Since the late 1960’s, a sea change has come over American politics. Republicans have dominated presidential elections as thoroughly as Democrats did in earlier decades. More important, there has been a shift in the main issues in domestic policy. The old disputes over economic equality and government control of the economy that dominated New Deal politics have been displaced by a debate over how to deal with entrenched poverty in the inner city. Today—contrary to Kevin Phillips—economic redistribution is effectively off the agenda; politicians argue instead about how to restore the order and competence at the bottom of society that the earlier, class politics took for granted. On these issues of social order and “values,” unlike on earlier size-of-government disputes, the GOP commands a majority.
Most liberals and most Democrats would love to return to a politics centered on economic equality. Some of them believe that the issue will soon be back on the agenda anyway, because economic inequality is rising. In their view, the Reagan and Bush eras have created an offensive new plutocracy, while real wages have declined for many ordinary workers. Americans, they say, are bound to rise up and demand redress, and they believe that the 1992 election may be fought on just this ground.
Short of an economic collapse, however, this is an implausible scenario. The trigger for redistributive movements in the United States has typically been not inequality but unemployment. Americans have demanded change when they could not support themselves at all, not when they were simply paid less than other people. Today, the labor market is tightening as job creation outpaces a slowly growing labor force. Even in the current recession unemployment has been relatively low, and Democrats have been unable to make much out of it. Voters are complaining about stagnant incomes much more than about joblessness. For most Americans in most years, the risk of unemployment is simply too small to cause major domestic concern.
Americans are more upset by something else: the failure of government to discharge its most elementary functions. Most people would be satisfied, the political scientist Thomas Cavanagh says, “if government could simply do the things it used to do well: educating children, repairing roads, and keeping criminals off the streets.” These things are now hard to do, chiefly on account of worsening social conditions in the cities. On the way to a more redistributive politics, the ghetto is the lion in the path.
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This is the Democrats’ dilemma: they do not approve of the disorders of the ghetto, but they find it impossible clearly to disapprove of them. Restrained by a fear of seeming to force values on cultural and racial minorities, they seldom condemn bad behavior openly, or invoke public authority against it. This failure to face the issues that preoccupy the public goes back some years now, and (to quote a recent statement by the man who was the issues director for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign) it “helps explain political developments at the national level during the past generation: the Democratic party has virtually ceded the terrain of popular values to the Republicans.”
Democrats are now in the classic “me-too” position of a minority party. The Republicans have taken a popular stand on a potent issue, and thus become the majority party. The minority party believes in the opposite position, and would like to assert it, but would be cast into the wilderness for its pains. Alternatively, it could take a stance closer to the majority in order to have a shot at power, but it would then lose its distinctive identity.
Up through the mid-1960’s, Republicans were themselves in this position. Big-government programs were popular, and were associated with Democrats. The GOP opposed them at its peril; but the party could not accept big government, as some liberal Republicans advised, without abandoning its reason for being. Today, barring an economic collapse, Democrats would have to be tough on crime and welfare to take over the White House, but this would require them to abandon the social positions that have become distinctively Democratic.
The dilemma is deep-seated. No superficial change in proposals or candidates can overcome it. On the issues raised by the enduring dependency of many urban poor, there is a real difference of view between Democratic leadership groups and the voting public. Most liberals believe that less can or should be expected in the way of work and other civilities from the poor than most voters want. Americans (according to a committee advising the centrist Democratic Leadership Council) are fed up with the liberal “language of compensation.” They want to hear about “middle-class values—individual responsibility, hard work, equal opportunity.”
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The Democratic dilemma is typical of a period, like our own, when basic social values are in question. Politically, the issue of citizenship and the proper definition of the community is prior to the question of class and equality. This favors conservatives, as it has repeatedly done over the nation’s life. Conservatives lead today just as they did in the period of the founding and later during the Civil War and its aftermath, when Republicans controlled Washington more fully than they do now. Only after Americans had established their political identity could questions of social fairness be addressed. Then and only then did Presidents Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts sweep conservatives out of office in the name of struggling farmers, workers, and the “little man.”
