The Completely Incorrect History of the Democratic Party
I know we’re done with the Peter Beinart book club, and the poor guy is getting picked on a lot this week. But I can’t resist, and as President Bush said after teasing a legally blind reporter for wearing sunglasses, `I needle you guys out of affection." (The bully’s excuse, doubly vicious because so plainly untrue, and forces the victim to be courteous.) I wouldn’t say that I needle Beinart out of affection -- I don’t know him well, but I admire him for trying to produce something of substance out of the admission that he was wrong about Iraq -- but out of frustration with the fact that he so often seems to start off o.k. and then gets things so spectacularly wrong.
So here’s his latest. In a defense of the Clinton Administration (which I’m totally comfortable with, by the way, having seen myself recently described as a "Clinton Democrat" and not flinching) Beinart gives the following thumbnail history of the Democratic Party in the 1970s:
In reality, the Democratic Party didn’t lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration.
Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson’s Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.
In The Good Fight, it’s not quite so clear that this is how he would sum up the history, but Wow! Let’s take that second paragraph one point at a time:
By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism,
Um, don’t know what you’re talking about here. McGovern was opposed to the Vietnam War, which was a war against communism. But the "enlightened" anti-communist liberals also opposed that war. To say that opposing the Vietnam is tantamount to "virtual abandonment of anticommunism" is the same as arguing that opposing the Iraq war is a virtual abandonment of opposition to terrorism. Since Beinart is not now willing to make either argument, he cannot keep baiting McGovern as insufficiently anti-communist, in the same way that he cannot continue to bait Iraq war opponents (among whom he now counts himself) for being insufficiently anti-terrorist. Although he makes a good rhetorical effort to do so.
and advocating racial quotas
o.k., the point here seems to be that the Truman-through-Johnson Democrats stood for "racial integration," whereas McGovern abandoned that principle by "advocating racial quotas." That assumes that affirmative action is somehow antithetical to integration,rather than a means to achieve it. But even if you accept that quotas are antithetical to the older ideal of race-blind integration, it seems worth noting that actual racial quotas were introduced into American political life by President Richard M. Nixon, who as it happens was McGovern’s Republican opponent in 1972.
(It’s possible that Beinart is referring to something much more arcane here, namely the internal reforms in the Democratic Party nominating process, implemented by a commission McGovern chaired. Those reforms included some criteria to ensure sufficient numbers of women and minorities were delegates to the convention, which was an important move given that southern states still produced all-white delegations. Beinart follows a traditional neo-conservative argument -- first advanced by Jeanne Kirkpatrick -- that the McGovern-Fraser reforms led to a fragmentation of the New Deal Democratic coalition into identity group politics. But if this is Beinart’s point, and even if he and Jeanne Kirkpatrick are right, it is bizarre to call it an "abandoment" of racial integration. At worst, it was an excessive commitment to integration. And it is also an event of very minor significance, except in the worldview of the neo-cons.)
in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson’s Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three
I’ll assume he means principle number two, "an expanding welfare state." I suppose this is a version of the argument that if only that most reckless of big spenders, Saint Scoop, had been elected president in 1976, all would be well. There are a lot of reasons the Carter presidency failed; not spending money on social programs wasn’t one of them. This was the era of CETA, after all. (The big public jobs program, which paid for my last summer in high school.) Carter didn’t have the sway over Congress that LBJ had, and both fiscal and economic circumstances were very different. Nor is "expanding welfare state" (that is, spending) a principle in itself -- expanding economic security is.
And that point Beinart immediately concedes, when it comes to Clinton:
If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party’s reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.
Yes! I think that’s basically right. But celebrating Clinton as an economic conservative is the complete opposite of arguing that Carter’s mistake was that he was an economic conservative who didn’t launch big programs the way LBJ did.
I have no gripe with Beinart’s rehabiliation of Clinton. I was never very critical of Clinton, and now that we really understand just how vicious the right-wing machine is, we have to appreciate that he did not have the freedom of movement that LBJ had, and that he made almost as much as could be made of his severely constrained political circumstances. It should be possible to make that case without trashing a couple decades of well-meaning, serious liberals -- as committed to anti-communism, racial fairness and broadly shared economic security as their elders -- who just happened to lack the policial skills of an LBJ or Clinton.
