After the Deluge

After the Deluge

November 11, 1980



The analytical vultures of both print and screen have already picked the bones of the 1980 Reagan victory clean, telling us it’s a watershed in politics, it shows the nation’s anger at President Carter, its confidence in Reagan, its unhappiness about the economy, its growing conservatism, its resurgent Republicanism. Whether few or all of these interpretations prove correct, the commentary has undoubtedly heartened many of the voters who elected Reagan, who voted Senators George McGovern and Birch Bayh out of office, who passed proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts, who elected Alfonse D’Amato to the Senate from New York. They wanted their votes to add up to a “mandate,” and it looks like that’s the way the nation is taking them.

But there’s another group of voters out there that feels none of the intoxication of post-mortem election analysis. Tuesday night brought for them a numbness that came on like a novacaine injection all at once at about 8:15 p.m., and lingers still. For these voters—many former supporters of Edward Kennedy, or backers of John Anderson, or supporters of smaller third parties, or even those who “held their noses and voted for Carter”—the election not only rejected their candidates but told them they no longer were part of American politics. “America is a conservative nation now,” the Reagan-blue electoral vote maps on TV screens told them, and all the instant analysts agreed.

In fact, the system of government has become dominated by conservatives, for a time at least; but to take 1980 as proof that the nation as well has shifted irrevocably right is to ignore the election’s simple numbers and its circumstances. Reagan’s sweeping electoral victory translates to a 51 percent to 41 percent popular vote lead in a pool of barely over half the eligible voting population. That is a powerful victory, but not a landslide.

The Republican ascendancy in the Senate shocked many Democrats who had become complacent in their control of Congress, and certainly it adds color to the visions of “America Swinging to the Right” that are multiplying on magazine covers. But it is as much a tribute to the tactical skill of New Right organizers who have mobilized the support of fundamentalists and other right-leaning, formerly apolitical groups through the use of national computer address banks. The answer for 1984 is simple: the left must organize itself to counteract this new force, using similar computerized-mailing tactics if necessary.

More important, liberals who feel the nation has abandoned them should look at the history of the election itself and its candidates before they leave the country. The 1980 presidential election cannot truly be called a defeat for liberalism because no liberal was on the ballot as a major candidate. Neither Carter nor Anderson presented economic or foreign policies that were fundamentally different from the Republican tradition of fiscal conservatism and increased defense spending.

Carter’s defeat represents a setback for the Democratic Party in the short run, certainly, and Reagan’s election presents troubling prospects for the next four years. But 1980 offers, with bitter finality, a vital lesson for Democratic leaders as the party regroups for the next decade: that for the Democratic Party to get out its voters and mobilize its power, it must take Democratic stands and nominate Democratic candidates. For future reference, this means that the party’s presidential nominee should not support the use of unemployment to combat inflation, should not support a foreign policy of military intervention, and should work as energetically to defend the consumer and the workingman from their corporate predators as to protect the vitality of American industry.

Democrats who respond to the “mandate” of the 1980 election by scurrying to the right will probably find their jobs taken from them by identical-looking Republican challengers in a few years. Jimmy Carter lost because he failed to define how he differed from Reagan’s blatant appeal to human greed and senile values—others who follow in his path will follow him to political limbo. This election was a defeat for the half-baked party Carter hoped to forge, not for the party that Franklin Roosevelt did forge and the one that can emerge strong from this year. If 1980 becomes engraved in history books as a milestone, let it be known not as one in the nation’s move to the right, but as one for the Democratic Party: the year in which the party lost the presidency to find itself.