We think of Democrats as having made the civil-rights issue their own in recent years, but on a longer view it is really the Republicans’ destiny to deal with race, as it is the Democrats’ to deal with class. Although Democrats enacted most of the civil-rights laws of the 60’s, it turned out that getting whites to deal with blacks more fairly in formal ways was relatively easy. It has proved much harder to equip poor blacks and other minorities to prosper in fairer competition. Many have reacted in effect by seceding from mainstream institutions—breaking the law, dropping out of school, not learning English, declining to work. This internal secession is no less threatening to the country than the more formal secession of the South in 1861.
The parallels between the parties’ reactions to the two conflicts are uncanny. Just as Democrats tried, in vain, to hold onto the South by deferring to Southern politicians, so they defer to black leaders today. It is Republicans who have resisted the new secession, as they did the old. The GOP leads the new struggle in part because it is more willing to exert public authority. Republicans also lead because, as before, they are more unified in their cause. Today as before, part of the Democrats’ constituency is among the secessionists. Republicans do not depend much today on black votes, as they earlier did not depend on the South, and they are hence freer to press the battle. This unity is one reason why, as in 1860, they find themselves in the White House even though more Americans are Democrats than Republicans.
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How have Democrats responded to their dilemma? One superficial tactic has been to appear tough on the same social issues that have proved so telling for Republicans at the polls. During the 1988 campaign, Democratic candidates identified themselves with “working people,” something they had no need to do before 1960. They were sure to have themselves photographed among unemployed factory workers or distressed farmers; they described traditional social programs as benefits not for the poor but for “working families” or, in the case of welfare, for “children.”
George Bush easily trumped these appeals. He used the Pledge of Allegiance to identify his party with American values, and to suggest that Democrats were soft on those values. The next year, when, on grounds of free speech, the Supreme Court disallowed laws punishing the desecration of the flag, Bush and other Republicans promptly called for a federal law to protect the flag and, when that too was disallowed, a constitutional amendment. Some Democrats joined in, loath once again to appear behindhand.
In 1990, the Senate voted a crime bill that was supposed to rescue Democrats from the imputations of permissiveness that Bush had levied to such effect in 1988. Among other provisions, the bill extended capital punishment over a wider range of offenses, and also limited the number of appeals that persons sentenced to death could make to the federal courts. “This is the toughest, most comprehensive crime bill in our history,” announced Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “Willie Horton is back in jail, figuratively speaking.” But then other Democrats weakened the effect by opposing capital punishment in general or, at least, in cases where race might have influenced sentencing. Their proposals, defeated in the Senate, received more support in the House, where a “racial-justice” amendment was added. Some House Democrats derided the new rules, prompting a Bush threat of a veto. These moves showed that, however tough Democrats talked, they would inevitably appear softer on law enforcement than the GOP.
Another option for the Democrats has been to try to avoid the social problem by putting forward a narrowly economic program. Thus, “neoliberals” propose that Washington actively enhance national economic competitiveness through tax breaks for business innovation, promotion of exports, and heavier investment in education and infrastructure. The United States, they say, should have an explicit “industrial policy” that favors change and growth, rather than assume that the magic of the market, plus today’s disjointed subsidies, will do the job. This program, the work of Robert Reich and other liberal economists, formed the centerpiece of Gary Hart’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. In the current campaign, Paul Tsongas, among Democratic contenders, most clearly takes this approach.
Whatever the economic merits of these ideas, they are politically problematic. Critics on the Left complain that if helping business becomes the Democrats’ platform, there will be little to distinguish them from Republicans. Neoliberalism, in any event, is far too detached from any visceral appeal to ordinary people to succeed at the polls. Nor, more importantly, does it contain anything to assuage public concern over the decline of order and civility in American life. Welfare and other antipoverty benefits are central to these worries, yet most Democrats today avoid discussing those programs. Some speak of social spending as “investment,” a word that sounds economic and hard-headed. But what the public wants to hear from the Democrats is not an economic language but a moral language that links benefits with obligations. These are not terms in which most Democrats find it comfortable to speak.
