Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Frank, Thomas

  Throughout it all burned the basic questions: Who are the Democrats? What is their purpose, and whom do they serve?

  What remained constant throughout these decades of wandering was a certain knowledge of what Democrats were not. On this, everyone agreed: Democrats could no longer be the party of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, with its heavy reliance upon organized labor and its tendency to see issues through the lens of social class. Through the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties, and into the Aughts, as different Democratic reform movements came and went, this was the universal thesis: The New Deal coalition was done for. The reasons for its demise changed as the years passed, however. Some said it was because manufacturing had been overtaken by white-collar work. Others said it was because people were moving to the suburbs … or because people were moving to the Sun Belt … or because unions were dying … or because unions deserved to die … or because white Southerners represented the only hope … or because white Southerners were a lost cause … or because universal, effortless prosperity … or because globalization, or because entrepreneurs, or because computers … or merely because certain groups who made up the old Democratic electorate were now considered a liability.

  Though these many diverse theories, offered up by many different Democratic reform movements, were complicated if not outright contradictory, they all pointed toward the same North Star, toward the same constantly growing awareness of what Democrats had to become in the future: the party of well-educated professionals.

  THE POWELL MEMO OF THE DEMOCRATS

  Our story begins in the smoking aftermath of the 1968 election, with its sharp disagreements over the Vietnam War, its riots during the Democratic convention in Chicago, and with a result that Democrats at the time took to be a disastrous omen: their candidate for the presidency, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. Soul-searching commenced immediately.

  There was one bright spot in the Democrats’ 1968 effort, however. Organized labor, which was the party’s biggest constituency back then, had mobilized millions of working-class voters with an enormous campaign of voter registration, pamphlet-printing, and phone-banking. So vast were their efforts that some observers at the time credited labor with almost winning for Humphrey an election that everyone believed to be lost.1

  Labor’s reward was as follows: by the time of the 1972 presidential contest, the Democratic Party had effectively kicked the unions out of their organization. Democratic candidates still wanted the votes of working people, of course, as well as their donations and their get-out-the-vote efforts. But between ’68 and ’72, unions lost their position as the premier interest group in the Democratic coalition. This was the result of a series of reforms authored by the so-called McGovern Commission, which changed the Democratic party’s presidential nominating system and, along the way, changed the party itself.

  Most of the reforms the McGovern Commission called for were clearly healthful. For example, it dethroned state and local machines and replaced them with open primaries, a big step in the right direction. The Commission also mandated that delegations to its 1972 convention conform to certain demographic parameters—that they contain predetermined percentages of women, minorities, and young people. As it went about reforming the party, however, the Commission overlooked one important group: it did nothing to ensure representation for working-class people.2

  The labor leaders who, up till then, had held such enormous sway over the Democratic Party could see what was happening. After decades of toil on behalf of liberalism, “they were being taken for granted,” is how the journalist Theodore White summarized their attitude. “Said Al Barkan, director of the AFL/CIO’s political arm, COPE, early in 1972 as he examined the scenario about to unfold: ‘We aren’t going to let these Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over our party.’”3

  But take it over they did. The McGovern Commission reforms seemed to be populist, but their effect was to replace one group of party insiders with another—in this case, to replace leaders of workers’ organizations with affluent professionals. Byron Shafer, a political scientist who has studied the 1972 reforms in great detail, leaves no doubt about the class component of the change:

  Before reform, there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white-collar constituencies and in which another, the Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue-collar constituencies. After reform, there were two parties each responsive to quite different white-collar coalitions, while the old blue-collar majority within the Democratic party was forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominantly with its needs.4

  Years ago, when I first became interested in politics, I assumed that this well-known and much-discussed result must have been an unintended effect of an otherwise noble reform effort. It just had to have been an accident. I remember reading about the McGovern Commission in my dilapidated digs on the South Side of Chicago and thinking that no left party in the world would deliberately close the door on the working class. Especially not after workers’ organizations had done so much for the party’s flat-footed nominee. Besides, it all worked out so very, very badly for the Democrats. Neglecting workers was the opening that allowed Republicans to reach out to blue-collar voters with their arsenal of culture-war fantasies. No serious left politician would make a blunder like that on purpose.

  But they did, reader. Leading Democrats actually chose to reach out to the affluent and to turn their backs on workers.5 We know this because they wrote about it, not secretly—as in the infamous “Powell Memo” of 1971, in which the future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell plotted a conservative political awakening—but openly, in tones of proud idealism, calling forthrightly for reorienting the Democratic Party around the desires of the professional class.

  I am referring to a book called Changing Sources of Power, a 1971 manifesto by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, who was one of the guiding forces on the McGovern Commission. Taken along with the Republican Powell Memo, it gives us the plans of the two big party organizations as the country entered upon the disastrous period that would give us Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Gingrich, and the rest. Where Powell was an arch-conservative, however, Dutton was a forthright liberal. Where Powell showed a certain cunning in his expressed desire to reverse the flow of history, Dutton’s tone is one of credulity toward the inflated sense of world-historical importance that surrounded the youth culture of those days. In the book’s preface, for example, he actually writes this: “Never has the future been so fundamentally affected by so many current developments.”

