May 14, 2001 | The Nation

Prochoice Generation Gap?

Port Chester,
N.Y.

In 1996 ten of the country's leading prochoice
organizations collaborated to overcome many of the obstacles noted in
Jennifer Baumgardner's March 5 "The Pro-choice PR Problem" by forming
The Pro-Choice Public Education Project. PEP strives to energize
younger women and develop the next generation of
leaders.

What Baumgardner seems to be missing is that PEP
is an effort to "engage young women more directly in the
struggle for abortion rights." As local organizations work to build
their forces, challenge antichoice initiatives and raise awareness,
PEP provides tools that would be too expensive for these groups to
produce on their own. PEP conducts cutting-edge research on the
opinions of young women, commissions ads that can compete for the
attention of young women and throughout the country introduces these
findings and ads to groups through workshops. Groups in forty states
have used PEP's ads and research to involve and educate young women
about threats to their reproductive rights. Please visit our website
at www.protectchoice.org.

THE PEP STEERING COMMITTEE

New York City

Having arranged
the Open Society Institute's research support for Jennifer
Baumgardner's article, I now take issue with her findings.
Baumgardner is correct that the prochoice movement has faced a
difficult dilemma in mobilizing young Americans who support, but are
complacent about, reproductive rights. She sets up a false dichotomy,
however, between efforts to engage young people through advertising
and conventional grassroots organizing. In virtually all of the
examples she cites the two have gone hand in hand.

Baumgardner portrays The Pro-Choice Public Education
Project, a collaborative effort of ten prochoice organizations, as a
prizewinning advertising campaign disconnected from the grassroots.
This simply ignores ample evidence that was provided her. Groups in
forty states--including local affiliates of Planned Parenthood, NARAL
and The Feminist Majority Foundation--all of which work with large
numbers of young people, have been using the ads at no cost to
educate and inspire activism. Follow-up polling after paid placement
of the ads in subways in New York and San Francisco also demonstrated
considerable impact. In addition, those ads drove extensive free
media coverage in magazines and newspapers across the country, which
dramatically increased the value of a relatively modest investment in
their production and placement.

Baumgardner, on the other
hand, extols the virtues of Choice USA, a spirited organization of
young women inspired by Gloria Steinem, which works primarily on
college campuses. Not mentioned is the fact that Choice USA has also
employed its own paid ads in college newspapers to great effect--ads
featuring wholesome young women claiming the right to make
responsible choices.

Most curious is Baumgardner's claim
that investment in advertising to reframe the prochoice debate has
had no political impact. Nothing could be further from the truth. At
least three major exit polls last November revealed that choice had
registered as a surprisingly strong concern among voters, just behind
education and Social Security, and ahead of taxes.

Much has
been made of the large numbers of women who deserted George W. Bush,
despite his deliberate efforts to obfuscate onthe abortion issue and
to buy silence from the Republican Party's right wing. Several of Al
Gore's advisers have admitted their mistake in failing to speak more
forcefully about Bush's poor record on reproductive rights. They've
given credit for moving the issue up on the radar screen--and for
driving up Gore's numbers in key states like Wisconsin and Oregon--to
targeted media campaigns by NARAL and Planned Parenthood. If only
there had been more of them.

These campaigns also had
strong grassroots components, which are producing an important
dividend as George Bush now shows his true stripes, arousing all of
us, old and young alike, from our complacency. In the Ashcroft
confirmation hearings, Planned Parenthood and NARAL mobilized a rapid
response. Thousands of letters, e-mails and phone calls from irate
citizens finally awakened Senate Democrats to the new political
resonance of reproductive rights. Now, prochoice Republicans in both
houses say they are prepared to reject Bush's reinstatement of the
global gag rule, which compromises rights of free speech and of
privacy for countless women around the world. One could argue that
media and message development has rarely seen such successful
outcomes. And now is certainly no time to quiet down about what's at
stake.

ELLEN CHESLER
Program on
Reproductive Health and Rights
The Open Society Institute

Amherst, Mass.

I have a different
opinion about the "pro-choice PR problem." I was a young prochoice
activist in the late 1980s-early 1990s, when there were thousands of
women, born before Roe v. Wade but just barely, who viewed
abortion rights as a cause they were willing to fight hard for. None
of us were old enough to remember when abortion was illegal, but we
devoted our weekends to clinic defense and spent evenings
volunteering in the NARAL office.

What happened? I don't
think it was apathy. First, the increase in violence in the movement
(shootings, bomb threats, etc.) combined with a sense that there was
no protection from police or government was enough to scare some
folks away from the frontlines.

Second, with the election
of Clinton some believed they could rely on Democratic promises to
safeguard choice (most of us were too young to remember anything but
Republican rule). Little did we know that the number of abortion
providers would fall at an even more rapid pace in Clinton's first
term than over the decade that preceded it.

Finally, it was
exactly the PR approach to abortion that led to a very real
disillusionment with national groups like NARAL. All too often NARAL
lived up to its single-issue reputation, ready to risk gains in other
areas of women's rights for the sake of abortion alone. Yes, that's
expected--the name alone implies it. But compare NARAL with the
grassroots groups (like the DC Coalition for Choice, in NARAL's own
backyard) that saw abortion as a key demand but only one in the
broader struggle for women's rights. Baumgardner's article highlights
this by pointing out how NARAL spent $1.5 million on ads attacking
Ralph Nader, ignoring a raft of other women's issues in the 2000
presidential campaign (e.g., welfare "reform," free trade, labor
rights, universal healthcare). NARAL's slick fundraising, lobbying
and inside-the-Beltway approach--represented so clearly in its
anti-Nader attack--alienated the young women who wanted to fight for
choice inside a larger movement for social justice.

I hope
that new groups like those started by Choice USA will revitalize that
kind of grassroots feminist movement.

STEPHANIE LUCE

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I'm a progressive
prolifer, 29, female and a full-time worker. There are many young,
activist (not even Catholic--imagine that!) females like myself who
are working to eradicate the need for abortion but doing so without
the stereotypical "aborted fetus" imagery. We also have an amazing ad
agency, filled with industry awards, dishing out amazing ads geared
toward supporting women. I know, you'd have to see them to believe
it. They are the voice of a new generation of prolife women, and they
are nonjudgmental, nonviolent, nonauthoritarian. We too, had a series
of ads that were rejected by the networks because they were too
controversial, and they contained no offensive imagery
whatsoever.

AMANDA PETERMAN
Right to Life of Michigan
Educational Fund

New York City

One
problem is obvious: Where does the coalition of fifty women's rights
organizations have its "prizewinning New York advertising agency"
target our limited liberal dollars? "Subways and buses throughout the
city"! Except for a small percentage on the E train to Queens and
some local buses in some neighborhoods, who will they influence in a
city and state with every serious candidate running, to some degree,
on a prochoice ticket?

ALAN SAGNER

Hudson,
N.Y.

For years the prochoice community has been
"reactive" to the antichoice community on issues ranging from clinic
safety to late abortions. Planned Parenthood has made some attempts
to reframe the "discussion" in terms of promoting family health and
stability by maintaining access to affordable abortions and family
planning methods. However, in my private practice where I provide
medical abortions (Mifeprex) to middle-class women in New York City,
I find they have little interest in supporting prochoice
organizations or any real concern that their hard-fought right of
"choice" could disappear with loss of one or two Supreme Court
heartbeats.

Conservative members of the House and Senate
are gathering to try to find ways of restricting the use of Mifeprex
("the abortion pill") or even withdrawing FDA approval. These threats
are real and the danger posed to women's reproductive health equally
real. Furthermore, Mifepristone may have important uses in the
treatment of breast, ovarian and uterine cancers. In the words of
Eminem, "Please stand up."

RICHARD HAUSKNECHT, MD

The Mount Sinai School of
Medicine

Scituate, R.I.

Jennifer
Baumgardner advocates efforts to engage young women in the struggle.
My experience suggests that young men can be targeted too. Hearing
Molly Yard of NOW speak, and other campus activism, helped propel me
to take part in clinic defenses, marches on DC and years of NARAL
donations.

ELIOT LEVINE

BAUMGARDNER
REPLIES

New York City

As I made clear
in my article, the ads Devito/
Verdi created for PEP are truly
great. However, these great ads don't have broad or effective
distribution except in San Francisco and New York City, two cities
with excellent access to abortion (as Alan Sagner points out). In
other words, the ads won't fulfill PEP's stated mission "to energize
younger women and develop the next generation of leaders." Especially
when they can't even get the ads on the air.

The antichoice
groups have had better luck getting their ads shown. Therefore, I
have to disagree with Amanda Peterman of Michigan Right to Life when
she asserts that her side is the victim of network squeamishness,
too. Their antichoice ads were pulled not for being controversial but
because they made false claims about then-Representative (now
Senator) Debbie Stabenow's voting record on late-term abortions. (The
ads claimed Stabenow voted against banning the procedure. Sadly,
Stabenow stated that she "has repeatedly supported legislation to ban
all late-term abortions...unless a doctor says that the health or
life of the mother is in serious danger.")

I agree with
Ellen Chesler that the members of PEP believe in both grassroots
organizing and advertising. But the PEP project has accomplished
primarily the glitzy-ads part of the equation at the expense of
efforts to build consciousness (and recruit young activists) through
painstaking person-to-person organizing. Further, there is ample
evidence that the "grassroots" (i.e., younger women--the majority of
those who have abortions) are not really listened to by this
prochoice establishment. A 24-year-old PEP fellow named Rebecca
Gurney, for instance, initiated several projects to increase the
connection between PEP and younger women (the presumed-ignorant
target audience of the ads). She developed a mentoring network, among
other projects, but none of her suggestions were taken. Amy Richards,
who helps administer an abortion fund for young women via Third Wave
Foundation, wrote a letter encouraging PEP to include young women in
their leadership and strategy-building in 1996, at PEP's inception.
Richards received no response. (Third Wave is listed cosmetically as
part of the PEP coalition, but it has no decision-making
power.)

I wrote my article before Bush became President,
and I almost pulled it because it felt odd to criticize some of the
most important organizations providing and preserving abortion rights
now that these rights are threatened more than ever. My decision not
to was vindicated by the letters in response. They reveal PEP's
delusion that a New York- and San Francisco-oriented ad campaign with
virtually no input by younger women or men is an effective way to
reach those people and ignite the prochoice majority. If anything,
the ads worked to take votes from Nader (which, as Stephanie Luce
points out, alienated some lefty female voters). Bush, on the other
hand, received 49 percent of the white female vote. While researching
the strategies and makeup of the entrenched prochoice groups and PEP,
I discovered that some constructive criticism about the efficacy of
this expensive undertaking was in order. I think there's a place for
thoughtful critique within the movement, and I offer my article in
that spirit. I do believe that we can maximize a prochoice majority,
and I support ongoing efforts to do so.

JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER

"Phanzi, Pfizer, Phanzi!" "Get out, Pfizer, go!" At rallies they sing the old liberation songs, replacing the names of apartheid leaders with those of multinational pharmaceutical companies. On the streets they chant demands, no longer for the vote or a living wage or freedom, but for fluconazole and cotrimoxazole and nevirapine. Their leaders and organizers might well be human rights lawyers and healthcare professionals, but most of the foot soldiers of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)--which has spearheaded the campaign for affordable medicine for HIV-related illnesses in South Africa--are ordinary South African men and women, HIV-positive but too poor to afford the drugs needed to keep them alive.

For most of us, globalization remains an abstract and troubling concept, but for the TAC's activists the pharmaceutical industry's cynical abuse of international trade agreements to keep its profit margins high has meant that globalization is literally killing them. What makes their activism so compelling is that their battle for access to treatment has brought them up against the consequences of the global economy--and that they appear to be triumphant.

