By David Reich
Race, religion, and the clash of competing economic interests have driven
American politics since the nation's infancy. While early struggles over
slavery, religious tests for public office, and central banking may have
given way to conflicts on things like affirmative action, government-sponsored
religious expression, and tax progressivity, the underlying themes have
remained the same.
Yet considering the small resemblance between America today and the
country of farmers and artisans that we were in 1800, it seems fair to
wonder how much longer Americans will hearken to these themes. For an answer
we went to four N.U. professors at the top of their fields. While not in
full agreement with one another, and with a fair amount of hedging, they
say that although economic issues will continue to be as important as ever,
race and perhaps religion are loosening their grip on American voters,
with effects that are already being seen in the run-up to the 2000 presidential
election.
Distinguished Professor of Political Science Michael Dukakis-whose loss
to George Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign has sometimes been blamed
on Bush's appeals to racial animosity-says race may have finally played
itself out as an issue than can move large numbers of voters.
Dukakis was the target of the notorious "Willie Horton" television
ad, which showed menacing-looking photos of Horton, a black man who had
beaten and raped a white housewife while on furlough from a Massachusetts
prison. A narration suggested that Dukakis, then Massachusetts' governor,
cared more about criminals than about crime victims.
While the candidate-turned-professor says the Horton ad badly hurt his
chances for election, the country hasn't seen its like since 1988. Dukakis
theorizes that after the election, voters were revolted by their neighbors'-or
their own-susceptibility to crude racial appeals. "There was a backlash
after the '88 election," he says. "I can't remember the state,
but a couple of years after, there was one major congressional or senatorial
race where one of Bush's media guys was hired. His being hired became an
issue, and he finally had to get out of the campaign."
The country's demographics are changing; social scientists predict that
by 2050, people of color will make up more than half the U.S. population.
That may also help explain the disappearance of Horton-style appeals, and
of the anti-Latino, anti-immigrant rhetoric heard in California in the
mid-1990s. "We're certainly getting a lot browner, and it makes a
difference," says Dukakis. When ultraconservative Orange County, California,
Congressman Robert Dornan "gets his head handed to him" in both
the 1996 and 1998 elections by Latina Democrat-and now U.S. Representative-Loretta
Sanchez, "that's a message," Dukakis says. "And when the
Republican Congress of 1995 passes tough anti-immigrant legislation and
gets its head handed to it . . . especially in California, it didn't surprise
me that a number of California Republicans went back to the Congress in
'97 and said, 'Hey, we're with the president on repeal of some of this
restrictive stuff.' "Perhaps for the same reason, George W. Bush-the
son and namesake of the man who ran the Willie Horton ad-has heavily courted
Latino voters both in his campaigns for governor of Texas and in the 2000
presidential race. Barry Bluestone, the Russell B. and Andrée B.
Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy, says, "Bush, to his
credit, has built strong bridges to the Latino community and even parts
of the black community. I think he recognizes this is critical. That's
why he talks about himself as a compassionate conservative."
Changing demographics may be affecting voting patterns in another way.
"The young people I'm teaching tend to be much more open, much more
tolerant of diversity" than students ten years ago, Dukakis says.
"Maybe that's because of their experiences. Look, Kitty and I went
to a high school with four black kids and five Chinese kids . . . Today
there are sixty-four racial and ethnic groups represented at that school.
It's just a whole different world!"
A final explanation for the declining significance of race in our electoral
politics comes from Bluestone, who ties the effectiveness of the "race
card" to concerns about affirmative action programs aimed at helping
women and people of color get jobs in fields they had previously been shut
out of. "Affirmative action is not a problem in a growing economy
where there are lots of jobs around," says Bluestone. "Trying
to provide more opportunity for a green person or a blue person or a black
person doesn't take much opportunity away from others. [But] we imposed
affirmative action just at the time when the economy was undergoing tremendous
deindustrialization, when growth was slowing down, when income inequality
was rising. And more and more workers who had at least remembered their
parents if not themselves as having had great economic security and [who]
were now experiencing great job insecurity, they looked at affirmative
action and said 'This is aimed at me.' "
By contrast, in the red-hot economy of the late 1990s, Americans "are
less susceptible to the kind of scapegoating that the Willie Horton ad
represented," Bluestone argues. "There is a real link between
how well the economy is doing and the nature of racial and ethnic attitudes."
