For the past two years, it has sometimes been hard to comprehend—beyond the label—just who and what the Democrats are, let alone where they are going. The collapse of the Carter Presidency and the loss of the Senate—a loss which proved that the party’s problems went much deeper than incompetency at the White House—left the Democrats stunned, divided, and adrift, their stores of thought and inspiration largely exhausted or gone bad.
Party leaders and publicists who had raised an outcry over the Watergate burglary reacted with bewildered indifference in 1980, when Republican strategists Walked off in broad daylight with a priceless inheritance of Democratic campaign themes. Promoters of supply-side economics and deregulation made off with John F. Kennedy’s legacy of “getting America moving again.” The rhetoric of Wilsonian idealism—“making the world safe for democracy”—was coopted by the party usually remembered for isolationism and cold-blooded Realpolitik. Republicans were not even embarrassed about reaching back to the scorned moral tradition of the Great Commoner and Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, who once campaigned—against the power of big business, it bears remembering—as an evangelist “fighting for our homes, our families, and our posterity.”
The practical methods the Republicans promoted in 1980 for reviving economic growth, rebuilding American strength, and restoring traditional values were open to serious challenge in political debate. But the 1980 election was not about such methods: it was about goals and principles. Accordingly, the country went Republican in a landslide.
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1.
Against this background there was a particular significance to the party’s 1982 mid-term Conference on Goals and Principles, held late last June in Philadelphia. A thousand voting delegates and several times as many journalists and observers met to adopt a detailed policy statement and, perhaps more important, to share assessments of their political predicament, listen to prospective presidential candidates, and reflect on past and future campaigns.
The national press, probably to the relief of many Democrats, found this event to be of largely ceremonial importance. The Democratic Conventions of 1968 and 1972 are hard media acts to follow: this meeting didn’t even have a roll-call vote. It also turned out to be the weekend of Secretary Haig’s resignation, high theater which made the out-of-power Democrats into something of a sideshow. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff, moreover, had prepared carefully to avoid open conflicts, and the congressional elections in prospect argued strongly for a show of unity. But despite the surface calm, there were powerful currents at work at this meeting—some still holding the party in the shoals of its recent experience, others tugging it toward safer, deeper waters.
Those who imagine that these mid-term party meetings—mandated by one of those expansive commissions in the age of party reform—are inconsequential publicity events might reflect upon the very first of them: the 1974 Charter Conference in Kansas City. It came just two years after the worst Democratic defeat in generations. Its purpose was to adopt a new charter, or constitution, for the party. The specific issues at stake then involved the degree to which the McGovern reforms of 1972 could be revised—reforms that had established the system of quota representation for women and blacks and that discouraged party leaders and elected officials from playing a significant role in choosing the presidential nominee.
These issues had brought the labor movement into the official decision-making structure of the Democratic party in a significant way for the first time—although AFL-CIO President George Meany, who always favored more informal methods of exercising labor’s political influence, held back from a full organizational commitment. In the months before the Kansas City mid-term conference a bloc of labor representatives had hammered out an understanding with party chairman Robert Strauss and other middle-ground leaders: quotas would go, and other party rules would be modified to shift influence from small, activist groups on the Left to the representatives of broader constituencies.
Yet this agreement collapsed completely when the 1974 Charter Conference opened. Leaders of the party’s Left—Bella Abzug for the women’s caucus and Congressman Ronald Dellums and Assemblyman Willie Brown for the black caucus—announced they would walk out in a blaze of television lights if the delegates refused to reaffirm the quota system. A number of Democratic officeholders panicked at that threat, and other delegates followed after them in confusion. The only important resistance came from a group of labor leaders, but even labor was somewhat divided. At that time the unions had no organized caucus machinery in the party, and no considered strategy: all they could offer were some eloquent protests from the floor. “Union labor will no longer suffer sophisticated denial and discrimination in the high councils of the Democratic party,” declared John Henning of the California AFL-CIO. Soon after, at Meany’s direction, AFL-CIO officials resigned en bloc from the Democratic National Committee, leaving it to the power brokers and the only serious force which remained for them to do business with—a triumphant, well-organized Left.
