Steps on the Road to Realism

One Democrat's formula for "New Liberalism "

Nothing stimulates an agonizing reappraisal more than a devastating defeat. The first liberal Democrat to emerge from the ashes of last November's election with a clearly reasoned answer to the question of "What now?" is Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. In a new book called The Road from Here (Knopf, $12.95), he argues that the hard realities facing the U.S. will force liberal members of his own party to abandon many of their cherished political assumptions.

The son of emigrants from Greece, and a Republican himself until the mid-1960s, Tsongas abandoned some of his own New Deal assumptions well before Reagan's victory. The crux of Tsongas' revisionism was a rejection of the belief that government can solve all social problems with new programs, an acknowledgment that capital formation and business growth are important for a healthy economy, and the realization that military resolve and a hard-nosed foreign policy are necessary to counter the Soviet threat. Tsongas, who was elected to the Senate in 1978, was singled out as a potential spokesman for the "new liberalism" after a speech he made a year ago to the Americans for Democratic Action, a bastion of liberal purity.

Criticism that he was merely rejecting liberal values without offering a nonconservative alternative prompted Tsongas to expand his ideas into a book. He writes: "The core of this book is realism --nonideological, clear-eyed realism." It is devoted to the analysis of eight salient "realities" that will determine America's future: energy sources, Soviet aggressiveness, economic growth rates, finite natural resources, stirrings in the Third World, international trade, an overburdened environment and inflation.

On energy, for example, Tsongas argues that continued reliance on a finite, diminishing resource like oil is dangerous both to the economy and to national security. Instead, he advocates greater use of nuclear power while trying to speed up the transition to other, renewable forms of energy. He also contends that the antimilitarism of many American liberals, a legacy from the Viet Nam War, is outmoded in the face of the Soviet threat. The U.S., Tsongas believes, must seek rough military equivalence with the U.S.S.R. while pursuing arms control negotiations, taking care to avoid either aggravating or ignoring the Soviets' aggressive tendencies.

On economic issues, Tsongas sounds a bit like the Republican he once was. He says that traditional Democratic concerns, such as industrial safety and worker's rights, should take second place to insuring that the economy is performing well. Says he: "A stagnant economy is, by definition, illiberal." Righting the economy, Tsongas argues, requires new incentives for savings and investment. He strongly opposes, however, Reagan's supply-side theology on the ground that across-the-board tax cuts are inflationary because they will stimulate consumption rather than productivity.

Not that Tsongas rejects all traditional liberalism. The years he spent in Ethiopia and the West Indies as a Peace Corps volunteer helped shape his strong belief that American support of repressive authoritarian regimes will lead inevitably to unrest and to meddling by the Soviets and their clients. Tsongas' hand-wringing concern about acid rain, the disposal of nuclear wastes and other threats to the environment ("We are treating Mother Earth like a giant garbage can") is conventionally Naderistic.

The book's major drawback is that it leaves the reader yearning for precisely what Tsongas avoids: a commanding and comprehensive vision that goes beyond case-by-case solutions to current problems. What the junior Senator from Massachusetts has done is begin stepping off some of the boundaries on the uncertain terrain of a new liberalism.

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