THE DEMOCRATS’ DEATH WISH : During the Past 15 Years, the Party Has Fallen out of Step With the Country and With the Times

Return for a moment to a time when the Democrats seemed about to inherit the world. It’s October 1976, and at San Francisco International Airport, a group of Bay Area Democratic politicians are waiting to greet the man who has been running far ahead in the polls for weeks: Jimmy Carter. The tawny-brown San Bruno hills loom in the distance, and the air has almost a rosy hue in the late-afternoon light.

The largest and the loudest of the group is Phil Burton, rumpled and always standing just a little too close to the person to whom he’s talking. Burton brought the rough manners and leftist politics of San Francisco’s old dockworkers’ unions to the House in 1964, where he was a kind of pariah, one of a handful who voted to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee; standing here now, he seems destined to become House Majority Leader, head of a party with 2-to-1 control of the House. Next to him, smiling cheerfully, is George Moscone, just elected mayor of San Francisco in the first city election in which gays were a major political factor. Nearby are San Francisco legislators Leo McCarthy, Speaker of the California Assembly, and Willie Brown, who delivered the stirring “Give me back my delegation” speech at the 1972 National Convention. From the East Bay is Pete Stark, the former “peace banker” now on the House Ways and Means Committee. Don Edwards, the civil libertarian who, as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, helped lead the fight to impeach Richard Nixon, is from San Jose. And from the working-class suburbs of the Peninsula is local politico-turned-congressman Leo Ryan. Standing apart, typically, is Jerry Brown, at 38 already the Governor of California and a presidential candidate who has beaten Carter in several primaries, a new kind of Democrat with prospects of being President himself some day.

They stand waiting for a politician they scarcely know, whom they back more from a sense that his victory is inevitable than out of any political conviction--they approach this meeting with the cynicism of successful politicians and the justified mistrust of allies thrust upon them. In 1976 a lifetime of political domination and public policy making seemed to be ahead of them. The Democrats would soon control the White House, two-thirds of the House, almost two-thirds of the Senate. They seemed sure to appoint most of the federal judges and Supreme Court Justices. They controlled the governments of big states such as California and of most small states. America’s newest generation of voters, the baby boomers, seemed even more Democratic than their New Dealer elders. Articulate opinion, in newspapers and on television, in the universities and even among many corporate executives, seemed solidly Democratic.

But for these Democrats on the Tarmac, who represented the disparate strands of their party--South as well as North, suburbs as well as big city, working class and Catholic and labor and liberal and intellectual--the disappointment and professional failure ahead was to be of monumental proportions. Some met tragic fates: In 1978, Ryan was murdered in Guyana by fanatic followers of a cult led by Jim Jones. The same year, Moscone was murdered in his City Hall office by a disgruntled former city council supervisor. Burton lost the majority leader’s job to Jim Wright of Texas in 1976 by exactly one vote, and died of a heart attack seven years later. McCarthy was ousted from the Speakership by his majority leader, Howard Berman, in 1980, who then lost the post to the wily Willie Brown. Jerry Brown, reelected to the governorship in 1978, was unable to win election to the Senate in 1982.

Only Stark and Edwards still have successful political careers, though both have suffered setbacks: Stark’s catastrophic health-care bill, enacted in 1988, was repealed in 1989 after a wave of protest from voters, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which Edwards shepherded through Congress in 1990, was vetoed by President George Bush as so-called quota legislation and is still the center of much conflict.

But the most monumental disappointment was the career of the man they were waiting to greet. Jimmy Carter won only 51% of the vote when he was elected president in 1976, and was turned out of office four years later by Ronald Reagan, a politician whom these Democrats and most political pundits dismissed as an extremist and a 65-year-old has-been.

What happened? What went wrong for these Democrats--and for the party in general? Why are the Democrats, who have won only one of the past six presidential elections, seemingly locked out of the White House and on the defensive with American voters?

The answer is that the Democrats’ problems are fundamental. This is a party that has fallen, as parties sometimes do, out of step with its country. The Democratic decline is not just a result of accidents--the loss of a helicopter in Desert One, Ronald Reagan’s skill at using television, the failure of a Massachusetts convict to return from furlough. It is more basic than that. It is a failure to learn the right lessons from the party’s past. And while some Democrats understand the trouble their party is in and are trying to make changes, the critical mass of office-holders, candidates and activists seems bent on repeating the mistakes of the past. The Democrats need to review the policies of the last several generations, and identify what worked and what did not.