This was more than a noisy spasm in the unending wrangles of inter-party politics; it had deep and lasting effects. Organized labor and its allies were cast aside in the Democratic campaign of 1976, and from the Carter administration that finally emerged out of it. An influential group of intellectuals and political activists who had long been involved in Democratic politics began drifting away in pursuit of their international concerns, which understandably grew more intense as the policies of the Carter administration unfolded. The Carter Presidency, like the party it was based upon, became an administration of the pragmatists and the Left. Somehow they together managed to reverse the tested formula for Democratic leadership: they urged austerity at home and practiced weakness abroad. That recipe failed badly.
So the mid-term Democratic conference of 1982 may—like the one that followed the debacle of 1972—have planted seeds of things to come. To be sure, this conference came before the 1982 congressional elections. Only after November, when those elections are behind us, will the pursuit of the national themes and alliances of presidential politics begin in earnest. But some clues about that process are already visible.
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2.
Conference passes were waiting for delegates and observers at the properly designated windows to the Philadelphia Civic Center, each pass neatly tucked into its typewritten envelope. This spoke of the chairmanship of Charles Manatt, a California lawyer whose watchword is “professionalism.” The party staff, from the young people who handed out passes up to the divisional directors, worked in a cool, smooth manner. There were no displays of dress or enthusiasm which might remind anyone of the woolly days of McGovernism. Even the jovial, wheeler-dealer style of Robert Strauss was evidently out. Democratic party workers today talk easily about multi-indexed direct-mail lists, issue networking, the demographics of media time buys. This is, unquestionably, a kind of progress. But to hear them one might think that what went wrong with the Democrats over the past decade-and-a-half had little to do with the product the organization was selling. It was simply a matter of bad merchandising.
The delegates, too, displayed a different style. The contrasts of 1972—the rotund ward bosses, the lavender T-shirts stenciled for gay power, the silver-haired notables in chalk stripes, the Afro and the dashiki—have faded. Quotas were supposed to guarantee diversity but, socially and culturally, the delegates seemed to have a lot in common—whatever their race or sex. They were mostly in their thirties and forties, neatly but casually dressed, with education and experience that put them at ease in a setting of big hotels, complex meeting arrangements, proximity to the powerful. They could have been a crowd at a weeknight concert at Washington’s Wolf Trap Park—the public sector on an outing.
A report from Congressional Quarterly which appeared after the conference described them this way:
. . . the young reformers of the late 1960’s and the 1970’s are the new regulars of the 1980’s. The roster of leading party officials in some states looks like a roll call of veterans from George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Ann Lewis, the party’s Political Director, takes it a bit further. “These by and large are people who came in through the movements of the 60’s and 70’s,” she explains. “But these are the ones who stuck it out—and matured.”
The first session of the conference, naturally enough, consisted of seminars on increasing the party’s professionalism: polling, voter registration and targeting, the media, and, most importantly, fund-raising. The reformers of yesterday have found a new ethos: build the party organization. The Democrats once had an organization of sorts: it was called the machine. (A term that had originally achieved currency as a Republican epithet was eventually put to its most cutting use by the Democratic reform movement.) The machines won a good many elections, even though they didn’t always elect the “better” sort of people. But progress required their demolition. Looking back, that was probably inevitable, one way or another. But as time passes, the particular way it happened begins to glow with ironies.
One of the organizational complaints that troubles the Democrats most is that they have comparatively little money. Incumbent Democratic officials do about as well as incumbent Republicans at fund-raising, for they raise most of their funds independently. But serious Republican challengers and candidates for open seats are well ahead of their Democratic counterparts. A principal reason for this is the relative weakness of the fund-raising operations of the Democratic party itself. According to preliminary figures, the total amounts raised by the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, and the Republican House Campaign Committee will exceed the amounts raised by their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of almost eight to one, giving the Republican party organization a net advantage of over $100 million.
Some Democrats complain about this as if it were but one more reflection of the radical injustice of the American socioeconomic order. There is no denying that Republicans, being richer and closer to big business, have important fund-raising advantages. But this isn’t the whole story. For instance: Republicans are better than Democrats at raising money from small contributors. Fully 57 percent of the DNC’s 1980 campaign contributions came in chunks of more than $500, compared to only 16 percent of the RNC’s. The average Republican contribution was only $27. These small contributors are mostly acquired through direct-mail fund-raising, which uses letters with rousing emotional appeals. But the causes of the Left no longer rouse—and those that do often provoke angers which offset their benefits. The Democrats are experimenting with new kinds of direct-mail appeals, and there are signs that they may be making some headway. But they certainly have not yet struck it rich.
