COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Perot’s Goodby Won’t Improve What Remains : The Democrats’ ‘new covenant’ papers over the real anti-labor and pro-business agenda.

The Perot cult, engendered by the man himself and then subscribed to by millions, took as its axiom of faith the notion that a single decisive man could clean up the national mess, flush out Washington’s Augean stables, end political gridlock and restore the Republic to its former economic glory.

Cargo cults, like millenarian movements, are fueled by desperation. Even people who found Perot’s personality and views unpalatable rejoiced in his “exploratory campaign” because it fitted with their own desperation at Business As Usual and offered simple salvation: a billionaire who would get things moving again. The other political cargo cult this year was slightly more bizarre, since it offered JFK as national salvation. Avenge JFK and all will be well.

All those folk with Perot bumper stickers--the only political ones I ever see on the highway--will now relapse into gloom and apathy, while taking a resentful second look at the two major-party candidates.

The alternative to these millenarian approaches to politics is recognition that reform is brought about not by billionaires or the falsified memory of dead presidents, but by the creation of vigorous new political institutions, coalitions and even parties. This is why Jesse Jackson’s speech to the Democratic Convention in Madison Square Garden was, for me, a tragic spectacle. Here was a man who did not seem to realize how completely he had forfeited the historic opportunity that he first grasped eight years ago, and how demeaned was his role in New York.

There stood Jackson, no longer a force to be reckoned with, and the reason was entirely of his own devising. Jackson had no power because he no longer had a movement. Without massed and enthusiastic (albeit ragtag) militants, without a Rainbow Coalition in anything but name, he was a mere speech-maker. Jackson came to that low ebb in Madison Square Garden by way of his demobilization of the Rainbow Coalition in 1988 after the Democratic convention in Atlanta.

Jackson’s speech was not as distressing as the setting in which it was delivered. Jackson recounted with vigor the dreadful working conditions in that North Carolina chicken-processing factory where 24 people burned to death behind doors locked by employers fearful of petty theft. He asserted the need to protect workers’ rights to organize and strike. He assailed repressive anti-labor laws.

But the expulsion of organized labor from any position of influence in the Democratic Party has been the central mission of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose representative is Bill Clinton, governor of a “right to work” state. One of Clinton’s main backers is Tyson Foods, the chicken-processing giant. The environmental havoc inflicted by Tyson on Arkansas’ water is a matter of record. (The business editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette called Tyson’s contract farmers “almost indentured servants.” And Clinton gives abject deference to this company.

Among the better-known stalwarts of the party addressed by Jackson are Sens. Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum. On June 25, both of these men voted to suspend a lockout by railroad employers and simultaneously to break the strike by unions against the southeastern-based CSX railroad. In so doing, these senators and their fellow legislators sent the dispute to arbitration by presidentially appointed boards, which will inevitably force a settlement on the employers’ terms.

Enough Democrats in Congress voted with Republicans on that June night to further erode the Wagner Act of 1935, whose ratification of the right to organize and to strike was one of the glories of the New Deal invoked in Madison Square Garden. The ability of workers to win a strike in this country is now near extinction. Privately employed workers who strike see their jobs go to “permanent replacements” and federally regulated ones are ordered off the picket lines and back to work.

The right-to-work Democratic governor and the back-to-work Democratic senators were there in Madison Square Garden, all promising “fundamental change.” They promised it so often that some reporters came to believe it. I saw one newspaper headline likening Clinton’s economic package to F.D.R.’s programs of the New Deal. Has no one bothered to read Clinton’s surrender to economic conservatism and corporate power? Maybe Clinton’s phony talk about change and a “new covenant” will fool enough people. Maybe, on the other hand, the millions who looked to Perot will decide that, absent a bracing cargo cult, they may as well stick with the fraudulence they already know rather than go to the trouble of buying into a new brand.