One could implicate The New Republic as a breeding ground for people like Beinart. In this case, he is not a bad guy, but when he reaches for a serious bit of analysis, his history, and his version of the Big Story is entirely right-wing. Thank you for reminding me of history that I myself experienced.
It's important, too; McGovern did democratize party-building, and it was an era when Democrats still had faith in Affirmative Action. For all the mistakes that might have been made, it wasn't in giving up on integration. The truth is, this degree of commitment scared off the middle class. We had changed the South, but it was the big cities of the Northeast that defeated real integration, that is, the integration of neighborhoods, with every breath. So McGovern's party was too principled. The average white guy, soon to be a Reagan Republican, was scared to death of rioting, and didn't want his property values to decline. The New Deal had been on his side. He was more and more sure that it wasn't anymore. The welfare queen was in the wings.
And it's very, very strange, and proof of the conservative ability to spin yarns, that the war that JFK continued from Eisenhower, and then LBJ jumped in with both feet, and which Nixon campagined to end "honorably" -- no mention of victory, imagine what you will -- and which ended disastrously on the watch of a Republican president, is blamed on Democrats, still. Or on the protesters. Or on the newspapers. Anywhere but the fact that, anti-Communist crusade or not, you're not going to win all the struggles, especially when the communism had gotten completely mixed up with the long struggle against colonialism.
June 16, 2006 2:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
J. McCutchen "JmacSF"
San Francisco. CA
Where does Beinart get his history? I worked on the Hill during the first two years of the Carter administration, and his must have been in some alternate universe.
But he is soooo cute
June 16, 2006 3:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sure at some point while writing this you said to yourself "why bother?"
TNR seems to be chock full of these so-called Dems who continue to attack "their own."
TNR does stand for The New Republicans, doesn't it?
Just as the neocons are an unpleasant spinoff of Dems, so are the TNR GOP-Lite crowd.
As a Methodist who looks at Nazarenes and Church of God spinoffs, I often feel the same ickiness about my particular Protestant denomination.
Err ... on preview, what swift2 said.
June 16, 2006 5:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
At least they're consistent. Like opponents of the Vietnam War, opponents back then of a costly, irrational arms buildup rather than arms control were not soft on the commies. Beinart wants Scoop Jackson back, but at least you know where he's coming from. Those who doubt that his prescription for the present involves more than what Kevin Drum and Matt Y. called verbal disagreement had better think again.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
June 16, 2006 6:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
More evidence that conservatives give up thinking when they take the pledge. Beinart can't even keep his points correctedly numbered, much less remember history correctly.
The motto must be "Never Look Back"; at facts, your own writing, etc. This isn't politics, it's religion, or at least faith. And faith must be practiced, so talking points are chanted every morning.
June 16, 2006 6:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lets get a little samity check here - while I agree with everything Mark writes, Beinart is not a conservative, at least if we are agreeing to use the comon meaning.
Mark,
Something interesting did happen in the 70s, and it has been unfortunate, although I am not sure where to put the blame. Jared Bernstein, over at Maxspeak, makes the case that we abandoned We are all In This Together(WITT) for You are On Your Own (YOYO) economic policy. Stagflation ushered in an era of inflation targetting at the expense of full employment policies (in the sense of labor having any negotiating power). We have experienced wage stagnation since, except a brief period in the late Clinton adminstration.
It is difficult to disentangle the asset bubble from the across the board wage increases, and the general sense of the labor market creating pressure for employers to become innovative in improving all aspects of working conditions. My sense is that this period also represented a political shift, unfortunately not necessarily toward liberals or progressives, but at least toward forward thinking, positive, anything is possible attitude. GWB, and his horrible policies (for most Americans, perhaps not for his biggest donors and friends) have eliminated that sense.
But I think people remember it, and it would certainly be nice to get back to a general feeling of shared progress.
June 16, 2006 6:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I believe racial quotas like busing was introduced not by Nixon but by the Supreme Court. Nixon took advantage of the disaffection in both the South and Urban ethnic neighborhoods about such policies and offered a basically separate but mostly equal economic policy.