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3.
Almost everything, it seems, comes back to “goals and principles.” What issues and values will the political machine that the Democrats now want to build be likely to promote? A hefty draft policy statement was given out, prepared by the DNC staff and the representatives of prospective candidates and important interest groups. It was described as a rough consensus of all the participants, and it proved to be an intriguing document indeed.
The opening page stated forthrightly:
The Soviet military buildup is real; it is continuing beyond any reasonable justification. All levels of our military forces—strategic, theater nuclear, and conventional—must be adequate to the threat posed by those of our adversaries.
Now that statement, to be sure, is limited: it does not tell us anything about what “adequate” levels are. But it is nevertheless remarkable. You will not find anything like it in a Democratic party platform or policy resolution over the course of the last three presidential campaigns. It would surely not have appeared in any document achieved by a process of consensus. Can it be that at long last the Democratic party has joined the post-Vietnam era?
There were pages of anti-Reagan rhetoric—much of it attacking the administration for recklessly doing too much in response to the Communist threat. We must stop pursuing a military solution in El Salvador, the draft argued, and instead negotiate a political settlement that will lead to a government of “national reconstruction.” We must stop thinking about how to win or survive a nuclear war, and instead seek a freeze at present levels of nuclear weaponry. The President’s military programs are “spasms of spending without plan or purpose.” Such charges were perhaps predictable.
But, surprisingly, the document also strenuously attacked the administration for doing fPost got the point, describing too little to resist the Communist threat. It argued that the administration’s response to the smothering of Poland was “clumsy and impotent.” It denounced the AWACS sale to Saudi Arabia and it pledged the Democrats to “insure Israel’s qualitative military edge over any combination of Middle East confrontation states.” (The crisis in Lebanon came too late for the draft—and would be debated on the floor.) There must be a “steady, sustainable modernization of our military forces,” with priority given to improving the conventional side. All this, it was candidly acknowledged, will indeed “make claims on our national resources.”
The foreign-policy section closed with an affirmation of the importance of American values to the conduct of foreign policy. One sentence especially stood out:
Our devotion to human rights, both at home and around the world, in past years has drawn like a magnet the hopes of millions of people in other lands to the United States, while placing the totalitarian regimes of the world on the defensive in the court of world opinion.
This emphasis on placing “totalitarian” regimes on the defensive—and even the word itself—was unusual. Surely the main effect of the Carter human-rights policy was not to put totalitarian regimes on the defensive—if the term is correctly used as a description of the Communist system. But President Carter was not there to disagree—gone fishing in Canada, someone explained with a grin.
The second section of the draft was as much a surprise as the first. It dealt with economic policy and was headed “A Party Committed to Growth.” In recent party platforms the words “economic growth” have usually been preceded by the word “balanced”—environmentally balanced, regionally balanced, balanced between cities and suburbs, and so forth. So “balanced” did Democrats become on this issue that the rhetoric of supply-side economics was able to challenge their standing as the party of prosperity. Evidently those who wrote this paper saw a need to remedy that.
They also made it clear that Democratic growth strategies do lean heavily toward the public sector. One that was stressed was a proposal for large investments in “rebuilding public capital”—highways, bridges, waterways, waste-disposal systems. (Will anyone remember the large responsibility Democrats had in shifting public spending away from public works toward welfare and the social services?) Another was “investing in human capital”—vocational training and education, especially science and math. Simplification of the tax structure was advocated as a means of shifting energies from paper shuffling into production. The “Atari Democrats”—who place great faith in the future of high technology—pressed for more government subsidies and tax preferences for research and development. The women’s caucus put forward a list of demands for greater protection and assistance to women in the work force. The black caucus asked for public-service jobs and programs “to upgrade youth literacy and basic learning skills.” Labor wanted to assure economic growth here at home, through protection against the unfair trade practices of “new, managed economies elsewhere in the world.” There were several mentions of the need to ease interest rates and credit.