  Dutton’s argument was simple: America having become a land of universal and soaring affluence, all that traditional Democratic stuff about forgotten men and workers’ rights was now as relevant as a stack of Victrola discs. And young people, meaning white, upper-middle-class college kids—oh, these young people were so wise and so virtuous and even so holy that when contemplating them Dutton could scarcely restrain himself. They were “aristocrats—en masse,” the Democratic grandee wrote (quoting Paul Goodman); they meant to “rescue the individual from a mass society,” to “recover the human condition from technological domination,” to “refurbish and reinvigorate individuality.” Better: the young were so noble and so enlightened that they had basically transcended the realm of the physical. “They define the good life not in terms of material thresholds or ‘index economics,’ as the New Deal, Great Society, and most economic conservatives have done,” Dutton marveled, “but as ‘the fulfilled life’ in a more intangible and personal sense.”

  Yes, the young were beyond the reach of economics, and seen from the vantage point of 1971, the Great Depression—the period that formed the identity of the Democratic Party—was a far-off country suffering from incomprehensible troubles. The New Deal was quickly becoming irrelevant. Dutton acknowledged that the Democratic coalition that came together during the dark years of the 1930s—he mentioned city dwellers, farm
ers, and blue-collar workers—still had some life in it, but it either couldn’t or shouldn’t survive much longer. These were two very different kinds of judgments, but for Dutton they seemed to overlap. The main thrust of Changing Sources of Power was that Democrats needed to reach out to the young, educated professionals-to-be because they were better, more liberal people; but Dutton also suggested from time to time that Democrats needed to do this because that was the direction the world was going. “Contending economic classes” no longer defined the political drama, Dutton wrote; instead, the great players on the national stage were the Now Generation and “an affluent and liberating upper-middle-class element.”

  In those days, when American prosperity looked like it would never end, the old economic issues felt to many like they had lost their vitality. Enlightened people didn’t really care anymore about the minimum wage or workers’ rights. But the stuff about authenticity and personal fulfillment—the stuff that appealed to “the young existentialists”—that stuff would win elections. The “balance of political power,” Dutton wrote, had gone “from the economic to the psychological to a certain extent—from the stomach and pocketbook to the psyche, and perhaps sooner or later even to the soul.”

  Then Frederick Dutton, Democratic Party power broker, went farther: he identified workers, the core of the New Deal coalition, as “the principal group arrayed against the forces of change.” They were actually, to a certain degree, the enemy. Dutton acknowledged that it was strange to contemplate such a reversal of the moral alignment that had put his own party into power, but you couldn’t argue with history. “In the 1930s, the blue-collar group was in the forefront,” Dutton recalled. “Now it is the white-collar sector.” Specifically: “the college-educated group.” That was who mattered in the future-altering present of 1971.

  Put yourself in Dutton’s place, and you can perhaps understand where he was coming from. In the Sixties, labor unions seemed like big, unresponsive, white-dominated organizations that were far closer to the comfortable and the powerful than they were to the discontented. Changing Sources of Power appeared shortly after a disturbing presidential run by Alabama governor George Wallace, an arch-segregationist whose appeal was then thought to be greatest among working-class whites. The culture in those years was saturated with depictions of blue-collar bigots doing scary things like shooting the main characters in Easy Rider and rioting in support of the Vietnam War.6 Everyone back then knew what reactionary clods FDR’s old constituents had become; just look at All in the Family.

  Still, a man like Dutton should have known better. A glance at the union placards carried by marchers at Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington—or at the way the United Auto Workers lobbied for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—or at the 1968 strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis—should have been enough to suggest that the Archie Bunker stereotype was not the whole story. Besides, what kind of Democrat gives up on basic economic issues in order to focus on matters of “the psyche” and “the soul”? This was not politics; it was psychotherapy. Worse: it was aristocratic hauteur disguised as enlightenment.

  Worse still: regardless of how sclerotic and self-interested unions were in 1971, closing the door on working people’s organizations also meant closing the door on working people’s issues. That, in turn, consigned future generations of Americans—young or old, enlightened or obtuse, it mattered not—to spend their lives in a society more similar to the Gilded Age than to the affluent 1960s. Although Dutton surely didn’t intend for matters to unfold this way, his reverence for the professional class and his contempt for the “legatees of the New Deal” opened the way for something truly unfortunate: the erasure of economic egalitarianism from American politics.

  A REALIGNMENT OF CHOICE

  What distinguished Dutton’s call for realignment from so many of the others that have appeared over the years was that, thanks to his position on the McGovern Commission, he had a certain amount of power to put his theories into effect. “Every major realignment in U.S. political history,” he declared in Changing Sources of Power, “has been accompanied by the coming of a large new group into the electorate.” There’s something to that, but what Dutton proposed, and what the Democratic Party in fact undertook, was something very different: a realignment of choice. Democratic leaders decided to reorient the party after 1968 not because this was necessary for survival but because they distrusted their main constituency and had started to lust after a new and more sophisticated one.

