

|
May 1991
When the official subject is presidential politics,
taxes, welfare, crime, rights, or values . . . the real subject
is
Race
by Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall
RACE is no longer a straightforward, morally unambiguous force in American
politics; instead, considerations of race are now deeply imbedded in the
strategy and tactics of politics, in competing concepts of the function and
responsibility of government, and in each voter's conceptual structure of moral
and partisan identity. Race helps define liberal and conservative ideologies,
shapes the presidential coalitions of the Democratic and Republican parties,
provides a harsh new dimension to concern over taxes and crime, drives a wedge
through alliances of the working classes and the poor, and gives both momentum
and vitality to the drive to establish a national majority inclined by income
and demography to support policies benefiting the affluent and the upper-middle
class. In terms of policy, race has played a critical role in the creation of a
political system that has tolerated, if not supported, the growth of the
disparity between rich and poor over the past fifteen years. Race-coded images
and language changed the course of the 1980, 1984, and 1988 presidential
elections and the 1990 elections for the governorships of California and
Alabama, the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, and the post of Texas secretary of
agriculture. The political role of race is subtle and complex, requiring
listening to those whose views are deeply repellent to some and deeply resonant
for others. The debate over racial policy has been skewed and distorted by a
profound failure to listen.
"You could classify me as a working-class Democrat, a card-carrying union
member," says Dan Donahue, a Chicago carpenter who became active in the
campaign of a Republican state senator in 1988. "I'm not a card-carrying
Republican--yet. We have four or five generations of welfare mothers. And they
[Democrats] say the answer to that is we need more programs. Come on. It's well
and good we should have compassion for these people, but your compassion goes
only so far. I don't mind helping, but somebody has got to help themselves,
you've got to pull. When you try to pick somebody up, they have to help.
Unfortunately, most of the people who need help in this situation are black and
most of the people who are doing the helping are white. We [white Cook County
voters] are tired of paying for the Chicago Housing Authority, and for public
housing and public transportation that we don't use. They [taxpayers] hate it
[the school-board tax] because they are paying for black schools that aren't
even educating kids, and the money is just going into the Board of Education
and the teachers' union."
Moderate-income voters like Donahue pose a central dilemma for the Democratic
Party. They are essential if the party is to have an economically coherent
base, and if the party is legitimately to claim to represent not only the poor
but also the average working man and woman. These voters have, however, been
caught up in an explosive chain reaction of race, rights, values, and taxes
which has propelled significant percentages of them out of the Democratic Party
in presidential elections and into the "unreliable" column in state and local
contests. Racism and racial prejudice fail to explain such voter defection
adequately, and Democratic liberals' reliance on charges of racism guarantees
political defeat and, more important, guarantees continued ignorance of the
dynamics at the core of presidential politics.
THE COSTS OF LIBERALISM
The past two decades have seen a significant enlargement of the ideological and
value-based underpinnings of political conservatism and, to a large extent, of
the Republican Party. Race, rights, and taxes have become key forces behind
this enlargement, helping to bring about a new polarization of the electorate,
a polarization that has effectively replaced the New Deal coalition structure
of presidential contests.
This polarization is built on mutually reinforcing divisions of the electorate:
taxpayers against tax recipients; those who emphasize responsibility against
those who emphasize rights; proponents of deregulation and an unfettered free
market against supporters of the regulatory state and of policies protecting or
advancing the interests of specific groups; and, finally, whites against
blacks. Public policies backed by liberals have driven these new alignments. In
particular, busing, affirmative action, and much of the rights revolution in
behalf of criminal defendants, prisoners, homosexuals, welfare recipients, and
a host of other previously marginalized groups have, for many voters, converted
the government from ally to adversary. The simultaneous increase, over the past
two and a half decades, in crime, welfare dependency, illegitimacy, and
educational failure have established in the minds of many voters a numbing
array of "costs"--perceived and real--of liberalism.
Major elements of the Republican Party have exploited and inflated the costs of
liberal policies. Republican strategists and ideologues have furthermore
capitalized on these costs to establish a new and evolving ideology:
conservative egalitarianism, opposed to special preferences whether for blacks,
unions, or any other liberal interest. Liberal Democratic support for
preferential hiring on the shop floor and in the schoolroom--to make up for
past discrimination--has enabled a conservative Republican Party to lay claim
to the cause of equal opportunity, once the rallying cry of the civil-rights
movement. In the wake of sustained group and individual conflicts over rights,
preferences, and government benefits, an egalitarian populism of the right has
emerged, one so strong that it was not only accessible to George C. Wallace in
1968 but remained available twenty years later to a scion of the old guard of
the Northeast, George Herbert Walker Bush. Conservative populism has permitted
the Republican Party to replace in the minds of many voters the idea of an
"establishment" ruled by business interests with a hated new liberal
establishment, adversarial to the common man: an elite--of judges, bureaucrats,
newspaper editors, ACLU lawyers, academics, Democratic politicians,
civil-rights and feminist leaders--determined to enact racially and socially
redistributive policies demanding the largest sacrifices from the white working
and lower-middle classes.
This new polarization drives a wedge right through the heart of the old
Democratic presidential coalition, and threatens to undermine the genuine
advances in racial equality which have occurred in the years since the passage
of the l964 Civil Rights Act. Race relations in America are, in fact, moving on
two tracks. On one there has been an extraordinary integration of the races, a
striking expansion of the black middle class, and a powerful contribution from
blacks to the mainstream culture. American society is undergoing a
transformation that may ultimately destroy many of the racial stereotypes that
drive prejudice. In the years before the outbreak of the Second World War, 73
percent of all black college graduates became ministers or teachers, almost all
serving exclusively black constituencies. In 1940 only 187,520 blacks held
white-collar jobs, and over 100,000 of them were clergymen, teachers, or the
owners of generally small, ghetto-based retail stores producing marginal
incomes. By 1990, 1.91 million blacks held managerial and professional jobs.
From 1950 to 1990 the black population doubled but the number of blacks holding
white-collar jobs increased by 920 percent.
On the second track, racial progress has run into major roadblocks: crime,
welfare dependency, illegitimacy, drug abuse, and a
generation--disproportionately black--of young men and women unwilling either
to stay in school or to take on menial labor, a group that has collided with a
restructuring of the American economy and a dramatic loss of well-paid
entry-level jobs. The worsening of the symptoms of social dysfunction over the
past three decades has become a driving force in politics, for the symptoms are
perceived as an unacceptable cost of liberalism not only in the neighborhoods
of southwest Chicago but also, increasingly, in the more affluent sections of
suburbia and in the business cores of cities.
A NEW LEASE ON PREJUDICE
Liberal elites have had major difficulty recognizing the costs both of racial
conflict and of the broader rights revolution in behalf of groups as diverse as
women, the mentally disabled, prison inmates, and immigrants from developing
countries. Liberal elites have in addition disregarded the effects of
burdensome taxes on working-class and middle-class voters, who may see
themselves as being forced to finance a revolution challenging their own values
and often undermining their hard-won security. Democratic liberalism has shown
a consistent reluctance to confront the inherent distributional conflicts
imbedded in liberal policies. After the 1984 election the Democratic National
Committee commissioned a $250,000 voter study by CRG Communications, only to
quash its release because it made explicit controversial sources of dissent
from liberal orthodoxy. The study, drawn from a poll of 5,000 voters and
thirty-three focus groups, found that Democratic defectors among white urban
ethnics and white southern moderates believed that
the Democratic Party has not stood with them as they moved from the
working to the middle class. They have a whole set of middle-class economic
problems today, and their party is not helping them. Instead it is helping the
blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel betrayed....[These voters] view gays
and feminists as outside the orbit of acceptable social life. These groups
represent, in their view, a social underclass....[White urban ethnics] feel
threatened by an economic underclass that absorbs their taxes and even locks
them out of the job, in the case of affirmative action. They also fear a social
underclass that threatens to violate or corrupt their children. It is these
underclasses that signify their present image of the Democratic Party....The
Democrats are the giveaway party. Giveaway means too much middle-class money
going to blacks and the poor.
In some communities, such as the white working-class suburbs of Detroit,
positive assessments of the Democratic Party have been washed out altogether by
anger and discontent that are open, unabashed, and extremely harsh. Voters from
such communities have been crucial to the outcome of presidential elections for
the past two decades--they are the silent majority of the 1970s and the Reagan
Democrats of the 1980s. Their votes expanded the Republican coalition to
produce election-year majorities, and their abandonment of the Democratic Party
in presidential elections undermined the coalition of the have-nots and
affirmed the ascendancy of a coalition of the haves, as disaffected
moderate-income white voters joined forces with traditional Republicans. The
views of working-class defectors from the Democratic Party were examined in a
1985 study of suburban Detroit by Stanley Greenberg, the president of the
Analysis Group, a Democratic polling firm. The study found that
these white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks,
a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and
politics. Blacks constitute the explanation for their [white defectors']
vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not
being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is
what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live....These sentiments have
important implications for Democrats, as virtually all progressive symbols and
themes have been redefined in racial and pejorative terms....
The special status of blacks is perceived by almost all of these
individuals as a serious obstacle to their personal advancement. Indeed,
discrimination against whites has become a well-assimilated and ready
explanation for their status, vulnerability and failures.
