languishing liberalism

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jan 13 09:59:39 PST 2000


[Carl Remick asked me to post this.]

Wall Street Journal - January 13, 2000

Without a Leader or an Agenda, Liberals in America Just Languish

By JOHN HARWOOD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

WASHINGTON -- American liberals are drifting into the 21st century with a serious identity crisis.

These ought to be heady days for those whose political heart also is a little to the left. Government coffers are bulging and foreign threats are dwindling, both factors that should free up tons of money for liberal spending programs. And to hear Democratic presidential candidates talk on issues such as guns and gay rights, it even sounds like a post-Clinton liberalism is sprouting up to the left of the president's "Third Way" centrism. Yet on big bread-and-butter issues, the triumph of market economics and the fear of a loaded label have left the movement with neither a clear national champion nor a coherent agenda.

Listen to former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley on health care. Eyeing left-leaning primary votes, Mr. Bradley brandishes an expensive, expansive proposal for new health-care coverage for the poor. But far from the old liberal dream of a government-run "single-payer" system, it proposes abolishing the Great Society's Medicaid program and building instead on GOP-inspired plans to use federal money to subsidize private-insurance coverage.

"Bradley has opened up the liberal themes in the debate," says Robert Borosage, an adviser to the Rev. Jesse Jackson who works at the Campaign for America's Future. But "no liberal could support the details of his health plan."

'This Can't Be'

Ruy Teixeira, a friend of Mr. Borosage and a former Students for a Democratic Society member who now works for a liberal think tank, is equally frustrated by the approach of Mr. Bradley's rival for the nomination. Vice President Al Gore's plan to augment Medicaid instead, which he insists is better for the poor, would spend less money and cover fewer people. And the vice president's embrace of debt reduction to forestall Republican tax cuts makes Mr. Teixeira wonder when, if ever, a Democratic president will be willing once again to write big checks to help the downtrodden.

"Is that what liberalism's about -- not spending any money so you can stop Republican tax cuts?" Mr. Teixeira asks. "I don't get it. That can't be liberalism for the 21st century."

But what is?

Mr. Teixeira is tackling the question one recent afternoon, striding up Washington's Connecticut Avenue to join 20 other activists for a meeting of the Working Group on Political Philosophy. Yet there's no consensus within this group either, which ranges from the left to the far left to include representatives of groups such as the Black Radical Congress and the National Organizers' Alliance.

Internal Differences

Those who hail the surging information-age economy, such as Mr. Teixeira, face fire from those who insist its benefits aren't reaching the poor and want to stop trade expansion. Those who advocate a Third Way to use civic institutions to advance social change, such as working group founder David Kallick, suffer barbs from those who hear echoes of Mr. Clinton's tepid centrism. Grappling with such internal differences means the group is unlikely to make much of a splash anytime soon.

"We need to kick ourselves out of the habit of thinking we can't be more bold," says Mr. Kallick, a fellow at the left-leaning Preamble Center. "It's been so long since we've been able to do that." But he concedes that a full-scale advance may require "a deeper recasting of the political scene than we're capable of bringing about" by the 2000 elections.

No wonder consensus is elusive: The liberal community itself is riven by disparate attitudes and cultural orientations. A recent survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, which for 12 years has matched voters' views with demographic characteristics, shows two distinct camps divided by income, lifestyles, racial profile and geography.

'Liberal Democrats'

On one side is a group Pew labels "Liberal Democrats," making up about 10% of the national electorate. Represented heavily on the East and West coasts, they are predominantly white, affluent, well-educated and secular. On issues, they strongly support the liberal bent on environmentalism and gay rights that Messrs. Gore and Bradley have shown this campaign season. Though they consistently vote Democratic, they consider themselves independent-minded and favor the idea of a third major political party.

On the other side are the "Partisan Poor," roughly 11% of the electorate. Clustered disproportionately in the South, they are working-class or poor and include a large component of single mothers; nearly four in 10 are black. They use the Internet less than any other segment of the electorate. They are strongly religious and even somewhat conservative on certain cultural issues. But they staunchly back civil rights and antipoverty programs, are loyal to labor unions and the Democratic Party, and harbor deep hostility toward big business.

Contemporary liberals lack a single national spokesman to bridge the divide. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and then-Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York strove at various points to fill that role. Neither Mr. Bradley nor Mr. Gore is attempting to; both men, their careers forged in an era when the "liberal" tag was a dead weight in national politics, decline to embrace it for themselves.

"I consider myself a progressive," is all Mr. Gore allows in an interview. Mr. Bradley says, "We're in a new world where there are new priorities. The label hasn't been found to describe what it is."

That isn't damping the spirits of those who do embrace the term and believe the movement's resurgence, in whatever form, is just around the corner. "I feel more hopeful now than I have at any point since the first six months of the Clinton administration," adds Robert Kuttner, editor of the liberal magazine American Prospect, based in Cambridge, Mass. The magazine has accelerated its publishing schedule from bimonthly to biweekly, the better to compete with the conservative Weekly Standard in helping to set the intellectual agenda in national politics.

