TAKEOVER
How the Left’s Quest for Social Justice
Corrupted Liberalism
Wilmington, Delaware
Contents
IntroductionThe New Progressives
Chapter 1Legacies of the Sixties
Chapter 2From the Streets into the Courtroom and the Neighborhoods
Chapter 3Brave Green World: Radical Environmentalism and the New Social Justice
Chapter 4Controlling Life and Death
Chapter 5The Dream of National Health Insurance
Chapter 6The Long March Leads to the White House
Chapter 7The Heights of Power
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
The New Progressives
How did liberals get to be the way they are today?
This book answers that important question. It is a question more and more Americans began asking as they witnessed the ascent of Barack Obama, the most left-wing Democrat to be nominated for president since George McGovern in 1972 and arguably the most progressive president ever elected.
Searching for answers, many commentators have looked back to the progressive movement of the early twentieth century. To observers such as talk radio host Glenn Beck, author Jonah Goldberg, and historian Ronald J. Pestritto, modern liberalism is of a piece with the progressivism that President Woodrow Wilson embodied a century ago.1 To be sure, today’s liberals, many of whom embrace the label progressive, share the older progressive faith in using governmental power to address societal ills. But this focus on the similarities between modern liberalism and early-twentieth-century progressivism overlooks a sharp break in the history of liberalism that began in the 1960s. Only by understanding that break—and the radicalism that accompanied it—can we fully understand our current political situation.
The older progressive tradition primarily aimed to address the ills of industrial capitalism. Progressive reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson sought strict regulations on business to protect the rights and health of workers and citizens and to deal with the problem of corporate monopoly. They proposed an associative order in which civic and business organizations cooperated with government at the municipal, state, and federal levels to promote the general welfare. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal built on this reform tradition by providing a “safety net”—old-age pensions, unemployment benefits, and welfare payments. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society went further in the 1960s, extending grants and loans to college students, establishing the Jobs Corps, creating Medicare and Medicaid, and declaring war on poverty. But this progressive tradition did not seek to dismantle capitalism itself. Even the New Deal, for all its statist sympathies, refused to nationalize banks or ailing industries during the worst global economic crisis in history.
The liberal agenda today is much more radical and encompassing. It is no coincidence that upon taking office, President Obama pushed for government control of nearly every aspect of American life—through nationalized health care, environmental regulation, caps on energy use, financial regulation, and a range of other governmental intrusions. The roots of this radicalism lie in a strategy that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge the American corporate order.
Infiltrating the Establishment
The New Left that came of age in the 1960s was not an extension of Roosevelt-Wilson progressive reform. Nor, for that matter, was it a continuation of New Deal or Great Society liberalism. Indeed, these activists denounced mainstream liberalism as the enemy of reform. Influenced by a rekindled interest in Marx, they saw the New Deal regulatory state as benefiting large corporations, and the New Deal welfare state as only an ameliorative measure designed to maintain class privilege. Where earlier progressives were concerned mostly with the failings of industrial capitalism, the new activists of the 1960s addressed the problems of a postindustrial order, which were related more to affluence than to scarcity. The range of concerns thus expanded beyond poverty and inequality to include corporate greed, toxic waste, unsafe consumer products, environmental abuse, overpopulation, and many other issues. These radicals disparaged consumption and corporate capitalism. They espoused what they called community control and direct democracy, though leaders of this movement generally came from elite backgrounds and aimed to impose their visions of “social justice” on the rest of society. This emergent Left was a new political phenomenon.
By the early 1970s, the New Left’s anti–Vietnam War protests and other street activism had faded away. But the radicalism remained. The activists simply changed their tactics for remaking American society. After fighting against the establishment, radical leaders discovered that they could achieve much more by working within the system. They learned to harness politics and the courts to pursue what they thought of as social justice. Becoming lawyers, professors, journalists, consumer advocates, union leaders, and even politicians, left-wing activists morphed into a new movement—the “New Progressives.”
This book examines how the New Progressives colonized many areas of American life in creative and powerful ways. They achieved their two most significant successes in rewriting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating rules and in remaking the legal profession. In the first case, New Progressive activists got their opportunity following the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Antiwar activists were outraged that Vice President Hubert Humphrey had won the Democratic nomination despite earning a small percentage of primary votes. The Democratic Party responded by appointing a commission, headed by antiwar senator George McGovern, to revise the party’s process for selecting delegates. Reformers on the commission—especially young staffers who came out of the antiwar movement—quietly rewrote the rules to give much greater power to left-wing activists, including peace protesters, feminists, environmentalists, community organizers, homosexual-rights advocates, and ethnic-minority leaders. These rules changes have had long-term consequences for the Democratic Party, enshrining identity politics and pushing the party much further to the left. As this book will show, Barack Obama almost certainly could not have won the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination without the McGovern Commission’s changes favoring progressive activists.
