But liberals have not dealt with the explosive political ramifications of the ideologically defensible policy of affirmative action. Urban whites competing with Blacks have felt disadvantaged by the very policies their tax dollars paid for. The GOP has exploited this divide and reaped the electoral benefits.

The Los Angeles violence is only one example of the consequences of years of conservative leadership and stagnation in Congress. Unemployment in South Central is estimated at more than 50 percent. Crime and illegitimacy have skyrocketed and graduation rates have plummeted. Clearly, it's time for a change.

The problem is not a shortage of new ideas, however. The New Republic suggests switching to community-rather than city-based policing, providing more drug treatment and nixing welfare in favor of a guaranteed jobs program in the style of the Works Progress Administration.

In congressional testimony last Thursday, Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) President Will Marshall--the major idea machine for Gov. Bill Clinton--suggested a Police Corps program to exchange college funds for police service, a civilian version of the G.I. bill, expanding the earned income tax credit, raising work-discouraging wage limits for Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and contracting out to private companies devoted to finding jobs for welfare recipients.

And Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack F. Kemp talks endlessly about "empowerment" and "enterprise zones," by which the government would give tax and regulation breaks to firms that locate in low employment, high poverty areas.

Some of these ideas are better than others. The PPI proposals, for example, seem particularly well reasoned.

The enterprise zones, on the other hand, would probably entice businesses to areas that desperately need them from areas that still need them badly. As Michael E. Kinsley '72 wrote recently, "What will Jack Kemp say to a white working-class area that loses a factory to an `enterprise zone'?"

But regardless of the merits of these plans, the important goal now is to drive some new ideas onto the national agenda of ordinary voters.

That will require disentangling tough but fair stances on crime and social decay from racism. It will require drastic reform of welfare to break cycles of dependency and disaffection.

For the Democrats, it will require policies and rhetoric which address the concern of both Blacks in the underclass and white working-class voters. If affirmative action is to continue and aid to cities is to increase (and we believe both should happen), the costs must be shifted onto wealthier Americans. In short, this will require ending the largest upward income redistribution in history.

Inertial and short-sighted American businesses must stop blaming taxation and regulation (which have severely declined in the Reagan-Bush era) for their own unwillingness to respond to the changes brought about by globalizing the American economy.

ALL THIS WILL REQUIRE, in short, massive political and social change. And, to be honest, such change probably won't be implemented to the extent the nation needs. Not because the American political system has become "gridlocked" or "stagnated" beyond belief, as this year's anti-politicians (namely Edmund G. Brown Jr. and H. Ross Perot) would have us believe. This has always been true.

The reason, unfortunately, is simply that most voting Americans don't like change very much--if change means what the Republicans say it means: higher taxes with few benefits.

Corporations will have to engage in messy and expensive restructuring. Already strapped middleclass Americans (both minority and majority) will have to work more, save more and study more.

And those who want change most desperately participate least in the political system. Perhaps the best we can hope for, then, is a president committed to some change--or at least the ousting of a president who has shown his inability to work for any change.

Refusing to change can only lead to more South Centrals, more poverty and less participation in the structures of politics by those who need them the most. It can only lead to more David Dukes and more Leonard Jeffrieses. It can only lead to a new, even deeper American dilemma, one that we cannot afford to face.