Donkeys, Lice, Gorillas

MOST PEOPLE seem to have taken a refreshingly restrained view of the Democratic party's off-year charter convention, which is just as well. Advance reports predicted a sort of monumentally dubious battle for the soul of the party. There's a character in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, who may be an appropriate laureate for the party that invented the Vietnam War, with the last word on that kind of analysis. "'You have scarce the soul of a louse,' he said, 'but the roots of sin are there.'" Robert S. Strauss, the Democrats' party chairman, compared the party not to a louse but to a gorilla, but he evidently had only the mildest, friendliest, least threatening kind of gorilla in mind--after all, the party did not want to frighten any potential voters away.

Whenever anyone at the Kansas City convention wanted to show what a great job the convention was doing, he announced that it was so broadly based that everyone could support it, and the huge photogenic banner that overlooked the delegates' deliberations incisively described the base of support they aimed at--as "We the Democrats of the United States." In case there were still any doubters, the Democrats proceeded to make it explicit in their charter: the first purpose of the Democratic party is to elect Democratic candidates to the presidency and other national offices. It's the sort of party goal that makes the ideological diversity all the speakers kept praising easily attainable.

BUT SINCE PEOPLE are bound to have ideas about how to solve their problems, ideological concerns inevitably surfaced at the convention anyway. And because almost all the Americans most affected by economic crisis and with the greatest interest in social change are in the Democratic party, while the majority of the folks with most to lose through social change aren't among the people referred to in that banner, the convention probably foreshadowed some of what will matter to American politics as the depression starts to really strike home.

The first surprising thing about the convention--the one that almost got old stalwarts like Al Barkan of the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education to walk out--was its renewed, if modified, support for affirmative action to make sure minorities, women and young people are represented within the party. On the face of it, this kind of equal-representation issue might seem tough for people who call themselves Democrats to oppose. But since the labels people give themselves are generally less important than their backgrounds, it's not too surprising that one wing of affirmative action's supporters--the rich and fashionably frivolous liberals who form, say, the basic readership of New York magazine--have already begun to sour on it, as journalists assure them that labor will never stand for it and the economy starts to limit the opportunities they've counted on.

SINCE MOST WHITE male workers probably don't care all that much about affirmative action, and a lot of them even accept journalists' assurances that new opportunities for women and blacks can only come at their expense, that leaves blacks, some women and the other wing of affirmative action's other supporters. It's probably a lot of not-so-well-off teachers, students, and other white-collar workers, and some younger professional people--a Village Voice readership instead of a New York magazine one, the kind of people who'd have been in the radical, non-socialist or moderately socialist wing of a 1930s Popular Front. Most of the old-time Democrats don't think much of these people, but from Richard Daley on down they evidently feel that along with blacks and women they're needed to capture elections, and maybe that they're easily cajoled into doing so: "Let's go fishing," said Brecht's angler to the worm.

But the other major decision of the Kansas City convention suggests that a comparison to the Popular Front of the '30s is more than fanciful. The convention came out for wage, price, and profit controls--it's not a particularly radical proposal, and a lot of delegates said they just wanted something different from what President Ford was offering. But it's still the first time a major party has written an economic program into its charter. And the convention's rhetoric, with its strong stress on price and profit controls and the benefits a Democratic victory would offer working-class and other "little" people, suggests that as the economy gets worse, the party will move further in that direction.

MOST BIG UNIONS from the Auto Workers down have quiet but nonetheless official positions for an expanded welfare state--national health care, a guaranteed income, the kind of thing that European Social-Democrats push. These proposals wouldn't revolutionize American society, any more than the '30s' New Deal did, but they'd make it considerably more comfortable and more democratic, as the New Deal did.

As the crunch gets worse, and more and more workers find their wages and jobs insecure, such proposals will probably seem more and more important. The Democrats certainly aren't pushing them now, and the people who run the party--Strauss and the candidates--would no doubt prefer to leave things the way they are. But they may not be able to. Especially if there's a minor leftist upsurge like that of the '30s, the Democratic gorilla may find itself advocating a new New Deal.