John Emerson has a very good article that was promoted to the front-page at Open Left about why the Democratic Party is the way that it is. It has a lot of good history and it’s all basically accurate. It’s a little heavy on the intellectual developments of the mid-twentieth century, though, and too light on everything else. It’s still worth a read even if I think it misses most of what makes the Democratic Party the way it is, but it covers a lot of ground.
It starts from the place that so much progressive analysis starts, which is that there was a Golden Age of progressivism within the Democratic Party during the first two terms of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency that has been lost, and then proceeds to try to explain what went wrong and how to get back to Shangri-La. I’ve always found the premise of these arguments to be mildly irritating. That’s because I don’t believe there ever was a progressive heyday.
Emerson begins:
The Democratic Party established itself in more or less its present form roughly between 1945 and 1955. The Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the sixties severely challenged the new party orthodoxy, but after 1972 (when many of the pros abandoned McGovern) the old guard took over again. The DLC takeover in 1988 moved the party still further to the right, but the foundations for an anti-populist, anti-progressive Democratic Party were laid immediately after WWII.
We can see from the dates that he’s willing to include FDR’s third term within the Golden Age, but not really.
A couple of weeks ago I described how the congressional progressives had at first been the New Deal’s biggest supporters, but went into opposition after 1937, so that the New Deal coalition was replaced by the old Grover Cleveland Democratic Party (the South and the urban machines) plus the unions. After 1937 the impending world war (which most Progressives opposed) increasingly dominated politics, and once the war had begun it trumped all domestic concerns, so that the Congressional role became rather limited and the progressives were marginalized.
So, he’s pretty much restricting himself to a Golden Age of 1933-1937. That’s a pretty brief period of time to hold up as the standard by which all subsequent ages should be judged. But, it’s true that in that brief period the interests of progressives and the interests of the Democratic Party were better aligned than at any time since. It’s also true that the onset of the war permanently changed American politics and the Democratic Party.
The most important permanent changes were related to dealing with the trauma of the second world war in thirty years, the unleashing of atomic energy, the emergence of communism as a global ideology with real power, and the real need to come up with answers to prevent a resumption of conflict, including a repeat of instigators like economic warfare between states. Probably nothing was more important than the Bretton Woods conference that set up the economic framework for the post-war era under American leadership. It was at this conference, in 1944, that America (under Democratic leadership) took over responsibility for monetary policy and assured that the Democratic Party could never again hope to rule as a majority as the antagonist of Wall Street.
It’s true, as Emerson describes, that all kinds of intellectual firepower was put to use to justify this change. But, just as with the responsibility of the Democrats to build a permanent military-industrial complex to deal with an atomic age, they had a responsibility to impose order on international markets to prevent the kind of chaos that occurred between the wars.
These twin responsibilities shaped the modern Democratic Party. And even though the Democrats after Truman lost the White House more than they won it, they controlled Congress almost uninterrupted up until 1995.
But, for me, this history does more to explain why America is the way that it is than to explain why the modern Democratic Party is the way that it is. That is because America developed in the post-war era by the Democratic Party’s design. They are inseparable. The Democratic Party was America all the way through to Reagan.
The progressive wing of the party didn’t die. But it could do nothing about economic or foreign policy. It had its successes on social issues. Progressives won battle after battle to extend rights to blacks, to women, to gays, and for religious minorities. But they made no ground on changing the ultimate power structures of American society, especially in how that power was projected overseas.
America’s elite took responsibility for the really complex stuff and for a long time the small people were content and rewarded for giving them their trust. All of that started to break down in the late 1960’s, and that’s when the Democratic Party began to break up as the party of American power.
The modern Democratic Party is not remotely similar to the party of FDR’s day, which had no responsibility for global economic policy or assuring that we have the preeminent military in the world. FDR’s party was dominated by segregationists. Today’s party is majority-minority. What’s happening is that the post-war consensus on matters both economic and international is breaking down and the base of the Democratic Party is becoming more old-school progressive. Ordinarily, the elites response would be to flee for shelter in the Republican Party, but they don’t agree (and never have) about the way the Democrats crafted that post-war consensus. So, there is no safe haven for the elites to run to.