As for McGovern. His call for America to "come home" was more than just about Vietnam. It was a far broader statement about the role of the United States in the world. The theme became so associated with isolationism the McGovern campaign belatedly reminded people that McGovern was a decorated bomber fighter in WWII.
What Mark leaves out is the Tom Haydens, the students that surrounded Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 election and in general the New Left who may have hated Nixon but also had very little use for Liberal Democrats such a Truman,Kennedy and Johnson.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 16, 2006 7:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've decided I have two Beinert beefs.
1. He conflates the best way to fight terrorism with the best way to make political hay out of it (I would argue the two are totally opposite).
2. The "Islamofascism" shell game. The shell game goes something like this:
"Islamic maniacs want to create a fascist state...and Islamic states are non-democratic and ignore the interests of their people...ergo we must attack Islamic states."
Now wait one darn minute!
Zarquawi himself was imprisoned - by his own country for nine years. Is Saudi Arabia "non liberal"? Damn straight it is - but now the Saudis themselves are battling the same maniacs who despise the US. In fact, Bin Laden's hates Saudi Arabian rulers as well as Americans.
Syria is advanced as this great threat to America, but they're one of the most secular states in the region (Bath party again).
So you take the biggest maniacs in the world, then conflate the motives of the states they come from (in fact, states that are themselves threatened by the maniacs, to a much larger degree than the US is threatened by them) with the maniac's motives.
Since we now have countries to invade, you better hold on to that trillion dollar a year Pentagon pork - ergo the cold war Pentagon just keeps on rollin' along.
Neat trick.
Somebody show me otherwise.
June 16, 2006 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Daniel, sorry, you're wrong on several fronts here.
Racial quotas were introduced by Nixon in the Philadelphia plan, which had to do with federal contracting. You seem to be confusing actions by the courts (supreme and otherwise) in the '70s to enforce Brown v. with the introduction of quotas, but in fact even in the broadest reading, you can't call enforced bussing a quota system, and chronologically, it came later than the Philadelphia plan.
Nor are you accurately reconstructing the "come home America" motif: had McGovern meant "let's withdraw from NATO and bring the troops out of South Korea and renounce our SEATO obligations," he would have said that. He didn't, and he didn't mean to. His bomber pilot status, meanwhile, was part of his campaign from the start.
and you are sadly confused about 1968. In 1968, there was a small but active and visible movement, the New Left, and the McCarthy campaign sheared off those willing to go "clean for Gene." Some elements of the New Left supported McCarthy, some would have supported Bobby Kennedy, and some, of course, supported running a pig for president and/or regarded electoral politics as a sham (a thought confirmed by the fact that Humphrey got the nomination without running in a single primary).
It is true that no one of whom the term New Left would be an accurate description supported Johnson (it's not clear in this context which Kennedy you mean, and i have no idea what relevance Truman has to this at all).
June 16, 2006 8:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is an interesting parallel here.
I would argue that Beinert totally misses the point. What killed the coalition he talks about was escalating Vietnam in the first place. LBJ is the one that made the fundamental mistake. In '72 McGovern was the Murtha or Kerry of his day saying "enough is enough; we have blown it, the war was a mistake from day 1 and we need to get out." It was his opponents in both parties who tried to turn his opposition to one mistaken war into the argument that he was in favor of a complete reveresal of Cold War policy.
Today the mistake was Iraq and once again those who recognized it as such are lumped in with whatever far-left bogeyman can be found (Michael Moore = Tom Hayden, and so on)
June 16, 2006 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
First off I was not talking about 1968 but 1972. In '68 McGovern was a stand-in for the late Robert Kennedy. By 1972 the new rules in the Democratic gave control of the Party's apparatus to the reformers. One result was that many who objected to the tradition party leaders were now in control of the Party.
I totally disagree with your reading of McGovern's slogan. It might not have been a call to get out of Nato but it was a call for the United States to be much more isolationist beyond just withdrawing from Vietnam. There was always a difference between Americans attitudes toward defending Europe and Asia. There was a reason McGovern lost 49 States.
As for quotas. You are right. Though Swann a busing case was decided in 1971. Nixon was very skillful at giving different groups what they wanted while playing one against another.