The Lessons of the New Deal. The Democrats’ problem stems not from the failure of the New Deal but from its success. As former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill puts it, the Democrats made people so well-off that they could afford to become Republicans. It’s important, however, to understand that the most successful New Deal programs were those that rewarded upwardly mobile behavior: the G.I. Bill of Rights, the FHA home-mortgage guarantee, and the children’s allowance created by the combination of a steeply graduated income tax with generous deductions for dependents. These programs transformed America from a working-class to a middle-class country, from a country of renters to a country of homeowners, from a country in which most people don’t graduate from high school to a country in which most do.

In contrast, the New Deal programs that redistributed income were unpopular or unsustainable. Labor unions, encouraged by New Deal laws to create higher wages, have always been controversial--never have most voters wanted to substantially increase unions’ powers. The graduated income tax, popular in theory, becomes unpopular as soon as higher rates cut at all deeply into the electorate’s paychecks, as they must if any substantial amount of revenue is to be raised. (The 1990 tax revolt against New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio is a recent example.) Americans have long supported mildly progressive taxes, but they’re inclined to believe that people are entitled to keep most of what they earn. Americans are optimistic enough to think that even if their incomes are low now, they may increase over time (and this is true in a great many cases).

Unfortunately, many Democratic leaders have forgotten which New Deal programs worked. Democrats tend to be transfixed on redistributing wealth. They denounce the widening gap between rich and poor that began around 1973 but fail to realize that it would take massive government redistributions to restore the more egalitarian pattern that prevailed immediately after World War II. When the Democrats try explicitly progressive programs such as catastrophic health care and the Florio tax plan, they are attacked by a middle class fearful of economic injury and get little support from those whom they intend to help.

The failure of the New Deal paradigm was apparent in 1976. Hubert Humphrey, at 65 the symbol of the New Deal impulse, considered running against Carter but decided not to--Carter and, for that matter, Brown had beaten candidates who were even more New Dealish than Humphrey. The big-city machines and unions that had produced the Democratic majorities during that era were no longer effective--the “working people” whom New Dealers liked to call on no longer considered themselves working class. The question for the Democrats in 1976 was not how to revive the New Deal but what to do next.

The Lessons of the Great Society. Today’s Democrats remember that Lyndon B. Johnson was elected in a landslide in 1964, but they forget that his chief domestic planks were a tax cut and a civil-rights bill, which banned racial quotas. And they forget that after passing his Great Society programs in 1965, the Democrats in congressional elections received the lowest percentage of votes of the quarter century between the Eisenhower and Reagan landslides.

President Carter didn’t entirely misread the lessons of the New Deal, though his Administration did reluctantly back losing legislative causes such as labor-law reform and progressive tax reform. But Carter drew the wrong lessons from the Great Society. His mistake was in large part a legacy of the civil-rights movement, expressed not by Martin Luther King Jr. but in the Kerner Commission report on riots published the month before King was assassinated. America was in danger of becoming two nations, the report said, one black and one white; blacks could not progress as the immigrants of 1840 to 1924 had because there were no longer enough entry-level jobs; a combination of racial preferences and massive government aid to blacks was needed.

Looking at the United States as a biracial society with great privilege on one side and a heritage of economic dependence on the other made sense to Jimmy Carter of Plains, Ga. And it made sense to many Democrats who, during the 1960s, had come to see America as a flawed, even malevolent society. They had little difficulty embracing policies of racial preference pioneered by the Nixon Administration.

But the Great Society paradigm, with its focus on the differences between blacks and whites, was never an accurate view of the kaleidoscopic variety of America. It became more inaccurate as the years went on; at the same time a large black middle class developed, pathological behavior among some blacks--violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock births--increased. These tragic changes could scarcely be explained by lack of jobs: In the 20 years after the Kerner Report, the number of jobs increased by 50%, the highest rate of job creation since the early 1900s. Not coincidentally, immigration to this country, mainly by Latinos and Asians, increased, and these immigrants did what the Kerner Report said was no longer possible: They took entry-level jobs, worked hard and moved up. Far from being a biracial society with a caste system, America is a multiethnic society with wide-ranging opportunity.

As with the New Deal programs, Democrats failed to look back to see which civil-rights programs had worked and which hadn’t. They would have found that administrative and legislative programs produced by the political process worked well: the desegregation of the armed services, the integration of public accommodations and workplaces mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the enfranchisement of Southern blacks by the Voting Rights Act of 1964. What worked less well, and often planted seeds of hostility, were desegregation of public school systems through busing, measures encouraging quotas in hiring and in admissions to colleges and universities--judicial decrees aimed at producing arithmetically symmetrical treatment of the races.

