The Mean Season

Barry Finger is a member of the editorial board of New Politics.

THE 1994 ELECTIONS BURIED THE DEMOCRATS IN A MALTHUSIAN REACTION that covered the nation like an inexorable flow of lava. How could this have befallen those supposedly hard-nosed New Democrats of Bill Clinton, that alliance of investment bankers, bloodless technocrats and neo-liberals who just yesterday emerged triumphant in their promise to restore faith in activist government while stealing the Republicans' thunder?

According to philistine mainstream punditry, Clinton, elected as a "new" Democrat, once in office reverted to liberal form by governing as a "McGovernik leftist." That is, the "left" betrayed "normal" people, as they invariably must, by pursuing "Stalinist measures" in an ill-advised effort to overhaul the nation's health delivery system, by maintaining affirmative action programs that threaten hard-pressed working-class white males and by championing marginal countercultural issues such as the imposition of gays in the military in arrogant defiance of mainstream sensibilities. Clinton, in other words, charted an agenda completely alien and socially incomprehensible to the ordinary tax payer. The repudiation of this liberal elitism is seen as touching off a plebeian firestorm which successfully reconnected the people to their government through the corpulent, swaggering intermediary of Newt Gingrich, Republican Commissar of Cultural Correctness, and his smirking minions.

That is the accepted flimflammery which passes for political analysis, the credibility of which is enhanced, like cheap gossip, solely through repetition. It is given added currency by the Clintons' own post-election contrition which included a nodding approval in the direction of school prayer, as well as the expression of vexed reservation toward "abortion-on-demand" -- just like plain folk. In truth, Clinton claimed the presidency through his promise to address and ameliorate the widening social and economic inequalities built up under the preceding 12 years of Republican indulgence toward the obscenely rich. His victory rode the crest against the Roaring 20s redux in which those who prospered did so by manipulating fictitious capital through leveraged buyouts and junk bonds and, in so doing, massacred jobs through corporate consolidation when not exporting them to the low wage Third World. Wall Street jobbers generated a level of hostility against themselves that not even the paid propagandistic fantasies of George Gilder, Jude Wanniski or Arthur Laffer could rectify, supply-side charts or pompous pseudo-scholarly disquisitions on capitalism's spirit-ennobling creative destruction notwithstanding. They were seen, and not inaccurately, as the sinister serial killers of the American dream. For the unpleasant fact remained that real after-tax earnings of ordinary American workers had been falling dramatically for decades and that millions of people were working longer hours and taking on multiple jobs in order to sustain previously attained living conditions.

THE ACCUSATION THAT CLINTON IS A WOBBLER, A MAN WITHOUT A CORE, ultimately succumbing to Democratic "special interests" -- that is, racial minorities, labor unions and gays -- is so patently absurd as to be surrealistic. The truly consistent thread that runs through the Clinton Administration -- and it is the only one -- is its corporate fealty. Working-class tax relief in the form of a peace dividend was never a consideration. Neither was the conversion of defense industries, a measure absolutely indispensable if the nation's working-class base is to be preserved. The only tangible piece of progressivity was a negligible tax increase levied against the superrich, significant mostly as a transparently symbolic nod to egalitarianism, combined with an earned income tax rebate for the working poor. Otherwise Clinton abandoned his modest stimulus package in midstream, failed to outlaw the permanent replacement of striking workers, accepted a humiliating compromise on gays in military service, sacrificed Lani Guinier to the Republican wolfpack, further weighted the Supreme Court with pro-market economic conservatives and managed to so disorient and terrify the public with his Rube Goldberg health care reform contraption as to effectively remove health care reform of any kind from the American agenda for the foreseeable future.

The only issues the Democrats proved passionate about were NAFTA, GATT, deficit reduction, a repressive and racist omnibus crime bill -- advertised as an installment on Martin Luther King's dream, no less -- and welfare "reform," an item that they themselves brought to the top of the national agenda. Rather than calm the climate of social anxiety, the Democrats cynically pitched their appeals to it and mobilized their influence behind it while intensifying the very forces of international competition which sustain and drive it forward. Banished from the political landscape entirely was any pretense at uprooting poverty, the very benchmark of the 1960s' civil rights-tinged Great Society liberalism, long regarded -- at least rhetorically -- as indispensable in quelling the violence and self-destruction induced by the poisonous vapors of mass demoralization and despair. No longer was it the system which needed to be reformed but, on the contrary, it was the most powerless and isolated victims of the system themselves who needed to be socially rehabilitated through "tough-love" discipline. This was the innovative response of Democratic newthink, Democratic Leadership Council style, to the "Southern strategy"-- so modestly understated -- of post-1968 Republicanism, predicated on the contemptuous premise that the white working class, insofar as it thinks politically, blames its misfortunes on blacks and therefore can, on that basis, be pried away from the Democratic Party.