The bitterness and anger of the white Detroit voters is one consequence of a
central tragedy of the past twenty-five years: the drive to achieve racial
equality and the striking advances of the black middle class have coincided
with a significant worsening of social dysfunction in the bottom third of the
black community. Social dysfunction--crime, welfare dependency, joblessness,
and illegitimacy--wreaks havoc, crushing recognition of the achievements of
liberalism. When it is disproportionately associated with one group or race,
social dysfunction assaults efforts to eliminate prejudice. Gordon W. Allport
wrote in The Nature of Prejudice,
Prejudice...may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and
minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced
if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports...and provided it is of
the sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity
between members of the two groups.
The contact between whites and the black underclass has routinely violated
every standard necessary for the breakdown of racial stereotypes. Most white
contact with the underclass is through personal experience of crime and urban
squalor, through such experience related by friends and family, or through the
daily reports about crime, drugs, and violence which appear on television and
in newspapers. The news includes, as well, periodic reports on out-of-wedlock
births, welfare fraud, drug-related AIDS, crack babies, and inner-city
joblessness.
"The stereotype is not a stereotype anymore," says Kenneth S. Tollett, a black
professor of education at Howard University. "The behavior pattern in the
underclass is not stereotypical in the pejorative sense, but it is a statement
of fact. A stereotype is an overgeneralization, 'This is the way people are,'
and then we say all are like that. The behavior of black males in the
underclass is now beginning to look like the black stereotype. The statements
we have called stereotypes in the past have become true."
Social dysfunction, and crime in particular, have tragically served over the
past two and a half decades to reinforce racial prejudice. Statistics suggest
the widespread problems among the black underclass.
In a nation that is 12 percent black and 84 percent white, there were in 1986,
according to the Department of Justice, more black prison inmates than white or
Hispanic. There were in 1988, according to the Department of Health and Human
Services, more black welfare recipients than white. By the late 1980s,
according to the Bureau of the Census, a majority of black families where
headed by single or separated women. At the same time, according to the
National Center for Health Statistics, more than 60 percent of all black
children were born out of wedlock. Among black male high school dropouts aged
twenty to twenty-four, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
proportion who had not worked at all during the previous year rose from 15.1
percent in 1974 to a staggering 39.7 percent in 1986. The comparable figures
for young white dropouts were 9.1 percent in 1974 and 11.8 percent in 1986, and
for young Hispanic dropouts 8.8 percent and 9.6 percent. According to figures
compiled by the Department of Justice in criminal-victimization surveys from
1979 to 1986--the surveys considered by law-enforcement professionals to
contain the most reliable data on race--an annual average of 44.3 out of every
1,000 blacks were victims of a violent crime, with much higher rates in very
poor areas, as compared with 34.5 out of every 1,000 whites. At the same time,
however, a far higher percentage of the crimes committed by blacks than of the
crimes committed by whites were interracial. In 1986 and 1987 whites committing
crimes of violence--robbery, rape, and assault--chose white victims 97.5
percent of the time and black victims 2.5 percent of the time in those
incidents in which the victim could identify the race of the offender. Blacks
committing violent crimes chose white victims 51.2 percent of the time and
black victims 48.8 percent of the time. For the specific crime of robbery the
figures are similarly striking. In 1986-1987, of those robberies in which the
race of the offender was identified by the victim, 95.1 percent of robberies
committed by whites had white victims and 4.9 percent had black victims; 57.4
percent of robberies committed by blacks had white victims and 42.6 percent had
black victims.
THE RACES POLARIZE OVER WHAT'S GONE WRONG
Violence, joblessness, drug abuse, and family disintegration have not only
functioned to reinforce racial prejudice; they have also led to widely
differing interpretations of what has gone wrong. Significant numbers of
blacks, both middle-class and poor, see malevolent white power behind the
disruption and dislocation in black neighborhoods. Take drug abuse. "It's
almost an accepted fact," says Andrew Cooper, the publisher of the City Sun, a
black weekly Brooklyn newspaper, echoing ideas often heard on black radio talk
shows and in other all-black forums. "It's a deep-seated suspicion. I believe
it. I can't open my desk drawer and say, 'Here it [the evidence] is.' But there
is just too much money in narcotics. People really believe they are being
victimized by The Man. If the government wanted to stop it, it could stop it."
Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, brought an entire
auditorium of black politicians, intellectuals, and organizers--men and women
on the left of the political spectrum, but by no means on the outer fringes--to
their feet during a 1989 speech in New Orleans which clearly captured elements
of a black world view. He said,
"The black man and woman in America is of no further use to the children of our
former slavemasters and when a thing loses its use or utility, it loses its
value. If your shoes wear out, you don't keep them around; if an old dress
becomes old, you don't keep it around. Once it loses utility, you move to get
rid of it....We cannot accept the fact that they think black people have become
a permanent underclass....If we have become useless in a racist society, then
you must know that not public policy but a covert policy is being already
formulated to get rid of that which is useless, since the economy is going down
and the world is going down. Follow me, brothers and sisters. According to
demographers, if the plummeting birth rate of white people in America
continues, in a few years it will reach zero population growth. As for blacks,
Hispanics, and Native Americans, if their present birth rate continues, by the
year 2080, demographers say, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans will
conceivably be 50 percent or more of the United States population....If things
continue just birthwise, we could control the Congress, we could control the
Supreme Court, we could control state legislatures, and then 'Run, Jesse, run,'
or 'Run, Jesse Junior, run,' or 'Run, Jesse the Third, run.'"
The emergence of predominantly black underclass neighborhoods rife with the
worst symptoms of social pathology has proved to be one of the most disturbing
developments in the United States, both for city residents and for residents of
surrounding areas. In his book Canarsie, the Yale sociologist Jonathan Rieder
described the climate of opinion he found in the late seventies in one of
Brooklyn's white urban ethnic enclaves:
Canarsie's image of ghetto culture crystalized out of all the visual gleanings,
fleeting encounters, and racist presumptions. Lower-class blacks lacked
industry, lived for momentary erotic pleasure, and, in their mystique of soul,
glorified the fashions of a high-stepping street life. The hundreds of
thousands of female-headed minority households in New York City, and the
spiraling rate of illegitimate births, reinforced the impression that ghetto
women were immoral....When provincial Jews and Italians recoiled from the riven
families of the ghetto, they were prisoners of ancient notions of right as well
as vituperative passion. "The blacks have ten kids to a family," the Italian
wife of a city worker observed...."Bring up a few, give them love and
education."...It is hard to exaggerate the bewilderment Canarsians felt when
they considered the family patterns of the ghetto. To be without a family in
southern Italy "was to be truly a non-being, un saccu vacante (an empty sack)
as Sicilians say, un nuddu miscatu cu nenti (a nobody mixed with nothing)."
THE VALUES BARRIER
The intensity of public reaction to the world of the underclass has coincided
with a larger conflict in America over values. This conflict has evolved, in
complex ways, from one of the major struggles of the twentieth century: the
struggle between so-called traditional values and a competing set of insurgent
values. Traditional values generally have been seen to revolve around
commitments to the larger community--to the family, to parental responsibility,
to country, to the work ethic, to sexual restraint, to self-control, to rules,
duty, authority, and a stable social order. The competing set of insurgent
values, the focus of rights-oriented political ideologies, of the rights
revolution, and of the civil-rights movement, has been largely concerned with
the rights of the individual--with freedom from oppression, from confinement,
from hierarchy, from authority, from stricture, from repression, from rigid
rule-making, and from the status quo.
On a level essentially ignored by liberal elites--but a level, nonetheless, of
stark reality to key voters--the values debate has become conflated with racial
politics. Among Democrats and liberals the stigmatization of racism in the
1960s had the unintended and paradoxical consequence of stigmatizing the
allegiance of many voters to a whole range of fundamental moral values. In the
late 1960s and early 1970s the raising of the "traditional values" banner over
such issues as law and order, the family, sexual conduct, joblessness, welfare
fraud, and patriotism was seen by liberals and blacks--with some accuracy--as
an appeal to racist, narrow-minded, repressive, or xenophobic instincts,
designed to marshal support for reactionary social policies. The conflation by
the political right of values with attempts to resist racial integration, to
exclude women from public life, and to discredit the extension of
constitutional rights to minorities fueled an often bitter resistance by the
left and by blacks to the whole values package.
The result was that liberal Democrats often barred from consideration what are
in fact legitimate issues for political discourse, issues of fundamental social
and moral concern which must be forthrightly addressed by any national
candidate or party. This stigmatization as "racist" or as "in bad faith" of
open discussion of values-charged-matters--ranging from crime to sexual
responsibility to welfare dependency to drug abuse to standards of social
obligation--has for more than two decades created a VALUES BARRIER between
Democratic liberals and much of the electorate. Insofar as many voters feel
that their cherished policies and practices have been routed, the values
barrier has been a major factor in fracturing a once deeply felt loyalty to a
liberal economic agenda.
When rank-and-file white voters characterize the value structure of the
underclass as aberrant, white liberals are not alone in their angry response.
