Since the election, I’ve been trying to figure out when the Democratic Party separated itself from unions. This is the fourth post in a series. Previous posts can be found at the following links.
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In the 1960s, the anti-establishment zeal of the New Left collided with the institutional conservatism of unions. The New Left won by “restricting the influence of public officials, the labor leadership, and others….” Democrats long had been charged with “drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism.” The removal of regulating elements proved disastrous.
In reaction to the New Left and to the anti-war movement in particular, neoconservatism emerged within the Democratic Party. Its driving policy was containment of the Soviet Union, but “neocons” believed that all of American liberalism had failed. The movement included “Democratic politicians and intellectuals” who had “became disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs.”
After McGovern’s disastrous candidacy in 1972, neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM). The CDM would spend the ‘70s advocating for increased defense spending.
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In 1973 we entered a recession unlike any other. It lasted from November of 1973 to March of 1975. It ended the post-WWII boom. It marked the relative decline of the United States in world economics. It started when Richard Nixon was in office but suppressed economic growth through the Ford administration, through the Carter administration, and into Reagan’s first term. Coupled with (and, in part, caused by) the Arab-oil embargo of 1973-74, the recession also gave us a new word: stagflation, or inflation during a recession.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was building up its military. Except that it wasn’t. Reagan’s soon to be campaign-claim that we had undergone a “unilateral disarmament” was a myth. At the time, though, it accelerated the now hyper-excited calls for increased defense spending. Surveys showed that the public had little interest in that, but both party establishments wanted it, including the neocons of the Democratic Party.
In hard times, social programs would bear the brunt of the defense buildup.
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The rise of neoconservatism was driven by foreign policy, and most neocons would drift to the Republican Party after Reagan magically reversed their isolationism. However, some remained in the Democratic party, though still believing that liberalism had failed. Their ranks were about to be reinforced.
The ‘60s generation had nothing like the unifying experiences of the Great Depression and WWII. Not all would become new leftists. Some would go into politics lacking a visceral sense of what unrestrained capitalism could do to the country or of how government could to step in to help its citizens. These Democrats saw corporations as a force for good rather than a danger. Nor was government the helping hand to them. Their war was Vietnam.
With the disgrace and collapse of the Nixon presidency, the 1974 mid-term election brought this generation of Democratic politicians to power. The Democratic wave became known as the Watergate Babies, after the scandal that propelled them into office. Mostly northern Democrats, they “moved power away from the conservative southern Democrats.” They also moved Democratic economic thought so far right as to be unrecognizable.
Libertarian theorists of the time and some Democratic theorists decided that monopolies were our friends. (These theorists included Libertarian Robert Bork, soon to be Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee rejected as too extreme.) The Watergate generation bought into this. By the end of the 1970s, much of the Democratic establishment had rejected the New Deal belief that the concentration of wealth “led to tyranny.” They decided it was a positive good. Democrats – Democrats – would popularize supply-side economics in a “Democrat-authored 1980 Joint Economic Committee report.” The Watergate Babies had become the foot-soldiers of the party’s right wing.
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In 1976, Democrats nominated Jimmy Carter and got him elected. Carter, it has been said, fought “most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives.” Others see him as the last gasp of the old coalition who tried in vain to hold that coalition together.
Carter did try to hold onto the international business interests, starting the deregulation process that Reagan would turn into a frenzy. By this time, though, with labor in decline, even FDR’s bloc saw no reason not to join with Republicans, especially once Reagan finessed the GOP’s historic isolationism and protectionist policies.
Carter tried to funnel money to traditional Democratic constituencies in the Northern urban centers. For environmentalists, he cut back water projects in the West (which only “hastened the departure” of Westerners from the party). For labor, he appointed qualified and liberal members to the National Labor Relations Board, and he backed the Labor Law Reform bill of 1977 (just not strongly enough to pass it).
The end came quickly. When a continually bad economy turned worse, the Fed raised rates. Everything fell apart. Just months before an election, Carter “was forced to make massive cuts in funds for the poor, blacks, and the cities.” That and the economy would make him a one-term President.
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As early as the mid-1970s, Democrats who never had known the Great Depression embraced libertarian economic thought. They ignored history, and that has consequences: the “destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party … cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century.” In that connection, Stoller quotes Justice Louis Brandeis:
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
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This, appropriately, brings us up to Ronald Reagan, the topic of my next post.
(Edited 10:22 pm, 20170227: changed National Labor “Review” Board to National Labor “Relations” Board. Thanks, 6412093.)