Born-Again Populism

At a hotel across the street from Cleveland's oldest and most prestigious businessman's club, the Citizens' Party Founding Convention last month launched a political movement aimed at eliminating the economic inequality they see symbolized by that club.

The Citizens' Party may become the strongest challenge to the two-party system from the left since the brief challenge of the Populist Party in the 1890's. In fact, author Studs Terkel convened the gathering on a Friday night by saying, "We are all born-again Populists." Much of the rhetoric that weekend recalled the Populists' fight against turn-of-the-century monopoly capitalism. But what really united the 262 delegates gathered to create a new political alternative was a shared belief that the existing political parties are no longer addressing the issues of most concern to Americans.

Terkel summed up this feeling in his denunciation of the "Republocrat" party he sees dominating contemporary politics. Barry Commoner, the environmentalist-turned-political-activist who received the near unanimous endorsement of the delgates as presidential candidate, put it more plainly when he accepted his nomination: "We are the people who are going to help our fellow Americans smile when they go into the voting booth, instead of holding their nose."

That ambitious statement, greeted by boisterous cheering, climaxed the effort Commoner, Terkel and about 100 others began last August to bring the Citizens' Party into existence. In eight months of hurried preparations, those founders managed to create party organizations in 33 states, and put Commoner on the ballot in four of those states.

Commoner himself only recently came on to the political scene, though he has been an activist throughout his career. He is probably best known as an environmentalist and energy expert, through the several bestsellers he has authored: "The Closing Circle," "The Poverty of Power," and his most recent book, "The Politics of Energy."

He is a Columbia graduate with a Biology Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941, and he currently directs the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, an environmental research facility. A deceptively energetic 62 year-old. Commoner has been calling for radical changes (including reorganization of the energy industry along socialist lines) for many years now. In founding the Citizens' Party, Commoner hopes to create a vehicle for implementing some of those changes.

Delegates at Cleveland represented a wide cross-section of backgrounds and motives for being there, including left-leaning democrats, new-left radicals from the 1960's (Mario Savio, founder of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley--the group which kicked off student protests in the '60's--was there, with graying hair and beard), radical teminists, American Indians, gays, and Gray Panthers.

Ideas were just as diverse--delegates held political and economic views ranging from socialist to the American ethic of agriculture and small business. Although it has not yet had a serious effect on the party, an underlying ideological split exists between party members who favor a return to the days of small-scale capitalism and those who favor a socialist industrial state.

This split manifested itself in the most spirited debate of the convention, over the economic plank of the party platform. A delegate from Ohio rose to denounce the plank, formulated by Sidney Lens, a well-known socialist author calling it simply a "wish list" and describing it as "old fashioned socialism." Lens vigorously rebutted these charges, thrusting the meeting into a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations of intellectual dogmatism and shortsightedness.

"The Citizens' Party will not engage in politics-by-label--damning a proposal just because someone has called it 'socialist,'" Lens said. In the end, the convention voted overwhelmingly to adopt his plank, which included calls for the nationalization of certain key industries.

Other features of the platform, which must be ratified by the membership at large in a mail ballot, call for a guaranteed job for everyone who wants to work, a more even distribution of income, cutbacks in military spending, an end to nuclear power, and increased implementation of affirmative action programs.

Party members admit the platform is unabashedly idealistic and do not claim to have all the answer. In the debate over, the economic plank, Lens said, "It someone asks me how we plan to go about nationalizing these industries. I'll say I frankly don't know. We don't know how to do it, but we do know that it's necessary that we do it."

Not surprisingly, Commoner's ideas are quite influential within the party; its collective vision of the ideal society strongly reflects his ideas of a new society built around a radically restructured energy system. Commoner is a tireless advocate of solar energy as the answer to America's problems, and his analyses show how a conversion to solar energy could solve economic problems as well as the "energy crisis"--which he sees as the result of a system based on profits instead of the national interest.

The profit system is Commoner's most frequent target, along with the giant corporations which he believes dominate critical decision-making. "All the problems of this country can be traced to the fact that decisions vital to the national interest are made by corporations who are interested only in maximizing profits," he claims, adding, "They don't give a hoot about the national interest."

Commoner (and the great majority of the party members at Cleveland) favor some degree of social control over the means of production. He cites the words of a businessman speaking about the steel industry (which most likely will be unable to meet domestic demand by 1985) that you just can't expect a corporation to produce something just because the country needs it--as a rationale for social governance.

"Democratic control of productive decisions will be the main political issue of the 1980's," Commoner predicts, "And the two major parties won't even touch it."

Commoner expects the Citizens' Party to fill this gap in the political picture. By providing solutions to the problems caused by our corporate-dominated society, Commoner plans the party will attract a large constituency of those disadvantaged by that same society, seize political power, and restructure the economy.

Commoner is not predicting any political revolutions in 1980, but he does feel that the electoral situation this year is especially suited to a third-part effort. A delegate from Pennsylvania observed that "the scandalous no-choice between Carter and Reagan" cries out for an alternative. And Commoner is "the first American of stature to advance himself not as a saviour like Anderson but as the candidate of a party that will last regardless of the election outcome."

