You sense a tiny whiff of hope the there could be something approximating a presidential election in 1992 after all. A couple of reasonable Democratic candidates are making start-up noises; a chorus of public-spirited rich people, foundation-niks and politicians of both parties lament the absence of a credible domestic policy in George Bush’s Washington; the postwar euphoria has diminished. The problem is the Democratic contenders cannot get anywhere just by coming up with a list of carefully constructed domestic remedies. They have to find a way to “nationalize” their pitch, to make a reformist domestic agenda desirable to a broad cross section of Americans at a time when the country has only a most tenuous sense of national community.
This thin-to-nonexistent sense of community in American national life is at the heart of our domestic impasse. I don’t mean that we are going to have to attain some state of perfect social and regional harmony before we can get anything done. But the fact is that there is not a single one of these domestic reforms that will not entail some cost or sacrifice or disadvantage or at least diminished privilege on the part of some in the society for the sake of making things more equitable for others. These things will have to be accepted, not enforced. And you don’t get that in an environment so atomized into its racial, regional, ethnic, occupational and class components as ours.
The traveler through America may be struck by a contrary, growing uniformity in certain items that range from eyesore motel architecture to nationally dispensed, glue-based apple pie. But for all this common culture, psychic distances between Americans have widened. Regional and municipal interests seem ever more assertive and compelling, and people don’t see why they should be bailing out troubled communities half a country or so away. In this respect they increasingly reject the idea of a federal responsibility for the well-being of others all around the country.
Importantly, this idea of federal responsibility, urged upon the public from the New Deal through the Great Society, implied a nationwide, shared citizen responsibility too; people in San Diego and Wilmington and Sioux Falls were expected to care about and do their part for people in Tallahassee and New York. There was always grumbling, but the broad assumption was pretty much accepted. Now the prevailing spirit is more nearly every lobby and every caucus and every congressional district for itself.
The national Democratic Party, which had a prominent role in creating the idea of a federal responsibility, has also had a prominent role in later years in undermining it. To the extent that the Democrats have tolerated fragmentation of their constituency into ever smaller and more insistent self-promoting interest groups, they have helped to undo their own handiwork. The Republicans as a group never quite accepted the idea to begin with, so their falling away, especially in the aggressively deconstructionist Reagan years, has been as uninteresting as it was predictable. What is interesting is the fact that now, given the need to do something about defective public performance in everything from schooling to corrections to bridge repair, more and more politicians are beginning to talk about the urgency of some kind of national domestic overhaul.
How can this be made persuasive in an environment such as ours? What should the rationale be? Three answers, all of which strike me as being both dangerous and deficient, have been provisionally tried out.
One is the return-to-our-roots illusion of the Democrats, those who hold that a good dose of anachronistic and irrelevant programs exhumed from the Democratic presidential past should be revived and aggressively promoted. But this is not just sentimental; it is also in its own special way reactionary-warm-bath, the-way-it-was stuff that risks failure in very much changed political, economic, social and demographic circumstances. The ’90s are not the ’60s or ’70s, let alone the ’30s, and programs must be different. Most of the prospective Democratic candidates know this. But to the extent that they justify their reforms on the second two rationales, they too are on treacherous ground.
As the first rationale is nostalgia, so the second is fright and the third penance. The fright argument relies on supplanting the Soviets with the Japanese. The argument for teaching our kids to read and ensuring that people don’t sicken and die for want of medical care is that if we don’t do these things we are going to lose it and become number 2 or perhaps number 200. It’s a point to be made, but by itself and too much stressed it justifies the worst kind of trade policies, stirs up all manner of ugly, xenophobic feelings and leaves out of consideration too many important social needs that can’t be addressed as part of the problem of beating the Japanese.
The politics of penance may be most fruitless of all. You can only harangue people and tell them what bad guys and oppressors they are and that they have a debt and better make good on it for so long before they tell you to get lost. Especially as those groups that have been victimized because of race or gender or other characteristics have come to champion their own causes militantly, it has become harder to persuade those they are challenging or sometimes denouncing that they need to fulfill a duty of penance for the past. Only some genuine feeling of connection and mutual interest and shared purpose can any longer cause them to respond or even to believe they have obligations of this kind. It is no accident that so many people who resist such social remedies on a national level are at the same time willing and eager to help when it comes to their neighbors, neighbors being loosely defined as those in the same city or even state.
At the end of the gulf war there was a lot of enthusiastic comment on the revival of national will and on how much people seemed to relish sharing a national purpose and sense of interconnectedness again. It shouldn’t take a war to do it. The Democrats challenging Bush will either figure out how to revive this spirit in peacetime or see their reforms turned into just one more contribution to the great policy-paper landfill.