  The crucial moment in that realignment, as I have mentioned, came in 1972, after the Democrats had reformed their presidential nominating process and chosen George McGovern himself as their candidate. The result was not a good one for Democrats, but they stayed the course. As a senator from South Dakota, McGovern had a decent record on working-class issues, but the public identified him with the Democratic Party’s new favorite group: affluent suburban liberals. In fact, according to one account, McGovern did better among these “highly skilled professionals” than he did with the Democrats’ traditional blue-collar constituency, many of whom were lured away by the Richard Nixon reelection campaign. What this meant was that McGovern romped in prestigious college towns and also came out ahead in the college-heavy and distinctly professional state of Massachusetts. Nearly everywhere else, however, his particular demographic appeal was a recipe for disaster. He went down in one of the greatest electoral wipeouts in American history.7

  Not everything was doom and debacle. Among other things, the McGovern campaign launched the political careers of several new-generation Democrats, including the future senator Gary Hart and the future president Bill Clinton, who worked on the 1972 campaign in Texas. And if you looked beneath the surface of McGovern’s results, according to a 1974 book by the future Clinton associate Lanny Davis, you discovered that taking the professional vote away from Republicans wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. The title of Davis’s account was The Emerging Democratic Majority—a title that would reappear later in the long, dark decades of Democratic infighting and exile—and his argument was as follows: if Democrats could win back white, working-class voters while hanging on to their new, affluent-suburban electorate, their triumph would be assured.

  But that never really happened. Instead, the party intensified its courtship of the comely professional-managerial class. In 1974, in reaction to the Watergate scandal, a huge group of Democrats was elected to Congress—new-school Democrats, that is, who seemed to be largely uninterested in traditional Democratic issues of economic equality. “The new Democrats came out of the anti-war protests and the McGovern campaign, the Peace Corps and the women’s movement, the professions and the suburbs,” writes historian Jefferson Cowie, “but not the union halls and the wards.”8

  Their de facto leader was the newly elected senator Gary Hart, McGovern’s former campaign manager, a man who made his name denouncing old-fashioned, working-class politics in favor of a more tech-friendly vision. Hart became a symbol of the Sixties generation’s revolt against the workerist politics of their parents. “The End of the New Deal” was the title of Hart’s standard 1974 campaign speech; he liked to mock old-school libs as “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” Later on, Hart would lead the technology-minded politicians the media nicknamed the “Atari Democrats”; his 1984 run for the Democratic presidential nomination was celebrated as a blow against the New Deal past. It was also the occasion for the media’s discovery of the affluent and tasteful “yuppie”—the “Young Urban Professional” whose rise was supposed to signal yet another break from the Democrats’ traditional blue-collar demographic.9

  The Jimmy Carter presidency was an earlier milestone. At first Carter had seemed like a man who could recover the party’s historic constituencies. But once in office, he broke with the New Deal tradition in all sorts of highly visible ways, cancelling public works projects and conspicuously snubbing organized labor. With the help of a Democratic Congress, he enacted the first of the era’s really big tax cuts
for the rich and also the first of the really big deregulations. As though to prove how tough and post-partisan he could be, in 1980 he and Paul Volcker, his hand-picked Fed chairman, put the country on an austerity diet that was spectacularly punishing to the ordinary working people who had once made up the Democratic base.

  Carter turned out to be a sort of archetype, the first in a series of passionless Democratic technocrats. That working people felt the brunt of Carter’s policies was no coincidence; this was not a group for whom his administration felt a great deal of sympathy. In a 1981 interview looking back at the administration’s deeds, Carter adviser Alfred Kahn, an economist, had this to say about the fights over deregulation and inflation:

  I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. You may say that’s inhumane; I’m putting it rather baldly but I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from competition can increase their wages much more rapidly than the average without regard to their merit or to what a free market would do, and in so doing exploit other workers.10

  This is a Democrat, remember, and what he was objecting to was the way unions supposedly allowed workers to prosper “without regard to their merit.” It is a view we shall hear again as we proceed.

  All these Democrats worked to sever their ties with the past, but for the nation’s mainstream political commentators the Democrats’ reorientation was always and forever insufficient. Regardless of what they did, they still hadn’t distanced themselves from the New Deal finally enough; they were still too beholden to manufacturing and blue-collar workers. Democrats would run for the presidency on a professional-friendly platform of high-minded post-partisanship and be rejected by the electorate—and then, in the aftermath, those same Democrats would be ritually denounced by Washington’s TV thinkers as examples of the New Deal’s exhaustion and irrelevance. It happened to the post-ideological Jimmy Carter in his bid for reelection; it happened to the budget-balancing Walter Mondale; it happened to the technocratic centrist Michael Dukakis—each one of them magically transformed on the day of their defeat into an instructional film on why Democrats needed to embrace post-ideological, budget-balancing, technocratic centrism.11