The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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past three quarters of a century. But there has been no consistency of purpose; no steadiness of vision. The party has been whipsawed by campaign donors and consultants, by of-the-moment strategists and “Third Way” think tanks that, invariably, counsel against going down the line unswervingly for progressive principles. Even now, Democrats wrestle with the question of whether to be so bold, so visionary, so truthful and so willing to take risks on behalf of economic and social and racial justice as was Henry Wallace.
As the Republican Party has moved toward the extremism that Eisenhower feared and that Wallace suggested might take the form of an American fascism, the Democratic Party has tried to occupy the middle ground. Whenever it has moved tentatively to the left, the advocates for this progression—the George McGoverns, the Shirley Chisholms, the Jesse Jacksons, the Tom Haydens—have been quickly sidelined by the insiders. The approach might be defensible, politically if not morally, were there a record of steady success. But that record does not exist. America is not a right-wing country, yet through most of the postwar era it has been governed by steadily more right-wing Republican presidents.
Even when Democrats have prevailed, they have struggled to advance the progressive agenda that polls show most Americans desire. The last two Democratic presidents lost their governing majorities in the Congress midway through their first terms, and the two Democratic presidents before them were so badly derailed by domestic and foreign policy missteps that they could not secure re-election.
If we step back and observe with an honest eye the history of our political parties, we see a story of stark and unsettling contrasts. Republicans do not win every election. Yet their party has pulled the country steadily to the right, controlling and corrupting the federal courts, initiating and maintaining endless wars and extending the reach (and the budgets) of the Pentagon, imposing austerity in order to fund tax cuts for the rich. The planet has burned. Nationalism, xenophobia and racism have been mainstreamed. No survey suggests that this is what America wants. Yet this is what we have. Why? Because we lack an adequate opposition. The Democrats have bent, again and again and again, to the demands of investment-bank campaign donors, apologists for the military-industrial complex, and Third Way hucksters.
Democrats have been able to renew their electoral fortunes when they unite with independents to upend the worst excesses of the Republicans. Yet Democrats have not been capable of maintaining the energy and enthusiasm necessary to keep power and to advance an agenda that is both truly progressive and truly necessary. In recent years, they have expended most of their energy fighting to preserve gains made decades ago. So the balance keeps tipping to the right. This pattern has held since the 1940s, the decade in which the critical fight for the soul of the Democratic Party was lost. It will continue until a new fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is waged, and won.
This book encourages the fight in the form of a series of historical essays that come to a point. This is not a whole history of the Democratic Party. Rather, it is an examination of a moment in the party’s history, of a brief period when a definitional choice was made. The Democrats opted for compromise in the mid-1940s. It was the wrong choice. And it has haunted the party, and the nation, since that time.
Historical knowledge is always necessary. But it is most necessary when everything is again up for grabs, as is now the case. A new generation of reformers and radicals, of grassroots activists and visionary idealists, has stepped up. They are on the move. They seek to remake the Democratic Party as a fighting force that might win the future. Their successes in reframing and renewing the party in which they have chosen to make their stand invite us to consider the prospect that was outlined by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques: “If men have always been concerned with only one task—how to create a society fit to live in—the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything can still be altered. What was done but turned out wrong, can be done again. The Golden Age, which blind superstition had placed behind (or ahead of) us, is in us.”
Henry Wallace is not a distant ancestor. There are still a few old radicals who remember marching at his side. What he did turned out wrong, not because his values were wrong but because they were ahead of the time. Now, perhaps, what turned out wrong can be done again. Perhaps, the lost soul of the Democratic Party can be found.
The Prophetic Politics of Henry Wallace
How FDR’s Vice PresidentAnticipated the Dangerous TimesThat Have Engulfed America
Watchman, what of the night?
—Isaiah 21:11–12, King James Version
A modern Isaiah, seeing the possibilities of modern transportation and communication, and observing the national barriers imposed by the nations of the world against each other since the war, would cry out against international injustices. He would go to the people of the different nations with his message and call for a New Deal among nations. He would do this with vigor and immense earnestness even though, from the immediate practical point of view, his message might be premature.
—Henry Agard Wallace, Statesmanship and Religion, 1934
In the summer of 1948, when his own fight against American fascism had been lost but he still refused to surrender the radical hope of a future framed by justice and peace, Henry Wallace would ask Pete Seeger to sing a favorite song. The words and music had been submitted by a young college instructor named Dick Blakeslee to the “People’s Songs” project that Seeger, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays and a handful of others launched after World War II to champion a revival of old folk music and new songs of work, struggle and idealism. Blakeslee’s lyrics sampled from Bible verses and ranged across American history. Yet his song closed in the moment, or, rather, in the moment that Wallace had hoped to create:
I was with Franklin Roosevelt’s side on the night before he died. He said, “One world must come out of World War Two, Yankee, Russian, white or tan,” he said, “a man is still a man. We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through.”
As they traveled the backroads of North Carolina and the other segregated states where Wallace challenged racial hatred, Seeger would sing the words “a man is still a man.” A thousand miles to the north, a Jewish teenager from Montreal learned those words from a socialist summer-camp counselor. They inspired an interest in folk music that proved to be transformative for Leonard Cohen. Years later, Cohen would add a slight variation to “Passing Through” as he sang the song from the concert stages of Europe and the Americas. After the line “One world must come out of World War Two” he would whisper “… ah, the fool.” Those who know something of Cohen’s wry romanticism, and the political penchants of the man who challenged his adopted United States (“the cradle of the best and of the worst”) with the slyest protest song of his time (“Democracy Is Coming to the USA”), will recognize that this was no insult. Rather, it was an invitation to reconsider casual notions of wisdom and folly.
Wallace and Seeger barnstormed across the segregated South for a doomed third-party campaign for the presidency, that of a New Party, which came to be known as Progressive. They were demanding that the United States make real the promise of World War II as a liberation struggle meant to defeat fascism abroad and at home. They knew they were being portrayed as nostalgic New Dealers who refused to give up on the hope that died with Franklin Roosevelt; as dupes of the Soviet Union in a nascent Cold War; as naïve idealists. Yet they persevered, in the face of the physical violence of the Jim Crow South and the ideological violence of a dawning Red Scare. This was not just their own political project; it was the mission that FDR had outlined in the last months of his life.
“We cannot be content,” explained Roosevelt in the waning days of World War II, “no matter how high [the] general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is