Fate of Democratic Party Debated : Politics: Amid <i> mea culpas</i> for liberal failings, UCLA seminar participants seek a new frame of reference and new opportunities in an enormously changed world.

“Can the Democratic Party Be Saved?” was the sign on the door, the name of the conference going on inside. Beneath it, someone had penciled “NO!”

More than a crotchety commentary from one of the disaffected among those in attendence, it evoked a general feeling of the group’s intellectual restlessness: that with the reordering of the political world in Eastern Europe, the crescendo of environmental anxieties, the slide of Democratic political fortunes in the United States, some new critical mass is being achieved in human society, and amid such enormous change, enormous opportunities are at hand.

Now what?

The weekend of seminars at UCLA, sponsored by the intellectual Jewish magazine Tikkun, sought to do nothing less than reinvent liberal thinking, a new frame of reference to make sense of a new world. Tikkun has a reputation for taking swipes at the orthodoxies of liberalism, and speakers at the UCLA sessions came up to the mark.

Although not limited to partisan politics--the conference seminars examined matters of Jewish life as well as secular concerns--it was the social and political discussions that drew some of the biggest crowds. About 1,000 people attended the conference.

Speakers from disenchanted former Democratic campaign consultant Patrick Caddell to feminist Betty Friedan deplored the state of the Democratic Party, issuing mea culpas for what they termed impersonal and institutionalized Democratic policies. The call was for reclaiming public services for the public, for a humane, family-level working politics.

“For liberals to apologize we can’t simply say we were wrong--we weren’t wrong fundamentally” about discrimination, poverty and such, said Tikkun’s editor, Michael Lerner. “We were wrong in an attitude. . . . We stuck to a definition of problems that was purely economic and political, and didn’t look enough at the pain of people’s lives.”

Speakers said the political right developed a personalized politics that took advantage of the individual’s frustration, channeling it into unworthy causes but clearly tapping a deep vein of alienation.

Georgetown law professor and panelist Gary Peller recounted growing up in the South as a Jew, where, along with discrimination and segregation in schools was “a real sense of community.” When government intervened to end discrimination and segregation, “it undermined that sense of community too. . . . Public schools today represent the victory of liberalism” but at a cost: “In place of localism and particularity was ideology of expertise and standardization,” almost a “colonizing (of) neighborhoods.”

In later years, liberals failed to see the “profound and authentic rage” that dispossession created, he said, nor “to understand what kind of yearning, rage and frustration the right wing has appealed to.”

Panelist Lerner argued that the right channeled this into political power by soothing people’s sense of isolation: “You’re feeling bad, inadequate? Come take part in The Nation, The Flag.” This, he argued, represented a way to feel better about oneself, but by belittling others in “Rambo” adventures in Grenada and Ivan Boesky fantasies on Wall Street. Liberals, he said, should now take charge and do that legitimately, not at the expense of others.

Now the country is at loose ends, groping for redefinitions, said UC Berkeley sociology professor Todd Gitlin, author of “The Sixties.” The Cold War was “a cultural principle . . . virtue and paranoia fused to make us the good guys,” and now it is virtually over. Eastern Europe is as astonishing “as if there’d been some sort of Disney takeover of American news, Snow White and the Seven Police States.” Now, “what happens when you’ve committed your national identity to a war and the enemy resigns?”

Against that backdrop of opportunities is the impotence of the Democratic Party. It has been hampered by disdain, and, said ACLU activist and record producer Danny Goldberg, by “a bizarre snobbery” toward talking to people in their own language, not the language of bureaucracy and legal briefs.

Using as an example the proposal to roll back Social Security taxes as a regressive burden, Goldberg cited the names of two TV characters, one working class, one filthy rich: “Unless people understand that Roseanne is going to pay more taxes than J.R., it’s just never going to capture the imagination of the country,” and the Democratic Party has “been sublimely indifferent to the falling away of people in politics” for just such reasons.

Reclaiming institutions for people--and ultimately reclaiming voters--starts with progressive family-level priorities, said Lerner, an issue liberals have allowed conservatives to run away with. Liberals, said Lerner, “began to sound as though all we cared about were people who had been left out,” the homeless, the addicts and such. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to continue to focus on their needs, but there are other levels of problems.”