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A more effective strategy for Democrats might be to return to the explicit appeals to class that generated liberal presidential majorities in the decades before 1968. This is the advice of Robert Kuttner and some other thinkers. They hope to break the grip of social issues on the domestic debate by (in Michael Katz’s words) pulling public discourse “away from family and toward power.”
According to Kuttner, “nonrich” Americans have forgotten what government does for them. Benefits such as Social Security and Medicare are taken for granted today. Social programs are associated only with the poor, hence are unpopular. Ordinary people have few hopes that government can improve their lives, so they are less interested in politics than they once were, and they vote less. As a result, the relative power of the affluent has grown.
A democratic majority can be restored, Kuttner and others say, only if the party recovers its “populist” heritage and appeals openly for “economic justice.” That means offering to the non-rich the sorts of additional benefits that once cemented their attachment to “affirmative government.” Programs targeted only on the poor will always command little support, but new entitlements could serve to attract the broad public, including the poor. Kuttner proposes new health, child-care, and housing programs, plus enriched unemployment benefits. He would regulate business to improve job security and embrace “economic planning” to protect the American economy to some extent from international pressures. Among this year’s Democratic candidates, Tom Harkin, with his rabble-rousing rhetoric and his appeals to economic nationalism, comes the closest to this style of thinking.
Politically, however, a program of new curbs on business—investment controls, restraints on plant closings, etc.—is prohibitive to sell. It sounds like the sort of state direction of production that has been discredited in most of the developed world. How can one contend seriously for a governmental economy when such a system has just been overthrown in the Soviet bloc and, in less extreme forms, questioned in Western Europe?
The more appealing side of the Kuttner program is its promise of new entitlements for the middle class. The idea is to complement the existing social-insurance benefits, which go mainly to the elderly and disabled, with programs to serve the practical needs of the working-aged. Such ideas continue along the path of liberal reformism that was interrupted by the economic pressures of the last decades and by the new and seemingly intractable forms of poverty.
The potential appeal here is real, as the results of the last presidential election suggest. Although Michael Dukakis lost, he gained a hearing for his contention that government should make good on the recent deficiencies of the economy by raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing health and child care, helping to finance college educations, and subsidizing more affordable housing. Such class-oriented pitches, made toward the end of the campaign, did a lot more for Dukakis than his earlier appeals to managerial competence. Despite his defeat, Congress within two years raised the minimum wage as well as wage subsidies for low-income workers and voted several new child-care subsidies. Nothing is more popular than new benefits for working people.
The present-day costs of health care, higher education, and housing might well provide the grounds for a progressive reform crusade where a shortage of jobs no longer does. By stressing these vulnerabilities, particularly among the young, Democrats might at last rebuild the coalition they need to govern, one that unites the working and middle classes with the poor and dependent. The potential was shown in November of last year when Harris Wofford won a Senate seat for Democrats in Pennsylvania by running on the health-care issue.
But there is one crushing precondition to an entitlements strategy: its beneficiaries must be workers. There is no way, except by subterfuge, to extend it to the nonworking poor. Americans clearly want most new benefits, like most existing ones, to go to the “deserving,” not the “undeserving.” Yet if new entitlements exclude the non-working, they will solve neither the economic problems of the poor nor the political problems Democrats face on their account.
That moral became clear in New Jersey, where James Florio, a liberal Democratic governor, assembled exactly the populist coalition critics like Kuttner speak of. Florio was elected in 1989 with a combination of urban and blue-collar votes, then used his mandate to push through stiff tax increases, mainly on the rich, in order to spend more on education and other services, chiefly in urban areas. Commentators applauded, but a backlash quickly mounted. Florio’s working-class constituents resented seeing so much of their money being spent on the crumbling cities they had left behind. They made their views felt in November’s balloting, when Republicans seized control of the New Jersey state legislature.
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None of these options deals directly with urban disorders, and that is their main limitation. Some moderate Democratic politicians, however, have begun to take positions on social policy that sound distinctly conservative. Democratic candidates Bill Clinton and Douglas Wilder talk of mainstream “values” and of expecting welfare clients to work. Some intellectuals have gone further, suggesting that a more authoritative stance might actually serve radical ends.
