A generation ago, socialists
and civil rights activists tried to transform the Democratic Party. Why did
they fail?
In 1964, there were few things that Students for a
Democratic Society and Barry Goldwater agreed on.
SDS was becoming a key voice of a new wave of American
radicalism, and the organization’s veterans would go on to shape the US far
left for decades. In much the same way, backers of Goldwater’s failed
presidential campaign that year would eventually become key figures in the new
Republican Party, turning it into a proselytizer for free-market fundamentalism
whose vigor was matched only by the evangelical commitments of its new voting
base.
Though the future trajectories of SDS and the Goldwater
campaign were unknown at the time, in 1964 they were already implacable
opponents. SDS, convinced of the threat Goldwater represented, reluctantly
agreed to campaign for his opponent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the slogan
“Half the way with LBJ.”
Yet SDS and Goldwater did find themselves in agreement on
one central question in American politics: the place of the South. Historically
a one-party region controlled entirely by segregationist Democrats known as the
Dixiecrats, the successes of pro–civil rights forces inside the national
Democratic Party had thrown the region’s alignment into question.
For Goldwater, it was obvious that these reactionaries
belonged inside his emerging Republican coalition. Speaking before an audience
of Georgia Republicans, the candidate assured them that he “would bend every
muscle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life
of the South.”
In a time of federal civil rights laws, and the use of
federal troops to enforce school desegregation, this kind of appeal to regional
self-determination had a clear meaning. And the rationale for such an overture
was equally obvious — black voters were not about to abandon the Democrats, and
as such, they should “go hunting where the ducks are.”
Strangely enough, SDS agreed. In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the defining manifesto produced
by the group, they called for “the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the
Democratic Party.” It went on to comment specifically on Goldwater, musing that
It is to the disgrace of the United States that such a
movement should become a prominent kind of public participation in the modern
world — but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the United States
that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed toward realignment
of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican Party in the
South.
SDS was hardly alone on the Left in welcoming such a shift.
From liberals to socialists, the attempt to push the Dixiecrats out of the
Democratic Party was widely held to be a necessary step in the project of
building a more equal country, allowing the Democrats to become a party more
like those of European social democracy.
Things did not exactly work out this way. The defection of
the South to the Republicans coincided with the conservatization of the
Democrats, and, in some accounts, even laid the foundation for the reemergence
of the Republicans as a majority party. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to
dismiss the advocates of the realignment perspective, who included both
liberals like Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and
radicals like Bayard
Rustin, as deluded or shortsighted in their strategy.
Indeed, their project was based on an analysis of American
society whose level of sophistication and scale of ambition puts much of
progressive thought today to shame. And, unlike most recent projects of the US left,
it succeeded. Though many revolutionary leftists dismissed the possibility at
the time, the Dixiecrats really were driven from the Democratic Party, even if
the consequences of that exodus were not what SDS and other radicals had
expected they would be.
Ultimately, the realignment strategy represented one of the
high points of the struggle for social democracy in the United States. For a
time, it seemed possible to transform the Democrats into a social-democratic
party. The failure of this project should not be taken as a verdict on the
failure of social democracy as a strategy. Its history does, however, contain
lessons for adherents of that strategy today, as well as for socialists looking
beyond it.
The Strategy
The strategy of realigning the Democrats by pushing out the
Dixiecrats and creating a party run by a liberal-labor coalition was backed by
much of the union leadership and social movements at the time. Figures from
Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King Jr noticed that the Democratic Party
contained within it both the most liberal forces in official American politics,
like Hubert Humphrey, and the most reactionary, like Strom
Thurmond.
The idea that the latter could be forced out, and that the
party could be hegemonized by the former, was an attractive one that gained
plausibility as the incipient civil rights insurgency intensified the
contradiction between the two groups. By the early 1960s, realignment was the
implicit strategy guiding the work of many of the leaders of the national Civil
Rights Movement.
Inside the movement, the most important partisan of
realignment was Bayard Rustin, perhaps the most talented organizer the US left
ever produced. Rustin had been, among other things, a Young Communist, a
pacifist, and an organizer for A. Philip Randolph’s March
on Washington Movement for civil rights.
By the 1950s, he was a well-known figure. When the
Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955, Rustin quickly headed down to Alabama,
becoming a key advisor to Martin
Luther King Jr. A few years later, Rustin would become the main organizer
behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Rustin was a tireless advocate of realignment. He
consistently argued that black Americans had to secure real political power in
order to achieve equality. The only way to do this, he asserted, was by
transforming the Democratic Party. Traditional methods of protest were
insufficient:
We have to look at political parties differently than we
look at other institutions, like segregated schools and lunch counters, because
a political party is not only the product of social relations, but an
instrument of change as well. It is the Dixiecrats and the other reactionaries
who want to paralyze the Democratic Party in order to maintain the status
quo. . . .