To answer you last point. Even when I was a volunteer in the McGovern campaign there was a continual fight over the connection of the campaign to the traditional heros of the Democratic Party. That often started with Wilson but most certainly included Truman.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 16, 2006 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
A bit more on affirmative action if not quotas. According to "infoplease" the first reference to affirmative action was by John Kennedy in 1961.
Then there is the following:
Speech defining concept of affirmative action
In an eloquent speech to the graduating class at Howard University, President Johnson frames the concept underlying affirmative action, asserting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination:
"You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair . . . This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result."
Sept. 24, 1965 Executive Order 11246 enforces affirmative action for the first time
Issued by President Johnson, the executive order requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment. Contractors must take specific measures to ensure equality in hiring and must document these efforts. On Oct. 13, 1967, the order was amended to cover discrimination on the basis of gender."
The next item mention is Nixon's "Philadelphia Order."
[Infopease http://www.infoplease.com/spot/affirmativetimeline1.html]
June 16, 2006 10:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
The way I remember it is that stagflation and the hostage crisis wrecked Carter's reputation. But the current occupant of the White House has given new meaning to the expression "failed president." I wish we would reconsider whether or not that term should be applied to Carter.
June 16, 2006 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Daniel, ok, if it's 1972 you were referring to (sorry that wasn't clear to me) then i'll simply say that there was no New Left by 1972. The last gasp of the New Left as we knew it in the '60s was the 1971 Mayday action in Washington, D.C., which led to the single most prescient remark John Mitchell ever made: he was quoted in Time Magazine at the time, looking over the teargassing and arrests going on during that action, as saying "this country is going to go so far to the right you're not even going to recognize it." He was right on the money.
But the point is that the tom haydens of the world weren't part of the democratic party in 1972, nor was the New Left an important aspect of the politics of the election. The campaign was about Nixon wanting "peace with honor" as opposed to McGovern's call for withdrawal from Vietnam and about McGovern's supposed support for "acid, amensty, and abortion," not about McGovern's "isolationism," about which i guess we're going to have to disagree, other than to note that the original point of Mark's post was that McGovern had not "abandoned" the anticommunist stance of traditional postwar liberalism.
Yes, in comparison to Nixon's willingness to stay in Vietnam indefinitely and expand the war to Cambodia, on a relative basis, McGovern looked more "isolationist," but on absolute terms, "come home America" was understood to refer to Vietnam and not to a withdrawal from the world stage.
But like I say, if you think otherwise, we're just going to have to disagree....
June 16, 2006 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS. that must have been quite a volunteer group, Dan, since whether or not McGovern connected to Truman, a guy who hadn't run for office in 24 years by 1972, was certainly not a public issue of the election.
June 16, 2006 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Like most people, including Beinart in his book, commenters here completely misread McGovern famous "come home, America" slogan by taking the words literally. Yes, of course, McGovern linked those words to immediate U. S. withdrawal from the Vietnam debacle.
But the words were a larger metaphor--which he elaborated at length during his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention--about America "coming home" to its best, truest, most democratic instincts, its best values, in short redeeming the promise of our finest ideals.
That was the power of his campaign, and that's why it was also, quite explicitly, separate from the wing of the New Left that hated "Amerika." George McGovern was an upper Midwest Progressive patriot, and "come home America" was that patriot's lament for a better America and his call to his fellow citizens to help evoke it anew.
June 16, 2006 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
We were young, I couldn't vote for McGovern, but very politically involved. Besides I can't remember a Democratic Party speech that did not recall the pantheon of Democratic leaders at least from Wilson and at times back to Jefferson or Jackson.
Doing grunt work leaves a lot of time to discuss politics. One of the issues was the very one being discussed here what did it mean to be a Democratic leader. We were very aware that if Nixon had to go Kennedy and Johnson following the anti-Communist tenets of the Democratic Party got us into the Vietnam in a big way in the first place.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 17, 2006 8:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Your last paragraph about McGovern is exactly right. He was both a war hero and a very good Senator. In many ways the slandering of McGovern by the Republican and Nixon campaign machines were a forerunner of what we still experience today.
Some excerpts from McGovern's 1972 Democratic Convention speech:
"I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.
There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North.
And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.
And then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.
This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves."
