NATION

Progressively Fading

By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, June 6, 1999

WASHINGTON -- No passionate offensive against corporate greed. No hue and cry over the fate of the poor, the sick and the old. No agony over those left behind as the economy surges ahead. That great silence you hear out there is the sound of the liberal agenda for the new millennium.

Slowly but surely, liberalism has slipped off the American horizon. None of the presidential aspirants for 2000 are rooted in even the establishment strain of liberalism. Neither are their platforms, as they themselves eagerly point out. And while a few scattered voices of liberalism still cry in the political wilderness, there is no critical mass calling for a domestic agenda built on progressive principles.

And so in this atmosphere it is impossible to avoid the thought: We may be too prosperous for progressivism.

Bad times are a breeding ground for ideology on both the left and right; the distress of the Great Depression created the appetite for the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, while the high inflation and unemployment of the late 1970s created the appetite for the conservative revolution of Ronald Reagan. Neither Roosevelt nor Reagan would have prospered in a time of great prosperity.

"Maybe the lesson is that in good times the center holds," said Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination. "There's general satisfaction among the electorate and a centrist kind of approach maybe the most popular."

But now, in the greatest economic prosperity of the century, there remain some ideological updrafts on the right; though the various strains of conservatives are constantly at war, conservatives are yeasty with ideas and prominent in the public debate. It's the left where the vacuum is.

"The liberals are still there, of course, but there are not many of them remaining in major political positions in the Democratic Party," said Austin Ranney, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. "For politicians, winning is a prerequisite for doing what they want to do, and it has been clear for a long time that New Deal liberalism is no longer winning material."

But even during the New Deal itself, the architects of the biggest burst of liberalism in American history worried that prosperity might crowd out progressivism.

Roosevelt, who in 1924 had told Democrats that liberalism would not have its opportunity "until the Republicans [lead] us into a serious period of depression and unemployment," gave voice to this fear in 1937, in his second inaugural address. He railed that "Symptoms of prosperity may become portents of disaster! Prosperity already tests the persistence of our progressive purpose."

Modern prosperity is testing progressives' purpose more than ever. The two Democratic contenders, Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and Bill Bradley, the former US senator from New Jersey, are both aiming only slightly left-of-center, perhaps a plus for Democrats committed to winning elections but a danger for Democrats committed to massive change in the nation's economy and culture.

The principal figure in the party's devotion to the center is the man who has dominated American political life for nearly seven years, Bill Clinton.

He watched Democratic stalwarts like former Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, Jimmy Carter's vice president, and Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the former governor, lean left to win the party nomination only to find that the very process of becoming the Democratic standardbearer had made them unappealing to the critical center, where general elections are won and lost.

A former president of the relentlessly moderate Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton recognized that the center of gravity in American politics had shifted to the right at least since Reagan's election in 1980, and maybe even since Carter's election in 1976. Though famous for his personal lack of discipline, he nonetheless showed remarkable political discipline in 1991 and 1992, hewing to the center and positioning himself to defeat President Bush, and, in 1996, Bob Dole of Kansas, the former US Senate majority leader.

"Liberalism dies away in good times," Dole said in an interview. "As Clinton found, it's possible to stay in the middle and adopt a lot of Republican things and the liberals have to accept that."

The lesson has not been lost on the Democrats.

But what has been lost are the voices on the left that contribute to the American debate even if they do not necessarily contribute to the victorious coalitions of Democratic presidential nominees. Indeed, those voices are greatly diminished now, at a period when the economy's roar drowns out the pleas of the poor.

"It's hard to be extremely liberal when the economy's going well," says state Representative Jim Solis of Arlington, Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Economic Development Committee. "The problem is that we might be leaving some people behind, and these are the folks -- the working poor -- that we have to take care of, still."

Prosperity hasn't always been incompatible with progressivism. The Great Society occurred during an economic boom, to be sure. But it was a boom unlike any other, occurring at the height of the Cold War when there was a sense of social solidarity. It occurred, moreover, at a time when rich and poor were often interdependent, producing wealth at factories owned by one group and operated by the other -- rather than at lone computer terminals that are linked not to people or products but only to networks and financial markets.

"There was rapid economic growth and a small gap between rich and poor and we did a lot of things to widen opportunity," said Robert B. Reich, Clinton's first secretary of Labor who now teaches at Brandeis University's Heller School. "But now, in another era of growth and prosperity, we seem unwilling to do these things."

The stratospheric heights of the Dow Jones Industrial Average have not wiped out the misery at the depths of American life. The last few years of the broadly shared prosperity have not been nearly strong enough to change substantially the standard of living of many working families. Between 1989 and 1998, the real wages of the typical male worker have actually dropped by half a percentage point per year. Since March 1998, when unemployment has been low and economic growth high, over 400,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"There's so much good news, but there still are very deep holes, and this level of prosperity will have to be sustained much longer than we can reasonably expect it to if we are going to climb out of these holes," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, one of the few remaining redoubts of liberalism in Washington.

Even the growing gap between rich and poor, a traditional feasting ground for liberals hungry for an issue, has gone largely ignored. But it is there, providing the largest increases in inequality since World War II.

Consider this: From 1947 to 1979, each income group in the national economy grew at about the same rate, about 2.4 percent annually. In fact, the highest fifth grew at 2.1 percent while the lowest fifth grew at 2.5 percent. But between 1979 and 1996, the average income of the bottom fifth declined 0.4 percent per year while the average income of the top fifth grew 1.5 percent per year.

But all of this is happening at a time when traditional liberalism remains discredited and when a new breed of conservative -- less allergic to government than Reagan, less committed to bombast than Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, but still skeptical of economic prescriptions imposed from above -- is growing in America, particularly in the cities.

"Wealth redistribution programs for 30 years didn't work," says Stephen Goldsmith, the Republican mayor of Indianapolis. "They put a slight drag on those with wealth and they degraded the quality of life of those in the bottom two-fifths of the population. The success of our economy plus the failures of the aggressive redistributors put liberalism at a disadvantage.'

Democratic politicians understand those limits.

"What you can do in good times is to help the children in poverty, the people who don't have any health care, and raise the issue of racial unity," said Bradley. "Good times allow you to play to people's better angels, and the question is whether the good times last long enough to make these changes, to move our collective humanity an inch forward."

Thus the great paradox at the heart of American politics today: If the good times don't last, liberalism may have a second chance.

David M. Shribman is chief of the Globe's Washington bureau.