If Democratic Party Is Shunning Interests, It’s Shedding People

Where did the Democratic Party go? I’m not asking whether it has gone leftward, as some say, in reaction to the Reagan years, or whether it has band-wagoned rightward, as some say, in reaction to the Reagan years. Rather, it seems to have disappeared entirely. If it does still exist, whom exactly does the Democratic Party represent?

At the national convention in Atlanta, and for many months preceding it, Democratic officials sought to distance their party from the dreaded “special interests” that had allegedly plagued the Democrats previously. They cited organized labor as one instance of a special-interest group that, if it had its way, would bring the party once again to defeat. Women, another group supposedly wanting an undemocratic share of the Democrats’ attention, had to be held at bay if the party was to prevail. The environmentalists, the peace activists, the homeless, the small-business people, the farmers, the gays, the elderly, the poor, the youth, the students and the minorities--black, Latino, whatever--could all bring down the Democratic Party this November should their needs become too much the focus of attention.

Well, then, whose interests, exactly, are left (as in remaining, that is)? After all, most Americans who work constitute labor (and millions of them are “organized”); more than half the country is female. In fact, just about everyone fits into one if not several of the above “special-interest groups.”

Maybe the Democrats (whomever they are . . .) don’t realize that their effort to represent “all of the people” is turning out to be one that will represent nearly none of us. For, unless we are to try to become one indistinguishable blur of a nation (words like fascism , racism and sexism come to mind with even worse connotations than special interests ), these distinct identities with their persistent needs will continue to constitute America.

Yet the Democrats have nominated someone with a rapidly disappearing identity. Michael S. Dukakis has developed during the past year of his national emergence as a gray, noncommittal presence. More and more he resembles President Reagan and his helicopters: We can get no sense of where he stands, what he wants, what he’ll do. Of course, his style is different from the incumbent’s, but the result is the same. He seems unable to hear, or unwilling to answer the questions that the American variety might ask. He may be exempt from the charge of special-interest pandering, but he is descending into the land of no man’s or woman’s interest, except perhaps that of his own ascension to power.

And as Dukakis fades from liberal identity into a fictional Everyman, so fades the Democratic Party. Once the “party of the people,” it is now striving to be no one’s party in order to somehow amount to everyone’s party. A nice turn of phrase, but the pride of America has been its tolerance of diversity (many could take issue here), its ability to withstand and balance the struggle of the competing interests that, legend has it, make America special in the history of civilizations. The truth is--as Jesse Jackson, who is not the Democrats’ standard-bearer, seems to know--that everyone is special and is someone, not no one.

If the Democratic Party wins in the form of Dukakis-Bentsen, whom will it represent? An anonymous human entity who has a “good job” or is being “educated” for one? A nation of Everyman Jobholder is the single, spartan vision of the future that the Democrats have united to project. The prospect is chilling. Without “special interests”--not to be confused with “unfair privileges”--life is a monotonous, colorless drudge.

If the Democratic Party stands only for jobs while eschewing “labor,” if a “good job” (Dukakis’ vague though enthusiastic promise) is the greatest aspiration that this party holds for the American people, then the Democratic Party has become nothing but the non-union labor force of the owners of American business. In short, the Democrats will have become merely the Republicans’ employees, harnessed to a life driven by economic monomania in emulation of and in combat with the Japanese and others.

Considering the alternative, I think that the party of “special interests”--like those concerning the environment, women’s equality, civil rights, economic justice, health and human services, nuclear disarmament and all the rest of them--sounds pretty good. That Democratic Party must not be permitted to disappear. For, without it, most of us have no representation at all.