The Democrats’ Dilemma
The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond.
by Robert Kuttner.
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books. 265 pp. $18.95.
Robert Kuttner, who is among the more prominent of the Democratic party’s younger intellectuals, has the soul of a Tammany ward boss. In fact, as Kuttner himself reveals, one of the inspiring personalities behind his The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond is George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany captain who at the turn of the century held forth from the bootblack stand of the New York County Court House on the virtues of honest graft, the value of “study-in’ human nature and actin’ accordin’,” and the uselessness of “chasin’ after theories and stayin’ up nights readin’ books.”
The Life of the Party sets out a strategy which Kuttner believes will create a permanent Democratic majority. Recognizing that the party’s progressive elites, with their isolationist foreign policy and nihilistic cultural ideas, are a political liability, he argues that the Democrats can nevertheless win votes from the country’s socially conservative majority if they run and then deliver on the bread-and-butter issues. He would thus have the Democrats promise and enact such programs as: national health insurance, all-day school grants, free child care, grants for home-buyers, job training, full-employment guarantees, and public-works programs. It would all be centralized in Washington, it would be paid for by the rich (through a transfer tax on stock sales, for example), and it would instill in its beneficiaries an attitude of dependency on big government and, especially, on the Democratic party.
Kuttner, in short, envisages another New Deal realignment, the “strategic use of governance to create political conditions for cohesive egalitarian policies.” George Washington Plunkitt expressed the same strategy in pithier language: “We stood as we have always stood, for rewardin’ the men that won the victory.” And Harry Hopkins, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s henchmen, had another phrase which captured the New Deal’s genius at majority-making: “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.”
The bulk of Kuttner’s book is a critique of the modern-day institutions and tendencies which block a Democratic return to Hopkins’s populist formula. Modern Democrats have generally welcomed the increasing emphasis on the media and on money in political life, the growing institutional importance of Gucci-shod powerbrokers and ideological think tanks; they have shared the sunny assumption that dealignment and rampant ticket-splitting are healthy developments; worst of all, they have espoused an endearing faith in the power of new ideas. Kuttner sees all these developments, so characteristic of the new Washington, as fundamentally Republican, and as having produced an atmosphere in which Democrats cannot flourish.
Thus, although he has some nice things to say about the denizens of liberal think tanks, basically Kuttner dismisses them as patrician meddlers, and worse, political naïfs. “To them,” he writes, “‘policy’ is something splendidly disconnected from politics, or connected only via a high-minded civic exercise.” Neoliberals are targets of his ultimate put-down: “Unreliable stewards of the Democratic party,” they are “a bit too enchanted with the notion of a general interest transcending the limited interests of various social groups.”
Kuttner remains, in general, unimpressed by this notion, preferring instead the rule that what is good for the Democratic party is good for the nation. A neoliberal like James Fallows might come up with an idea that aims to benefit the nation as a whole—say, the capitalization of emerging high-tech industries—but, writes Kuttner, this would have to come at the expense of rust-belt dinosaurs, and “as Plunkitt of Tammany Hall or for that matter Harry Hopkins might have reminded Fallows, these are good Democratic voters you’re talking about, son. It’s one thing for a new-class intellectual to write such people off; it’s quite another to commend this view as a philosophy for the Democratic party.”
On analogous grounds Kuttner opposes such policies, endorsed by a number of Democratic economists, as means-testing for welfare, by which programs are directed at those who need them. Kuttner argues that since participation in government programs instills communitarian values, which are the natural bedrock of a Democratic coalition, such programs should therefore expand to touch as many middle-class lives as possible, even if there is no strictly economic reason for doing so. By the same token he opposes voucher programs in education, health care, and legal services, because while they may be more efficient, and more conducive to individual choice, they do not raise consciousness—i.e., reinforce the image of a protective government.
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Do Kuttner’s ideas have a place in today’s Democratic party? It would not seem so. Rather than acknowledging the legitimacy of mainstream America’s mistrust of what they stand for, leading Democrats appear to have decided that their problem is one of packaging. Articles in the new Democratic canon bear such titles as “A New Language for the Left,” and a typical suggestion is that Democrats should drop the word “liberal” in favor of “progressive” because the latter has fewer negative connotations among white males in the South and West. In short, such Democratic “rethinking” as exists owes more to marketing than to philosophy.
These repackaging efforts have been or promise to be failures. But is Kuttner’s the road to success? True, the voters of the South and West, who live in such towns as Tippah, Mississippi, Ringgold, Iowa, and Atoka, Oklahoma, seem unwilling to rejoin the Democratic party unless it can deliver tangible economic goods. Yet the Democrats’ dilemma is that they may not be able to recapture the populists in Atoka without disaffecting the progressives in Cambridge, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Bethesda.