If we only protest for concessions from without, then that
party treats us in the same way as any of the other conflicting pressure
groups. This means it offers us the most minimum concessions for votes. But if
the same amount of pressure is exerted from inside the party using highly
sophisticated political tactics, we can change the structure of that party.
Later in the decade, Rustin’s insistence that black
insurgents orient themselves around official politics in the US would bring him
into direct conflict with the nascent expressions of black power, and he would
eventually become one of its most prominent black critics. In the early 1960s,
however, he was still moving with the general current of black protest.
His position on realignment was similarly popular in left
milieus. In 1960, Reuther declared his intention to “bring about a realignment
and get the liberal forces in one party and the conservatives in another.” And
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who famously attempted to unseat the
segregationist delegation from their state at the 1964 Democratic Party convention,
was in part motivated by the same perspective.
Looking back on their effort, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) and MFDP organizer Cleveland Sellers recalled that
We were thinking far beyond Atlantic City. If our venture
there was successful, we intended to utilize similar tactics in other Southern
states, particularly Georgia and South Carolina. Our ultimate goal was the
destruction of the awesome power of the Dixiecrats, who controlled over
75 percent of the most important committees in Congress. With the
Dixiecrats deposed, the way would have been clear for a wide-ranging
redistribution of wealth, power, and priorities throughout the nation.
Realignment’s embrace by such a wide variety of progressive
forces belies its rather obscure origins. Before Reuther and Rustin threw their
considerable skills behind the strategy, it was being promoted by a
little-known but key figure in the history of American radicalism: Max
Shachtman.
Shachtman was the leader of a heterodox Trotskyist grouping
that, although small, had helped lead important struggles in an earlier era,
such as the fight against the no-strike pledge, enforced by both the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO) officialdom and the Communist Party during
World War II.
Shachtman had come to the position that the advance of the
American workers movement was dependent on the formation of a labor party, and
looked to union leaders like Reuther as the incipient nucleus of such a party.
During the late 1940s, Shachtman and his associates attempted, unsuccessfully,
to convince Reuther and other left-wing labor leaders to break from the
Democrats and start such an organization.
By the late 1950s, it had become clear that a split was not
on the agenda. Even before the 1955 reunification of the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) and the CIO — in which progressives like Reuther took a back seat
to the new organization’s head, the apostle of business unionism, George Meany
— the labor movement had grown more conservative.
At the same time, the development of the civil rights
insurgency raised the possibility that a right-wing split from the Democrats,
led by the Dixiecrats, might be more likely than a left-wing one. The way might
then be clear, Shachtman reasoned, for labor and its liberal allies to take
over the party, transforming it into something like a European
social-democratic party.
Shachtman’s thinking gained influence through the efforts
of his followers, most importantly Michael Harrington.
Harrington had joined Shachtman’s group in the early 1950s and, as the leader
of the party’s youth section, quickly became a prominent member.
Hard-working, intelligent, and charming, Harrington gained
influence in left-liberal circles, writing for Dissent magazine and becoming
chairman of the League for Industrial Democracy, out of which SDS would be
born. He befriended Rustin in the mid 1950s and forged an alliance between the
older civil rights activist and Shachtman’s milieu. Together, the three men
worked to build a broad consensus in the American left around realignment.
The material conditions supporting such a strategy
certainly existed. What political scientists have called “the Southern veto”
had effectively blocked efforts to secure progressive legislation around race
or labor at the national level. Moreover, the Dixiecrats had prevented the
Democrats from assuming a coherent political identity as the party of American
liberalism.
Thus, the partisans of realignment held, even if the exit
of the Dixiecrats cost votes in the short term, it would allow liberals and
labor to run the party unopposed, finally creating a national political party
unambiguously committed to a left agenda.
The Party of Which People?
The realignment strategy was powerfully attractive because
it seized on major tensions in American political life in a way that connected
political realities with radical ambitions. Unlike most left strategies today,
it began neither with individual action oriented, somehow, toward social
transformation nor with visions of social transformation disconnected from the
grubby reality of society as it exists.
Instead, it latched onto what was arguably the key
political fracture in the postwar period: the split at the center of the
Democratic Party. Understanding both the significance of this split, and why it
failed to transform American politics in the way the theorists of realignment
thought it would, requires examining the forces responsible for assembling the
modern Democratic Party.
The pre–New Deal Democratic Party was in many ways a
regional party, based in the Solid South with support from urban political
machines in the North. Virtually the entire business class supported the
Republicans, the default party of government for the first three decades of the
twentieth century.
All of this changed during the Great Depression. Faced with
a crisis of unprecedented severity and longevity, the political unity of the
American capitalist class fractured. A large segment abandoned the Republican
Party, whose traditional economic policies of protectionism and anti-labor
repression had failed to halt the downturn. This section of capital, though
wary of labor’s growing power, was open to the reforms promised by Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, and became a key base of support for his administration.