In segments of the black community the response is often a wounded outrage so
extreme that it precludes all debate.
Bernard Boxill, a black scholar at the University of North Carolina, has, for
example, argued that the growing problems of the underclass may be used by the
white community as "an excuse to undo the legal, social and economic advances
made by the black middle class, plunge the country into a race war, and worst
of all, be a pretext for genocide."
Dr. Frances Welsing, a black psychiatrist, was loudly applauded at a
predominantly black "town meeting" organized and televised in 1989 by ABC-TV
and Ted Koppel when she argued that whites bear responsibility for whatever
disorders there may be in black ghettos:
"Racism is a behavior system that is organized because white people are a
minority on the planet....If we understand the white fear of genetic
annihilation, which is why Willie Horton [the Massachusetts prisoner who
committed rape and assault while on furlough] could be used as a very profound
symbol by the Republican Party to win this election, then we will understand
what is happening to the black male in this society. The black male is a threat
to white genetic annihilation. And so he is profoundly attacked in this
society."
THE ROOTS OF OUR RACE-CHARGED POLITICS
In the gulf between Frances Welsing and Dan Donahue one can see evidence of a
political struggle that goes back to the 1960s. When one looks at recent
political history through the prism of our current race-charged politics,
familiar events take on a new significance. From the perspective of 1991, for
example, the presidential election of 1964 stands out as a turning point in the
politics of race in the United States. That election forced race, already a
volatile national issue, into the partisan competition between the Democratic
and Republican parties. The 1964 contest pitted the Democrat Lyndon Johnson,
the leading supporter of the recently passed Civil Rights Act (which granted
full U.S. citizenship rights to blacks for the first time in history), against
the Republican Barry Goldwater, an ideological conservative and a strong
opponent of the bill. By Election Day, 1964, an exceptional 75 percent of the
electorate knew that Congress had that year passed the bill, with a striking 96
percent of those voters aware that Johnson had backed the measure and 84
percent aware that Goldwater had opposed it.
The Democratic and Republican nominees' polarized positions on civil rights
immediately transformed public perceptions of the two parties. Two years before
the 1964 election, polls conducted by National Election Studies showed
virtually no difference in the public assessment of whether the Democratic or
the Republican Party would be "more likely to see to it that Negroes get fair
treatment in jobs and housing." Of those polled in the 1962 survey, 22.7
percent identified the Democrats as more likely to protect black interests,
21.3 percent identified the Republicans, and the remaining 56 percent said
either that there was no difference between the parties or that they had no
opinion. By 1964, however, fully 60 percent identified the Democratic Party as
more likely to help blacks get fair treatment in seeking jobs, and only seven
percent identified the Republican Party--the party of Abraham Lincoln.
By 1964 the Democrats had become the party of racial liberalism and the
Republicans had become the party of racial conservatism. It was the first and
last presidential election in which racial liberalism was politically
advantageous.
The event most strikingly associated with the decline in political support for
Democratic liberalism was the riot that broke out on August 11, 1965, in the
Watts section of Los Angeles. Blacks throwing rocks and bottles at policemen
shouted, "Burn, baby, burn!" as television cameras rolled. By August 16, after
the National Guard had been called in and order slowly restored, there were
thirty-four dead, more than 1,000 injured, over 800 buildings damaged or
destroyed, and nearly 4,000 arrests. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader
of black protests since the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, was unprepared for
Watts. Stunned by the scope of anger among rioters, and by their perception
that the civil-rights movement had been largely irrelevant to improving
conditions in the ghetto, King "was absolutely undone" after visiting Watts,
his close associate Bayard Rustin recalled.
A succession of other violent eruptions followed over the next three years.
According to the Kerner Commission, appointed to investigate the causes of
rioting, in 1967 there were 164 "disorders," eight of them ranked as "major" on
the grounds that they involved "many fires, intensive looting, and reports of
sniping; violence lasting more than two days; sizeable crowds; and use of
National Guard or federal forces as well as other control forces." More than
eighty people were killed, nearly 90 percent of them black civilians and 10
percent policemen, firemen, and other public officials. More than three
quarters of the deaths were in two cities, Detroit (forty-three) and Newark
(twenty-three). During the five-year period 1964-1968, according to one
estimate, 329 significant outbreaks of violence took place in 257 cities.
Seventy-two percent of rioters in Newark surveyed by the Kerner Commission said
they agreed with the statement "Sometimes I hate white people"--a finding
painful to white liberals.
The sea change in American presidential politics--the replacement of a liberal
majority with a conservative majority--involved the conversion of a relatively
small proportion of voters: the roughly five to ten percent of the electorate,
made up primarily of white working-class voters, empowered to give majority
status to either political party. Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was the
politician who showed the Republicans how to seize lower-income white voters.
Running as a third-party candidate in 1968, Wallace capitalized on the huge
defection of white Democrats, particularly in the South, as the Democratic
Party formally repudiated segregation. He won just under 14 percent of the
vote. Wallace and Nixon together that year won 57 percent of the vote, however,
establishing what would become the conservative presidential majority. This
majority carried every presidential election but one over the next twenty
years--the exception being Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter's victory in the wake
of Watergate, the worst Republican scandal in history.
The strength of Wallace's appeal in 1968 went beyond white backlash. Wallace
defined a new right-wing populism, capitalizing on voter reaction to the
emergence of racial, cultural, and moral liberalism. Wallace demonized an elite
Democratic establishment, providing a desperately sought-after moral
justification to those whites who saw themselves as victimized and displaced by
the black struggle for civil rights and by broader social change. For these
voters, Wallace portrayed the civil-rights movement not as the struggle of
blacks to achieve equality--a goal impossible to challenge on moral
grounds--but as the imposition of intrusive "social engineering" on working men
and women by a coercive federal government in the hands of a liberal cabal:
lawyers, judges, editorial writers, government bureaucrats, and intellectuals.
"They have looked down their noses at the average man on the street too long,"
Wallace told disaffected voters. "They've looked down at the bus driver, the
truck driver, the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the steelworker,
the plumber, and the communications worker, and the oil worker, and the little
businessman, and they say, 'We've gotta write a guideline. We've gotta tell you
when to get up in the morning. We've gotta tell you when to go to bed at
night.'" Wallace laid the groundwork for the Republican assault on "reverse
discrimination." "You know who the biggest bigots in the world are--they're the
ones who call others bigots," he declared at a Milwaukee rally, as he struggled
to be heard over the shouts of protesters. In another campaign speech he said,
"It's a sad day in the country when you can't talk about law and order unless
they want to call you a racist. I tell you that's not true."
Perhaps most important for long-range Republican strategy, Wallace brought into
mainstream presidential politics a new political symbol, a vilified Democratic
establishment that replaced as an enemy of lower-income voters the Republican
establishment of corporate America and the rich. Wallace effectively portrayed
this Democratic establishment as bent on imposing a liberal, authoritarian,
statist agenda on an unwilling electorate.
To voters resentful of the heavy hand of the new liberal establishment, Wallace
said, "You are one man and one woman, and your thoughts are just as good as
theirs."
Richard Nixon set out to win the Wallace vote. Nixon was among the first
Republicans to understand how the changing civil-rights agenda could be
manipulated to construct a new conservative majority. His strategy effectively
straddled the conflict between increasing public support for the abstract
principle of racial equality and intensified public opposition to
government-driven enforcement mechanisms. Nixon found a message that
encompassed the position of the growing majority of white Americans who had
come to believe that the denial of basic citizenship rights to blacks was
wrong, but who were at the same time opposed to the prospect of forced
residential and educational integration, directed by the courts and the federal
regulatory bureaucracy
When, in October of 1969, the Supreme Court rejected an Administration attempt
to postpone the desegregation of Mississippi's schools, Nixon declared, "We
will carry out the law," but he stressed that he did "not feel obligated to do
any more than the minimum the law required." The Court ruling, Nixon warned,
should not be viewed by "the many young liberal lawyers [in the Justice
Department]...as a carte blanche for them to run wild through the South
enforcing compliance with extreme or punitive requirements they had formulated
in Washington." On the campaign trail in 1972 Nixon declared,
There is no reason to feel guilty about wanting to enjoy what you get and
get what you earn, about wanting your children in good schools close to home,
or about wanting to be judged fairly on your ability. Those are not values to
be ashamed of; those are values to be proud of. Those are values that I shall
always stand up for when they come under attack.
THE REPUBLICAN RACIAL STRATEGY
A central irony of the Nixon administration was that the development of a
Republican alternative--"black capitalism"--to the traditional civil-rights
agenda created a critical vulnerability for Democrats in the 1980s. Under black
capitalism the federal government began actively to promote three
racial-preference programs that would soon become controversial: a minority
contracting program known as "8-a," which set aside fixed percentages of
federal contracts for minority-owned businesses; the Office of Minority
Business Enterprise, established within the Department of Commerce to assist
minority business in securing government contracts; and, most important, the
so-called Philadelphia Plan, designed to increase black access to high-paying
union jobs.