In mid-April, after a three-year fight, thirty-nine multinational pharmaceutical companies agreed to settle a suit against the South African government to prevent it from purchasing brand-name drugs from third parties at the cheapest rates possible. This, Big Pharma had claimed, was in violation of international trade and property agreements the South African government had signed. The withdrawal was brokered directly by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who had been asked by the five biggest companies to help them find a way out of what had become a public relations nightmare. Annan called South African President Thabo Mbeki, whose officials drafted a last-minute settlement that committed the country to negotiate with the multinationals before implementing its policy. The victory, however, was the TAC's: Not only had it proved that the suit was unwinnable, it had brilliantly mobilized a broad spectrum of support at home and abroad against the drug companies, which were shamed into the settlement--in effect, an honorable withdrawal.

The icon of this victory, broadcast all over the world, was the image of a large African man in the courtroom popping a bottle of champagne in a circle of jubilant celebrants. This man was Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of Cosatu, South Africa's largest labor federation and the backbone of the "Revolutionary Alliance" that brought the African National Congress to power--and that keeps it there. Surrounding him was a fascinating mix of working-class activists, high-powered lobbyists from international organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam, and ecstatic government officials reliving, for one brief moment, the euphoria of activism.

The TAC has managed to put together the first seriously effective social movement since South Africa's transition to democracy in 1994. The keynote speaker at its first national conference, in March, was Cosatu president Willie Madisha. "There is no urgency from government," he told an audience of 500 delegates from more than 169 organizations, including major religious and healthcare groups. "Sometimes it drags its feet, at other times its HIV/AIDS work is incoherent. Broader social mobilization is essential to engage government constructively."

In 1994 most antiapartheid activists either went into government and became enmeshed in the workings of the new state or set off for the private sector to exercise their newfound freedom and follow their own interests. The result was that the broad-based social movements that brought apartheid to its knees in the 1980s ossified into bureaucracy or withered into nonexistence. The TAC offers a cogent example of the consequences: In the early 1990s, AIDS activists played a major role in the drafting of an exceptional National AIDS Plan, which was adopted by the African National Congress. But instead of mobilizing mass support to achieve the demands of the plan, AIDS activists found themselves inside the system and thus bound by the inevitable constraints of government, relying too heavily on what the TAC calls "the politics of access." Outsiders became insiders, and without the oxygen of a mass movement to keep it alive, the plan was suffocated by red tape.

But just a week before the victory against Big Pharma, TAC's chairman and chief strategist (himself a product of the antiapartheid movement), Zackie Achmat, publicly accused two senior government officials--both medical doctors and former healthcare activists themselves--of having the blood of children on their hands because they were retarding the implementation of antiretroviral programs for pregnant mothers with HIV. "We face a greater tragedy than the acts of omission of the drug companies," he said, "and that is the failure of government officials to act with courage, humility and urgency."

The accusation may have been unduly harsh--Achmat himself could be accused of understanding neither the constraints of bureaucracy nor the choices that the ill-resourced government must make--but he has a significant mass-based constituency behind him when he makes it. The TAC's brilliance was in recognizing that it had an issue that would appeal to the broad left wing of South African society not only because of the government's manifest ineptitude in the face of a horrifying pandemic (4.7 million infected out of a population of 40 million) but because the battle for treatment was a perfect vehicle for taking on the heartlessness of global capital and the perceived wrongheadedness of the ANC government's neoliberal macroeconomic policy. South Africa has been the good boy of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, Achmat says, and we're sicker and poorer than we've ever been.

The reason Cosatu and the left like the treatment access issue so much is that it allows them to say this; it puts flesh on their critique of the government's quest for a balanced budget in line with the World Bank's specifications, a quest that means less funding for programs like the provision of lifesaving medication. Globalization, finally, has a face. TAC activists appeared at court wearing ghostly, leering masks of Big Pharma's mandarins. Globalization is itself on trial: The masked activists were in handcuffs.

Just last year, Mbeki accused the TAC of actually being in the employ of Big Pharma because of its strident criticism of the government's AIDS policy. Now, despite the brief and effective courtroom alliance between activists and government, the same battle lines are drawn again, sharper than ever. Minister of Health Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang held a press conference after the courtroom celebration at which she made it clear that providing AIDS drugs was not a government priority; the TAC shot back that it would do whatever was needed--including confronting government head on--to bring "real drugs to real people."

It remains to be seen whether the victory against Big Pharma is anything more than symbolic, whether it will have any effect at all in bringing affordable drugs to the ailing masses of South Africa. Its significance, rather, is in its creation of a mass-based, independent, critically minded social movement that takes the best of South Africa's tradition of struggle and engages it, in a sophisticated and tangible way, in a battle against the negative consequences of the global economy and the manipulation of institutions like the WTO by multinational corporations. The TAC's battle could provide the same brand of moral leadership in the global struggle that the antiapartheid movement did in decades past.

UNFAIR HARVARD

Timothy Patrick McCarthy, who teaches history and literature at Harvard, writes: On April 18, forty-six members of Harvard's Living Wage Campaign took over Massachusetts Hall, one of Harvard's main administrative buildings, to demand a living wage for all Harvard workers. In addition to the sit-in, hundreds of other protesters and sympathizers have marched outside, fasted, slept in tents in Harvard Yard, held panel discussions and rallies and launched an impressive outreach and petition campaign. The Living Wage Campaign is demanding that all Harvard workers, whether directly employed by the university or hired through outside firms, be paid a living wage of at least $10.25 per hour, adjusted annually for inflation and with basic health benefits. According to the administration's own figures, more than a thousand full-time and part-time, or "casual," employees are paid less than $10 per hour for their work. Dining-hall workers at Harvard Law School currently earn as little as $6.50 per hour, and most janitors receive less than $9 per hour. As the university celebrates a transition in presidential leadership from Neil Rudenstine, a humanist, to Lawrence Summers, an economist, it must have the courage to do what is humane and economically just: Provide a living wage to all its workers.

CASUALTIES OF THE DRUG WAR

When the single-engine plane carrying missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity, was shot down on April 20 by a Peruvian fighter jet, killing mother and daughter, they became the latest victims of an ever more irrational US-backed drug war. The missionary plane, tracked by a CIA surveillance aircraft, was mistaken for a drug flight and blown out of the sky by a Peruvian crew. The US claims that the CIA operatives in the surveillance plane tried to dissuade the Peruvian pilot from shooting, but both planes were there because of the antidrug crusade. How many innocent Peruvians have been aboard the other planes shot down in this campaign? The surveillance flights are temporarily suspended, but the Bush Administration is going ahead with plans to more deeply embroil a growing list of Latin American nations in the crusade. Colombia's internal war, fueled by stepped-up US antidrug dollars, already threatens to spread to neighboring countries. In the United States the thousands of mostly poor, nonviolent drug users who fill the prisons are forgotten victims of the drug crusade. Perhaps the barbaric killing of the missionary and her baby will prick the American conscience as past tragedies have not.

DRUGGED OUT

Intern Kathryn Lewis writes: Thanks to a 1998 amendment to the Higher Education Act, college students convicted of drug-related charges are barred from receiving federal aid for a year or more from the date of conviction. To gain access to assistance, they must complete an approved rehab program. Nearly 10 million students who can't afford higher education without government aid are potential victims of this selective targeting. (No other class of offender, including convicted rapists, is disqualified from receiving aid.) How many students who require financial assistance are going to be able to pay for an expensive treatment program? Last year 9,215 students were denied aid as a result of the provision. More than 800,000 federal aid applicants did not answer the application question asking if they had been convicted of a drug charge. The Education Department decided not to disqualify those who left the question blank, but this year, students who don't answer will be ineligible, so the number denied aid might skyrocket. Congressman Barney Frank has introduced legislation repealing the provision, and sixty student governments have endorsed it. (For information: Drug Reform Coordination Network at www.drcnet.org.)

WHITE TRASH

For six years the Missouri branch of the Ku Klux Klan demanded that it be allowed to participate in the Adopt-a-Highway program, which gives it the privilege of picking up trash and posting a self-congratulatory sign along a stretch of I-55. The state didn't want the KKK sign littering its roadside, and a legal battle ensued, culminating in a March ruling by the US Supreme Court supporting the Klan's right to promote itself on the highway. Meanwhile, the state had renamed the Klan's stretch the Rosa Parks Highway. Whether that reduced Klan members' work ethic we know not, but the stretch of road became so trashy that the state expelled the KKK from the Adopt-a-Highway program.

JEFF DAVIS'S REVENGE

In voting for a state flag bearing the Confederate battle emblem, the people of Mississippi seem to have followed, in a perverse way, native son William Faulkner's dictum: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The pro-flag vote was made easier by the myth that the Confederacy had nothing to do with slavery or white supremacy. Here's what Faulkner thought about white supremacy: "They [African-Americans] will endure. They are better than we are." In Montgomery, Alabama, 150 Dixie die-hards protested plans to erect a monument to the Selma voting rights march on the state capitol grounds. They regard the monument to civil rights heroes as a desecration of the site where the Confederate States of America was formed in 1861.

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

Al Kamen reported in the Washington Post that Assistant US Attorney Janet Rehnquist is about to be named inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. That's right. She is the daughter of the Chief Justice. Kamen also said that Eugene Scalia, son of Justice Antonin, and Virginia Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence, were being considered for Labor Department solicitor and a "top spot" at OMB, respectively. Political payoff? We prefer to think of it as affirmative action.

George Orwell would have appreciated the irony of President Bush and other hemispheric leaders declaring in Quebec their intention to spread democracy, as chain-link fences, tear gas, water cannons and mass arrests prevented citizens from getting anywhere near the April 20-22 Summit of the Americas. George W. Bush and the leaders of thirty-three other nations who agreed to establish a Free Trade Area of the Americas by the year 2005 claimed that their action would improve the lives of citizens from Alaska to Argentina, but their proclamations rang a bit hollow to those arrested for advocating democracy and the alleviation of poverty.

Meanwhile, inside the fortress, even some of the summiteers admitted to doubts about the magic of free trade; at one point when the leaders apparently thought public transmission of their comments had ended, Canadian International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew remarked, "It is not the market or trade per se that can eliminate inequality."

Why are so many people so dubious about the FTAA? The experience of NAFTA, which was recently condemned by Human Rights Watch for creating structures that are consistently biased against the protection of working people, has made skeptics of citizens who can see that a corporate-defined free-trade regimen only enriches corporations. In Mexico, even by the government's conservative estimates, manufacturing wages dropped to $1.90 from $2.10 per hour between 1994 and 1999, after NAFTA came into effect. In the United States, more than 300,000 workers have qualified for training programs set up for those laid off because of NAFTA. It is realities like those that led to the protests in Quebec and to rallies in cities from Buffalo to San Diego. In Chicago, Service Employees Local 1 president Tom Balanoff asked workers: "We know what NAFTA did--why would we want to make the same mistake" with the FTAA? In St. Paul, Senator Paul Wellstone told a crowd that included truckers and teaching assistants, "We speak for a global economy that doesn't just work for greedy multinational corporations."

The broad-based coalition that was so effective in Seattle and that reasserted itself in Quebec will play an important role in the "fast track" fight that will soon stir in Congress. Bush will not have an easy time putting together the majority he needs to win fast track negotiating authority, which would allow the Administration to craft an agreement that could then be only voted up or down by Congress. But he doesn't lack leverage: Obliquely acknowledging the legitimacy of the protesters' demands, he has copied business's newfound rhetoric of sensitivity to labor and environmental concerns in an effort to win the votes of "centrist" Democrats, and there is talk that the Administration might be willing to cut deals with some labor and environmental groups in order to buy off opposition. On the GOP side, Bush faces possible defections among those concerned about home-state industries like steel and those from farm states, as well as a core group of traditional anti-free traders.

