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CounterPunch
November
14, 2002
"The
Doctors' Vote is Now Up for Grabs"
The Fading Democratic Delusion
by ANIS SHIVANI
The Emerging
Democratic Majority
by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira
Scribner, 2002. 213 pages. $24.00
Judis and Teixeira have argued before that emerging
demographics all but assure a solid Democratic party majority
in the early twenty-first century. Professionals, single and
working women, and minorities already share the social values
that the Democratic party espouses, and it is only a matter of
time--probably during the first decade of the twenty-first century--that
a major new realignment will be completed. In this view, the
election of 2000 was a fluke--just as the election of Jimmy Carter
was a fluke in the middle of a Republican realignment--and the
Democrats will soon regain the upper hand by strengthening their
core in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Far West. (Judis and
Teixeira dismiss the 1994 Southern gains of the Republican party
as merely the long-delayed completion of the Goldwater-Reagan
realignment, not the formation of a new one.) Since the Democratic
Leadership Council's takeover of the party, Judis and Teixeira's
strategy has already been enshrined in the party's vision. It
constitutes a massive delusion to think that voters will choose
the Democratic party if it peddles the Republican party's essential
message, only more softly and geared to a different demographic.
Besides, if the Democrats become soft Republicans, what point
is there to be a different party at all? Judis and Teixeira
are cynics of the highest order. They are interested purely
in winning electoral strategies, and even there--as November
5, 2002 amply demonstrated--they are dead wrong. The deluded
notion is that the Democrats don't actually have to do
anything--they need not come up with an appealing message, reconfigure
their vision to accord with the conditions of the economy, or
anything as stressful--no, sheer changes in demography will make
the electorate lean heavily toward non-threatening Democrats.
Do nothing, and sow the harvest in elections.
Judis and Teixeira's argument is deeply
flawed from the historical perspective. They argue for a Democratic
party that would be a weaker version of the new Republican party--in
their words, "progressive centrism," or a return to
the "progressive Republicanism" of the early twentieth-century.
If their manifesto for the Democratic party's future is followed,
it would consign the Democratic party to oblivion, as the 2002
elections have already showed, and as future elections will no
doubt continue to prove. More than a refutation of the Judis
and Teixeira thesis is at stake here: for more than a decade,
the Democratic party has relied on some version of "progressive
centrism," which has led to electoral evisceration. There
simply isn't enough of an electoral base to consolidate the kind
of majority Judis and Teixeira envision, and the Republicans
can always outmaneuver the Democrats' attempt to co-opt their
message. If there needed to be any proof, the 2002 elections
have shown that if the Democratic party follows any part of Judis
and Teixeira's strategy, it will face even greater debacles until
it reaches a point of complete irrelevancy. This book's message
should go out the door, along with discredited Daschle, Gephardt,
Edwards, Lieberman, Kerry, Gore, and the party's entire "centrist"
wing. It is as irrelevant as Terry McAuliffe's chairmanship
of the party, and Clinton's appearances on behalf of Democratic
candidates. There is no way to play a double game with the Republicans
on values and hope to come away winners--the Republicans will
ratchet up the rhetoric one more notch each time and leave you
in the dust. A war-scarred veteran like Max Cleland has little
chance in the end when the Republicans go for the jugular with
the ultra-nationalist spiel of Saxby Chambliss. If there isn't
a "values" crisis (and that includes values pertaining
to war), it can always be manufactured, and that process can
now occur endlessly for the duration of the new global hot war
against terror.
Judis and Teixeira derive great hope
from the closeness of the 2000 election, and the victories of
Democrats Mark Warner in Virginia and Jim McGreevey in New Jersey
in November 2001. They disregard a whole raft of dynamics suggesting
the Democratic party's inherent weakness due to the softness
of their message or its indistinguishability from that of the
Republicans', which was shown in the tepidness of support for
them during the 2000, 2001, and definitely in the 2002 elections.
Judis and Teixeira construct their argument on insufficient
evidence that a major realignment, such as occurred in 1828,
1860-64, 1896, 1932-36, and 1968, is occurring. Did any previous
realignment occur simply because the blurring of ideology made
it possible for a party to appeal to disaffected voters, rather
than explicit repositioning to defeat the other party's ideological
vision? Simply because professional workers of the kind that
Judis and Teixeira obsess about--those in San Jose's Silicon
Valley, Seattle's King County, Boston's Route 128, and North
Carolina's research corridor--have a soft spot for some of the
social rhetoric of the Democratic party, doesn't mean that a
new Democratic majority is in the offing. Besides, as the 2002
election showed, even when there is some expressed sympathy on
the part of professionals for the Democrats' message on abortion,
guns, and gay rights, as soon as the slightest recommitment of
the government's resources to alleviate some of the worst injustices
is demanded, voters decamp for the real Republicans. It is notable
that there is no real economic component to Judis and Teixeira's
book; it is all about deploying certain kinds of social messages
that will keep the professional workers, single women, and newly
rising minorities in the fold. In other words, their argument
is: Let's be Republicans in disguise, and fool the electorate
with the right scare words on abortion, guns, and gays.
When Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging
Republican Majority in 1969, he set the model for future
Democrats to be obsessed with penning similarly prescient books--and
certainly Judis and Teixeira have tried in recent years. Teixeira
and Joel Rogers's America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White
Working Class Still Matters (Basic Books, 2000) was all but
the unofficial manifesto for the Democratic party's losing campaign
in 2000, and remained so in the year and a half of Tom Daschle's
accidental reign as Senate majority leader. America's Forgotten
Majority was misleadingly advertised: the working class
of the title was mostly ignored in favor of the concerns of professional
workers Teixeira talks about in his new book with Judis; at least,
now he's stopped talking about the working class and aligned
his advertisement with his convictions. This is good, because
now we can see a new level of exposure of "centrist"
Democratic thinking, stripped of even rhetorical concessions
to the working class or any of the constituencies that used to
matter to the Democrats since the New Deal. It enormously simplifies
the task of analysis. The New Republic and The American
Prospect brand of advocacy of "centrism" has nothing
useful to say about the revival of the Democratic party's fortunes.
Judis and Teixeira's false confidence
knows no bounds. They believe that the Republican era Phillips
forecast in 1969 is decisively over. The first signs of the
end of Republican hegemony were Clinton's win in 1992 and Ross
Perot's independent bid. The Republican takeover of Congress
in 1994 was nothing but a fluke, as was Gore's 2000 defeat.
Moreover, Bush's popularity after September 11, 2001 won't last.
Soon the demographic changes will reassert themselves and by
the end of the decade the transition to Democratic majority will
be completed. Judis and Teixeira have a difficult time explaining
why this transition is taking so long, and why it's proceeding
in such fits and starts; but they're sanguine about it. Their
belief seems to be that it's just going to take a while for the
professionals, women, and new minorities to realign themselves
completely with the Democrats. Patience--of the Daschle and
Gephardt kind--will be justly rewarded by 2010 at the latest.
The thing to look for is a Republican collapse of monumental
proportions--in fact, of course, exactly the reverse has been
happening. In the new globalized economy--with old-fashioned
commitments to economic security all but ended--it is possible
to manage away economic misfortune in whole new ways that form
no part of Judis and Teixeira's analysis. Before Clinton made
the full commitment to globalization in the nineties, it was
still possible to bring forth passionate voters looking for New
Deal social justice commitments. There is nothing similar on
the horizon, and the disaffected, including the young, mostly
don't vote at all. Unionized and manufacturing workers are a
small minority, even if the ranks of unionized workers in the
professions might be on the uptick. So how is it possible to
take electoral advantage of economic inequality after the age
of Clinton, when voters no longer distinguish between the Democrats
and the Republicans on fundamental economic issues? And marginal
economic differences are all that Judis and Teixeira even peripherally
refer to, a recipe for disaster as we have seen in the continued
erosion of the Democratic majority at all levels of government
(apart from the Clinton executive interlude of the nineties).
Why is the current realignment taking
so long? Judis and Teixeira say that unlike the previous realignments
of 1860-64, 1896, and 1932-36, which went along with cataclysms,
there is no similar cataclysm now. So it will take from 1992
"until sometime in this decade for the conservative Republican
majority to disintegrate and for a new Democratic majority to
emerge." But the authors never probe how in this age of
spectacle artificial cataclysms may be engineered by the party
in power to consolidate majorities in its favor, to the extent
that perception of crisis and the kind of leadership called forth
to deal with it becomes all but established reality. Judis and
Teixeira, building on Walter Dean Burnham's thought, take realignments
to be surrogates for revolution in this country. In this view,
the country dealt with industrialization not by falling into
a socialist revolution but by progressive reforms, and with the
Great Depression not by falling into fascism but by forming the
New Deal compact. They say that "realignments take place
because a dominant political coalition fails to adapt to or to
contain a growing social and political conflict." If their
own premise that the times are unusually quiet in terms of a
social or political crisis is correct, then one fails to see
where the call for a new political response might come from as
long as the electorate doesn't perceive a sense of calamity.
Actually, an economic collapse of monumental proportions has
been in the works (the stock market alone has lost $5 trillion)
for the last few years, but this has failed to have any apparent
effect on eroding the Republican majority. Imagine what Bush
should be able to do electorally with a reviving economy. Judis
and Teixeira are peculiarly old Democratic in their hope that
the electorate will rally to the Democrats in old-fashioned allegiance
even as they claim to propound a new Democratic philosophy.
The Jacksonian Democrats in 1828, the Lincoln Republicans in
1860-64, the McKinley Republicans in 1896, the New Deal Democrats
in 1932-36, and the Conservative Republicans of 1980 had bold
new ideologies to offer. Is there anything parallel on offer
by the Democrats today? And certainly, one won't find any vision
on this level in this book.
To justify their assumption that the
Democratic majority is emerging but taking a while to do so,
they draw a parallel between the kind of change prefigured by
the 1964 Goldwater candidacy which took a full sixteen years
to translate into electoral victory, and the equally quixotic
1972 McGovern candidacy which will finally materialize into electoral
majorities in this decade. Yes, you heard that right, these
new Democrats evoke McGovern! Not because of any apparent ideological
affinity with him, but to appropriate certain parts of the McGovernite
counterculture vocabulary and to squeeze the actual pattern of
voting into their fantastic realignment paradigm. Judis and
Teixeira tie themselves in knots to explain away why realignments
supposedly take so long now (in fact, of course, a contrary argument
could be that under more postmodern conditions they occur suddenly,
abruptly, without even much warning), and they resort to all
sorts of reasons--economic depressions are more contained today,
business cycles can alter the predicted trajectory, and so on--but
ultimately remain confident that the Republicans won't be able
to muster up a counter-strategy to defeat the imminent forces
of realignment.
Why should they be so confident? To
understand this, we need to go back to David Brooks's book of
"comic sociology" (this designation might apply to
Judis and Teixeira's book as well, except that unlike Brooks
they make no such self-deprecating move and there is nothing
but the bleakest technical calculation informing their manifesto).
In Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got
There (Simon and Schuster, 2000) Brooks spoke favorably of
the new meritocracy--Bourgeois plus Bohemians equals Bobos--which
is similar to Judis and Teixeira's conceptualization of the new
professional class (note that in Brooks's version they are the
"upper class" while Judis and Teixeira mistakenly think
of them as the class bulwark for the new Democratic party).
Today's professional class, according to Brooks, has reconciled
the bohemian or counterculture values of the 1960s, and lives
and spends accordingly. But not a single reviewer noted about
Brooks's book that the new professional class only has a shallow,
or mostly verbal, commitment to counterculture values. Yes,
you may not tolerate racial or anti-gay slurs as people used
to thirty years ago, but these "values" do not in any
way interfere with your pursuit of material success fully in
accord with the new rules of capitalism. Every reviewer of Brooks's
book took it for granted that the Silicon Valley or Wall Street
professional's commitment to bohemian values was real and substantive.
Judis and Teixeira make the same mistake, but with more profound
consequences since their book, unfortunately, is not meant as
a work of comic sociology but serious political analysis.
Judis and Teixeira assume that old-fashioned
racist (or nationalist) appeals won't work anymore. Clearly,
they still do. Nixon and Wallace decried busing, and Reagan
fetishized "state's rights" (the code word for racism),
as well as "law and order," "welfare cheating,"
and support for capital punishment. Bush and his band have their
own code words, which their constituents understand clearly enough.
Judis and Teixeira want to argue that such crass racist appeals
have no chance of working with the white working-class anymore.
But part of their reasoning is that the Republicans were able
to explain the economic difficulties of the seventies and early
eighties by attaching blame to blacks. If economic times get
hard again, could such racist appeals not be revived again?
(One of the first things that Republican strategists started
taking about after election 2002 was shutting down the immigration
doors completely.) Moreover, Judis and Teixeira evade a larger
question in reciting how the white working-class (Reagan Democrats)
left the Democratic party because of racial resentment. Could
it be that whites--both middle- and working-class--no longer
have the concern about the economic conditions of non-whites
that made the New Deal coalition possible? Is white--both middle-
and working-class--support for imperialist and nationalist ventures
a suggestion of racial resentment, deflected onto the global
stage?
Surely Judis and Teixeira don't mean
to argue that racism is no longer a force mobilizable by the
Republican party for electoral gain, but they certainly seem
to be doing so. They're making the Democratic party's task sound
easier than it really is. Along with racism, "voters' discomfort
with the counterculture of the sixties, including feminism, gay
rights, abortion rights, decriminalization of drugs, and sexual
freedom," which Reagan so skillfully exploited, also no
longer seem to be potent fears for Judis and Teixeira. Note
first that their litany of sixties progressivism is all in the
cultural arena, none in the economic one. But it's not even
true that fear of the counterculture is passé. This was
the single biggest reason Bush won in 2000, successfully attaching
counterculture values to Clinton and Gore. Certainly, the white
Southern electorate remains resolutely anti-countercultural.