Later McGovern added:
"Now, it is necessary in an age of nuclear power and hostile forces that we’ll be militarily strong. America must never become a second-rate nation. As one who has tasted the bitter fruits of our weakness before Pearl Harbor in 1941, I give you my pledge that if I become the President of the United States, America will keep its defenses alert and fully sufficient to meet any danger.
We will do that not only for ourselves, but for those who deserve and need the shield of our strength -- our old allies in Europe and elsewhere, including the people of Israel who will always have our help to hold their Promised Land.
Yet I believe that every man and woman in this Convention Hall knows that for 30 years we have been so absorbed with fear and danger from abroad that we have permitted our own house to fall into disarray.
We must now show that peace and prosperity can exist side by side. Indeed, each now depends on the existence of the other. National strength includes the credibility of our system in the eyes of our own people as well as the credibility of our deterrent in the eyes of others abroad.
National security includes schools for our children as well as silos for our missiles.
It includes the health of our families as much as the size of our bombs, the safety of our streets, and the condition of our cities, and not just the engines of war.
If we some day choke on the pollution of our own air, there will be little consolation in leaving behind a dying continent ringed with steel.
So while protecting ourselves abroad, let us form a more perfect union here at home. And this is the time for that task."
Given that McGovern lost 49 states the problem was not that McGovern was not pledging to defend the country and keep it strong but with the Cold War still going on Americans did not feel confident that he would do enough to defend the country. That is a perception right or wrong, until perhaps Bush, that still plagues Democrats.
[The Amercian Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/shownomination.php?convid=16]
Daniel A. Greenbaum
June 17, 2006 8:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
It was a wonderful speech, and I only wish you had quoted the "come home America" refrain with which McGovern ended the speech--I don't have it in front of me, but it was five or six consecutive grafs where he urged America to "come home" to the best, most democratic, most generous, and most humane expressions of its highest values. It was incredibly moving, and, in fact, was a precise manisfestation of the Niehburhrian creed that Beinart evoked in his book: America should acknowledge its own fallibility and demonstrate its capacity to do better--that is the mark of our greatness.
June 17, 2006 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have to agree with howard. I cast my first vote for McGovern and I can't remember anybody talking about Truman. For you youngsters, even those of us who first voted for McGovern, weren't born when Truman was elected President. The revisionist historians totally leave out the context of the time, boomers vs WWII generation, massive social change, a war when people really did fear the draft. Civil rights, women's rights, war, drugs, Kent State, urban riots, generational divide -- isolationism just wasn't on the agenda. The great thing about that period though was that young people really did still believe we could change the world. Who needed to romanticize Truman or Wilson when you believed you had the future before you?
Time to get back to the future, Democrats.
June 17, 2006 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . McGovern lost 49 states . . . [because] . . . Americans did not feel confident that he would do enough to defend the country.
Nixon won nearly 61% of the popular vote; eight years earlier Johnson won a bit more.
Does that mean that Americans thought Goldwater wouldn't "do enough to defend the country"?
June 17, 2006 10:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
No they thought he was crazy.
Because McGovern lost like arat for a specific reason (a bit moire complex than they didn't trust him to defend the country) that doesen't mean everyone who loses like a rat lost for that reason.
June 17, 2006 4:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
And with no real third party candidates in the race, Mondale got less than 41% of the vote.
Does that mean voters "thought he was crazy"?
June 17, 2006 4:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
People seem to oblivious of the fact that isolationism was basically a conservative phenomenon -- its progressive opposite was internationalism. Isolationism meant opposition to the UN and no foreign aid as well as not involving oneself in foreign war. It verges on slander to suggest that McGovern, a war hero, was in any way connected to isolationism. I find it disturbing that such suggestions should be coming from people who call themselves democrats.
June 18, 2006 12:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nope, just means he wasn't for what the majority of America wanted, which is why Democrats can't say what they are "for" or they lose.
June 18, 2006 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
What did the "majority of America" want?
June 18, 2006 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
What they always want: a free lunch. Until the economy gets totally trashed and even the most obtuse realize you need to fix the defecit people will always vote for whoever says he will cut taxes but not cut any programs they actually like (in other words pretty much all of them that actually cost any real money)
June 19, 2006 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink