Our tendency to gloss over the unspeakable carnage of World War Two and call it ‘The Good War’ is only partly explainable by the fact that we faced an undeniably evil set of enemies and that we defeated them decisively. There were at least three really fortunate outcomes of the war that made us look back at it with less horror than it warranted. The first was that the threat of the war allowed Franklin Roosevelt to win an unprecedented third-term (and then a fourth) in which he was able to solidify the liberal bent of the Supreme Court and develop the welfare state. This created the kind of political consensus needed for Truman to win and carry forth a twenty year uninterrupted period of liberal rule. The second piece of good fortune, as Paul Krugman notes this morning, was that the necessity of borrowing the modern equivalent of $30 trillion to fight the war overcame the political resistance to deficit spending that had stalled the economic recovery in 1938. The Great Depression was cured not by brilliant political leadership, but by accident. The third piece of good fortune was that the leading general of the war who won the presidency in 1952 was not Douglas MacArthur, but Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower tamed the reactionary forces on the right and allowed the basic structure of the New Deal to stand, thereby creating a postwar consensus that benefited us greatly and allowed the middle class to grow and prosper. As a result of these three pieces of good fortune, we got a flourishing economy, a robust middle class, a decent social safety net, and a Supreme Court that would lead us forward on civil rights for blacks, women, and religious minorities.
But we have to imagine an alternative history where liberalism was not allowed to govern uninterrupted and largely unchallenged, where the stimulus never came to end the Great Depression, and where we didn’t have a string of fairly strong non-reactionary political leadership. That prospect is what we’re facing now.
In my optimistic moments, I detach myself from the moment and consider this a mere trough like we faced in 1938 or the Republicans faced in 1982. It’s a significant correction in an otherwise uninterrupted path to a new political climate. I get this feeling when I look at data on the cyclical nature of electoral outcomes or at demographic projections or at the Electoral College map.
In my pessimistic moments, I look at examples where the reactionary right has actually capitalized on bad economic times to win power and then undermined the electoral process to assure their continuation in power. You want a possible example of what I am talking about? Consider that Houston, Texas mayor Bill White is running for governor against Republican Rick Perry. Now consider this:
(HOUSTON) Texas law and Harris County elected officials are calling it a “public calamity” that has thrust elections into a sudden mode of uncertainty.
A morning 3-alarm fire destroyed an old, beat up warehouse off Canino and Downey in northeast Harris County. While it may have looked like any other non-descript warehouse in the neighborhood, some 10,000 pieces of election equipment and “nearly all of the county’s voting machines, which were to be used for the upcoming elections” were burned up in the fire…
Harris County’s top election officer, County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, did her best to sound optimistic at an afternoon briefing, even though she was left completely without answers and even a general plan at the time.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to have a timely election here and that we’re going to take care of the voters,” said Kaufman, who admitted that there will likely be a shortage of voting machines throughout the Houston area for the November 2nd election.
Lucky bit of good fortune for the incumbent governor or deliberate attempt to suppress the Houston vote? Arson investigators are still looking into it. Are those investigators independent, or are they foxes watching the henhouse?
Reactionaries don’t have to call off elections. They can capture the vote-counting process instead. They can resort to intimidation. They can ban certain political parties, or all but their own. In the American system, we have some pretty strong safeguards against some of the more extreme threats from the right, but we’re still susceptible to capture and suppression.
For all their talk about constitutional principles, the far right is actually pretty dissatisfied with the Constitution, which is why they keep offering to tear up amendments and offer new ones. The far right that is emerging now is pretty much like the far right we would have seen if MacArthur or Robert Taft had become president instead of Eisenhower. They never agreed to the postwar consensus or with how we overcame the Great Depression or in the liberal bent of the Warren Court that led the way for civil rights for blacks, gays, and religious minorities (and, now, the LGBT community). They want to roll it back. And they’re very, very ascendant at the moment.
So, as I vacillate between optimism and pessimism, I will continue to remind you of the stakes. Our history is a guide that can often provide comfort. But we have been lucky. If we’re not careful, our luck will run out.
Yeah, but both sides are the same so what difference does it make?
Well, in a way that’s true. Eisenhower Republicans are now people like Robert Gates, Colin Powell, and to an extent even Chuck Hagel, who are largely inside the Democrats’ Big Tent. So, the post-war consensus, which still involved contentious politics, is all housed on one side of the political aisle these days, facing the people who were shut out of power during the Cold War and who never bought into that consensus.