The split within the capitalist class was not merely the
result of differing approaches to addressing the crisis — as Thomas
Ferguson has argued, it was also rooted in the political economy of
American industry. The firms that supported Roosevelt were, by and large, from
two groups: capital-intensive industries who were internationally competitive,
and internationally-oriented commercial banks. Both groups strongly supported
Roosevelt’s affinity for free trade. But even more importantly, they were
better able than other sections of American capital to bear the costs of
reform.
A major swath of New Deal reforms — from the public
employment programs to unemployment insurance — tightened labor markets by
giving workers options other than either starving or toiling at the price
capital would pay. Other measures, such as legislation compelling firms to
recognize unions, made it easier for already-employed workers to bid up their
wages.
For labor-intensive sectors, such as textiles or
agriculture, wage-boosting reforms seemed to have near-apocalyptic
ramifications. But for capital-intensive industries, such as oil, the
consequences of higher wages were not nearly so dire — labor costs constituted
a smaller share of their overall bill. For these businesses, the ameliorative
programs of the New Deal were a sounder bet than either continued stagnation,
or, even worse, the prospect of a revolutionary labor movement.
The South fit only awkwardly into the agenda of
reform-minded capital. With a still heavily agricultural economic base, run
largely on coerced
black labor, Southern politicians were, at best, lukewarm toward the New Deal’s
pro-labor reforms. Indeed, they worked furiously to secure exceptions that
would allow them to keep their labor force as it was. This helped ensure that
the benefits of the New Deal would flow disproportionately to workers in the
North.
Southern politicians were, however, far friendlier to
aspects of Roosevelt’s program that disproportionally benefited the South: the
mushrooming subsidies to groups like agricultural producers and federal works
programs that attempted to renovate the infrastructure of the country’s more
backward areas. This Southern politicians could get behind — but the Republican
Party, still committed to balanced budgets, was unlikely to endorse.
The modern Democratic Party, then, was born of a strange
marriage, between the most advanced and reform-minded sections of American
capital and the most economically backward section of the country. What united
them was their support for economic policies that went far beyond what capital
had previously been willing to stomach, from subsidies to regulation to forays
into state planning.
This unity of interests, however, was accompanied by real
tensions, particularly over civil rights and labor. Initially, civil rights was
the less potent of the two. Before the late 1940s, the national Democratic
Party had done little that would upset Southern sensibilities. Instead, clashes
centered around labor, with Southern legislators playing a key role in both
blocking pro-labor legislation and passing repressive bills like the Taft-Hartley
Act.
As the 1950s progressed, however, and the movement for
black equality gained in strength and scope (at the same time the labor
movement was beginning its long decline), race moved to the fore as the party’s
key fault line. The movement’s strategy of disrupting through nonviolent civil
disobedience put the federal government on the defensive, the endless stories
of white supremacist brutality proving troublesome for the US’s efforts to gain
influence in the decolonizing world. The interests of the Southern ruling class
had been throw into conflict with those of the wider ruling class.
The Realities of Realignment
The tension developed into a chasm, and then a split. But
not only did the Democratic Party move to the right in the decade or so
following the departure of the Dixiecrats, some argue it was precisely the exit
of working-class whites from the “New Deal coalition” that paved the way for
such a shift.
So why didn’t the outcome that Rustin and his co-thinkers
sought come to pass? Explanations that focus on factors like the voting
behavior of the white working class are ultimately too superficial to explain
the sea change in American politics since the 1970s. It is instead necessary to
attend both to the realignment strategy’s evolution, and to the same kinds of
political-economic forces that made the odd coalition of Northern liberals and
Southern reactionaries possible in the first place.
Legend has it that, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson told an aide
that his signing of the Civil Rights Act had given the South to the Republicans
“for a generation.” What Johnson saw with trepidation the partisans of
realignment celebrated.
Of course, the Dixiecrats did not leave the party in one
fell swoop. Many of the most prominent among them, such as James Eastland,
remained Democrats until the end of their careers. Nonetheless, 1964 was a
turning point. In the 1968 election, only the independent segregationist candidacy
of George Wallace kept Republicans from sweeping the South.
The way had been cleared, it seemed, for a liberal-labor coalition to begin
turning the Democratic Party around.
The advocates of realignment had little time to savor their
victory, however. Other developments in American politics put increasing strain
on both their strategy and coherence as a political current.
Ultimately, these developments all flowed from the
escalation of the war in Vietnam — by the late 1960s, one of the central issues
in American politics. While it might seem that, for the group of socialists and
pacifists pushing realignment, the war would hardly be a cause of internal
discord, it produced a major schism.
To understand how this could be, it is useful to recall the
view of Shachtman and other realignment advocates that labor officials like
Walter Reuther were potential leaders of a nascent American social democracy.
