TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111692/11169919.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 16.6 KB | 335 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 84

ELECTION `92

A Pretty Good Society


Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of
the Humanities at Harvard University.

By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.


     When President Lyndon Johnson described his vision of the
Great Society in 1964, he spoke of a civilization where "the
city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the
demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for
community. . . Where the demands of morality, and the needs of
the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation." With
these lofty words, he launched the most ambitious agenda of
social and economic reform since the days of Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

    The New Deal, which bequeathed to us what we know as
modern liberalism, was patched together in a time of economic
crisis, impelled by desperation. By contrast, Johnson's vision
was buoyed by a time of prosperity, fueled by a national mood
of expansiveness. If America's capacity for self-improvement was
not inexhaustible, our faith in that capacity surely was. That
November, Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by what was then the
largest popular majority in U.S. history.

    Bill Clinton becomes President without the warrant of a
depression that emboldened F.D.R. or the lift of economic
expansion that energized L.B.J. Times are hard; they are not
desperate. But it is the long shadow and the troubled legacy of
the Great Society -- not its policy failures so much as its
political failure -- that Clinton must overcome. While he
assumes the presidency with a detailed plan for domestic change,
his vision will have to be implemented on the cheap: not a Great
Society but, if his luck holds, a Pretty Good Society.

    The early days of the Great Society witnessed a host of
legislative initiatives. There was Medicare for the elderly;
Medicaid for the indigent; Head Start for preschoolers. There
was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Job Corps.
The Model Cities program. Of greater political significance were
the promulgation and enforcement of sweeping civil rights
measures, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Through five heady years, the Great Society
seemed to embody the full and resplendent maturity of
liberalism, fending off the forces of reaction and ushering in
a bright new day. In the ensuing decades, it came to look a lot
more like liberalism's super-nova: a final, white-hot burst
before its dark collapse.

    As with the New Deal, some of the programs were poorly
conceived and ineffectual. Others are now taken for granted as
a part of the political biosphere, programs whose worth neither
party would dare contest. But it was the overarching scheme, and
dream, that fell into disfavor. Reform was no longer experienced
as something performed for the people but as something
performed on the people. In an age of belated racial redress,
white America -- the rank and file, the lower-middle class --
felt itself under siege. With jolting suddenness, the old
alliance fell apart. Liberalism was coded as the elevation of
black grievances over white ones, the welfare of layabouts over
that of workers.

    The irony was that liberalism, which sought to heal the
injuries of class, should itself fall victim to class warfare
-- to the resentment of the blue-collar and lower-middle classes
against those they saw as the professional-class purveyors of
paternalism. White Southerners and Northern ethnics, once
Democratic stalwarts, increasingly felt like outsiders at the
gate. A Great Society? Not if you'd been left off the invitation
list.

    It's no accident that two recent books that chart this
historical process of alienation -- Why Americans Hate Politics
by E.J. Dionne Jr. and Chain Reaction by Thomas Byrne Edsall and
Mary Edsall -- served virtually as a blueprint for the
successful Clinton-Gore campaign. Yet for Bill Clinton, there
is nothing theoretical about this disaffection: the fateful
fissure runs down his soul.

    The President-elect comes from just the region and class
that felt most betrayed by the '60s agenda of social reform.
And yet what he has made of himself -- a professional educated
at elite institutions -- is the demographic type most
supportive of that agenda. His so-called centrism is not the
centrism of caution: it reflects, rather, a heartfelt
negotiation between creeds that are bitterly in conflict but do
not have to be so. Clinton's personal devils are our national
devils.

    Make no mistake: his remains the old reformist faith. But
he knows, as his illustrious forebears forgot, that reform must
leave no one out. Government by the enlightened for the
disadvantaged? No: by the people, for the people.

    To test this thesis, ask a simple question: Whom did Bill
Clinton run against? Well, the current officeholders and their
policies, of course. But besides that? Curiously enough, no
clear enemies emerge. This was a campaign surprisingly light on
red meat. The Clinton-Gore team wasn't really targeting the
business class (contrast its mild strictures with the
anti-fat-cat vitriol of an earlier era). Nor was it targeting
(as Reagan did so effectively) the "undeserving poor." It wasn't
even stigmatizing conservatives as such.

