Is Clinton a chastened, converted liberal? Or does he just believe the White House is worth a moderate speech? Republicans will say his acceptance speech, sounding themes of entrepreneurship and responsibility, was mere trimming for tactical purposes. That is not a frivolous suspicion about a man who entered polities in the service of George McGovern and who was nominated by a convention composed of delegates more liberal than even most Democrats.
Dukakis learned what happens to a Democratic nominee who runs from the liberal label. When he told the 1988 convention that the election would be about “competence,” not “ideology,” Republicans pounced. Clearly Dukakis himself thought that his liberalism was a handicap. There is a striking difference between the two parties today. Ask a Republican running for office if he or she is a conservative and chances are he or she will say, “Darn tootin’.” Ask a Democrat running if he or she is a liberal and he or she is apt to exclaim nervously, “Labels do not matter!”
Oh yes they do. The words “liberal” and “conservative” denote beliefs that are motives for actions. It is pathetic that Democrats cannot redefine liberalism by reassociating it with popular actions. What is the most broadly and deeply popular thing American government has done in this century? Social Security. Liberals did it. Of all that government has done since the Second World War, of what are Americans most proud? The civil rights laws that liberals wrote before they degraded the phrase “civil rights” into a cover for a racial spoils system. Clinton cannot win unless he rounds on Republicans and defends his liberalism by distinguishing it from other liberalisms. Liberalism is a faith with several sects, and Clinton’s recent utterances suggest he is a communicant in what can be called the church of middle liberalism.
Clinton could have usefully taken the country on an imaginary Manhattan walk from Madison Square Garden to where, in 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory resulted in the deaths by suffocation or jumping-the building had only one fire escape, no fire extinguisher and many doors were locked–of 146 women workers. Michael Barone, in “Our Country,” his history of American politics from 1930 to 1990, says the flames lit the fire of modern Liberalism. Watching in horror from the street was a young social worker, Frances Perkins, who 22 years later would come the first woman in a president’s cabinet (FDR’s secretary of labor). She served on the commission that the fire and advocated many health and safety laws that defined a kind of liberalism-the use of government to regulate enterprise and shape society’s allocation wealth, opportunity and security.
American polities can be considered a tale of three liberalisms, the first of which, classical liberalism, teaches that the arena of human affairs is society, as distinct-very government. Government’s proper function to protect the conditions-life and liberty, primarily-for individual’s private pursuit of happiness. This is now called conservatism, but until the New Deal it was the Jeffersonian spirit of most of the Democratic Party.
FDR knew that New Deal liberalism was significantly more ambitious. He said that until the emergence of the modern industrial economy, “government had merely been called upon to produce the conditions within which people could live happily, labor peacefully and rest secure.” Now it would be called upon to play a grander role. It would not just provide conditions in which happiness, understood as material well-being, could be pursued. Rather, it would become a deliverer of happiness itself. Government, FDR said, has “final responsibility” for it. This “middle liberalism” of the New Deal supplemented political with economic rights.
The New Deal-the modern state it created and the class of people for whom that state provided employment-led to the third liberalism, that of the 1960s and 1970s. This “managerial liberalism” celebrates the role of intellectuals and other policy elites in rationalizing society from above, using the federal government, especially the judiciary, and the “science” of public administration, meaning bureaucracy. This liberalism promised that government mastery of economic management would end business cycles, thereby guaranteeing a steady flow of revenues for building a good-no, merely good is not good enough–a great society. According to this liberalism the creative agency is not society but government, which molds society like modeling clay.
The result of this liberalism was an overreaching, overbearing nanny government. It caused a proliferation of whiny, dependent factions claiming victimization and demanding entitlements. It also caused a conservative reaction that swept liberals into the political wilderness.
The 1930s taught a majority of Americans to think that the free market is a fragile and sometimes perverse thing, and that government is generally more efficient than private sector institutions. The Second World War, during which government organized prodigies of productivity, reinforced the public’s faith in the public sector. The high tide of that faith came in the 1960s, the politically formative years for Clinton and his running mate. Indeed, Al Gore, something of an environmental hysteric, seems to have boundless confidence in government’s ability to organize the future by accurately foretelling and wisely regulating economic and scientific advances.
But now Clinton, leading a liberal party weary of the wilderness, says that an entrepreneurial economy is that on which all other policies depend. He says that the “forgotten middle class” (actually, politicians think of little else) and not various “victims” of American life is the focus of attention. And he says welfare recipients have a responsibility to go to work. So he now says. The question is, has he learned the lessons of America’s recent history, or just the tactics of Henry of Navarre?