As Shachtman and his followers gained influence in the wider labor movement,
they broadened this stance to cover the labor leadership as a whole.
The most important figure in this milieu — and the most
important figure in the American labor movement for the entire period of the
realignment approach — was George
Meany, head of the AFL-CIO. Meany was a labor bureaucrat’s bureaucrat,
bragging that he had never walked a picket line in his life and openly
contemptuous of organizing unorganized workers.
Also a staunch anticommunist, Meany enthusiastically backed
the war in Vietnam (which delivered plenty of money to AFL-CIO workers in
defense industries) and was deeply involved in the federation’s efforts to
combat communism in unions abroad.
In their efforts to remake the Democratic Party under the
leadership of the liberal-labor coalition, figures like Shachtman and Rustin
were unwilling to take action that would push Meany out of that coalition. This
carried enormous consequences.
It meant shrinking from even some of the mainstream demands
of the civil rights movement. Affirmative action, for example, became an
unacceptable position, as Meany and other officials in the AFL-CIO bitterly
opposed such policies in deference to unions that still practiced black
exclusion, such as the building trades.
Crucially, it also meant refusing to publicly oppose the
Vietnam War. For some, such as Shachtman, this was hardly even a compromise.
Shachtman had moved steadily to the right over the previous decade, and now
held that American capitalism was preferable to Soviet totalitarianism, even if
socialism was still preferable to both.
In line with this perspective, Shachtman publicly backed
the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (calling the US-backed counterrevolutionaries
“good, stout, working-class fighters”), as well as the various
counter-insurgency regimes installed in South Vietnam. For Rustin, the
compromise was more difficult, as he continued to support a negotiated end to
the war in private, and defended Martin Luther King’s public opposition to it.
Still, Rustin ultimately maintained a coalition with
pro-war forces like the AFL-CIO for pragmatic reasons. He refused to support
any part of the antiwar movement, and went out of his way to attack antiwar
spokespersons. He also tempered his longstanding opposition to racism in the
labor movement, declaring, “I myself am, in my own capacity, committed to end
the vestiges of discrimination in the trade union movement, but I absolutely
refuse to conduct the battle along lines that will ultimately injure the labor
movement.”
The result was that Rustin, Shachtman, and their supporters
effectively stopped trying to remake the Democratic Party at all — they simply
became backers of its leadership. Meany and the AFL-CIO officialdom were, on
the whole, perfectly happy with Johnson’s performance as president. Moreover,
as it became clear that those attempting to build a more left-wing Democratic
Party were largely motivated to do so by Johnson’s prosecution of the war,
these realignment proponents began spending more time opposing those trying to
change the party than trying to change it themselves.
New Politics
Not all realignment supporters were willing to follow this
strategy. Led by Michael Harrington, a second group maintained its intention of
remaking the Democratic Party in the image of the liberal-labor coalition.
Their struggles to do so took them into the heart of the party — and, despite
opposition from their former comrades, they managed to secure some real changes
in party structure.
But the reforms did little to change the fundamental nature
of the Democratic Party, and, in the context of the 1970s economic crisis, weren’t
enough to prevent it from moving even further to the right.
The first victory for Harrington came in the early 1970s,
when the Democratic Party implemented a series of reforms intended to open up
the party and decrease the power of party elites. The reforms came on the heels
of 1968 election, in which a candidate who had run in no primaries, Hubert
Humphrey, ultimately won the nomination at a convention marked by Democratic
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s police force cracking the heads of protesters outside.
Disgruntled by this experience, supporters of the antiwar
candidate Eugene McCarthy managed to win a vote to create a party reform
commission, which would be headed by South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The body (called the McGovern-Fraser
commission) instituted affirmative action in delegate selection, required that
delegates be picked in the year of the election, eliminated prohibitive
delegate fees, and put in place a new, more transparent set of rules for
delegate selection.
The immediate consequence of these rule changes was the
nomination of George McGovern for president in 1972. McGovern had entered the
race late in 1968, but had drawn attention as a principled opponent of the war
with a solidly liberal voting record.
Drawing on the experience of the 1968 McCarthy campaign,
McGovern employed a grassroots strategy, relying on networks of volunteers to
secure the vote in key states like New Hampshire and Wisconsin and running a
thoroughly antiwar and liberal campaign. It worked.
His success in dislodging frontrunner Edmund Muskie and
winning the nomination quickly gave way to disappointment, however. In the
November 1972 general election, McGovern lost every state but Massachusetts.
In subsequent years, McGovern’s campaign has come to stand
as the symbol of a Democratic Party gone too far to the left, alienating the
“silent majority” of Americans repulsed by the various manifestations of 1960s
radicalism.