The Lessons of the Baby Boom. The classic players of baby boom politics, actually born several years before the first boomers, were both members of the class of 1964 at Yale Law School, enrolled as Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Gary Hartpence. The son of a governor of California and the son of a Kansas religious fanatic both rebelled against the generations before them, as so many baby boomers did. One became a very different kind of Democratic governor than his father, the other a secular debunker of traditional values and political methods. It is a little difficult to remember how plausible it was in the late 1970s to believe that theirs was the politics of the future. Both realized that the baby boom voters, who were quickly becoming a large segment of the electorate, were economically less interventionist and culturally more liberation-minded than their New Deal elders. Hart and Brown believed that a politics of economic suppleness--creating an economy responsive to markets--and cultural liberalism could produce large voter margins over New Deal Democrats and Republicans.

The political calculation was plausible. But in practice it did not work out so well. In California, Brown was phenomenally popular for four years. But his ties with most voters were broken in 1978 when he sided with public-employee unions and officialdom and opposed Proposition 13, seemingly abandoning his skepticism about big government. He was further damaged by the decisions of his Chief Justice, Rose Bird, who overturned every death-penalty case that came before her, and for his hesitation in spraying malathion on Medfly-infested areas. These were not incidental policies: Opposition to capital punishment was strong in the governor, who as a young seminarian had begged his father to commute the death sentence of rapist Caryl Chessman, and hesitancy about using a pesticide came naturally to one who saw his father’s freeway and water projects as depredations of the environment.

Gary Hart’s campaign for the 1988 presidential election ended in scandal, but the verdict of events on Hart’s favorite policies suggests that they probably wouldn’t have been any more successful than Carter’s. Hart is a well-informed student of the Soviet Union, but his conviction that Mikhail S. Gorbachev is a dependable reformer with firmly rooted power seems dubious today. Hart was a leader in the military-reform movement, and while his advocacy of maneuver warfare was vindicated in the Gulf War, his skepticism about the worth of sophisticated weapons systems was not. Even more important, Hart’s strong opposition to the use of U.S. military force in the Gulf (Brown’s opposition was even stronger and more vitriolic) seems to have been a colossal misjudgment, since the United States was able, with minimal casualties, to destroy Saddam Hussein’s military capability to threaten the Gulf oil supplies, his Arab neighbors and Israel. For all his thoughtfulness about military policy, Hart seems to have an almost pacifist foreign policy, an attempt to avoid the mistakes made by John F. Kennedy.

The politicians of the baby boom paradigm, in short, seemed unable to move from a politics of adolescent rebellion to a politics based on adult responsibility.

The Lessons of the Walter Polovchak Generation. Back in 1980, Walter Polovchak, then 12, refused to leave a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Chicago and return to the Ukraine with his parents; he had decided that America was a whole lot better than the Soviet Union. (The ACLU tried to send him back, but his lawyer delayed the case until Polovchak turned 18 and could be sworn in as a U.S. citizen.) The generation of Americans born after 1961, a group called the “Thirteenth Generation” by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book “Generations,” are very much like Polovchak: They came of age in an America that their elders were complaining about and decided that, on the whole, it was a pretty nice place. The apocalyptic political rhetoric of the 1970s and early ‘80s struck them as dissonant from the generally peaceful, prosperous nation they saw around them.

Despite the fact that this 13th generation is arguably worse off than its baby-boom counterparts, it does not seem to want economic redistribution or cultural liberation. These are the latchkey children, left home alone by their liberated parents; left by permissive educators to learn for themselves, and left without the allowances many baby boomers got. They learned that one’s economic status depends on personal effort and decision. These young Americans are looking simply for a predictable, rational order in which they can work to achieve their private goals.

Such a framework can be found in the military, and, as Strauss and Howe point out, enlistment rates shot up in 1980 when “13ers” began to turn 19. Politically, they have thus far found the order they are seeking from Republicans. Voters under 30 today are the most Republican age group in history. A Times-Mirror survey conducted in March found that those under 30 identify with Republicans over Democrats by a 41% to 21% margin and would favor Republicans over Democrats for Congress by 62% to 34%; voters over 30 favor them by only 48% to 44%.

