The Democratic Road Not Taken.

By Gary Hart, The New York Times

16 June 12

or more than four decades most Americans identified the Democratic Party with a social contract and safety net, equality of justice and opportunity, and progressive - yes, even liberal - causes. Sometime in the last 30 years the party of progress and change - Emerson’s party of hope - became the party of reactionary liberalism.

This phrase would be an oxymoron were it not for the fact that merely defending social programs, liberal programs, is reactionary. Those programs included Roosevelt’s social safety net, as expanded by Johnson’s Great Society, and the expansion of minority rights and women’s rights after that. They include the framework of environmental laws of the 1960s and ’70s, often supported and occasionally created by what were then moderate Republicans.

But beginning dramatically in the 1970s things changed. Things being: globalization and foreign competition; the decline of the manufacturing base; petroleum-producing nations controlling the price of oil; and the unsustainable costs of cold war military engagements and deployments.

The OPEC oil embargoes of 1974 and 1979 contributed to the combination of stagnation and inflation and to the flattening of household incomes for the first time since the beginning of World War II. Meanwhile, the numbers of people qualifying for assistance under New Deal and Great Society programs increased, as did the overall costs of operating those programs, especially in the area of health care.

The Democratic Party during this period had the opportunity to develop a new economic platform but failed to do so. Having no constructive response to a tide of economic and social revolutions, it clung to the defense of its historic social agenda, which required taxation of working class and middle income people to finance that agenda at a time when their own economic security was endangered. As Todd S. Purdum described this phenomenon recently in Vanity Fair, "the Democrats came across more and more as the crouched consolidators and defenders of past gains." Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein echoed this conclusion in their new book, "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks." The Democrats, they write, "have become the more status-quo oriented, centrist protectors of government."

The Democratic response of triangulation and centrism, essentially splitting the difference between reactionary liberalism and increasingly virulent conservatism, cost the party its identity. A few political figures of my generation, essentially those swept into office by the post-Watergate tidal wave in the mid-1970s, began to fashion an alternative, comprehensive, long-range agenda built around the managed transition of the economic base of the United States from traditional manufacturing to information and communications. In sum, this involved transforming our steel and auto industry into plants that produced high value products at which we could excel; combining a package of tax incentives, advanced scientific research investments, computer education and worker-training programs, information highway acceleration; and developing competitive free trade initiatives (as opposed to the protectionist measures that sought, Canute-like, to hold back the tide of globalization) that would help us maintain a lead in the emerging worlds of science and technology.

The confusion this effort to reposition the Democratic Party caused in the traditional political media of the time is suggested by the fact that within a two- or three-month period I was featured in one magazine as a "neo-liberal" and in another as a "neo-conservative." None of this agenda lent itself to traditional ideological categories.

This economic transformation policy came to be combined in my case with a new foreign policy approach detailed under the label "enlightened engagement" and thereafter with a post-cold-war defense policy based upon carefully detailed military reforms that anticipated the coming transformation of war and the rise of irregular, unconventional conflict. These initiatives were the answer to the clever debate taunt, "where’s the beef?" But they also resisted media insistence on sound-bite compression.

One does not have to agree with the details of these new departures in the three major policy areas of governance - the economy, foreign policy and defense - to admit that they did offer a much more positive response to the revolutions in globalization, information, energy, nationalism, and the transformation of conflict than the "crouched" defense of the status quo and past achievements.

The principal theory of those of my generation who believed every bit as strongly in the social contract and care for the needy as the most ardent New Dealer was that the economic pie must continue to grow to generate the revenues required to finance that contract. To argue that taxes on the working middle class must continue even as incomes contracted is to virtually guarantee a revival of conservatism and anti-government sentiments of the kind that now characterize our politics.

The Democratic Party has not only been the party of hope, the party of compassion and inclusiveness, it has also been the party of innovation. By failing to innovate some 30 years ago, it has permitted itself to lapse into the defensive, if not also reactionary, posture that now plagues it. A well-motivated Democratic president now struggles to move the nation forward against a conservative tide that emerged in the policy vacuum created by Democratic failure to adapt and in a political climate where many people, especially young people, do not know the basic principles of the current Democratic Party or what it stands for.