Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond.

IN 1988, then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho convened a task force of Democratic congressmen to draft a new social agenda for the party. But when some members pushed the group to declare that the work ethic was "the core value of society," t proved too radical for Representative Gus Hawkins, a black who then served as chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Hawkins, reports Brown, declared the statement "would be seen as a slap in the face to welfare recipients." The other Democrats backed down.

But if, in 1988, the Democratic majority in Congress was paralyzed with guilt over the plight of black America, the heart of what had been the party's white middle-class constituency wasn't bleeding any more. Back in 1985, after watching Fritz Mondale rack up a grand total of 13 electoral votes against Ronald Reagan, the Democratic leadership felt so lost stumbling to rediscover the political homeland of the white middle class that it paid a marketing firm $250,000 just to point it in the right direction. Five thousand individual interviews and 33 "focus groups" later, the firm came back with some bad news: white "Southern moderates and Northern, mostly Catholic, urban and newly suburban ethnic voters," it said, viewed the Democratic Party as the champion of "liberals on the one hand and special interests (blacks, gays, Hispanics, feminists, and labor) on the other."

In Minority Party, Peter Brown explores this phenomenon, focusing especially on the relationship between the Democrats and blacks. "Whether it is tourists being stabbed on the New York subway; Detroit blacks setting their city ablaze every Halloween; D.C. Mayor Marion Barry using crack ....or Los Angeles gang wars," writes Brown, "urban/black America evokes the hostility and fear of most middle-class whites." Whites who in the 1960s marched with Martin Luther King, flirted with free love, and burned joints, draft cards, and college administration buildings, in the 1980s were struggling with two incomes to pay a mortgage in a safe suburb, send their children to good schools, and protect their meager savings from inflation. They also were voting for Reagan.

The Democrats alienated the white middle class, Brown argues, by carrying the civil-rights movement too far. Middle-class whites, Brown believes, draw their image of blacks from only a "small slice of black America," but they are not racist. They believe in a level playing field. The problem is that the Democratic Party doesn't, and by tilting the field it creates a conflict of interests between the races. Brown's middle-class white typically resents the possibility he could lose out on a job or a promotion to a less-qualified black because of a Democrat-mandated racial quota. He is outraged by a Democrat-created justice system that fails to jail criminals-a disproportionate number of whom are black. And he hates paying taxes to subsidize the idleness of a seemingly permanent black underclass.

These sources of white disaffection with the party of the New Deal and the Great Society, Brown concludes, add up to a "minus sum" political equation. The more Democrats appeal to their traditional black constituency, the more they alienate their traditional white one. Because more than 80 per cent of American voters are white, the Democrats have more to lose by losing the whites.

Thus when Jesse Jackson ran for President that same year, fellow Democratic candidates responded to his redistributionist rantings with a studied respect and collegiality normally reserved for congressional-ethics hearings probing the corruption of fellow Democratic legislators. Middle-class whites, Brown contends, responded with fear and loathing. Translated into demographics, the Democratic hypersensitivity to the demands of Jackson and people like him injures not only Democratic presidential aspirations, but also Democratic hopes of maintaining a congressional majority forever. A largely white population, moving south and west and to the suburbs, will not long continue punching ballots for politicians who push the interests of a Northeastern, urban underclass.

As a road map to show the Democratic Party the way back to Camelot, Mr. Brown's theory may or may not be adequate. He suggests, for example, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton as politicians who have tapped into a coalition that could elect Democrats in the future. The idea is to deprecate affirmative action, crime, and taxes just enough to win more than 40 per cent of the whites, but not so much to lose the Jackson block and the Stanford faculty.

But as social theory, Mr. Brown's analysis leans a little too much to the assumption that voters are motivated principally by material interests. The Democrats' 1985 voter survey hinted at the truth when it showed whites rejecting the party because it had become the party of "blacks, gays, Hispanics, feminists, and labor." This is an oddly mismatched set: blacks and Hispanics are created by God; homosexuality, feminism, and managerialized labor unions are the handiwork of man. And most middle-class whites understand the distinction.

Had Mr. Brown probed the attitude of the white middle class toward homosexuality, feminism, and big labor as deeply as he probed its attitude toward blacks, he would have developed a fuller model of a class still devoted (as is much of black America) to a culture defined by the values of self reliance, family, and fear of God. But the ideology that supports the homosexual and feminist subcultures is anti-family and irreligious, while big labor favors a big government that engenders a dependent citizenry.

The American politicians who will win the firmest majorities will be those who project a sincere belief in the faith, the family, and, as Tony Coelho's group once tried to put it, the work ethic.