In 1997 and 1998 a labor, environmental and human rights coalition defeated Clinton in the House on fast track at a time when the opposition was not nearly as broad-based or well organized, and it can prevail again this year. To win, however, in a way that is viewed as a step forward for citizens everywhere, that effort should focus not only on what's wrong with the FTAA but also on the fact that its critics have developed responsible alternative visions to "globalization at any price" that include such things as right-to-know legislation that would require US multinationals to collect and disclose vital data on environmental damage and workplace conditions in their overseas production.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien dismissed the thousands who came to Quebec City with the words On va protester et blablabla (they're coming to protest and blah blah blah). But as Naomi Klein wrote, "Quite the opposite. They're coming to Quebec to protest because they've had it with the blah blah blah." The demonstrators bore witness for those who weren't in Quebec--the people on the wrong end of globalization.

The protesters have done their job well, making it clear to the world that the spirit of Seattle is not only alive but growing stronger. Now it's up to US activists to make sure Congress gets the message.

So much for "compassionate conservatism." During his first 100 days, George W. Bush's principal accomplishment, indeed his only one, was to demolish any too-generous illusions about who he is. The mild and moderate character who ran for President, claiming to want more or less the same things Al Gore wanted, has been replaced by a hard-edged, rather maladroit right-winger. Bush brushed aside his own rhetorical flourishes toward bipartisan civility and has engaged in a bare-knuckle (and politically tone-deaf) style of governing that most resembles the notorious theft in the Florida recount operation: Take no prisoners, obliterate the facts and rules of reason, forget the dubious legitimacy upon which this presidency is based. A more likable and personally persuasive leader (think Reagan or Clinton) might have pulled it off. When Bush speaks, one's thoughts drift immediately to whether he will successfully read the words off the card.

This President's beginning is not just ugly, it's ominous. That conclusion isn't based only on ideology but on the retrograde mindset of the new Administration. The men in charge--the older guys, his handlers--seem stuck in a time warp. It's as though Cheney, O'Neill, Rumsfeld et al. have missed the past twenty years of politics and evolving public attitudes. Their opacity is potentially dangerous for the country as they try to bull their way forward, and Bush the Younger, we predict, will encounter many more rude surprises. His agenda is out of touch with reality, distant from what the government should be doing to help this society and economy get through the darkening waters ahead.

The environmental deletions--arsenic-in-your-water being the operative symbol--are throwback appeasements to business patrons and parochial politics (the Bushies seem surprised to learn that people, including Republicans, do care about these matters). Bush's abrupt reversal on global warming, discarding his campaign pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, is the most dangerous shift and is sure to bite back. The tax-cut legislation is hand-me-down Reaganomics from the early eighties (Bush's fumbling turn as a fake Keynesian failed to persuade.) His energy policy--drill we must, lest we become dependent on foreign oil--is similarly out of date. Oil-guzzling America is (and ever will be) dependent on imported oil as long as it fails to reform its consumption patterns, no matter how much pristine landscape is torn up by drilling rigs (as even the industry boys privately acknowledge). The cold-warrior wannabes--let's get it on with the Chinese--held their tongues during the Hainan Island incident, but they expect their silence to be rewarded with Star Wars and other arms boodle. The blunt assault on organized labor, though expected by the unions, has been meaner and pettier than could have been anticipated. Bush's obeisance to the right on a woman's choice revives harm to innocents around the world.

In short, there are no new ideas here. The Bush content is composed entirely of recycled oldies from the Nixon/Ford and Reagan/Bush years. Indeed, his government is populated by elder statesmen and hacks from those administrations, joined by fervent young acolytes who innocently believe in the restoration. The older heads, we suspect, are more cynical--pushing through whatever they can as fast as possible in the knowledge that the conservative hegemony is living on borrowed time. In other circumstances, their clash with reality could be entertaining. But our situation is far too dangerous. As the economy sinks and unemployment begins to swell, as corporate bankruptcies accumulate, an eyes-open government would be preparing emergency measures to stimulate recovery and to rescue millions of debt-soaked families. The Bush Administration instead pushes through a bankruptcy bill for bankers. It seeks to whack tax obligations for the wealthy one more time. It squeezes the very public spending accounts that could serve as economic stabilizers in troubled times.

Meanwhile, it turns on the smoke machines to promote another round of free-trade agreements, unwilling to acknowledge the international rebellion expressed in the streets of Quebec. Bush foreign policy--the China incident aside--looks like a smashmouth approach to global relations. We're the big guys. We get to say what goes. Kyoto and global warming--forget about it. Russia and China--in your face. South Korea's hopeful reach for détente with the North is brushed aside. A massively flawed national missile defense policy is pursued with no regard for existing treaties or the alarms it raises in Moscow and Beijing, or Paris, Berlin and London. Expanding NATO to Russia's borders is put on the agenda. All this amounts to the worst form of America First triumphalism. Given our burgeoning capital indebtedness to foreign lenders, a more mature approach would be prudent.

The Bush II years, in sum, promise nasty ideological warfare on virtually every front that matters--a struggle at least as serious as the Reagan era's and maybe more, given the decayed state of representative democracy. The awkward new President's boldness is encouraged, we observe, by the lame responses of the Democratic opposition. If Democrats don't make the full-throated fight now, when may we expect them to do so? If Democrats remain so timid, popular agitation must build fires under them, too. The political imperative is not exactly news but requires repeating: Do not wait for Washington to resolve these great issues. March on it. Bang on it.

Depending on who's counting, one in four, five or six American children lives in poverty, the highest rate in the industrialized West. Nearly 11 million have no health insurance. Hundreds of thousands are in foster care. Five hundred thousand are homeless. The infant mortality rate in the inner cities of Washington, New Haven, East St. Louis and Chicago rivals that of Malaysia. There is one thing America has, though, that you won't find in France or Denmark or Sweden or Italy, and that is the persistent conviction that children would be just fine if only their mothers would give up working and stay home.

Consider the media feeding frenzy around the latest research released by the National Institute for Child Health and Development. Just about every paper has given major play to its finding that 17 percent of children who regularly spend thirty hours or more a week in childcare between the ages of three months and four and a half years are aggressive, disobedient and defiant in kindergarten, versus only 6 percent of children who have spent less than ten hours a week in childcare. (Childcare, by the way, is everybody but Mom, including nannies, Dad and Grandma--so forget equal parenting, and forget, too, the nanas and bubbes and aunts and older sisters who have taken care of small children for centuries while mothers toiled in the fields or behind counters or over laundry vats long before "working mothers" existed.) Buried in the coverage is the study's other finding: that high-quality childcare is associated with better cognitive and linguistic skills. Unmentioned is the fact that only a few years ago welfare moms were lambasted as lazy and useless for staying home with their children by some of the same right-wing ideologues now crowing on TV about the NICHD study. The truth is, the daycare debate has always been about college-educated working moms--women with good jobs some think they shouldn't have, and children every quirk of whose development is of interest to the opinion classes.

As it happens, Jay Belsky, who has gotten the lion's share of the press attention and is often cited, incorrectly, as the study's lead or even sole author, has been warning against the dangers of early childcare since 1986, when he claimed it caused babies and toddlers to fail to bond with their mothers. That didn't pan out but Belsky is all over the press now, boasting of his lack of political correctness in bringing people the unpleasant truth. "I won't lie down and play dead," he told the New York Times. Elsewhere, he has recommended not only parental leave but that mothers reconsider full-time work. Sarah Friedman, Kathleen McCartney and other researchers on the study don't agree at all. "This study was conducted by a team of some thirty researchers," Friedman told me. "His view is not the majority view." And she adds, "the type of analysis does not allow us to infer causality." In other words, childcare may not cause aggression but may be associated with something else that does--family stress, exhausted parents. Says Deborah Vandrell of the University of Wisconsin, "Mothers should stay home? Childcare is bad for kids? The data don't support that." And indeed, the study isn't so dire: Most kids in childcare are fine; the problematic behavior falls within the normal range; moreover, kids kept out of childcare double their rate of aggression when they finally get to school, suggesting that Vandrell may be right when she theorizes that the results mostly reflect the opportunity for aggressive behavior, and that kids would benefit from better conflict-resolution skills. (In an all-caps e-mail to me, Belsky professed himself "appalled" that McCartney put this idea forward on Face the Nation--he claims the study refutes it--and accused his colleagues of focusing on childcare quality rather than quantity because they don't want to be "unpopular.")

It's easy to take potshots at social science, so I'll just note in passing that one of the criteria for "cooperation" is "keeps room neat and clean without being reminded." It does seem like yesterday, though, that Bruno Bettelheim was blaming the group care typical of an Israeli kibbutz for making kids too sociable, too compliant, not ruggedly individualist enough. I know, it sounds crazy now--have you ever met a laid-back Israeli? But then, as Caryl Rivers pointed out on Women's E-News, back in the 1950s stay-at-home moms were blamed for producing a generation of mollycoddled wimps unable to stand up to the communists. If middle-class working moms really did trade the briefcase for the stroller, not only would lots of them be poor and frustrated, but within five years we'd be reading about spoiled, feminized sons and angry, condescending daughters already plotting their escape to Lesbian Island.

My French friends find the American debate over childcare utterly mystifying--all French 3-year-olds go to the écoles maternelles, and many are in crèches long before that. In European countries with long-established childcare systems, the American suspicion of daycare does not exist. (Vandrell noted that the European papers haven't even reported the NICHD study.) But then, why would it? European parents have government-paid parental leave and government-funded childcare systems staffed with well-trained and decently paid professionals. In this country, paid leave is a rarity, and daycare is like babysitting: Any warm body will do. Pay is abysmal, training rare, formal standards low. And, of course, the very conservatives who champion the NICHD study oppose every attempt to raise those standards, because that would cost money, encourage "bureaucracy" and go against the know-nothing faux libertarianism that is their political stock in trade.

There's another difference, though: Although everywhere childcare is connected to women's employment, in Europe childcare was developed as something that would be beneficial for children, like nursery school; in this country, it's seen as something for women--women, who if middle-class shouldn't have jobs and if low-income shouldn't have kids. Daycare in America is about feminism. That's why no matter how many studies appear touting the benefits of high-quality childcare, the ones that hit the headlines are always full of gloom.

Picture a grown-up discussion in Iceland, Portugal, Italy or Poland. The question is--what to do with a confessed mass murderer? The argument veers between different kinds of therapy and incarceration, and then somebody says: Let's kill him by playing doctors, and invite some people over to watch it on TV! All eyes roll toward the ceiling.

A few years ago, I took the tour that the federal government offers visitors to its facility in Terre Haute, Indiana (see "Minority Report," May 8, 1995). This rather depressed little burg, once celebrated as the birthplace of the mighty and humane Eugene Victor Debs, had become the lucky recipient of a state subsidy for a new death row. Local boosters talked vaguely of how this might bring much-needed jobs to the area. Now I notice that there has been a recent and well-publicized shot in the arm for the town's T-shirt and souvenir concessionaires. At the time, I remember wondering what I was being reminded of. It came back to me this week. In The Adventures of Augie March, old man Einhorn warns Bellow's young protagonist that the state buys beans in bulk, and well in advance, knowing that there are some people who can be counted upon to get themselves behind bars and come and eat them.

In something like the same way, if the federal government decides to join the death-penalty racket, it will sooner or later find someone to execute. And it can also count on a number of liberals, all troubled and conscientious, to bite their lips and say that perhaps just this once wouldn't matter. "Poster boy for capital punishment" is the lazy phrase that has been employed by several columnists and commentators to describe Timothy McVeigh, as they agonize about whether the state should have the power of life and death, not to mention the right to reinforce this power by means of compassionately conservative closed-circuit TV.

