A sex crime—a black man, a white victim—and Willie Horton, the convict furloughed by Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, who on a weekend outing brutalized a couple in Maryland, entered the culture as a cause célèbre, as a key in the switch that in the 1988 presidential campaign turned a 19-point Dukakis lead in May into an 8-point lead for George Bush in November, and as an enduring symbol: of what, no one agrees. Democrats call it race-baiting, playing on prejudice. Republicans, from the President down, say the issue is not what Horton looked like but what Dukakis did. Along with the quota wars, the struggle over busing, racial tensions in cities and on university campuses, the Horton case occupies the ground where race crosses crime and other issues, a terrain of danger and immense complexity, where feelings are high, motives suspect, and meanings everywhere unclear.
At this juncture, oddities occur. Republicans court black achievers as possible candidates. Black “leaders” denounce them as enemy renegades. As Americans accept blacks as leaders and heroes—as governors, generals, justices, and (in at least two cases) as serious possible Presidents—the civil-rights movement tumbles from favor, its clout diminished, its agenda challenged. In the crossfire of argument over the Clarence Thomas nomination, it becomes apparent that race is entangled in a cluster of issues marginally connected to it, ranging in nature from interest to principle, with great emotive power of their own.
Did whites who fought busing hate black children? Or fear having their own children bused into neighborhoods they or their parents had escaped? Is “quota” a flashword because whites hate blacks? Fear losing a job or a lawsuit? Resent mandated preference in anyone’s interest? Detest a value system that denigrates people, reducing them to members of a herd? Was the Horton case about a black criminal—or about a criminal who happened to be black?
If George Bush plays on these themes, what does that make him? A politician, raising questions of values and policy? Or a haut-Wasp George Wallace, playing on hate? Democrats, who claim they lost the 1988 election on a pitch to racial prejudice, and think they may have lost the White House indefinitely when they took on the burden of equity, join the civil-rights movement to call Bush a cynic, pandering to an electorate irredeemably racist, that hates blacks as blacks, and hates whites who help them, and that uses terms like “values”—and crime, welfare, and discipline—as code words for bias, for feelings better left unexpressed.
Is this true? Or is race now the code word, absorbing strains from other domestic issues, even more divisive, which the country as a whole abhors? Is race making social issues nastier? Or are social issues stopping progress in matters of race? In this question is the puzzle of domestic politics. Who is telling lies to whom?
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The Democrats’ take on the Horton case has always been simple: Republicans magnified, and lied about, a minor incident. Dukakis was blameless. The driving force throughout was race.
This is simple. It is also wrong. Many states had furlough programs in which inmates facing release were permitted short-term outings, to ease them back into normal life. Only a few furloughed those serving life sentences, who were never programmed for release. Dukakis did not start the program, begun in 1972 by a Republican. But he backed it, endorsed it, defended it, and in 1976, vetoing a bill that would have changed it, he made it his own. After Horton’s capture he still would not change it, refusing to release records which would show that Horton had a history of eleven in-prison violations, some of them involving drugs.
It was after the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune had run most of what would be 175 articles, had started a write-in campaign, and collected 57,000 signatures on a petition to put an anti-furlough referendum on the November 1988 ballot, that the Massachusetts legislature stepped in, preempting pressure with an amendment of its own. Dukakis signed this in March 1988 as he was closing in on the Democratic nomination, making it clear he was signing under protest, having refused in the meantime to answer or acknowledge critics, or meet Horton’s victims, the couple Horton had attacked in Maryland and the sister of the young man Horton killed. The Eagle-Tribune was about to win a Pulitzer Prize, and the Reader’s Digest was preparing an article for its July issue that would shred the governor, when Bush’s campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, handed an aide a 3′ x 5′ index card, returned later with notes about the furlough and related issues, including Dukakis’s hostility to defense programs and his veto of a bill instructing public-school teachers to start the day by leading students in the Pledge of Allegiance.
In late May, this material was tested on Reagan Democrats planning to return to their old party. Republicans knew the furlough story would resonate, but were stunned by its power: minutes after having heard it, half of every focus group had turned. Early in June, Bush started to mention it. In late June, Atwater realized it had started to define the enemy. He did not realize he had struck platinum until the July 4 holiday, at a bikers’ rally, when a (black) woman at a table near his discussed the Digest article herself.