Our luck has run out. We need to depend on hard work to get done the change that we see must happen if the middle class are to survive in this country.
Wanna interesting observation about how our luck has run out? No candidate is campaigning on a platform of peace and prosperity. Some Democratic candidates (who are responsible for the healthcare reform act being the mess it is) are campaigning on the fact that they voted No. Democrats!
Liberals, progressives, and their allies have thought for too long that just electing the proper candidates changes the political climate. It doesn’t. It never has. It changes because people at the grassroots change the opinions of their neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers–their personal networks.
We need to get back to that hard work — and stories about family holidays show how hard it is. We have been coasting on the inertia of the New Deal for 64 years. That’s why we seem lucky.
That luck is gone.
I want to quibble with “Truman to win and carry forth a twenty year uninterrupted period of liberal rule.” The purge of the left which is mistakenly called McCarthyism actually began inside the Executive Branch in the immediate wake of World War II, when Truman encouraged loyalty hearings against Federal employees, conducted with very little due process for those accused of disloyalty. Truman also gave birth to the national security state both by intention and by being clueless about people in his Administration raising Cold War hysteria. The hunt for traitors was quickly turned from hunting for Americans who had helped our fascist enemies to traitors who had helped our communist allies, or had ever sympathized with them, or had been, in J. Edgar Hoover’s phrase, “premature anti-fascists.” McCarthy actually discredited the movement Truman had begun.
Well, yes, there was the Cold War, and any forty-five year endeavor which involves demonizing socialism is going to be a bit rough for the left (whether moderate or not). But that was part of the consensus, too. Without totalitarian leftists like Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot to point to, it should be possible to find safer ground a bit more to the left than what the consensus gave us.
Enter terrorism.
Never mind.
What I’m saying is that Truman did not carry forth “a twenty year uninterrupted period of liberal rule.” Roosevelt’s liberal rule had welcomed leftists as a very active part of the New Deal coalition. As soon as Truman came into office, the American left was investigated, sent to prison, fired, blacklisted, accused of treason – all based on wild, often unsubstantiated charges. It was a campaign, not a series of accidents. And it wasn’t some drunken Republican Senator outside the post-war consensus who accomplished it. He, in fact ended it by discrediting it. Truman preserved, and even tried to expand, the New Deal, but he destroyed a lot of New Dealers who had built many of the political and administrative underpinnings of the New Deal. It’s not insignificant that many of the people who actually conceived and midwifed the New Deal were cast out of acceptable political society by a man ‘carrying forth liberal rule.’
So, yes, it was better that progressive conservative (i.e. today’s “moderate” Democrat) Dwight Eisenhower was nominated at the 1952 Republican Convention than shogun-in-waiting Douglas MacArthur. The American right outside the New Deal/Cold War consensus hasn’t gotten its bakufu – yet.
As to the ‘totalitarian left’ not being around any more making something slightly more left possible, that was never the point. The American Communist Party was the bane of the Comintern in the ’30’s and ’40’s, precisely because they often refused to do the dumb shit Moscow ordered them to do, like the good little European Communist parties – e.g. go into alliance with the Nazis against the Social Democrats, as the KPD compliantly did. That the American left has been relatively blameless in supporting totalitarianism – in stark contrast to the American right – never made any difference once it was sent out of the protection of the Democratic Party – where it remains.
that’s all true, but it lacks some degree of texture.
Obviously, the overwhelming concern in the immediate post-war era (meaning 1945-1953) was not to allow another totalitarian regime to grow unchecked again, particularly one hostile to not only Democracy, but freedom of commerce, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Especially not one known for starving its own population and setting up a network of gulags for its political enemies.
It was no easy task to focus the minds of exhausted Americans on a threat from formerly friendly Uncle Joe. And, so, we revved up The Mighty Wurlitzer and went completely overboard. We’re still asleep.
So, not discounting the truth in what happened to the left beginning under Truman, it wasn’t wholly without merit. Looking back and realizing that we survived and communism collapsed, we are prone to see all the excess and little of the upside of the War on Anything to the Left of the Consensus.
The crusade has badly weakened the left. And the Wurlitzer continues to mesmerize. But what’s at risk now is not the old left or the new, but the Consensus itself.