If McVeigh is the poster boy for anything, he is the poster boy for the feral American right. He is opposed to "big government," yet--in his most callous and disgusting phrase--he regards dead children as "collateral damage." (Where on earth did he pick up that obscene phrase, I wonder?) He is also the poster boy for a cult of death and revenge, which takes its tune from the state murder of civilians at Waco, Texas. His last request, or the closing point in his demented program, is a demand that society put him to death without further reflection. Now we can see the same Justice Department bureaucracy that brought us Waco, as it scurries to attend to every detail of the mass murderer's wish.

The McVeigh case makes absolutely no difference at all to the arguments against the death penalty. It is not news that we have depraved people among us; nor is it news that they like to taunt society with their combination of relish and indifference. The number of victims, the heinousness of the offense--these considerations do not and should not weigh in the balance. Ted Bundy could have been snuffed for any one of his crimes, or for none of them. Many people sentenced to death have doubtless been executed for crimes they might have committed but for which they were not convicted. Many living prisoners have committed appalling and evil crimes for which any sentient person would want them to die. And many murderers have been reprieved because they were condemned for the wrong murder, quite probably just as many as have been executed for the only murder they did not in fact commit. People sternly say that at least there is no doubt about McVeigh. Does that then nullify all their previous doubts on the death penalty?

The case can be put quite simply and intelligibly. It is not possible to be in favor of the death penalty à la carte. The state either claims the right to impose this doom or it does not. Nobody will ever be in possession of enough information to determine which convict is deserving of death and which one is not. (This is what people mean when they say rather falteringly that nobody can be "god" in such matters.) Subjective considerations about atrocity and wickedness are what the judicial system exists to prevent, or at the very least to contain. The argument about "closure" and satisfaction for relatives and friends is a sinister and bogus appeal to the irrational; the same argument would support a closed-circuit torture session for the condemned man, and it would not startle me in the least if McVeigh demanded this, too, as his right and his preferred means of checking out. Would we then defer to his expressed wishes and enact a scene of cathartic cruelty?

All but the most extreme pacifists will admit of a case where it might be immoral or amoral not to use force, if not to defend oneself then to defend others. All but the most fanatical opponents of abortion will allow for certain customary "exceptions," too well known to be rehearsed by me. The most committed vegetarian may still employ a leather belt if the consequence of not doing so is that his pants fall around his knees. But capital punishment is an either/or proposition, as every law-bound society except the United States has come to realize. The state, even in time of war, may not lawfully kill its prisoners. (And the populace has no business demanding that it should.) There are even some good utilitarian arguments for this. We don't know enough about serial killers and mass murderers, and, humanely treated, these very perpetrators might live to yield useful information. The possibility of rehabilitation cannot be excluded; it occurred even with some of the Nuremberg defendants and can also be accompanied by some worthwhile disclosures.

The utilitarian argument ought not to be the deciding one, though it's interesting to notice that even the basest version of it will vanquish the emotional nonsense put forward by Attorney General Ashcroft and his closed-circuit constituency. Ashcroft found the idea of further interviews and statements from the Terre Haute death cell too repulsive to contemplate. But as I write, and in full view of a mass audience, McVeigh is orchestrating the last chords of a fascistic anthem and hypnotically persuading the whole dignified force of law and order to join in.

(With apologies to Alan Jay Lerner)

Will China deign to give us back our plane?
We know they've got it.
Will China deign to give us back our plane?
For sure, they've got it.
It goes against our grain
To explain. It's a pain.
And yet they still retain
Our plane. Our plane!
Will China deign to give us back our plane?
Will China deign to give us back our plane?
What more can they obtain
That's germane from our plane?
In vain do we complain.
It's plain insane!
Their government is truly inhumane,
So should we bomb them into beef chow mein?

So now comes Bob Kerrey to remind us that even fair-haired boys may
commit the most unspeakable of war crimes. Or, as he puts it by way of
explaining the killing of at least thirteen unarmed Vietnamese women, older men
and children by a squad under his command: "Human savagery is a very
slippery slope."

Indeed it is, and by the accounting of one veteran of his Navy SEAL
unit, disputed by others, the savagery may have extended to the rounding
up and cold-blooded execution of noncombatants. That's the memory also of
Vietnamese witnesses. Yet even the more benign version of former Sen.
Kerrey--that the carnage was the result of honest confusion--while it may
lessen his personal responsibility, doesn't erase the specter of our
nation's leaders officially condoning wanton murder. It's they who came
to define the countryside of Vietnam as a killing field in which Kerrey's
team did what it thought it was ordered to do.

Kerrey, then 25, and other young warriors were deliberately lied to by
leaders who knew better. The terror of that night is the work of the four
Presidents who insisted the United States had an obligation in Vietnam to fill the blood-stained shoes of a defeated French colonialism.

None of the four who ordered this mayhem unleashed upon a distant land
ever established that the war served a serious national security purpose.

Dwight D. Eisenhower created a puppet government in South Vietnam in
1954, flying in Ngo Dinh Diem--an autocratic Vietnamese exile safely
cloistered in a New Jersey Catholic seminary--to rule an overwhelmingly
Buddhist country. Diem followed US orders in preventing the election
called for in the Geneva Accords that would have unified Vietnam, an
election Eisenhower predicted our designated enemy, Ho Chi Minh, would
have won overwhelmingly. But while Eisenhower left the CIA to create an
artificial nation out of South Vietnam, this former World War II general
drew the line at committing US troops.

John F. Kennedy ignored that caution, sending to Vietnam a small
contingent disguised as flood control advisors. But when his ambassador
approved the assassination of Diem in 1963 and installed an even more
compliant puppet, Kennedy indelibly committed this country to the path of
madness.

That was the path pursued vociferously by Lyndon B. Johnson, who in
taped conversations with advisers stated he could find no legitimate
purpose for being in Vietnam, other than to ward off right-wing hawkish
attacks in the upcoming 1964 election. As Johnson told his national
security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, "I don't think it's worth fighting
for." Yet he was convinced he would lose to Barry Goldwater if he
appeared soft on communism.

Goldwater was right when he later charged that LBJ lied to Congress
about an attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, to
secure what Johnson interpreted as a declaration of war. In turn, he
dispatched half a million US troops, including young Kerrey, and
unleashed history's most intense air war, with more explosives dropped on
the thin strip of Vietnam than had been used in all of World War II,
leaving 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American dead.

Richard Nixon, who got elected pledging to quickly end this war he
knew to be without legitimate purpose, instead escalated it to even more
nightmarish proportions, including the destruction of once-peaceful and
neutral Cambodia, with another million dead.

Those Presidents bear responsibility for deceiving good men like Bob
Kerrey into thinking they were serving their nation, when what the war
was always about was the poison of political ambition.

That is the admission of Nuremberg-level criminality lurking in the
1997 mea culpa of Robert McNamara, Johnson's Defense secretary, who
defined much of the South Vietnamese countryside as the legitimate target
of indiscriminate bombing.

The village Kerrey entered that fateful night fell into McNamara's
territory of the doomed; does it matter whether those illiterate peasants
ended up the hapless victims of McNamara's napalm or a Navy SEAL's
razor-sharp knife? The difference is that Kerrey was forced to witness
the pain while McNamara, the Ford Co. auto
executive-turned-deskside-warrior, was not. Yet McNamara already knew, as
he would later write, that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" and cited five
honorable opportunities that the US passed up to end the war by 1967,
two years before Kerrey visited upon that village such horror.

The true war criminal, yet to be brought to account by a nation that
presumes it can judge others throughout the world, was that steely
corporate bean-counter who took over the Pentagon and defined victory in
Vietnam by the number of Vietnamese dead, even if they were the children
and mothers slaughtered by Kerrey and his boys.

Bob Kerrey is lost in the haze of Vietnam.

"Five years, four sentences," is how television anchor Tavis Smiley summed up the terse dismissal note he received from Black Entertainment Television (BET) on March 23. The response from viewers and fans was heartfelt and immediate. BET and its new parent company, Viacom, were deluged with calls, and the Rev. Al Sharpton and others helped organize protests in Los Angeles and at BET's Washington offices. The outcry, which continues, is a testament to the power and reach of Tavis Smiley, and the widespread sense among African-Americans that BET has betrayed us.

If this were a Movie of the Week it would boil down to two characters: the heroic Smiley, Los Angeles preacher's kid (his mother is the minister, thank you), who moved through the black political machine of former LA Mayor Tom Bradley to become one of America's most influential commentators; and the villainous BET CEO Robert Johnson, a kind of Vernon Jordan of media, who leveraged his extensive business connections (including a stint as a top lobbyist for the cable industry) into a billion-dollar business. The foundation of his success has been more than 60 million viewers, reaching the vast majority of African-American cable households.

Whereas Smiley used his perch at BET to advance black political and economic concerns, Johnson's political activity, save his high-profile support of the Million Man March and financial backing of a few black political candidates, has focused on advancing his business interests. In fact, Johnson has taken positions widely thought of as anti-black--such as, most recently, supporting the Bush estate-tax repeal. Now that Johnson has "sold out" to media giant Viacom, the fight has moved beyond an internecine squabble where everyone's trying to "keep it in the family." The dirty laundry's on the line.

Nationally syndicated radio host Tom Joyner (where Smiley comes on air twice a week) fired the first volley when he urged his 7 million-plus audience to demand Smiley's return. "We've got to let media giants like Viacom know that we will not accept just anything they toss out at us," he said.

Johnson shot back with an appearance on BET Tonight, this time with BET Lead Story host Cheryl Martin, to counter allegations by Joyner and others that white-owned Viacom was pulling the strings. Johnson's assertion that he was bought but unbossed might have been convincing if it hadn't been for his explanation of the dismissal. Johnson said the final break came after Smiley sold ABC an interview with a former Symbionese Liberation Army member involved in the Patty Hearst kidnapping.

But Smiley has always operated as something of a free spirit. His penchant for activism, entrepreneurism and inveterate networking has resulted in a sort of dynasty, where he provides programming for other networks as well as commentary for Joyner's radio program and other cable shows. For example, a recent eight-hour program called State of the Black Union, featuring leading African-Americans and drawn from a book that Smiley compiled and edited, aired on C-SPAN without any public fuss from the network. That BET would draw the line at an interview with a former SLA member seemed odd, especially given its own downsizing of news programming.

Whether Smiley was fired because Viacom-owned CBS wanted first dibs on the interview, or because of long-simmering tensions between the star and the network, or because of BET's growing debt, is unknown. What's clear is that despite Smiley's overbearing "me first" black capitalist politics and gee-whiz approach to anything to the left of Sharpton, his departure leaves a huge hole in BET's programming.

Smiley's unabashed targeting of those he's found guilty of racial wrongdoing has compelled more than a few companies and politicians to come on air with promises to do better. "In this era of multinational corporations, media conglomerates and mergers, what Tavis has been able to accomplish is nothing short of heroic," says scholar and cultural critic Michael Dyson, who has appeared on Smiley's program. "He represents something unprecedented in contemporary black culture." Adds hip-hop journalist Davey D., "The only time we get to see many of Tavis's guests is in defensive positions on white talk shows where they are there for three seconds trying to make sense out of some crazy controversy. He wasn't perfect, but at least I could see everyone from Snoop to Manning Marable speak in a safe, conducive environment."

Well before the sale to Viacom, BET had been canceling and dumbing down its public affairs content. The company was roundly slammed for dumping Emerge, an award-winning newsmagazine, to launch the fluffy Savoy instead (the debut issue featured an article on black genius with fashion credits). Previously the company discontinued the sophisticated YSB (targeted to youth) and, more recently, its edgy 360hiphop.com.

These changes, BET announced, were part of an effort to "lifestyle" its properties. That's PR-speak for stripping publications and programs of political content and concentrating on stuff that sells--beauty, fashion, food, etc. In a media market where whites enjoy some diversity, BET's narrowing was a significant reduction in black voice and black choice.