While the emphasis on the public sector and many of the particulars of this program are by no means new, taken together they do represent a new direction. Ever since the mid-60’s, when economic boom almost effortlessly supplied government with resources, the Democratic party has been preoccupied with providing benefits. But today, even the party’s Left is finding it necessary to talk in terms of production, not merely redistribution. Even the environmentalists acknowledge the importance of growth and energy independence, trying hard to sound convincing about the possibilities of conservation and solar power, while gingerly avoiding endorsements of nuclear power, coal slurry pipelines, or offshore oil drilling.
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4.
The debate over the policy paper came later: on the afternoon of the first day prospective Democratic candidates were heard: Cranston, Hollings, Glenn, Hart, and Mondale. (Kennedy had contrived to speak at the closing session.) All gave competent speeches, and Mondale especially hit a nice rhetorical stride. But they generally spoke as though the Republicans were still the party of Herbert Hoover. There was little appreciation of the ways in which Republicans have usurped Democratic themes and constituencies, and little attention paid to how that might be turned around.
Many Democrats still seem to be waiting around for the Great Reagan Crash. They are mesmerized by the conviction that Republicans are just too out of touch with American reality to govern—for long. If Herbert Hoover established that expectation, Watergate confirmed it, and perhaps in the end will be seen to have hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans. In 1980 Jimmy Carter thought so little of his Republican opponent that, as Theodore H. White recounts it, his entire campaign strategy involved little more than a series of jibes aimed at provoking Reagan into proving that he was a “dangerous muddlehead.” It ended up making Reagan seem genially plausible, while Carter seemed smug and mean. So far, despite serious reverses on the economy and in the polls, Reagan has not crashed. One reason may be that his opponents have so few convincing alternatives to offer—only blistering complaints, which can easily sound like carping.
Mondale evokes warm memories of Hubert Humphrey, much as Senator Kennedy recalls his older brothers. (In 1984, will the contest for the Democratic nomination be fought by ghosts?) But in his speech, Mondale lacked the visceral appeal of Humphrey at his best. He didn’t make anyone mad—but he didn’t stir fighting enthusiasm, either. Many political handicappers, Right and Left, speculate that he may be bogging down in the swamps of centrism—the treacherous Muskie marshes.
Other Democratic candidates, it seemed, face a similar danger. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who wore dashing leather pants when he commanded the McGovern insurgency, has become a master of prudent equivocation. He argued for a beefed-up defense, but not for spending a lot of money on it. He denounced “slogans or rhetoric or easy answers,” while promising “compassion—and humanity and fundamental fairness.” Senator Ernest Hollings of North Carolina argued that the Democrats haven’t shown the wit or discipline to convince the country they can manage economic policy. But he was stronger on scolding than on solution, and seemed to irritate. Senator Alan Cranston of California appeared to be running as a way of keeping himself in the big picture.
Senator John Glenn of Ohio closed the session by emphasizing the need to restore America’s leadership in technology. Glenn has political strengths that are often underestimated: he carried Republican Ohio by a wide margin in the face of a Reagan landslide, and draws crowds of autograph seekers in the streets. One imagines him as a viable candidate in a general election: his association with the space race might help him regain ground lost to the Republicans on defense and economic growth. But his speech in Philadelphia also lacked a cutting edge. He might have stressed his differences with other Democrats: Jimmy Carter won liberal votes by promising the party an opening to the conservative, Baptist South. Glenn might have gained support—even from some on the Left—by offering to mobilize the crowds of Cape Canaveral. Instead, he was a decent fellow—and delegates drifted out of the hall.
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5.
One other significant event occurred at this session of the conference: a carefully staged rally in support of (or in memoriam to) the Equal Rights Amendment. The day before the conference opened, the women’s groups announced they had failed to get the votes in state legislatures needed to ratify ERA. The national Democratic party was steadfast and even indulgent in its support for ERA—the 1980 convention, over the strenuous objections of President Carter and other officeholders, voted to deny party funds to any Democratic candidate who did not support ERA. That probably has already cost the Democrats at least one congressional seat, in a special election in Ohio. But the National Organization for Women (NOW) nevertheless held the Democrats equally responsible with the Republicans for ERA’s defeat. NOW even called a protest demonstration for ERA outside the Philadelphia conference—in effect, a protest against the Democrats. So a score of party leaders—women prominent among them—crowded to the podium to prove themselves once again for ERA. Signs and banners marked time as the band pounded out ERA fight songs.
