American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  In the late 1980s the structure of government remained intact, the balances in the old clock still operating, the springs and levers still in place. A Republican President and a Democratic Congress nicely checked each other; House and Senate held an absolute veto power over each other; the Supreme Court had an all but final veto over the two political branches. Inside these separated institutions lay political and intellectual conflicts that contained the seeds of enormous change and potential crisis.

  Realignment?: Waiting for Lefty

  For a century and a half the two main parties had proceeded down the political mainstream, rolling along with the inevitability of the Mississippi. But just as storm and flood had periodically roiled the placid waters of that river of American history, so political movements and ideological tempests had disrupted the steady flow of two-party politics. And American politicians, like the people living along the riverbank, knew that the flood would come again—but they did not know when.

  Social protests and political movements had risen and fallen with some regularity over time. Before the Civil War abolitionism had challenged both Democrats and Whigs and the easy accommodations they had made with slavery. In the 1890s aroused agrarians had moved into the Democratic party, even wresting the presidential nomination from the centrist Clevelandites. In the 1930s several streams of protest had coalesced as desperate farmers, urban reformers, western progressives had taken a dominant role in the Democracy. In the 1970s and 1980s conservatives of varied stripes had merged with Republican party regulars to put Ronald Reagan into office and keep him there.

  These movements might appear to have erupted with the suddenness of a spring freshet and then subsided as quickly. Each protest, in fact, had sources deep within the politics and morality of its period. Outrage over slavery had aroused the consciences of men and women in both the Democratic and Whig parties, triggered third-party forays such as that of the Liberty party, cut deep divisions not only between parties and between major interests but within them, and convulsed the entire political system by the 1860s. The lightninglike capture of the Democratic party by the Bryanites in 1896 was the product of years of intense agrarian unrest, western greenback and silver movements, organizational efforts by the Farmers’ Alliance leaders and rank and file, years of populist agitation, the devastatingly low farm prices and other hard times of the nineties. Fighting Bob La Follette’s Progressive party of 1924 and Al Smith’s presidential candidacy of 1928, followed by the farm movements of the great depression, helped pave the way for Roosevelt’s presidency and for the New Deal expansion of both the political appeal and the social philosophy of the Democracy. And on the American right both economic and evangelical leaders had fought a long battle, first winning and then losing with Gold-water in 1964, flirting with George Wallace and other elements North and South hostile to civil rights, and losing once again with Reagan in the GOP nomination fight of 1976, before achieving their breakthrough in the 1980s.

  Thus movement politics had collided and combined with party politics throughout American history. Like their counterparts in other countries, American social protest movements were unruly, untidy, and unpredictable in effect, but they displayed continuities and similarities in their very dynamics. The pattern was clear, even dramatic: these movements emerged out of economic stress and social tension and erupted in conflict, often violent. After a time they dominated political debate, overshadowed more traditional issues, cut across existing lines of party cleavage, polarized groups and parties. The immediate test of success was whether the movement could force one major party or both of them to embrace its cause. The test of long-run success was whether the movement left the whole party system altered and, even more, left the political landscape transformed.

  The great transformations that had occurred, in the antecedents of such critical elections as those of 1860 and 1896, and the series from 1928 to 1936, have been studied in great detail by exceptionally able historians and political scientists. The main interest was usually in the rise and fall of parties, since their fate in elections could be so easily measured. But party change contained a paradox—despite all the turmoil the nation had undergone, the Democratic party had existed ever since the 1830s and the Republican party since the 1850s. These staid old parties had entered and left office like Box and Cox but had continued to move down the political mainstream, capsizing and sinking third parties in the process.

  Hence on closer inspection, the critical question was not so much party realignment as party reconstitution. The most significant case of this kind of change in the twentieth century was the shift of the Democratic party under Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Behind FDR’s leadership the Democracy became much more of an urban, trade union, ethnic, and poor people’s party, but—partly because of Roosevelt’s need of support from internationalists of all stripes during the war years—it retained its old and solid base in the white South. Truman’s bold civil rights stance, Kennedy’s Catholicism and growing commitment to civil rights, and LBJ’s comprehensive civil rights program accelerated the reconstitution of the party. Blacks forsook their ancient allegiance to the Republican party of Lincoln and flocked to the Democracy; white southern Democrats forsook the party of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson to move first toward third-party ventures and then toward their old partisan adversaries, the Republicans.

  For Southerners, switching parties was not easy. Their leaders in particular were “in a bind with the national Democratic party,” as Republican Representative Trent Lott of Mississippi noted. “If they subscribe to the national Democrat party’s principles, platform, they are clearly going to alienate the overwhelming majority of the white people in Mississippi.” If they stayed with the national party’s base, “they wind up with blacks and labor and your more liberal, social-oriented” Democrats. “Put those groups together and they are a minority in Mississippi.” So Republican party leaders were ready at the front gate to welcome the Southerners. The Goldwater-Reagan party, having ousted the liberal Rockefeller wing, was prepared to usher southern ex-Democratic leaders into the inner councils of the purified GOP. Congressional converts like South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond were soon making Republican party policy, and convert John Connally of Texas even ran for the Republican presidential nomination.

