Targets of opportunity.

• Author: Reed, Adolph, Jr.
• Position: Liberal strategies - Column

So the liberals have finally returned to power, and the Left, after twelve years of fighting rear-guard actions against the Reaganite Right, can once again think strategically about what we should struggle for and how to go about it. Of course, we deserve a better class of liberals than Bill Clinton et al., and we'll have to spend more time than we should combating their own rightist predilections. Nevertheless, they pay at least occasional lip service to notions of Government responsibility for the common weal and ideals of fairness and equality. And, no matter how ashamed of it they may feel, their electoral success still depends in part on the progressive constituency.

While it's not a very bright or exciting moment, we have our best opportunity to go on the offensive since the likes of Anita Ward and the Bee Gees were dominating the pop charts and Jane Fonda was making left-inspired movies. We should try to make the most of it because it may not last very long. The stakes are high, and our job is not easy.

The currently fashionable liberalism looks first to prove itself acceptable to the Right. And it's not only the self-styled New Democrats whose reflexes drive them rightward. For example, "Year of the Woman" star Barbara Boxer, in response to California Governor Pete Wilson's latest outburst of xenophobia, has called for stationing troops on the Mexican border to stem illegal immigration - an old stratagem of the Minutemen and other ultra-rightists. New liberal conscience Bill Bradley has endorsed a version of Edward Banfield's nefarious call (as laid out in The Heavenly City) for taking "lower class" children from their parents to correct their supposed psychocultural deficiencies in orphanages (or is it workhouses?).

We face the danger that this liberalism will become virtually indistinguishable from the Jack Kemp/Christian Weld wing of the Republican Party, thus rendering the mainstream political landscape empty of real alternatives to the legacy of the last twelve years. A key objective has to be stopping this dangerous convergence.

Many of these liberals are fundamentally committed to their rightward slide. They actively want to redefine the polity to include only the mainly white, comparatively well-off voters to whom they pander. Others may, as their defenders insist, only be responding to a realpolitik dominated by pressure from conservatives. In either case, our task as progressives is to change the shape of the realpolitik by exerting pressure from the left.

This task entails: 1) intervening in policy debates to provide alternatives to the prevailing assumptions and initiatives; 2) cultivating and...