To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility

8. A NEW POLITICAL ALLIANCE

Ultimately, through campaign finance reform, a communicating what works movement, and related grassroots advocacy, we need to create a new voting majority, a new political alliance in America. The alliance must bring together middle income Americans (who often need 2 or 3 jobs in the family to make ends meet), wage earners (who need to be reminded that their CEOs earn on the average 419 times as much as they do), and the poor (who suffered in the 1980s and hardly improved in the 1990s).

What are the common grounds for such a new political alliance? One common ground is resentment over an unfair economic deal. We know from Sophie Body-Gendrot at the Sorbonne that large majorities already exist in 5 European countries and in Japan that want public policies to reduce economic inequalities. And now we have at least some evidence that middle and working income Americans appear to be resentful of CEOs with excessive salaries and stock options, according to surveys by Alan Wolfe at Boston College. Such rewards to CEOs are perceived by many middle and working income people interviewed by Wolfe as disconnected from the efforts that go into securing them. Like "welfare mothers," the wealthy rewardees are perceived by many as not earning their money. This, suggests Wolfe, makes the rich politically vulnerable -- especially given the enormous income, wage and wealth gaps that have opened in the 1980s and widened in the 1990s. ² Middle income and wage earner families, including those with both parents working, may respond to messages like "reduce affirmative action for the rich" and "get corporations off welfare."

Resentment over an unfair economic deal is not the only common ground that middle and working income people share with the poor. They all share, as well, a vulnerability to the technological global marketplace. As Jeff Faux has observed, middle income people, wage earners and the poor all need education and re-education, job training and re-training, to compete.³ Can we secure a voting majority around government-facilitated education and training? The answer may be yes, based on new national surveys of voters by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press⁴ and especially by Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril.⁵ For example, the Cantril surveys show voter disagreement philosophically on the role of government in the abstract. But the Cantril surveys also identify majorities in terms of voter support for specific, pragmatic government investments. Such investments include increased spending on Head Start, teacher subsidies, college student aid and job training. The Cantril findings fit well into our frame of program-selective urban and criminal justice investments based on more of what works and less of what doesn't, along with our recommendation of an economic investments based on the elimination of child poverty and the creation of full employment, especially for the hard to employ.

It will be easier to secure a voting majority around these issues of education and jobs than around issues like media entertainment violence and handgun violence. But here, too, there are some promising trends -- like the new anti-handgun alliances between central city voters and more conservative, suburban, soccer mom voters. As one unifying theme, campaign finance reform embraces all of these issues.

In the late 1960s, after numbing assassinations and street riots, and with an understanding of how America's culture of violence produced rates far higher than other industrialized nations, the National Violence Commission concluded that the greatness and durability of most civilizations has been finally determined not by external assault but by internal decay.⁶ Our civilization will be no exception.

The challenges within America require vision, not incrementalism and policy bites. Vision is needed from the grassroots to the White House. We need big solutions to big problems. That is what America always has been about. It is about dreaming and trying to fulfill those dreams, however long they may have been deferred.

In the words of historian James MacGregor Burns, "While centrists cautiously seek the middle way, leaders in science, technology, education, entertainment, finance and the media pursue their own transforming visions."⁷ Isn't it time to establish justice and insure domestic tranquility through the transforming visions of grassroots movements and, perhaps, even of our political leaders

Notes

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