The last time this happened was when this cycle began, back in 1933.
There also seems to be a turning point around 1973, when income inequality began spiking and oil production in the lower 48 peaked. This is when the economic well-being of the American middle class started to really falter.
I’m not suggesting that ‘oil production’ is the cause of this, but I think it’s a reasonable proxy for ‘America has real competitors in the world now’.
How can it be a “golden age” if the Democratic party was the party of segregation? That speaks to a very narrow idea of who and what it was good for and excludes many people. That could never be my idea of a “golden age”.
Michael Tomasky has a great article called Against Despair about the misreading of history by many (white) progressives. The “golden age” that many dream of never actually existed.
That really is a great article. I also don’t think there was ever a “golden age” that existed. Golden moments maybe but that’s about it. There was FDR with segregation and LBJ with Vietnam; not my idea of complete fidelity to progressivism. It’s always been about herding cats with the Democratic Party. The only difference is a there is now a new cast of cats.
Every age has its faults. But certainly, progressive ideas which are usually the best ideas, had the most traction in the machinery of government in that time. That those ideas which could and should be applied to everyone were not, is a failing. They should have benefited minorities more than they did. Implemented properly they WOULD have.
In terms of receptiveness and willingness to implement progressive ideas that time was the best time for it. Certainly far better than today.
In terms of economic policy maybe, but nothing else.
Economics is from where all else flows.
Okay, I can’t sleep. So I read the article. And let me say this, it says NOTHING that I didn’t already know. He talks of Obama as a single chess piece, say a step on the long road.
What he doesn’t mention is that as a whole, Obama is a step sideways. Or backwards.
That might be true; I don’t know. At this point, all I’m hopeful for is that he moves the ball a little further than Clinton did. You gotta look for crumbs where you can find them in the 21st century.
He already moved it more than Clinton (stimulus, HCR, financial regulation coming, DADT get repealed, escrow account), but for some reason some don’t want to admit Obama is actually doing a good job just because he doesn’t run on MSM/blog time.
He already moved it more than Clinton (stimulus, HCR, financial regulation coming, DADT get repealed, escrow account)
People can flame me, I don’t care, but look at that list. Do you get kudos at your job for the stuff you are supposed to be doing? Or for going above and beyond? The only one thing that’s gone above and beyond, if at all, is HCR. And some of them, like FinReg and stimulus are weak tea compared to what’s needed. And plenty of respected people are saying that now. Not Monday morning quarterbacking. Times like these call for bold measures and we haven’t gotten them yet.
The only way to get them through the Senate would be to use the Jedi Mind Trick on a dozen or so Senators – no Jedi, no bold measures.
I think this is backwards.
DADT is not being repealed and a strong possibility exists that the military will simply lie in their study so they don’t have to do it and the Congress will get cold feet. Call it a push because nothing is sure to change and the status quo can be reaffirmed.
The escrow account I gave you.
You should not give Obama credit for financial regulation. He has fought tougher controls every step of the way. The real good that is in that bill is in-spite of the White House, not because of it.
You should also not give Obama credit for HCR. HCR is essentially Romney Care with a few minor fixes that are largely the product of efforts opposed by Obama. Moreover it enshrines a right-wing market-as-god mentality in the health care industry and that is why I look at as a step sideways.
As for stimulus I think it should have been bigger much bigger. Everyone who is honest thinks that. However some like Booman think alternatives could not have passed.
I disagree–and moreover the situation has become so awful I now think creative destruction might have been the better option. But even more than that, we have seen how the stimulus has been effectively wiped out or even exceeding by state budget cuts. Cuts that we all knew were coming.
Call it a generous push for the stimulus. Even Bush realized the federal government needed to spend money. As I said before, the stimulus is keeping the patient alive but they are not getting any better.
