The Message From the Mean Streets

For Democrats eager to produce a smooth show at their convention in Los Angeles, demonstrators on the streets pose something between a nuisance and a menace. Those gathered at the Shadow Convention are, at best, an unwelcome distraction. But Democratic leaders and activists would do well to listen to what the protesters are saying. They are raising issues central to this nation’s future. The Democratic Party will either champion their central cause or find itself shorn of the energy and the purpose it needs to win.

Demonstrators gathered for what they call D2K represent a dizzying array of causes: greens, feminists, anti-death penalty, homeless, anti-School of the Americas, libertarians, Students against Sweatshops. But at the center of the cacophony is a growing chorus of discontent about the corporate-dominated global economy. This movement showed its force last fall in the “Battle in Seattle,” when it shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization, protesting a trading system that appears to protect property but not the environment, copyrights but not worker rights.

Globalization bears some of the onus for a central theme of the demonstrators and the Shadow Convention: the yawning divide between rich and poor, CEO and worker. After the longest period of growth in U.S. history, with employment high and wages finally rising, working people still find this economy doesn’t work well for them. Wages have only begun to make up ground lost over the last 25 years. Parents are working harder and longer just to stay even. The new economy brings greater opportunity but also jobs with greater insecurity, fewer benefits and greater pressure. Welfare rolls are down; but working poor mothers cannot lift their children up from poverty. Los Angeles exhibits perhaps the greatest disparity between wealthy and impoverished workers of any city in the country.

Why does this rising tide, as one wit put it, lift only all yachts? Part of the answer is the government’s failure to invest in children, empower workers and hold corporations accountable. That failure leads directly to another central theme of the protesters: the inordinate influence of big money in politics. The party conventions seem almost a caricature of their suspicions--lavishly underwritten by corporate donations, running one show on stage for delegates and the television audience and another in the sky boxes where big money parties with a purpose. It isn’t that government is weak; it is that it is too often working for management rather than citizens.

These issues--challenging corporate globalization, curbing the influence of money in politics, redressing the divide between rich and poor--pose questions the next administration cannot duck and that the Democratic Party must address.

They are explosive because they reveal the gulf between big donors and voters in both parties, but particularly the Democratic Party. A recent survey for the Nation magazine and the Institute for America’s Future by the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake contrasted the views of large donors with those of voters in both parties. Majorities of donors and voters were equally cynical about politics. Both agreed that lobbyists and special interests had the most influence in Washington, and that politicians tended to vote as donors told them to. (The donors clearly thought they were getting their money’s worth.)

But on core economic interests, they are starkly divided. A majority of voters in both parties don’t think prosperity has reached people like them. Republicans, Democrats and independents alike are suspicious of free trade, believing it costs more jobs than it creates. Majorities in both parties opposed granting China permanent normal trading relations. Overwhelming numbers want labor rights and environmental protections built into trade accords. But, of course, large donors in both parties trumpet the benefits of free trade and favor the China deal. This divide between voter and donor is most stark in the Democratic Party.

Similarly, when asked what should be done with the blessings of prosperity, voters in both parties preferred investing in education and health care over cutting taxes, eliminating the debt or raising the defense budget. Not surprisingly, donors in both parties lean far more toward tax cuts and debt elimination. Both Texas Gov. George W. Bush, with his commitment to deep tax cuts, and Vice President Al Gore, with his commitment to debt elimination, are appealing more to their contributors than their voters.

These issues pose a particular threat to the Democratic Party. Republicans are inevitably the party of big business. They win votes across town on conservative social issues: anti-choice, anti-affirmative action, pro-gun, prayer in school. Democrats are supposed to be the party of middle-income working and poor people. They win votes in upscale suburbs on liberal social issues: choice, gun control, environment. So these questions speak directly to the Democratic Party’s purpose. They already engage the passions of many of its activists: union and community organizers, clean-government reformers, environmentalists, students.

Moreover, these concerns will only grow more compelling. Eventually, there will be new rules around the global economy to hold corporations accountable to standards other than simply the bottom line. The new prosperity provides both the opportunity and the moral imperative to tend to the fifth child, the one in five who is raised in poverty. Workers are becoming more assertive in demanding a fairer share of the profits they are creating. Money in politics is already roiling the waters in both parties. Democrats can ill afford to allow GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona be the tribune of reform.

If the party fails to respond, if the issues are treated like the demonstrators and kept out of sight, Democrats will surely pay the price at the ballot box. The best and brightest of the young will see Democrats as an obstacle rather than a vehicle. The most active workers will question whether the party can respond to their needs. Voter participation will continue to drop, and distractions, like that posed by Ralph Nader’s campaign this year, will grow more seductive.

At the party-platform hearings this summer, an anonymous Gore advisor was reported as saying that the party has “worked through all the biggies. It worked through trade; we are a free-trade party. We worked through welfare reform; we are the party that reformed welfare. We worked through fiscal discipline, because we are the party that got rid of this deficit. So a bunch of the cleavages . . . actually have been settled by the process of governing.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.

What the demonstrators and the Shadow conventioneers are saying is that these are central issues of our time and the debate has only begun. If Democrats are to retain the mantle as the party of reform, they would to well to get the message. *