This is not even to take account of Southern evangelicals who
make up a large proportion of the voting population. If Reagan
drew on "Midwestern blue-collar Democrats," "traditional
farm-state Republicans," and "Northeastern moderates,"
a new coalition of voters with implicit racist, nationalist,
and inegalitarian feelings can surely be brought together by
Bush and his successors.
If anything, we may be entering the final
phase of consolidation of the Republican majority--that is, unless
the Democratic party shapes up--where a decisive shift in favor
of state sovereignty, dismantling of the regulated economy (the
final shredding of "environmental, labor, and labor regulations"),
and privatization of Social Security and Medicare, in fact occurs,
supported by extreme right-wing judicial appointments at all
levels to make the shift last for at least a generation. Consider
the broad base of the New Deal coalition: "Northern blacks
and Southern whites, Wall Street investment bankers and Detroit
autoworkers, Protestant small farmers from the Midwest and Catholic
machine politicians from the Northeast." In contrast, the
new Democratic coalition, according to our authors, would have
to rest on what seems to be some of the professionals some of
the time, some of the women some of the time, and some of the
minorities some of the time.
The gap between white male support for
Bush against Gore was big, and the Democrats simply cannot put
together winning coalitions unless they have a new economic message
(not simply defensive postures towards Social Security and Medicare)
for this group of voters. Although Clinton oversaw the nineties
boom, voters in 2000 and 2002 don't seem to be willing to give
the Democrats credit for the economy. The Republicans used to
have a monopoly on credibility on foreign policy; now they seem
to have claimed monopoly on economic issues as well, even if
the economy is precipitously declining on their watch, as it
has for the last two years. The business scandals of the last
year, combined with possible double-dip recession, were not only
not enough for the Democrats to gain seats in Congress, but worked
against them by letting the party in power reverse the historic
trend in midterm elections. And it is not that the Iraq or sniper
distractions were one-time events. What's to prevent future
distractions during similar downtowns during the election cycle?
Republican economic growth is always uneven (we should say,
more uneven than Democratic economic growth), but nothing in
Judis and Teixeira's political language suggests capitalization
on this source of resentment among voters (that would be "class
warfare" to them, and certainly wouldn't appeal to professionals,
suburban housewives, and upwardly mobile minority workers).
Judis and Teixeira speak approvingly of Clinton's neoliberal
focus, shifting attention to economic growth rather than redistribution.
Nothing in their book suggests that the Democrats should bring
back any part of their previous emphasis on redistribution.
Clinton came to power by signaling to white Southerners that
he was willing to play the racist game, if it made them feel
better, and that he no longer stood for New Deal redistribution
to bring the poor into the fold of the economy. As one of their
1992 commercials ran:
They are a new generation of Democrats,
Bill Clinton and Al Gore. And they don't think the way the old
Democratic Party did. They've called for an end to welfare as
we know it, so welfare can be a second chance, not a way of life.
They've sent a strong signal to criminals by supporting the
death penalty. And they've rejected the old tax-and-spend politics.
What is left of the New Deal in this
message? There is overt racist appeal (welfare and the death
penalty). The Democrats of 2002 were plying the same message,
but by now voters have decided to support the real racists and
imperialists (the Republicans) rather than their pale imitators.
The authors of this book admit that the
old New Deal majority is definitely gone; but they offer no real
case for a Democratic coalition of interests that might take
its place, although they try hard to find it among professionals
and white working-class voters who might share the professionals'
social values. If major realignments are made possible by major
shifts in worldviews, then what such shift is on offer from these
authors, or any of the Democrats who will soon be clamoring to
replace the discredited Clinton/Gore/Gephardt/Daschle strategy?
We've been hearing for a long time now that the Reagan coalition
has broken up, but why are the eighties Reagan Democrats not
lining up behind the Democrats in numbers large enough to return
the party to electoral majority? To an unprecedented extent,
economic facts are now irrelevant to successful electoral strategies--the
subject can simply be changed too easily, with the assistance
of the media, and kept there for as long as is convenient for
the ruling party. In the absence of the power of economic reality
to shift electoral patterns, where do the Democrats get the necessary
boost? These are all questions for--one hopes the new--Democratic
leadership to answer. Judis and Teixeira, and their brand of
"centrist" thinking, offer no clues in that direction.
