ness executives. By contrast, lower-middle- and middle-class voters — small businessmen, rural Southerners, artisans and prosperous workers, farmers, service workers, retirees, white-collar employees — showed great volatility. It is hard to be precise about each category, but in general these voters moved heavily toward the two GOP presidential nominees — Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1980 — who very successfully enunciated populist, anti-establishment themes, made overt appeals to “Middle," “Silent,” or “Forgotten” Americans, and used slogans about family, work, and neighborhood. Cumulatively, the presidential elections held between 1968 and 1980 severely eroded the one-third or two-fifths of the New Deal coalition composed of the rural and small-town white South, the rural and small-town Catholic Farm Belt regions, and, notably, lower-middle-class suburbia, especially in the new Sun Belt metropolitan areas, which have had a high rate of immigration. Thus a huge slice of “Middle America” has come loose from its traditional political moorings. But few politicians have displayed so little understanding of who and what elected them as Ronald Reagan. Like the great California Proposition 13 tax revolt of 1978, Reagan’s surprise ten-point landslide of 1980 was quickly read as something it was not: a mandate for experimental conservative, pro-business, pro-upper-bracket economics. In consequence, the vicissitudes of Reaganomics in 1981 and 1982 have played havoc with the 1980 Reagan coalition. Its blue-collar and Dixie populist supporters have become disaffected, along with many other voters. Donald Warren’s “Middle-American Radical” thesis contains a simple explanation: Middle-American Radicals (and to a greater or lesser extent the George Wallace supporters and New Right voters) are hostile to the rich and to big business at the same time as they dislike minorities and the liberal politicians who seem to favor minority interests over those of the white working class. By hitching his political future to the fiscal theories of Calvin The present two-party system is coming to resemble a sinking ship, battered and increasingly weakened in each Presidential election by angry constituencies and interest groups that seem like loose cannons on a deck. Coolidge’s and Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary Andrew Mellon and by making the White House notable for its West Coast millionaires, mink coats, and Cadillac Fleetwoods, Reagan, too, has offended these frustrated Middle Americans. If the two-party system were vital and resilient, it would be tempting to ask where else the Middle- American Radical can go. But the present two-party system is coming to resemble a sinking ship, battered and increasingly weakened in each presidential election by angry constituencies and interest groups that seem like loose cannons on a deck. My own view is that the two-party system was gravely weakened in the first half of the 1970s. In 1972 the Republicans seemed capable of solidifying their gains in the South and of bringing about a party realignment; but this prospect crumbled after Watergate and with it the possibility of a relatively restrained New Majority coalition. Diverted from realignment by Watergate, both the Republicans and the Democrats lost their coherence and creative direction. And in the meantime, economic and political disillusionment, fragmentation, and Balkanization of the parties took on dimensions that grew by 1980 to a level unmatched since the days before the Civil War. At the moment, I would say that there is a 20 to 30 percent chance that either the radicalized New Right conservatives will take over the Republican Party by 1984, driving out many others, or the New Right will be looking for a new party vehicle of its own because of antipathy toward the GOP’s heir apparent, Vice-President George Bush, who is seen as tied to the “establishment.” Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, a leading spokesman for fundamentalist morality and anti-Wall Street economics, is probably the most plausible New Right splinter candidate; if circumstances were favorable Helms could probably draw 10 to 15 percent of the total vote, with substantial strength across much of the Bible Belt. Or it may happen that the Middle-American right could once again be part of a broader, conservative coalition under a resurgent Reagan or another charismatic figure. Those who find a Helms candidacy implausible, in view of the pressures of the two-party system in a presidential election, have yet another factor — or rather three factors — to consider: the small but potentially significant strength of the Citizens Party (under whose banner Barry Commoner ran for president in 1980), the continuing nationwide organization of the Libertarian Party, and the near certainty that 1980 Independent can- didefte John Anderson will run for president again in 1984. If three splinter parties, why not four, or even more? The larger trend of politics in the Western democracies is compatible with such a splintering process. From Canada and Britain to Belgium and Germany, fragmentation is taking place. In a post-industrial time minor parties are feeding on the breakdown and increasing irrelevance of old party loyalties fashioned during the era of industrialization. And the process seems to be gathering force as the ideologies of the left and right prove unable to solve contemporary economic difficulties. The trend in post-industrial areas of our country — university towns, high- tech developments, “gentrified” urban brownstone neighborhoods, environmentalist centers, prosperous resort areas, and so forth — provides a fascinating “progressive” counterpoint to the populist “conservative” trend in so many Southern fundamentalist counties and Northern blue- collar neighborhoods. If the relevance of the existing party system is being relentlessly undercut on the one hand HANDCRAFTED... It's what we do and how we make it. The essential tool is the human hand. PORTLAND'S FAMOUS WEEKEND MARKETPLACE Through Christmas in Old Town THE MARKET STORE Weekdays, 11-5pm, 213 N.W. 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