Democrats: a Party With a Stricken Soul

A mysterious principle of compensation governs both nature and the affairs of man.

One morning last week, after days of shockingly mild weather, unpredicted snow began to fall, obliterating foolish optimism and restoring the inescapable New England balance between bitter and balmy. More dramatically, a friend of ours announced that, despite having undergone a tubal ligation by the best of doctors, she was now pregnant. Her husband ascribed the event to some suprascientific intervention--another illustration of the balance between man’s assumption of scientific order and the warning disruptions of the Divine.

Reflecting on these events, it occurred to me that if a warm sun can shine during a New England January, and a woman with tied tubes can become pregnant, it might even be possible to revive that somnolent, sprawling, amorphous conglomerate fondly known as the Democratic Party. Since all thinking Americans regard themselves as Doctors of Politics, let us approach this problem as the medical metaphor would dictate. First, we must diagnose the constitution of the patient and the affliction.

The patient is sound of flesh. Democrats will be elected to offices of every rank. The arteries are not clogged, nor the mind deranged. The party structure can thrust people of ability into positions of governing responsibility.

The sickness is of the soul.

The soul of a party is the seat of principled determination: What does it stand for, and what will it will fight for?

There once was a set of values, of national goals, that linked the party of Thomas Jefferson with that of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Those comprised, in most general form, a commitment to American justice, which I once described in a speech written for President Johnson as a nation where “all of every station and origin would be touched equally in obligation and in liberty . . . (where) each could become whatever his mind and spirit would permit . . . to strive, to seek and, if he could, to find his happiness.”

This ordering commandment has taken many forms--shaped always by the changing American condition. In our century it was expressed through commitment to rising abundance, fairness in the distribution of American wealth, protection against expanding tyranny and, as late as 1968, opportunity for those locked behind some invisible door of racial injustice or inherited poverty.

Now, like some corporate King Lear, we are purchasing some transient tranquillity by laying waste to the resources that contain the possibilities of our future. We are insanely accumulating a mountainous debt--public and private--that will consume the living standard not only of our children but also of every citizen who lives to see the year 2000. We are devastating the resources that are the source of realistic hopes for progress--our land, water and air; the untrained minds and skills of the young; the hopes of the poor and racially oppressed whose fading belief in justice has been the alternative to class conflict and spreading violence.

And where, amid this amiable carnage, can we hear the voice of the Democratic Party--the sound of anger and indignation and eloquent opposition to this violation of all that it has stood for?

Almost nowhere. There are a few faint voices, perhaps. But from those whose energy and ambition has carried them to the highest ranks there is, with few exceptions, nothing to be heard. Indeed, for the most part they are accomplices to this betrayal.

The Democratic House of Representative tinkers with the tax laws while the massive unfairness of that system escapes fundamental reform. Democrats, murmuring some protest, stand by while efforts to improve opportunity and the conditions of life are dismantled, while their historic constituency, the working American family, is compelled to transfer the fruits of labor to the powerful few who are in full occupation of the halls of Congress and the suites of the executives. Democratic officeholders and candidates alike study polls instead of principles, trying to find room on the mythical ghost ship called “The Conservative Temper,” which they think is headed for the port of high office.

They’ll have a tough time of it. That ship is already crowded, and not with allies. But even if they make it, it won’t help the rest of us--the people who the Democratic Party is supposed to serve.

A return to principles is not a return to the past. If the Democratic Party is searching for practical, tangible ways to pursue principles, all it has to do is listen. The country is full of intelligent men and women who have evolved new ideas.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has cut itself off from the intellectual roots that nourished it since the New Deal. While conservatives were establishing think tanks and journals, Democrats were replacing their once-unmatched pool of intellect and practical talent with committees of politicians--not policy committees, but election committees.

There is a promising agenda for the Democratic Party. But a patient with a stricken soul finds it hard to hear, even harder to imagine, what might be other than what is. Unless that seat of courage is restored, the patient will continue to decline.