American Experiment (403 page)

However familiar a political alliance this was for the Democrats, the question in the late 1980s was whether the partners—party regulars and movement activists—were ready for one another. The Democratic party leadership hardly appeared ready for bold initiatives. That leadership, indeed, had cut its structural ties with movement activists when, earlier in the 1980s, the Democrats’ regular midterm policy conference had been discontinued. That midterm conference, a grand assembly of both Democratic party regulars and delegates representing women and minority groups, had been noisy, expensive, untidy, unpredictable, sometimes a bit embarrassing. But it had also linked the party establishment to creative and dynamic electoral groups; by abandoning it, the leadership cut off some of its own intellectual and political lifeblood. The presidential aspirants, focusing on their own campaigns, could not be expected to restore the connection. Several of them in fact were founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that made no secret of its intention to rescue the Democracy from control by “extremists” and “ideologues”— the very groups that had lost their footing at the midterm conference. Michael Dukakis, in choosing Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate and shunning liberal-left stands on tough issues like taxes, presented the moderate face of the Democratic party to the nation. In Massachusetts, however, he had won elections in part because of his skill at uniting party regulars with movement activists.

Nationwide the activists for their part had decidedly mixed desires and capacities to marry or remarry the Democratic party. The movements themselves were divided organizationally. Peace activists were morselized into tens of thousands of local groups individually or cooperatively conducting local rallies, demonstrations, and protest action. Women’s groups had the same types of divisions along with a particular inhibiting factor— many women’s organizations, especially the large and influential League of Women Voters, were nonpartisan and hence barred from forming
organizational links with the Democrats. Blacks were overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting but proudly separate in most political endeavors. Some activists in all these movements shunned party politics as a matter of principle, on the ground that Democratic party leaders had betrayed, sold out, neglected, forgotten, or otherwise mistreated them over the years. Other movement leaders spurned any kind of conventional politics at all, preferring to put their energies into street activism.

Then there were the “young,” tens of millions of them. It was calculated that by the late 1980s those born from 1946 onward, in the baby boom, would comprise around 60 percent of the electorate. But this was a demographic “cohort,” not a voting bloc. Some had become the yuppies who were distinguished mainly by having no distinctive political attitudes beyond a vague and ineffectual anti-establishmentarianism. Historian Robert McElvaine, however, detected among the immense number of baby-boomers a group that was not upwardly mobile, affluent, or typically professional. “During the 1950s and ’60s, the average American’s inflation-adjusted income increased by 100 per cent between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five,” McElvaine noted. “For those who were twenty-five in 1973, however, their real income had risen by only 16 per cent when they reached thirty-five in 1983.” Because many of these young people had lived the hard-pressed lives about which New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen sang, McElvaine called them the “Springsteen Coalition.”

Inspired by childhood memories of King and Kennedy, disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam and much that followed, these young persons retained both a sense of grievance and a streak of idealism that might surface in their voting in the 1990s. But would they vote? Or would they contribute more than their share to the steadily declining voter turnout of the late twentieth century? The same question could be asked of the protest movements that made up the Democratic party’s natural constituency. Movements that had supplied zest and fresh blood to party politics now appeared passive, dispirited. They were part of the impasse of the system, not solvents of it.

If movements as well as parties were fixed in the immobility of American politics, was it likely that Americans might experience incremental, brokerage politics under transactional leadership for years to come? Or was it possible that they would enter another period of social protest, movement politics, and major party transformation and bring on a critical realignment? The answer would turn on the quality of leadership and the character of its followership.

Neither the movement nor the party leadership of the nation gave much promise in the late 1980s of moving Americans out of their political immobility. Leaders were scarce whose capacities could compare with those of the great leaders of the past—with Dr. Townsend’s skill in mobilizing the elderly in the 1930s, with the kindling power of John L. Lewis or the labor statesmanship of Walter Reuther, with the intellectual and political audacity of the early leaders of the women’s movement, or with the galvanizing power and charisma of King and his fellow protesters. As for the Democratic party, virtually all the candidates for President—even Jesse Jackson—exhibited great skill at working within the system. Few of these “pragmatists” hinted at a potential for transcending the system, mastering it, transforming it if necessary. To be sure, any one of the candidates might display great leadership capacities upon attaining office, as Franklin Roosevelt had done. But FDR had not had to go through the modern presidential recruitment process that tested candidates more for their ability to campaign than for their capacity to govern.

Was there no alternative, then, to politics as usual? One possible development that could “break the system wide open” was an economic catastrophe of the magnitude of the great depression, or at least of a severe recession following a stock market plunge like that of “Black Monday” in October 1987. Some liberals and Democrats were predicting such an event, some even forecast a likely time of onset, but the prospect that the nation had to wait for a catastrophe in order to take actions that might have prevented it seemed as wretched as the notion that the world would have to go through a nuclear crisis before it would take the necessary steps to forestall nuclear war.

Some kind of desperate crisis might be necessary, however, for liberal-left Democrats to employ the most ambitious and radical means of opening up the system, a mobilization of the tens of millions of Americans not participating in electoral politics. By the time of the 1984 election the number of voters, even in the presidential race, where the participation rate was much higher than for lower offices, had fallen spectacularly—to roughly half the potential electorate. Americans, who like to view their country as something of a model of democracy, had the poorest voter-turnout record of all the industrial democracies. Aside from the occasional laments of editorial writers, however, Americans did not appear unduly disturbed by this travesty of democracy.