Not a single time during their book do they mention national
health insurance, security for workers in the age of globalization
(the word globalization probably doesn't even occur in an ambiguous
sense), or governmental intervention to alleviate almost unprecedented
economic inequality. Whether the Democrats talk about their
commitment to gun control and abortions ("judicial appointments"
is now the code word for this perennial bugaboo) or whether they
soft-pedal these issues to appeal to rural and Midwestern swing
voters, in either case they will be easily outmaneuvered by Republicans.
The entire Democratic party strategy for the last decade has
been based on the notion of narrowing their differences on economics
with the Republicans, and hoping to scare professionals on what
they hope is their commitment to tolerant social values.
Judis and Teixeira's hopes for a new
Democratic majority rest on "professionals, working, single,
and highly educated women, and minorities" who will be the
"products of a new postindustrial capitalism, rooted in
diversity and social equality, and emphasizing the production
of ideas and services rather than goods." Note that there
is zero economic or class content to this new configuration.
Even environmentalism, when it is listed along with cultural
values, is more a feel-good cultural expression rather than a
transformation of basic economics. McGovernite counterculturalism
is Judis and Teixeira's precedent for the appeal to professionals,
minorities, and educated women. For Judis and Teixeira, America's
gradual transformation into a postindustrial society dealing
in services rather than goods began as long ago as the twenties.
But why should this new professional class (Bobos, whether they
are white males or females, or minorities) necessarily support
enlightenment values or economic justice? That's not even Judis
and Teixeira's concern. What if Bush and his successors in the
Republican party soften their cultural rhetoric? Actually, they
have shown that even if they use harsh cultural rhetoric, they
can always get more votes from those who appreciate someone standing
for something rather than fuzzy liberal tolerance.
Judis and Teixeira's whole argument is
based on the transformation supposedly wrought by the "new
economy." To the extent that we question the reality of
the new economy for the majority of people in the country, their
argument is discredited. Moreover, is it true to assume that
as people get more educated, they become more liberal? Professionals
may be the fastest growing in numbers of "any major occupational
group" but they are outnumbered by managers, not to mention
workers, who don't necessarily share Judis and Teixeira's social
values. Professionals, as Judis and Teixeira recognize, were
conservative during the first phase of transition to postindustrial
society (between 1900 to 1960), disdaining unions, opposing the
New Deal, and believing in individual success rather than collective
action. Why couldn't they just as well go in this direction
again? Why shouldn't the final phase of the postindustrial society
usher in a barbaric, neo-medievalist order, with an absolute
split among the ruling class of highly educated professionals
no longer relying on government for basic services and all the
rest who can no longer count on government? Why couldn't the
future Republican majority be consolidated around professionals
preferring gated communities to a shared commons? In the chart
of values Judis and Teixeira use to show what professionals value,
"making a contribution" (a reprise of the slavish,
conformist organization man of the fifties?) ranks as high as
68 percent among teachers, 54 percent among nurses, 47 percent
among engineers, and 37 percent among information technology
workers, while "professional autonomy" gets only 10
percent among teachers, 16 percent among nurses, 11 percent among
engineers, and 16 percent among information technology workers.
What Judis and Teixeira are doing is constructing a mythic constituency
for the already rigid demographic view of the DLC--professionals
with verbal commitment to civil rights, abortion, gay rights,
and gun control, who mildly, but not radically, question market
values. To gain the new majority, Democrats only need marginally
distinguish themselves from the "unequivocally pro-market
Republican party."
Judis and Teixeira write that during
the sixties, "many future professionals, while attending
college, became supporters and leaders of the civil rights, women's,
antiwar, consumer, and environmental movements." But as
many, if not more, future professionals never committed themselves
to these cultural values. It is these to whom the Republican
party speaks directly and persuasively. Judis and Teixeira want
to rope in the professional class with the kind of failing appeal
the Democrats have been using, counting on their commitment to
"clean air and water, physical and mental well-being, and
safe and reliable products." There is absolutely nothing
about economic redistribution here that can excite a majority
of voters. In not wanting to change the professional class's
interest in fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, Judis
and Teixeira are resorting to some of the worst sins of pre-Keynesian
economics, which the Democratic party has upheld for the last
decade. Just as managers and administrators are excluded by
Judis and Teixeira as natural Democratic voters, not all women
qualify either. The Republican party has already shown that
it has vast appeal to married women, not only in the South but
in the entire country. When Democrats rest their entire program
on some mythic new economy that only leaves marginal cultural
values to be satisfied, that's the natural result. Since there
is no mention in this book of a higher minimum, let alone a living,
wage, women voters are supposed to be pulled in by appeal to
affirmative action and breast cancer research.