The Philadelphia Plan established the authority of the federal government to
require companies doing business with the government to set up "goals and
timetables" for the hiring and promotion of minority members. The plan set
specific percentage "ranges" for blacks and other minority groups for
craft-union jobs. For example, plumbers and pipefitters, of whom only twelve
out of 2,335 in Philadelphia were black (0.5 percent), were given a hiring goal
of five to eight percent in 1970, a range that would rise to 22 to 26 percent
by 1973. The goals-and-timetables mechanism was incorporated in 1970 into the
regulations governing all federal procurement and contracting--affecting a
universe of corporations that employed more than a third of the nation's work
force.
Nixon in 1969 did not anticipate that the affirmative-action provisions of his
Philadelphia Plan would become, in the course of the next twenty years,
essential to a Republican strategy of polarizing the electorate along lines of
race--and thus be vital to constructing a presidential partisan realignment. It
did not take him long to learn, however: by the 1972 election Nixon was
campaigning against the quota policies that his own Administration had largely
engendered.
It was Nixon's re-election campaign that developed a relatively comprehensive
Republican racial strategy stressing whenever possible the costs of remedies
for discrimination, especially in the cases of busing and affirmative action.
On March 17, 1972, Nixon escalated his assault on busing. The school bus, "once
a symbol of hope," had become a "symbol of social engineering on the basis of
abstractions," he said. Seeking to reap political rewards from the growing
stockpile of blue-collar resentment, Nixon turned against his own Philadelphia
Plan: "When young people apply for jobs...and find the door closed because they
don't fit into some numerical quota, despite their ability, and they object, I
do not think it is right to condemn those young people as insensitive or even
racist."
THE DEMOCRATS BECOME A WHITE-COLLAR PARTY
In devising a political strategy for capturing white working-class and southern
voters, the Nixon Administration in 1972 would have had difficulty designing a
scenario more advantageous to the Republicans, and more damaging to the
Democratic-Party, than the one the Democrats devised for themselves. This
scenario grew out of a seemingly minor development at the 1968 Democratic
convention. As a token gesture of appeasement to the forces of Eugene McCarthy
and Robert Kennedy, Democratic Party regulars allowed the creation of a special
Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, to ensure that "all
feasible efforts have been made to assure that delegates are selected through
party primary, convention, or committee procedures open to public participation
within the calendar year of the National Convention."
No one, neither Democratic Party regulars nor the press, had any notion of the
scope of what had been set in motion. "There was not much attention to the
Rules Committee reports," Max Kampelman, one of Hubert Humphrey's major
strategists, recalled later. "Our objective was to get a nominee....We said to
ourselves, if you are going to STUDY it, you can control it. If you get the
nomination, you'll have control of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. If
you have the DNC, then you'll control any study. A study commission could be a
way of harmonizing the issue." Few political judgments have proved more
incorrect.
The liberal-reform wing of the Democratic Party--in part made up of veterans of
the civil-rights and student anti-war movements--dominated the party-structure
commission and achieved a radical alteration of the presidential-delegate
selection process. The new rules shifted the power to nominate presidential
candidates from the loose alliance of state and local party structures, which
had in the past been empowered to use their control of the party to pick
delegates, to the universe of activists, often rights-oriented liberal
reformers, who were now granted direct access to the machinery of delegate
selection. "Before reform," Byron Shafer wrote in his book describing the party
rules changes, Quiet Revolution,
there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was
primarily responsive to white-collar constituencies and in which another, the
Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue-collar constituencies. After
reform, there were two parties each responsive to quite different white-collar
coalitions, while the old blue-collar majority within the Democratic Party was
forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominantly with
its needs.
In other words, those who unquestionably lost power in the Democratic
presidential-nomination process were the white working- and lower-middle-class
voters who were already leaving the party in droves because they felt the
heaviest burdens of the civil-rights revolution had been placed on their
shoulders.
Party reforms produced a substantive ideological upheaval. Before 1972,
Democratic presidential delegates were only slightly more liberal than the
public at large, according to delegate surveys, while Republican delegates were
considerably more conservative than the electorate. Delegates to the 1972
Democratic convention, however, were significantly further to the political
left of the electorate at large than the Republican delegates that year were to
the right.
No development better summarizes the shift in intra-party power than the
decision by the McGovern forces at the 1972 convention to oust the
fifty-nine-member Cook County delegation under the control of Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley. Since 1932 the Chicago organization had been more important to
the success or failure of Democratic presidential candidates than any other
city machine. Without Daley in 1960, for example, John F. Kennedy would not
have carried Illinois by an 8,858-vote margin.
The Cook County delegation, elected in a March 21 Illinois primary, was
vulnerable to challenge because Daley's machine had slated candidates in closed
meetings, and because the composition of the Chicago delegation did not include
the required proportions of women and blacks.
Pro-McGovern reformers successfully voted out the Daley delegates and replaced
them with a slate "chosen no one knew quite how," according to Theodore H.
White. White wrote,
In the 1st Congressional District of Chicago, for example, a group of people
had met at the home of one James Clement and decided that only ten of those
present might vote for an alternate to Mayor Daley's slate; those ten had
chosen 7 delegates, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson. This rival
hand-picked alternate slate offered the exact proportion of women, blacks and
youth required by the McGovern reform rules. Yet the elected slate in the 1st
Congressional had been voted in by the people of Chicago, and these had not.
In an open letter to Alderman William Singer, the leader of the Chicago
reformers, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko wrote,
I just don't see where your delegation is representative of Chicago's
Democrats....About half of your delegates are women. About a third of your
delegates are black. Many of them are young people. You even have a few Latin
Americans. But as I looked over the names of your delegates, I saw something
peculiar...There's only one Italian there. Are you saying that only one out of
every 59 Democratic votes cast in a Chicago election is cast by an Italian? And
only three of your 59 have Polish names....Your reforms have disenfranchised
Chicago's white ethnic Democrats, which is a strange reform....Anybody who
would reform Chicago's Democratic Party by dropping the white ethnic would
probably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.
After the credentials committee voted seventy-one to sixty-one to oust the
Daley delegation, Frank Mankiewicz, a spokesman for the McGovern campaign,
dryly noted, "I think we may have lost Illinois tonight."
In the 1972 general election, George McGovern lost not only Illinois but
forty-eight other states, being defeated by 61 percent to 38 percent, or 18
million votes. For the long-run future of the capacity of the Democratic Party
to nominate and elect Presidents, the central issue was not just the magnitude
of McGovern's defeat. It was the inability of the Democratic Party to absorb
competing factions and to mediate the differences among them. The new rules
removed from the presidential-nomination process those white elected and party
officials who were closer to the racial and cultural conflicts plaguing the
party than the liberal reformers who dominated the proceedings. Among those who
did not attend the 1972 convention were 225 of 255 Democratic congressmen, the
Democratic mayors of Los Angeles, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and San
Francisco, Mayor Daley and his Chicago loyalists, and uncounted city
councilmen, state legislators, and leaders of Democratic ward organizations.
These leaders represented white voters who were on the front lines of urban
housing integration; who were the subjects of busing orders; who were
competitors for jobs as policemen and firemen and union craftsmen which were
governed by affirmative-action consent decrees; who regarded as
incomprehensible many liberal Supreme Court decisions on criminals' rights,
abortion, sexual privacy, school prayer, busing, and obscenity. These voters
and their political representatives were, and still are, largely relegated to
peripheral status in the Democratic presidential-primary process. With the
withdrawal of socially conservative white voters from the nomination process,
Democratic presidential candidates have negotiated that process in the context
of an artificially liberal primary electorate that puts the candidates outside
the ideological mainstream and provides them with virtually no training in the
kinds of accommodation and bargaining essential to general-election victory.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS AGENDA BECOMES REDISTRIBUTIVE
As the white working-class voters who had formed the core of the New Deal
coalition began to lose clout within the Democratic Party, the economy began to
falter. Steady economic growth, which had made redistributive government
policies tolerable to the majority electorate, came to a halt in the mid-1970s.
With stagnation the threat to Democratic liberalism intensified. Just as the
civil-rights movement reached its height, high-paying union jobs and big-city
patronage--which had served to foster upward mobility for each succeeding
immigrant generation--began to dry up. Many blacks lost even a toehold on the
ladder, while whites slipped down, sometimes just a rung, sometimes all the way
to the bottom.
The end of vigorous post-Second World War economic growth came in 1973. Hourly
earnings, which had grown every year since 1951 in real, inflation-adjusted
dollars, fell by 0.1 percent in 1973, by 2.8 percent in 1974, and by 0.7
percent in 1975. Weekly earnings fell more sharply, by 4.1 percent in 1974 and
by 3.1 percent in 1975. Median family income, which had grown from $20,415 (in
1985 inflation-adjusted dollars) in 1960 to $29,172 in 1973, began to decline;
family income fell to $28,145 in 1974 and then to $27,421 in 1975.
In a whipsaw action the middle-class tax burden rose with inflation while the
economy and real income growth slowed. The tax system was losing its
progressivity, placing a steadily increasing share of the cost of government on
middle- and lower-middle-class voters, vital constituencies for the Democratic
Party. In 1953 a family making the median family income was taxed at a rate of
11.8 percent, while a family making four times the median was taxed at 20.2
percent, nearly double. By 1975 the figures had become 22.7 percent for the
average family and 29.5 percent for the affluent family. In other words, for
the affluent family the tax burden increased by 46 percent from 1953 to 1976,
while for the average family it increased by 92.4 percent.