Still, New Progressives maintained an uneasy alliance with the Democratic Party. Left-wing activists wanted to radically transform American society—by pursuing militant environmentalism; tearing down corporate power; crusading for population control, abortion, and euthanasia; pushing for nationalized health insurance; and more. But electoral politics meant compromise, working with lobbying interests, and trusting politicians interested only in winning elections. Often, too, New Progressives found that voters did not embrace their radical agenda. They needed to find a way to impose their vision on the country. That is where the second notable achievement, in the field of law, proved so consequential.
New Progressive legal activists practically invented the field of public interest law. Growing out of the rights revolution of the 1960s and especially the anticorporate crusading of Ralph Nader, a left-wing legal movement took advantage of liability law and class-action suits to go after businesses, physicians, civic organizations, government agencies, and any number of other groups. By the mid-1970s, leading New Progressive legal thinkers had laid out the strategy for taking down corporations in the name of giving power to the people. One prescient essay outlined how class-action suits could be used to exact hundreds of billions of dollars from tobacco and liquor companies, the pharmaceutical industry, food manufacturers, and other groups—exactly what activist lawyers would do in the succeeding decades.
The courts also became the place to seek social transformation, especially in the area of abortion rights. The appeal of circumventing the normal democratic process was not lost on New Progressives. According to the lawyer who argued for the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, she and her fellow activists recognized that “around the nation, the big advances seemed to be coming from the courtrooms, not legislative halls.”2
The story of the New Progressives is one of radicalism tied up with elite power. Well-heeled foundations provided extensive financial support to the New Progressive judicial activism. Most notably, the Ford Foundation funded public interest law and legal clinics at the country’s leading law schools, helping make these elite institutions training grounds for left-wing legal activism. Both the legal professoriate and the student body shifted increasingly leftward. An October 1967 survey at Harvard Law showed that 31 percent of the students identified as Republicans; by 1972 those voting Republican had dropped to a mere 11 percent—this at a time when McGovern the Democrat was losing in a landslide. Similarly, in a 1956 survey at Yale Law School, 56 percent of entering students described themselves as “liberal” or “far left”; by 1972, this aggregate figure had risen to 80 percent, with fully 32 percent describing themselves as “far left.”3
The Ford Foundation also funded a host of public interest law firms that reflected the wide-ranging agenda of the New Progressives. Among the groups the foundation helped establish were the Center for Law in the Public Interest, the Public Advocates, the Education in Law Center, the International Project, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Native American Rights Fund, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, the Citizens Communication Center, the Georgetown Institute for Public Interest Representation, and the League of Women Voters Education Fund.4
Public-sector unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), as well as key industrial unions, contributed crucially to this radical matrix by providing funds and personnel to activist causes, including community organizing, voter registration drives, and political campaigns. They cooperated with organizations such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in campaigns for low-income housing development, health-care reform, political mobilization, and other causes. Funding for these activities often came from philanthropic foundations as well as wealthy corporate backers. By the 1990s, for example, hospital associations and large private insurance corporations backed national health insurance reform. Industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) joined with hard-pressed corporations to shift long-term pension and health-care benefits to the American public.
New Progressives involved themselves in an astounding variety of causes. Fears of overpopulation and environmental degradation, for example, led activists to oppose nuclear power and to promote animal rights, regulations for food packaging, use of mass transportation, construction of low-income housing, and restriction of population growth. One of the leading figures in the population-control movement was John D. Rockefeller III, heir to the oil fortune. Rockefeller supported abortion on demand, family planning, sex education in schools, immigration restrictions, and more.
Given the array of issues it has pursued, the New Progressive movement is diffuse and fluid. Its goals are sometimes ambiguous. Causes have appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared. For a time, the leading issue was nuclear development, followed by suburbanization, unsafe drinking water, food additives, McDonald’s Styrofoam containers, a nuclear weapons freeze, the destruction of rain forests, and nationalized health care.
What unites these disparate causes is the rallying cry of social justice. Radicals have never defined the exact meaning of “social justice.” The concept appeals to the heart and to good intentions. It has allowed New Progressives to form alliances, at various times, with concerned Americans who would resist being called radicals. Even some activists drawn to the New Progressive banner have been well-intentioned reformers who sought answers to legitimate problems related to poverty, environmental pollution, health care, and corporate abuse. Yet their mistrust of corporations and their ignorance of, and hostility to, free markets led them increasingly toward solutions that relied on big government and technocratic and legal elites.
