The Democratic Party is in a historic state of (to steal a cerebral phrase from George Bush) deep do-do.
That`s the conclusion of a more elegant analysis in the May Atlantic that deems the Democratic Party, and our political system, at risk due to the polarization in American life inspired by one issue.
”Race” is the appropriate title of a cover story by the husband-wife team of Thomas and Mary Edsall, he a Washington Post political writer of uncommon intellectual breadth, she his frequent collaborator. Theirs is a map of a sea change in our political life.
They open with musings of a union carpenter in Chicago whom they view as defining the ”central dilemma of the Democratic party.” The party must keep moderate-income voters like him but is imperiled because the unionist blames the Democrats for the preponderance of ”welfare mothers,” of white taxpayers propping up municipal housing authorities, and black-dominated, ineffective public schools.
Such voters are portrayed as trapped in an ”explosive chain reaction of race, rights, values, and taxes.” It`s a process whose modern political roots the authors trace, not totally convincingly, to the 1964 Lyndon Johnson-Barry Goldwater contest, which turned race into ”partisan competition” as the two candidates clashed over passage of the Civil Rights Act.
The authors know that prejudice or outright racism are too simple to serve as sole explanations of subsequent trends. Instead, they say, the problem is how race became bound to a variety of issues, including violence, drug use and unemployment. This prompted a gap in how whites and blacks perceive issues that was widened in the late 1970s by the end of the trend in which black wages were catching up with white wages, the key demographic fact of white-led suburbanization, and a plummeting of the benevolent image of
”liberalism.”
The Edsalls show how Republicans exploited issues such as fairness in employment, isolating the defensive Democrats, who were branded as quota lovers. The Democrats became a party of ”poor, underclass black America”
that, ironically, now relies more than Republicans on special-interest funding, pork-barreling, gerrymandering of districts and congressional incumbency (which, the Edsalls might have added, is personified by the Illinois delegation).
While claiming to be apostles of reform, Democratic congressmen now get a majority of their campaign funds from political-action committees. The Edsalls argue that this ”weakens any claim” they have to being populist and ties them to forces of reaction on parochial interests, such as water projects and rice subsidies.
Their harsh analysis (which leaves out voter apathy, the stagnant nature of a system fueled by money, and the virtually institutionalized gutlessness of national politics) concludes by underscoring how conservatives have been handmaidens to the affluent.
To believe that the poor or the working class will be aided by conservatives ”risks serious damage to both groups,” they conclude. As the Democrats flail, the nation loses a political, cultural and economic vitality traditionally assured, even fostered, by ”a sustained and vibrant insurgency.”
Nice touch: April 29 Insight sticks its front cover where the back cover usually goes, with an ad on the front, to highlight a story on left-handers. … When a Kansas high schooler founded the magazine, most surely thought it a wacky idea. But May Runner`s World celebrates a 25th anniversary, profiling the late Steve Prefontaine and legendary New Zealand Olympic gold medalist Peter Snell, 52, now an exercise physiologist in Dallas who finds the dropoff in athletes` performance when they hit age 45 to be dramatic.
Calvin Trillin has this brief book review in April 29 Nation: ”Oh, Kitty K., what hast thou wrought?/The dirt that in thy net thou`st caught/Must make the Reagans so distraught./That Nancy`s bad by now we ought/To know. We know the clothes she`s bought./This book, though, hath a bombshell brought:/She`s even badder than we thought.”
Madonna discusses the lower anatomy of Warren Beatty in May 7 Advocate. … May Esquire brings together Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal for a mellow, even snoozy, conversation, including minor fencing on the legacy of Tennessee Williams and on rating the Kennedy boys. Mailer gives top ranking to Teddy
(!), who is also the object of an April 29 Time psycho-profile that focuses on his boozing.