    By contrast, the Bush-Quayle campaign, from the
ill-starred G.O.P. Convention onward, regularly anathematized
a host of Others: the nefarious "cultural elite"; the make-work
lawyers in their tasseled loafers; the outlaw poor, who rioted
in L.A.; the "nuclear-freeze crowd"; tree-hugging
environmentalists; homosexuals and those perpetuating
"alternative life-styles" as morally equivalent; the godless
who, Bush reminded us, forget to put the three letters G-O-D in
their party platform. Most of all, it went after liberals,
especially those who pretended to be something else. The
Republican campaign had spawned more demons than you could shake
a crucifix at.

    As the fall campaign showed, it was easier to say what
Bush was against than what he was for; it was easier to say
what Clinton was for than what he was against. But Clinton
ultimately owed his victory not to the relative economic
advantages of neo-liberal remedies over supply-side nostrums but
to his vision of this nation as a community, his unflagging
search for common ground. "This is America. There is no `them,'
" Clinton likes to say. "There's only us." Which means that this
year's election was, among other things, a referendum on
inclusion.

    Sounds like so much election-year ozone? Take a closer
look.

    As an early member of the Democratic Leadership Council,
Clinton has spent the past several years trying to mend the
divisions that surfaced in the '60s. Inheriting a society
profoundly riven by color and class, he knows that liberalism
lost its political capital when it became perceived as something
that taxed the majority to advance "special" -- which is to say,
"minority" -- interests. Through an excess of gallantry and
zeal, liberalism itself created the alienated "them" that deeded
the Republicans the White House.

    Clinton's approach has been to advance programs that unite
black and white in common purpose. That means he has
consistently steered away from race-specific, even
need-specific, remedies, preferring universal social policies
instead. Job training. Universal health-care coverage. Access
to college loans. Apprenticeships for those who aren't college
bound. These are proposals whose potential beneficiaries, and
therefore supporters, aren't restricted to the poor. Not
incidentally, however, they are of particular value to the poor.
None of these things looks like a "poverty program." All would
combat poverty.

    Or take his well-publicized emphasis on pro-work welfare
reform. A covert way of pandering to white rancor? Funny, nobody
thought so when Jesse Jackson was calling for such measures in
1988. Contrary to popular belief, welfare payments -- including
Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps -- make
up only a tiny fraction of the federal budget, around 3%.
Reform designed to promote work, not dependence -- combining
earned-income tax credit and measures to promote, or at least
not penalize, savings -- would cost more, no question. Yet there
is good reason to think that Americans, who are skeptical of
handouts, will shell out more if it will be spent in ways they
approve of. As sociologist Christopher Jencks writes, "Americans
love to help people who are trying to help themselves." Is this
liberal? Conservative? Both?

    Or consider Clinton's emphasis on education. It was
conservative Chicago School economists like this year's Nobel
laureate, Gary Becker, who first hit upon the notion of "human
capital," the notion that education is an investment, like any
other capital investment, only more profitable. A recent survey
by two Princeton economists found that every additional year of
education at any stage increased income an average 16%. If so,
expanding the availability of education -- as through the
proposed National Service Trust Fund -- is just a smart
investment, while the Reagan-era cutbacks may have been
penny-wise and dollar-dumb. Liberal? Conservative? Does it
matter?

    In emphasizing race-neutral, universal policies, has
Clinton turned his back on black America? He's been accused of
it. Some black spokesmen have even chided him for delivering the
same speech to black audiences that he gives to white
audiences. Maybe they're missing the point. It means he's giving
the same talk to white audiences that he gives to black ones.
No coded messages. No tailored racial appeals, and no playing
off of interests.

    As it turns out, on the issues where, rightly or wrongly,
he departs from many black advocacy groups -- issues such as
capital punishment and welfare reform -- he's actually closer
to black public opinion than they are. "Blacks can't forget that
like it or not, they are part of this country too," observes
Derrick Bell, the black activist and legal scholar. "At some
point, we have to hope for the best with regard to racial issues
but recognize that we sink or swim with this society."

    Some are worried that Clinton has distanced himself from
the traditional black leadership. They see that he has been
less than intimate with the grand, grizzled heads of the civil
rights Establishment. In fact, his closest ties are with a
younger, and no less impassioned, generation of black leaders,
such as California Congresswoman Maxine Waters; Kansas City,
Missouri, Mayor Emanuel Cleaver; Chicago alderman Bobby Rush;
and New York City Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch Jr. It seems to have
dawned on Clinton, as it has dawned on few white politicians,
that 30 million African Americans do not speak with a single
voice. Now all this makes an older generation of civil rights
leaders uncomfortable. It's not their way of doing things. But
it just might be a way of getting things done.