In "Under God," his 1990 book on religion and american politics,
journalist/historian Gary Wills argues that "religion has always been
at the center of our major political crises, which are always moral crises-the
supporting and opposing of wars, of slavery, of corporate power, of civil
rights, of sexual codes, of 'the West,' of American separatism and claims
to empire." Wills could have added a long list of issues fought out
over the last two decades and still unsettled as a new century begins-issues
like abortion, censorship, government-sponsored religious expression, public
school curricula, and women's role in society. Particularly since the rise
of the religious conservative movement in the late 1970s, even such apparently
secular issues as criminal justice and welfare reform have often taken
on religious overtones.
Yet observers like Jack Levin, the Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor
of Sociology, downplay religious conservatives' power to affect elections.
Says Levin, "They may have made more noise, they may have inspired
Americans to think about certain issues, but that doesn't mean, if you
look at the data, that Americans ever supported them on these issues-including
impeaching the president, the right-to-life movement. It was never a majority
position for Americans according to every survey I've seen."
Religious right voters, Dukakis adds, "were a much greater factor
in the congressional elections of '94, where they made up about thirty
percent of the Republican vote" than in his own 1988 defeat, where
many more voters came to the polls, thus diluting the religious right vote.
But an analysis relying solely on voter numbers leaves out the invaluable
service religious conservative volunteers render for their party, as well
as their power to shape debates, points out sociologist Debra Kaufman,
Matthews Distinguished University Professor, director of N.U.'s Jewish
Studies Program and founder of the Women's Studies Program. For example,
the abortion rights debate "shouldn't have been fought in terms of
rights-the rights of the mother versus the rights of the child-but as a
social justice issue," Kaufman asserts. "That is, if life weren't
so difficult for people, maybe these choices wouldn't have to be made."
But the highly mobilized religious right, with its myriad interlocking
groups, has shaped the abortion rights debate in child-versus-mother terms
from the outset, she says. Kaufman adds that, even though Roe versus Wade
is settled law, the continuing struggle over things like public funding
and late-term abortions forces abortion rights supporters to spend energy
and money they might use on other issues and on electoral campaigns-in
short, that the abortion fight keeps them pinned down. And even where voter
numbers are concerned, she says religious conservatives are "pivotal"
when you combine their numbers with those of secular conservatives. "Who
do you think brought Reagan in?" she asks rhetorically.
Despite recent setbacks for the religious right such as the outcome
of President Clinton's impeachment trial and the Christian Coalition's
loss of tax-exempt status, Kaufman thinks the movement and its issues will
continue to affect our politics through think-tanks, legal institutes,
universities, and other institutions, which, she predicts, "will have
very long lives." Dukakis disagrees, however, saying that "the
steam seems to be out of the movement."
So far, Campaign 2000, and especially George W. Bush's campaign, gives
some evidence for both the Kaufman and Dukakis views. Religious-right candidates
like Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes have fared poorly in opinion polls, and
Bush has consistently soft-pedaled the social issues that energize religious
conservative voters, even in his September 1999 speech to the Christian
Coalition. On the other hand, Bush has sought and won the endorsement of
televangelist Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition founder, and has hired
Ralph Reed Jr., the coalition's erstwhile executive director, as a top
campaign advisor. These moves may well pay off in a nation where, according
to a recent Gallup poll, seventy percent of the citizens support school
prayer and forty percent support the teaching of creationism instead of
evolution.
But even if religious issues have little effect on this year's election,
Levin cautions that they could reassume their old importance should a new
recession come. "The same voters who might be persuaded by survivalism,
the militia movement, or Pat Buchanan, may also be persuaded by the religious
right," he says. "Just like these other alternatives, the religious
right seems to thrive when mainstream politics lose credibility. I think
it really depends on how the economy fares in the next several years."