The issue was not central to national governance, and was easy for critics to dismiss. It mattered because it showed Dukakis in a pattern voters found incredible, and one he never bothered to explain. As the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg noted in an intra-campaign memo, “Voters are looking for some way of understanding Dukakis’s position, . . . in the absence of an explanation, they are proceeding to imagine the worst. We have to give voters some way of understanding or rationalizing the furloughs, so they can achieve closure, and move on.” Dukakis said nothing—not to the voters, and not to the victims who held him responsible and added to their brief of bad judgment an incredible indifference to their fate.
“Dukakis would later call [it] a ‘terrible tragedy,’ but he would never apologize,” writes Roger Simon in Roadshow. “The Dukakis campaign said there was no reason for the governor to apologize for something that was not his fault.” Horton’s victims then dropped the coup de grâce upon the governor, filming commercials for the Bush campaign and going on a speaking tour.
The issue worked because it touched a picture of Dukakis as governor—and of his party in the past. For years, that party had seemed weak and dissonant, estranged from many of its old constituents, uninterested in defending them, either abroad, vis-à-vis a foreign power, or in their streets and neighborhoods at home. Once the guardian of order, it shunned the very word. Once mainstream, with roots in mass culture, it identified with those who saw the culture as oppressive and corrupt. Alienation was glorified, sometimes beyond reason, valid theories carried to extremes. Concern for rights became contempt for community. Tolerance for deviants became disdain for the norm. Liberals saw criminals as rebels or victims, underdogs facing the weight of state power. They did not sense how much common people saw themselves as threatened, by a predator class and an indifferent system in which victims were abandoned or ignored.
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In 1972, the social issue surfaced in national politics. Democrats, who had swept the country in 1964, and in 1968 almost pulled even despite a splintered party and a weak candidate, now took one state and the District of Columbia. After 1972, they attempted to finesse the issue by running candidates whose credentials varied but who in the course of campaigning invariably revealed themselves as weak: weak in person, weak on defense, weak in controlling the claims of client groups. The Dukakis campaign was framed to make him appear moderate and strong: moderate compared to Jesse Jackson, his late-term rival, strong compared to Bush, then painted as an effete patrician and as weak himself. Dukakis’s lead was built on this image, which pushed him 19 points ahead by spring. In May, Atwater knew he had to shatter it. In June, he had the hammer in his hands.
The charm of the case was that it tripped all the wires, the bill of divorce between Middle America and the national Democrats, in effect for over sixteen years. Dukakis was a liberal, new-style, whose heart bled in all the wrong places. He put abstract rights above public safety, the interests of criminals over those they terrorized. He liked social plans that looked good on paper, ignoring consequences when they failed. He was indifferent to those who deserved his protection: the tax-paying, law-abiding, middle class. (Bush’s media consultant, Roger Ailes, who knew the damage even a delayed gesture would do to the campaign he was crafting, lived in terror that Dukakis would at last apologize for the furlough—a step the Democrats debated endlessly but could not bring themselves to take. One reason was that Dukakis still thought himself blameless. Another was that he might reveal his reason for favoring furloughs for those serving life sentences: he intended to pardon them, as he had already pardoned 28.)
For all the Democrats’ talk of deception and image-mongering, the fact remains that throughout his career everything Dukakis said or did in public only reinforced the impression that in matters of crime and punishment he saw life through the eyes of the defense—or at least of the defense attorney—not the victim, or the state. The defining moment, which validated the campaign against him, came in the second debate with Bush, when the TV journalist Bernard Shaw hypothetically cast him as a victim of violence, and Dukakis leaped reflexively to the side of the accused. Dukakis was described later in books and articles as “an emotional minimalist,” “pathetically incapable of relating to others,” and “oblivious to undercurrents . . . complicated, unspoken, but very real sensitivities . . . the stuff of which all politics is made.” Whether he did not share, or simply could not voice, the rage felt by most people at the impact of violence, he never expressed it, and when Shaw gave him a chance to do so, he turned the question back against himself. Whatever he might have said or felt in private, his concern in public was always for criminals. No impression could have hurt him more.
The Dukakis campaign had been posed as counter-McGovern, an attempt to re-center the party and reclaim its lost millions—based on the fact that he was, after all, a fiscal moderate and, unlike the party’s 1984 candidate Walter Mondale, unconnected to the noisy interest groups. But on two themes—defense, and crime and punishment—he was a McGovern liberal, and it was on these that he was destroyed. Both concerned the issue known as use-of-force: social force, employed by government, to punish or deter aggression, abroad or in domestic matters. This is what most people want of government. It is what Democrats find very hard to do.