As the job market, income patterns, and growing pressure from many groups for
spending on the poor created a competition for government funds in which there
were more losers than winners, the civil-rights agenda itself became
increasingly redistributive. In order to remedy past and present discrimination
in both employment and education, the courts and the federal regulatory
structure turned to tough affirmative-action policies. Federal directives and
regulations--developed in part by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
and endorsed by the Supreme Court in 1971 in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and in
later decisions--sharply restricted hiring and promotion procedures that
adversely affected blacks.
The most aggressive efforts to provide jobs for blacks were directed at the
most besieged white Democratic constituencies: the building-trades unions and
police and fire departments. White men working as carpenters, plumbers,
sheet-metal workers, iron workers, steamfitters, cops, and firemen became the
focus of the anti-discrimination drive waged by the Civil Rights Division of
the Justice Department.
The dilemma inherent in using racial preference to remedy past discrimination
is sharply reflected in Justice William Brennan's 1976 majority opinion
upholding the award of retroactive seniority to blacks in Franks v. Bowman
Transportation Co., Inc., and in the dissenting opinion of Justice Lewis
Powell.
Brennan wrote that retroactive seniority was essential for the victim of
discrimination, because without it he
will never obtain his rightful place in the hierarchy of seniority according
to which these various employment benefits are distributed. He will perpetually
remain subordinate to persons who, but for the illegal discrimination, would
have been, in respect to entitlement to these benefits, his inferiors.
Powell, on the other hand, contended that the award of retroactive seniority
would penalize "the rights and expectations of perfectly innocent employees.
The economic benefits awarded discrimination victims would be derived not at
the expense of the employer but at the expense of other workers."
The intensity of the conflict over affirmative action can be seen in less
abstract terms in Birmingham, Alabama. Not until 1968--103 years after the end
of the Civil War--did the Birmingham fire department hire its first black
fireman. Throughout all those years blacks were systematically denied the
opportunity not only of employment but also of building seniority and learning
the promotional ropes. Legal proceedings were initiated against the city in
1974, the year the second black fireman was hired. Richard Arrington,
Birmingham's first black mayor, was elected in 1979, and two years later the
city agreed to a consent decree providing that every white hire or promotion
would be matched, one for one, by a black hire or promotion, as long as blacks
were available who had fulfilled basic test requirements.
In 1983 James Hanson, a white fireman, and Carl Cook, a black fireman, both
took the Birmingham Fire Department test for lieutenant. Both passed, but
Henson ranked sixth among all who took the test, with a score of 192, while
Cook ranked eighty-fifth, with a score of 122. Under the consent decree Cook
was promoted to lieutenant and Henson was not.
Henson became part of a group of whites attempting to challenge the consent
degree. He argued, "I can understand that blacks had been historically
discriminated against. I can also understand why people would want to be
punitive in correcting it. Somebody needs to pay for this. But they want me to
pay for it, and I didn't have anything to do with it. I was a kid when all this
went on."
Cook countered, "Say your father robs a bank, takes the money and buys his
daughter a Mercedes, and then buys his son a Porsche and his wife a home in the
high-rent district. Then they discover he has embezzled the money. He has to
give the cars and house back. And the family starts to cry: 'We didn't do
anything.' The same thing applies to what the whites have to say. The fact is,
sometimes you have to pay up. If a wrong has been committed, you have to right
that wrong."
The Birmingham case represents an extreme: pitting white and black workers
against each other in a competition for government-controlled jobs and
employment benefits. Over time these racial divisions reverberated in
Birmingham's political system. Once, every elected official in this city was a
Democrat; now racial conflict has begun to translate into a local partisan
realignment. By the end of the 1980s Jefferson County, which encompasses
Birmingham, had its eighteen seats in the state House of Representatives split
between blacks and whites. In partisan terms there were eight black Democrats,
one white Democrat, and nine white Republicans. Among the white Republican
state representatives was Billy Gray, a former president of the Firefighters
Union. Race had become central to establishing partisan difference.
The same zero-sum element of affirmative action in employment is applicable to
higher education. "We are committed to a program of affirmative action, and we
want to make the university representative of the population of the state as a
whole," James A. Blackburn, the dean of admissions at the University of
Virginia, said in 1988. "That means fewer spaces for the traditional mainstream
white students who have come here from around the country....If you were
looking at the academic credentials, you would say Virginia has it upside down.
We take more in the groups with weaker credentials and make it harder for those
with stronger credentials."
REAGAN AND RACE
Explosive forces--stagnant incomes, declining numbers of manufacturing jobs,
inflation-driven increases in marginal tax rates, sharply accelerating welfare
dependency, skyrocketing crime, soaring illegitimacy, and affirmative-action
competition for jobs and college placement--began to reach the point of
combustion in the mid-to-late 1970s. Democrats failed to recognize the threat
these forces represented; leaders of the party were given false comfort by the
belief that Watergate had done irreparable harm to the Republicans.
The importance of race in the chain of events that brought Ronald Reagan to the
White House--from the Great Inflation of the 1970s to the California tax
revolt--cannot be overestimated. Reagan, echoing Goldwater from sixteen years
before, strengthened the image of the Republicans as the party of racial
conservatism. Under Reagan in 1980 the percentage of voters who said the
Republican Party was "not likely" to help minorities shot up to 66 percent
(from 40 percent in 1976), while those who said that the party would help
minorities collapsed to 11 percent (from 33 percent). Unlike Goldwater in 1964,
however, Reagan in 1980 demonstrated that racial conservatism was no longer a
liability--that in fact it was a clear asset--as his party made gains at every
level of electoral competition from state legislative seats to the White
House.
Under Reagan the Republican Party in 1980 was able to stake out a conservative
civil-rights stand that won strong majority support. Advocacy of "equal
opportunity"--the original clarion call of the civil-rights movement--became
the center-right position, the core of the new conservative egalitarian
populism. Republican and Democratic differences over what Equal Opportunity
meant reflected, in part, differences in the opinions of whites and blacks. By
the 1980 election the ideological divergence had extended beyond issues of
civil rights to basic questions about the role and responsibilities of the
federal government. In 1980 blacks who believed that it was the responsibility
of government to provide jobs outnumbered those who contended that "government
should just let every person get ahead on his own" by a margin of 70-30,
according to National Election Studies poll data. Whites, however, split in the
opposite direction, contending by a 62-38 margin that government should just
let "everyone get ahead on his own" rather than guaranteeing work.
Responses to this question also revealed the extent to which ideology, voting
patterns, and race had become commingled. In addition to polarizing blacks and
whites, the question was found to polarize Reagan and Carter voters, with
Carter getting 80 percent of those who most strongly supported government
intervention to provide work, and Reagan winning 79 percent of those most
strongly opposed to such intervention.
In a parallel split, Carter received 93 percent of the vote from those
citizens, white and black, who most strongly supported government efforts "to
improve the social and economic position of blacks," while Reagan got 71
percent of those who felt most adamantly that "the government should not make
any special effort to help because they should help themselves."
Race, ideology, and partisanship had become inextricably linked, a linkage that
empowered the Republican Party in its new populism. Lee Atwater, who ran
southern operations for the 1980 campaign and managed George Bush's 1988
campaign, has argued, "In the 1980 campaign we were able to make the
establishment, insofar as it is bad, the government. In other words, big
government was the enemy, not big business. If the people are thinking that the
problem is that taxes are too high and government interferes too much, then we
are doing our job. But if they get to the point where they say the real problem
is that rich people aren't paying taxes, that Republicans are protecting the
realtors and so forth, then I think the Democrats are going to be in pretty
good shape. The National Enquirer readership is the exact voter I'm talking
about. There are always some stories in there about some multimillionaire that
has five Cadillacs and hasn't paid taxes since 1974, or so-and-so Republican
congressman hasn't paid taxes since he got into Congress. And they'll have
another set of stories of a guy sitting around in a big den with liquor saying
so-and-so fills his den with liquor using food stamps." So what determines
whether conservative or liberal egalitarianism is ascendant, Atwater says, is
"which one of those establishments the public sees as a bad guy."
Reagan focused on the right-wing populist strategy described by Atwater,
playing on the combustible mix of race, big government, and white working-class
anger. One of Reagan's favorite anecdotes was the inflated story of a Chicago
"welfare queen" with "eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security
cards" whose "tax-free income alone is over $150,000." The food-stamp program,
in turn, was a vehicle to let "some young fellow ahead of you buy T-bone steak"
while "you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger."
Such implicitly race-laden images, and the values conflict associated with
welfare and food stamps, furthered the Republican Party's efforts to expand
beyond its traditional base and establish a sustained policy majority--which
supported the first major retrenchment of the liberal government policies of
the 1930s and the 1960s, ranging from assaults on labor to a broad attempt to
dismantle the civil-rights regulatory structure and to overturn court rulings
favoring minorities. In direct contrast to the "bottom-up" coalition of the New
Deal Democratic Party, the new Republican presidential majority was--and is--a
"top-down" coalition.
WHAT "FAIRNESS"--TO WHOM?