Yet the truth is that few Democratic leaders, to judge from private conversations, look forward to another round of the long twilight struggle for ERA. There are even signs of strain between leaders of the more militant women’s organizations and women who have achieved positions of authentic leadership in Democratic politics. The latter discreetly acknowledged that NOW more than once hurt ERA with its confrontationist lobbying in state legislatures. (At Philadelphia, the ERA militants sported buttons with the slogan “Too Nice Too Long.”) The more moderate feminists would like to replace the narrow equal-rights agenda with a broader program of economic and social concerns for women. Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski, always outspoken, told the Washington Post that this approach will appeal to women “who didn’t think the equal-rights issue was their cup of tea. One of my concerns is that the right wing has stolen our issues of family, neighborhood, and crime.” That is not quite the way she used to talk.
Such remarks have produced speculation about the emergence of a “second generation” of women’s political leaders. This had its moment of epiphany when the cameras passed by Bella Abzug, who was denied a seat on the New York delegation this year, to pick out Geraldine Ferraro, the Queens Congresswoman who drafted major amendments on women’s issues for the current policy statement. Tension between these two strains of feminism is often treated with a veritably ladylike discretion by women’s leaders, but it was nonetheless palpable. Eleanor Smeal, NOW’s President, issued a “hit list” of 121 Democratic legislators upon whom NOW hopes to inflict its retribution, and denounced the party (in an unliberated metaphor) for its failure to “clean house” of such miscreants. Molly Yard, another ERA militant, explained: “It’s true the Democrats have ERA in their platform, but it’s also true that eight unratified states are totally dominated by Democrats.”
Now’s strategy for punishing ERA holdouts in the legislatures is to elect more women—to create a female “third force” in politics—rather than to make an alliance with the Democratic party. Democratic leaders—including many women—take this as a slap in the face. They remind the militants how the women’s caucus at the 1980 convention—drawing upon female Carter delegates who won seats under the 50-50 quota rule—overrode the President to vote a plank endorsing federal funds for abortion, and another denying campaign funds to anti-ERA candidates. They also point out that many female state legislators—both Republicans and Democrats—refused to push for ERA. Yet NOW prefers to speak of cleaning the Democratic house, rather than tidying up its own.
Nor does it seem likely that the “second generation” of women’s issues will offer the Democrats smooth sailing. Foremost among them—repeated a half-dozen times in policy drafts and amendments—was a demand that men and women receive “equal pay for work of comparable value.” This is something quite different from the old trade-union program of “equal pay for equal work.” Under this proposition, jobs that are usually filled by women might be evaluated by “experts” for comparison with jobs traditionally held by men. In San Jose, California, a commission has graded municipal jobs according to a point system based on KH (know-how), PS (problem-solving), AC (accountability), and WC (working conditions). San Jose’s senior telephone operators, mostly women, got more points than senior water-system technicians, mostly men—but were being paid less.1 Pay scales based on such socioeconomic studies might supplant those shaped by market forces and traditional collective bargaining—a feminist road to socialism, perhaps.
But some important Democratic elected officials have doubts. Mayor Richard G. Hatcher of Gary, Indiana—no neoconservative—reportedly speaks of “concern and apprehension over the San Jose situation,” and Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit is blunter: “I wouldn’t want to put the fiscal status of the city or the labor scales of the city up for judgment on the basis of some damn study.” Still, no political party would trade the problems presented by Geraldine Ferraro for the problems presented by Bella Abzug.
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6.
The most serious change that has occurred in the Democratic party revealed itself on Saturday morning, when delegates were lining up for seats at the foreign-policy workshop. The front ranks of the line were filled with AFL-CIO unionists, fresh from a breakfast caucus, their arms laden with marked-up resolutions and amendments. The labor movement has at last become an organized force in the Democratic party—even on issues of foreign policy.
The AFL-CIO’s decision to participate in party affairs has also finally brought about another change—there were seven or eight members of the House and Senate in this workshop alone. Last March the DNC—under pressure from labor—decided that state party officers and elected officials should be given a significant role in national party affairs. The number of such officials at the 1984 convention will be increased from 8 percent to 22 percent of the total—and most of them will be “automatic delegates,” who will not have to face the risk and expense of running for their seats in presidential primaries. That is the first significant change to date in the McGovern reforms of 1972, when elected officials were figures of suspicion—if not the enemy. Now they have been acknowledged to have some legitimate claims to leadership.