As far as many of these young voters are concerned, Carter created an economy verging on runaway inflation. Reagan and President Bush, on the other hand, have given them almost 10 years of low-inflation economic growth and a new, pro-American order. The national standards of the new Bush education program, for example, provide the structure young Americans want, and its reliance on local initiative is reminiscent of the flexibility and initiative required of small military units. In contrast, the institutions of which liberals have custody--the public schools, big-city governments, the federal civilian bureaucracy--have performed poorly over the last generation.

The Democrats’ failure to understand this new generation was shown by their treatment of the Operation Desert Storm troops. The response of the Democratic National Committee to their achievement was to pass a resolution introduced by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) that scarcely mentions that the Americans had won, singles out black and Latino troops for special praise and treats the troops as victims--in need of special government programs--rather than heroes. In a few words, it sums up everything wrong with today’s Democratic Party.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY is out of joint with the times. Its New Deal paradigm is dead; its Great Society paradigm is twitching in its death throes; its baby boomer paradigm never came entirely to life. The Democrats’ 1988 nomination fight, in retrospect, was a sort of culture war in which the Farm Belt candidate won the Farm Belt, the black won the blacks, the white Southerner won a plurality of white Southerners, and the ethnic son of immigrants carried the voters descended from at least one immigrant. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Michael Dukakis ended up personifying disorder at home and pacifism abroad. Jesse Jackson, the dominant TV figure at the 1988 Democratic Convention, symbolized to many racial separatism and quotas. Since then, most of the Democrats’ responsible nationalists--Sens. Lloyd Bentsen, Sam Nunn and Pat Moynihan and Rep. Dick Gephardt--found themselves backing something like a pacifist position and opposing American action in the Gulf.

The Democrats currently thinking about running for president are aware of at least some of their party’s problems and are making some attempts to address them, often adopting more conservative attitudes. Paul Tsongas, a former senator from Massachusetts and the only declared candidate, says that government must not overtax business lest it kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Gov. Douglas Wilder stresses his work in balancing Virginia’s budget. West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, clearly contemplating a run, backed the Constitutional amendment that bans flag-burning. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo can argue that he cut top-bracket tax rates and trimmed $1 billion from his most recent state budget. Sen. Albert Gore (Tennessee) and Gov. Bill Clinton (Arkansas), potential candidates, supported the Gulf War resolution last January. The Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton heads, has proved an advocate of a more active government that respects traditional values and economic markets.

Yet when the candidates go out on the hustings, these stands are not what elicit the cheers from the Democratic activists. They cheer Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin when he calls for the kind of redistributive populist economic principles that have been so soundly rejected by the electorate. They cheer any echo of George McGovern’s “Come home, America” and hiss at any Democrat who hails the leadership of Bush in the Gulf War. They save their loudest cheers for opponents of abortion restrictions, including those with popular support.

The Democrats have gotten into the bad habit of not just seeking tolerance of diversity, such as gay rights, but of insisting on endorsement of practices once widely frowned upon and suppression of what used to be, and often still are, majority impulses. It is hardly surprising that almost no one thinks the Democrats can beat Bush next year.

The melancholy prospect for the Democrats is that the workings of the political market, which give the party a leftward tilt, will move their party away from the direction it needs to go. Given its history and the variety of its constituencies, the Democratic Party should portray itself as the embodiment of America, but too often, thanks to the baby boom-Vietnam-Watergate mind-set of so many of its activists, it seems to regard America as its adversary.

Still largely missing from the national Democratic agenda--though it is there in the successful political records of some Democrats in the states--is a recognition of the need for order, for encouraging upwardly mobile behavior, for celebrating ethnic diversity while affirming the overall culture, for returning to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy of extending American military power around the globe in the confidence that it will promote freedom and democracy.

But the existing body of Democratic officeholders, for all their genuine idealism and dedication, still seem stuck drawing on the wrong lessons of the past, sentimentalizing the baby boom and remaining ignorant of the Walter Polovchak generation.

As one who started identifying with the Democrats 32 years ago and continues to admire dozens of Democratic politicians, who stood at the San Francisco airport 15 years ago and contemplated with satisfaction the politicians who seemed about to govern the country for the foreseeable future, I begin to wonder if today’s Democrats can ever get it right. The party might do better in the long run if its majorities in Congress and the legislatures were swept out, as there is some chance they will be in 1992, and replaced with a new generation willing to create policies that will work as well as the best of the New Deal, Great Society and baby boomer policies did in the past.