While the Reagan administration repeatedly stressed the costs to white America
of civil-rights enforcement, especially affirmative-action remedies, the
Democratic Party, deliberately or inadvertently, continued to find itself
identified with those costs. Throughout the 1984 campaign Walter Mondale was
repeatedly enmeshed in negotiations with Jesse Jackson, with organized labor,
with feminist groups, and, most damaging of all, with those seeking to raise
taxes to fuel what many voters saw as an intrusive federal government. The
vulnerability of the Democratic Party was reflected in the deeply hostile
public reaction to Mondale's proposal to raise $30 billion in new revenues to
"promote fairness."
The Democratic "fairness" message in 1984 was viewed by a crucial sector of the
white electorate through the prism of race. The Analysis Group, reporting on
the views of white Democratic defectors in Macomb County, Michigan, found
that
conventional Democratic themes, like opportunity and fairness, are now
invested with all the cynicism and racism that has come to characterize these
sessions [focus groups]. In effect, the themes and Party symbols have been
robbed of any meaning for these Democratic defectors. On hearing the term
'fairness,' these voters recall, on the one hand, 'racial minorities' or 'some
blacks kicking up a storm,' and on the other hand, 'only politics' or
politicians who are 'lying.' It never occurred to these voters that the
Democrats were referring to the middle class.
Similar views abound among white voters in such communities as Boston,
Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and rural East Texas. These views are
particularly devastating to the Democratic Party because fairness has become a
central Democratic theme. The 1980 Democratic platform declared, "In all of our
economic programs, the one overriding principle MUST BE FAIRNESS." The platform
of four years later asserted, "A nation is only as strong as its commitment to
justice and equality. Today, A CORROSIVE UNFAIRNESS eats at the underpinnings
of our society." (Emphases added.)
In addition, fairness remains a strong and legitimate issue for the legions of
black Democratic voters. "The issues that concern working-class minorities
comprise the traditional 'fairness' agenda of jobs, housing, welfare, and
education," the voter study by CRG Communications found. "They want more
benefits for themselves and their children. [They] strongly assert the validity
of the 'fairness' theme. They believe that they are entitled to certain
governmental benefits and view the diminishment of those benefits as a betrayal
of a trust."
The association in the minds of many white voters of "fairness" with "fairness
to minorities" has made it very difficult for the Democratic Party to
capitalize on the striking increase in the disparity of income over the past
decade not only between rich and poor but also between the working and
lower-middle classes and the rich. During the 1980s the top one percent saw
after-tax family income grow by 87 percent, from $213,675 in 1980 to $399,697
in 1990 (both figures in 1990 dollars); families just above the median, in the
sixth decile, saw their after-tax income grow by only three percent, from
$25,964 in 1980 to $26,741 in 1990.
In the 1988 election no one knew better than Michael Caccitolo, the Republican
committeeman of Chicago's 23rd Ward, the difficulty of the Democratic Party's
struggle to revive the issue of fairness among the once-Democratic voters of
southwest Chicago. "Every night I sit at home and watch the news," he said. "I
see Jesse [Jackson] up there talking about 'black empowerment, our people,' and
that's sending a message out there that no Democratic precinct captain can
possibly overcome. When the Dan Ryan [Expressway] was being built, the old lady
from Operation Push [Rev. Willie Barrow, at that time the president of
Jackson's Operation Push] comes out and says, 'We are going to close the Dan
Ryan down unless we get more blacks on construction.' The people in the
neighborhood remember that. Nobody threatened to close the Dan Ryan down to get
Polish people on. And they [city and state officials] backed down and they gave
a bunch of black guys entry-level jobs. And look who they threw off and got
sent back to the neighborhood and told, 'Get on unemployment.' All it takes is
two or three of them. Would you define them as Republican precinct captains?
No. Is it advantageous for the Republicans to watch a guy like that sitting in
a tavern drinking his beer and telling the story about how he got bumped? And
then all of a sudden it's six o'clock and [on TV] it's Jesse. It's bad and it
ain't going to get better."
THE SIGNAL OF "CRIME"
In 1988 the Bush campaign assembled and deployed a range of symbols and images
designed to tap into voters' submerged anxieties about race, culture, rights,
and values--the anxieties that had helped to fuel the conservative politics of
the post-civil-rights era. The symbols of the Bush campaign--Willie Horton, the
ACLU, the death penalty, the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag--and rhetoric such
as "no new taxes," the "L-word," and "Harvard boutique liberal" conjured up the
criminal defendants'- and prisoners'-rights movements, black crime, permissive
liberal elites, a revenue-hungry state, eroding traditional values, tattered
patriotism, and declining American prestige.
Willie Horton represented, for crucial sectors of the electorate, the
consequences of an aggressively expansive liberalism--a liberalism running up
against majority public opinion, against traditional values, and, to a certain
degree, against common sense. Horton came to stand for liberalism's blurring of
legitimate goals, such as helping prisoners judged suitable for rehabilitation
(prisoners, for example, without long records of violence), with the
illegitimate goal, in the majority view, of "coddling" violent and dangerous
criminals whom much of society judges irredeemable.
Republican strategists recognized that the furloughing of Willie Horton
epitomized an evolution of the far-reaching rights movement, an evolution
resented and disapproved of by significant numbers of voters. These voters saw
crime as one of a number of social and moral problems aggravated by liberalism.
The evolving rights movement was seen as extending First Amendment privileges
to hard-core pornography, as allowing welfare recipients to avoid
responsibility for supporting their children, as fostering drug use,
illegitimacy, homosexual promiscuity, and an AIDS epidemic. All these led, in
turn, to demands on taxpayers to foot skyrocketing social-service and
health-care bills.
"Crime" became a shorthand signal, to a crucial group of white voters, for
broader issues of social disorder, evoking powerful ideas about authority,
status, morality, self-control, and race. "On no other issue is the dividing
line so clear, and on no other issue is my opponent's philosophy so completely
at odds with mine, and I would say with the common-sense attitudes of the
American people, than on the issue of crime," Bush declared in an October 7,
1988, campaign speech to police officers in Xenia, Ohio, adding,
There are some--and I would list my opponent among them--who have wandered far
off the clear-cut path of common sense and have become lost in the thickets of
liberal sociology. Just as when it comes to foreign policy, they always 'Blame
America First,' when it comes to crime and criminals, they always seem to
'Blame Society First.'...[Criminal justice under Dukakis is] a 'Twilight Zone'
world where prisoners' 'right of privacy' has more weight than the citizen's
right to safety.
THE RACIAL CHASM
The divisive power of race and race-infused preoccupations with values, class,
and social disorder endured throughout the 1980s, reverberating across the
electorate. Differences of opinion between blacks and whites intensified over
the decade. A 1989 voter study conducted by KRC Research and Consulting for
Democrats For the 90's, a private organization affiliated with the Democratic
Party, revealed the extent to which key white Democratic voters "take issue
with the Democratic rhetoric of representing the 'middle class and the poor.'
These [voters] perceive themselves to be neither rich nor poor, and they do not
like being referred to in the same breath as 'the poor.' They describe
themselves as 'working people.'" Black urban Democratic voters, conversely,
"feel that the country and the Democratic Party are increasingly racist and
that the party cares little for their needs and interests."
Divisions between the races have emerged on a host of fronts. On the basic
question of whether judges and courts treat whites and blacks even-handedly, 56
percent of white New Yorkers in a 1988 WCBS-New York Times poll said they
believed that the system was fair and 27 percent said the system favored one
race over another, with that 27 percent evenly split between those who saw
black favoritism and those who saw white favoritism. Among black New Yorkers
only 30 percent saw the system as fair, and 49 percent saw it as unfair, with
the overwhelming majority of those who perceived unfairness seeing a bias in
favor of whites.
Such highly controversial cases as the 1987 allegations of rape by Tawana
Brawley and the 1984 shooting by the "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz of four
black teenagers provoked sharply divergent views from blacks and from whites.
After a grand jury determined in 1988 that Brawley had fabricated her story, 73
percent of white New Yorkers polled by WCBS-New York Times said she lied, while
only 33 percent of blacks were prepared to make that judgment (18 percent said
she told the truth, 14 percent said she didn't know what happened to her, and
35 percent were unwilling to express an opinion). In the case of Goetz, the
WCBS-New York Times poll found in 1985 that the proportion of whites describing
themselves as supportive of the shooting, relative to those who were critical,
was 50-37, as compared with 23-59 among blacks. Whites felt that Goetz was
innocent of attempted murder by a margin of 47-18 (with the rest undecided),
while blacks said that he was guilty by a margin of 42-19. (Hispanics sided
more with whites than with blacks, favoring innocence over guilt at 41-23.)
Underlying these differences in public opinion is a profound gulf between
blacks and whites over the cause of contemporary differences between the races.
In seeking to clarify these differences of opinion, Ron Walters, a black
political scientist at Howard University, has argued that the fundamental issue
in the contemporary politics of race is "Who is responsible for our condition?"
He says, "Once you draw the line on that, you draw the line on a lot of other
race-value issues. Whites see blacks as generally responsible for their own
situation, which means that whites refuse to take responsibility. Blacks see it
differently. They believe there ought to be a continuing assumption of
responsibility for their condition by the government, in addition to what they
do for themselves. And therein lies a lot of the difference."