It's a far cry from the vision Johnson articulated more than twenty years ago, when he launched BET. Those of us who heeded his call to demand that cable companies carry the network were fighting for a space of our own where we could find programming that respected African-Americans, valued our intellects and offered a real venue for discussion. The network's initial offerings were so promising. Great black films, innovative news and public affairs programs, and youth-oriented productions were a welcome respite from standard TV fare. Now, the network that promised to reflect the breadth of black images has become one of the worst purveyors of black stereotypes. Well over half the program day is a steady diet of exploitative music videos and comedy. And even though these changes predated the Viacom deal, in a world where even PBS only reflects us in February, seeing BET come under white ownership is a hard pill to swallow.

Of course, BET is only one part of the larger problem of media access for all communities of color. The 1996 Telecommunications Act restricted huge amounts of digital "airwaves" from public access, and meant higher cable rates, more mergers and less accountability.

This and other setbacks are finally inspiring some groups to fight back. One national effort, backed by hundreds of organizations, is pressing the FCC to establish a fund for airtime for "noncommercial" television (see www.bettertv.org). Other groups are monitoring negative imagery and using their findings to hold outlets more accountable. For example, We Interrupt This Message (www.interrupt.org) worked with youth to complete two studies on media portrayals of youth of color. Says participant Shaquesha Alequin, 19, "The media affect us. If we're walking down the street, an elderly person crosses the street. It's almost as if people think crime is in our genes. We wanted to do more than be angry about it. The study was something positive we could do to make a change." The Center on Blacks and the Media also monitors racial imagery, offering an extensive critique of BET's content at www.afrikan.net/hype. Still others leverage opportunities afforded by the Internet, while a courageous few risk prison by running illegal, low-power radio stations in order to create and control some media of their own.

If we are to learn anything from the BET debacle, it's that regardless of ownership, media is more than a commodity to be bought and sold. It is both a mirror and a maker of public discourse, and that's too important to be left to the vagaries of the bottom line.

He's an archconservative who thinks big and knows how to get things done.

The former FCC chairman talks about his battles to open up the airwaves.

America's provocative military posture in Asia makes war with China more likely.

It has been a long time since a Mexican film became an international critics' darling or audience favorite (since, probably, Like Water for Chocolate). The success of first-time director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-nominated, Cannes-awarded Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch)--currently playing on more than 150 screens in the United States alone and just past the $1 million mark in no-subtitles America--thus gives every appearance of the miraculous, a virgin birth devoid of precedent.

The plethora of coverage in the mainstream press, itself unusual for a Mexican film, has by now acquainted the moviegoing public with some of the details of the phenomenon. In a three-part structure of stories connected by a singular car crash, González Iñárritu sketches wildly different characters, classes and neighborhoods linked by crime and fate. The film eschews linear narrativity to jump-start its story from a central hub, circling events as though they were traffic roundabouts through which our attention can be endlessly but fruitfully redirected.

In the first, a Cain and Abel pair of brothers do battle in a downtrodden Mexico City barrio, while a woman, a dog and a considerable stash of cash hang in the balance; in the end, many bloody dogfight gambles later, betrayal trumps betrayal and a desperate race for help results in the fateful crash. In the second story, which climbs the social ladder, a smoothly upper-class Mexico City businessman leaves his family to shack up with a model. The car crash leaves his girlfriend injured and homebound, focused on the hole in the living-room floor and their dog, which disappeared into it. The third story joins the worlds of the first two in the character of a professor turned revolutionary turned hit man, hired to kidnap and kill a business partner who turns out to be his client's own brother. The prizefighting dog reappears, this time with a different mission. And the theme of family, imprisoning in the first and abandoned in the second, returns for a third time to signify refuge and rebirth.

Amores Perros has become a hit, not by virtue of its story but rather its style of storytelling. Raw and energetic, propelling the narrative forward with a musical score drawn from the ranks of Mexico's rock en español movement--note, here, that González Iñárritu spent years as a disc jockey before making commercials and finally turning to film--it's well suited to current international tastes. González Iñárritu has modernized Mexican cinema by shooting and editing in a relentlessly urban, fast-paced and hip fashion, packed with sex and violence and raring to go. It's a breath of fresh air in an industry more accustomed to older narrative and pictorial styles.

Too bad that freshness doesn't extend to gender or class relations, as the film reinscribes all the worst portrayals that Mexican cinema has formularized, from the treacherous underclass family that eats its young to the debased women who, in a universe in which everyone is doomed, always somehow suffer more--and always at the level of the body. It's too bad that González Iñárritu didn't retrofit his characters as thoroughly as his style. With one exception: The central figure of the film, the mysterious old revolutionary, who carries out hits at the bidding of a corrupt cop but really yearns to rejoin his family, smells like a sendup of Subcomandante Marcos. Perhaps González Iñárritu is more cynical than he is modern, after all.

Amores Perros is bound to be a banner film, one of which the new generation of Mexicans, who speak English fluently, wear international clothing and follow the latest cinematic trends (I had an argument with a colleague's teenage son, on my last trip, over the merits of Tarantino), can be proud. And the Tarantino connection is hardly incidental. Amores Perros is claiming a place for Mexico at the table of international cinema, seated right up there with Pulp Fiction, Go and Run Lola Run, thanks to their shared narrative strategies. The similarity serves it well, since US critics tend to be oblivious to the particularities of Mexican cinema.

Indeed, the only name to show up regularly in reviews is that of Luis Buñuel, the brilliant Spanish director who set up shop in Mexico City when Franco came to power and who stamped Mexican cinema forever with the images of Los Olvidados. Of course, however, the low-life setting mined by González Iñárritu in Amores Perros was virtually invented by Arturo Ripstein, Buñuel's artistic heir, who has fashioned an entire career out of the underclass for three decades, replete with squalid living conditions, depraved behavior, doomed characters and violent mises en scènes. As ahistorical as it is ever-present, this style has become cinematic shorthand for hecho en México and a school of filmmaking to which González Iñárritu clearly owes a debt.

If Mexican cinema is actually a rich terrain, like Mexico itself, and so very close to Hollywood, why so little attention? Too often, critical myopia about Mexican film is facilitated by a political myopia about Mexican immigrants, Chicano citizens and the diverse Latino communities that increasingly inhabit a parallel universe within this country. Hollywood, are you listening? Probably not. Hollywood, a cloistered guild disguised as a major industry, never answers back. Its position in Southern California and its reliance on Mexican service labor has generally failed to translate into onscreen presences, except when a pioneer like Gregory Nava offers a reminder. (See, for example, the instructive scene in Selena, Nava's breakthrough feature about the late singer--played by Jennifer Lopez--as she shops for a Grammy dress in a mall where she's patronized by the saleswomen until a mob of workers far humbler in status comes to pay their respects.)

A handful of Latino-accented films on screens recently show a decidedly mixed picture of where Hollywood is coming from and where it thinks it's going. Traffic! Spy Kids! The Mexican! Price of Glory! If the bad news is that old stereotypes are still in full swing, the good news is that hip style (handheld camera, fast editing, nonlinear narratives) and hip humor (parody, satire, self-awareness) make them go down easier.

And, occasionally, even a mainstream film wins points for uplifting the raza. The border has long been a favorite Hollywood theme, rendered most memorably by Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, a film that anticipated today's boomlet with its spin on sleaze and corruption redeemed by a twist of formula: The American sheriff (played by Welles himself) was the bad guy, and the Mexican cop (uh, improbably, Charlton Heston) was the good guy.

Following badly in its footsteps, this season, is The Mexican. It apes Welles's formula of moral inversion, but this time around the tragedy is rendered as farce. And not a particularly compelling one at that, what with Julia Roberts acting all manic and ditzy, Brad Pitt impersonating an errand boy for the mob who can't shoot straight and James Gandolfini providing the only relief in his Soprano-transgressive role as a gay hit man. (Why is he gay? Cuz he's Julia's best friend.) The Mexican of the title is actually a gun, not a person, which seems as instructive as any other detail of what might be wrong with not only this film but with the whole Hollywood project.

The Mexican's few redeeming moments occur when it trades in slapstick for satire and uses parody to poke fun at gringos, both for their clueless monolingo habits and for their transparently stereotypical expectations of Mexico and Mexicans. In one such scene, Pitt lands at the airport en route to Real de Catorce in San Luis Potosí (nice location, dude). When he demands an alternative to the proffered Chrysler because it's not Mexican enough, his Mexican rental-car agent takes him at his word, so to speak, and switches from English to Spanish. "Do you speak Spanish, sir? Only what you learned from Speedy Gonzalez, I bet." In a smart sendup of Mexican modernity undermined by Anglo cliché, the script awards him a lowrider classic pulled off a back lot clearly reserved for American tourists who want to ride like the cholos back home.

Still, such parodic moments cannot rescue the film from the undertow of the racist imaginary that drives its characterizations and plot devices--from the fiesta celebration in a small town filled with drunken revelers shooting guns into the air to the honorable landed family whose quest for the legendary pistola is all about dignity, not money. The fact that their story is told in sepia-toned flashbacks only reinforces the antique quality of the stereotype and the fixed, unchanging view of Mexico that pervades the film. It's as if Hollywood has an old-fashioned code of honor itself. Punch in the location, get the message: Mexicans are ruled by honor if the setting is a family, by corruption if it's a police scene and by violence if it's a tavern or small town. In the end, "good" Mexicans are basically those who are governed by the sanctity of tradition because they've inherited enough money that they don't have to hit up gringos for more. (This is the Mexico of very, very old movies.) What's most astonishing about The Mexican, though, is its arrival at such an old place, in the end, after its plot has treated the country more like a modern computer game, in which Pitt can just hop into a car and drive around, have adventures and return home safe and sound. On a Mexicana plane, no less.

Traffic is a far superior product, as Oscars and Ten-Best lists have amply testified, and its formulas are correspondingly more nuanced. But while it is a brilliant film--astonishingly bold in its aesthetic strategies, pumped up by cinematography and editing that do to vision and cognition what steroids do to muscles, and so finely tuned in its narrative structures that it holds attention without even a second of The Mexican's slackness--it too is chock-full of woeful stereotypes and wishful thinking. Mexico, while not the main focus of Traffic's concerns, is a necessary ingredient in its cautionary tale of what drugs can do to a wholesome American family. (So's the African-American drug dealer, another stereotype pulled out from under a rock to re-enter prime time.)

To tell its tale, Traffic needs its trafficker, the narcotraficante, who of course comes in two flavors: Mexican and Colombian. In Traffic's case, NAFTA camaraderie and the kind of script requirements that mandate no long flights, please, just a short hop across the border, dictate that its traffickers be Mexican. Once again, hip style trumps hip content. This time, no inversion of types à la Welles. Not even a trace of The Mexican's parodic voice. We are back in the land of corrupt cops once again, without relief. (Sure, Benicio del Toro is a hero, but not only is he the exception, the actor is actually Puerto Rican! The subtlety is lost on Anglo audiences, for sure, but not on Spanish-speaking viewers, who've been known to guffaw or fume at his accent.)

While the film does well at imagining a world cut loose from moral quadrants, where right and wrong are not clear choices and all decisions seem tainted by compromise, its imagination is confined to a US model. In Mexico, it ignores the very stereotype that The Mexican embraces: that Mexicans care about family, are bound to tradition and are more honorable than Americans even when it comes to crime. In Traffic, Mexico is no longer bound by such rules. We are supposed to take for granted the criminality of daily life in Mexico, especially where the police force is concerned (pace del Toro).

For a different riff on Latino life and how it could be, there is a new film by a Chicano director intent on exploring different, er, motifs, entirely. Robert Rodriguez, a third-generation Tejano, who shot to fame at 23 with El Mariachi and has now returned to fame and fortune with America's No. 1 movie (at this writing), Spy Kids. Of course, its trailers and posters don't lead anyone to expect a Latino film, but that's just what we get.

