At some point, Democrats and working men and women went their separate ways. I wanted to know when and how. This is the third post in a series in which I try to work through that. Previous posts can be found at the following links.
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The symbiotic relationship between unions and Democrats that developed under Franklin Roosevelt did not outlive the Roosevelt-Truman era. Cracks formed in the alliance in the early 1960s. A new form of liberalism soon would turn those cracks into a chasm.
The new liberalism was a hyper-excited, unruly child of the ‘60s. It is hard for those who did not live through the 60s to appreciate the turbulence of those times. There were assassinations, energy crises, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A decade’s worth of social drop-outs formed a “counter culture.” Then, there was the civil-rights movement.
I worry about how few young people realize that segregation was both legal and rampant just 50 years ago? There were civil-rights upheavals starting in the 1950s. The ‘60s began with the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter. There were the Freedom Riders, and George Wallace’s call for “segregation forever.” There was the murder of three civil-rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi (where Ronald Reagan would kick off his presidential campaign – wink wink, nod nod). There was the Birmingham campaign, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Even with all this, though, the key to the ‘60s was the Vietnam War. In 1960, we sent 3,500 troops as “advisors” to Vietnam. By 1973, when Richard Nixon declared victory and ran, we had lost 58,000 American soldiers to that war. The rift between those prosecuting the war and the increasing number of those protesting it would tear us apart on college campuses, in the streets, and on the nightly news.
Somehow, the righteousness of the Civil Rights movement and the passion of the anti-war movement converged to fill the decade with social-justice crusades. Any movement, group, or gathering that could be thought of as fighting for justice for one oppressed group or another became part of a larger whole. Causes multiplied until it became self-satirizing. This ethos would be christened the “New Left,” the start of what today’s pseudo-pundits have dubbed “identity politics.”
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There was a generational divide at work. Unlike the New Deal, the New Left never was grounded on unions or on workers or class. It “concentrated on a social activist approach.”
To the generation that had survived the Great Depression, won WWII, put Europe and Japan back together, and created a period of unprecedented prosperity, the New Left was anarchy. That older generation had built the establishment, willing it into existence from the emptiness of the Depression and the brutality of the war. As they saw it, the New Left and the counter culture mocked their sacrifices and scorned their achievements. Anger ran deep.
This also was the generation that had built the unions.
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At the time, Democrats were the establishment. However, they also were the party of civil rights and of the war on poverty. It is not surprising, then, that many Democrats gravitated to the social causes of the New Left. Feminism, environmentalism, and gay rights were taken up. When an anti-war movement arose within the party, it brought “the central issue of the New Left into the mainstream liberal establishment.” Less radical members of the New Left became “central players in the Democratic Party ….”
In the 1968 primaries, against a challenge from anti-war candidates, unions stood with the establishment. That sowed the seeds of the debacle that was the 1968 Democratic Convention. In response, Democrats established a commission to rewrite the party rules. Inside the party, the New Left was doing business as the “New Politics,” and they dominated the reform commission. But by their origin and nature, they were more “concerned with the demands of the political activist” than with the needs of the average citizen.
The 1972 convention was run under the new rules. It nominated Senator George McGovern. McGovern was a strong supporter of unions. He also had served with distinction as a bomber pilot during WWII. He knew something about war, and he was the antiwar candidate. However, his support never grew much beyond that.
The Democratic establishment saw McGovern’s nomination as a hostile take-over. He experienced “an unprecedented defection of rank-and-file Democrats” to Richard Nixon, previously “distinguished as one of the most unpopular Presidents in modern history.” Among those who walked were unions, despite McGovern’s support for them.
Vietnam was the 1960s.
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Mark Schmitt calls the New Politics “the reformist liberalism that split the party from organized labor and the white working class.”
To the New Left, unions, the white working class, were just racists. Unions, for their part, were integrated just as global competition and automation were taking a toll on manufacturing. To the white working class, the New Politics offered fewer jobs and more competition for the jobs that remained. Worse, they seemed to favor that new competition.
In Joan Walsh’s review of Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” she writes, “The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left’s inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent.” I suggest that the failure was that of party leadership to show them both a way forward together. Regardless, Walsh writes, “The New Deal coalition was dead.”
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The party still was transforming, though, and about to lurch to the right. That would formalize the split with unions and carve it in stone. I look at that in the next post.