Is There Life After Disaster?

By LANCE MORROW

The Democrats must build a new a party base--and vision

Democrats wandering from the wreckage of their 1980 presidential campaign will be bitter and disconsolate for a while. But as the smoke lifts and they count their losses in the Senate and in the House, it may occur to them that in terms of the party's future, the defeat of Jimmy Carter, for all its landslide proportions, was not necessarily a disaster. Perversely, four years of Ronald Reagan may be what the Democrats need to recover the internal discipline and philosophical coherence--the party's "soul," as an old time New York politician puts it--that have been bleeding away since the late 1960s.

In a sense, Carter was an irrelevance to his own party. He was never a Democratic leader by either blood or inclination--not really. He never sought, like Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, to preside as paterfamilias over the great brawling Democratic coalition, rewarding and remonstrating from the head of the table while all the family factions (workers, blacks, Jews, city dwellers, the poor, intellectuals) passed around the meat and potatoes. Carter won the White House in 1976 as a sweet-psalming loner circuit riding outside the party structures. As President, owing little or nothing to the party, he practiced a cool neglect of it. His motivations were rooted in his own interests, not the party's: a perfect '70s politician. He did not encourage new Democratic talent or ideas; he neglected both the mechanism and the vision of the party, its sheer reason for being. Thus Carter's defeat is less traumatic to the Democrats than it might have been; it is like the end of a loveless marriage.

In defeat, Carter will probably cease almost at once to be a political force. One night last month, he swore: "This is my last campaign, the last political race I will ever run." A book based on the meticulous diary he kept during his White House years probably will occupy him, along with plans for a presidential library, probably in Atlanta. He may emerge now and then to pay off old political debts--to Fritz Mondale, for example--but as one Eastern Democratic leader says, "As far as the party is concerned, Carter will disappear like dew on a hot day."

With Carter in power another four years, the Democrats might have been able to slide along in the self-delusion that their party remained, after all, the voice of the American majority, still something like the fractiously diverse pluralistic parade that Roosevelt organized. Now Democrats will have to face the truth: their party has been rusting and clunking along for years on only two or three cylinders. Unless they recover their partisan energies and intellectual vigor, the Democrats could enter a long historical passage of declining influence and relevance, becoming the political equivalent of some of the decaying cities of the Northeast, once flourishingly productive, the exuberant places where the modern Democratic Party originated.

A presidential defeat, of course, usually sets off apocalyptic prediction about the doom of the losing party. Forecasting the demise of the G.O.P., which has been in the minority in nearly all the years since F.D.R. came to power in 1933, became almost a genre of punditry. But descendants of the Goldwater expedition that was buried under Lyndon Johnson's landslide in 1964 have survived to see themselves this year proclaimed the emergent, more conservative American majority. The Democratic Party will surely endure as well.

But it must fundamentally change. Says Larry Hansen, administrative assistant to retiring Illinois Senator Adlai Stevenson III: "This is a party with no sense of what it's about, what it should be about, where it's going, where it should go. It tends to be dominated by men whose enthusiasm ran out a decade ago. There is no vision."

Both the ideas and the constituencies of the Democratic Party have grown thinner, partly because of the party's own past successes. Now, more have-nots have. Blue-collar workers, who were once a strong and reliable phalanx of Democratic power, have joined the middle class; in straitened times, an era of limits, they see Big Government not as a source of protection, as before, but as a vast bureaucracy, the big spenders installed by Democrats, extorting their tax dollars. They rebel against welfare. If the economic pie will not expand, then a certain amount of the emotional generosity goes out of the old Democratic program. Inflation has been hard on the humane instincts of Democratic liberalism.

The demographics changed: Americans in large numbers abandoned the Northeast for the South and Sunbelt. The Democrats seemed to become the party of the cities, the problems, the blacks, the Hispanics and welfare. An undercurrent of racism is down there in the shadows of the rightward trend. The suburbs, more affluent than the cities, are growing; so are the small towns of rural America. Those who fled the cities now have a stake, however small, that they want to hang on to, and yet their taxes are high, and rising. The Republicans' pitch that Democratic deficits are the cause of inflation has found an audience in that portion of the middle class that feels the Democratic Party has grown old, run out of ideas, that it cannot help them any more. The Democrats came to be seen as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The procedures of the party have changed profoundly as well: the 1972 "McGovern reforms" designed to open the party to more direct democratic participation have ended by destroying the party's formal structure. The McGovernites were, many of them, college-educated, upper-middle-class, amateur political activists, schooled in Viet Nam and civil rights protest, who regarded the old party boss structures as morally corrupt. The Watergate era, which made all party politicians vaguely suspect, led many candidates (including Jimmy Carter) to minimize their party affiliations, virtually to deny them. And television allowed candidates to project themselves directly upon the electorate's psyches without the mediation and benediction of the party.