Mickey Kaus, himself a liberal, has written that recent liberal social thinking provides a poor rationale for governance. Liberal Democrats like Mario Cuomo want to help the poor and other vulnerable groups out of “compassion,” but that appeal neglects the moral distinctions the public insists on drawing among claimants at the public trough; it suggests an “indiscriminate dispensing of cash in a sort of all-purpose socialized United Way campaign.” Above all, it offers a “miserable basis for liberal politics,” because it attributes to government clients the qualities only of “dependence and piteousness.” A social policy based only on “charity” can never yield a society of “free, equal citizens.”
This sort of unease has spurred renewed talk on the Left of the responsibilities of citizenship. The problem with the welfare state, the historian Fred Siegel says, is that it liberates people from responsibility for themselves but makes no demands, and thus has no “ethical core.” Some have tried to resuscitate the idea of citizenship in its original sense as a force for revolutionary change. Barbara Ehrenreich, a feminist author, recently wrote that the Left could reverse the conservative political tide only by crafting “a genuinely radical alternative vision” based not only on the “redistribution of wealth” but on “the old small-R republican values of active citizenship.”
Some of this talk never gets beyond generalities: intellectuals on the Left find it easier to affirm values rhetorically than actually to require people to obey them. For some critics, too, the main agenda of “citizenship” remains economic: the term is a code word for reversing Reaganite cuts in taxation and regulations and reasserting public control of the economy. Others, however, have developed detailed ideas of what a civic liberalism would amount to. Kaus, arguing that the Left has spent too much political capital on efforts to redistribute wealth and income, urges liberals to build up public institutions that compensate for economic inequality. Through improved schools, universal social services such as child or health care, and democratized local government, Americans could share a common life even if they had radically different incomes.
Unfortunately, the social problem once again quickly intrudes. Civic liberalism presumes that the middle class would want to inhabit, and to invest in, the same public spaces as the poor. But without more secure conditions in schools, streets, and parks, that is very doubtful. The problem of the underclass must first be solved.
Kaus accepts that the poor must be required to work, that standards must be raised in schools, and that law and order must be restored in cities. He has proposed to replace welfare with guaranteed jobs, a plan much like what some conservatives talk about. The Democratic Leadership Council, too, has attempted to promote work and family obligations as a basis for social policy. But all such efforts have met stiff resistance among other Democrats. In the crafting of the Family Support Act, the most recent reform of welfare, most Democrats in Congress accepted the need to strengthen work requirements for adult recipients, but they did not accept that participation in “workfare” programs should be mandatory. Most liberals support work or other requirements only in general terms—not specifically enough to make benefits truly conditional. Few intellectuals talk about enforcing social standards with anything but distaste.
The liberal aversion to authority assures that, for now, any more hard-headed form of liberalism will remain speculative. In response to Kaus, the conservative political theorist Mark Lilla wrote, “Until Democrats realize that citizenship sometimes means having to sit up straight and tie your shoes, civic liberalism will have no party to call its own.”
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One source of liberal and Democratic opposition to a more authoritative work policy is the belief that, if successful, it would shift American politics further to the Right. With more work and less dependency among the needy, the argument goes, the welfare state would shrink and society would return to a market basis where even the needy had to labor to survive. As more of the poor achieved some measure of advancement, the case for radical social change would be even weaker than it is now.
My own hunch is different. History shows that, as groups become more integrated, they make more demands on society. A poor population working at higher levels might retain many of its historic resentments, but would now have a much stronger claim on public sympathy, not to mention more income and more practical ability to contribute to political organization. The labor movement offers an example. Unions became major players in national politics not in the 19th century, when the movement was marginal and sometimes extremist, but in this century, when with greater numbers and legitimacy they were able to exact key concessions during the New Deal and succeeding Democratic administrations.
