February 23, 1996

Dancing in the dark

Even with conservatives setting the terms of national debate, liberal elitists remain smugly in the past

by Dan Kennedy

Since at least George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign, the biggest misstep a politician can take is to allow his opponents to hang a scarlet "L" upon his chest.

The liberal tag ruined the presidency of Jimmy Carter, even though in his case the accusation was false (remember, Ted Kennedy challenged the centrist Carter from the left in the 1980 primaries). It destroyed Walter Mondale, who flaunted his liberal credentials, and Michael Dukakis, who tried to shun his.

Bill Clinton's re-election strategy is to cast himself as the only moderate Republican running for president. And it may work: Howard Fineman reports in the February 19 Newsweek that the Republicans' biggest problem is that the "death of liberalism" has exposed divisions within the conservative movement.

As the revolutionary Tom Paine, whom the left has always claimed as one of its own, put it: "These are the times that try men's souls."

Now, in the midst of liberalism's darkest hour, a time when Newt Gingrich is ascendant, when Bob Dole is criticized for not being conservative enough, and when Clinton has redefined the Democrats as a me-too party that would somehow be more responsible than the Republicans in cutting taxes and slashing welfare benefits, several writers have stumbled upon a bold new strategy for the left.

Denial.

This strategy was laid out in its clearest, most provocative terms in a January 14 essay by Roger Rosenblatt in the New York Times Magazine, titled "The Triumph of Liberalism." "If the Democrats sound like Republicans," said the subtitle, "it's not because the Democrats abandoned the liberal agenda. It's because the Republicans absorbed it."

Rosenblatt's thesis is that modern society has so thoroughly assimilated liberal ideas -- civil rights for blacks and other minorities, feminism, abortion rights, environmentalism, and tolerance for lesbians and gay men -- that people no longer associate those concepts with liberal ideology. He quotes Mondale as saying that liberals "kind of used up the old agenda." And he proclaims: "The triumph of liberalism is not a political victory. Rather it is a triumph of temperament and attitude; it reflects how America wishes to exist. . . . Within my lifetime, America has progressed from a nation that quashed human rights and diminished human dignity to one that worries about cultural influences and a budget. Most people would call that a triumph."

Don't worry, be happy

Though Rosenblatt's is the most overtly ideological manifesto of liberalism triumphant, there are others. A few examples:

* Newsweek and Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson, in his new book, The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995 (Times Books, 293 pages, $25), argues that the source of much popular disgruntlement is the failure to recognize the success of post-World War II government programs.

"Americans have achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity and personal freedom," Samuelson writes. "We are healthier, work at less exhausting jobs, and live longer than at any time in our history. Job security has vastly improved, and government provides a safety net for the poor, disabled, and elderly that never before existed. Many old discriminations -- based on race, sex, or religion -- have diminished dramatically, even if they haven't entirely disappeared."

* In his book A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism (Viking, 745 pages, $27.95), Gregg Easterbrook argues that the environmental movement has lost some credibility because of its reluctance to acknowledge its very real victories. "Environmental protection is a triumph of liberalism, yet liberals themselves have difficulty saying those words," Easterbrook said in a Phoenix interview last year (Tim Sandler's "Ditching Doomsday," News, April 21, 1995).

* In a Focus piece in the January 21 Boston Sunday Globe headlined LIBERALISM LIVES!, Anthony Flint describes the theme of an emerging new brand of liberalism this way: "Things aren't so bad in this country, we've come a long way over the last 35 years, and -- this is key -- liberals are largely responsible for that."

To be sure, none of these observers is irrational, and all have important points to make. Rosenblatt's aim is to identify liberalism's achievements at a time when it's easy for a lefty to lose heart. Samuelson's book is a serious, well-researched treatise on the limits of government. Easterbrook's widely misunderstood book urges environmentalists to maintain their vigilance, not to declare victory and go home -- as many of his detractors claimed in an attempt to discredit his thesis. Flint's recitation of liberalism's past glories serves as an introduction to a new school of leftist thought that urges a return to government activism, not smug self-congratulation.

Yet all of them make the mistake of assuming there is broad consensus for ideas and programs that are actually under virulent attack.

The social safety net that Samuelson assumes is more or less firmly in place develops new holes every day. The latest example: a story in the Globe on February 5 reporting that Governor Bill Weld's welfare-reform law is unfairly forcing hundreds of women off welfare because they have no way of providing state bureaucrats with information on where to locate their children's fathers, as the new law requires.