From this perspective, realignment failed by being too
successful — activists like Harrington and his followers pulled the party so
far to the left that they destroyed its chances with a still-moderate American
electorate. In many versions of this story, the advocates of party reform — known
as the “New
Politics” supporters — drove the party toward supposedly middle-class
concerns like feminism and environmentalism, repelling its (white) blue-collar
base and eliciting the AFL-CIO’s decision not to endorse McGovern.
But however influential, this telling bears little
resemblance to the actual history. For one thing, labor wasn’t especially
powerful in the party even before the McGovern-Fraser reforms. In 1965, with a
Democratic supermajority in both the House and the Senate, unions failed to win
passage of a bill to ban state-level “right-to-work” legislation, an objective
Meany had declared labor’s highest priority.
Labor did wield power as a behind-the-scenes broker,
trading delegate slates and endorsements like machine politicians. The AFL-CIO
officialdom’s ability to play this role was undermined by the McGovern-Fraser
reforms.
However, it was precisely because they felt that they
weren’t getting a fair shake from Meany’s wheeling and dealing that unions like
the UAW, AFSCME, and the communications workers, supported these reforms. As
such, it hardly makes sense to characterize the New Politics reforms as
effecting a middle-class takeover of a formerly working-class party.
Nonetheless, there is a grain of truth to the idea that the
commission’s reforms helped cost the party the 1972 election. Meany’s outrage
over losing some of his backroom power translated directly into an intense
hostility to McGovern and everything his supporters represented. That McGovern
was also a steadfast opponent of the war in Vietnam only intensified Meany’s
hatred.
He demanded that the AFL-CIO executive board vote
unanimously against lending the federation’s support. While he came up short,
Meany was nonetheless able to prevent the AFL-CIO from playing an active role
in the campaign. Aiding him in this endeavor were the remaining Shachtmanites,
who labeled McGovern the candidate of surrender and used their influence to attack
his support in progressive circles.
These attacks undoubtedly made McGovern’s campaign more
difficult, and while many union affiliates of the AFL-CIO endorsed his
campaign, the organizational muscle of the federation itself was sorely missed.
Thus, though it is true that McGovern was too far left for an important
Democratic constituency, it is a gross distortion to equate that constituency —
conservative union leaders — with working-class voters.
But even the loss of the AFL-CIO was less decisive in McGovern’s
defeat than the ability of his opponent, Richard Nixon, to forge a new investor
coalition and the incumbent president’s pre-election expansionary economic
policy.
As discussed earlier, part of the core of
Democratic-friendly capitalist firms consisted of multi-nationally oriented
firms, such as global exporters and international commercial banks. When
international economic disorder intensified in the early 1970s this capital
bloc began trying to stabilize the system through increased international
cooperation.
Formed by David Rockefeller in 1971 to steer away the
country from economic nationalism, the Trilateral Commission was the main institutional proponent
of this approach. The immediate stimulus for the commission’s founding was
Nixon’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which suspended the dollar’s
convertibility to gold — the foundation of the postwar economic order — and
issued a new series of import tariffs.
The multinational capital bloc feared potential reprisals
from other advanced capitalist economies, greatly damaging the bottom line of
export-oriented firms. A series of attacks on Nixon’s trade policies began
appearing in the business press, serving notice to the president that not all
of capital was happy with his policies.
In 1972, Nixon responded adroitly, removing the import
tariff and replacing the strongly nationalist Treasury Secretary John Connally
with the more multilaterally-oriented George Shultz. Even more importantly,
Nixon signed the Smithsonian Agreement in 1971, establishing new currency policies
between ten of the largest capitalist economies.
Over the course of the election year, Nixon worked
systematically to endear his administration to the traditionally Democratic
bloc of multinationally oriented firms. His success in doing so deprived the
McGovern campaign of yet another traditional source of Democratic Party
support, a source that could hardly be identified with the values of the
American electorate.
The final reason for Nixon’s resounding victory in 1972 was
the “political business cycle” of that year. For decades now, scholars of
American politics have noticed the tendency of economic policy to become
reflationary in election years, effectively boosting the campaign of the
incumbent (or his party).
Nixon furnished a particularly notable instance of this
pattern in the years before the 1972 election. From 1970 to 1972, the Federal
Reserve, chaired by close Nixon associate Arthur Burns, expanded the US money
supply at an average rate of 7 percent a year. With the money supply expanding
so quickly, businesses could easily acquire money for investment, powering
rapid growth in the economy. Nixon also embarked on a program of strong fiscal
expansion, pushing the growth rate to climb from about zero in 1970 to almost
7 percent in 1972.
Even with the specter of inflation lurking, a McGovern
triumph in the context of such rapid economic growth would have been
astounding. After taking into account the AFL-CIO officialdom’s abandonment of
McGovern and Nixon’s wooing of the multilateral investment bloc, McGovern’s
loss is entirely explicable.
Realignment at Last?
By the mid 1970s, the realignment strategy had lost much of
its appeal. Shachtman and Rustin allied themselves with the extant power blocs
in the party, essentially reconciling themselves to the existing order.
