‘The Test of Our Progress’: The Great Equality Debate Returns

With just over a week to go before the presidential debates begin, the unexpected has happened. The differences between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush haven’t narrowed, they’ve grown wider. At issue is the future of egalitarianism in America.

Can Gore convince voters that his defense of “working families”--or, as he now prefers to call them, “hard-working, middle-class families”--constitutes a new egalitarianism? Or will Bush, who last week in stump speeches in the South and on “Oprah” seemed to borrow Gore’s language in talking about his concern for the middle class, successfully make the case that Gore’s attempts at 21st-century populism are really “class warfare” designed to pit one group against another?

With an estimated $4.6-trillion budget surplus up for grabs over the next decade, the differences between the two campaigns are the most dramatic since 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry M. Goldwater fought over the Great Society and the civil-rights movement. At stake is whether America will be genuinely changed by the unprecedented wealth at its disposal.

Mainstream egalitarianism in a country like America, which has never had a labor party or a socialist party in power, has always been a delicate balance. It has required an assault on inequality that leaves unchallenged the nation’s basic faith in class mobility.

The classic modern advocate of mainstream egalitarianism was Franklin D. Roosevelt. After a successful first term, which saw such New Deal measures as the National Recovery Act of 1933 and the Social Security Act of 1935 become law, Roosevelt went out of his way in 1936 to make sure the country understood the political values he had been fighting for in the name of the “average man.” Roosevelt began his much-quoted Second Inaugural by lamenting the fact that one-third of the nation remained “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” It was the needs of these people, Roosevelt argued, that the government had to fix first in order to make sure America’s wealth reached its potential. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little,” Roosevelt concluded.

Roosevelt’s commitment to mainstream egalitarianism did not, as he knew, arise out of the blue. It had its roots in the 18th-century ideas of Thomas Jefferson, whom FDR made a point of quoting during his 1936 campaign. An agrarian who worried about the moneyed interests defended by Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson was outspoken in his belief that “the earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and live on.” On the basis of this belief, Jefferson insisted, “Small landholders are the most precious part of the state,” and in a 1785 letter to his friend and fellow Virginian James Madison, he took this idea to its next stage by arguing for a concept of justice that held, “Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.”

A half-century later in his Bank Veto Message of 1832, Andrew Jackson adopted a similarly egalitarian stance in defending those he called “the humble members of society: the farmers, mechanics and laborers.” While conceding that “distinctions in society will always exist,” Jackson went on to oppose the Second Bank of the United States because it promised, in his words, “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful” while harming those who had neither the time nor the means of securing favors from the government.

In the years before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, too, found the language of mainstream egalitarianism essential to his political purposes. In defending the idea of a protective tariff, Lincoln argued for protectionism not on the basis of what it would do for America’s young industries but of what it would do for the typical worker. It is wrong, Lincoln observed, that, throughout history, “Some have labored and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.” The object of “any good government” was to challenge that practice, “to secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible.”

Whether Gore’s defense of working families, a term he used seven times in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, will win the same approval from voters that Jefferson’s defense of small landholders and Roosevelt’s defense of the average man did is unclear. Bush has good reason to believe Gore is vulnerable as a result of the egalitarian stance he has taken. The country’s prosperity is helping Bush defuse the sympathy Gore is trying to arouse for families that have lost ground in the ‘90s. Bush also has his father’s model: the Republicans’ successful 1988 election strategy.

There, then-Vice President George Bush went after Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis for declaring that the election was about competence rather than ideology. Insisting that Dukakis was really a liberal who was afraid to defend his true beliefs for fear of alienating mainstream voters, Bush forced Dukakis to defend his liberalism, then criticized him for being out of touch with America.

Gore has not made Dukakis’ mistake of running away from the positions he staked out, but he has been cautious in counterattacking Bush’s class-warfare argument. The contrast between Roosevelt and Gore is instructive in this regard. When challenged for inciting class warfare, Roosevelt, like Gore, a Harvard graduate from a distinguished family, did not hesitate to turn the tables on his accusers. He insisted they were “economic royalists” and “privileged princes” who, in wanting more while others struggled for a basic living, were really the ones promoting class warfare. “Here is an amazing paradox,” Roosevelt sardonically observed in a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden. “The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system.”

Sixty-four years later, Gore is in a position to make a similar counterattack. He can point out that Bush inherited enormous family wealth and that his running mate, Dick Cheney, will receive an estimated $20-million severance package from the Halliburton Company, yet both head a party that, recent concessions by Republican House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert notwithstanding, opposes raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 an hour over the next two years. Gore has not, however, felt comfortable with such a direct attack on his wealthy opponents.

But what Gore has working for him is a vision of mainstream egalitarianism that is surprisingly in tune with the mood of a country that, more than a decade after Ronald Reagan’s presidency, remains suspicious of activist government. Gore’s egalitarianism is, in essence, a cautious populism that depends not on a dramatic expansion of government so much as a targeted use of the budget surplus accumulated during the Clinton years. The most innovative Gore proposals keep day-to-day spending choices in the hands of individuals rather than government officials and avoid creating new federal bureaucracies. Gore would use the surplus to pay down the federal debt, put Social Security and Medicare on surer footing and provide tax credits that would, among other benefits, help parents pay for their children’s college education and give the elderly access to cheaper prescription drugs.

In the past, egalitarians have run into trouble for advocating populism tailored for a narrow segment of the population. In 1896, William Jennings Bryan made that mistake with his currency-reform proposals and a famous speech designed to appeal to embattled Western farmers, and it allowed William McKinley, a figure much admired today by chief Bush strategist Karl Rove, to sweep to a victory in which he carried every Northern industrial state. In 1972, Sen. George S. McGovern made a similar populist error with a quickly discredited guaranteed-minimum-income proposal, and it helped Richard M. Nixon to a second-term landslide win in every state in the country except Massachusetts.

The problem for Gore--and the potential plus for Bush--is that the line between a winning and losing populist campaign is a fine one, and, in good times, voters may resent any candidate who even comes close to that line. On the eve of the presidential debates, it is no accident that Bush insisted, “I’m going to make this a contest on policy.”