This racially loaded confrontation over the issue of responsibility, both
historical and contemporary, is perhaps best illustrated by the views of the
political analysts Roger Wilkins and Patrick Buchanan. Wilkins, a black
professor of history at George Mason University and a well-known commentator
who served as an assistant attorney general in the Johnson Administration and
was an editorial writer for The New York Times and The Washington Post, has
written,
The issue isn't guilt. It's responsibility. Any fair reading of history will
find that since the mid-seventeenth century whites have oppressed some blacks
so completely as to disfigure their humanity. Too many whites point to the
debased state of black culture and institutions as proof of the inferiority of
the blacks they have mangled....[The logical implication] is simple: black
people simply need to pull up their socks. That idea is wrong and must be
resisted....Like it or not, slavery, the damage from legalized oppression
during the century that followed emancipation, and the racism that still
infects the entire nation follow a direct line to ghetto life today.
On the other side, Buchanan, an Irish Catholic who was a ranking conservative
strategist for the Nixon and Reagan administrations and remains a widely
followed political columnist and television commentator of the hard right, has
written,
Why did liberalism fail black America? Because it was built on a myth, the
myth of the Kerner Commission, that the last great impediment to equality in
America was 'white racism.' That myth was rooted in one of the oldest of
self-delusions: It is because you are rich that I am poor. My problems are your
fault. You owe me!
There was a time when white racism did indeed block black progress in America,
but by the time of the Kerner Commission ours was a nation committed to racial
justice....
The real root causes of the crisis in the underclass are twofold. First, the
old character-forming, conscience-forming institutions--family, church, and
school--have collapsed under relentless secular assault; second, as the
internal constraints on behavior were lost among the black poor, the external
barriers--police, prosecutors, and courts--were systematically undermined....
What the black poor need more than anything today is a dose of the truth.
Slums are the products of the people who live there. Dignity and respect are
not handed out like food stamps; they are earned and won....
The first step to progress, for any group, lies in the admission that its
failures are, by and large, its own fault, that success can come only through
its own efforts, that, while the well-intentioned outsider may help, he or she
is no substitute for personal sacrifice.
CAN AMERICA AFFORD AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?
The conflict represented by Wilkins and Buchanan is driven not only by a
fundamental difference over values and responsibility but also by economic and
demographic forces. These forces are helping to make the political struggle for
public resources and benefits increasingly bitter and increasingly
irreconcilable. In many respects these forces are working in tandem to make the
process of incorporating new groups into the mainstream of American society
more difficult. They include the globalization of the economy, the growing
disparity between the wages paid to the college-educated and the wages paid to
those with a high school diploma or less, the drop in college entry by blacks,
and the emergence of a suburban voting majority.
The globalization of the economy constitutes a fundamental attack on the
mechanisms traditionally relied upon to integrate new untrained and poorly
educated groups into the mainstream of American life. Before the
internationalization of manufacturing, policies and practices ranging from
widespread political patronage to legislation creating the pro-union National
Labor Relations Board forced the incorporation of immigrant groups into the
work force.
The threat represented by overseas competition has thrust American companies
into a battle for survival in which there is little or no room to accommodate
the short-term costs of absorbing blacks and other previously excluded minority
groups into the labor force. And while affirmative action performs for blacks
and other minorities the same function that patronage performed for waves of
immigrants from Ireland and southern Europe, it also imposes costs that place
American companies at a disadvantage in international competition.
These costs lie at the core of the debate over the civil-rights bill of 1991.
Although the issue of quotas has dominated public discussion of the
civil-rights bill, the real battle is over legislating the precise cost to
companies that affirmative-action programs will involve. In an attempt to
overturn recent conservative rulings by the Supreme Court (now dominated by
Republican appointees), the Democratic leadership of Congress has proposed
legislation strictly limiting the use of ability tests and other hiring
procedures with potentially discriminatory impact, even in the absence of
discriminatory intent. If hiring or promotion procedures are found to have
"adverse impact" on blacks--that is, if disproportionately more blacks (or
other minorities) than whites are rejected--employers must demonstrate that
such tests are essential for business operation and meet a stringent "business
necessity" standard. The legislation would in effect overturn a 1989 Supreme
Court decision, Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, that allowed companies to use
ability tests and other hiring criteria that adversely affect blacks and
Hispanics if such criteria met the far less stringent standard of "business
justification." Wards Cost explicitly declared that "there is no requirement
that the challenged practice be 'essential' or 'indispensable' to the
employer's business." Such seemingly arcane and legalistic phrases as "business
necessity" and "business justification" can have profound consequences. If, for
example, companies were permitted to use scores on ability tests as a hiring
criterion, it would at present be a major setback to the hiring of blacks and
Hispanics--unless scores were adjusted for differences among whites, blacks,
Hispanics. and other groups (a scoring process termed "within-group scoring,"
"within-group adjustment," or "race-norming").
The importance of restricted ability testing for the employment prospects of
blacks and Hispanics has been documented in two book-length studies, Ability
Testing (1982) and Fairness in Employment Testing (1989), by the National
Research Council. On almost all ability tests studied, the council found
(without engaging the unresolved issue of causes), blacks scored substantially
below whites, and Hispanics scored somewhere in between. One study found, for
example, that on average, if hiring were done strictly on the basis of
ability-test scores, an employer selecting from a pool of 100 whites and 100
blacks would take only three blacks in the first twenty-three applicants
chosen, and only six blacks in the first thirty-six. The differences in
test-score results are reduced, but remain substantial, for blacks and whites
of similar income and education.
The contemporary conflict over affirmative action is rooted in the issue of
test scores. Everywhere from college admissions to hiring for jobs, tests have
become a primary instrument for determining personal status, income, and
security. On one side of the debate it is argued that the unrestricted use of
ability tests imposes an extraordinary burden on blacks, Hispanics, and other
minorities; on the other that prohibiting ability testing imposes costs on the
economy in terms of lost productivity and efficiency.
THE NEW SEGREGATION
While low-skill, entry-level jobs have moved overseas to low-wage countries,
the domestic job market has changed in ways that work to enlarge, rather than
to lessen, disparities in the incomes of whites and of blacks. The growing
demand for college-educated workers and the decline in demand for low-skill
manual workers have in recent years substantially changed wage patterns.
From 1975 to 1988 the average earnings of entry-level workers with college or
more-advanced degrees rose from about 130 percent to about 180 percent of the
earnings of workers with high school diplomas. This shift was inherently
damaging to blacks: in 1988, 13.1 percent of blacks between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty-four had college degrees, as compared with 24.5 percent
of whites.
Compounding this disparity is a second development: just as the value of a
college education has skyrocketed, the percentage of blacks between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-four who go on to college and get a degree has fallen. From
1976 to 1988 the percentage of blacks aged eighteen to twenty-four enrolled in
college fell from 22.6 to 21.1, while the percentage of whites rose from 27.1
to 31.3.
The effect of these two trends has been to undermine what was a powerful drive
toward economic and educational equality between the races. In the ten years
immediately following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the economy
pushed the earnings of both blacks and whites who were in the work force
steadily upward. There was a strong convergence of shared prosperity and
growing racial equality. From 1963 to 1973 average weekly earnings for everyone
grew from $175.17 to $198.35, in 1977 inflation-adjusted dollars. As wages rose
for whites and blacks, income differentials were sharply reduced: from 1963 to
1977-1978 the difference between black and white wages dropped from the 45
percent range down to the 30 percent range, a drop of about one percentage
point a year. For younger, well-educated workers the gap had almost disappeared
by the mid-1970s.
Starting in the late 1970s and continuing into the early 1980s, however, the
situation began to change radically. While the income of college graduates
continued to rise, the income of high school graduates began to fall. At the
same time that the so-called "college wage premium" rose, the wage levels for
job categories that employ disproportionately more whites (professionals,
managers, and sales personnel) grew substantially faster than wage levels for
those categories employing disproportionate numbers of blacks (machine
operatives and clerical, service, and household workers).
The result has been a striking shift in racial wage patterns. Starting at the
end of the 1970s the convergence between the incomes of working blacks and
whites--a convergence that had the potential in the long run to enlarge the
economic common ground between the races--came to a halt. In the late 1970s
black wages abruptly stopped catching up to white wages, with the differential
stagnating at roughly 30 percent.
For a Democratic Party seeking to build a majority coalition aligning the
interests of blacks and whites, this was a grave blow. The failure of the trend
toward wage equality to continue has encouraged the conflict between black and
white world views, in which black gains are seen as a cost to whites, and white
advantages are seen as a manifestation of racism.
RACE AND THE SUBURBS
Just as wage and education patterns are working to undermine what was a trend
toward economic equality between the races, the dominant demographic trend in
the nation--suburbanization--is working to intensify the geographic separation
of the races, particularly of whites from poor blacks.
The 1992 election will be the first in which the suburban vote, as determined
from U.S. Census data, will be an absolute majority of the total electorate.
From 1968 to 1988 the percentage of the presidential vote cast in suburbs grew
from 35.6 percent to 48.3 percent, and there will be a gain of at least two
percent by l992 under current trends.