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The social issue is a disaster for the Democrats, who have now lost the Supreme Court into the next century and the White House in five of six starts. For the civil-rights movement, it has been a catastrophe, slicing its ties to the American heartland, shrinking it from a crusade to a marginal enterprise, linking it by association to ideas Americans dislike: crime without punishment, welfare without work, and quotas, or the rating of people by type rather than talent. The movement cannot shake its association with quotas since it seems to promote them. Neither can Democrats after the rules adopted by their 1971 reform commission, and after nominating Geraldine Ferraro for the vice presidency in 1984.
Do racists type blacks as lazy or criminal? So do liberals, who by constantly linking black rights to the interests of deviants, create and reinforce the pairing between minorities and crime. Blacks are more likely than whites to be criminals. They are also more likely to be victims, and are increasingly likely to work for the law. Would the widow of a black policeman mind the chance to tell a courtroom what violence has brought into her life?
The Gulf War was a gift to the civil-rights movement, a chance to bond with the heartland on shared pride, power, and competence, to prove that affirmative action done properly—expanding the pool, promoting on merit—can work very, very well. Did the movement push black soldiers as heroes and models? Stress that a military success had been won by an integrated armed service? Proclaim that the military, with a far higher percentage of blacks than the general populace, works better than many civilian businesses, for which it might serve as a model? All this was said—by white conservatives. The civil-rights movement went public with support for HR1, an employment bill vulnerable to the quota charge, and with attacks on Clarence Thomas, whose life story refutes negative imaging. Shunning success and its symbols, the movement sets itself counter to national values, thereby courting resistance. Linking itself to disorder and impotence, it ensures resistance will appear.
Increasingly, the movement has problems with blacks who win power. They win power as people the movement has been programmed to dislike. The parallel is with feminists, who despised Margaret Thatcher, an individualist quick to use power in the national interest. That is why she became prime minister. Twins in spirit, the civil-rights and feminist movements leach values into the national Democratic party that have hastened its precipitous decline. They incline toward group-think, seeking redemption by number. They urge social tinkering for prearranged outcomes. They are pacifist, opposing force in all settings. Feminists see power as mere boyish nonsense. Movement people misread their own experience, thinking that the nonviolence that worked in America, with a strong government, strong Presidents, and strong public input, would work in the world, where there is no National Guard and no government, and nothing at all to check abusive power—except power of another sort.
The message—that power is evil, and that a flawed society has no values it can legitimately impose on anyone—devastated the Democrats, already reeling from Vietnam and their guilt about it, and preconditioned to retreat. The party softened, becoming neutered, then feminized, losing power both in platforms and in candidates. On domestic issues, it fell back on nurturing (becoming, in Christopher Matthews’s term, the “mommy” party), withdrawing to the sickroom and nursery, frightened of the noises in the street. In foreign affairs it no longer even pretends to have a policy. Only ten Senate Democrats voted to support the use of force in the Persian Gulf. Because of this, the party views the next election with terror. If it loses, it will, of course, blame race.
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Is race the killer, the source of the Democrats’ malaise? They say so. But John F. Kennedy sent troops into Southern states, and died a national hero. Lyndon Johnson signed two massive rights bills and in between won a landslide, leaving his rival—a backlash candidate who ran on the code words “states’ rights” and “law and order”—with a shattered party and six Southern states. The Democrats did not lose until 1968, when they split over the war and culture. They did not lose big until 1972, when they assumed the burden of the social issue, whose dead hand grips them still.
What happens to blacks (or liberals) who shed the matrix, the weave of weakness/quotas/crime? General Colin (“cut it off and kill it”) Powell has no problems with power. Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia said “no new taxes,” and wrapped himself in the flag. Gary Franks, running in a white Connecticut district, became the first black Republican in the House since Reconstruction, defeating a white liberal on values and defense.
No candidate was more linked to blacks than Jimmy Carter, backed by a dozen visible black leaders, blessed on national television by the father of Martin Luther King. In 1976 he won as a social conservative and ex-career officer, a protégé of Admiral Rickover—naval icon, tough nut. (In 1980 he lost as a wimp who could not keep order, in his party or the Persian Gulf.) John Kennedy appealed to snobs, and to men in bars and factories. Johnson took votes in ghettos—and white ethnic neighborhoods. No one thought of them as in the “mommy” party. They would not have looked peculiar in a tank.
