Left out

Where have all the liberals gone?

by Michael Crowley

For the long-suffering liberals of America, these are the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, they recognize that no grassroots movement or celebrity fundraiser could do more damage to the Republican right than the conservatives' own clumsy, unpopular, and -- as this week made clear -- failed attempt to depose the president.

On the other hand, liberals tend to like Bill Clinton better when he's being martyred by spiteful reactionaries than when he's actually doing his job. Clinton has, after all, been one of the most moderate Democratic presidents in history, single-handedly redefining his party almost as dramatically as Franklin Roosevelt did -- but in a vastly different way.

Since the grand failure of his health-care plan in 1994, Clinton has made himself into something of an anti-liberal, a man freed from the ideological bonds of his party. He has cut capital-gains taxes for the rich, inflated the military budget, signed a harsh welfare-reform law, bombed Iraq, backed a ban on gay marriage, fought unions on trade, expanded the federal death penalty, pared down civil liberties, exploited campaign-finance loopholes, and merrily joined in the vilification of Big Government. Clinton is called many things -- New Democrat, "Third Way" Democrat, centrist -- but to many liberals, he has become little more than a moderate Republican.

Now the process of choosing Clinton's successor has begun, and the 2000 Democratic nomination is likely to go to his heir apparent, Vice President Al Gore. Strategically, the nomination of Gore is probably good for the Democratic Party: Clintonism has become so popular that it even beat back an impeachment, and the vice president has been schooled in its arts for six years. But for the party's left wing, in exile for most of the 1990s, this likely coronation will be further confirmation of liberalism's marginal status in America today.

Liberals have long been resigned to the prospect of a Gore nomination. But recent announcements by two leading voices of liberalism who might have sought the presidency have underscored how silent the party's left wing has fallen under the New Democrat regime.

The first decision came in January from Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, one of the most unapologetically leftist politicians in America. Wellstone, who had planned to mount a campaign based on economic justice and political reform, says chronic back pain will force him not to run. And last week, House minority leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, a labor hero long considered Gore's most potent rival, announced that he'd rather help the Democrats win back control of Congress than campaign for the White House himself.

Each man held a different appeal for his party's left wing -- Gephardt was more electable, Wellstone more crusading -- but with both gone, it's possible that the far left will have no voice in the 2000 campaign. The Reverend Jesse Jackson says he's thinking it over, but he isn't expected to run. Massachusetts's own Senator John Kerry has been waiting out the Senate impeachment trial before announcing his plans -- but he seems an unlikely spokesman for the party's ideological fundamentalists. Former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley is already running, but he is more a cerebral moderate than an impassioned liberal.

At best, then, the Democratic primary is shaping up as a gentlemanly tussle between three wonky centrists in Gore, Bradley, and Kerry. These men would surely find important things about which to disagree. But what will be missing is a voice of conscience, a different story, a reminder of first principles. The Democratic Party has a rich tradition of crusaders who have challenged the favorite sons of the party establishment -- if only to make their voices heard. Think of segregationist George Wallace in 1964, anti-war crusader Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and even the flighty iconoclast Jerry Brown in 1992. This year it is the Republicans who will serve up ideological fundamentalists, from Christian moralist Gary Bauer to flat-taxer Steve Forbes. The Democrats will answer with no such candidate. And in a time when the political debate already ranges only from center to right-of-center, that's the last thing we need.

"[A liberal candidacy] raises issues that might otherwise not get raised," says Amy Isaacs, national director of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). In addition, she observes, ideologues can influence the other candidates in a campaign: "There is sure to be pressure from the right wing pulling [presidential candidates] to the right, and it is extremely useful to have an articulate voice out there pulling back from the liberal side."

OF COURSE, to many Americans, Al Gore is far from a moderate. On the contrary, this is the man who once called for a "Global Marshall Plan" to save the environment, at a cost to the United States of $100 billion per year. Like Clinton's, his support of abortion rights is unqualified (even if Gore opposed federal funding for abortion -- "arguably the taking of a human life" -- in the mid-1980s). As Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) puts it: "On a lot of the defining issues, Gore is a liberal."

Still, liberals have notoriously high standards for purity. And Gore fails to meet them on several fronts, leading Isaacs to label him a "dyed-in-the-wool moderate."