Harrington and his supporters, however, had not given up
the fight, even after the McGovern debacle. The Watergate scandal had given the
strategy a shot in the arm, ushering Nixon (and then Ford) out of the White
House, bringing Jimmy Carter in, and enhancing Democratic super-majorities in
the House and Senate.
In 1976, Harrington strongly supported Carter, declaring in a debate
with Socialist Workers Party candidate Peter Camejo that “if Carter wins, he
will owe his victory in considerable measure to the working class politically
organized as a class.” At the beginning of his term, it seemed like Carter
agreed. On the Democratic agenda were long-term liberal projects such as a
federal Consumer Protection Agency, labor law reform, and a federal
full-employment bill (a central project for realignment advocates since the
1960s).
Carter, however, took power amid a period of economic
turbulence unknown since the Great Depression. Corporate profits, which had
been declining since the late 1960s, dipped near 2 percent in the early
1970s, before rising again to an anemic 4 percent for the next few years.
As profits tanked, US firms looked to cut labor costs.
Resistance to unionization skyrocketed. A decade earlier, many companies had
acquiesced in the face of unionization elections, declining to challenge the
results 42 percent of the time. By 1978, firms were contesting 92 percent
of such elections. Companies also resorted to playing dirty more often, firing
pro-union employees at rates that far exceeded those of previous decades. As in
the Great Depression, the imperative to reduce labor costs fell most heavily on
labor-intensive firms.
However, the 1970s were unlike the Depression decade in a
crucial aspect: there was no threat of a radicalized labor movement to convince
firms who could absorb higher wages that it was worth compromising. While labor
radicalism spooked elites through the 1930s, a rank-and-file rebellion at the
outset of the 1970s quickly receded as unemployment rates crept up.
Thus, while the same divisions of interest that laid the
basis for the 1930s compromise with labor were present in the 1970s, the level
of working-class insurgency that activated these divisions was absent. Lacking
such a movement, capital-intensive industries potentially open to another
informal accord were not about to complain too loudly about their colleagues’
efforts to strip workers to the bone.
The same period also saw an unprecedented level of business
organization. The Business Roundtable, now the leading organization of
American capital, was formed, and existing organizations such as the National
Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce experienced a
resurgence in membership.
The impetus was both the recession itself — which revived
memories of the Depression — and a wave of regulatory legislation in the
preceding years, such as the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA), which, unlike previous legislation, which only targeted
individual sectors, affected all firms, creating a common interest for capital
to rally around.
Business was ready for a fight.
That fight came quickly, in the 1977 congressional season.
First on the agenda was the creation of a consumer protection agency, which had
previously passed in Congress but was vetoed by Ford. Everyone assumed the
legislation would be approved easily. Business, however, put together a
tremendous effort to defeat it, and the bill failed in a lopsided vote,
189-227. Of the newly elected Democratic representatives, 60 percent
opposed the measure.
Next up was common site picketing, which allowed an entire
worksite to be picketed if there were grievances against any employer at that
location (a rule particularly important for construction unions, who often
worked at places with multiple subcontractors). Also the victim of a previous
Ford veto, common site picketing met the same fate as the consumer protection
agency.
Unions’ biggest priority that year, however, was labor law
reform. Reeling from capital’s new intransigence, labor sought to stiffen the
penalties for various unfair practices during union elections. George Meany
declared that the AFL-CIO was “going to fight harder for this bill than any
bill since the passage of the Wagner Act.”
The skirmish did, briefly, bring to the surface the kinds
of schisms between sections of capital that had been so crucial in the New
Deal. Capital-intensive firms in the Business Roundtable advocated neutrality
in the fight, preferring to save their legislative muscle for battles more
central to their vital interests. But labor-intensive firms prevailed in the
vote among the group’s leadership, 19-11.
Unburdened by the dilemmas created by working-class
militancy, the capital-intensive segments of the class went along for the ride.
Despite a Democratic supermajority, a filibuster ultimately thwarted the bill.
The final legislative defeat came disguised as a victory —
the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of
1978. Long an objective of the liberal-labor coalition, full-employment
legislation was seen as one of the most important steps toward building
progressive social policy in the US.
By the time Carter signed the act, however, it had been
completely defanged. While the original legislation mandated the president move
towards full-employment levels — and included provisions enlisting the federal
government as the employer of last resort in case efforts to stimulate
private-sector employment failed — the final bill simply called on the
president to report progress toward full-employment and lacked any language
around direct creation of public jobs.
What had begun as an effort to force the president to
produce an economy of abundant jobs ended up being little more than a
declaration of his discretion to do so — discretion that would, ultimately,
never be used. The legislative linchpin for those leftists still holding on to
visions of realignment had finally passed, with practically no effect on the
American political economy.