The bipartisan consensus to keep the New Deal has fallen apart because the Republican Party has been slowly taken over by the MacArthurites and expelled its Eisenhowerites: the Republicans have welshed on their end of the bargain. Democrats expelled what is today called the far left immediately after World War II. Social Democrats have been slowly made an unwelcome and unequal partner with the Business Democrats – i.e. Eisenhower Republicans. We are pandered to during the primaries, exploited during the generals, and taken for granted or reviled while Democrats are in office. So, the center of the only party defending the New Deal doesn’t really want the people who support the New Deal.
Don’t forget that Truman ignored General Marshall’s warning to stay out of Southeast Asia.
Asia. Marshall was opposed to intervention in the Chinese Communist Revolution and was a target of maneuvering by the Chiang Kai-Shek-supporting China lobby. Truman listened to Marshall on that policy.
Truman’s Asian war was Korea after North Korea invaded the south of Korea. Korea is in Northeast Asia.
Eisenhower was who got us involved in Southeast Asia in 1954 after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Good post, Booman. Truly, WWII was an important part of the entrenchment of New Deal principles and programs into our country. But it’s interesting to note that the Western European states are much further to the left as social democracies than our country. I wonder if that’s because, following WWI and WWII, both of which had a much more immediate and devastating impact on Europe than the US, the state was the only entity remotely capable of picking up the pieces. In other words, only government (and especially in the case of post-WWII, foreign government) had the capacity to feed and care for individual citizens and fund their rebuilding of society. Once a program like the Marshall plan could save the lives of your family, and millions of other families, and rebuild your home and your healthcare system and your economy. In the face of conditions like that, a Reagan dictum like “I’m from the government and I’m here to help are the most terrifying words in the English language” is absurd on its face, and could never truly take hold in the subconscious of society.
Re: our current situation, I think I am able to stay optimistic because I never expected much out of these early years of what I predict will be a progressive wave of many decades. You have to remember that FDR’s New Deal did not follow 30 years of manic, radical conservative rule. Yes FDR got huge majorities, yes he got some “lucky” breaks having entered into office just as we were pulling out of the trough of the Depression, and WWII for the reasons you mention. But the social conditions of the country were very different too, and most people were not primed to think of government as an evil thing in the way that so many are today. That trained hatred of government, entrenched deep in the minds of so many Americans, is a fact that progressives cannot ignore no matter how much we may want to. Thus, our task, in my opinion, is not necessarily to push through a second New Deal in a few short years. That would be a set of changes that too much of the country right now would simply consider too radical, and would probably fight with the force of arms. Rather, the current era of progressives must work to steadily build a foundation for progressive change that future eras (i.e. over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years) can build upon. The majority of people, I think, will more readily accept major progressive change if it occurs over that elongated time period, and as it continues to be bolstered by better demographic conditions. We have to turn around a ship of state that was headed 180 degrees in the other direction, and that’s going to take a long time, almost assuredly longer than what I assume will a 2-term Obama Presidency.
He got into the war as a draftee in 1943, after he graduated from high school. He missed the landing at Normandy, fortunately for me and my siblings. Luckily, my sister got interested in his story, and did an interview about the war with him prior to his death last November. So, we have a written record.
WWII was not a good war. It was a war that claimed 100 million people. It had two good effects:
The bad things of the war are obvious. The deaths of 100 million, the destruction, the near annihilation of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other “untermenschen”, and the unstoppable rise of the Communist state, left in a strong position by the loss of Germany as a counterweight, and the failure of Roosevelt at Yalta to reasonably see into the future (Yalta occurred on Feb 4-11, 1945; Roosevelt died April 19, 1945; how sick was he at Yalta??) left Uncle Joe in a very strong position.
It was the formative event of the second half of the 20th century. It created the US of today, until the youth revolutionary movement of the late 60s (reaction to Eisenhower/brown/beige/boredom/lack of vigor) and early 70s, and the compensatory rise of Reagan and the counter-revolution in the 80s (the guys who couldn’t get dates or the joint passed to them at the concerts).
Another good effect: WWII was the proximate cause of the death of colonialism.