There are two groups of progressives that any Democratic strategist thinking about Kuttner’s answer to his problem has to worry about: the elite who are professionally involved in politics or policy, and the broader numbers of upper-middle-class do-gooders for whom politics is a high-minded hobby.
The first group might well turn out to be not much of a problem at all. Although Kuttner disdains the neoliberals—the Washington insiders who draw their livings from law firms and consultant organizations, and the army of congressional staffers and agency underlings—a Kuttnerian program, even one which repudiates the public interest for the sake of party interest, would have little trouble buying their support.
Take, for example, the issue of protectionism. Economists of all stripes agree that protectionism in any form is harmful to the nation, but powerful interests see that it is nevertheless to their benefit. It takes an opportunistic, desperate, and intellectually dissolute party to hoist the protectionist banner, for such a party has to be able to say to itself, “We know the experts say this is bad for the country, and privately we know they are right, but we need this issue to win votes.” Such a party was the Republican party of fifty years ago; it is the Democratic party of today. The Washington Post and other liberal organs still argue against protectionism, but not too vehemently; on this issue, and faced with the prospect of another Republican presidency, liberal policy professionals would most likely be willing to tolerate Democratic-party opportunism on a massive scale.
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The do-gooders who dominate the Democratic primaries pose a more serious threat, because while they might naively “believe in” populist economic measures—massive public-employment programs, confiscatory tax policies for the rich, a nationalized health insurance—they would be repelled by the rough-and-tumble politics which has always characterized local populist enterprises. Harry Hopkins, for example, forfeited his chance to succeed Roosevelt in the White House when he turned federal relief dollars over to big-city machines and used WPA workers to aid the primary campaigns of White House loyalists. His defense—“There is nothing wrong with supporting the political group that will give you the most”—enraged progressive sensibilities of the day, which were if anything less delicate than those of today, when high-minded progressives are more high-minded than ever.
Walter Mondale was talking directly to these progressives when he said, “I would rather lose an election about decency than win one about self-interest.” Indeed, today’s dainty progressives, who demand purity in their candidates, have all but written honest self-interest out of the political debate. The jobs and special-favors programs they do endorse come wrapped as civil-rights crusades or “family policies.” These cause-of-the-month-club groupies have enough power in the Democratic primary system to crush any populist candidacy of the Kuttnerian stripe—unless such a candidate can successfully disguise his populism by exuding communitarian gush.
As it happens, this year there is such a candidate: Paul Simon. Just as the Roosevelt personality appealed to both elite progressives (with some misgivings) and aggrieved populists, Paul Simon is well constructed to capture votes from Cambridge to Carson City. The author of twelve books, with a bit of an unpolished, Adlai Stevenson graininess about him, Simon embraces a platform of out-and-out redistributionism: an $11-billion program for full employment, defense cuts, taxes on the rich—all adding up to a balanced budget. Most importantly, Simon believes that this wish list—which anybody from Michael Dukakis rightward would call disastrous for the nation—is actually in the national interest. His positions are opportunistic, but he is sincere about them, and sincerity is to the progressives what preparedness is to the Boy Scouts.
Simon’s problem, however, and Kuttner’s too, is that his conception of populism is still class-based and therefore obsolete. Real incomes have increased by about 200 percent since the New Deal; today’s populists are likely to have college degrees. In fact, the most visible populists in America are business leaders and Republican conservatives like T. Boone Pickens and H. Ross Perot, who have railed against big business and liberal cultural values in equally resonant terms. Even among Democrats, the most truly populist-sounding figure is Lee Iacocca. Class antagonism, once the base of populist discontent, has largely disappeared from American life, as is demonstrated in numerous polls by Roper and the National Opinion Research Center.
Nor is redistribution any longer the heart of a populist economic policy, although Kuttner and Simon still cling to the notion. The populism of the 1980’s, which cuts across economic lines, is fueled mostly by grievances about the internationalization of the U.S. economy. When a Wall Street Journal reporter asked Jesse Jackson what was his worst mistake in politics, the answer was: “Failure to study the internationalization of the economy and its damaging effects on all sectors of society, not only blacks.” If you ask many a Democratic politician what he is going to do to help the nation adapt to the internationalized economy, his response will be, “I’m against it.”
Thus we are back to protectionism. The trade measures now being proposed by Democrats would be a first step toward building a Great Wall around the American economy; restrictions on the flow of capital would be another. An electoral campaign informed by this new economic isolationism, and drawing on reserves of nativism, xenophobia, and anti-Asian racism, might indeed appeal to populist constituencies across the nation, and it might indeed be good for the prospects of the Democratic party. It would also be ugly in the extreme, the sort of spectacle only a George Washington Plunkitt would enjoy.
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