Right Turn
In some accounts, such as Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s Winner Take All Politics, business’s increasing political
mobilization is the principal reason labor suffered these defeats — the
implication being that, had labor been better organized, less divided, and less
encumbered by the Meanyite officialdom, it could have successfully resisted the
offensive. But what such a conclusion ignores is the way the crisis itself
reshaped the political terrain.
With all sections of capital increasingly resistant to
labor, the pressure for a compliant policy agenda ran through channels well
beyond business lobbying, exerting direct pressure on the executive itself. The
last two years of the Carter administration provide a devastating case study of
this pressure at work.
Carter’s tenure had begun in the fashion typical of
Democratic presidencies in the postwar era. His administration was so stocked
with representatives of multilaterally-oriented capital that the association
between Carter and the Trilateral Commission became a standing joke. The
turbulence of the 1970s, however, broke apart the old Democratic coalition once
and for all, propelling Carter to the right and setting the stage for every
Democratic administration since.
The first shock to the administration came through the
defection of the oil companies. As the capital-intensive industry par
excellence, oil had been a Democratic stronghold since the New Deal, making the
OPEC oil crisis particularly dicey. OPEC’s oil embargo forced up energy prices,
leading to pressure from consumers for price controls. The Democratic congress
had obliged under Ford, and though Carter managed to attract much of the
industry back to the fold with talk of deregulation, suspicion now existed
where there had once been none.
When oil prices skyrocketed again in the summer of 1979,
the pressure on the administration became unbearable. Put simply, Carter had to
choose between the interests of the oil industry, a key Democratic
constituency, and energy consumers sensitive to price rises, which included the
great majority of the electorate, as well as a large section of capital. Carter
chose the latter, endorsing a windfall tax on oil profits as a means to address
the growing budget deficit. United in opposition to such a surcharge, the oil
industry thus began its association with the Republican Party.
The flight of oil made Carter’s administration all the more
vulnerable to pressure from other sections of capital. Facing increased
international competition in product markets, large sectors of corporate
America began pushing for reductions in their tax rate. These tax cuts made it
impossible for federal spending to continue at its previous levels.
Confronted with the demand to slash the budget from a wide
range of the business community, Carter acquiesced. The austerity so often
associated with the Reagan presidency actually began with Carter, under whom
spending on welfare, for example, contracted more rapidly than it ever would
under Reagan.
Carter also moved to deregulate huge sections of American
industry, including the airlines, trucking, and, perhaps most saliently today,
banking. Faced with an increasingly dissatisfied business class (despite their
recent legislative victories), Carter acted aggressively to placate their
concerns, attacking the interests of his own electoral base so ferociously that
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was motivated to mount a brief primary
challenge to the incumbent president.
Finally, Carter took a hard right turn on foreign policy.
Reeling from the blow of the Iranian Revolution, which had overthrown a loyal
US client regime, the president promised that the US would deploy military
force to defend its interests in the Middle East. It is one of the few promises
in American politics that has been kept.
Carter also reversed the détente between the US and the
USSR, initiating an American arms buildup and successfully goading the Soviets
into a bloody war in Afghanistan in the hopes of giving them “a
Vietnam-style quagmire.”
Today, it is a widely held assumption of the liberal-left
that the rightward turn in American politics was launched under Reagan, and
spearheaded by right-wing Christian groups such as the Moral Majority. A
different version of the same story holds that it was Nixon who started that
shift by mobilizing the “silent majority” against the Civil Rights Movement and
the Left. Both of those narratives rest on a basic misconception. In fact, it
was not a Republican, but Jimmy Carter who began this process. And he did it at
a time when he commanded majorities in both houses of Congress.
One reason the myth of Republican ascendancy is so
pernicious is that it suggests that it was voters who drove American politics
to the right. Underlying this view is the notion that what really caused that
move was the break-up of the so-called “New Deal Coalition,” which collapsed
because of the increasingly reactionary bent of racist white workers.
It is certainly true that the 1970s saw the emergence of a
racist backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. But it wasn’t
led by racist white workers, and it didn’t destroy any “New Deal coalition.” In
fact, working-class Americans remained left-wing on a broad range of political
issues well into the 1980s. If anything, the Democrats’ defeat at the hands of
Reagan reflected how isolated from their voters they were becoming.
The culprit wasn’t reactionary white workers electing
Republicans. It was elites and officials, Democrats and Republicans alike. That
doesn’t mean the decline of the Civil Rights Movement and collapse of the labor
radicalism of the early 1970s didn’t matter. Without those kinds of radical
movements, capital remained more or less united, without the kinds of splits
that can open up space for the Left.
Far from Harrington’s hope that Carter might represent a
respite from ruling-class aggression, and a chance for labor to have, at least,
half a seat at the table, Carter’s presidency initiated the all-out attack on
the New Deal order that Nixon and Ford had only hinted at. The window for
realignment had closed.