So Push (stimulus), Obama -1 (health insurance bill), Obama +1 (escrow), and undermined (financial regulation).
No, he has fought the disastrous parts of Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives bill. The rest he has fought in favor of, especially the CFPA. And if someone argues that it’s inside the Fed and that’s bad, please, that’s as independent as you’re going to get.
And if anyone seriously thought the stimulus would be bigger, well, that’s a shock to me; I was personally surprised it was as big as it was. Maybe if before he was president he campaigned on it around the country first thing to get everyone prepared for it and taught the public Econ 101 (all schools other than Austrian push for stimulus in a recession, some say tax cuts others say direct spending, but all recognize the need). The public doesn’t like spending, but they want employment. So I think he should have went around campaigning before it was debated, eased the room, and then counted votes. He counted votes before he got in, that’s the size they judged that they could get.
So it maybe could have been bigger had he went around the country campaign style. However, he didn’t have very much time. This bill had to be pushed through ASAP, and he also didn’t have 60 votes in his caucus at the time. The dynamics were different. I still think that he should have refused to cut state aid if he agreed to cut anything, though. It was the most important part.
that’s my point.
He sees the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement as blips on a basically unchanged Democratic power structure. I give those movements much more credit for defining the modern Democratic Party. That is who we are. We’re not playing footsie with racists anymore. So, today’s Congress is the the most progressive in history. But if you ignore issues of race and social issues and focus only on economics, today’s Congress can seem reactionary.
The truth is, neither party is willing to upset the defense and financial sectors, even if their bases would be fine with that.
The truth is, neither party is willing to upset the defense and financial sectors, even if their bases would be fine with that.
That’s why you need to continue to throw the bastards out until you find ones that are willing to upset those two sectors. We all know that Wall Street is the biggest bunch of wimps going. It’s just that no one ever stands up to them. All their “Going Galt” bullshit is just that.
.
From Emerson’s diary:
“Truman’s commitment to the Cold War and his defeat of the Progressive challenge was a defining moment for the Democratic Party. WWII was FDR’s war and the Democrats (with the full support of the Communists) denounced and rejected anyone who opposed it. But after the war the time came to switch from war against Fascists (in alliance with Communists), to war against Communists (in alliance with hastily-rehabilitated Fascists) and it was the Communists’ turn to be purged.”
In fighting the Communist ideology including the propagation of the doctrine of Free Capitalism, the United States became a fascist based nation. Capitalism and corporatism in politics supplanted true democratic freedom of its people. Eisenhower’s warning of the military-industrial complex wasn’t heeded as it became an all-consuming black hole in American society. The cost of the Vietnam War led to inflation, devaluation of the dollar, and an economic recession and mass unemployment in the early ’80s. Lower incomes were frozen as the rich became richer and more powerful in all positions of state and federal institutions. Meanwhile, the US were supporting every dictatorial, fascist regime in Central and South-America during the last decades of the 20th century. The ambiguity in foreign policy led to the world view of the ugly American imperialist. Freedom is not the beacon of entry to New York city harbor while passing the Statue of Liberty donated by France. Instead, the everlasting emptiness where once the two tall Twin Towers stood signals destruction and hatred of America.
One cannot escape the fact that the right-wingers in the Republican party devoutly portray Democrats as socialists and communists, the enemy of Wall Street and American corporate interests.
See also my comment on Social Change in America since WWII.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Jews and Catholics are basically social minded persons. It’s a shame the institutions representing them are autocratic and authoritarian based on right-wing power structures: the state of Israel and the Vatican in Rome. Both apparently supported the United States in the dirty wars in Central- and South America. The Catholic church always supports the fascist power structures and regimes: Germany, Austria, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Chili, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatamala. Jesus Christ was a rebel and opposed the Orthodox Jewish establishment while balancing the separation of religion and (Roman) empire. Today it’s the individual who can make the difference in his community. The offers to be made are sometimes one’s life for speaking out. There are many examples …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Evolving globalization, particularly after the Cold War, revived and renewed ethnogenesis and the indigenization of subnational groups. Paradoxically, proliferating state structures exerted less and less control over loyalties, and subnational groups around the world began to reconstitute themselves by becoming more visible, self conscious, and politically contentious. This is true in the U.S. with the contemporary Mohawks, Delawares, Sioux, Navaho, Latinos, and Miami Haitians, as elsewhere among Canadian and Mexican indigenous communities, Scotch nationalists, East Timorians, Kurds, Basques, Berbers, Tamils, Sikhs, and others. They view themselves as inhabiting larger states and cultures that are not their own. In the contemporary world, war and political violence is more likely to be between subnational groups within states than between nation states.