This foreign-policy and defense workshop was the most lively session of the conference. Senator Kennedy’s backers were hoping that it would provide a ringing endorsement of the nuclear-freeze resolution he has sponsored in the Senate. He even mailed a free copy of his book promoting the freeze to every conference delegate, and backed away from pushing his positions on the other controversial issues—such as his opposition to military aid to El Salvador—to concentrate on this one.
The freeze—like ERA—is something no one really wants to oppose. This kind of issue-campaign seems devised to keep certain leaders and movements at center stage, rather than to enact a practicable legislative objective. Anyone who criticizes such campaigns on the basis of sober practical objections can be put down for quibbling about the danger of nuclear war, opposing women’s dignity, or something similarly awful. It is not the sort of debate the Democrats need in these times.
But, surprisingly, the conference delegates did add something significant to the Kennedy freeze language. The draft statement, modeled on his Senate resolution, called for a “mutual and verifiable freeze on the testing, production, and deployment” of nuclear weapons. Just after those words the AFL-CIO proposed an amendment which added the phrase “consistent with the maintenance of overall parity.” The amendment implied that no freeze should be adopted which leaves the Soviet Union with a nuclear advantage now or in the future, while the original Kennedy position was freeze now, no matter where it leaves us.
Those who backed the amendment included not only traditionally pro-defense Democrats like author Ben Wattenberg, but Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, a persistent critic of the Pentagon, and Congressman Albert Gore, Jr., of Tennessee, a strong advocate of arms control. The amendment passed with virtually no opposition. Kennedy supporters, believing that the complexity of the change would be lost on most people, decided in advance to avoid an awkward conflict over this. But a story in the Washington Post got the point, describing the amendment as “language broad enough to embrace both the nuclear-freeze resolution popularized by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) and the nuclear-reduction resolution sponsored by Senator Henry M. Jackson (D.-Wash.).”
For the rest, the foreign-policy workshop sustained the generally pro-defense and anti-Communist tone of the policy draft. Amendments were adopted which urged greater pressure on the Salvadoran government for human rights and land reform, but endorsed popular elections, not shadowy diplomatic deals, as the basis for a political settlement. A proposal “to reduce the size of the Reagan military budget” was adopted, but other proposals to designate specific figures or weapons systems to be cut were defeated. The importance of international human rights was affirmed, but without the guilt-laden emphasis on the abuses of America’s friends and allies which so weakened the record of the Carter administration.
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Only one other issue stirred the meeting, an issue with possible portent for the foreign-policy stance of the Democrats. Mark Siegel, once President Carter’s liaison to the Jewish community, introduced a resolution which declared that “the situation in Lebanon presents an opportunity for the reunification and restoration of Lebanese sovereignty and independence.” The resolution spoke of the Israeli attack on the PLO as a blow to international terrorism and to Soviet influence, and urged U.S. humanitarian and political assistance “to build a lasting peace for the people of Lebanon and greater security for Israel.”
The absence of any criticism of Israel in this resolution had drawn some private murmurs of dissent before the meeting. But when it arrived on the floor two dovish Congressmen—one of them Toby Moffett, a Lebanese-American—rose to defend it. After a phrase was added expressing “deep regret at the loss of all life on both sides,” the amendment carried with only one opposing vote.
So Israel is still special to the Democratic party, which, given some of the rhetoric of the Reagan administration, is reassuring. But there is reason to wonder how good it is for Israel to be so special, so different. How can Democrats and liberals provide leadership in defending Israel—and Israel’s liberation of Lebanon from international terrorism and Soviet influence—while at the same time countenancing the sway of terrorism and Soviet influence in Indochina, in Africa, and now in Central America, our own neighborhood? Is it possible to defend a military intervention in Lebanon—a country where, even in better times, corruption and human-rights violations were not unknown—while refusing to endorse mere military assistance from the United States to the beleaguered government of El Salvador? It is, of course, possible—but there is a price to be paid. Such inconsistencies in the long run contribute to the international isolation of Israel, while feeding the suspicion here at home that the Democrats have no foreign-policy principles, but act in response to pressures from a shadowy “Jewish lobby.”
