The L-Word Rides Again? Probably Not

Is America poised for a liberal revival? Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bradley compete to offer plans for universal health care and uplifting the poor. After hard-fought campaigns, labor unions have won elections to represent textile workers in North Carolina, shipyard workers in New Orleans and home-care workers in Los Angeles County. Opinion polls suggest that voters care more about reining in HMOs and protecting Social Security than beefing up the military or cutting taxes. The Republican leaders of Congress are hardly more popular than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, while George W. Bush, front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, talks about his compassion for the unfortunate and must fend off an attractive challenger who would keep corporate money out of politics. Can a new Great Society be far behind?

The answer is probably no, though liberalism is no longer the ideology that dare not speak its name. It will take more than such straws in the wind to bring back the kind of mass zeal for reform last seen during the 1960s. Only five years ago, conservatives were just as convinced that they had finally achieved electoral dominance. The media was hailing Gingrich as the leader of an insurgency that would shrink the size of government, slash income taxes and make Democrats the minority party for decades to come. Today’s liberal optimists have one thing in common with the unlamented former speaker of the House: They forget that, at least in the United States, it takes zealous social movements to provoke a political sea change.

That’s the key to the reforms achieved when Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were in the White House. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the civil-rights movement grew in strength and numbers, challenging authorities both north and south to live up to the nation’s egalitarian creed. Thousands of organizers went to jail and hundreds were killed before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later.

The black freedom movement was, in the phrase of historian and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, a “borning struggle.” It inspired and became the model for other “liberation” movements that mushroomed through the decade: of women, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, gay men and lesbians, and the disabled. Even foreigners benefited from the boom in group rights. In 1965, Congress finally scrapped the old quota law that had discriminated against immigrants who lived anywhere but Northern or Western Europe.

With social justice high on the political agenda in the 1960s, it was easier to pass wealth-sharing legislation that liberals had been advocating since the end of the New Deal. A limited “war” on poverty, billions in aid to education and the Medicare program all benefited from an alliance between civil-rights organizations and the then-powerful AFL-CIO. In the mid-60s, with liberal Democrats at the helm of Congress and the White House, it seemed the U.S. was on the verge of instituting a welfare state to rival those of its prosperous allies across the Atlantic and in Japan.

Why didn’t it happen? The growing war in Vietnam sapped billions from the federal Treasury and embroiled liberal and left activists in divisive quarrels over the morality of military intervention in the Southeast Asian country. But a surging conservative movement also raised the political costs of liberal reform. Foot soldiers from Barry M. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign turned the GOP sharply to the right, while opponents of busing and affirmative action, abortion and secular education undertook a long march through the states. By the late ‘70s, their efforts had helped make conservatism the conventional wisdom and lifted Ronald Reagan to the presidency.

But the right was no better at sustaining its grass-roots momentum than the left had been. The Reagan and Bush administrations did little to satisfy Pat Robertson and his ilk, and the end of the Cold War left many conservatives without a clear enemy to fight. The triumph of 1994, spurred more by disgust with President Bill Clinton than anything else, quickly proved a false dawn.

You can still glimpse traces of the galvanic movements spawned in the 1960s when Jesse Jackson leads a march in Illinois, or right-to-lifers blockade an office of Planned Parenthood. However, the passions of both left and right got channeled into organizations that are skillful at raising funds and lobbying legislators but motivate few members to do more than write a check or forward an occasional e-mail to members of Congress.

Ironically, it is only in some corners of the labor movement, whose insurgent heyday came and went decades before the ‘60s, that young organizers still burn with the old desire to make the world over. Men and women in their 20s who, if born earlier, would have been marching against war and for civil rights, now preach a living wage and the need for a collective voice on the job. Yet, despite some notable victories, union activists, in general, are just treading water and hoping Democrats will somehow protect their organizations from the hostile winds of international commerce.

The shrinking of mass movements helps preserve a political universe that is, by turns, content and deeply troubled. In Washington, officials talk endlessly about solving social problems but dare not unbalance the budget or raise taxes. According to a recent Los Angeles Times poll, most citizens think the nation is “seriously off on the wrong track” (except, of course, for the economy) but don’t expect government to do much to improve the situation. Given their assumption, is it any wonder that most Americans decline to follow the moves and countermoves of the men who would be president?

No matter who wins in 2000, the current climate of anxious centrism will probably last for a while. Liberal writers will continue to point to festering problems--the wealth gap, racial division, global warming and the like--but most lawmakers, responding to the loudest and best-financed voices, will nod sympathetically and go about their business. As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass made clear over a century ago, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” *