there...

...Some of the candidates are hard to categorize on this issue...

...Sponsors of the legislation lost 80 votes on the Democratic side, more than 20 of them from normally liberal northern Democrats concerned about bureaucratic expansion...

...If, at last, the problem begins to be solved, nonetheless leave the agency or program, its budget, and its personnel in place...

...If the problem becomes intractable, the program or the agency should be given additional funding and personnel...

...Not just whether they will help somebody-everything government does helps somebody -but whether they will help enough people...

...Hardly anybody in the party opposes that, because it’s almost too vague to oppose...

...Still, Wattenberg has a point...

...Michael Dukakis is Hubert Humphrey with a payroll to meet...

...Few have emerged from his first year in power in Sacramento...

...There’s nothing startling about that idea, but it’s the kind of suggestion the Democrats will have to consider if they start telling voters the New Deal no longer makes sense...

...Like Brown, Dukakis has attracted attention during his first year in office for his skeptical attitude toward government expansion...

...But it has also been easy to dismiss Brown as an aberration, to emphasize his personality rather than his questions, to categorize him as a lone eccentric governor soft on Buddhism and unlikely to lead a national political party in new directions...

...They see it, especially in its Great Society package, as a clumsy bureaucratic approach to social problems in which little attempt is made to assess what’s working, and most of the money spent ends up with the bureaucrats rather than the needy...

...They are, of course, familiar to readers of this magazine...

...Wattenberg said that to repudiate the New Deal, even 40 years after the fact, was to cast aside the only politics and program the party knew how to win elections with...

...There are signs of restlessness in Congress, as well...

...A weekend in Louisville, however, made it clear that Brown and Dukakis are not aberrations, however unique their personal or state situations may be...

...Can we find a way to pursue equality and social justice without the cost and waste of bureaucratic expansion...

...He talks of how he brought his state “zero-based budgeting,” a system in which every program in the state budget is scrutinized each year as if it were a new idea competing for its first dollars...

...until you have some confidence that bureaucracy can be made accountable, nationalizing things won’t make any difference...

...Harris’ populist rhetoric is, if anything, pre-New Deal, a throwback to the nineteenth century...

...Carter says he saved the state $50 million a year this way while he was governor...

...Contagious Skepticism Politicians are suddenly saying things you don’t expect them to say...

...Give the governor a little money, it is said, and you will find him as orthodox a liberal as anyone else...

...The voters will want answers and ought to demand at least a few from the 1976 presidential campaign...

...Handling these things by creating new government agencies, as we have done, creates a morass of legal fights and red tape, Schultze said...

...Four years ago there was little hint of a split between New Deal liberals and any new breed or new generation of liberals...

...his criticism of corporations and of the regressive tax structure leads more toward direct redistribution of wealth than toward new social programs...

...Morris Udal1 of Arizona said he agreed with a lot of what Brown has been saying in California, but that he was more optimistic than Brown about what government could accomplish...

...In 1971 and 1974, the margin was better than 2 to 1. This year, with the House far more Democratic ,and far more liberal, it was a matter of nine votes, 208 to 199...

...Udall’s platform includes national health insurance and a federally guaranteed job for everybody who wants one, an unlikely beginning to a limitedgovernment campaign...

...What these legislators said was that there was no reason to believe the money would go to the schools that needed it most, and that their taxpaying constituents might not like that...

...Economist Charles Schultze offered one when he said that most modern social problems are too complex to be solved with the New Deal approach of agencies and regulations...

...If the problem still exists, it should be studied through grants to former colleagues in the agency...

...Rep...

...it represents the only political program most of today’s Democrats have known or used in their adult lives...

...A healthy skepticism about New Deal approaches does not require repudiation of everything Democratic administrations have accomplished since 1933...

...The idea behind the Louisville meeting was that the party ought to take some time to talk about its identity and its public policies, and that the formal Democratic convention in New York next July would be a poor place to do it...

...Most of the party’s presidential candidates seemed to feel not that the New Deal and Great Society had failed, or become irrelevant, but that they were unfortunately never quite completed-even though, as Van Dyk points out in his Louisville background paper, the number of federal social programs rose from 45 to 435 between 1961 and 1968...

...It was strictly a weekend of talk...

...John GiUigan, a conventional liberal Democrat during his four years as governor of Ohio, surprised the Louisville audience by saying he couldn’t support national health insurance...

...On November 6, for example, the House passed for the third time in four years a bill to create a new federal consumer agency...

...The inequalities of those days still exist...

...The timing was bad for us,” he said...

...The author of the bill, Democratic Rep...

...during his first year in the Senate he has voted with Humphrey and other traditional liberal Democrats far more often than he has opposed them...

...Ted Van Dyk, former Humphrey and McGoyern speechwriter and Louisville panelist, summed up four decades of liberal Democratic thought in one critical paragraph: “Once a social and/or economic problem is perceived, a new federal program or agency should be established to solve it...

...Pollster Peter Hart said “the Democratic Party cannot expect the voters to put Democrats back in office on the strength of a few newly warmedover 1933 programs.’’ And futurist Alvin Toffler, the keynote speaker, told them even more bluntly to “throw out all the old New Deal claptrap .” The audience, which included roughly equal proportions of youthful activists and middle-aged union members, did not seem particularly disturbed by such a barrage of revisionist thinking...

...Throwing dollars after problems is better by far than the alternative, which is to do nothing...

...And last month Newsweek devoted an entire story to a critique of big government...

...But presumably he was serving notice that he would not be an automatic vote in favor of every new social program, regardless of its cost...

...A string of speakers told the delegates that the New Deal concept of massive federal intervention to solve social problems may be obsolete...

...If Jerry Brown had been there, it’s unlikely he would have provided many answers either...

...By contrast, the House passed by voice vote an amendment by freshman Democratic Rep...

...But what was said was interesting, and by traditional liberal standards much of it was heretical...

...The one who emerged as chief defender of New Deal honor was writer Ben Wattenberg, former LBJ White House aide, confidant of Senator Henry Jackson, and devout centrist...

...it is a group of people, many of them Muskie or McGovern campaign workers in 1972, who have been saying for several years that the party could use a little more debate about what it stands for...

...Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts said he thought “much of what government has tried to do over the past 15 years has failed...

...There is nothing obsolete about compassion...

...The fact that somebody is expressing these ideas is not in itself shocking...

...What is surprising is the speed with which the critique is now spreading within the Democratic Party...

...And beyond that, a deeper question...

...Who repealed the New Deal...

...This bill is a victim of this tide...

...There is a tide in state legislatures as well...

...No one on either side of the argument tried to define the words “New Deal,” even though that was crucial to the debate...

...Benjamin Rosenthal of New York, admitted that something was in the air, even on his side of the aisle...

...It stands for a national coalition that won the presidency seven times and has kept Congress in Democratic hands for all but four of the years since 1932...

...There were few answers to that in Louisville, for all the criticism of old-fashioned liberalism...

...So they voted with Walker-and the veto was sustained...