  The test of this reconstitution lay in the political grass roots of the South, and here the shift was dramatic. The percentage of white Southerners identifying themselves as Republicans rose eight points between 1979 and 1984 and then jumped an astonishing ten points further the following year, a movement which public-opinion analyst Everett Carll Ladd saw as “an almost unprecedentedly rapid shift in underlying party loyalties across a large and diverse social group.”

  By the late 1980s the Republican party had reconstituted itself as the clearly conservative party of the nation. Ronald Reagan presided as a conservative; all the Republican presidential aspirants of 1988 endorsed his Administration and bore, in one way or another, the Reagan stamp. Reagan Republicans had conducted “half a realignment,” in popular terms. They posed a challenge that the Democratic party leadership was failing to meet as the 1988 election approached.

  That challenge was as much philosophical and ideological as political and electoral. The GOP’s rightward tack appeared to leave a huge unoccupied space in the middle of the political spectrum. To all the Democratic presidential aspirants save Jesse Jackson this space was an enticement. How logical it appeared for Democrats to shift some of their appeal to the center while holding their traditional support on the left, and forge a moderate-centrist-liberal coalition much like the winning North-South alliance the national Democracy had maintained for decades before that strategy crumbled in the face of the black revolt. But in a battle against conservative Republicans, they could not talk centrism without being accused of the sin of “me-tooism.” And me-tooism was hardly the answer to the Democratic dilemma. “If American voters are in a conservative mood,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., w
rote, “they will surely choose the real thing and not a Democratic imitation.”

  So what the Democrats talked was not conservatism or even centrism but pragmatism. The American Enterprise Institute political analyst William Schneider, after sitting in on a 1986 board meeting of a candidate’s think tank—it happened to be Gary Hart’s—noted that certain words kept coming up: parameter, interactive, consensus, instrumental, modernize, transition, dialogue, strategic, agenda, investment, decentralize, empowering, initiative, and entrepreneur. But the word of the day, he noted, was pragmatic. “Be pragmatic in all things,” the group seemed to be saying. “Be not ideological.” The Democrats’ selection of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis as their presidential nominee in 1988, and his choice in turn of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, met this test.

  What did they mean by pragmatism? Whether the candidates used the term or not, it was clear they meant what was practical, realistic, sensible— what worked. But what was the test of workability? By what values was workability measured? Into this forbidding “ideological” land the candidates were reluctant to venture.

  What politicians mean by workability is usually what promotes their immediate candidacies, rather than an ultimate cause or creed. Thus was pragmatism degraded into the most self-serving kind of doctrine, a pragmatism that would not have recognized its intellectual ancestry. Indeed, presidential candidates in the 1980s, especially the Democrats, were embracing their brand of pragmatism so enthusiastically as to make it into a doctrine, even an ideology—anathema to Charles Peirce and John Dewey.

  To a degree, pragmatism was a convenient way to avoid labeling. Did it conceal an agenda? “Pragmatic,” Schneider noted, had become “this season’s Democratic code word of choice for market-oriented, rather than government-oriented, solutions.” For most of the Democratic candidates, it seemed, pragmatism meant some form of market capitalism. Then how much of an ideological gap separated them from Reaganism? The leaders of the Democratic liberal-left answered “too little” and proposed a clearly contrasting alternative.

  That alternative was a movement strategy as against a strategy of mainstream and marketplace. It was in key respects an old-fashioned idea: if social protest movements had been vital to the renewal and redirection of political parties in the past, and if the needs and aspirations of large sectors of American society remained unmet, then the Democrats must make their mightiest effort to reach out to movement leaders and rank and file. These, in some combination, were its natural and traditional constituency— women, peace groups, blacks, union labor, small farmers, ethnics, youth, the poor, and the jobless.

  However familiar a political alliance this was for the Democrats, the question in the late 1980s was whether the partners—party regulars and movement activists—were ready for one another. The Democratic party leadership hardly appeared ready for bold initiatives. That leadership, indeed, had cut its structural ties with movement activists when, earlier in the 1980s, the Democrats’ regular midterm policy conference had been discontinued. That midterm conference, a grand assembly of both Democratic party regulars and delegates representing women and minority groups, had been noisy, expensive, untidy, unpredictable, sometimes a bit embarrassing. But it had also linked the party establishment to creative and dynamic electoral groups; by abandoning it, the leadership cut off some of its own intellectual and political lifeblood. The presidential aspirants, focusing on their own campaigns, could not be expected to restore the connection. Several of them in fact were founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that made no secret of its intention to rescue the Democracy from control by “extremists” and “ideologues”— the very groups that had lost their footing at the midterm conference. Michael Dukakis, in choosing Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate and shunning liberal-left stands on tough issues like taxes, presented the moderate face of the Democratic party to the nation. In Massachusetts, however, he had won elections in part because of his skill at uniting party regulars with movement activists.