It certainly helped to finish it off, but if you’re talking about the British Empire, the real culprit is WWI. That’s when Britain’s hold on its colonies, always shaky, really began to break down because of the economic devastation WWI wreaked on the Empire. In fact, the historian Niall Ferguson has a (controversial) book out there called “The Pity of War” arguing that the major tactical error of the 20th century was Britain’s entry into WWI. He argues that had Britain stayed out of it for just a few more weeks, Germany would have taken over the continent and created a relatively benign continental German empire. This would have led to the two hegemons (Germany and Britain) balancing each other out, thus avoiding the devastations of WWI and WWII, the collapse of the British empire (which Ferguson thinks was a bad thing), and the rise of Communism, and allowing the the steady liberalization of Europe to continue uninterrupted, ultimately resulting in something like the European Union of today. But without the horrors of the World Wars, the rise of Communism, etc. (Caveat: I’ve never actually read this book, only a bunch of reviews of it.)
WWII contributed most to the death of colonialism in Southeast Asia, partly because native peoples were shocked to see white people defeated in battle by the Japanese “race.” That helped to bring white Europeans down to a human level, as opposed to the elevated, God-like, undefeatable status many native peoples previously held them in.
I’m not as sure as you that colonialism died so much as it changed form. IMO the colonialism of Western and Central Europe gave way to Moscow’s supreme soviet and various US backed corporate entities (see Berlin Wall, ARAMCO, United Fruit, et al). And whether your talking about the Spanish Armada or the Cuban Missile Crisis, a nations colonial/political interests & power are usually backed by a pretty impressive military presence. The US didn’t control 25% of the world’s post war resources (with just 5% of the world’s population) by declaring colonialism illegal.
And Russian troops on the NATO/Warsaw Pact border could hardly be called a lessening of that country’s global reach. So I guess it all depends on how one defines colonialism.
But regardless of one’s beliefs (yours or mine), this is a really good thread discussion thanks to you, others and Booman’s initial comment.
Eisenhower saw the camps and a lot of other seriously disturbing things when in Europe. The soldiers that came home saw the same nightmares. The people elected to congress served and had seen enough hate they were mellowed by an overdose of violence. The Repugs now do not have that experience. They are all hate.
The GIs got their combat itch fulfilled, and did not want to have a war anymore. They wanted boring peace stuff.
The Repukes now are with no exceptions non-vets. That means that all that aggressiveness, all that hate, is concentrated on political warfare, and is untempered by actual combat experience.
re 60’s: many factors went into that, but boredom was not one of them. there was a world wide justice movement happening during the 60’s. the usa part of it was set in motion by prewar social movements and participation in WWII, (not to underestimate the interactions across race and class in military service during WWII, the impact of being in europe, and rising expectations post), racial and economic justice movements set in motion during the 50’s (Brown vs. Board, others picking up on pre-war movements, unions, reaction to Jim Crow, Michael Harrington’s The Other America anyone?) combined with post war prosperity. everything but boredom. – I find usa participation in the 60’s written off as “Woodstock” which is how the MSM likes to spin it (nothing to see here, move along). I’m curious what % of under 30’s attended woodstock, but I’m sure it’s far less than was active in the various political causes. I’d say 60’s was a very political effort to have usa live up to our ideals, as of course was the Great Society response. msm and wingnuts would like us all to forget what is possible.
I asked some ppl (in connection w. some research I was doing) who were very involved in Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s as adults, not part of the youth movement, what happened to the momentum, the euphoria of that period (which they described). They told me that the problems turned out to be much more complex, intractable than they had envisioned at the time. Something to keep in mind alongside Booman’s incisive analysis of what we face now.
It is Labor Day, after all, so one could make the case that the cause of the long Democratic domination was the rise of powerful unions, and perhaps luck played less of a factor than you think.
There has long been corporate influence in elections, and since McKinley, the corporate party of choice has been the Republicans. When unions were powerful, they were a counterbalance to corporate influence. With the decline of unions, corporate money became the sole route to winning elections, and the Democrats sought that money as well as Republicans. Hence the eclipse of the Democrats as a progressive force.
The role of urban machine politics should also be cited. Harry Truman, after all, was the product of such a machine in Kansas City. FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson all had strong ties to urban bosses. Those machines were, of course, just as undemocratic as today’s Republicans, but instead of suppressing the votes that were likely to be cast against them, they inflated the votes cast for them, but it amounts to the same thing.
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Also the development of the jet powered airplane was delayed until the end of the war. Most probably do not realize that all aircraft during WWII were prop-driven. The jet came on line in Feb 1945. Had these jets been available earlier, much would have been different.
i’m with you,BooMan.
For the record, it’s alternate history, not alternative history.