Disfranchising the Progressives : Ignore the Liberals, Dukakis Signals in His Jackson Snub

Wednesday morning I drove through the dawn street to the plane that would return me to Boston after my first prolonged stay in Los Angeles since that poignant day in 1968 when I stood in a hospital room and watched the doctors turn off the machine that sustained the dead Robert Kennedy in a technological mimicry of life.

But, the morning papers in my lap, I was not thinking of Robert Kennedy or of the curious mixture of vitality and the obscene disproportions of wealth that define the capital of the Pacific Rim. Instead, reading Mike Dukakis’ announcement of his running mate and the contemptuous manner in which Jesse Jackson had been informed, I felt anger mingled with renewed awareness of just how large, how momentous, Bobby’s loss had been--not only to me but to the America he loved and whose hate and myriad afflictions he so intensely wished to heal.

It was not the refusal to nominate Jackson, for it was certain from the beginning that he would not be named. However, he wanted and deserved--had fairly won--to be dealt with respectfully as an important leader with a large following, one whose voice on vital issues should be heard and heeded.

But it was not just Jesse Jackson who was being denied. It was all of us who had shared and still retained the progressive, liberating hope of the 1960s. Having known Dukakis for a long time, I knew that he was not a careless or clumsy man; that his actions--his manner of action--had been calculated, deliberate, planned. He was telling the country that he was alien to Jackson and what he stood for; that he was not a liberal, nor--and not incidentally--one who would accommodate his own will to that of a black man. He intended to take that same message to the Democratic convention, welcoming a fight on important platform issues so that his victories might reinforce that same message.

It did not matter that millions of Americans had voted for Jackson. It did not matter that millions who had not voted shared the concerns and ideals to which he had given eloquent voice. Nor did it matter that Jackson was the first black American to attain a position of national leadership through the political system--a living, historic symbol of America’s progress toward victory over racial injustice. The people to whom these things mattered--the once-dominant progressive wing of the Democratic Party--had nowhere else to go. They would not vote for the Republicans and so could safely be ignored, even taunted, in pursuit of other constituencies, more dubious votes.

I cannot judge the accuracy of this calculation, although my instincts, tutored by long experience, tell me it is probably a fatal mistake. All the victories of the Democratic Party in this century have come when it stood as the party of liberating change; that when the people mainly wanted management of the status quo, they had turned to the Republicans. But my anger was not fueled by the beliefs that a political mistake had been made. Rather it was sourced in awareness that all those who believed that the most serious problems of this nation--from dwindling economic productivity to the growth of a permanent, impoverished underclass--should be addressed and resolution sought, even at the cost of temporary sacrifice--were now effectively being disfranchised. The honored designation liberal was now to be regarded as a term of opprobrium. And those of us who clung to the public philosophy of liberalism--even if many deny the label--were in the wilderness, without voice or power to share in the direction of that great experiment that is America.

It is obvious that those who now control the Democratic Party have the power to exclude the principles and people who constitute the advocates of liberating change. But no convention majority, no popular mandate, can--with a simple vote--eliminate the profound afflictions of today’s America. Poverty and injustice, crime and drugs, the approach of national bankruptcy and the relative decline of America’s economic strength cannot be voted out of existence. No ballot can decide that the air shall once again be pure or the water freed from the poison of technology. These realities must either be confronted or allowed to diminish the America we will bequeath to our children.

It is ironic that this reality of a Democratic Party stripped of its noblest heritage should be conveyed by the nomination of a Texas senator, made in explicit analogy to the selection of Lyndon Johnson in 1960. For it was Johnson--a President who did more to further the cause of black America than any President since Lincoln--who proposed and compelled passage of the Voting Rights Act that made the Jackson candidacy possible; whose vision of a Great Society--consumed in the agonies of Vietnam--is as desirable and compelling and as far from attainment today as it was in 1965.

They are a source of the values Jackson advocated, of the issues he raised. And not just Jackson. Millions of us. Tens of millions. And reshaped to the condition of modern life they will once again be heard in the unending struggle for the soul of America’s future. But not, it seems, this time. Not this election year. I may be wrong. I hope so. But if not, there is still a future to be won, a movement to be built, a place to be created where none now exists.