Other factors support that sense of buoyancy. Polls show young Americans displaying stronger support for government than their parents. The nation's enthusiasm for tax cuts wanes. And early in the 2000 presidential race, the Republican front-runner, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, feels it necessary to describe his conservatism as "compassionate."

Novel Solutions

The Democratic candidates, for their part, are each tapping their own portion of the liberal constituency. Mr. Bradley's campaign -- combining liberal-sounding themes with fat campaign donations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley -- appeals to the upscale, independent-minded group. Invoking Franklin Roosevelt's spirit of experimentation, he has been willing to entertain novel solutions to social and economic programs, from abolishing Medicaid to raising the Social Security eligibility age to testing private-school vouchers.

Mr. Gore's establishment candidacy -- cautious and grounded in Democratic loyalty with a Southern accent -- appeals to what the Pew Center calls the "Partisan Poor." Drawing on lifelong ties as the son of a Tennessee senator from his party's Great Society heyday, he has cultivated organized labor and teachers organizations by contrasting his fealty to Medicare, Social Security and public education with Mr. Bradley's deviations from Democratic orthodoxy. To some low-income voters, especially the minorities who felt most under siege during the GOP surge of the mid-1990s, his "step-by-step" approach to expanding health coverage feels safer than attempting reforms on a grander scale.

Medicaid "is not the utopia that people want," observes James Thomas, an Alabama state legislator and president of a national black legislators group before which Mr. Gore attacked Mr. Bradley's health plan at a recent convention. "But it's a bird in the hand."

Even among similar types of liberals, there are differing views of how to advance the goal of using government to help those who need it. Consider Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois -- both representing mostly white constituencies, both among the most liberal lawmakers on Capitol Hill. But they've reached opposite conclusions in the Democratic primary contest; he's supporting Mr. Bradley, she's backing Mr. Gore.

'If Not Now, When?'

Sen. Wellstone views Mr. Bradley's $65 billion-a-year health initiative as a breath of fresh air after the centrist compromises of the Clinton years. "It's a winning politics right now," says the Minnesota senator, a protest-leading political-science professor during the 1970s. Liberals "long for a politics they can actually believe in... . If not now, when?"

Rep. Schakowsky wishes the vice president would strike more "bold and visionary" notes, too. But she backs Mr. Gore for "sticking with us" to defend Social Security and Medicare against changes in eligibility or benefits. For liberal friends who raise their eyebrows at her support for Mr. Gore, she points to Mr. Bradley's "troubling" votes in the Senate that sided with Republican views on education vouchers and entitlement reform.

"For people who are looking for the more liberal candidate, look back and study what they've done," says Ms. Schakowsky, a former teacher, senior citizens' advocate and state legislator. "I come up with Al Gore."

Neither candidate has embraced what Sen. Wellstone and Rep. Schakowsky say should be the liberal movement's top economic priority: slowing down the rush to market-opening trade deals in favor of efforts to "civilize the international economy" through new cross-border labor and environmental agreements. That's partly because, despite the derailment of recent World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, some liberals continue to embrace trade as part of the economic engine that has raised wages and begun to ease income inequality in recent years. It's also because Messrs. Gore and Bradley, both longstanding free-traders, will need voters from pro-trade centrists in this year's general election.

Raw Competition

In some ways, of course, the Democratic race is less about philosophical divisions than about raw competition for power. Notwithstanding their images in this campaign, both men had moderate-to-liberal records on Capitol Hill. Elbowing one another for liberal primary votes, the two candidates are echoing one another -- and testing the limits of the political marketplace -- on a range of social issues, from the rights of gays to serve openly in the military to the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes to proposed licensing of gun owners.

On issues such as the budget, health care and education, Mr. Gore invokes their common goals but says his more frugal approach can "consolidate the gains" and leave progressives "positioned to go the rest of the way" by preserving the current economic boom. By contrast, he charges that Mr. Bradley's "risky spending scheme" threatens to undermine the economy and bankrupt progressive aspirations by draining budget surpluses and bringing back deficits.

Mr. Bradley says "there's no consistency" to the front-runner's strategy beyond "whatever his advisers tell him to attack me on." And while espousing ambitious spending plans, he points to his support from business executives, who understand from his past work on the Senate Finance Committee that "I know what getting economic fundamentals right means."

Whatever consensus on policy and tactics they arrive at, liberals will need more than just the presidency to make headway in 21st-century Washington. Indeed, it was a Democratic president, Mr. Clinton, who delivered some of the biggest body blows to the movement in recent years with his support for ending the federal welfare entitlement and his declaration that "the era of Big Government is over." Some liberal strategists believe the left won't feel emboldened to make a full-throated cry for its priorities until Democrats retake their old Washington beachhead, the House of Representatives.

Current polls suggest that liberals could well see Democrats recapture the House but lose the presidency. That's why Sen. Wellstone, chastened by Clinton-era disappointments, pauses before predicting a decisive leftward swing of the pendulum during the 2000 campaign. "Well," he offers with a chuckle, "it was supposed to be the 1990s."



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