Suburban growth will in all likelihood profoundly change national politics, and
will further deepen schisms between the public-policy interests of the two
races. Although opinion polls show increasing support for government
expenditures on education, health, recreation, and a range of other desired
public services, a growing percentage of white voters are discovering that they
can become fiscal liberals at the local SUBURBAN level while remaining
conservative about federal spending. These voters can satisfy their need for
government services through increased local expenditures, guaranteeing the
highest possible return to themselves on their tax dollars, while continuing to
demand austerity at the federal level. Suburbanization has permitted whites to
satisfy liberal ideals revolving around activist government while keeping to a
minimum the number of blacks and poor people who share in government largesse.
For example, the residents of Gwinnett County, Georgia, which is one of the
fastest-growing suburban jurisdictions in the United States, heavily Republican
(76 percent for Bush), affluent, and predominantly white (93.6 percent)--have
been willing to tax and spend on their own behalf as liberally as any
Democrats. County voters have in recent years approved a special recreation
tax; all school, library, and road bond issues; and a one percent local sales
tax.
The accelerated growth of the suburbs has made it possible for many Americans
to pursue certain civic ideals (involvement in schools, cooperation in
community endeavors, a willingness to support and to pay for public services)
within a smaller universe, separate and apart from the consuming failure
(crime, welfarism, decay) of the older cities.
If a part of the solution to the devastating problems of the underclass
involves investment in public services, particularly in the public school
systems of the nation's major cities, the growing division between city and
suburb lessens white self-interest in making such an investment. In 1986 fully
27.5 percent of all black schoolchildren, and 30 percent of all Hispanic
schoolchildren, were enrolled in the twenty-five largest central-city school
districts. Only 3.3 percent of all white students were in these same
twenty-five districts. In other words, 96.7 percent of white children are
educated outside these decaying school systems.
Even within major cities there is a growing divergence of interest between
blacks and whites. Many of the more affluent citizens in racially mixed cities
are turning to private service providers, including independent and parochial
schools. Private police and security services, proliferating private
recreational clubs, and private transportation companies.
THE END OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?
In political terms race clearly remains a republican trump card, while racial
fissures within the Democratic Party leave it weakened and vulnerable.
On a broad strategic scale the Republican Party over the past two years has
taken steps to capture the fairness issue and to defuse charges of Republican
racism, initiating an aggressive drive to win the support of affluent blacks
and even running, on occasion, fully competitive black candidates. Income
trends in the black community suggest a reservoir of prospective Republican
support: the income of the top fifth of black families has over the past two
decades been growing at a significantly faster rate than the income of the top
fifth of white families. Trends among the well-to-do of both races have led to
increasing racial equality of income, in sharp contrast to trends among the
least affluent blacks and whites: the bottom fifth of the black community is
falling steadily further behind the bottom fifth of the white community
Insofar as the Republican drive to win support among affluent middle-class
blacks is successful, and insofar as the party is able to insulate itself from
charges of racism, it will further isolate the national Democratic Party as the
party of poor, underclass black America. The isolation of the Democratic Party
continues a process damaging to the vitality of the American political
system.
Fissures resulting from racial conflict, and fissures resulting from tensions
over rights, culture, and values, separate the national Democratic Party from
many of its former constituents. Such fissures have forced the party to
increase its dependence on special interests in order to maintain its
congressional majority.
Without the resource of plurality voter loyalty, Democratic members of the
House of Representatives--the seemingly unshakable bastion of Democratic power
in Washington--have come to rely increasingly on an essentially corrupt system
of campaign finance, on the perquisites of incumbency, on pork-barrel spending,
and on the gerrymandering of districts in order to thwart continuing
demographic and ideological shifts favoring their opponents.
As recently as the mid-1970s the Democratic Party was able to portray itself as
the party of political reform battling a Republican Party dominated by moneyed
interests. Now Democrats in the House of Representatives are more dependent on
institutionalized special-interest groups than are their Republican
adversaries. In 1990 the majority--52.6 percent--of the campaign contributions
received by Democratic incumbent House members running for re-election came
from political-action committees, while the percentage of support from
individual donors represented a steady decline, from 44.8 percent in 1984 to
38.0 percent in 1990. Republican House incumbents, in contrast, received 50.9
percent of their financial support from individuals in 1988, and 41.1 percent
from PACs, in a pattern virtually the mirror image of the Democrats'. In 1988
not only did labor PACs follow tradition by giving far more to Democratic House
incumbents ($16.7 million) than to Republican incumbents ($1.9 million), but
corporate PACs--the contemporary version of "moneyed interests"--gave more
money to Democratic House incumbents ($15.7 million) than to their Republican
counterparts ($13.5 million). While helpful to incumbents in the short term,
this kind of contribution pattern weakens any claim the Democratic Party may
make to provide popular representation.
The Democratic reliance on special interests in fact extends beyond Congress to
a second party stronghold, the nation's major cities. The public's ability to
direct essential services--most important, the public school system--has been
lost in varying degrees to institutionalized bureaucracies. Within urban school
systems faced with declining tax bases and lessened federal support,
associations and unions representing teachers, principals, administrators,
clerical staff, custodians, carpenters, and security guards have become
politically influential in protecting their members' tenure while carefully
limiting their responsibility for meeting the larger goal--that of producing
well-educated students.
Democratic vulnerability on this terrain is perhaps nowhere better reflected
than in Detroit--possibly the most Democratic municipality in the nation, a
city with one of the nation's worst school systems and perhaps the worst
delivery of public services. In recent years Detroit voters elected a black
Republican school-board president and a black Republican city councilman. Both
were elected on platforms of promises to break through bureaucratic
ossification and revive competitive market forces, through parental choice in
school assignments, through private alternatives to public services, and
through the transfer of power and responsibility from administrators downtown
to principals and teachers in the trenches.
The congressional wing of the Democratic Party has become locked into an
alliance with the forces of reaction--with interests and bureaucracies
conducting largely futile efforts to resist, among other things, the
consequences of international economic change. The Democratic Party has, in
many respects, discovered that survival depends on the creation of a
congressional party entrusted by the people to look after parochial
interests--from water projects to rice subsidies to highways to health care for
the elderly. However, to the degree that presidential elections have become
referenda on the nexus of social, moral, racial, and cultural issues in the
broadest sense, the Democratic Party has in five of the past six elections been
at a competitive disadvantage.
The losers in this process are not only the Democratic Party and liberalism but
also the constituencies and alliances they are obliged to represent. The
fracturing of the Democratic coalition has permitted the moral, social, and
economic ascendance of the affluent in a nation with a strong egalitarian
tradition, and has permitted a diminution of economic reward and of social
regard for those who simply work for a living, black and white. Democratic
liberalism--the political ideology that helped to produce a strong labor
movement, that extended basic rights to all citizens, and that has nurtured
free political and artistic expression--has lost the capacity to represent
effectively the allied interests of a biracial, cross-class coalition.
Liberalism, discredited among key segments of the electorate, is no longer a
powerful agent of constructive change. Instead, liberal values, policies, and
allegiances have become a source of bitter conflict among groups that were once
common beneficiaries of the progressive state.
The failures of Democratic liberalism pose a larger problem. With the decline
of liberal hegemony, conservatism has gained control over national elections
and, to a significant degree, over the national agenda. No matter what its
claims, conservatism has served for much of the twentieth century as the
political and philosophical arm of the affluent. Entrusting the economic
interests of the poor and the working class to such a philosophy risks serious
damage to both groups.
That conservatism represents the interests of the well-to-do is to be
expected--and even respected--as part of the system of representation in
American democracy. A far more threatening development is that as liberalism
fails to provide effective challenge, the country will lack the dynamism that
only a sustained and vibrant insurgency of those on the lower rungs can
provide. Such an insurgency, legitimately claiming for its supporters an equal
opportunity to participate and to compete and to gain a measure of justice, is
critical, not only to the politics and the economics of the nation but also to
the vitality of the broader culture and to democracy itself.
Over the past twenty-five years liberalism has avoided confronting, and
learning from, the experience of voter rejection, as institutional power and a
sequence of extraneous events--ranging from Watergate to the 1981-1982
recession--have worked to prop up the national Democratic Party. For the
current cycle to reach closure, and for there to be a breakthrough in stagnant
partisan competition, the Democratic Party may have either to suffer a
full-scale domestic defeat, including (to deal in the extremes of possibility)
loss of control of the Senate and the House, or at the very least to go through
the kind of nadir--intraparty conflict, challenge to ideological orthodoxy, in
short, a form of civil war--experienced by the Republican Party and the right
in the 1960s. The original strength of Democratic liberalism was its capacity
to build majorities out of minorities--a strength that comes only from a real
understanding of what it means to be out of power, from direct engagement in
the struggle to build a majority, and from an understanding of what is worth
fighting for in this struggle. Recapturing the ability to build a winning
alliance requires learning the full meaning of defeat, and developing a
conscious awareness of precisely what the electorate will support politically,
what it will not, and when--if ever--something more important is at stake.
Copyright 1991 by Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 1991; Race; Volume 267, No. 5 pages 53-86.
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