Rodriguez knows what he's doing and why: Consider right upfront that the name of the Antonio Banderas character is Gregorio Cortez. Huh? The founding film of the Chicano dramatic feature movement, made by the non-Chicano Robert M. Young, was The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, starring the young Edward James Olmos as the title character. A legendary Robin Hood, Gregorio Cortez was an honorable man forced into crime by a cruel and unjust posse. His fame has endured because of a corrido composed and sung in his honor. (The corrido, or border ballad, is a narrative song that passes on the news and opinions of important events and people, making them legend.)

In many ways, Spy Kids is a Chicano movie writ large, a sort of Trojan horse that smuggles the goods (ethnic pride, family values) into the multiplex disguised as entertainment (spy story, children's movie and supersonically cool paraphernalia, no doubt coming soon to a mall or McDonald's near you). Shot in his own town by a Tejano who's made it big, Spy Kids is no doubt the very film that Rodriguez wishes he could have seen as a kid and that he's now determined to give his own children. In an early scene, the boy Juni complains to Daddy about being bullied at school. "Remember!" admonishes Banderas. "You are a Cortez!" Humph, thinks the kid. "What's so special about being a Cortez?" (Maybe Juni could consult the website that New Line threw up last year for Carlos Avila's mainstream movie Price of Glory, which traces the name back to its Spanish roots--and, more interesting, addresses the curious web surfer as "you" in a tacit recognition of Latinos as the legitimate moviegoing audience and web-page viewers.)

The film is replete with references, and for every one that quotes a spy movie, there's also one that refers to Chicano culture. Carmen and Juni are average kids who turn into superheroes, once their parents are revealed to be famous spies in need of their assistance. Who tells them? Uncle Felix, of course--played by Cheech Marin, Chicano cinema's archangel. With enemies in hot pursuit, they land in "San Diablo," where an errant snapshot leads them, by fairy-tale logic, to their dad's long-lost brother Isidore, code name "Machete," a sci-fi gunrunner with a shop in a seedy part of town. He's got the weathered face and laid-back habits of that staple of Chicano culture, the cholo. And just when the script lands the whole family in trouble, Uncle Izzy saves the day.

Spy Kids is the mirror image of the worlds espoused by the other films, in fact. It shows a Latino family held together by shared moral values, uncorrupted by drugs or even television, united across gender lines and unfettered by underclass woes. (Their house is cool and the kitchen muy mexicano, with tiles and everything, and the women don't even have to stay in it.) A commercial blockbuster that will write Rodriguez's future in any language, Spy Kids still manages to stay true to its own language--as when spy kid Carmen needs to open secret locked doors and has only to pronounce her own full, multiword Spanish name as password. "But I don't use it," she complains. Use it or else, says the script. Uplifting the race doesn't get any clearer. If the film's other message is that such a pretty picture can only take place in a fairy-tale future, far from cops and robbers, limited distribution and injurious stereotypes, well, perhaps its box-office success will prompt a long-overdue change.

Kiwi is the color of the moment. There's no escaping it, not even in the august galleries of the Museum of Modern Art. With its "Workspheres" exhibition, there was little to distinguish the museum gallery from a retail furniture showroom elsewhere in Manhattan--except that it was almost impossible to try out the merchandise.

Curated by the cosmopolitan and well-connected Paola Antonelli, the recent show seemed to suggest that if you're not enchanted by a gelatinous computer keyboard or a desk that looks like a surfboard, you're just not cool enough to triumph in the New Economy. The Workplace of the Future is a place where everyone is empowered, everyone is a road warrior and everyone has a boss--or investors--more than willing to buy desk chairs at $800 a pop.

Offices have captured the imagination at least since Bob Cratchit with his fingerless gloves grasped a ratty quill pen and cowered under Ebenezer Scrooge's demands. Contemporary Western offices are places where (mostly) adults read, write, compute, analyze, market, sell, argue, solve problems and display their know-how, power or impotence--their own and that of the company--generally acting in ways they hope will contribute to the company's bottom line. Offices can be located in landscaped "office park" cul-de-sacs off major highways or leased out within the skin of urban skyscrapers. They can be wedged into multipurpose buildings and malls. Increasingly, they are built into settings that whisper of other traditions, like renovated mills, warehouses and industrial lofts. With work forces that swell and shrink--the business-world term is "churn"--full-time and contract workers make temporary alliances that often mirror a company's rising and falling stock price.

It's interesting--and telling--that MoMA made a deliberate decision to focus on office work and the office-type work that is done at home and on the road. Antonelli and her colleagues excluded manufacturing environments, hospitals, stores or schools from their survey. Unlike "production" work, it's hard for an outsider to tell what, if anything, is being produced in most office environments. Formal offices are the most abstracted of work environments. This may be how MOMA got away without being seriously challenged on its rhetoric.

Because the "Workspheres" exhibit was not about workers at all. It was not even about work. First and foremost, it was about R&D for a new generation of high-tech toys. Look for the Snowcrash Netsurfer Computer Divan--essentially a souped-up Jefferson chair--and the smart pillows embedded with stereo speakers so you can do your business in bed (just right for the Yoko Ono wannabe on your block) in a Sharper Image catalogue coming to you. The MaxiMog Global Expedition Vehicle System is an SUV on testosterone, for off-road trips on Mars. "Workspheres" is a justification-in-design for the ways that corporations and business theorists rationalize their employment and labor decisions. Working longer hours? Your hydraulically operated padded room offers a side of entertainment along with the requisite data-crunching. No time for lunch? Eat in the company cafeteria on digital placemats so that you can surf the net while you dine. Tired out from twelve-hour days? Here's a nap mat with its own LifeSaver-shaped "Do Not Disturb" ring you can hang from the door of your office--if your office happens to have a door.

OK, Matali Crasset, the designer of the nap mat, apparently was only fooling. For the same reason, I smiled at Thomas Bernstrand's Sugar Ray ceiling lamp, on which a disgruntled worker can literally punch out the company's lights. There were traces of appreciation for the needs of human bodies in humane settings in designs that offer the pleasures of sensuous materials like dense felt and corrugated cardboard. "Workspheres" also publicized some design ideas that would really work, including Snowcrash's hanging file racks that create semipermeable screens between workstations, and the stepped, three-tiered display shelves that cocoon around the back of a desktop surface like a theatrical backdrop in Brian Alexander's Drift System Desk, designed to keep a number of paper files or projects visible simultaneously (Drift's backless tricycle seating is better left to the daycare set).

But most of the designers of the products found in "Workspheres" seem to have taken their directions from a combination of business-school blather and the kind of advertising hype that promises you can work on your laptop on some remote mountaintop, sending Great Thoughts and spreadsheets out to your colleagues between tousling your 10-year-old's hair and avoiding the grizzly bears.

Let's take an overtly uncontroversial example. While most of the office equipment and furnishings in the exhibition are designed to be applicable to any generic office setting--a warning signal if there ever was one--the Jack Flexible Workstation designed by Andrew Jones is an exception. It is designed expressly for call-center workers. A simple desk wired for phone and computer hookups is surrounded by a curving fixed screen that gives the call-center worker visual and acoustic privacy. It is not unlike a grad student's library carrel or a church confessional. Clearly, the intention of the design is that the worker will be focusing on the conversation she is having with a customer over the phone and the information she will be pulling up from--and recording in--her computer.

But there's one catch. I've observed call centers in the United States and England where tech support reps were troubleshooting network problems, nurses were documenting workers' compensation claims, librarians were directing researchers to websites and documents, phone company workers were settling accounts and insurance claims processors were talking to customers who had totaled their cars. In none of these settings is the work done in an isolated way. In fact, call-center workers regularly explain that they couldn't possibly get their work done at home, for they rely on each other. There's even a name for the common practice of sticking their heads over the top of a cubicle to try to get each other's attention: prairie-dogging.

The knowledge that call-center reps provide to their customers is collective knowledge. This is not because they're individually incompetent; far from it. Call-center workers who want to do a good job often want others to validate and test their hypotheses, expand their awareness of alternatives and give them tips on how to be more efficient or accurate next time. No one has enough knowledge to answer every question or anticipate every unforeseen combination of events. Life is just like that. It's called learning.

The wall texts for "Workspheres" may have been dense with references to collaboration, but the designs on display told an opposite story. Like the Great Man theory of art-making, work was represented as an autonomous, individual activity. That rarely happens in art, in offices or even, truth be told, in industrial design studios.

It's an unnecessary misstep. The sponsors of "Workspheres" included the big names in office furniture design: Haworth, Herman Miller, Knoll and Steelcase, as well as the Xerox Foundation. Over the past decade and a half, they have collectively conducted or commissioned some of the best empirical research in the world into how people actually get their jobs done, what makes them crazy about office settings and workplace technologies, and how workers have tried to fix what is broken and innovate within the scope of the limited resources at their disposal. We need designs that take the knowledge and expertise of workers themselves as the starting point for every important investigation. If the designer is going to be elevated to the status of auteur, he or she should at least be expected to try the job he is designing for, so he knows whereof he pontificates. At another and equally important end of the spectrum, the British Design Council has engaged in serious analysis of how work is penetrating the public sphere, and its members have begun to discuss how a public infrastructure of Internet kiosks, data connections and other resources can be built, and how the costs of implementing it can be shared and amortized among the companies that will ultimately profit from such access.

In the bouncy chairs and butterfly-wing desks of the workplace future envisioned at MoMA, work is an arena where there is much room for creative ferment but few contested goals. By the time one reached the last galleries, this blindness to real-world politics became absurd. The week I went to see the show the Senate voted to repeal the ergonomic rules that OSHA estimated would protect workers from 4.6 million repetitive-motion injuries over the next ten years. Around the same time, the Supreme Court ruled that state employees cannot sue for damages under the Americans With Disabilities Act. It makes you wonder what's more important--a choice of personal weather patterns displayed overhead on one of Naoto Fukasawa's beautifully poetic "personal skies" screens or, say, an employment contract that provides a family with adequate health insurance?

As the Democrats struggle to define a strategy for dealing with the Bush Administration, an intense debate has emerged between centrists and populists over the reasons for the party's loss of the White House in the 2000 election. At its heart lies the interpretation of the widespread rejection of Al Gore by white working-class voters, a rejection that reached landslide proportions among white working-class men. Despite Gore's assertion of "populist" themes and proposals, more than 60 percent of non-college educated and nonaffluent white men and a majority of similar working-class women gave their votes to George W. Bush. (Although white women workers rendered Bush a slim majority, had male workers voted as did female, Gore would have easily won the election. Attempts to understand the rejection of Gore, therefore, largely focus on the attitudes of white working-class men.) Although the centrists and populists reach substantially different conclusions, they do agree on two central points. First, Gore's positions on the major specific issues in the campaign--healthcare, education, tax policy and others--were substantially more popular with the voters than those of Bush. As Stanley Greenberg, Gore's pollster, noted in an analysis done for the Campaign for America's Future, "If the election were run on message alone, Al Gore would be President with a comfortable majority of the popular vote."

Second, the most important obstacles future progressive candidates will have to overcome relate to the moral and social "values" of American workers and to their distrust of Washington and "big government." While the 2000 election was influenced by other factors, such as the legacy of the Clinton Administration and Gore's performance as a candidate, the values of white workers and their distrust of government appear likely to have the greatest continuing influence on American politics.

What the postelection analyses do not do, however, is address the question of how a progressive candidate can overcome these obstacles. Although a large number of opinion polls and focus groups have examined the public's views on values and their hostility to government in recent years, they cannot effectively explain where individual issues fit within a person's overall worldview or how values and issues combine to influence the choice of a political candidate. There are, however, alternative approaches within the social sciences better suited to answering questions of this kind. In the 1950s and early 1960s, such research examined whether workers were becoming "middle class." When Governor George Wallace gained substantial support among white workers in the 1968 presidential election--and clashes between peace demonstrators and "hard hats" gave rise to a popular image of all workers as deeply reactionary "Archie Bunkers"--research responded by trying to look behind the stereotypes and understand the forces shaping workers' attitudes. Some of these studies, like Joseph Howell's Hard Living on Clay Street and E.E. LeMasters's Blue-Collar Aristocrats, were based on prolonged observation of life in working-class neighborhoods. Others, like Robert Botsch's We Shall Not Overcome: Populism and Southern Blue-Collar Workers, analyzed extended interviews with dozens of subjects.