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 with a populist campaign that
homed in on "the economy, stupid," and this year even GOP front-runner
Bush is talking about his wish to avoid a society "of haves and have-nots."
Clearly, in addition to their influence on voter response to racial and
religious electoral appeals, economic issues can also stand alone as a
powerful election theme.
To begin with, today's costly TV-based campaigns give the wealthy more
power than ever to turn elections-and to influence government policy. This
has never been truer than in the run-up to the 2000 presidential race.
Five presidential candidates-including a former vice president, a U.S.
senator, and two former cabinet secretaries-had dropped out of the Republican
primary process a year before the election-even before the first debate!-because
of to funding problems. Meanwhile, odds-on favorite Bush had raised an
unprecedented $70 million and eschewed federal campaign funds to be eligible
for unlimited private contributions.
As for the relation between money and political influence, it's becoming
more and more transparent, thanks to efforts by Senators John McCain and
Russell Feingold to rewrite the campaign finance laws. McCain, who's emerged
as Bush's chief rival for the GOP presidential bid, is staking his whole
campaign on the issue. As an example of money corrupting the legislative
process, McCain, during a recent Senate debate, pointed to "the so-called
1996 Telecommunications Reform Act," saying, "Anybody . . . who
looks at the results, which are increases in cable rates, phone rates,
mergers, and lack of competition, clearly knows that the special interests
are protected in Washington and the public interest is submerged."
In a similar vein, Dukakis says that numerous provisions of the tax bill
that emerged from the Republican Congress last year can be traced back
to major GOP donors.
Even more important to contributors than getting to write particular
provisions into tax or trade or regulatory legislation is "setting
the whole context of the economic debate," says Bluestone, who has
detailed how Wall Street executives and major Clinton financial backers
Robert Rubin and Roger Altman signed on as Treasury Department officials
in 1993 and went on to set the tone for the administration's economic policy.
The president, Bluestone points out, had run in 1992 on a platform that
talked about government investment in things like health care, education,
public transportation, and roads and bridges. But by mid-1993, Bluestone
says, "The entire debate over economic policy shifted from the many
roles that government can play in encouraging growth and worrying about
the distribution of that growth to the belief that government's major role
is simply to build up the biggest surplus possible and doing everything
we can to keep inflation under control." In other words, the Clinton
administration adopted the worldview of Wall Street insiders.
Outcomes like this perpetuate a vicious cycle, Bluestone says. That
is, unequal income distribution breeds unequal political influence, which
breeds even more unequal income distribution, and so on, until democracy
all but disappears. What's more, Bluestone warns, the Wall Streetled
economic policies of the 1990s will sooner or later kill off the growth
we're seeing now-growth he attributes not to Clinton's balanced budgets
but to the boom in information technology. Future growth, he says, depends
on "public expenditures for research and development, for infrastructure,
for education and training . . . By the year 2004 we'll be spending half
as much as a percentage of GDP for those three things as we did in 1970.
It won't show up tomorrow, it won't show up next quarter, it may not show
up for the next two or three years. But by the middle of the next decade,
if we continue to reduce our public investments, it will begin to show
up-with drastic consequences and, as the economy slows down, another great
spurt in inequality."
But can we reasonably expect more public investment in a system where
private money speaks much louder than the public interest? "We have
a chicken and egg problem," Bluestone admits. "To make income
more equal, we need good government policies. To get good government policies,
we have to have a more equal income distribution to fund campaigns and
to make sure people who have dropped out of the political process re-engage
with it. So it's awfully tough . . .
"Yet I also recognize that you every once in a while get a candidate
who can really galvanize people's imagination . . . And [that] can partly
neutralize the value of the dollar . . . So while I worry about all this,
I'm not a fatalist."
Neither of the contenders for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination
has galvanized many voters so far, but, suggests Dukakis, there's one way
for even a candidate with no charisma or oratorical gifts to work around
the skewed campaign finance system. "My party," he says, "has
got to spend a lot more time and effort organizing at the grass roots because
that's how we're going to win. We're not going to outspend [the Republicans],
but we can outwork them, and I don't think we're doing anywhere near as
much as we should at that level."