Both the American and the world economies are becoming bi-modal, economies of “elephants and a multitude of ants.” Looking closely at large and multinational firms, reveals not only monstrous hierarchical bureaucratic organizations, but, increasingly, global firms constituted by horizontally connected enterprise networks of consultants, brokers, subcontractors, and subsidiary firms. In the sphere of electoral politics in the United States, the decline in party loyalty and the rise of independent voters have been well documented.
Americans have always been comparatively individualistic. Yet in the 1980s all national surveys showed an increasing preoccupation with the self, and commentators noted (and often bemoaned) excessive individualism and lack of commitment to organized religion, employers, community, and the nation. Growing voluntarism meant that Americans felt increasingly free to choose among commitments of all sorts, relational, familial, political, and religious. These fractionating processes reflect widely recognized characteristics of religious change. They are read negatively as religious privatization, but they can also be read as an increasing religious subjectivity and antinomian spirituality that transcends organizational loyalties, doctrines, and barriers.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."First, to have a movement, you need followers. Those folks who were adults or just coming of age (in high school) at or near the beginning of the Great Depression, saw, nay they lived, and survived during that time of need. Both of my parents graduated from high school in 1931.
From all that they told me, the movie “Cinderella Man” accurately depicts what it was like during the ’30s.
During the ’30s,’40s and into the ’50s, if you ran into a college graduate they were either a nurse or a school teacher. And a lot of my school teachers who were men, got their education by using the GI Bill after WW2.
The Dem party had the bulk of trade union people.
Second point – the Republican accusation that the Dems “lost” China was nothing more than a talking point. The Chinese gov’t much like the Cuban gov’t twelve years later, was beyond corrupt. No one Repub or Dem could have stopped the movement of Mao and his believers.
Bottom line: I am not at all sure the root cause as to why an FDR could get elected and how that institutional memory has faded has been explored.
Because it has no leadership at the top.
Blame Obama, Clinton, Carter, LBJ, and Kennedy for the failure of white liberalism? Give me a break.
Carter or LBJ or Kennedy. And what does “white” have to do with anything?
A piss poor attempt at working a wedge into the progressive coalition…
There are a number of different issues here.
Why is the Democratic Party the way it is?
Why was FDR able to get elected and obtain so much progressive legislation in the New Deal?
Was the New Deal really the Golden Age of the Democratic Party?
If it was, why has the Democratic Party fallen so far from that Golden Age?
Starting with the easy issue first. FDR was able to get elected because the urbanization that occurred in the 1920s created an agricultural depression that began around 1922. But that was fine with urban folk until the stock market crash created massive urban unemployment, and the Hoover administration sticking to its deficit-fetish could not get the economy restarted. Southern farmers, workers including textile mill and cigarette factory workers in the South, and a lot of the middle class voted against Hoover and for FDR. He got elected for the same reason Bill Clinton and Barack Obama got elected in less dire circumstances.
Second, FDR was able to get so much progressive legislation through Congress because he swept in a large number of new Congressmen and Senators on his coattails. And they owed him for that. And FDR understood that the country was in a crisis and that he had to enact programs to deal with that crisis. And fast. But he failed to get through some significant legislation and lost other legislation, like the National Recovery Act (NRA) in the courts. He dared not address segregation or he would immediately lose Southern Democrats, most of whom might have agreed with him but knew that they would be voting themselves out of office to threaten the “Southern Way of Life”. And FDR appointed a few progressive cabinet secretaries – most notable was Frances Perkins. And he appointed a business owner, not a banker as Secretary of the Treasury.