Yet when working-class voters once again defected to the Republicans in 1980, giving rise to the category "Reagan Democrats," researchers still seemed baffled. There was not even a generally agreed-upon way of thinking about the group. Were they "blue collar," "working class," "middle class" or "middle American"? And what was the link between these labels and their political behavior?

The most coherent and systematic answer to these questions came in 1984, with sociologist David Halle's America's Working Man, a detailed, seven-year study of factory and community life in a large New Jersey chemical plant.

Halle recognized that only by studying the lives of the men he lived and worked with in far greater detail than previous studies had done could the link between the conditions of their daily life and their political views be determined. As a result, Halle photographed and described street blocks and individual houses. In the plant, Halle described specific departments, work areas and individual jobs, including sketches and diagrams of specific areas.

This level of precision allowed Halle to discern patterns and relationships too subtle to be noted by more general studies. He concluded that workers' "consciousness" is actually best understood by viewing it as composed of three overlapping perspectives.

The first is rooted in the world of work. Halle identified five basic characteristics of "blue collar" jobs in the factory: physical labor, a relatively dangerous or dirty environment, boring or routine tasks, close supervision and limited opportunities for upward mobility. Although some white-collar jobs share some of these features, Halle found that this cluster of characteristics did produce a distinct social viewpoint and identity. Although the men did not usually define themselves as being working class, they were virtually unanimous in describing themselves as "workingmen" with problems and interests common to others like themselves.

Although this occupationally based class consciousness is often seen as limited to the approximately 20 percent of American workers employed in traditional manufacturing, it actually influences a far larger group. There are almost 19 million white men employed in manual, blue-collar jobs in America today, in contrast to about 16 million white men in managerial and professional occupations and another 9 million in lower-level white-collar jobs. Thus, about 45 percent of employed white men still work in essentially manual jobs rather than white-collar occupations.

This occupationally based identity as "workingmen" does create a distinct perspective. Ronald Reagan, for example, was widely viewed as antilabor by workers in the chemical factory, despite his popularity in other areas. However, when Halle turned to studying workers' attitudes related to their neighborhoods and communities, he found that this working-man's perspective did not carry over from the workplace. He noted that neighbors on the streets where workers lived were generally not all blue collar but rather a mixture of blue and white collar, including, in one typical case, a storekeeper, an elementary-school teacher, a real estate agent, a gas station owner and a salesman. Workers also did not see their neighborhoods as distinctly working class but rather as situated somewhere "in the middle" between slum or ghetto areas below and "nice" or "fancy" neighborhoods above.

In consequence, it was entirely reasonable for these workers to view themselves as "middle class" or "middle American" when thinking about their homes, neighborhoods and communities. Thus, what appeared to be two distinct identities, "workingman" and "middle American," Halle revealed as different perspectives between which workers would shift, depending on the context and situation.

Halle identified a third perspective that also influenced workers' political views--a national identity they felt as Americans but one that was closely linked with a populist identity as "the people" or "ordinary citizens" whose interests were often opposed to that of national elites from business, the government or academia--elites who were seen as "running the show" or "calling the shots" over various aspects of their lives.

One task Halle did not directly attempt, however, was to define the basic values that workers held and to determine how those values affected their political views. In the national political debate during the 1970s and 1980s, "middle American values," "mainstream values" and "family values" were frequently invoked and were generally defined to include both support for the work ethic and traditional family norms as well as a range of conservative or quasi-religious views on a wide range of moral issues. In many such discussions, it was often simply assumed that these represented key "working-class values" as well. But this obscured the more important question--was there actually a set of values that could be considered distinctly "working class" in character, that represented a distinctly working-class worldview?

One of the most sophisticated recent attempts to answer this question appeared in the recent study The Dignity of Working Men, by Princeton sociologist Michèle Lamont. She recognized that asking workers to choose their most important values from a prepared list would essentially force their replies into a predetermined mold that had little to do with their real-world thoughts and feelings. Lamont used instead open-ended and nondirective questions. She interviewed 150 blue-collar workers, black and white, in the United States and in France, and compared them with middle-class people in both countries. Her questions asked workers to describe people similar to them and people who were different, people they liked and disliked, and those to whom they felt superior or inferior. Follow-up questions probed why they felt as they did, spontaneously eliciting a complex pattern of moral judgments and values. Both work and family did indeed emerge among the blue-collar workers' core values. But the real significance lay in how those were perceived.

For the middle-class American men Lamont studied, work meant a profession or career, a frequently stimulating and often fulfilling sphere of activity that had to be balanced against the demands of family in daily life. For the working-class men, in contrast, work was basically "just a job." For some, it might be interesting or challenging (as it is for many construction workers, for example), but, even for them, it was their family life and not work that provided the basic meaning and satisfactions of life.

And central to workers' vision of their family was the constant difficulty of supporting and preserving it in an often hostile environment. Lamont's workers repeatedly described having to "fight tooth and nail" to get where they are, of constantly having to "fight for what's ours." When asked to name their heroes, many of Lamont's workers chose their own fathers because "he held the family together" during hard times.

Seen from this perspective, work was viewed in two distinct ways. On one level, it was a sacrifice, a physically exhausting, hard and sometimes dangerous sacrifice that a worker made on behalf of his family. Yet on another level, these same qualities made a worker's mastery of the difficulties and challenges of his job a tremendous source of pride and personal worth.

But while they valued work itself, blue-collar workers had a much lower opinion of ambition and success. In Lamont's interviews, workers repeatedly said that to them, money is not the most important thing in life, that the quest they see middle-class people conducting for higher status seems to them unending and to offer little satisfaction.

In fact, while these workers generally did not feel resentment toward the middle-class managers and professionals above them--saying, for example, that "I can't knock anyone for succeeding"--their view of them was far from admiring. Middle-class people were "cold, shallow"; they did not really enjoy themselves; they were "worrying all the time," sacrificing their family, "missing all of life" and living "with blinders on."

Moreover, these workers sensed both a profound snobbishness and a dishonesty among the middle-class people they encountered. They perceived middle-class people as "snotty," "snobby" and constantly ready to "look down at people." They were "two faced," "phonies," "show-offs" and willing to "screw people to get what they want."

Workers saw themselves, in contrast, as more authentic and sincere and aware of the important things in life. They placed friends and friendship above success and money; and, along with work, family and friends, they saw honesty and good character as fundamental values. They admired people who were "honest," "straightforward," "no BS," "stand-up guys," who would "be there" for someone else in times of adversity and "carry their weight" in the struggles of daily life. As a value, they saw strength of character as far more important than success.

This description of the core "values" of working Americans is startlingly different from the usual media portrayal. Yet it is the perspective that spontaneously emerges as workers simply describe the kinds of people and attitudes of which they approve or disapprove. In fact, this distinct combination of viewing work, family, friends and good character as central values in life, while according a much lower value to wealth and ambition, is instantly familiar to trade unionists and others who work directly with American workers as an accurate picture of the pattern of distinctly "working-class values" that American workers actually hold. It appears unfamiliar only because, for so long, the term "values" has been applied instead to a fixed set of conservative positions on a certain group of moral and social issues.

A significant number of American workers do in fact hold traditional or conservative views on many specific moral and social issues, but that does not make them working-class rather than middle-class values, nor are these views necessarily shared by all or even most American workers. Lamont's research, for example, shows that only 25 percent of her sample could be accurately described as deeply religious. Equally, opinion surveys have shown that the attitudes of individual blue-collar workers vary widely among different "family values" issues and that blue-collar attitudes have also become significantly more tolerant over time on a wide range of topics. Most important, Lamont's research dramatically demonstrates that the values that workers can accurately be said to share as a group--those that can properly be considered specifically "working-class values"--are not only not objectionable but are, in fact, profoundly admirable.

The key question that arises from Lamont's work is to determine how these values influence workers' thinking about specific social and political issues. While focus groups are often used to gain an understanding of what a group of people is thinking, they are not designed to systematically study the process by which opinions are derived.

One approach is presented in Talking Politics, by William Gamson. Gamson drew together 188 participants into thirty-seven small groups and presented each with newspaper clippings and editorial cartoons on four political issues. Gamson documented how these blue-collar people evaluated the materials and, working as a group, tried to draw conclusions. What Gamson found was that working people tend to blend three distinct kinds of information in analyzing an issue--information from the media, personal experience and popular wisdom or "common sense"--and to insist that conclusions had to make sense in terms of all three approaches. This is quite unlike the route of many educated people, who prefer to rely entirely on the conclusions of specialists (for example, economists or scientists). Moreover, Gamson found that popular wisdom and common sense are conduits through which workers bring their values to bear on political issues. Statements described as "common sense" are in fact often expressions of basic values.

The most dramatic recent example of how this process affects actual politics occurred during the first debate between Bush and Gore. Although most commentary focused on Gore's physical appearance and mannerisms, a significant difference also existed between the way the two candidates presented their ideas. While Gore presented a barrage of facts and figures in support of his proposals, Bush frequently replied with simple statements to the effect that the surplus belonged to the people, not to Washington and that he believed in the people, not the government.

While many liberals perceived these remarks as superficial clichés, subsequent opinion polls showed that viewers tended to see Bush as someone who had values similar to theirs, while Gore was perceived as a politician who would "say anything to get elected." Gore's heavy reliance on facts and figures, and his failure to engage Bush's aphorisms with equally clear statements of the "common sense" behind his proposals, was perceived by many blue-collar workers as reflecting an absence of solid underlying values.

The massive rejection of Gore by blue-collar workers on Election Day, however, was not due solely to a failure to communicate his views effectively. It also reflected a profound distrust of government programs or activism of any kind. Democratic strategists were well aware of the massive suspicion and distrust many workers feel toward the Democratic Party in particular, and workers' perception that it caters to a wide range of liberal interest groups but rarely pays attention to them. But what was not so obvious was that this antagonism predated the late 1960s and actually began in the 1950s, when American workers' view of themselves underwent a subtle but profound transformation.

Two books that help to explain the collapse of the relationship between blue-collar workers and the Democratic Party are Samuel Freedman's The Inheritance and Lillian Rubin's Families on the Fault Line. Freedman's book follows three working-class families through three generations, from the early 1900s to the Reagan years. Rubin's book analyzes extensive personal interviews she conducted in the early 1990s with 162 working-class families.

By focusing on a few individuals, Freedman, a former New York Times reporter, is able to show in extraordinary detail the way in which the New Deal reforms improved the lives of ordinary Americans. For one family a WPA job meant not just an escape from poverty but from a sense of shame and humiliation as well. For plumber Silvio Burigo, the Wagner Act revitalized the trade-union movement and launched his career as a union official.

It was not only materially that blue-collar workers benefited from the New Deal. In the 1930s working people had a positive image in the national culture, and working-class values were generally treated with respect. From the poetry of Carl Sandburg to films like The Grapes of Wrath, ordinary people were portrayed as equal in intelligence to the ambitious and the wealthy, and morally superior as well. Manual labor was shown as a dignified occupation and those who did it as capable of living a rich and rewarding life. Within the growing trade-union movement, trade unionism was seen not as a device for insuring individual economic security but as a great moral and social crusade. As Silvio Burigo's local union paper proclaimed, "This great influx of workers into the unions of America is one of the great inspirations of our time.... It is emancipation before our eyes." In national politics blue-collar workers were respected as the heart of the "Roosevelt coalition," an alliance that also included racial and ethnic minorities, middle-class liberals and significant sections of the rural population in a coalition for social progress and reform.