Just as Easterbrook was releasing his hopeful book, the Gingrich-led House was gearing up for an unprecedented assault on environmental regulations. "The War on the Environment," the Sierra Club called it, denouncing such Republican outrages as inviting lobbyists from the oil, timber, mining, chemical, and agriculture industries to draft legislation aimed at reducing their environmental obligations. Gingrich finally softened his stance in the face of public opposition, but it seems clear that he's contemplating a change of strategy, not a change of heart.

An affluent, well-educated liberal living in New York -- someone like Roger Rosenblatt, for instance -- might well think we've moved toward a more open, tolerant society. Yet freedom is under attack on a variety of fronts.

In a report on National Public Radio on February 12, Kate Michelman, president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, said her organization had just completed a study that showed "the freedom to choose is caught in a crossfire of attacks from the states, where 171 anti-choice laws were introduced last year, and from Congress, where 36 anti-choice measures were advanced."

People for the American Way, in its report "Hostile Climate 1995," found that anti-gay activity is at a three-year high, "providing hard evidence of what most gay men and lesbians . . . believe to be true: that the climate for homosexuals in America is growing more hostile, not less." That trend is unlikely to be reversed given such incidents as the decision of school officials in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, to fire a teacher for using books that teach tolerance of homosexuality.

Affirmative action and the broader issue of race have, blessedly, been less of a presence in the presidential campaign than had been predicted in 1995, when the rise of the Angry White Male, the racially charged response to the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the prominence achieved by black-nationalist hatemonger Louis Farrakhan following the Million Man March exposed divisions many of us had kidded ourselves into thinking no longer existed. But race remains the overarching issue in American life, and it's the unspoken subtext to the Republicans' get-tough rhetoric about crime and welfare. Anti-affirmative-action forces still hope to place a repeal measure on the California ballot this November. If it passes, it will have national repercussions -- especially if Bob Dole, a former supporter of affirmative action who flip-flopped to appease the Republican right, is elected president.

"There is a tremendous backlash throughout all of America against all of these gains," says Chip Berlet, senior analyst for the Cambridge-based Political Research Associates. On one end of that backlash, Berlet says, is the armed-militia movement, some five million right-wing extremists, many of them racist and anti-Semitic, who look at the federal government as some sort of foreign occupation force. On the other is the newly cuddly Patrick Buchanan, whose economic populism may have transformed him into the left's favorite right-winger, but whose anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti-choice views place him "just teetering on the edge of having `The Horst Wessel Song' as his theme song," as Berlet puts it.

"The point isn't that we shouldn't pause and congratulate ourselves for having moved forward," Berlet says. "But right now we're in a period where every one of those gains is being pushed back by forces that are truly reactionary."

He adds, "I think everyone has to concede that many of the answers put forward by real liberals haven't worked, and we've got to deal with that. I think it's pretty clear that welfare needs an overhaul, but I don't want to blame welfare mothers for what has happened. You don't blame the victim for the problem. We used to have economic analyses for these problems, not focus on individual pathologies, so-called."

Economics 101

Indeed, perhaps the strangest thing about Rosenblatt's essay and Samuelson's book is the role played by economics. For Rosenblatt, economics essentially doesn't figure into his analysis of liberalism. For Samuelson, economics is of overriding importance, but it's a tool with which to teach his readers about government's -- and thus liberalism's -- limits.

Liberalism hasn't always embraced the belief that government must intervene to mitigate capitalism's excesses. Radical-left Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, in a recent interview with the Phoenix, sneered that Newt Gingrich, far from being a considerative, is actually a do-gooder "Benthamite liberal," referring to English social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

In those days, a liberal was someone who opposed the supremacy of the state and embraced laissez-faire capitalism. Since Franklin Roosevelt, though (and, arguably, since Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era), belief in a government role in the economy has been an essential ingredient of liberalism. Worker-safety laws, progressive tax rates, union protections, the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, the 40-hour work week, Medicare, and Social Security are all part of liberalism's legacy. And all, with the exception of Social Security, are now under siege.

The most obvious evidence of the eclipse of liberalism is the growing inequality in our society -- a phenomenon that's well documented in Samuelson's book. Between 1970 and 1990, according to statistics Samuelson gleaned from the US Census Bureau, family income of the poorest fifth of the population grew by just 2.9 percent when adjusted for inflation. Income of the middle fifth -- the middle class -- grew by 13.9 percent. Meanwhile, income of the richest fifth grew by a whopping 35.3 percent.