Commoner does emphasize that the Citizens' Party is not just another one-shot campaign a la Eugene McCarthy; its long goal is to become a majority party. Commoner uses phrases like "building a political force" and "establishing a presence in American politics."

But the party faces serious problems in its quest for legitimacy. One is a strategic question which caused a major rift at the convention--whether a presidential campaign is the most effective way of establishing a political party with the strong grass roots tendencies of the Citizen's Party.

Commoner, the leader of the presidential faction, maintained at the convention that a national campaign can be an invaluable asset to local organizing, by providing the party with a recognizable national symbol.

The opposing faction did not deny this, but questioned Commoner's commitment to local party-building. Lucius Walker of Pennsylvania, a major figure in the camp opposed to Commoner's views, said that Commoner would be an ideal national candidate. "He's very good on the corporate and macro issues, but not so good on grass roots organizing."

But in the end, the split in the party was smoothed over. The grass roots faction strongly endorsed Commoner's nomination, and Commoner apologized for campaigning against that faction's leaders. The question that remains is whether the split will surface again during the next few months.

The noticeable absence of organized labor groups at the convention suggests a potential hindrance to the party's growth. Despite Commoner's favorable attitude towards labor (he called for automobile plants owned and operated by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and work-owned steel plants at the convention), the Citizens' Party has not attracted much support from liberal labor organizations.

Delegates said labor's leanings toward Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has weakened Citizen's Party appeal to labor support, but are unable to explain this lack of support further.

Some delegates at the convention said that the party will have to convince labor of its legitimacy if it is to gain strength.

John Anderson's campaign as an independent is another issue which the Citizen's Party must confront if it is to succeed, for Anderson and Commoner appeal to many of the same kinds of voters. Commoner recognizes the odds; Anderson has an unquestionably wealthier and more organized campaign.

Commoner's strategy at the moment attempts to discredit Anderson in the eyes of liberal voters--he goes out of his way to point out Anderson's inconsistencies and the conservatism of his voting record.

"Anderson is only a pseudo-alternative. His supposedly liberal positions amount to a warmed-over republicanism," says Commoner, although he does grant Anderson credit for legitimizing the idea of an independent candidacy.

"Anderson claims he's running a campaign of ideas. Well, I think its very good for a candidate to have ideas, but more important for a candidate to have good ideas."

Commoner also has an argument ready for those who would accuse him of being a "spoiler" in the presidential race--that is, of drawing votes away from the Democratic party and thus guaranteeing a Reagan win. Suppose you are a voter concerned about growing militarism in the world, he says. Suppose you cast your vote for Carter because you have weighed the risks and decided that Carter would be a bit less likely to get America involved in a war. Well, says Commoner, that may be the case (though he doesn't see that much difference between Carter and Reagan)--but a vote for Carter does not in any way let Carter know that it was a vote cast specifically for peace. It is a wasted vote because it isn't differentiated from the millions of other votes Carter receives.

A vote for the Citizen's Party, on the other hand, "would leave no doubt whatsoever in the mind of whoever won eventually that it was most definitely a vote for peace," he says. "Nor would voting for Anderson be a vote for peace, because Anderson's position will have no meaning after the election.

If the Citizen's Party does well and establishes a constituency for peace, "it could even put a chip in Reagan's fascist tendencies."

But more immediately, Commoner's campaign faces the more concrete problem of getting his name on the ballot in as many states as possible.

With a win in November an almost certain impossibility, a more realistic goal for the election is five per cent of the popular vote--the level necessary for a party to become eligible for federal election aid funds. Commoner has said that if the party can reach 80 per cent of the electorate, he believes there is a good chance the Party would capture five per cent.

Federal funds, which could run into millions of dollars, is essential in the process of building a party from scratch. As it is, the party is scratching for what funds it can get and Commoner plans a major fund drive to stock the party's treasury once the petition drives to get on the ballot end.

Right now, Commoner has successfully met petition deadlines in six states out of eight attempts--and deadlines are fast approaching in many others.

In Massachusetts, the party faces a stiff challenge in meeting the May 5 deadline, Commoner predicts. With 39,425 signatures required, Massachusetts is among the toughest states for achieving ballot status, Commoners believes, adding that poor organization earlier has left the party in a tough spot.

The petition campaign is in full swing now, and Commoner was in town this week to gather more volunteers to collect signatures. Wednesday he spoke to about 35 Harvard students at the Eliot House Junior Common Room about the problems of mounting a third party campaign, and asked them to "sacrifice some time, maybe even a bit of your GPA, to help us provide the alternative Americans want."

Commoner is fond of comparing the birth of the Citizen's Party to the beginnings of the Republican Party in the years before the Civil War, on the grounds that its conception emerged from the failure of the two major parties to deal with the fundamental issues of their day.

Commoner, of course, has a vested interest in making an analogy with a successful political departure, but perhaps Studs Terkel's comparison to the Populist era is more appropriate to the contemporary political scene. Eugene V. Debs, founder of the American Socialist Party, once said during that period, "I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want and get it."