This assessment is based on Gore's close kinship with Clintonism, which he made clear in a December policy address. "We began by inventing a new and vibrant politics of the center, a politics that moved not left or right, but forward," Gore said. "Let us move politics not only farther forward, but also upward to a higher place, to a place far beyond the false divisions and dichotomies of the past." Translation: stay the course. Gore found a more elegant way of saying this, of course, summing up his vision as "practical idealism."

But that's an oxymoron if there ever was one. For better or worse, true liberalism is idealism, largely untempered by practicality. It is both liberalism's greatest strength and its most debilitating weakness that it imagines Utopia first, and figures out how to get there later. But our reach should always exceed our grasp. It's a mistake to let practicality become an end in itself, to fight only popular or winnable battles -- which is exactly what the administration's detractors say Clintonism is all about.

To be fair, Clinton and Gore were forced to accommodate the reality that budget deficits and public frustration with government made ambitious liberal activism next to impossible. To some extent, their moderation was a cunning realpolitik, a way to preempt a far more illiberal Republican agenda. But the problem is that if everyone is in on the co-optation game, the political debate inexorably creeps rightward -- just as it has done for the past several years. Somebody has to be a lifeguard, to remind Democrats of how far they've drifted from the shores of principle.

Dick Gephardt laid out the anti-centrist case with a December 1997 speech at Harvard, in which he assailed those "who now call themselves New Democrats -- but who set their compass only off the direction of others -- who talk about the political center, but fail to understand that if it is only defined by others, it lacks core values. And who too often market a political strategy masquerading as policy."

The policy Clintonism has produced in the past several years amounts to nibbles around the margins of government and society: some tax credits here, some education spending there. Since the health-care debacle, the Clinton-Gore administration has lost either the imagination or the political will for anything much more ambitious than school uniforms and the V-chip.

Largely unheard within the narrow Washington debate, however, a bold liberal agenda still exists. Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America's Future, a liberal Washington think tank, ticks off some potential themes for a presidential candidate speaking for the left: "Defense of our rather meager social-insurance system. A larger vision of the role of government investments in the future, possibly involving a shift in military priorities. A new trade regime that would try to reinforce and strengthen worker and environmental rights around the world. . . . A more ambitious effort to attack poverty." Also on the left's wish list are another crack at universal health care, a more progressive tax system, campaign-finance reform, a more urgent response to global warming, and a fresh assessment of US policy toward countries like China, Cuba, and Iraq.

Above all, however, the most potent liberal critique of the Clinton-Gore status quo is an economic one. On paper, of course, the good times are rolling in America: the stock market is up, unemployment is down, the budget's in surplus. But in a way, it is economic growth -- with its inequities and its threats to workers and the environment -- that gives critics on the left an opening.

To Barney Frank, skepticism toward the global free market is the "one defining issue" that will set true liberals apart from Al Gore in 2000. "Until recently, the notion was that the way in which you dealt with globalization was to let capital have total freedom, and once it found its best niche it'd be better off," Frank says. "That's trickle-down [economics] taken globally. We believe we can mitigate the bad effects without losing the good effects."

Such thinking would have been a core theme for Gephardt, who told the Boston Globe in 1997: "If you don't temper capitalism, it's a race to the bottom. . . . Capitalism left alone will defeat itself." For Gephardt, tempering capitalism means questioning the gospel of free trade that now reigns at the White House. He calls for more worker and environmental protections in such trade pacts as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and wants to tie Most Favored Nation status for China to human-rights reforms there. At home, Gephardt would simplify the tax code and tilt it away from the rich, and he'd pressure Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to speed economic growth through monetary policy. All these ideas are anathema to Wall Street -- but not to worry, bankers: Gephardt will be sitting out the race.

Where Gephardt posed a more realistic political threat, however, Jesse Jackson and Paul Wellstone are better able to frame economic policy in impassioned moral terms. In a December address at Washington's National Press Club, for instance, Jackson called the ever-widening gap between rich and poor "America's dirty little secret." He added: "You won't hear presidential candidates talking very much about this yet, if at all. Their finance directors will not allow them. . . . We need to talk about this gap. We need to confront it. We need to resolve it."

Wellstone, a master of the liberal-values stemwinder, was also prepared to raise the income-gap issue. "We need to be talking about what is not on the table," Wellstone said in a May 1997 speech. "What is not on the table are the monumental changes in the distribution of income and wealth that have occurred since 1980, the astonishing growth of personal wealth at the top, and the declines in the share of national pie received by the majority of Americans."