In the 1950s, however, all this changed. On TV shows, leading men wore suits and came home from offices, not factories, while the occasional blue-collar protagonists who did appear were treated as buffoons. Being a "success" in America came to mean being something superior to a factory worker, and those who could not find upward mobility from manual labor bore a subtle stamp of inadequacy and failure.

The consequences of this redefinition were profound. For one thing, it caused American workers to lose the conviction that the way to improve conditions was through collective action and to internalize the notion that they were individually responsible for their economic fortunes. If they were not better off or more secure, it was entirely their own fault. Rubin, both a sociologist and a practicing psychotherapist, is extraordinarily deft at capturing the subtle ways this negative self-image and sense of failure affected the inner lives of blue-collar workers.

At the same time, the trade-union movement changed from a crusade to an institution, one rarely mentioned outside the business pages of the national press. The men like Burigo who ran its local branches found themselves increasingly isolated; virtually every new plumber's apprentice in the apprenticeship program Burigo ran for the local union was the son of a close friend or relative.

Finally, the redefinition of workers as part of the middle class during the 1950s made specifically working-class problems disappear from the national agenda. As Rubin notes, "If the popular political language denies the very existence of a sector of the population, their needs aren't likely to be taken into account." She also makes the critical point that the redefinition of workers as middle class also "renders them and the particular problems that beset working-class life unnamed, therefore invisible, often even to [the workers] themselves."

This ideological transformation would have had tremendous long-term consequences under any circumstances. But during the mid-1960s two major social trends converged to place working-class America at the heart of a sociological "perfect storm."

On the one hand, the black protest movement began to target job discrimination and segregation in housing. Freedman is extraordinarily evenhanded in portraying the gradual collision between the insular world of Silvio Burigo's apprenticeship program and the dedicated black activists like the ex-Marine and son of a steelworker, Earl Forte--a collision neither man desired but neither could control. Freedman continually steps back and describes the larger social forces at work as he depicts the increasing wave of blue-collar incomprehension and then anger at the ghetto riots, growing welfare rolls and deterioration of public housing.

At the same time, an equally profound antagonism was growing between blue-collar workers and the college educated, as workers' children fought and died in Vietnam while the college-aged children of the middle class remained largely exempt. When college students then became the leading force in the growing peace movement, it seemed to workers a betrayal of their own children, who were risking their lives on the frontlines.

Many analyses during the 1980s and 1990s traced the way these events and others combined to convince workers that their needs and interests were under assault from liberals above and blacks below; from pressures for affirmative action, busing and the extension of welfare benefits, on the one hand, and from the demands of middle-class-led social movements, including women's rights, gay rights and the peace and environmental movements on the other. By the 1980s there was no longer much debate that these measures and movements, which workers identified as coming from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, had significantly alienated them from the party as a whole.

This conflict was by no means inevitable. In many European countries social welfare systems were designed to be comprehensive social safety nets with universal coverage rather than special programs for a distinct group defined as "the poor." As a result, European blue-collar workers strongly supported these programs during the postwar period, rather than resenting them. But in America there was no significant force or institution in the mid-1960s prepared to propose a system of this kind that could have united the interests of black and white blue-collar workers. In fact, even if there had been, American workers no longer had a political language or intellectual tradition in which to talk about collective demands of this sort. Instead, they had only society's description of them as junior members of the affluent society and the broad "middle class." They knew they were not really in the same position as the doctors and advertising executives--people who could legitimately be described as affluent--but, as Rubin noted, they did not even have a vocabulary to describe what they really were.

The only politician who gave voice to the anger and frustration of American workers was George Wallace, the third-party candidate in the 1968 elections. Wallace's diatribes against both blacks and "pointy-headed intellectuals" echoed workers' perceptions of attack from above and below, while his potent slogan "Send them a message" precisely expressed what white workers wanted to do--to send both political parties the message that they were ignoring working-class Americans.

During the 1970s Wallace's message was refined by various Republican spokesmen. But the overt racial and social stereotyping was too bitter and divisive to serve as the basis for an enduring political realignment. It required Ronald Reagan's more optimistic and positive version of a populist revolt against big government to convert it into a political philosophy that could bind blue-collar workers to the Republican Party. Reagan's antigovernment philosophy carried the individualistic approach that American workers had internalized during the postwar era to its logical conclusion: If government programs were controlled by people who had no sympathy or understanding for working Americans, and if government actions were more likely to harm workers' interests than help them, workers would be better off if government did little or nothing at all.

By 1992, however, after a decade of stagnant or declining real income, even with both husband and wife working full time, and increasing job insecurity as factory closings and corporate downsizing spread across the economy, many of the blue-collar Reagan Democrats soured on the entirely individualistic solutions offered by the Republican Party. Workers' growing disenchantment could be traced in studies such as Ruth Milkman's Farewell to the Factory and Rick Fantasia's Cultures of Solidarity, which documented the effects of factory closings and the growing trade-union militancy in working-class America. In the political sphere, workers were once again voting in substantial numbers for a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, whose major function, like Wallace's, was to "send Washington a message" that both political parties were ignoring their needs.

The Perot candidacy allowed Bill Clinton to enter the White House without winning a majority of the popular vote and emboldened the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to begin designing strategies aimed at winning back the Reagan Democrats. By the mid-1990s the effort was well under way to recast the Great Society programs of the 1960s along lines that provided universal coverage and extended benefits to blue-collar America.

Progressive strategists were further encouraged by Clinton's victory in the 1996 election and by a variety of polls showing that blue-collar workers were actually positively disposed toward a wide variety of social programs. What did not receive comparable attention, however, was the fact that blue-collar distrust and hostility toward government, and particularly toward the "liberals" in Clinton's first administration, was entirely undiminished. (The militia movement of the mid-1990s, in which large numbers of blue-collar workers actively participated and actually came to perceive employees of federal agencies as an alien occupying army, provided a stunning demonstration of the depth and intensity of this feeling.) Opinion polls did not adequately reflect this profound antagonism, but trade unionists and others close to American workers knew that the social gap between middle-class liberals and blue-collar workers had in no way been overcome.

As the 2000 election approached, campaign strategists began to assert that Gore could win it if the contest was decided on the issues rather than personalities. While "values" were said to be important, those were defined to be a position on a particular set of issues such as gun control and abortion rather than an underlying personal philosophy. And the campaign was indeed largely fought on the basis of the issues Democrats had hoped to highlight. Yet while black and Latino blue-collar workers gave Gore substantial majorities, white workers turned away.

In a survey of 2,000 voters conducted immediately after the election, Gore's pollster Stanley Greenberg found that there were several key factors that had contributed to Gore's loss. Bush was successful in blurring the differences between the candidates on the issues where Gore held an advantage. More critically, Gore was perceived as less trustworthy than Bush, and more Americans felt that Bush, not Gore, shared their values. In fact, the single most important predictor of how people would vote was their perception of which candidate more fully shared their values.

These poll results help explain Bush's victory but seem to offer little guidance for the future: Voters' subjective opinions about trustworthiness and values seem painfully vague and difficult to challenge. But the specific factors Greenberg notes can be seen as elements in the larger process by which American workers make political choices. At this more general level, the outlines of a strategy for progressives does begin to appear.

Because of their limited time and resources, blue-collar workers generally do not try to evaluate competing sets of facts and statistics presented by political candidates. Instead, they pay more attention to what they often call the candidates' "philosophy"--the candidates' views regarding the kinds of policies they consider right or wrong and the general rules or criteria they promise to use in making decisions about specific issues. In effect, workers tend to choose a candidate based on his or her overall approach to the major issues of the day and then rely on that person to make the appropriate decisions about the specifics. This makes certain personal characteristics of a candidate, such as his or her honesty and understanding of working-class life, especially important. Thus, the objections to Gore that Greenberg identified should not be dismissed as superficial or capricious. For blue-collar workers, the trustworthiness, values and honesty of a political candidate are not simply desirable personal characteristics but rather an inherent part of their approach in deciding between competing political views and programs.

There are many potential lessons for progressive politics that can be drawn from the in-depth studies of working-class political opinion. But the central conclusion they suggest is the absolutely critical importance of respecting the values of American workers and understanding the culture in which they live.

To be sure, Democratic political candidates have already become accustomed to reciting a litany of respect for home, work and family when they are on the campaign trail, but this is far from sufficient. It is necessary to face the uncomfortable reality that there is still a vast cultural chasm and a profound lack of understanding that separates the college-educated from the 45 percent of white American men who are manual workers. It is a gap created not by differences in knowledge or intelligence but by the fact that the two groups live in fundamentally different worlds.

For one thing, although opinion polls demonstrate that workers' views on major issues actually span a wide range from left to right, many college-educated Americans still hold stereotypes of blue-collar workers as conservative "hard hats." The reason for the strength of that image is that the political debate between progress and reaction that goes on within working-class America, and the important cultural changes that have occurred over the years, are largely hidden from those outside. The college educated, for example, have not personally observed the subtle evolution of working-class attitudes toward women over the past thirty years, an evolution reflected in the songs of both male and female country music stars. Nor have they frequented the Wednesday evening prayer meetings that are held all across America, where working people seriously and sincerely struggle with their feelings on issues like prejudice, tolerance and greed. The Archie Bunker stereotype survives not because it is accurate but because those who live outside working-class America have no other image with which to replace it.

Equally, even those who consciously struggle to reject the stereotypes find it difficult to visualize ordinary working people as more than abstractions--the "hard-working husbands and wives with stagnant incomes and insecure jobs" who have become the clichés of the modern campaign trail. There is genuine concern and empathy for workers in these descriptions, but often a palpable sense of distance and disengagement as well. All too often, workers described in this way seem little more than the sum of their economic difficulties.

The problem arises because most educated Americans have so extraordinarily little intimate human contact with working people. For many, the depth of the cultural divide only becomes apparent in the awkward and uncomfortable moments when they cannot find a topic for small talk with a tradesman or employee. They have never shared the intense sense of brotherhood that pervades working-class life, the continuous joking and casual conversation on a construction site, the satisfaction of working together as a team and "getting the job done right." They have never experienced the exhilarating sense of mastery that a framing carpenter can feel as he stands on a narrow beam three stories above the ground, looks down at the traffic passing below and thinks to himself that he feels sorry for all those poor bastards who are going to be stuck in an office all day long.

In short, most educated Americans have little sense of the texture and the complexity of working-class life, of its richness and satisfactions as well as its problems and discontents. And without an intimate and personal understanding of these things, it will always be profoundly difficult for liberals and progressives to convince working Americans that they should be trusted to represent workers' needs and interests in the political system.

Conservatives have always been acutely aware of this cultural chasm between college-educated and blue-collar America, and every key Republican political strategist, from Kevin Phillips and Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, has relied on it as a critical advantage in the struggle for the blue-collar vote.

Just how decisive this cultural distance is can be seen in a single, startling fact: When trade unions took the case for Al Gore directly to their members, they totally reversed the national trends. While 69 percent of white men who were not members of trade unions voted for Bush and only 28 percent for Gore, 59 percent of white men who were members of trade unions voted for Gore and only 35 percent for Bush. Among white trade-union women, 67 percent voted for Gore and 31 percent for Bush. Among nonunion white women, in contrast, Gore lost by 7 percent.

The significance of these results is difficult to overstate. They demonstrate that when workers are presented with a progressive message by campaign workers who come from an institution that is part of working-class life, and who share their culture and values, a substantial majority can be convinced to support progressive candidates and programs.

During the 1930s, union organizers were taught never to blame the workers if an organizing campaign failed. "It's not their fault for not understanding," the organizers were instructed. "It's your fault for not explaining it clearly enough." It is a motto today's liberals and progressives would do well to hang on the walls of the political campaign war rooms in the elections of the coming years.