The debate now raging in the wake of Lebanon could bring further defections from the foreign-policy Left in the Democratic party, as did earlier debates about the Middle East. (One thinks of Martin Peretz, a leader of the Eugene McCarthy insurgency of 1968, who now publishes the cautiously hard-line magazine, the New Republic, or attorney Morris B. Abram, a leading Muskie backer in 1972, who opposed Jimmy Carter in 1980.) It is difficult, for example, to hear accounts of the brutalities of PLO rule in Lebanon without noticing some similarities to the accounts of Sandinista repression now coming out of Nicaragua. But whether such perceptions will have serious effects on internal Democratic politics remains to be seen.
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7.
In all, the policy statements adopted by the conference provide evidence of some healthier trends among Democrats on economic matters and on foreign policy. These trends were not, however, given much attention in news accounts from Philadelphia: both press and broadcast reports stressed the demonstration for ERA and the endorsement of the nuclear freeze, two issues which agitate the Left and cause strains in the Democratic constituency. So far, the economic and social concerns of the Democrats’ long-forgotten man (and woman, as we now say) still do not make much impression through the party’s public relations. That is not, in the main, the fault of the media. It is a reflection of the organizational effectiveness of the party’s Left—the disarmament movement and the pro-quota caucuses—and the relative ineffectiveness of those forces which speak for more mainstream interests.
There is hope for remedying this in the AFL-CIO’s recent decision to try to unify the labor movement behind a single candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The AFL-CIO plan, as spelled out by President Lane Kirkland, is for each member union of the Federation to cast a vote, weighted according to its membership strength, for its preferred candidate at a meeting of the AFL-CIO General Board in December of 1983. If any candidate can get two-thirds of the vote, he will win unified labor support in the Democratic primaries—support that means money and, perhaps more importantly, the backing of labor’s national political machinery.
To some, this strategy looks like a riverboat gamble. What if labor picks a loser? What if labor’s endorsement produces a backlash against its candidate among other Democrats—or in the general public? What if labor can’t agree on anyone? If the strategy fails, won’t labor’s political influence be extinguished?
All these embarrassments are possible, but the Federation has permitted itself a lot of room to improvise if, on the day of decision, an endorsement looks like a bad idea. Meanwhile, fifteen months remain before labor has to make up its mind—and by getting into the process now, the AFL-CIO has placed itself at the center of Democratic dialogue for what could be a seminal period. The Wall Street Journal recently reported with mild astonishment that no fewer than six Democratic presidential candidates addressed a convention of sheet-metal workers in August—almost a full two years before the 1984 Democratic nominating convention. During the coming months competition for labor support may take Democratic candidates to plant gates and construction sites more often than to the snows of New Hampshire or the grange halls of Iowa. This could help considerably in balancing the influence that small, well-heeled, activist groups usually exercise on Democratic campaigns in the critical months before the primary season formally opens.
So, as a matter of short-term political tactics, the AFL-CIO’s gamble does not seem to be an especially risky one. But seen from another perspective, the stakes are high indeed—for labor, for Democrats, and for the country. If the Republican “supply-side” economic strategy does not produce benefits soon, we can expect fundamental debate and political conflict over the American economy in the 1984 election. The issues at the center of that debate—many of them emergent at this year’s Democratic conference—involve proposals that imply deeper public intervention in some central aspects of our economy: reindustrialization, credit and capital allocation, programs to rebuild the nation’s “public capital” through job-creating public works, the protection of strategic U.S. industries from foreign competition, and the like. Even such conservatives as George Will and Kevin Phillips acknowledge the imminence of these ideas.2
Debate over these kinds of proposals could impose new strains on our political culture. Alan Baron, a Washington political analyst and sometime spokesman for the Democratic party’s Left, recently told the Wall Street Journal that the foreign-policy and social issues which have so hindered the Left are no longer important. “It’s the economy that’s being debated now,” he argued, “and in that environment all the other underlying differences are fading.”
