The Dictatorship of ‘Or’

I n Jane Coaston’s The Argument podcast over at the New York Times, Democrats have been debating the future of their party and Republicans — and former Republicans — have been debating the future of the GOP.

National Review’s Rich Lowry and the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes had a discussion that was, for me at least, considerably more interesting than the Democratic debate, in which Lanae Erickson of Third Way made the case for politics-as-engineering while Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color made the case that everybody who disagrees with him politically is a racist. That the Republican intramural brawl is more interesting is maybe to be expected, since there is just a lot of new and horrible stuff going on in the Republican Party. Nobody slows down to look at a train that didn’t go careering off the tracks.

But there is something to be learned — not least by conservatives — from the current Democratic angst. “Are Democrats the Party of Joe Manchin, or AOC?” asks the headline over Coaston’s writeup. And that, of course, is the real question. In a more normal political time, the Democratic Party would be happy to represent such a wide swath of political opinion that both left-wing New Yorkers and Appalachian moderates felt at home there. But these are not normal times, and our political factions define themselves not by what they believe but by what — whom — they exclude. Implicit in the “Manchin or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” formulation is that the Democrats are going to be one or the other, even if, at the moment, they are both.

There is a similar and more urgent question in front of Republicans, of course: Are they going to be the Trumpist party or something else?

I wrote above of normal political times, which is not the same as boring or low-stakes political times. Consider the performance of the Democratic Party in the 93rd Congress, which sat from January 3, 1973, to January 3, 1975. Those were very dramatic times, with a presidential inauguration, an unscheduled change in the presidency as Richard Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandal, and another presidential inauguration, that of Gerald Ford.

Congressional Democrats accomplished a great deal in that Congress on behalf of progressive causes. In addition to taking up the matter of the impeachment (Nixon was not formally impeached but almost certainly would have been both impeached and removed from office if he had not resigned), Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and other important pieces of environmental legislation; it created the Legal Services Corporation; it enacted the Case–Church Amendment, which cut off U.S. military support for operations in Cambodia and Laos; it opened up Highways Trust Fund money for mass-transit use; it updated and rationalized federal disaster-relief procedures; it regulated pension plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act; it regulated consumer warranties; it imposed reforms on the juvenile criminal-justice system and codified the federal rules of evidence; it passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act; and, of course, Senator Kennedy solved the nation’s health-care problems by instituting the HMO, which turned out so famously well.

If the main criterion is policy, then progressives should consider the 93rd Congress a banner year for the Democratic Party and its agenda. But if the main criterion is who makes policy — who is in and who is excluded — then progressives must consider the Democrats of that time a vexing bunch. There was a great deal of diversity within the party, which was not “the party of James Eastland or Hubert Humphrey” but the party of both. And while Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color argues that white supremacy is the most important driving force in American politics today (which is preposterous, but, stay with me), the high-water mark of progressivism in the 1970s happened under a Democratic leadership that was full of out-and-out, unapologetic racists, men (overwhelmingly) who could not hope to have comparable political careers today even if they hailed from the most bigoted and atavistic corners of the country, such as Minnesota.

The president pro tempore of the Senate was Eastland, the Mississippian “Voice of the White South” and as ghastly a creature as the Democratic Party has ever coughed up. The Democratic Senate whip was Robert Byrd, who had held the title “Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.” The Democratic Caucus chairman voted against every piece of civil-rights legislation he ever had the chance to oppose; segregationists such as William Fulbright and Sam Ervin were prominent figures in that Congress, and Senator Russell Long, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had boycotted the 1964 Democratic convention over civil-rights legislation. Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia had, as governor of that state, shut down the schools rather than see them desegregated. House Democrats included such staunch opponents of civil rights as Omar Burleson.

But the Democratic caucus of that time also included left-wing figures such as Bella Abzug and George McGovern, big-city progressives such as Barbara Jordan, western liberals such as Frank Church, old-fashioned labor pols such as Walter Mondale, and party-machine operators such as Tip O’Neill. If it ever occurred to the new senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, to wonder whether his Democrats were to be the party of his good buddy the Exalted Cyclops or the party of Bella Abzug, he never thought to ask the question out loud.

There was more diversity on the Republican side, too, of course, with Barry Goldwater serving alongside Nelson Rockefeller and Lowell Weicker, while the sainted junior senator from New York was formally a member of the Conservative Party.

Call it the politics of cooties — I do not think I would want to be in the same political party as James Eastland. But a party that can accommodate a thick slice of the surprisingly broad spectrum of diverse political opinion that actually exists in these United States — as opposed to the narrow spectrum of opinion that has the imprimatur of the New York Times and the sanction of polite society — is a party that can get things done. Of course, getting things done requires caring more about what those things are than about who is doing them. Democrats once understood that. Republicans, too.

But that was the republic of and. This is the dictatorship of or.