At a time when Democrats and Republicans alike tend to offer safe homilies to the suburban middle class, such discordant notes tend to go unnoticed. As the left-liberal media critic Norman Solomon noted this week, when Wellstone criticized Bill Clinton's budget proposal recently for failing to address "the broad and growing chasm that divides the wealthy and prosperous from the majority of Americans," the New York Times noted that "it was a sign of the Democratic Party's move to the center on fiscal issues that his critique was an isolated one." As a candidate, Wellstone would have been on every television and in every newspaper for weeks. But alas, not this time: his criticism of the budget merited just a few lines in the Times.

Economic justice is the most powerful issue available to a would-be liberal candidate, but it's not the only one. Wellstone, for instance, was planning a vigorous call for radical campaign-finance reform, an issue on which Al Gore -- he of the Buddhist temple -- has little credibility. Jackson wants to see diplomatic ties restored between the US and Cuba. Both men have addressed what Wellstone calls "the frightening concentration that we're seeing in the communications industry, with the enormous power this portends in controlling the flow of information to people." The list goes on. A candidate of the left would bludgeon the Clinton-Gore administration for pledging another $110 billion over the next six years to an indefensibly bloated Pentagon. He (or she) might question the human toll of US sanctions against Iraq, and demand fuller explanations of such stunts as Clinton's poorly justified missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan last August. He might hammer the administration's regressive record on civil liberties, which has included such highlights as the Communications Decency Act, new federal wiretapping powers, and new limits on the constitutional right of habeas corpus. Only a liberal would be free to remind the public that America is the only major Western democracy whose government executes its citizens. And a liberal would serve the essential purpose of countering the shiny happy spin from both Democrats and Republicans about the still-uncertain effects of welfare reform.

It's unlikely that such a liberal messiah will emerge in 2000. Jesse Jackson, for instance, was watching the Super Bowl with the president at Camp David last month -- not the behavior of a man preparing to take on Clinton's anointed successor. Jerry Brown is fretting about drainage and property taxes as the new mayor of Oakland, California.

But now that so much unoccupied territory lies to Gore's left, it's possible that Bill Bradley could cast himself as less a squeaky-clean policy wonk and more a liberal voice of conscience. Bradley has already said that he and Gore "clearly have a difference on welfare," and he criticized the 1996 federal welfare-reform law for cutting "the bond between the mother and the child." And his early rhetoric has addressed major health-care and poverty themes.

"More than 2.8 million children in America live in what is called deep poverty," reads a "Message from Bill Bradley" on his campaign Web site. "As they grow up, many of them become armed, dependent on drugs, preoccupied with a distorted sense of `respect' and uninterested in the future. We won't reach our potential as a nation until we improve this unacceptable situation." Particularly in light of John Kerry's recent centrist posturing on education, hard-core Democrats may be hoping that Bradley will choose to accept their liberal mission.

And they will keep the pressure on Gore himself. Says Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America's Future: "There will be progressive groups in places like New Hampshire and Iowa challenging the vice president and urging him to speak out in a certain way."

IT WOULD be nice to see a widespread liberal resurgence in America, in which the left's most ambitious ideas resonated with the public and were rewarded at the ballot box. But in the absence of a defining issue like the Vietnam war (which propelled the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy), or the emergence of a new leader with Bobby Kennedy charisma, liberalism seems faced with a long, slow road to recovery.

Indeed, it seems likely that good liberalism is still bad politics. Barney Frank persuasively argued as much in his 1992 book, Speaking Frankly: What's Wrong with the Democrats and How to Fix It, written in response to five Democratic losses in six presidential elections. Frank says that although it is theoretically possible to build a campaign on core liberal themes such as reduced defense spending and universal health care, "[p]ractically, the emotional and intellectual tenor of many Democratic activists makes it hard for them to resist the tendency to generalize these specific proposals for improvements in our society into a generalized criticism of its shortcomings. This is where we begin to lose votes."

Frank's admonition is still on the mark: when liberal constituency groups require Democratic candidates to kowtow before them, they merely make the party's nominee unelectable in the general election. The Democratic left must still learn to sell middle-class voters a progressive agenda in terms that don't scare them away (although the zeal of the Republican right may be starting to scare them more). At the moment, there appears to be no liberal ideologue who combines the charisma, the issues, and the careful rhetoric to mount a winning presidential campaign. But that's no reason for liberals to fall silent altogether. As the Democratic Party floats farther and farther from its moorings, it's vital that somebody keep its anchor in place.