  Nationwide the activists for their part had decidedly mixed desires and capacities to marry or remarry the Democratic party. The movements themselves were divided organizationally. Peace activists were morselized into tens of thousands of local groups individually or cooperatively conducting local rallies, demonstrations, and protest action. Women’s groups had the same types of divisions along with a particular inhibiting factor— many women’s organizations, especially the large and influential League of Women Voters, were nonpartisan and hence barred from forming organizational links with the Democrats. Blacks were overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting but proudly separate in most political endeavors. Some activists in all these movements shunned party politics as a matter of principle, on the ground that Democratic party leaders had betrayed, sold out, neglected, forgotten, or otherwise mistreated them over the years. Other movement leaders spurned any kind of conventional politics at all, preferring to put their energies into street activism.

  Then there were the “young,” tens of millions of them. It was calculated that by the late 1980s those born from 1946 onward, in the baby boom, would comprise around 60 percent of the electorate. But this was a demographic “cohort,” not a voting bloc. Some had become the yuppies who were distinguished mainly by having no distinctive political attitudes beyond a vague and ineffectual anti-establishmentarianism. Historian Robert McElvaine, however, detected among the immense number of baby-boomers a group that was not upwardly mobile, affluent, or typically professional. “During the 1950s and ’60s, the average American’s inflation-adjusted income increased by 100 per cent between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five,” McElvaine noted. “For those who were twenty-five in 1973, however, their real income had risen by only 16 per cent when they reached thirty-five in 1983.” Because many of these young people had lived the hard-pressed lives about which New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen sang, McElvaine called them the “Springsteen Coalition.”

  Inspired by childhood memories of King and Kennedy, disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam and much that followed, these young persons retained both a sense of grievance and a streak of idealism that might surface in their voting in the 1990s. But would they vote? Or would they contribute more than their share to the steadily declining voter turnout of the late twentieth century? The same question could be asked of the protest movements that made up the Democratic party’s natural constituency. Movements that had supplied zest and fresh blood to party politics now appeared passive, dispirited. They were part of the impasse of the system, not solvents of it.

  If movements as well as parties were fixed in the immobility of American politics, was it likely that Americans might experience incremental, brokerage politics under transactional leadership for years to come? Or was it possible that they would enter another period of social protest, movement politics, and major party transformation and bring on a critical realignment? The answer would turn on the quality of leadership and the character of its followership.

  Neither the movement nor the party leadership of the nation gave much promise in the late 1980s of moving Americans out of their political immobility. Leaders were scarce whose capacities could compare with those of the great leaders of the past—with Dr. Townsend’s skill in mobilizing the elderly in the 1930s, with the kindling power of John L. Lewis or the labor statesmanship of Walter Reuther, with the intellectual and political audacity of the early leaders of the women’s movement, or with the galvanizing power and charisma of King and his fellow protesters. As for the Democratic party, virtually all the candidates for President—even Jesse Jackson—exhibited great skill at working within the system. Few of these “pragmatists” hinted at a potential for transcending the system, mastering it, transforming it if necessary. To be sure, any one of the candidates might display great leadership capacities upon attaining office, as Franklin Roosevelt had done. But FDR had not had to go through the modern presidential recruitment process that tested candidates more
for their ability to campaign than for their capacity to govern.

  Was there no alternative, then, to politics as usual? One possible development that could “break the system wide open” was an economic catastrophe of the magnitude of the great depression, or at least of a severe recession following a stock market plunge like that of “Black Monday” in October 1987. Some liberals and Democrats were predicting such an event, some even forecast a likely time of onset, but the prospect that the nation had to wait for a catastrophe in order to take actions that might have prevented it seemed as wretched as the notion that the world would have to go through a nuclear crisis before it would take the necessary steps to forestall nuclear war.

  Some kind of desperate crisis might be necessary, however, for liberal-left Democrats to employ the most ambitious and radical means of opening up the system, a mobilization of the tens of millions of Americans not participating in electoral politics. By the time of the 1984 election the number of voters, even in the presidential race, where the participation rate was much higher than for lower offices, had fallen spectacularly—to roughly half the potential electorate. Americans, who like to view their country as something of a model of democracy, had the poorest voter-turnout record of all the industrial democracies. Aside from the occasional laments of editorial writers, however, Americans did not appear unduly disturbed by this travesty of democracy.

  Democrats on the left had special reasons to be concerned, for the poor, the jobless, and the ethnics were disproportionately absent from the polling place. These no-shows represented a huge array of constituencies that the Democrats were failing to tap. A strenuous effort by a national voter registration group helped persuade some states to relax the registration barriers that had kept some people from voting and to allow the use of government offices as registration places, but even in those states turnout remained low. The root difficulty was that many low-income, less educated nonvoters did not see the point of voting—for them electoral participation in America was a middle-class game which they did not care to join.