Without the power to discipline and reward, the always fractious F.D.R. coalition has pretty much fractured. Even many blacks deserted the party they used to support almost by instinct. A profound psychological shift occurred in American voters: they lost much of their desire or need to be part of a political majority, but instead formed themselves into single-issue constituencies, an oddly specialized and peculiarly destructive version of politics. In the era of single-issue politics, it is not a broad political agenda, a party's view of the nation, that is important, but gun control or abortion or ERA or women's rights or busing.

Still, in the coming Reagan years, the Democrats may coalesce somewhat. They will enjoy the always exploitable negative advantage: as the party of opposition in a conservative Republican Administration, the Democrats will attract new loyalties, new factions of those disaffected with Reagan's rule. Those out in the cold always tend to huddle closer together.

The real recovery of the Democratic Party will have to begin with leadership. The two clear contenders in the next four years are Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale, although each talks vaguely and modestly of his future. "They'll both start running for '84," said one Carter aide, "and it will be great for party fund raising, because they'll vie to see who goes to more Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners." Both Kennedy and Mondale have built up substantial political IOUs this year. Mondale's dogged and solitary stumping around the nation for Carter has built him a large and loyal constituency within the party. The doubts about Mondale have always focused on his belly: Is there enough fire there? One of his aides snaps: "That would not be a dilemma for him now."

But Kennedy and Mondale both preach the same old-time Democratic religion, and therefore appeal to something of the same constituency--even though Kennedy may still possess a certain magic of political celebrity that transcends ideologies. Jonathan Moore, a moderate Republican who is head of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, believes that the first Democratic reaction to Carter's defeat will be a lament that the Georgian "ran as a Republican," that the party must regain its soul by reasserting itself as the champion of the poor and minorities, that it must turn to Kennedy or Mondale for a comeback in 1984.

But that impulse may fade, Moore believes, as the Democrats seek a newer breed, with less static and traditional views. The Senate may offer some notable new stars, including Georgia's Sam Nunn and Connecticut's Chris Dodd. Among the young Democratic Governors who are potential comers in the party is West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller.

As for the oldtimers, House Speaker Tip O'Neill and Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd now automatically become their party's highest elected officers in national politics. But neither man seems likely to become the voice of the Democrats' future.

In addition to fresh faces, the Democrats will have to find some new ideas of their own. Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas believes that Democrats must change their ways. "The party must face up to it," says Tsongas. There are six basic realities to address, he says, and the party that confronts them will be the majority party of the future: 1) the energy crisis, 2) the "biosphere overload"--hazardous wastes, etc., 3) nationalism in the Third World, 4) a new view of the Soviet Union, taking into account the difficult times ahead for that butter-shy, gun-heavy society, 5) the reality of the nonexpanding economic pie, 6) the need to be competitive economically in world trade.

"It is to the Democrats' advantage," says Tsongas, "that we are challenged by a party that is still stuck in the 1950s. Ronald Reagan is a product of the things that brought us down. A Reagan true to his advisers would open up opportunities to the Democrats in 1984."

But even massive Republican fecklessness in the next four years would not automatically restore the Democrats to their previous vigor. To start, they must bring back at least a degree of party discipline, perhaps by partly undoing the 1972 reforms. They must somehow escape their orthodoxies and old incantations, a tendency toward reflexive liberalism that faces problems by creating Government agencies and printing more money to pay for them. Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York wrote tellingly last summer: "Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas."

The Democratic Party may find an opportunity in the next four years to demonstrate the virtues of its old openheartedness when it is practiced in imaginative ways. But if the party merely reverts to a reflexive New Dealism, it may only be an opposition that proves the maxim formulated by the late social theorist Ernest Becker: "A protest without a program is little more than sentimentalism--this is the epitaph of many of the great idealisms."

--By Lance Morrow.

Reported by Simmons Fentress and Johanna McGeary/Washington

With reporting by Simmons Fentress, Johanna McGeary

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