Democrats on the left had special reasons to be concerned, for the poor, the jobless, and the ethnics were disproportionately absent from the polling place. These no-shows represented a huge array of constituencies that the Democrats were failing to tap. A strenuous effort by a national voter
registration group helped persuade some states to relax the registration barriers that had kept some people from voting and to allow the use of government offices as registration places, but even in those states turnout remained low. The root difficulty was that many low-income, less educated nonvoters did not see the point of voting—for them electoral participation in America was a middle-class game which they did not care to join.

It would take rare leadership to overcome their ignorance and alienation, to attract them to the polls, to enable them to vote their deepest, most authentic, and abiding needs. Aside from Jesse Jackson, who demonstrated a remarkable talent for mobilizing low-income blacks and whites in his 1988 presidential primary campaign, this kind of leadership was missing, at least on the left, in the America of the late 1980s. Such leadership could not be manufactured—it emerged out of a people’s heritage, values, aspirations, and took its color and energy from conflict. Great leadership historically had never been possible except in conditions of ideological battle. Such conflict was not in sight in a nation whose liberal leaders, or aspirants to leadership, appeared wholly content with a politics of moderation, centrism, and consensus.

As the 1988 presidential nominating races got underway more than a year before the first primary, it appeared unlikely that one election could break open the party and the constitutional gridlock that gripped the American political system. From the very start the presidential candidates were entangled in one of the worst leadership recruitment systems in the Western world. The presidential primary not only pitted them against fellow party leaders in endless and acrimonious combat; it forced them to mobilize personal followings that after the combat might persist as dispersive and even destructive forces within the parties and within their Administration. It was not surprising that the governor of a large state, such as New York’s Mario Cuomo, would reject this process whereas fifty-six years earlier Franklin D. Roosevelt had found it possible to perform as governor and to campaign for the presidency in the much less demanding nominating procedure of 1932. How defensible was a selection process that choked off the recruitment of some of the best and busiest leaders?

In other Western democracies the parties served not only as recruiting agencies for leaders but as training grounds for leadership. Party mentors identified, coached, and promoted promising young men and women—sometimes in actual party schools. By and large, the more doctrinal the party, the more effective its recruitment and training programs. It was only
when the GOP became a more ideological party that it “engaged in an extensive program of political education for legislative candidates and their managers,” John F. Bibby reported. But this effort was exceptional; in this century American parties have been too flaccid, underfinanced, and fragmented to serve as schools of leadership. Other sectors of American society, among them corporations, the military, and government agencies, taught forms of leadership, but these were specialized programs that served the purposes of the organization rather than the broader needs of the general public.

Typically, Americans were trained to be effective politicians—good brokers, manipulators, money raisers, vote winners. Since the very nature of the governmental system, with its rival branches and complex dispersion of power, put a premium on transactional leadership, American politics offered endless play to lawyers and other negotiators and mediators. The system would long ago have collapsed without their capacity to grease the machinery at the connecting points. But what if the machinery was failing anyway? Appeals for creative, transforming leadership were frequent in the 1980s but vain. Such leadership could not be summoned like spirits from the vasty deep.

When political leaders fail, Americans often turn to the next most available saviors or scapegoats—the educators. The era from Vietnam and Watergate to Iran-Contra generated even more than the usual calls for reforming or revolutionizing the nation’s secondary schools and, even more, its colleges and universities. Most of the proposals, dusted off for the latest crisis, embodied the special ideological, professional, or career interests of the reformers—more cross-disciplinary studies, more emphasis on reading the classic writings of the great philosophers from Plato on, strengthening the liberal arts curriculum, and the like. There was much emphasis in the 1980s on teaching and the taught, but significantly less on the teachers. Few of the reformers appeared to comprehend that teachers were the people’s first and most influential set of leaders, as role models, opinion shapers, inspirers, disciplinarians, embodiments of ongoing middle-class, ethnic, and political traditions.

If the public had recognized the central importance of teachers, perhaps proposed reforms would have focused more on these human beings. Or perhaps not, because “reforming” the human beings would have appeared far more difficult and dangerous than manipulating processes or techniques. Still, the quality of the teachers—their competence, breadth of knowledge, intellectual vigor, commitment to the classroom, and
professionalism—was far more important than their specific mode of teaching, set of readings, or place in the curriculum.

This centrality of the teacher made all the more crucial and ominous a finding during the “educational crisis” of the 1980s that received little attention at the time compared with the headlines dwelling on superficialities. From a random sample of 2,500 Phi Beta Kappa members and of almost 2,000 Rhodes scholars, Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster concluded in 1985 that fewer and fewer of the nation’s most intellectually promising young people were entering or planning careers in higher education. This finding had the direst implications for the quality of the best kind of teaching as leadership for the half century ahead; and, as the analysis concluded, it was also significant that “the academy, it seems, grows less and less attractive as a house of intellect, as a nurturing and stimulating environment for the gifted and creative.”

This finding was widely ignored, perhaps because by implication it called for the most prodigious effort to draw the truly best and brightest of the nation’s youth into teaching. The Bowen-Schuster report noted, as had so many earlier findings, that the “quality of working conditions for faculty also has deteriorated markedly over the past decade and a half; less clerical support, overcrowded facilities, outmoded instrumentation, tighter library budgets, and poorly prepared students.” No improvement was expected for another decade or so. To overcome these deficiencies in public higher education would call for the kind of clear goals, dependable funding, long-range planning, firm commitment, steady policy making, and persistent follow-through that were so uncommon in American government.