The Democrats’ On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics

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MEYERSON ON TAP (Prospect.org)
The Democrats’ On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics

After World War II, Dems lost touch with their New Deal roots. Now they’re coming back home.I’ve been reading the journals of historian-speechwriter-liberal activist-Prospect founding sponsor Arthur Schlesinger over the past week. They’ve helped me understand a good deal about American liberalism (as well as making clear, were there any doubt, that the line between Harvard historian and party animal was, and surely still is, easy to cross).

Schlesinger’s three-volume history of the New Deal, written during the 1950s, remains essential reading for anyone interested in the waxing and waning of American liberalism. Even as Schlesinger was embarked on that project, he also became one of the leading speechwriters for Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois governor who was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, losing both times, decisively, to Dwight Eisenhower.

Despite his allegiance to and affection for Stevenson, Schlesinger admits in his 1952 journal entries that Stevenson had no interest in incorporating the class-based politics of the New Deal (and of Harry Truman’s Fair Deal) into his speeches and, more broadly, into his political identity. A few weeks after Stevenson’s loss to Eisenhower, Schlesinger writes, “Adlai was right that we should not run against Hoover,” the Republican president on whose watch the pre–New Deal economy collapsed, and against whose relatively laissez-faire and pro-corporate economics both Roosevelt and Truman had successfully campaigned. “This issue meant very little to younger people,” Schlesinger continues, “for whom Social Security and collective bargaining and economic opportunity were as secure and unalterable parts of the landscape as the trees and bushes.”

A decade later, while working in John F. Kennedy’s White House, Schlesinger comes away from a meeting with UAW President Walter Reuther and Sen. Hubert Humphrey, noting that both of them still spoke in “the New Deal’s distinctive rhetoric. Walter and Hubert could talk about ‘the people,’ about their ultimate wisdom, and the importance of doing things for them, in a way quite alien to the New Frontier”—the not particularly class-based perspective of the Kennedy administration. “I wish I could figure out,” Schlesinger laments, “the terms in which the idealism and imagination of the New Deal could be infused into the anti-sentimental, anti-rhetorical, understated mood of the New Frontier,” whose leaders he terms “technocrats.”
Read today, these passages illuminate the links between the shifting shapes of American liberalism—and, for that matter, American socialism—and the American economy. Writing at a time when New Deal reforms had produced an economy of opportunity “as secure and unalterable” as the landscape, when, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein recently noted in our pages, the real wages of working-class Americans doubled in a single generation, the postwar Democratic establishment had abandoned the class politics of its predecessors, whose victories had appeared to create a permanent middle-class majority.
Reuther and Humphrey, by contrast, were at that point semi-social democrats who were concerned about those who either didn’t make it into that middle-class majority or whose membership therein was precarious. At the time, as Schlesinger noted ruefully, their concerns about these numerically marginal constituencies (at least, that was how they were viewed by the liberal establishment) registered only at the margins of liberal consciousness. The whole point of Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962, was to document the persistence of American poverty at a time when that poverty—as opposed to the pervasive poverty that preceded World War II—had become largely invisible.

Even as Schlesinger was writing his Stevenson- and Kennedy-era journal entries, American liberalism was slowly turning to those who’d been excluded by reason of race or gender from the rights and benefits of post–New Deal citizenship. It was Black activists who compelled the Democrats to focus on ending, or at least diminishing, those exclusions, but despite the socialist ideals of such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, it was the prisms of race and gender far more than that of class through which Democrats viewed the American landscape, and through which they largely defined themselves for the rest of the 20th century.

But can anyone look at what Schlesinger was writing in the 1950s and yet still marvel at the rebirth of class-based progressivism and socialism today? There are virtually no young people today who view their economic prospects as “secure and unalterable,” a view we now know was peculiar to the boomer generation. Is it any wonder that DSA, despite the fierce moral commitments of its founders, stayed a small organization of several thousand until the crash of 2008 and its prolonged and incomplete recovery made clear to young people, then and since, that the economy—deregulated and all but devoid of unions—was anything but secure? Is it any wonder that this year’s Democratic primaries, including this week’s in Florida, are defined by the precinct-walking and phone-banking of the young, class-based left, while the Democrats opposed to them can mobilize money but few if any volunteers?

The technocrats are being driven from the Democrats’ temple—or opting, rather, to hurriedly grasp onto some of the class-war perspectives that the Democratic base has embraced. While Schlesinger would doubtless reject some of DSA’s stances (as do AOC and Bernie Sanders, and it’s hard to imagine Angie Nixon celebrating Fidel), I’m confident he’d welcome the Democrats’ turn to a 21st-century version of the New Deal. They’re speaking his preferred language again.
Harold Meyerson
Editor at Large
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