CAPITALISM IS IN A PERIOD OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RETRENCHMENT and the political forces that oversee the system cannot but reflect this dynamic. This requires not only the downsizing of the labor force at all levels and its subjugation to an increased pace and intensity of work, but also calls for a parallel reduction in overhead, including the social overhead represented by the welfare state. In opposition to the Republican juggernaut, the Democrats offered the promise of an orderly retreat of "equalized" sacrifice, painstakingly conditioning labor and blacks to this new reality of permanently diminished expectations. That they could attempt this maneuver, while still claiming to represent the "little guy," would be inexplicable were it not for the deep cynicism with which government in general is regarded.

What proved nevertheless to be the Clintonites undoing was precisely their self-deceptively slick choice of competing on Republican terrain, heralding their opposition to welfare as if it were a form of social idealism while flagellating its recipients as constituting -- in Moynihan's terms -- an emerging and distinct social species. But in playing the "race card" against cardsharks, they were simply out of their depth. That is not to deny that the Democrats put up a valiant fight, vowing as they did to outdo the Republicans in social reaction not only by arresting and murdering more criminals, but in out-demagoging the opposition on the subject of welfare mothers and in threatening to surpass their opponents in cracking down on illegal immigration by militarizing the southern borders. Rather than risk jeopardizing Republican prospects to this challenge, Gingrich and company merely upped the ante one notch. They offered the electorate a "welfare dividend" as an offset to the diminished paycheck, thereby drawing a line that the Democrats finally could not cross without repudiating the entire post-Depression legacy of activist government which they themselves pioneered in response to the massive labor and civil-rights struggles that convulsed the system. In a desperate gambit, voters took the Republican bait and opted, in effect, to cash in their insurance policy by dismantling the welfare state.

The White House has now been put on notice by the Republicans that there will be no compromise. If true, fiscal and monetary institutions, now used primarily in any case to buttress the bond market, will be legislatively retired as countercylical tools with the onset of a balanced budget amendment. Full employment, with its attendant tight labor markets and rising wage rates, will be similarly exiled to the museum of vestigial social artifacts, otherwise known as the memory hole. Illegitimate children and teenage mothers will be the special targets of state vengeance; the orphanage and the gutter joining the jailhouse as frontline institutions of the reformed state. Private schools, individual retirement accounts, self-employment, medical savings accounts and private charities will be increasingly touted, in opposition to collective solutions, as the remedies of choice as America -- the nation of individuals -- readies itself to go back to the future.

Of course the intellectual underpinnings of this reactionary tidal wave were spawned and nurtured in the conservative think-tanks and institutions which function as the intellectual clearing houses for the corporate elite. Ordinarily the questions as to how government monies are to be raised and to what ends are among the most telling of political issues. But these have been swept aside by a new approach of anti-Enlightenment elitism merged with modern pseudo-scientific eugenics. This approach contends that race-based social inequities are inherently intractable due to genetic differences and that the dynamic of the welfare state, stripped of its grandiose pretenses, consists in nothing other than bureaucratic self-perpetuation. Liberals may dispute the arguments, which are after all vulgar rehashes of social Darwinism garnished with an intimidating thicket of statistical jargon. But what continues to lend these arguments significance is not their "scientific" virtues, but the persistence of their social appeal to successive generations of conservative-moving intellectuals who continue to discover them anew and dignify them with a fresh veneer of academic respectability.

For behind this appeal is the indisputable and equally disquieting truth, which liberals are powerless to refute, of the failure of existing government compensatory programs to reverse and eliminate the problems of poverty they were designed to redress. Even at their most successful, such programs -- with the glaring and unduplicated exception of Social Security -- have rarely made more than a temporary dent in the problem. Successes are measured in increments or more modestly by the degree to which the line can be held. Liberal intellectuals are thus faced with a difficult dilemma when they consider moving from theory to program. They can conclude that there is something fundamental to the social structure of American life which renders it deeply resistant to correction by means of reform and piecemeal adjustment, in which case they are driven to relinquish their commitment to the system. Or they can find some justification for their continued adherence to a system which perpetuates poverty and racial injustice by subordinating their political values to the quest of isolating and identifying some purported characteristic of the victims of society, whether it is intelligence or family structure, which justifies their continued victimization. This accounts, in large part, for the intellectual volatility undermining the liberal sensibility in recent decades and explains why the rate of intellectual defection from liberalism to the right has mounted to a virtual stampede.

The Democratic Party is bereft of ideas and motivation, which befits a party increasingly bereft of its electoral base. The left cannot rejoice in the conditions of the Democrats' continued decline and can only look on with horror as the Republican Party assumes its new-found role as pawnbrokers to the welfare state. But neither must we entertain any illusions about the Democratic Party. In this climate of political polarization, given its corporate ties, the Democratic Party has become not a barrier against reaction, but a principle contributing factor to it.

Contents of No. 18