Opinion: The Real Majority

Political rhetoric tends to achieve a life of its own, congealing into cant and conventional wisdom, an unexamined shorthand. In a forthcoming book, The Real Majority (Coward-McCann Inc.; $7.95), Political Analysts Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg take a canny inventory of the nation's political assumptions and vocabulary. They conclude that some of the preconceptions of both Democrats and Republicans need a fresh going over.

Scammon and Wattenberg, who describe themselves as independent Democrats, find that liberals, primarily Democrats, have made the profound mistake of equating firmness against crime and rioting with racism. This blunder gives conservatives and Republicans a decided advantage: "The law-and-order issue today is essentially a civil libertarian's issue, and the question that must be asked is: What about the civil liberties of hardworking, crime-scared Americans, black and white, many of whom happen to be Democrats? It is black Democrats who face the worst crime rates in America."

Shifting Center. The Democrats, say the authors, have failed to recognize the mass of Americans' "nonnegotiable demands" for tranquillity. Republicans have understood the fears and desires about law and order much better. In fact, some of the more conservative Republicans have exaggerated and exploited the issue. But the Republicans, say Scammon and Wattenberg, have been much less perceptive in other areas, notably Middle America's acceptance of Medicare, federal aid to education, the need to rebuild cities and to face up to problems of race.

The "real majority" in America, according to the authors, remains "the un-young, un-poor, un-black, un-college and un-political." This group occupies a middle ground that Democrats and Republicans alike often fail to define intelligently. For the center shifts. Those in the middle have, according to the authors, become somewhat more conservative on such social issues as crime, race, drugs and pornography (this is in part contradicted by much greater permissiveness about what now can be printed or shown on the screen, and greater open-mindedness about marijuana than existed only a few years ago). At the same time, the center has grown more liberal on economic issues.

Goldwater's Lesson. Both parties, Scammon and Wattenberg argue, tend to magnify impulses at either extreme. Some Democrats speak of forming a new coalition of the left composed of the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, while relegating others, especially white union labor, to the ranks of "racists." But, the authors observe, only the blacks generally vote as a bloc, not the young or the poor. Enfranchising 18-year-olds will lower the average age of all voters slightly, but it will remain above 40. Besides, "being a young American apparently connotes nothing more than a chronological fact; some are liberal, some conservative."