
          The Present Danger
          By Willingham, AlexAlex Willingham
          Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 1-3
          
          In the current presidential campaign, the forces of reaction have
sought to win by controlling the tone of public discussion. By
portraying Reagan's superficiality as innocent pleasantry, any real
concern with issues can be put down as nuisance. If the Republicans
succeed it will merely postpone candid discussion of the national
condition and obscure the present danger.
          For years Reagan has engineered a reputation as essentially
harmless, good natured and tolerant. Now, the forces he has asembled,
and who have assembled him, pose a real danger to the ideals of open
and egalitarian society and to the gains we have made in recent
years. Unless the Reagan Administration is defeated in
November, popularly elected leaders will constitute the main threat to
established freedoms.
          The present danger arises out of this president's rhetorical stance
for "less government" and the reality of an increasingly invasive new
statism of the right wing. As federal domestic policy, "Reaganomics"
is deceptively dressed as a comprehensive alternative to the social
welfare state. In practice it has come to represent a marginal attack
directed not against manifest shortcomings of welfarism, but against a
few redistributive reforms developed since the presidency of Lyndon
Johnson.
          These programs applied innovative strategies to improve the lives
of blacks and the poor. They were "re-distributive" because they
promoted the "transfer" of money to the disadvantaged and mandated
"maximum" participation by recipients. These programs covered the
concerns of much of the progressive thought of the times: 1) an alarm
that large sections of the nation continued to live in material
poverty and 2) the belief that the ability of people to conquer
misfortune would be enhanced by their participation in the policy
making process.
          These concerns dovetailed with the activism of the Civil Rights
Movement and became interwoven with the fight to ban racism and all
other forms of discrimination from our society.
          In its heroic moments the Great Society tried to be affirmative. It
sought to move away from safety net policies and to move toward
strategies for empowerment. It realized that 

government's innovations
of the past--for example Social Security or the G I bill--offered
models which suggested how to adress current problems. It realized
that piecemeal legislation would not overcome stiff resistance to an
open political process. Bold action was needed: We got the War on
Poverty (1963) and the Voting_Rights_Act (1964).
          Innovative federal policies were enacted even in succeeding
Republican administrations. In certain cases--Head Start, the Voting
Righs Act, Legal Services--there have been powerful, positive
results. The success of the effort--both in getting the attention of
government and in realizing some of the intended goals--promoted an
optimism about some federal programs.
          But the Great Society was hardly an unqualified success. By the
Carter years, with an array of social programs in place, and a
Democratic administration in power, mounting doubt grew about the
actual function of welfare policy. Improvement--although present--was
incremental at best. A full-scale debate was about to start. It would
have focused on the large residual population still untouched by the
programs. Any number of possible reforms would have been debated
including administrative streamlining, changes in funding levels, or
decentralization. There would have been concern about the
"professionalization" of the delivery system. The question would have
been raised: after all, can the goals we seek be accomplished within
the American two-party system?
          An unheralded achievement of the Reagan Administration has been to
coopt that debate. Reaganite hostility to Great Society goals and
programs took the ground out from under the looming critique and
transformed would-be critics of the troubled sub-system into defenders
of the status que ante.
          The Reagan forces tapped a preexisting
skepticism. "Neo"-conservatives, some of whom were former advocated of
reform, were the idealogical point-men for the Administration. Black
neoconservatives--typified by Thomas Sowell--gave racial legitimacy to
the view. The argument took the form of a general attack on government
activity. In common, "neo"--liberals and "supply-siders" used the
documentation of continuing misery to argue that positive government
was bad and, in any case, could not deliver on the crucial matter of
anti-poverty reform. At one point Sowell, who has never been accused
of understatement, claimed that Brown v. the Board of
Education, the 1954 Supreme_Court decision against school
segregation, was undue government interference. No sacred cows here:
positive government was necessarily evil and especially so in trying
to implement lofty intentions. Reaganites went to Washington
determined to cripple its governing institutions.
          What is revealing, however, is the limited nature of the
cutback. The basic welfare structure remains in place even after a
full Reagan term. There have been program cutbacks, to be sure, and
they have had disastrous effects on the recipient population. Yet the
troubled structure is still in place. No doubt much of this comes from
congressional resistance.
          It is possible to interpret these developments as a defeat for
Ronald Reagan. In fact however, they seem to represent changing
priorities of conservative forces operating at the helm of a powerful
state apparatus. Now, in domestic affairs, the threat of the Reagan
regime comes less from a frontal attack on government than in the way
it would prune its operations to make this a more paternal, as opposed
to participatory, bureaucracy. The positive state would become a tool
for on-going administration of a permanent underclass rather than a
means of its transformation.
          The new statism of the Reaganites is the basis for alarm. It comes
at a time when the Republicans have nearly completely capitulated to
right wing extremist groups. The spiritual fervor of these groups is
sustained by anticipation or expanding their influence through the
exercise of official authority.

          Boring within the Republican party represents something of a
turnabout for these groups. The fundamentalist network had been part
of the base used by Jimmy Carter to gain national prominence. Yet
Carter, whose personal religious expression fit the mode, disappointed
many of the born-again--especialy in his formal allegiance to
separation of state and church. This congregation has gone over to
Ronald Reagan who is much less religious but who has been willing to
support government-enforced prayer, segregated religious schools, and
the like--and who is willing to individualize responsibility for
whatever plight grows out of oppressive social conditions.
          Reagan's posture encourages resistance among those who use race,
sex or religious beliefs to protect their advantages.
          When Reagan went to Washington, it first appeared that our greatest
domestic threat would come through efforts to abolish social welfare
programs that help the poor or, in attempts to frustrate the
enforcement of hard-won civil_rights gains. And, indeed, his
Administration has cut federal support of basic human needs and has
subverted the enforcement of justice. Yet, today the danger is not
that the Reaganites will cut back on government power, but that they
will use it to actively promote conformity. Insofar as Reagan, his New
Right or business allies are perceived as merely racist or excessively
frugal, we obscure the real threat his reelection will mean to the
poor, to women, to minorities--and to our hope for democratic
society.
          
            Alex Willingham lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. He is
editor of the Voting Rights Review.
          
        