There is an appearance of truth to Baron’s statement: at the moment, it seems as though the labor movement and many former McGovernites are moving toward some sort of accommodation. But what will be the eventual terms of that accommodation? One outcome could be the transformation of the Democratic party into something like what the British Labor party is today—an alliance among trade unions, the unilateral disarmers, and a large assortment of cranks. There are surely many in labor and the Democratic party who will resist that prospect. But, at least in the short run, they face some challenging obstacles.
The quota system is now entrenched in the party, and has produced a strange political universe all its own. The list of preferred groups has grown beyond blacks and women to encompass such hard-to-define categories as Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian/Pacifics. (The last was added in part because American Indians feared that Hawaiians might poach on their entitlements.) The original purpose of the quota system—never really one of bringing in new constituencies but one of keeping out the party’s moderates—still operates with telling results. And the ideology of the quota system, which overrules democratic choice in political affairs, will surely be seen as a liability to a party proposing major economic reforms.
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8.
But a bigger, more immediate obstacle is the candidacy of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Kennedy gave what in effect was the closing address of the Philadelphia conference, and again demonstrated his appeal to the party’s activists. No matter how it is discounted, the polls give him an impressive lead in the race for the Democratic nomination—Democrats prefer him to Mondale by 43 percent to 13 percent according to an August Gallup report. But Kennedy’s strategy for the Democratic nomination appears to be exactly what it was in 1980, despite the fact that he is not running against a sitting President of his own party. He is campaigning uncompromisingly as the candidate of the Left. In his conference speech he poured scorn on those among his colleagues who have been groping for ways to rebuild the party’s appeal: “We do not have to call ourselves neoliberals, or cozy up to neoconservatives.” And while he ran through the standard list of Democratic economic concerns, his speech began and ended on the issues that most interest his constituency: reviving ERA and holding down defense spending.
Even some of Kennedy’s supporters may see the problem his candidacy poses to the party. If he can dominate the race early, on the strength of the ideas and constituencies of the McGovern era, he will cut short what prospects there may be for some rebirth of the grand Democratic tradition. The AFL-CIO’s decision to vote for an early presidential endorsement could contribute to just such an outcome.
But if concern about fundamental economic problems grows, as seems likely, Democrats may in time come under considerable pressure to increase their distance from the social and foreign-policy radicalism of the decade past. The strategic constituencies on economic issues—the blue-collar industrial and construction workers chief among them—have never been comfortable in the atmosphere of the Left. Nor is the general public likely to respond favorably to programs for structural economic changes if those advancing such proposals are associated with cultural or international currents the public takes to be hostile. And while the Reagan administration may be becoming more and more vulnerable to attacks on economic issues, there is no sign yet that its posture on foreign policy or on social issues is becoming widely unpopular.
Instead of imitating the British Labor party, the Democrats might do better to stress programs of structural economic reform while at the same time taking a harder line on foreign policy, and developing their own responses to the social and cultural mood that Reagan tapped so effectively. As our media might confusedly describe it, this would be moving “Left” on economic issues while moving “Right” on foreign-policy and cultural issues. Such a stance would be helpful to labor, whose chief concerns more and more involve structural economic problems. And it would be an asset for Democratic candidates, who cannot continue their support for the benefits of the welfare state without also proposing serious strategies for economic growth.
But in the end, neither labor nor Democratic officeholders nor both together can restore the Democratic party to sounder ground. The future of the party, for better or worse, lies in large measure with those who rose to positions of influence through the movements of the 60’s and 70’s—and those who are coming after them. Have they learned any lessons from their experiences? Are they willing to reject the moral and intellectual animus of the Left toward so much of what this society—and their party—has stood for? Can they pledge themselves to govern America by its own central values and traditions?
These are questions that will probably be answered in the months just ahead, even before the 1984 primary season opens. The response of the Democrats in Philadelphia to these questions—more so the delegates in their policy statement than the candidates in their speeches—gives some cause for hope. Maybe they were only dabbling in a new rhetoric. But rhetoric has proved its power in the past—the rhetoric of the Left had a power to harm. Perhaps the new Democratic rhetoric will bring some power to restore.
1 For more on this see John H. Bunzel, “To Each According to Her Worth,” Public Interest, Spring 1982.
2 See, for example, Phillips's Post-Conservative America, p. 149: “. . . if attempts to return economic decision-making to the invisible hand miscarry in the early 1980's, the failure could easily provoke renewed emphasis on economic and business-government partnership.”