What would have happened were Willie Horton white, or a black who savaged black victims, or a white thug who brutalized an appealing black couple, no one can know. But the focus groups that turned on Dukakis did not know Horton’s color. Bush never mentioned it. In the Reader’s Digest article, whose impact is shattering, it is nowhere mentioned or implied. It was not until September that a mug shot was slipped onto cable television, whence it was picked up by the national and network news. By this time, Dukakis had long since started to decline.
Televised, Horton’s face is pale against the hair around it. It is easy to see that he looks menacing; it is less obvious that he is black. As the British journalist Matthew Ridley writes in a book not kind to the Republicans, most Americans did not know Horton’s race until the issue crested, and then only because the Democrats complained. Did Bush play the bias issue, reaching out to racial fears? No. He played the cracks around the social issue, careless of the race themes entwined in it, guilty of the effort not to heal. But the Democrats, trying to stifle him, tried to suppress a critique of their own failures, their weak candidates, their flawed ideas. Theirs is a feel-good claim, that lets them rationalize and live with failure. Civil rights is Good. If they lose while defending it, they are good too. Too good for the country. Too good for this world.
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The Democratic party and the civil-rights movement have squandered the capital amassed through the mid-1960’s, slipping from the center to the fringe of power, making “liberal,” once the term of choice of the American majority, an expression of derision and contempt. The civil-rights movement will not recoup until it reclaims consensus, separating integration, which should be a national purpose, from the social agenda, which is narrow, rigid—and disliked. The party will not recoup until it regains its senses, taking its cues from John, not Ted, Kennedy, the latter of whom, in the Gulf War debate, recalled the words of their father at Munich: “I should like to ask you if you know of a dispute or controversy existing in the world which is worth the life of your son, or of anyone else’s son.”
To recoup, the party must revert to the status quo ante (ante about 1967), and let go of three lies: that by doing so they betray their heritage; that they betray the weak, and their own historic mission; that they lose because of bias, not through errors of their own. These thoughts comfort them. They are not true.
The litmus-test issues the Democrats have lost on are not part of their proper heritage. They stem from McGovern, not Truman or Roosevelt, from the Blue Period, not the Golden Age. What did Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy think of the death penalty, quotas, or late-term abortion? What did they think about force? Roosevelt sought war, and waged it. Truman dropped two atomic bombs and defended Korea. Kennedy risked war over Cuba, and bought therein the power to talk peace. This historically is how peace is purchased. Republicans, the new interventionists, learned this from Democrats—at the same time the Democrats forgot.
Nor will the Democrats betray their mission, the integration of outsiders into the greater community, the pulling into the mainstream of the marginal strivers, immigrants, minorities, the working poor. This mission has already been compromised. The caucuses that swarmed over the party in the 1972 election not only drove out the middle, but subjugated the needs of the poor to their own arcane agendas, their “lifestyles issues,” their sense of grievance and deferred entitlement, their endless escalation of demands. Slicing society into factions and subgroups, battening on the condition of victimhood, fighting each other for attention and recompense, they broke the sense of community that makes progress possible. Ensuring by their presence that the party will stay out of power, they have banished the poor from the true source of recompense: a national government run by a President whom the poor have helped to elect. They condemn the needy to ongoing impotence. If this is service, it is strange.
The last lie is the one that Horton’s color has let them keep telling: that they lose, not because of weakness, but because they are “progressive” on race. Are the refinements they push now more progressive in their time and place than what Johnson and Kennedy accomplished? Why did this not break them as leaders? Why were the peak years of rights agitation also the peak years of the Democrats’ power? Why did they win most when associated with racial change?
Historically, the Democrats have not lost on race. They have won on it: when it has been presented as a national purpose, as a matter of fairness to individual people, when it has stood as an issue on its own. It stood on its own in the 1964 election. Democrats won. By 1968, the social issue intruded. They lost, narrowly. It coopted them in the 1972 election, when they entered the Dark Tunnel, from which they still struggle to emerge.
The damage done to everyone by the social issue is a matter of record and regret. Bitterly dividing whites through two decades, it is now dividing blacks as well. It has shattered the Democrats as a national party, exempted the presidency from contest and accountability, and given Republicans a seemingly permanent key to power—with a nasty little twist: while the social issue is still mixed up with bias, anyone addressing it, however unwillingly, ratchets up the tensions over race. Nixon did not care. Reagan did not notice. Bush notices, and cares, but is politically too indebted to the social issue to pull back. His presidency has in some way been tarnished by it—cut off from one aspect of national leadership. The President, not guilty as charged, is not innocent, either. The civil-rights movement has become its own worst enemy. The Democrats are lying to themselves.
