American Experiment (398 page)

“But that’s not God-ordained,” Clark said. “I’m convinced that social engineering is no more difficult than space engineering. If a program to get us to the moon didn’t work, the engineers would try another program.” Why not with social engineering as well? He was bewildered, Clark said despondently, that so many liberals—old friends and students—had given up trying and had even deserted the liberal cause.

To staunch socialists further left on the spectrum, liberal weakness was no surprise. Liberal failure of commitment was one reason they were socialists. On the eve of the Reagan presidency, however, few leftists were optimistic about the future of socialism. Its leaders still showed little interest in shaking off the failed intellectual and political habits of the past. The leadership had usually had a Marxist as well as a religious orientation—a source of disunity in itself. Historically, the larger the appeal of the socialist movement, the more variegated its membership had been—militant Wobblies from the old Industrial Workers of the World, prairie populists, Wisconsin progressives, Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, western copper miners, urban intellectuals. The socialists of the 1980s could no longer claim leaders of the quality of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, who had managed to transcend major divisions.

Politically socialism had long been notorious for its electoral purism and ideological sectarianism. Socialist leaders had stood aside from the New Deal, even though it brought “the greatest wave of social reform that this country had seen for many decades,” in Irving Howe’s view. A half century later many socialist leaders and intellectuals were still standing aside from
even the most liberal of liberal initiatives and programs. Typically socialist and other left-wing movements were composed of hundreds, even thousands of local organizations focused on specific goals of their own as they responded to local needs and interests.

When the defeat in 1980 set socialists, liberals, and Democratic party strategists to considering new possibilities of a Democratic, left-wing coalition, the most perplexing problem for socialists was still the old one— whether to vote for the lesser evil between the two major parties, and thus run the risk of throwing away their vote, or to seek to build a strong third party, and thus run the risk of doing the same thing.

If a measure of rethinking about coalition strategies was taking place, the left was ignoring almost completely the question of governmental strategy when and if a liberal-labor-left party coalition took office. It had long been obvious that the fragmentation of power resulting from federalism and the checks and balances would gravely hobble a left-wing government. It was remarkable that in 1987, when politicians and professors devoted much attention to analyzing the Constitution during its bicentennial, liberal and left-wing thinkers gave so little attention to a constitutional system filled with veto traps and devices for delaying and devitalizing progressive measures and programs. How much could the left expect from a radical or socialist leadership in Washington, considering how Wilson with his Treaty of Versailles, Roosevelt in his second term, and Kennedy in his one and only term had been thwarted by political forces acting through the marvelous contrivances devised by the Framers and elaborated by their successors to balk comprehensive and forthright government action? At least, as the Reagan era dawned, leftist thinkers could settle back and plan to enjoy the spectacle of a conservative Administration being divided and frustrated by conservative constitutional arrangements largely of conservative origin.

F
OR
A
MERICANS 1987 WAS
to be a special year of remembrance and perhaps of renewal. In a winter of deep cold and heavy snows New Englanders commemorated the guerrilla struggles of the Shays rebels during the same kind of harsh weather two hundred years earlier. Late in May 1987 scholarly conferences in Philadelphia marked the bicentennial of the arrival of delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the leadership of James Madison and his fellow Virginians in offering a bold new plan for a stronger national government. In September, on the bicentenary anniversary of the convention’s close, Philadelphia burst into pomp and pageantry as hundreds of thousands celebrated with floats and balloons and fireworks.

The festivities barely concealed an undercurrent of concern and disillusion. The bicentennial year began amid revelations of gross failures in the Reagan White House, of an Administration out of control as a few men conducted their own “rogue” foreign policy with the government of Iran and with the Contra opposition to Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. Reagan’s erratic leadership, both foreign and domestic, compared poorly with that of his fellow conservative Margaret Thatcher, who won her third general election, and that of the worldly Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had launched a bold effort to modernize the Soviet economy and democratize the political system.

At home Congress and the President gave a classic demonstration of the workings of the checks and balances by failing to agree on or enforce measures sharply to reduce the annual deficit and eventually tackle a national debt nearing $3 trillion. The nation continued to struggle with economic ills whose solution appeared beyond human wit—regional decline, inner-city blight, lack of affordable housing, large sectors of entrenched poverty. Abroad Americans faced brutal competition from Japan and other exporting nations. The United States had now become a dependent nation. Financially, wrote Felix Rohatyn, “we are being colonized.”

The floundering leadership of 1987 stood in stark contrast to the bold,
purposeful work of the Framers of the Constitution two centuries earlier. Even those who wondered whether the Constitution was good for another two centuries—or even two decades—freely granted that the Founding Fathers had displayed a collective intellectual leadership without peer in the Western world. Above all they had displayed during their four months in Philadelphia the capacity to stand back from the existing national government—the Articles of Confederation—and summon the institutional imagination and political audacity to fashion a whole new structure of government. Two hundred years later proposals to make even small structural changes in the constitutional system evoked emotional opposition from some members of the public and the academy—and almost complete indifference from officeholders who were struggling unsuccessfully to make the present system work.

The Framers had shown remarkable flexibility and responsiveness to the public as well, especially when it became clear that delegates to the state ratifying conventions in 1787 and 1788 would approve the new charter only if the Constitution makers guaranteed that consideration of a Bill of Rights would be one of the first duties of the new Congress. That Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in the summer of 1789, endorsed by Congress that fall, and ratified by the states between 1789 and 1791, became the crownpiece of the Constitution. Its enactment also meant that celebration-weary Americans would have to gird themselves for another series of bicentennial commemorations from 1989 through 1991.