Realigning Expectations
The story of realignment harkens back to a time when
large-scale historical projects still animated the US left. Even though it is
apparent in retrospect that the strategy never had much of a chance, it is
possible to look back with respect at the strategic thinking that motivated
Rustin, Harrington, and their comrades. They astutely identified one of the
major fault lines in American politics, and developed a way to shake that fault
line such that when the dust settled, something like an American social
democracy would exist.
Today, this kind of thinking has all but disappeared. To be
sure, there are many who continue to labor in the shadow of Harrington’s
vision, who often speak of “intensifying the contradictions” between the
Democratic Party’s base and its investors by backing left candidates within the
party. What’s missing from this orientation is any sense of the momentum of the
party.
The contradiction between the party’s base and its
investors has existed since the birth of the modern Democratic Party in the New
Deal. It has persisted through the Great Society, through the New Politics era,
through Carter, all the way up until the present. Again and again, this
contradiction alone has proven inert, unable to change the basic structure of
power within the party.
In the late 1950s, it was obvious that tensions between
Dixiecrats and the rest of the party were coming to a head. And if the internecine
schism between base and investors could not turn the party leftwards then, when
accompanied by the civil rights revolution, there’s little reason to believe it
will do so today, in our far drearier historical moment.
Gloomy as this conclusion is, the history of realignment
also offers if not hope, then at least some sense of the grounds on which hope
can be built.
The strategy was correct in looking for divisions in
official politics. It failed, ironically, in not recognizing the divisions that
made its strategy even possible — the fractures in capital that allowed a more
accommodating sector, fearful of losing everything to working-class insurgency,
to compromise with labor. This concession was the condition of existence for
the Democratic Party, and when its own conditions of existence were undermined
in the crisis of the 1970s, that compromise ended.
The contemporary left should aspire to do what the
realignment strategy tried to accomplish — to recognize the different interests
that exist within capital, and leverage them to our own ends. To be successful
in this endeavor, however, and to avoid the sorry end of postwar realignment,
it will have to organize on the basis of two truths that Harrington and his
co-thinkers ultimately forgot.
First, working-class insurgency is the only force that
renders the contradictions between capitals dynamic and capable of serving the
Left. Second, whatever power labor manages to assert against capital, whether
on the shop floor, in a capitalist party like the Democrats, or even in an
actual social-democratic party, will always be partial, and subject to
dismemberment as soon as capital is able. While Harrington’s intellectual work
stresses this, the project he helped built did not reflect it.
The failure that ensued was nothing to celebrate. The
absence of an American social democracy is not only responsible for the brutal
and devastated character of working-class life in US society — it has also
yielded a feeble revolutionary left.
Deprived of the robust class-wide organizations built and
preserved by social democracy elsewhere, the revolutionary left has perpetually
struggled with the most extreme forms of political isolation, and the political
and organizational pathologies that accompany it. The sectarianism and
splintering that afflict the radical left are not, as is sometimes smugly
implied, a cause of the radical left’s powerlessness. They are instead a
symptom of a situation in which splitting over obscure questions of doctrine
carries no real consequences for the Left’s ability to change anything.
American social democrats have also suffered from the
failure of realignment. The absence of a real American reformism has left
would-be social democrats largely holding on to the coattails of the unreformed
Democratic Party. Again and again, this has occasioned the spectacle of
committed radicals, including Harrington, campaigning for politicians, like
Carter, who oppose everything they believe in.
The problem with this dynamic is not so much that radicals
sully themselves with the impurities of compromise — some measure of compromise
is necessary in any kind of electoral participation. Rather, it is that in
arguing that workers should defend their interests by voting for progressive
Democrats when possible (or neoliberals when there are no progressives),
American social democrats orient politics on a sphere in which it is actually
impossible to defend those interests.
The argument always goes, of course, that social struggles
outside the electoral sphere are necessary as well. But as anyone who has ever
been inveigled to support the lesser of two evils knows, somehow the emphasis
on those forms of struggle never reaches the frenzied pitch of election year
appeals.
Any political action comes with opportunity costs, and the
costs of a strategic focus on electing Democrats have been grave — from the
labor movement’s inability to defend
itself against attacks from “their” party to antiwar movements that
disappear when a Democrat comes to office. Configuring left politics around
electoral action, in the absence of any kind of social democracy, inevitably
results in a situation where, as Robert Brenner puts it, reformism doesn’t even
reform.
The failure of realignment, then, contains lessons for
socialists who fall on both sides of the old “reform or revolution” argument.
Its history should not be taken as a verdict against reformism. Indeed, the
story of realignment serves to clarify what, exactly, will be required for a
successful American reformism. Because ultimately, the kind of grand strategic
vision that animated realignment is a prerequisite for both those who wish to
see, at long last, social democracy in the United States — and those who wish
to go beyond it.
