Changing The World, Gitlin Style Author/Activist Sees Hope In The New Party

During last November’s presidential election, a majority of American voters considered the choice between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole to be no choice at all.

Either that or they simply forgot what day it was.

Whatever the reason, millions ended up staying at home, and the result was the lowest voter turnout since 1924. In all, only 49 percent of voting-age Americans bothered to cast their ballot.

This much is clear: Something is wrong with the system. Just as clear is the fact that no one knows exactly what to do about it.

Todd Gitlin is busy trumpeting an idea that he says is as good as any, and maybe better than most.

It’s called The New Party.

Gitlin, who will speak at Eastern Washington University on Thursday, teaches courses in culture and communications and in journalism at New York University. As a scholar, his half-dozen books range from studies of the press (“The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making”) to analyses of contemporary society (“The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage”).

His most recent book, “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars,” is another attempt by Gitlin to explain this complex collection of subcultures that we call America.

Specifically, the book is his take on how the political left, he says, “came to look like, at least in the eyes of most Americans, a set of special interests rather than the voice of the people. And how it came to pass that people who are so-called conservatives didn’t even get an argument when they claimed to be the voice of the people.”

But “Twilight of Common Dreams” is more than a mere primer on liberal vs. conservative politics. It is a serious-minded attempt to look at America’s political malaise and at how that malaise effectively can be addressed.

Speaking over the phone from his NYU office, Gitlin is quite clear on where the solution cannot be found: in “cultural wars” waged over everything from textbook content to resolutions involving the very language we speak.

“We get stuck on a lot of marginal issues, and we don’t deal with what might tear the country apart,” Gitlin says.

It’s not that these “marginal issues” aren’t important. It’s just that they receive daily mention in newspaper headlines and broadcast sound bites at the expense of the very problem that, Gitlin charges, so often is hardly addressed at all.

And what problem is that? To Gitlin’s way of thinking, it is “the tremendous disparity in living conditions among Americans.”

In fact, Gitlin charges that it isn’t in the interest of American politics to hold serious discussions about such issues. That’s because, he says, such debates don’t serve America’s two-party political system.

That’s the same system, you’ll recall, that had American voters choosing last November between the lesser of two presidential, if you will, evils.

Which brings us back to The New Party.

The strategy put forth by organizers of The New Party, Gitlin says, would change the two-party system irrevocably. Simply speaking, it stresses the importance of emphasizing winnable local campaigns, and would make obsolete the vain, mostly symbolic, presidential campaigns by such activists as Ralph Nader.

Nader, who spoke at Eastern on March 6, is a particular target of Gitlin’s.

“It would have been one thing had Ralph Nader run a serious race and would have raised publicly a lot of significant issues and at the very least created some excitement,” Gitlin says. “But running this stealth campaign was completely pointless. He gets a half million votes. Who cares? That doesn’t exercise any clout on Clinton. That’s a laugh.”

New Party politics, as explained by Gitlin, work like this: First you organize around local issues, especially those emphasizing the need for economic reform. Then, if you have a race you know you can win, you run a candidate under the New Party banner.

If you don’t have the votes to win, though, you need to change tactics. And you do that by essentially appropriating the Democratic or Republican candidate who most represents what you believe. It’s what is called “fusion” politics, Gitlin says.

Under this scenario, for example, Gov. Gary Locke last November would have been listed on the Washington state voter’s ballot as both the Democratic and the New Party gubernatorial candidate.

What would be the point of this? Well, Gitlin says, it would let pols such as Locke know that a certain voting block is backing him - but that it is doing so because he agrees with its specific political concerns.

“You want him to know and you want the rest of the political universe to know, that x-thousand people supported Gary Locke because he supports the positions of The New Party,” Gitlin says.

The notion that this kind of political activism is just what America needs is, of course, an arguable point. Maybe it would work, maybe not. It doesn’t matter at the moment anyway because “fusion” politics is illegal in all but 17 states.

The basis for that illegality, Gitlin says, dates back in some cases a full century. State legislatures, feeling threatened by a similar strategy then employed by the populist-based People’s Party, quickly voted to outlaw any efforts at promoting multiple-party affiliations.

A change in the law may be coming, however. After the New Party was bounced off the Minnesota ballot last year, party organizers brought suit. And the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with their argument.

“The right for people to peaceably assemble, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, also amounts to the right to endorse anybody you want on a ballot,” Gitlin says. “To me, it seems indisputable.”

Even so, that’s now up to the U.S. Supreme Court to decide.

Some New Party opponents hope that the high court reverses the appeals court. They argue that the two-party system is the glue that has held America together and that any tampering with that system could lead to disaster.

Gitlin, not surprisingly, disagrees.

“This is a very diverse country, but it’s quite uniform in a lot of ways,” he says. “There’s a consensus on many, many things and we have a long way to go before we suffer from a grave breakdown of that fundamental consensus.”

On the other hand, Gitlin says, “I am worried about our incapacity to accomplish what we need to do for the purposes of justice. What we need much more is a capacity for people to make their desires known.”

Especially at the ballot box.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SPEAKING Todd Gitlin speaks at 2:30 p.m. Thursday during EWU’s Founder’s Day celebration in Showalter Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.