Books in Brief: The Real Majority

The Real Majority, by Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg (Coward-McCann, 347 pp., $7.95). The authors combine the use of the most up-to-date tools of psephology (the science of voting behavior) with a dose of common sense in the analysis of present day American voting trends. As they marshal the electoral facts, such myths as the coming reign of the poor, the young and the black vanish. The electorate is middle-aged (average age 47 and, even with the eighteen-year-old vote, likely to stay above 40 in the foreseeable future) and solidly middle-class. Themselves moderate liberals—though of that vanishing breed who really believe in democracy—they clearly warn the Democrats against the equation of law and order with racism. The electorate is ambivalent on the racial issue, but deeply opposed to softness on crime, drugs, hippies, student demonstrators. The authors aptly term these deep concerns of the average person “the Social Issue,” and maintain that this issue threatens to overshadow traditional issues among the real majority. They believe that the Democratic Party can in conscience, and must, dissociate itself from permissiveness on the Social Issue while remaining (moderately) racially progressive. It is the responsibility of political leaders to be responsive to the people, and this is what the real majority in the center wants. Not ideologues themselves, the authors diagnose the existential folly of so many liberal politicians as a passing malady, not as the result of many years of intellectual evolution. Consequently, their ability to observe the symptoms of the crisis does not extend to an understanding of its true magnitude or its ultimate causes.

JM

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J. C. Meyer

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The Real Majority, by Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg (Coward-McCann, 347 pp., $7.95). The authors combine the use of the most up-to-date tools of psephology (the science of voting behavior) with a dose of common sense in the analysis of present day American voting trends. As they marshal the electoral facts, such myths as the coming reign of the poor, the young and the black vanish. The electorate is middle-aged (average age 47 and, even with the eighteen-year-old vote, likely to stay above 40 in the foreseeable future) and solidly middle-class. Themselves moderate liberals—though of that vanishing breed who really believe in democracy—they clearly warn the Democrats against the equation of law and order with racism. The electorate is ambivalent on the racial issue, but deeply opposed to softness on crime, drugs, hippies, student demonstrators. The authors aptly term these deep concerns of the average person “the Social Issue,” and maintain that this issue threatens to overshadow traditional issues among the real majority. They believe that the Democratic Party can in conscience, and must, dissociate itself from permissiveness on the Social Issue while remaining (moderately) racially progressive. It is the responsibility of political leaders to be responsive to the people, and this is what the real majority in the center wants. Not ideologues themselves, the authors diagnose the existential folly of so many liberal politicians as a passing malady, not as the result of many years of intellectual evolution. Consequently, their ability to observe the symptoms of the crisis does not extend to an understanding of its true magnitude or its ultimate causes.