    For sure, the coalition that Clinton scraped together may
prove an unstable one. One vote does not seal a partnership. But
as veteran Clintonologists have suggested, the real Clinton
campaign hasn't ended; it's just begun. For in a key respect,
the conservatives are right. There are profound differences of
values among the American people, differences that can never
quite be reconciled. The donnybrook over the NEA-funded Robert
Mapplethorpe photo exhibition was an immense distraction from
the affairs of state, but it put plenty of money into Senator
Jesse Helms' campaign coffers. Subjects on which many Americans
have mixed feelings -- including issues of sexual and
reproductive morality -- can easily be inflamed by politicians
intent on polarizing the polity. Divide the country, former
Nixon aide Pat Buchanan counseled his boss in 1969, and we'll
take the larger half. The "Kulturkampf," he resciently observed,
would be the conservatives' best friend.

    One of the most heartening signs of a larger-scale shift
in the social and political climate is the surprising failure
of the "values" campaign engineered by ideologues like Vice
President Dan Quayle's chief of staff William Kristol. It wasn't
family values as such that made people uncomfortable; it was the
politization of family values, their enlistment in a rhetoric
of intolerance, from which we recoiled. Maybe that "kinder,
gentler" ethic that Bush named in 1988 was bigger than he or his
speechwriters ever realized.

    "There is a religious war going on in this country for the
soul of America," Buchanan ringingly proclaimed in August. "It
is a cultural war . . . for the soul of America." If the new
society Clinton envisions is to emerge, the new President must
help broker the truce that most Americans seem to long for.
There is no instruction manual for this, but his instincts seem
sound. Declaring that the government "ought to give people a
good lettin' alone on things that are truly private," Clinton
seeks to defuse the issues that Republicans have sought to
manipulate for political advantage, and he does so by tapping
into the traditional conservative distrust of government
intrusion.

    Many on the right have nurtured a vision of America as a
country riven by warring creeds, as a Manichaean battleground
where the forces of good are arrayed in ceaseless struggle
against indulgence, decadence and anarchy. They complain about
the fragmentation of the American polity but fail to recognize
their own catalytic role. In fact, the trend they have backed
is to "ethnicize" ideology, to treat political labels such as
"liberal" and "conservative" as social identities, analogous to
such social designations as black, Chicano, gay. In their scheme
of things, these labels aren't just rough guides to political
inclination but, in some deeper sense, to who you really are.
If this is a powerful and insidious tendency, it is also one
that Clinton's very ideological ambiguity has effectively
undermined. What he has disavowed is not liberalism so much as
the omnipotence of the label.

    A new "vital center" will not emerge overnight. There are
thickets to clear. The culture wars have presented us with a
surfeit of either-ors. Traditional mores vs. urban decadence.
Communitarianism vs. individualism. Rights vs. responsibilities.
John Boy Walton vs. Bart Simpson. My values vs. yours. Yet as
a society, we've become demoralized by the mindless side taking.

    "On the one hand, on the other hand -- you can't govern
that way," an exasperated George Bush complained of his
Democratic rival. But isn't such a balancing of interests
precisely what effective governance consists of? What
President-elect Clinton may understand is that to overcome a
legacy of division, we must move into an era of two hands. Down
with either-or. Up with both-and.

    Both rights and responsibilities, both tradition and
modernity. Both your values and mine. And they will conflict,
these things we cherish: they will jostle and collide against
one another, and these clashes will determine and define who we
are. As the great political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin once
said, "The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution,
in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely
unattainable -- that is a truism -- but conceptually incoherent;
I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some
among the Great Goods cannot live together."

    For there is a cultural war going on and, indeed, there
always has been. But the conservative architects of division may
have misunderstood its fundamental nature. What if this war is
not for the soul of America? What if this war is the soul of
America?

    We are poised, uncertainly, before a new era, one in which
the common realm and the public square -- long shadowed by
suspicion -- must regain prestige. And one in which the often
overlooked social legacy of the New Deal must come back into
focus. Here, Robert Reich, one of Clinton's closest policy
advisers, points us in the right direction when he maintains
that "Roosevelt's boldest innovation had been designating the
nation as a community." In a day of multiculturalism, a day of
rapidly changing demographics, the challenge of rebuilding the
architecture of community looms larger than ever before. If
Clinton can cement the coalition his campaign scraped together
-- bringing disparate interests and values into some sort of
equilibrium, however uneasy -- he may do more than secure his
political fortunes. He just may help lay the foundations of a
truly New Society.