RAT FWD: Split down the middle

[Laura Winton <fluffysingler@prodigy.net>]

Published on Friday, November 10, 2000 in the
<http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/guardian> Guardian of London
Split Down The Middle
by Richard Sennett

America's election result is no surprise. If two centrist
parties compete for the same small group of independent voters, they are
likely to split the result down the middle. That cursed arithmetic confronts
Tony Blair as well and any other social democratic leader seeking to move
toward the centre.

The American Democratic party began its trek rightward
nearly 20 years back, convinced that "old democrats" - ecologists, believers
in a strong welfare state, the young would remain, if unhappily, in the
party. Elections would be won by capturing the affections of suburban
"soccer moms", young professionals, and other voters with no strong
political sentiments and so likely to vote either way.


For a while this strategy seemed to work. Bill Clinton's
amazing personal gifts made it happen. Indeed, the greater his troubles, the
greater his hold over the imaginations of just these voters. For better or
worse, Al Gore lacked Clinton's charisma; his only assets are his integrity
and his competence. Absent a candidate who could arouse the emotions of
"swing" voters, the raw arithmetic of splitting the middle has asserted
itself.

Rightwing pundits such as William Kristol have long understood that this
strategy could hold a political party hostage to a
relatively small group of confused or indifferent voters in the centre. But
the leaders of the republican revolution in the 1990s misread the American
public. While we tend to hate government bureaucracy, Americans want the
fruits of government: good schools, adequate pensions, a well regulated
environment. The opportunities for the Democratic party lie just there, in
making the government work better.

The current leadership of the Democrats has failed to
respond to that desire. In the election, the New Democrats made two
strategic errors. The first was obvious: they treated the Green party and
its leader [NOTE FROM LAURA:  Ralph is the Greens' CANDIDATE--not its
LEADER] Ralph Nader as traitors. Rather than ask what had driven the Greens
out, the New
Democrats tried to tame them through guilt; a vote for
Nader is a vote for Bush. Which was not news to the Greens. The guilt-trip
failed, the demand for better government persisted - on Green terms - and
this fringe group received an unprecedented 3% of the vote, making the
contest for the centre all the more fraught.

The second error was more important and more subtle. Only
about half the American electorate votes; this past week the number is about
51%. A big slice of the non-voters consists of people who are apathetic, but
another big slice comes from those for whom not voting is a political
statement of sorts. They are "rejectionists," and most of them are young.

Young Americans who won't vote are your nice nephew or niece
who believes the political system is corrupt. They aren't social isolates;
many believe in, and many practice, volunteer work, which is their version
of self-government. When I taught in America, I encountered them again and
again - good citizens for whom politics has little to do with real life.

The New Democrats have largely ignored this pool of young
people. The effort to capture the middle ground instead sent politicians in
pursuit of the middle aged. On the campaign trail Gore seemed baffled when
asked about policies aimed at young people, and he retreated into
banalities. The failure to connect particularly lost him young male voters,
aged 18 to 30, perhaps the most disaffected group in the American political
spectrum.

However the final result turns out, the Democratic party has
set its own course to become ever more fragile, ever more at the mercy of a
relatively small group of the middle class, the middle aged and the muddled,
ignoring in the process the aspiration for good governance which broadly
marks the American public. Why, then, has New Labour in Britain, or the "New
Middle" tendency in Germany, sought to follow in the path of the New
Democrats in America, in obsessing about this unreliable middle?

The answer lies again in maths. All these centrist social
democrats believe that the policies which appeal to the young, or have
appealed to the old left, are likely to lose them votes in the centre. This
is politics conceived as a zero-sum game: to gain new appeal you have to
lose your old appeal. Certainly if Labour had retained clause four, it would
not today be in power; not even Clinton could have remained in office if he
had run on the programme which kept Franklin Roosevelt in office.

But this way of doing the numbers has put nothing of new
substance in place of the old. The zero-sum game is a confession of
intellectual poverty, as well as a practical disaster; it assumes that a
social democratic party can contrive no political programme which might
appeal to the public as a whole, to the young as well as the middle aged, to
Greens as well as to entrepreneurs. Roosevelt managed to do so. New
Democrats, like New Labour, have not. The result is that we will see in the
future, and here, repeats of the pathetic drama now unfolding in the United
States.

Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at the LSE.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
###

"Those poor kids.  So young.  So nauseous."
--Krusty the Klown Telethon for Motion Sickness


Laura Winton
fluffysingler@prodigy.net
http://pages.prodigy.net/fluffysingler