Beyond the Pall

AT THE RISK of casting an even greater pall over the Democratic Party than currently exists, the Reagan landslide is symptomatic of much more than a temporary nationwide shift to the right and a recent disenchantment with New Deal liberalism.

Quite simply, the President's victory further solidifies the longtime political lead the GOP has held over the Democrats in presidential elections since Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 died in 1945, and provides further evidence that the Democrats have little credibility in large swatches of the South and West.

Some evidence:

* Republicans have won four of the last five presidential elections and six of the last nine.

* With the exception of 1964, the Democrats have carried a total of seven western states in the past five elections, three of them Hawaii. They have not won California since 1948.

* With the exception of Jimmy Carter, no Democrat has won a clear victory in the south in 40 years--even in 1964, when Johnson lost Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

* Since 1944, no Democrat who is not from the South has won a majority of the popular vote in a general election, and since 1960, no non-southerner has won more than 43 percent of the popular vote.

The gloomy statistics should debunk the argument that Reagan's victory and demographic sweep--excepting, of course, the Blacks and the Jews--represents a general trend towards the Republicans or, in a singularly knee-jerk fit of wishful thinking b8 the Democrats, a mere mandate for the rosy wrinkly cheeks and gee-whiz smile of the President.

The voting patterns over the past four decades also cast into doubt the longstanding Democratic faith in the power of the proverbial New Deal coalition, a seething mass of humanity that managed to include everybody but white male anglo-saxons. The problem, glaringly revealed last week, is that the clear majority of Americans are either white male anglo-saxons or would like to think of themselves as part of the white male anglo-saxon mainstream. And in the South, where everybody attributes the racial gap in voting patterns to blind racism, the Democrats have yet to give 'jes plain folks a good reason not to vote GOP.

So let's all clear our vocal cords, give a little cough, and bellow for reform. Then, think a little. Democratic National Committee Chairman Charles Manatt pipes in with the advice that the next nominee come from somewhere other than the northeast or midwest. Others say, let's tap the New Generation of leaders who can lead us into a New Era.

It is all too easy to promptly purge all the Mondale-Carter and McGovernite elements, as the Party has done in the past. And it is easy for the Democrats to decide to do something, anything, differently than they have in the past three or four elections.

But these solutions all assume that the Democratic problems are largely ephemeral and that last week's drubbing was a combination of Reagan's popularity and Mondale's lack of charisma. The problem is much deeper, and while the Democrats will clearly look elsewhere in '88, they will also have to stand for something as well.

Everything in the current Democratic hand-wringing fits in nicely with a powerhouse Gary W. Hart candidacy in 1988, and the Democratic Party must use the freedom of utter defeat to build upon the neoliberal agenda the Colorado Senator set forth this spring. Those of us brought up on Mom, Apple Pie and the New Deal must lower our turned-up noses and realize that neoliberalism, whatever we think of it, will be part and parcel of the Democratic geist for years to come.

It is useless to blindly embrace neoliberalism or to flat-out reject it, for, in fact, neoliberalism as a clearly-defined political creed does not yet exist. What exists is a mindset--apparently an attractive one--that, like Gary Hart, continually whispers "new, new, new, not old, not old" in your ear. What has yet to be determined is the clear-cut political agenda that will accompany the invocation of spiritual rebirth and political renewal.

NEOLIBERALISM will be what we make of it, and it is crucial that opinion makers--we students included--push this new ideology of pragmatism away from the abyss of Reaganite greed and Yuppie self-interest that looms just beyond the Gary Harts and Bill Bradleys of this w/rld. If we do not succeed, there will be more years of Democratic failure on the national scene.

Hart articulated some of what neoliberalism may be, but his was but a grab-bag of new ideas and his rhetoric lacked the compassion that neoliberals will need to convince voters they are not just warmed-over Republicans. Now, it is the task of the would-be Democratic Presidents to fill in their rhetoric with specific programs for industrial policy, tax incentives and reform, and, most important, a social agenda that will clearly differentiate the Democrats from post-Reagan Republicans like Rep. Jack F. Kemp (R.N.Y) and Vice President George Bush.

We must accept neoliberalism because right now it is the only thing that will wrest the White House away from the Republicans, and I am convinced that with a magnetic spokesman and a concrete agenda the Democrats can win for years to come.

But this will only happen if we accept neoliberalism now and mold into something that we can live with.