A New Politics of Race Could Move Nation Left : Riots: It looks like the ‘60s, but racial disorder then was a revolution of rising expectations. Today, it’s about diminishing expectations.

The Texan in the White House is unhappy, watching America’s cities in flames, seeing his formerly sky-high job approval down in the 40s, hearing voters demand an end to overseas adventurism and greater focus on domestic priorities, wincing at his stunning embarrassment by a little-known rival in the New Hampshire primary, listening to citizens grumble about the bankruptcy of the political Establishment and facing what could be the strongest third-party presidential challenge since 1912.

George Bush? No, Lyndon B. Johnson in March, 1968, the last President to watch columns of smoke over America’s cities just before he decided to retire.

The parallel is intriguing--not just because another palsied governing ideology may be coming undone, but because the politics of race, rooted in the ‘60s, may also be outdated. It may, in fact, be heading for another watershed.

After 1968, the upheaval in racial politics catalyzed the formation of a conservative national majority that restored law and order in the cities and turned America away from permissive jurisprudence and unpopular programs like school busing. As a strategist for Richard M. Nixon, I supported that transition. Now, a generation later, the hour may have come for a new politics of race--this time launching a more progressive agenda.

For the assumption that riot-generated racial tensions automatically help the GOP also needs an update. True, that was the electorate’s reaction to the riots of the ‘60s, when an exhausted liberalism was mismanaging the White House. But it’s less logical now, after 12 years of GOP rule. Moreover, the Republican President in office is regarded by many Americans as uninterested in developing serious domestic policy--even some fellow conservatives criticize him as opportunistic and provocative on racial matters.

We seem to be moving into a new era. Dozens of surveys show Americans lopsidedly critical of Bush’s minimal attention to domestic policy; and a new poll by the Times-Mirror Corp. suggests the nation’s response to the Rodney G. King verdict and ensuing riots may favor Democratic candidate Bill Clinton, because Americans see him as the candidate better able to build a bridge between the races. According to the poll, Clinton leads Bush by 7 points as the best candidate to deal with the racial situation. In addition, besides overwhelming Bush as the better choice to improve conditions for the poor, he leads the incumbent as the better bet to improve conditions for the middle class.

The L.A. riots have taken America’s attention off less important matters--where Clinton’s probity is in doubt--and shifted the focus to a wider arena in which Clinton’s morality appears to outshine a President whose 1988 Willy Horton ad has come to symbolize racial politicking and whose flip-flops on 1991 civil-rights legislation offended many. Bush has little moral stature on racial issues, but who could have imagined this extraordinary turnabout. Only a week ago, “conventional wisdom” assumed the riots would benefit Bush by stirring white suburban fears.

Obviously, fears have been stirred--not without cause. However, a majority of Americans worry more about racial and economic tensions, for they want a White House committed to serious, affirmative domestic policy-making--something the Administration has neglected.

Confronting declining real incomes for middle-class families, vanishing jobs, 25% of U.S. children growing up in poverty and one major U.S. city after another setting gruesome records for murders, car thefts or drive-by shootings, the President has shown fervor and conviction for one domestic-policy proposal: reducing the capital-gains tax rate.

To blame the Bush Administration’s priorities for the outbreak of violence in Los Angeles is unfair. Democrats who do so, go too far. But to call the policies of the last 12 years--from White House tolerance (perhaps even promotion) of economic polarization to conspicuous unconcern for cities and the poor--part of the reason for what happened seems beyond dispute. Moreover, it’s relevant that outbreaks of social unrest and rioting have a close historical association with defeat of incumbent administrations and even party watersheds in U.S. political history.

The most recent example came with the downfall of the Johnson Administration. However, social unrest and violence were also growing in the early Depression years. Before Herbert Hoover was voted out of office, in 1932, he used the U.S. Army to disperse “bonus marchers”--after four people had been killed. Following the riots and social disturbances of 1919-20, the incumbent Democrats lost the White House in 1920; and the White House also changed hands in 1896, following the traumas of 1893-94, when scattered groups of jobless men formed into “armies” and converged on Washington. Control of the White House also shifted in each election during the tense years from 1886 to 1892, the time of the Haymarket and Homestead massacres.

Because of this record, historian Allan J. Lichtman, who has developed “13 keys” to predict a change in the White House, includes social unrest and disorder as a signal that the party in power may lose. This is not a question of “law and order” but of effective leadership, successful economics and wise policy-making. Social unrest and violence usually develop because these hallmarks of a successful presidency are not present. Just as they were lacking 25 years ago, when liberalism and an exhausted three-decade-old Democratic coalition failed under Johnson, they appear lacking today under Bush and a GOP that has been in power for 20 of the last 24 years.

The actual dynamics of failure are different, however. The Democrats of the mid-1960s tried to make government and liberal public policy reach too far. The result was inflationary economics, a bungled war and, most of all, a permissive mix of criminology and social engineering that let the civil-rights revolution evolve into race riots and high crime rates. The racial disorder of the ‘60s was a revolution of rising expectations; blacks were in a hurry to get their share of a prosperous America with an expanding economy.

Today, after 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, with the rich getting richer and the middle class and poor stagnating, with jobs fleeing to Taiwan and Mexico and with the 3-year economic growth rate lower than that of any Administration since Hoover, these riots are different. They are a revolution of diminishing expectations, painful and frustrating for a squeezed middle class that sees the American Dream shrinking, but incendiary for blacks who have gotten an even shorter end of the stick.

This, obviously, is the potentially larger indictment of the Bush Administration that rises out of the violence in Los Angeles. Middle-class voters apparently understand that it dwarfs any one-dimensional interpretation that rests on racial fear. If history prevails, this larger disenchantment and indictment will dominate, and the conservative politics that began in the 1960s, and atrophied in the 1990s, will give way to a new agenda.

True, Democrats can destroy themselves if they forget the foolishness of defending racial violence. But the most intriguing sign is that the aging GOP coalition is coming unglued--just as the aging New Deal Democratic coalition came undone in the ‘60s. Like Johnson in 1968, Bush has been humiliated in New Hampshire and faces the prospect of a massive third-party challenge and an election where as many as 30%-40% of Republican voters decline to support the GOP presidential nominee. For those of us who thought the big change in U.S. politics wouldn’t come until the 1996 elections, the aftermath of the L.A. riots has an unexpected message: Maybe not.