As for the final component of the new
Democratic majority, Judis and Teixeira seem content on the Republican
party's false steps on immigration and similar issues. The Democrats
don't need to offer a compelling economic program; they can just
count on the Republicans self-destructing. First of all, this
ignores the continuing potent appeal of racism, even within minorities
themselves (Asians versus blacks, blacks versus Jews, Hispanics
versus blacks). Also, an event like September 11 can rally nationalist
spirit in a way that fine points of racial discrimination go
by the wayside (we escalate to a radical, all-encompassing racism).
It is also too much to expect that Hispanics and Asians will
fall obediently in line with McGovernite cultural values, especially
when there is nothing at stake for them economically. If anything,
the Republicans' conservative family values spiel appeals naturally
to many Hispanics and Asians. Asian-Americans are still only
2 percent of the voting electorate. The whole strategy, then,
seems to be to count on enough people not on the margins to be
scared into voting for the Democrats (because the fearsome Republicans
will take away the right to abortion or do overtly racist things
against minorities), while building the core of the appeal around
presently small components of the electorate. As Judis and Teixeira
wax nostalgic over Clinton's symbolic gestures toward Chinese-Americans,
they seem to have strayed very far from any notion of appealing
to the white male. Should the Democratic party give up altogether
on white males with non-McGovernite cultural views? Republicans
can still cede much of the minority vote and put together enough
of a coalition to win, as long as the Democrats have no forceful
economic program. What happened among Mark Green, Al Sharpton
and other Democratic party leaders in 2001 is something that
Judis and Teixeira dismiss as "turf" or "intraparty"
battles that can be avoided if only "demagogues" like
Sharpton were squeezed out of the picture altogether. That is
not going to happen, nor should it.
Many among the white working-class remain
as offended by McGovernite counterculture values, especially
abortion and gun control, as they ever were. Ultimately, Judis
and Teixeira's program boils down to a symbolic cultural makeover,
while reassuring the business class (let's just call it that,
instead of higher professionals) that none of their goodies will
be taken away. At one point, they do say that in 2000 "Gore
actually lost white working-class voters in rural areas by almost
20 points more than Dukakis did," but white working-class
voters, rural or urban, are hardly their foremost concern. They
seem to believe that white working-class voters who work alongside
professionals in such high-tech enclaves as Seattle's King County
or Portland's Multnomah County are more likely to vote Democratic,
because they somehow share the professionals' cultural values.
There is no explanation in the book of this voting confluence
by osmosis, although it is one of their crucial arguments.
Geographically, too, this book seems
to want to be a retroactive justification of what actually happened
in the 2000 election, rather than a prescient program based on
ability to change the shape of the electorate. So Judis and
Teixeira are mostly content for the Democrats to build their
majority "in the Northeast, the upper Midwest through Minnesota,
and over to the Pacific Northwest." An alternative way
to look at this geographical grouping is as a rump, the last
holdovers for whom some of the scare tactics of the Clinton-Gore
era resonated. And even within this geographical area, Judis
and Teixeira discount the vast territories that voted solidly
Republican. Because population growth--particularly in terms
of professionals, single, educated women, and minorities--is
expected to be mostly within the postindustrial centers of large
urban areas, the Democrats need not worry about the apparently
vast geographical territory where they have no sway. There simply
aren't enough electoral votes there. But ideas people will always
only be a small minority. Judis and Teixeira are sanguine that
"waiters, hospital orderlies, salesclerks, janitors and
teacher's aides" who work in Austin (Texas), Raleigh-Durham,
Boston, or San Francisco will echo the libertarian and bohemian
values of the Bobos. For one thing, many of these downscale
workers don't vote at all. For another, the concentration of
professionals and support personnel in certain urban areas minimizes
their electoral impact, because of the perverse workings of the
electoral college.
Judis and Teixeira call these metropolitan
postindustrial areas "ideopolises." But aren't places
like St. Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit, where politics remain
"marked by familiar race and class cleavages," more
typical of the country? Centrist Democrats have wanted to erase,
or not even acknowledge, these perennial cleavages, in favor
of faux libertarian ideas (even as they commit themselves to
a culture of incarceration for the poor) meant to appeal to the
ideopolises. When Judis and Teixeira describe the rising number
of motion picture (new economy) versus aerospace (old economy)
workers in Los Angeles County, one notices the small minority
of voters these constitute (about 150,000 in 2000). Judis and
Teixeira discount the presence of religion among professionals
in Orange and San Diego Counties, and the continued commitment
of the nation to global military dominance which leads to the
kinds of professionals who vote Republican. Regardless, even
if the Democrats won 90 percent of Asians, Hispanics, minorities,
and single women in Los Angeles and New York, the electoral college's
unfairness guarantees that on the presidential level it won't
make much difference.