Once work levels rose among the low-income class, a new politics of redress might appear first in an upsurge of labor organizing. One form might be more militant municipal unionism, already seen in cities like New York where ethnic groups have traditionally dominated one or another sector of the public service. More important would be a wave of new organizing in private-sector service industries that have recently provided the bulk of new employment for the low-skilled. These are not jobs that employers can easily shift to other regions or overseas, so they are ripe for organization. The next frontier could be elective politics. Overstressed new workers might funnel demands into the Democratic party or conceivably into a splinter party further to the Left. The new movement—Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition may prove a harbinger—would be an economic analogue to the civil-rights movement. Fledgling workers would demand protections like greater affirmative action but also enhanced benefits, job training, and other services.
Blacks would also have more power to push for change themselves. In July 1990, John E. Jacobs, president of the Urban League, called for an “Urban Marshall Plan” to invest in infrastructure and minority education and thus save America’s cities. Appealing for help not only to whites, he pointed out that blacks now had a “critical mass” of middle-class and professional people to advance such a program on their own. Black “lawyers and computer experts, corporate managers and business people” were going to turn out to be “revolutionaries” in “suits and cuff-links.” They would remember their heritage and demand redress for disadvantaged blacks left behind in the inner city.
If there is any plausibility to this scenario, why should conservatives be the ones pushing tough work and welfare politics today? The answer is that their concerns run deeper than the small-government agenda with which they have traditionally been identified. Today’s conservatives defend, not simply the free economy but a vision of self-reliant individualism that they see as underlying the entire American, and Western, tradition. If that larger aim requires opening the door to increased collectivism, it is a price many feel worth paying.
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When the poverty problem appeared in the 1960’s, what prevented a strategy of work enforcement was not so much the large numbers on Aid to Dependent Children and other welfare programs as the eruption of the new debate over dependency. For the first time, liberal politicians, intellectuals, and poverty lawyers were prepared to characterize nonworking adults as helpless victims who could not be expected to function. Conservatives countered with arguments for personal responsibility and “values”—arguments they seldom had to make in the decades before 1960, when the vast majority of working-aged Americans supported families on their wages with little expectation of direct help from government. The dispute made it all but impossible to agree on social standards. Today, a national interest in raising work levels is clear, yet how to achieve that goal remains deeply controversial.
The poverty problem does not seem rooted in race, since poor and prosperous Americans alike are drawn from all racial groups, yet racial politics remains the most formidable obstacle to resolving it. The greatest political resource of those opposed to a more authoritative social policy is that most black leaders and notables agree with them, or at least acquiesce, even though these black leaders know the ravages that drugs, crime, and dependency have caused in low-income areas. It is hard for conservatives to institute enforcement measures, and for liberals even to advocate them, when black leaders decline to speak up publicly for enforcing moral and social standards.
The opponents of work-oriented reform policies may thus prevail, even in the teeth of legislative decisions. Already, local workfare officials report stiff opposition from poverty lawyers determined to litigate every step of the process by which recipients are obligated to participate in these programs and work. Amid constant legal and political challenges, the effort to enforce work and other civilities may grind to a halt. Progress may have to wait upon the emergence of a more conservative black leadership, willing to abandon the activists, reject racial excuses, and enforce behavioral norms in the name of integration.
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At best, work enforcement will involve a long struggle that is bound to strain the nation’s political resolution. This second civil war will be as testing in its own way as the first, though less dramatic. The lethargy of the dependent may be too great for any policy to change. Yet the majority of Americans, black and white, continue to reject the ghetto’s ethos of resignation. They continue to affirm both that individual effort is meaningful and that persons can be held accountable for their lives.
To exempt people from minimal standards of social behavior on grounds that they cannot cope tempts the poor, and others with them, toward a collective slough of despond. That way, most Americans feel, lies the abyss. The other way is to reassert, deliberately and constantly, the idea of responsibility. Precisely because it can no longer be assumed, responsibility must be willed, and promoted as a matter of explicit policy. Only by resisting passive poverty as firmly as the West resisted Communism can we hope for a day when most nonworking poor will accept that some opportunity exists for them and that they should seek it. Only then could the social problem recede. Only then could questions of economic equality receive a renewed prominence in American politics.