"There's research, if one needs it, that tells you a good grass-roots
campaign is worth eight to ten points in an election. There aren't too
many elections that are won by more than eight to ten. And that's the way
we ought to raise money, too-at the grass roots."
Both Dukakis and Bluestone say universities can help, too-by educating
voters and future voters about economics and politics. "What worries
me," Dukakis says, "is that fewer and fewer Americans, including
young Americans, are getting involved in active politics. That's one of
the reasons I'm teaching these days and spending a lot of my time on college
campuses talking about public service and the importance of it." Dukakis
is also writing, with former U.S. Senator Paul Simon, a high school and
community college text tentatively titled How to Get into Politics, with
the hope of drawing young people into internships in government-and ultimately
into government office.
For his part, Bluestone says, "I'm a kid of the '60s, and '60s
issues were simple moral issues compared to the ones now: those young kids
can't sit at the same lunch counter in the South because one has dark skin
and one has light skin, this woman has to ride in the back of the bus.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand this problem. Many
of us felt the same way about Vietnam-this was an issue of American hegemony
involved in a civil war.
"Today the issues tend to be very complicated economic issues:
What should we do about free trade? What should we do about the budget
deficit? What should we do about saving Social Security? Finding ways of
raising the literacy level of the American people to deal with these tough
issues seems to me to be in everybody's interest, conservative and liberal
alike."
A final question remains as we try to foretell the shape of American
politics in the first years of the twenty-first century: if race and possibly
religion begin to fade as rallying points for voters, which new issues
will take their place beside the economic facts of life that have always
influenced elections? Bluestone mentions "the fact that we are becoming
part of an international community, as opposed to being the stand-alone
'America the mighty.' I see us more and more involved in global arrangements
instead of purely nationalist ones. And I think there's going to be a battle
over that. It will have to do with our foreign policy, our economic policy,
our trade policy."
For Levin, the big issue of the next century may have to do not with
skin color but with another biological variable. "Many gerontologists,"
he says, "now are talking about intergenerational warfare. Certainly
elders vote at a much higher rate than young people, and they tend to vote
in terms of their self-interest. They have the American Association of
Retired Persons, a very powerful lobbying group, to represent their interests
in Washington, and they're likely to get even more powerful in the next
couple of decades.
"Numbers alone do not assure power and wealth, but [older people]
certainly have numbers on their side. By 2025, more than twenty percent
of all Americans will be over sixty-five . . . So age may turn out to be
a very important, if not the most important, factor in explaining political
differences over the next couple of decades. I think it's kind of a sad
trend. It may get more younger voters out there, but it may also create
more conflicts between parents and grandparents versus their own children."
On a cheerier note, Dukakis points not to an issue but an influence:
"the fact that we are requiring community service of our kids at the
high school level and beyond. It shows-the kids are very involved in the
community in ways they weren't. Which is one more reason why so many more
Americans are accepting, open, tolerant of others. So there's a lot that
gives us reason to be optimistic."
Bluestone finds other reasons to believe that the rifts of American
society may be narrowing. "I've been working with companies and unions
across the country that are actually democratizing the workplace,"
he says. "The Saturn division of General Motors is the best example.
"And I think that in cities, more attention is being paid to the
needs of individual communities. For example, in Boston in the 1960s, we
developed a city plan that was absolutely top-down: 'This is what we're
going to do. We're going to wipe these neighborhoods out.' [They] never
spent a minute asking the community, 'What do you want?'
"It's also possible that the new information technologies will
make it possible for people to be engaged-through the Web, through e-mail,
through virtual town meetings," he says.
Thus there is reason for cautious optimism in foretelling the future
of American politics. "While in terms of the political sphere of parties,
campaign, and so forth, democracy is being trumped by dollars," Bluestone
concludes, "at least it isn't going in a single direction."
David Reich is editor of the World, a national religious magazine.
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