Was it a Golden Age? For a generation of rural and working-class Americans born during and around the time of World War I, it was. If you were in a rural area, you lived in a decade of depressed prices. For example, my grandfather one year in the 1920s received $75 for his year’s cotton crop and had to pay rent on the farm and supplies for the next year out of that. And if you sought a better life in town or in the cities, after 1929 you were likely to be unemployed. If you graduated from high school in the early 1930s, you were likely not to get a job because you had no experience. Until the various New Deal jobs programs cranked up – Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, and so on. Then because of the enforced savings during World War II, when the war was over you had money to buy into the prosperity that began in the late 1940s and extended to 1970. Folks who were young adults through this time strongly thought that the FDR Presidency was a Golden Age.
The Democratic Party has fallen away from that sense of the Golden Age because most of those young adults have passed. And because that was no more a Golden Age than the people who thought it was were The Greatest Generation. And even for those of that generation, as they became more prosperous the trended to the Republican Party. And the first step was a vote for Eisenhower.
And the Democratic Party is the way it is because it is all-at-once democratic, traditional, and progressive and because it is a big tent party that is ideologically diffuse. Will Rogers is apropos, “I’m not a member of an organized political party; I’m a Democrat.” The traditions are honoring of Jefferson, Jackson, FDR, and JFK and the philosophical strands they added to the Democratic Party.
Until 1964, the main difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party was that they were dominated by by different elites and interests but had similar ideologies. That was a consensus American ideology. The Movement Conservatives recovering from the national repudiation of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy changed that.
The question really isn’t why are the Democrats like they are but why have Democrats more successfully responded to what has happened to the Republican Party? And what has happened is that the Republican Party has become a party with totalitarian ambitions that are rooted in its “to fight a dragon you must become a dragon” response to Soviet communism. In the 1960s, popular conservative works described how the Communist Party of the Soviet Union maintained their power through politicization of the bureaucracy, propaganda, and the use of cells and local institutions to maintain social control. And the Movement Conservatives went and adopted almost every one of those tactics. In a real sense the Busheviks of the past quarter century are very much the anti-Communists — in a mirror image sort of way.
As the Bushevik fifth column marched through American institutions — churches, chambers of commerce, universities, the media, corporate boards, and what few Demoratic elite institutions there were (think Brookings Institution) — Democrats were flummoxed because Republicans were no longer behaving according the elite American consensus of the 1950s. And in 1968, through their suppression of opponents to the Vietnam War the Democratic establishment lost the party loyalty of a generation of white liberal Democrats.
Where we stand is after the implosion of the Bushevik Revolution. In historical parallels we are about at Russia 1995 in this process. Bushevism remains seductive in the argument that the last Bush wasn’t sufficiently Bushevik but the new Bushevism will be different. It is political siege warfare in Congress just as in 1995 it was political siege warfare in the Duma. The nomenclatura is rushing to make as much money out of the situation (in this case lobbying) before the structure falls apart. This is a much more serious situation that being post-Hoover. And the progressives long for it to be 1933, the Democratic leadership thinks it is 1993, and the Republican leadership thinks it is 1998.
And elites are more nuanced than they used to be. They don’t run for either party but co-opt any powerful party through campaign donations (carrot) and attack ads by untraceable cut-outs (stick). Or they run themselves, the self-financed self-described benevolent protectors of economic prosperity.
Don’t forget who was Fed Chair during most of the Great Depression .. Marriner Ecles(whose name is on the Fed building) .. the dude was a Mormon Republican through and through .. yet he’d be a heathen in today’s GOP … and with good reason .. he’s another that rose to the challenge of the times
Why?
Please.
‘Money talks; nobody walks” goes the old mob saying.
Also “Everybody has their price.”
Bought and sold, the Dems.
Several times over.
End of discussion.
Bet on it.
AG