Since the election, I’ve been trying to figure out when Democrats separated from working men and women. This is the seventh post in a series. Previous posts can be found at the following links.
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The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was founded in 1985 by Al From, a prominent Democratic activist and functionary. Other founders were “conservative, mostly southern Dems as a rump faction of disaffected elected officials and party activists.” The DLC declared America liberalism dead and itself the replacement. According to its website, the DLC was "a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.”
“Non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions” meant small government achieved through privatization, deregulation, and austerity – that is, neoliberalism. The DLC was amenable to some privatization of Social Security, opposed single-payer and universal health care, and supported charter schools and conservative candidates. (I will not address the DLC’s “Third Way” efforts to go global.)
To old-line liberals, the DLC was “the "corporatist" wing” marked by a “lack of principle, and a willingness to sell out … the party’s base.” The DLC’s funding sources were “oil companies, military contractors, and various Fortune 500 companies,” specifically, “ARCO, Chevron, Merck, Du Pont, Microsoft, Philip Morris and Koch Industries.”
Regardless, the DLC would claim that, by moving the party even farther to the right than it was in the mid-1980s, it had saved the party. I’ll look at that in the next of this series. First, though, it is reasonable to ask whether, in 1985, the party needed saving.
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Of the 36 years between 1896 and 1932, Republicans held the White House for all but 8. Over the next 36 years, Democrats held the White House for all but 8. That brings us to the election of 1968.
That year, Hubert Humphrey stepped in late when Lyndon Johnson withdrew. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts would cost Democrats the South, going to third-party candidate George Wallace. Humphrey also was burdened by the riot that was the Democratic Convention that year, by a badly split party, and, mostly, by the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks, ensuring that the war would not end before the election, sacrificing tens of thousands of lives, many of them American boys, to win an election.
Four years later, in 1972, Nixon won re-election over George McGovern. McGovern was as liberal as they come, but his candidacy further split the party, and he was an anti-war candidate at a time when Nixon was proclaiming the war won. Finally, the Fed had “turned on the monetary spigot,” allowing Nixon to run on what was, to that time, “one of the greatest political business cycles in all U.S. history.” Nixon cruised to a massive victory.
Gerald Ford became president when Richard Nixon was forced to resign. Ford ran for election in his own right in 1976. A limited candidate, he had been damaged by a primary challenge and by his pardoning of Nixon, who had left Ford holding the bag for the fall of South Vietnam and for a badly damaged economy. Jimmy Carter’s victory reversed Nixon’s huge win of just four years prior.
In 1980, Carter was running for re-election. He faced an on-going hostage crisis in Iran, a bruising primary, and a third-party challenge aimed at liberals. Ronald Reagan kicked off his campaign with a “states’ rights” dog whistle at a site every white Southerner would recognize. Carter’s negative campaign contrasted badly with Reagan’s polished, optimistic message. With an economy still as hobbled as any since the Great Depression, Carter became a 1-term president.
In 1984, then President Reagan ran a feel-good campaign for re-election, given an economy finally starting to recover from the stagflation of the 1970s. Walter Mondale, on the other hand, “offered voters almost nothing” on the economy, becoming the “first Democratic nominee in many years to fail even to put forward a major jobs program.” That, Reagan’s talent, and a long overdue recovery doomed Mondale.
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So, in 1985, every presidential election that might indicate a floundering liberalism had alternative, conventional explanations: the stronger candidate, a unified party, the economy, and a strong message about the economy.
Nor do data on the House over the years leading up to 1985 indicate the death of liberalism. Nixon’s overwhelming victory was a personal one, and neither of Reagan’s massive victories had a significant effect on the House. In the Senate, Nixon’s big win lost 2 Republican seats. The flip that occurred with Reagan’s first win was at least partly due to a terrible economy and Reagan playing the closet racist. Democrats would regain the Senate 6 years later when those new Reagan senators had to defend their seats.
Finally, the Washington Post reported that the number of Democrats serving in state legislatures vastly outnumber the number of serving Republicans from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s. Governorships show a growing Republican dominance but, again, not until the 1990s.
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The party did need an overhaul in 1985. It needed better candidates. It needed to concentrate on the economy and jobs. It needed to rebuild its grassroots effort and to find “economic issues that unite low-income groups across racial lines.” None of these needs would be satisfied by throwing away 50 years of principle. There was more of opportunism about the DLC than of salvation.
The right could claim that the party of the New Left was not what they had signed onto. But an austere, laissez faire, small-government party was something no one else had signed onto. There already was a party for that.