What works & what doesn't

Stand Up Fight Back

Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge E. J. Dionne Jr.

Simon & Schuster, $24, 256 pp.

Radical Middle

The Politics We Need Now Mark Satin

Westview Press, $19.95, 219 pp.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that American politics runs in generational cycles. The resurgence of Democratic liberalism that took John Kennedy to the White House was powered by revulsion at racial segregation, distaste for Republican coziness with big corporations, dismay about environmental degradation, and worries over slow economic growth.

Liberalism's triumph turned to hubris by Richard Nixon's first term--when even Nixon proclaimed that "we are all Keynesians now," and sponsored a form of guaranteed income for the poor. The Greeks could have told us what came next. The 1970s were liberalism's time of tears--runaway inflation, the messy extrication from Vietnam, the loss of industrial competitiveness, Jimmy Carter in his Rose Garden. The Reagan Revolution was explicitly anti-1960s and everything the decade stood for.

That was twenty-four years ago. E. J. Dionne is a well-known political analyst and syndicated columnist (also a Commonweal contributor), who, in his very commonsensical Stand Up Fight Back, suggests that the wheel is turning yet again. Certainly, the conservative paradigm has swept all before it, becoming so ingrained in the 1990s that Bill Clinton, mirroring Nixon's volte-face in 1968, held office by adopting long-held conservative positions on issues like budgets and welfare. Just as the media and think tanks used to be dominated by the "liberal elite," large slices of both now look like kennels for conservative attack dogs.

The onset of fatal conservative hubris may have come just after September 11, 2001. Prior to that, the Bush administration was looking very shaky. The defection of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords in the spring of 2001 had put the Democrats in control of the Senate, and a groundswell was building against Bush's badly skewed tax program and his Wall Street-driven agenda for Social Security.

With the catastrophe of 9/11, though, and the consequent upsurge of patriotic feeling, the administration called for an end to partisanship and for a national pulling together. Then it cynically exploited the drop in Democratic defenses to push through one of the most partisan programs in recent memory. As the Wall Street Journal put it: "the bloody attacks have created a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their president." The paper concluded that the president should "use the moment to press a broad agenda that he believes is in the national interest." As if tax cuts on stock dividends and gutting environmental regulations had something to do with terrorism.

Publishing schedules being what they are, Dionne's book was written well before Iraq and terrorism began to morph into potential millstones for the Bush re-election campaign, which makes Dionne's sense of Republican vulnerability all the more prescient. Just as liberals did in the 1960s, conservatives, in short, may have overplayed their hand.

The bulk of Dionne's book is a plea for Democrats to break out of the linguistic and mental straitjacket conservatives have suckered them into. The Clintonian route to power entailed coopting conservative slogans, especially the jargon of business and markets. In the words of one party leader: "We used to call for immunizing little children against disease. Now we call for investment in human capital."

Dionne wants Democrats to be true to their roots in the New Deal. Government is part of the solution, not just part of the problem. Markets are wonderful, but sometimes they just produce gasguzzling SUVs. Even Adam Smith knew that there are categories of issues for which the free play of markets makes things worse. Safety nets for the old and the poor won't destroy private enterprise. The conservative campaign against taxes in almost any form has long since passed the point of wanton antigovernment destructiveness. Democrats, in short, should stop apologizing and say forthrightly what they stand for.

Dionne's book is essentially a campaign primer, and an admirable one. While its recommendations are neither startling, nor even especially original, it is clear, acutely argued, and nicely structured. One imagines it will have a wide audience. (One small cavil: I should have liked to see Dionne's assessment of internal Republican weaknesses, like the peculiar alliance between the big business antitax interest and the Christian right.)

Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name in the first place. It opens breathlessly: "Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from kitchen tables to nonprofit organizations to corporate boards, Americans are turning away from the politics of bickering and division and working out a new politics--a politics of creative problem solving." As the Saturday Night Live skits used to say, "Not!"