Liberalism's third act?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2008 by Robert J. Bresler

MODERN LIBERALISM, rifled the New Deal, opened on the American stage in the 1930s under the direction of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its promise was to bring some minimum guarantees of a decent life to U.S. citizens. What followed was the Social Security program, unemployment insurance, public works spending, welfare for widows and orphans, and, during World War II, the most successful program, the GI Bill of Rights. By today's standards, these initiatives were quite modest. Nonetheless, Roosevelt insinuated into the American political mainstream the idea that the government was responsible for providing the good life.

The second act of American liberalism, the Great Society, introduced by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, was, reflecting the man, hardly modest, and took Roosevelt's ideas to the next level. This cornucopia included, among other programs, vast Federal subsidies to elementary and secondary education, Medicare, Model Cities, an array of antipoverty initiatives, and aid to the arts and humanities. Unlike Roosevelt's New Deal, which came in the midst of the Great Depression, when there was a public demand for government action, Johnson's Great Society emerged in a time of unprecedented prosperity. In his zeal to take advantage of the massive congressional Democratic majorities his 1964 landslide produced, Johnson designed programs--with the exception of Medicare and aid to education--for which there had been no grassroots demand. His Great Society was the product of an emerging new class of policy intellectuals made up of social scientists, lawyers, and social workers. Poverty, they assumed, resulted from behavior pathologies that could be ameliorated by the right mix of interventionist strategies and government programs. These initiatives, such as the Job Corps, Community Action Programs, Manpower Development, and Model Cities, had mixed results at best. They did generate a bureaucratic enclave designed to serve a special constituency of governmental clients. In short, the Great Society made little impact on most working- and middle-class Americans. If you were not elderly, poor, or a minority, the Great Society was something you only paid for or read about.

The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, accompanied by Democratic congressional majorities close to what Johnson enjoyed, was to have ushered in the third act of American liberalism. Sadly, it was a show dressed up with nowhere to go. Carter had no overarching agenda and the dramatic label that would have gone with it. In fact, he knew that he could not be elected as another embodiment of LBJ. During his campaign, he sounded what later became known as neoliberal themes--reorganizing the Federal government, reforming the tax laws, and balancing the budget. As president, he resisted any dramatic expansion of health care, welfare, and urban assistance. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called him the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. Crushed by double-digit inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, and a liberal revolt in his reelection campaign led by Ted Kennedy, Carter's one-term presidency ended having made little or no impact on the course of American liberalism. Bill Clinton's presidency, after the failure of his health care plan and the election of a Republican Congress looked more like a Democratic version of Eisenhower Republicanism. With the exception of his personal scandals, Clinton will be known best for balanced budgets, capital gains tax reductions, and welfare reform.

The past indeed is a cautionary tale. Just as Johnson's liberalism overreached, Carter and Clinton's underreached. Now, the Democratic Party is looking for another chance and toward the 2008 presidential and congressional elections with their greatest expectations in more than 30 years. The Democrats already control the House of Representatives and have little chance of losing it next fall--and there are possibilities of picking up enough seats to put them tantalizingly close to a filibuster-proof Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass anything of consequence.

Of course, no one should predict a November election in January, and a Republican comeback is not out of the question. Putting that possibility aside, let us assume that a Democratic president is elected with strong working majorities in both houses of Congress. Then, what? Will we finally see the enactment of liberalism's third act? There are serious obstacles in the way. First, there are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their continuing costs. What president would want to walk away from those conflicts after years of sacrifice and progress? Who wants their names associated with such a national disgrace? Second, there are the demands for continuous protection against another serious terrorist attack. Homeland security, which the Democrats have claimed remains inadequate, does not come cheap. If the Bush Administration ends without another Sept. 11-type attack, no Democrat would want to see one on his or her watch.