Oregon and Washington too are states
that "typify the new progressive centrist politics"
where "voters back regulatory capitalism, but are wary of
ambitious social engineering." For Judis and Teixeira,
and the new Democrats who have been ruling the roost for the
last decade, to speak of regulatory capitalism is another thing
altogether than for a New Deal Democrat to speak of the same
thing. They assume that voters are not interested in "ambitious
social engineering"--isn't another name for this brand of
politics "compassionate conservatism?" Minus, of course,
some of the religious overlay, but this can easily be moderated
in the future. The thinness of the bohemian libertarian culture
Judis and Teixeira talk so much about was evident in New Jersey
in the nineties, where, as soon as Governor Jim Florio, after
winning office with his "moderate, pro-choice, pro-gun-control"
views, raised taxes and championed "an unpopular plan to
redistribute school funds from predominantly white to predominately
black districts," he was booted out of office. Anything
that the New Deal Democrats ever stood for scares the Bobos into
running toward Republicans like Christie Todd Whitman who will
reassure them culturally while not ask them to recommit economic
resources. An alternative to Judis and Teixeira's favored trajectory
of professionals' voting preferences is the pattern of Texas's
ideopolises in Dallas and Houston, where Republicans rule.
Even if there were enough high-tech corridors
in the country to sustain Judis and Teixeira's strategy--and
there aren't and never will be--there remains the paradox that
voters in ideopolis and non-ideopolis areas are motivated by
the opposite cultural spectrum. When Gore softened his views
on "guns, abortion, and the Clinton scandals" he lost
the enthusiasm of the ideopolis voters, while not even being
sure of gaining the non-ideopolis voters. And that will remain
the dilemma of the future, as long as Democrats harp on patients'
bill of rights and prescription drug coverage instead of real
redistribution in the form of universal health coverage. And
one could say the same of regressive taxation, the incarceration
epidemic, the rise of poverty, or any such real issue, none of
which figures in this book. Judis and Teixeira don't see that
what "united the white Southern Bourbon and the Northern
black who voted for Roosevelt in 1940, or the upscale suburbanite
from Bergen County and the white working-class evangelical from
Greenville who voted for Reagan in 1984" was in each case
an economic plan that cut across race and class. Like the current
Democratic party leadership, they offer no equivalent broad,
heterogeneous economic plan. Even cultural politics--such as
Clinton's support for gays in the military--cannot really be
practiced, except at the purely verbal level. The contentless
politics of Clinton in 1996 and Gore in 2000 is the direct explanation
for the Democrats' flat-out defeat in 2002. It's not that scandals
derailed centrism--scandals and trumped-up crises are how the
media work now. A winning strategy ought to be able to take
control of that situation.
Judis and Teixeira's lack of sophistication
is evident in their appraisal of Pat Caddell as a visionary when
he was working for Carter. Caddell wrote then that "younger
voters are more likely to be social liberals and economic conservatives.
More importantly, they perceive a new cluster of issues--the
'counterculture' and issues such as growth versus the environment--where
the old definitions don't apply. . .We must devise a context
that is neither traditionally liberal nor traditionally conservative,
one that cuts across traditional ideology." No such new
compact is possible, given the terms of the process, unless the
Democratic identity is given up altogether. Everything not conducive
to the shallow liberalism of the professional class is too easily
dismissed as ambitious social engineering. Judis and Teixeira
may not want to call their strategy the same as the one formulated
by the old Atari Democrats, or admit the exact parallels to the
appeal to "wired workers" postulated by Mark Penn,
but the idea is the same--make the new professionals comfortable
and hope that they make the difference.
In fact, when Bill Galston, Elaine Kamarck
and the DLC advocated "fiscal conservatism, welfare reform,
increased spending on crime prevention through the development
of a police corps, tougher mandatory sentences, support for capital
punishment, and . . .traditional families" they offered
racist policies that pretended to be the opposite. The Democrats
under Clinton became so good at "inoculating" themselves
against race-based criticism from the Republicans that they ceased
to be Democrats. It was not inoculation but taking on the disease
as market incentives were promoted rather than environmental
regulation, managed competition rather than single-payer coverage,
charter schools and public school choice rather than a new commitment
to public education, and growth rather than redistribution.
