INNER CITIES, OUTER POLITICS AND UNDERCLASSES : Politics by Drawbridge

Politicians usually find it better to receive than give--except for taxes. That instinctive preference for giving away tax breaks is one reason President Bush’s proposed reduction in the capital gains tax has shown such political strength, despite intense opposition from the Democrats’ leaders in both House and Senate.

But there is more than instinct pushing a tax break that could ultimately add billions to the intractable federal deficit. Washington’s tussle over capital gains, like the debate now raging over drugs, shows that habits acquired in the Ronald Reagan years continue to dominate national politics. From polar perspectives, the capital gains and drugs debates point to the same conclusion: Middle- and upper-class voters do not expect much beyond basic security from government, and they don’t want to give government any more than they absolutely must.

This is drawbridge politics, the belief that every man is an island, and it is bad news for Democrats whose appeal is irremediably anchored to the idea of collective action through government to confront social problems. The political hostility to government that marked the early Reagan years has ebbed; even George Bush uses the language of shared responsibility. But he has refused to ask voters for the revenue to fund his concerns. For Democrats hoping to see a bolder approach, events of the past few weeks offer some barbed reminders of the hurdles ahead.

The decisive rejection, on Sept. 28, of the House leadership’s proposal--to replace a capital gains tax with a package that expanded Individual Retirement Account (IRA) benefits for the middle-class and raised income taxes on the wealthy--testifies to the times.

The concerns of the electorate can usually be read most clearly in the fears of their elected representatives, and there’s no doubt that many House Democrats feared defending a tax increase--even one aimed ostensibly at the wealthy--far more than they looked forward to trumpeting a new IRA. “If you saw this as a vote about a tax hike, that was more dangerous than whether you were helping the wealthy or the middle class,” said one Democrat involved in the House leadership’s strategy. “The tax hike is the thing that people are much more worried about.” Senate Democrats have displayed even more wariness of new taxes.

That fear is the most revealing aspect of the debate so far. The capital gains-IRA tussle shows that Congress will simply not impose new taxes without cover from President Bush, even when taxes are coated with the sugar of a corresponding benefit for the middle class. It also shows how deep is the fear in Congress of standing against a tax cut popular with their most affluent constituents. Those attitudes, ingrained under Reagan, leave the Democrats with extraordinarily little room to maneuver.

In the battle to reclaim the middle class, for example, many Democrats have put their hopes on expensive programs aimed specifically at economically squeezed voters--assistance for first-time home buyers, expanded college-tuition aid, the revival of the IRA. (One of the few things Democrats applauded about Michael S. Dukakis was his success at developing such an agenda.) That approach doesn’t look quite as promising after rejection of the House leadership plan.

Voters in the middle are feeling squeezed, but that anxiety seems to produce far more opposition to new taxes than support for new programs. The Senate may fudge the issue with minor levies to push through a limited IRA expansion of its own, but the resistance of both houses to anything but marginal tax hikes means that money to fund a broader middle-class agenda may be impossible to raise. Unable to afford either, in fact, Congress may ultimately end up passing both an IRA expansion and capital gains reduction. In an era of drawbridge politics, money is even harder to find for programs that benefit the middle-class less directly, such as the stepped-up efforts against drugs. So far the drug debate has been fought within narrow parameters: Bush’s stress on individual responsibility and law enforcement, the Democrats’ effort to target more money to the fight, particularly for treatment.

A revealing sign of changed times is that Democrats--often derided as the party of permissiveness--have not challenged Bush’s hard line on penalizing users. Even more revealing is the absence of systematic attempts by the party to link the drug problem to the larger distress of the urban poor.

The growing awareness that the most intractable drug problems are concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods has opened a media window on the life of the urban underclass. That by itself is a major shift from the glittering Reagan years, when the rich absorbed the spotlight. But this growing exposure of social breakdown in the big city ghettos hasn’t produced any measurable political thrust to attack the despair that festers drug abuse--unemployment, poverty, hopelessness.

At a hearing a few weeks ago, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D - N.Y.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics, told drug czar William J. Bennett that failure to consider such underlying problems represented a crippling “gap” in Administration anti-drug strategy. Bennett rejected the premise, and so, apparently, does much of middle-class America.

What moves suburban voters is less concern about the inner-city conditions that breed addiction than the promise of tough law enforcement; they hope enforcement will keep the problem from moving, massively, into their own neighborhoods.

Aggressive law enforcement is also popular in not-so-nice neighborhoods. Low-income residents on the front line of the drug wars overwhelmingly support tough measures. But most of them don’t believe that more arrests alone will solve the problem; the middle class may be unwilling to pay for much of anything else.

Partly, that’s because no political leader in either party has articulated a convincing program for tackling the “root causes” any more effectively than Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty did 25 years ago. If not a comprehensive strategy, at least some intriguing new ideas have been developed since then: public-private partnerships to build decentralized low-cost housing instead of imprisoning public-housing projects; developing job-training programs as an alternative to imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenders. “The problem is, no one has articulated this agenda in politically winning terms,” said Derek Shearer, an Occidental College professor of public policy who is an adviser on urban affairs to the Democrats. “It would cost money and somebody has to make the political case for that approach.”

The drug debate could yet evolve in that direction. The enormous uproar has already allowed congressional Democrats to funnel millions of dollars into the inner city for treatment and education programs that never would have been funded otherwise. “Drugs may become the tail that wags the dog,” said one Senate Democratic aide, “but the need is to proceed carefully and slowly.”

To move the debate that way will require enormous political dexterity. As the plight of the inner city blurs in the suburban mind with the risks posed by crime and drugs--and as casual suburban drug use declines--fear shrinks the audience for an education message. “Because of the focus on drugs, the window is open on the problems of the inner city in a way that it would not have been otherwise,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “That’s to the good. On the other hand, the reaction of most people is: The window’s open, just bar the door. Keep them out of my neighborhood.”

That’s drawbridge politics in its purest form, and it is the controlling force in the drug debate. Its influence now courses through our politics--from the retreat on catastrophic health care (where resistance to a surtax among the more comfortable elderly is forcing repeal of a major expansion of health benefits) to the public acceptance of Bush’s pale lament that national needs find him with more will than wallet. That attenuated battle cry (more of a shrug than a summons) echoes a society that acknowledges problems but resists funding programs to fight them--partly because it feels financially squeezed, partly because it remains unconvinced that government could achieve its aims, with or without the money.

There’s justifiable skepticism in that conviction--and rationalization, too. If government had more credibility the drawbridge could come down, but only for a time. Community has frayed as a political force in American life. In a landscape of raised bridges, we face a politics dominated by disconnection.