And it's probably going to get worse, according to a study by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies that was commissioned by liberal software tycoon Mitchell Kertzman (see Al Giordano's "State of Mind," News, January 26). The study, which focused on New England, found that family income has dropped since 1989, with the biggest declines reported by families headed by the least educated -- in other words, by those who were already on the bottom rung of the ladder.

Given that the policies of the Reagan Administration resulted in huge tax cuts for the rich (among other things, the top income-tax rate of 70 percent was cut in half), you might think Samuelson would point to government policies as being at least partly responsible for rising inequality.

You would be wrong.

Instead, Samuelson cites inequality as almost a force of nature, as evidence that some social problems are simply beyond government's reach. In an interview with the Phoenix (see interview with Samuelson), he argued that taxes have actually become more progressive over the past two decades, as exemptions that benefited the rich have been eliminated. The real problem, he says, is increased immigration, the explosion of low-income single-parent families, and a changing culture in which people at the top of the economic ladder are paid disproportionately more than they were a generation ago.

"If I could change it, I would dial it back," Samuelson says. "I don't think what has happened in the last 25 years in terms of the increase in inequality is desirable socially." Nevertheless, he suggests, hard-pressed middle-class Americans shouldn't complain too much: the wealthiest 20 percent still pays 61 percent of all taxes. (Then again, it is also true that the richest one percent owns 40 percent of the national wealth.)

Among Samuelson's more perceptive critics is Robert Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect, a liberal journal based in Cambridge, and an op-ed-page columnist for the Boston Globe. In his review of Samuelson's book in the New York Times Book Review of January 28, Kuttner lampooned Samuelson's, er, liberal use of the word "we" in sentences such as this: "We are healthier, work at less exhausting jobs and live longer than at any time in our history." Wrote Kuttner: "This is the fallacy of composition -- the error of attributing the same characteristics to the parts and the whole. Or, as Tonto once explained to the Lone Ranger, `What you mean, "We"?' "

In an interview with the Phoenix, Kuttner blasted the notion that liberalism has somehow triumphed. "This is just complete wishful thinking," he says. "Liberals triumphed 30 years ago, but ever since 1981, the whole idea that the government has a legitimate role to play has been dismantled brick by brick."

And if Kuttner finds Samuelson's economic analysis flawed, then he finds Rosenblatt's omission of economics from his definition of liberalism to be an inexcusable oversight.

"When Rosenblatt says we liberals won, it says to me that he isn't much of a liberal," Kuttner says, calling Rosenblatt's essay an example of "the pundit class projecting from its own comfort." Kuttner concedes the advance of such personal-freedom issues as feminism and gay rights, but adds, "The part of liberalism that won was the libertarianism, which was always an easier sell. But precisely because those things are so unpopular with the working class, their support is shaky."

Working-class heroes

The working class. Now there's a phrase you don't hear associated with liberalism very much anymore. The working class was an integral part of the Democratic coalition from FDR through JFK, but it's been moving Republican ever since. Fear of crime and revulsion with urban riots and the youth movement pushed many working-class voters to Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. By 1972, the rift was complete, with Nixon employing a populist theme in his campaign against McGovern and the elitist liberals who were among McGovern's most prominent supporters.

Nixon practiced a type of crude populism, favoring the middle class (the "Silent Majority") against both the rich and the poor. His success prompted Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips to write his now-classic book The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).

Yet Phillips now argues that Ronald Reagan and George Bush, while incorporating middle-class populist themes in their campaigns, abandoned populism once in office, returning instead to the traditional Republican practice of rewarding the rich. The unwillingness of Democrats and liberals to take back the populist mantle has created a political crisis for both parties, Phillips says, with first Clinton and then Gingrich triumphing at the polls by voicing populist appeals, only to become captive to corporate and financial interests once in office.

In the preface to the new, paperback edition of Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics (Back Bay Books, 290 pages, $12.95), Phillips writes: "As a result, what I will call the financial economy, with its pinstriped cowherds, megabyte marauders, and derivative instruments able to speculate on everything short of war with Mars, continued to eat the real economy, in which ordinary breadwinners who once relied on the American Dream of a home, a job, and a pension faced the future with churning stomachs."