New Yorkers who liked celebrations were in luck. Manhattan was where Madison had drafted the noble statement and where Congress had been sitting when it passed the proposed amendments. Indeed, New Yorkers had already held their celebration of the Bill of Rights in 1986, when they had seized on the centennial of the erection of the Statue of Liberty to stage a great weekend festivity, amid a swarm of old sailing ships in New York Harbor and a spectacular display of fireworks in the evening.

The celebration revealed a deep hunger on the part of people to return to the past, to touch and savor it. Liberty Weekend, designed to stress the great statue’s welcome to immigrants, turned into a preview also of the Bill of Rights commemoration, as orators, pundits, and plain people explored the deeper meanings of freedom as the central value in American life and history. The celebrations took on a poignant aspect as speakers conjured up memories of the illustrious leaders of the past such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, devotees of liberty like Tom Paine and Patrick Henry. Two hundred years later, was there a single leader who could be compared with these men? What had happened to that fierce devotion to liberty?
Could Congress formulate, would the states ratify, would the people approve a
1989
Bill of Rights as bold and sweeping as that drawn up two centuries earlier?

That weekend, while President Reagan and other dignitaries paid homage to the restored and relighted Miss Liberty, a score of panelists— women’s leaders, trade unionists, educators, the mayor of the city—met in a hotel on Broadway to debate the next hundred years of freedom. The future of individual liberty seemed safe in the hands of panelists who had passed in front of garish, X-rated movie houses to enter the hotel but rejected censorship of pornography, who were concerned that their children could buy rock records with sexually explicit lyrics but favored identifying the contents rather than banning them. After New York’s Mayor Edward Koch complained that women had complained when his minions had placed signs in bars warning pregnant women against drinking, NOW president Eleanor Smeal asked not that the signs be taken down but rather that other signs be posted warning men against drinking and thus endangering babies while driving home.

When the question shifted from the protection of individual liberty against government to that of the advancement of freedom through government—that is, from “freedom of speech and religion” to “freedom from fear and want”—the conferees became far more divided. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sharply posed the issue of social and collective freedom when he called on America to open its doors to anyone who wanted to enter, for economic as well as political reasons. We are all free only to the extent others are free, he said. The discussion turned to equality as inseparably linked with liberty. Could the American constitutional system not only protect liberty but broaden social freedom and deal with the nation’s enduring inequalities?

Some of the conferees answered that the system worked, or at least could be made to work. However fragmented and stalemated, it could at least fend off arbitrary governmental intervention, and at the same time could be used as a positive means for expanding economic and social freedoms. Other conferees were doubtful. The system was too slow, too ponderous, too exposed to control by economic and social elites. Still others believed, though, that great leadership of the quality of Jefferson and Lincoln and EDR might make the system work. If anyone at the conference thought morosely about the state of the current leadership in both parties, no one wanted to mention the matter on a pleasant Fourth of July weekend of happy celebration.

Few at the Liberty Weekend conference would have offered as a model leader the man who a few miles away was hailing the renovated Miss Liberty in a speech filled with his usual pieties and banalities. Even though Ronald Reagan had twice won both the governorship of California and the presidency of the United States, many in the press and academia still viewed him as merely a rigid ideologue whose hard-core conservatism was cushioned by a relaxed, easygoing manner and prettified by disarming, even self-deprecating, jokes and anecdotes. It was easy to compare his mind, as Harding’s had been compared, to stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. Or to picture, as Garry Trudeau had in his comic strip, an intrepid explorer pushing through the tangled filaments of the President’s brain in an effort to discover how—or whether—it worked.

Even after his six years in the White House spotlight, many President watchers were still misjudging Ronald Reagan. They did not see the committed political activist and strategist behind the façade. They saw the Reagan who appeared on the screen, an “aw shucks” old boy, with bobbing head, face turning and smiling, shoulders rising and falling—a showcase of ingratiating body language. They heard that long-honed voice over the radio every Saturday, easily rising and receding, alternating between mellowness and intensity, hovering at times “barely above a whisper,” Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “so as to win you over by intimacy, if not by substance.” They chuckled at the perfectly timed joke or anecdote or observation. Many of his stories turned out to be untrue even during his presidential years, when at least his speech writers should have been more careful, and his misstatements and tall tales were numerous enough to be collected and published in book form.

But few appeared to care when Reagan was found out, contradicted, refuted. “There he goes again,” the public seemed to smile indulgently. It took a long time for President watchers to understand that Reagan was not a man of details, specifics, particulars. Theodore White had called him a man more of ideas than of intellect, but he proved to be a man less of ideas than of stances, shibboleths, stereotypes. He was a strategist rather than a tactician, a hedgehog who knew one big thing, in Herodotus’ famous phrase, rather than a fox who knew many little things. What Reagan had known in the 1960s was that he must and could rid the Republican party of its liberal elements, marry the GOP to the burgeoning conservative causes and movements, fight off the far-right extremists, reunite Republicans around a clearly conservative doctrine, mobilize disaffected
Democrats and blue-collar workers behind a Reagan candidacy, denounce the Russians—and win.

In retrospect this strategy would seem obvious and even easy, but it had not so appeared at the time. The dominant image in the minds of Republican party politicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the crushing Goldwater defeat of 1964. Never mind the excuses—that no one could have overcome the Kennedy remembrance that year or outbid LBJ as peace leader. The practical pols knew their history—a moderate Eisenhower had won in 1952 and 1956, Nixon with his conservative, red-baiting image had lost in 1960, a “new Nixon,” bleached and smoothened, had won in 1968, and any solid right-wing candidate, no matter how attractive personally, would yield centrist voters and hence presidential elections to the Democrats. It was this Goldwater syndrome that Reagan had to overcome if he was to put himself at the head of the GOP and take it to victory.