{"id":49835,"date":"2026-08-21T13:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T20:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=49835"},"modified":"2026-08-21T13:20:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T20:20:14","slug":"the-democrats-on-again-off-again-class-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/08\/21\/the-democrats-on-again-off-again-class-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Democrats\u2019 On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
MEYERSON ON TAP<\/strong> (Prospect.org)<\/td><\/tr>
The Democrats\u2019 On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics<\/strong>

After World War II, Dems lost touch with their New Deal roots. Now they\u2019re coming back home.<\/em>I\u2019ve been reading the journals of historian-speechwriter-liberal activist-Prospect<\/em>\u00a0founding sponsor Arthur Schlesinger over the past week. They\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s Fair Deal) into his speeches and, more broadly, into his political identity. A few weeks after Stevenson\u2019s loss to Eisenhower, Schlesinger writes, \u201cAdlai was right that we should not run against Hoover,\u201d the Republican president on whose watch the pre\u2013New Deal economy collapsed, and against whose relatively laissez-faire and pro-corporate economics both Roosevelt and Truman had successfully campaigned. \u201cThis issue meant very little to younger people,\u201d Schlesinger continues, \u201cfor whom Social Security and collective bargaining and economic opportunity were as secure and unalterable parts of the landscape as the trees and bushes.\u201d

A decade later, while working in John F. Kennedy\u2019s 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 \u201cthe New Deal\u2019s distinctive rhetoric. Walter and Hubert could talk about \u2018the people,\u2019 about their ultimate wisdom, and the importance of doing things for them, in a way quite alien to the New Frontier\u201d\u2014the not particularly class-based perspective of the Kennedy administration. \u201cI wish I could figure out,\u201d Schlesinger laments, \u201cthe 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,\u201d whose leaders he terms \u201ctechnocrats.\u201d<\/td><\/tr>
<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
Read today, these passages illuminate the links between the shifting shapes of American liberalism\u2014and, for that matter, American socialism\u2014and the American economy. Writing at a time when New Deal reforms had produced an economy of opportunity \u201cas secure and unalterable\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s The Other America<\/em>, published in 1962, was to document the persistence of American poverty at a time when that poverty\u2014as opposed to the pervasive poverty that preceded World War II\u2014had become largely invisible.

Even as Schlesinger was writing his Stevenson- and Kennedy-era journal entries, American liberalism was slowly turning to those who\u2019d been excluded by reason of race or gender from the rights and benefits of post\u2013New 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 \u201csecure and unalterable,\u201d 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\u2014deregulated and all but devoid of unions\u2014was anything but secure? Is it any wonder that this year\u2019s Democratic primaries, including this week\u2019s 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\u2019 temple\u2014or 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\u2019s stances (as do AOC and Bernie Sanders, and it\u2019s hard to imagine Angie Nixon celebrating Fidel), I\u2019m confident he\u2019d welcome the Democrats\u2019 turn to a 21st-century version of the New Deal. They\u2019re speaking his preferred language again.<\/td><\/tr>
\"\"Harold Meyerson<\/strong>
Editor at Large<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MEYERSON ON TAP (Prospect.org) The Democrats\u2019 On-Again, Off-Again Class Politics After World War II, Dems lost touch with their New Deal roots. Now they\u2019re coming back home.I\u2019ve been reading the journals of historian-speechwriter-liberal activist-Prospect\u00a0founding sponsor Arthur Schlesinger over the past week. They\u2019ve helped me understand a good deal about American… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2006],"tags":[759,2415],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49836,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49835\/revisions\/49836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}