The communitarian, "national interest" approach currently
favored by the Democrats will fail to win back a majority for
the Democrats, except at the cost of becoming a subset of the
Republican party. Of course, Judis and Teixeira are quite comfortable
with that notion. Gore in 2000, and Democrats broadly in 2002,
already fully practiced the Galston, Kamarck, From and Marshall
prescription, and it failed. The illusionary Democratic electoral
victories of the nineties were only a reaction to, or a component
of, the continuing Republican revolution.
In The New Republic of October
28, Judis wrote in "Poll Vault," his forecast for the
election, that although the Democrats "don't deserve to
do well in November's elections" they probably will anyway.
He wrote that "if voters focus on the economy rather than
national security in the remaining weeks, the Democrats may well
increase their edge in the Senate, recapture the House, and dramatically
reverse the Republican advantage in governorships." He
knew that the Democrats didn't have a distinctive message, but
he trusted--as he does in his book with Teixeira--that the voters
would perceive the Democrats' "timid agenda" as "surprisingly
effective in today's peculiar economic climate," and that
Republicans would not be able to exploit social wedge issues
as in the past. Wrong on both counts. While one awaits Judis's
probable rationalization of his utterly failed forecast, his
bosses, editor-in-chief Martin Peretz and editor Peter Beinart,
have already spoken in the most predictable terms. For them,
the Democratic party lost so badly on November 5 because it didn't
hew to the center enough. Democrat Martin Frost, the House Democratic
Caucus Chairman, reiterated this line on November 7, in his aggressive
drive to become minority leader. He trashed House Democratic
Whip Nancy Pelosi, saying that the party needs to appeal to the
"vast center," not turn to the left, appeal to moderate
swing voters in swing states, and not come across as weak on
war and national security. But that's exactly the losing strategy
the Democrats have been following. There is no more center
to move to, there is only the extreme right.
More than likely, the Democrats will
continue to follow the Judis and Teixeira plan until they are
utterly humiliated. If Frost becomes minority leader, if the
party nominates another centrist like Gore, Kerry, or Edwards
in 2004, it will be utterly wiped out. But it will probably
only be after such complete humiliation--greater in magnitude
than the loss of 2002--that the Clinton-McAuliffe era will finally
be over. Gore already finessed his cultural message to appeal
to the thin-skinned Bobos in 2000--on gun control, abortion,
and capital punishment--with disastrous results. This sleight-of-hand
has been taken as far as it can. Should the Democratic party
continue to speak in terms of civil rights (with its minority
appeal) rather than civil liberties (with broad appeal to all
Americans), the Republicans will keep on making heavy inroads
among the white working-class.
It was revealing to watch Mondale debate
Coleman the day before the election. Mondale was willing to
take on Coleman on all the fuzzy logic that has made Democrats
indistinguishable from Republicans, in an exposure of Orwellian
doublespeak that no Democrat--not even the mythical Wellstone--has
been able to manage in recent years. In debating Coleman, Wellstone
kept coming back to heavy corporate contributions to Coleman's
campaign, but then Wellstone was running as a pure candidate,
not necessarily one likely to accomplish legislative change.
There was something empowering about Mondale's pre-DLC language:
the Democratic party needs its central leadership, not people
on the margins like Wellstone whose main function seems to be
to validate the betrayal at the center by serving as an outlet
for frustration, to be unafraid to speak as liberals. And finally,
also, perhaps Ralph Nader can be absolved for the Democrats'
defeat in 2000, which can be claimed to be a fluke only in an
act of denial. Gore's centrist strategy couldn't even win him
Arkansas and Tennessee. So much for emerging electoral majorities.
Democrats, how about appealing to downscale workers for a change?
And factor in the idea that postindustrial transitional disorder
can more easily lead to extreme conservatism or outright fascism
than a pleasant McGovernite counterculturalism based on market
values.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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November 10,
2002
Ali Abunimah
Sharon's
Appendix
M. Shahid
Alam
Political Geography
Zionist Theses and Anti-Theses
Michael Neumann
Demonstrating a Genteel Reticence
Rosemary &
Walter Brasch
Personal Possession:
War and Iraq, a Recollection
Ralph Nader
The Mid-term Elections
Mark J. Palmer
Bring Back the Grizzly
Robert Fisk
Bush's "Clean Shot"
Dave Marsh
And the Beat(ing) Goes On
Adam Engel
No Blood for Marijuana in Iraq
Josh Frank
Sleater-Kinney
Rocks
Our Protest Songs Are Here
Clifford Lyle Marshall
Give the Trinity Back to the Salmon
Zeynep Toufe
Turn These Children into Stone
Philip Farruggio
In Name Only
Charles Sullivan
Mountain Party Rising!
Bernard, Krieger, Alam
Poets'Basement
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