Part of the Way with Jimmy

EVEN IN PLATITUDE and papered-over unity, it's hard to hate the Democrats. They remind you of a doddering old, favorite grandmother, slightly out of step with the times, forcing the same old remedies on you--in this case, public works to insure full employment, more social services tied to increased government efficiency (this year's cliche, but remember that FDR promised to balance the budget), and the achievement of the American dream for all within the next Carter administration. We shouldn't be too cynical, though. The old girl has heart, her mistakes nothing more than the shortcomings of her nation's people: too much faith in their ability to tinker with an economy which really should be restructured to face a reality of monopoly corporate power; belief that supersession of the "special interests" will be a matter of Ralph Nader-type government regulation; and that all we need is an honest man to lead us in sacrifice and renewal of our pioneer toughness.

Next to that, the Republicans are a low, base, scary spectre. Hunter Thompson, writing about Nixon's last campaign, said that Republican victory rests on the assumption that the United States is a land of 215 million used car salesmen--that we should respond to our poor people and the world's underprivileged in a spirit of paranoia, that we ought to shoot first and ask questions later, that free enterprise somehow means huge government subsidies to corporations with too much decision-making power over the kind of work we do and the kinds of dreams we have. It's ironic to the point of national neurosis that the most extreme of the Republicans, the self-dubbed part of capitalist "freedom," should represent near-fascism; and that the Democrats, often described by the Right as creepingly socialistic and thus, totalitarian, should have Its trust-busting extremists favoring somehing like a small-scale competitive economy and society.

Political correspondents from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, NBC News, ad infinitum, are delivering a conventional wisdom that the Democrats latest convention is evidence of a return to conservative sanity after the ideological rending of 1968 and 1972. Martin Nolan, one of the best of Washington columnists, compares the McGovern and Carter installations as a constrast between a Rotary convention and Woodstock nation. This viewpoint implies that the Democrats have gone back to being something akin to the Christian Democrats of Italy--a permanent majority party dedicated to winning elections and dispensing patronage, oblivious to broader issues since the American electorate is itself "non-ideological." The foregoing opinion has the virtue of being comfortable: it tells people like my father, a liberal man who's voted for Roosevelt four times, Trumanonce, Stevenson twice. Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey (and wishes he'd voted for McGovern) that the world's oldest, continuous political party is still pretty much the same. Not too much will be different with Jimmy Carter as president and the Democrats retaining their nearly two-thirds congressional majority, the experts imply.

THAT DOESN'T SEEM ALTOGETHER right to me. Look at the platform, written by Carter's people and approved by the candidate. It commits the nation to a foreign policy more progressive than anything seen since the international popular front of democratic forces in World War II. It says that we can no longer intervene to preserve the status quo in most of the world where, as Frank Church put it, there is no status quo; that means in Angola, Chile, and Indochina. Charter's closest advisers of foreign affairs, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball, point to the primacy of our alliance with the Social Democratic states of Western Europe, all of whom had better stands than the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford axis on Spain, Portugal and Italy, as well as the third world. The "European alliance," stressed at the expense of U.S. Soviet relations, means the diminution of tit-for-tat negotiating with the Soviets, lessening the chance of nuclear war growing out of quarrels like those which recently brewed over southern Africa. We can also expect more support from a Carter administration for majority rule in that area--not least because black Americans were Carter's earliest and most loyal supporters in the primaries.

On school busing, on abortion, on welfare, and employment programs, the Democratic platform will be far more progressive than the Republicans, though don't believe for a second that the conservative wing of the party hasn't exacted its price. To hold his power base in Texas and the oil producing states in general, Carter has not revealed his position on oil monopolies and the need for a national energy corporation. Nor has he really addressed the problem of deregulation of natural gas prices, for the same reason. His other deplorably weak stand is on national defense, where clowns like Admiral Elmo Zumwalt have way too much influence with him. A $5.7 billion defense cut isn't much, especially compared to what McGovern people were talking about four years ago. But the faction embracing Sen. Henry Jackson is still in the party, as Moynihan's apparently popular candidacy attests, and the uneasy coalition of social forces that the Democrats represents will remain in tension at least through November 2.

SO, THE DEMOCRATIC convention was not so much a repudiation of 1972's majority and the Chicago convention's large minority as it was a consolidation of certain gains, the greatest of them in the international policy sphere. The Democratic party can now go only so far rightward and still maintain itself, the Democratic left having formed during the struggles against the Viet Nam war and currently composing from a third to a half of the party.

In a related way, the latest primary campaign and convention--for all the latter's stability, widely mistaken for conservatism--continued a gradual power shift of some importance, masked by the "good government" rhetorical appeal of Carter, who all along has sought support on the basis of his personal qualities rather than issues. The old AFLCIO labor bosses are on the outs, having supported Jackson; and the more liberal union leaderships, like those of the Auto Workers, State, County and Municipal workers, National Education Association, and the coal miners, have grown in power, having backed Carter and at least partially responsible for his victories in Iowa, Florida and Michigan.

The latter group, as The New York Times reported yesterday, was more numerous at the convention just ended. And in its eschewal of New Deal reformism (which always comes from on top, and protects corporate control), and its willingness to at least consider options like workers' say in managing production, they form the nucleus of what the Democrats could perhaps come to be: a social democratic labor party of the European type. But the Democrats are possibly more alive than those relics: they contain a cross-section of the nation, have little real opposition to their left, and the Democratic progressives' long exile in the opposition has made them a bit more skeptical of pure welfare-statism than its European counterparts.

QUALIFIED support for Carter-Mondale and the Democrats seems in order, then, particularly if the Right's candidate is Reagan or if a race against Ford looks close come late October. The Democrats put Cezar Chavez up there, and I saw as many women as men on the platform and almost as many on the convention floor; there were also enough black people on hand so Madison Square Garden didn't resemble a Brigham Young University pep rally, like the Republicans in Kansas City undoubtedly will. The potential mass left-wing in America is with the Democrats now--the huge number of working people with everyday worries about family and money and being taken advantage of by the "special interest" hucksters and their men like Reagan and Connally. And we too should be part of the way with the Democrats.