Thus, if liberals are to move ahead rather than congratulate themselves for past successes that could be reversed at any time, it's clear that they are going to have to stake a new claim to populism. Certainly there are some efforts in that direction.

Earlier this month, US Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the few Democratic liberals never to abandon working-class concerns, unveiled comprehensive legislation to undo what he called "the quiet Depression," a byproduct, he said, of economic insecurity. Among its provisions: tax breaks and incentives for companies that meet federal standards for salaries and benefits; a change in antitrust laws to restrict mergers that hurt communities; stiffer penalties for anti-union activities; and a higher minimum wage.

Nearly a year ago, in the March 27 issue of the New Republic, writers John Judis and Michael Lind called for a "new nationalism" that would revitalize liberalism by pursuing a populist policy of limited protectionism to preserve jobs, selective cutbacks in military spending, and "a nation-uniting approach to social policy" with the goal of reducing "the growing disparity among economic classes."

Among those already working to build a new, populist form of liberalism is Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the Texas Observer, currently a fellow at the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. In a piece in the Nation last August 14 titled "Real Populists Please Stand Up," Dugger proposed the creation of a new organization to be called the Citizens Alliance to take on corporate dominance of the political system.

In an interview with the Phoenix, Dugger said the difference between him and Roger Rosenblatt is that the latter espouses a "parlor liberalism" that does nothing to get at the moneyed interests that Dugger believes control both political parties.

"Roger's perfectly defensible logically, because it's what he means by liberalism," Dugger says. "I'm talking about populism. The fact is that the corporations have the government. What's interesting is how you can essentially make a re-election case for Bill Clinton without ever discussing the overconcentration of wealth in this country and corporate power."

It's interesting that Dugger declines to condemn Pat Buchanan, other than to call him "a white person first and a xenophobe." Despite being "a man whose social perspectives are limited," Buchanan, Dugger says, has connected with working-class people in a manner that liberals would do well to emulate.

"Buchanan wants a conservative country. For all I know, he wants a theocratic country. But he wants a democratic one," Dugger says. "What I'm not sure about is why he worked for Reagan. But I believe in everybody's redemption, and on these questions of where the power is, he's making some sense. Not enough."

The `New Progressives'

If Dugger and his allies are pushing the radical edge of populism, then the mainstream is likely to be defined by E.J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist whose new book, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, $24), is both a burst of optimism and a statement of purpose.

Unlike Dugger (and Buchanan), Dionne is uncomfortable with populism as a historical analogy, noting that the 19th-century Populist Party ended up destroying itself by trying to halt technological progress. Dionne points instead to the Progressives, who followed the Populists and who worked successfully to curb industrial capitalism's excesses. "In our era," Dionne writes, "the New Progressives are those who accept the need to make another large economic transition, but know that the transition will be successful only if government acts creatively, and with a strong concern for social justice."

Dionne says he agrees with both Samuelson and Rosenblatt that American society made tremendous advances during the first half of the postwar era. And he points to the GI Bill, which sent millions of veterans to college; FHA loans, which created a new class of small-property owners; and the civil-rights movement as exactly the type of progressivism that liberals should embrace once again.

"American liberalism was historically a movement of working people," Dionne says. "If American liberalism breaks its links with the middle class -- what is now called the working middle class, and what used to be called the working class -- it will never have a chance of creating a majority in the country.

"I think that what Americans are looking at now is precisely re-establishing economic arrangements that we got used to from 1945 to 1973," he adds. "The rich got richer, the middle class got richer, and the poor got richer. To give up on that is somehow to give up on a deeply embedded American idea."

In a celebrated essay in the New Yorker on February 6, 1995, sometime liberal Michael Kinsley dismissed middle-class anger, the result of several decades' worth of declining living standards and rising economic insecurity, as little more than ungrateful whining.

"Populism, in its latest manifestation, celebrates ignorant opinion and undifferentiated rage," Kinsley wrote. "As long as you're mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, no one will inquire very closely into what, exactly, `it' is and whether you really ought to feel that way." Kinsley reduced that idea to two words in the title of his new anthology: Big Babies (Morrow, 336 pages, $23).

It's exactly that sort of elitism that has resulted in liberalism being not triumphant but rather, as John Cleese might put it, expired, passed on, ceased to be, no more . . . dead. Dionne may be right when he says that liberalism only looks dead. But appearance will give way to reality unless liberals can reconnect with the people they've left behind.