That reliance on governmental power, the faith in elites to determine the collective good, and the suspicion of free markets are all hallmarks of the New Progressives. Indeed, only by examining how the New Progressives emerged and the radical departure they represent can we see the close connections among seemingly unrelated issues. Modern liberalism can appear to be a grab bag of causes: radical environmentalism, class warfare, abortion rights, nationalized health care, feminism, regulations on the free market, assisted suicide, sex education, caps on energy, and on and on. To these new-style liberals, the breadth of the agenda is the very point. They call for new standards of public morality to be built on a foundation of social justice in which individual rights are subsumed in the collective interests of the community—with the New Progressives defining those collective interests, of course.
Such public morality does not stop at determining how government treats the needy and how much leeway businesses are given to operate. It involves how all citizens live their lives: how much energy they consume, the health-care plans they purchase, the cars they buy, the lightbulbs they use, and even the food they eat and drink. Big corporations, New Progressives suggest, manipulate consumers with sophisticated advertising campaigns, often targeting children, the poor, or ethnic minorities. To these activists, health warnings, public education campaigns, and common sense are not enough to ensure that consumers make the right choices; the state must step in to restrict those choices.
In short, this leftist agenda is intent on transforming America into a European-style social democracy, run by a governmental elite from the top down. If the public and corporations cannot be cajoled by the argument of social justice, then coercion through new legislation or court rulings is necessary. With an electorate that has remained stubbornly center-right through the decades, such coercion has often proved necessary.
Into the White House
Progressives did, however, finally achieve their long-sought electoral triumph when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008. Sickened by the centrism of Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, progressives had long looked for a new leader. After flirting with John Edwards, they found that person in Barack Obama, who had come directly out of New Progressive circles. The son of a Kenyan father and an American mother who had worked for the Ford Foundation in Asia, Obama had been educated at Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He had worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, devoting himself to the cause of social justice and to activist methods. Most important, he shared progressive concerns, opposing the war in Iraq, calling for nationalized health insurance, proposing new energy and environmental policies, urging the end of corporate greed, and advocating arms control and the reduction of nuclear weapons.
In 2008, Obama stepped forward to harness progressives into a well-organized political movement. Once in office, he proposed transformative change: a sweeping national health insurance program, an extensive “cap and trade” energy policy, unprecedented regulation of finance and banking, and a government purchase of a big chunk of America’s largest automobile company. In 2009, the government invested heavily in the takeover of General Motors, the insurer AIG, the student loan program, and many of the nation’s home mortgages. If the president got his way, the New Progressive elite that ran the government would control health care, automobiles, energy use, nutrition, and banking. There would be top-down control, oversight, and regulation from cradle to grave. In Obama’s America, the nanny state had become the nanny-to-granny state.
1
Legacies of the Sixties
Like many changes in American life, the transformation of liberalism began in the 1960s. Until that crucial decade, liberals could be found in both major political parties, although the Democratic Party, as the majority party, contained more liberals. At the beginning of the sixties, liberals, suspicious of big business, influenced by the social gospel, hopeful that an informed public would make enlightened decisions, and confident that increased governmental power and regulation could cure all ills, were still close to the economic and social reform ideas of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. To these tenets, Harry Truman had added support for civil rights and strong anticommunism.
The sixties rattled liberals, challenged their premises, and turned liberalism to the left. John F. Kennedy used money, television, and primaries to destroy the boss-led convention nomination system, while Lyndon Johnson completed the New Deal agenda. Meanwhile, the civil rights revolution introduced moral politics, participatory democracy, egalitarianism, and voting rights. Young radicals emerged, while African Americans, women, and other groups embraced identity politics. Then the Vietnam War brought antiwar protesters into the Democratic Party. In 1972, George McGovern cultivated identity politics and ran for president on progressive principles. Although McGovern lost in a landslide, he pushed the Democrats permanently leftward. By the eighties the Democrats were increasingly a party of New Progressives devoted to elite control of governmental power in pursuit of social justice.
Kennedy and Johnson: Old-Style Liberals
In the early 1960s, Americans innocently embraced the present as prelude to a better tomorrow and imagined easy successes. The sixties were the “go-go” years. The stock market rose, and the jet set cavorted in Capri. The government planned to send an American to the moon (outer space), while others plotted to turn America on to psychedelic drugs (inner space). No one affirmed the country’s optimism more than President John F. Kennedy.1 “We were guys of the fifties,” one of Kennedy’s advisers later recalled, “who thought there was nothing we, or America, couldn’t do.”2 Presenting himself as a dynamic, can-do guy, Kennedy was nevertheless only a moderate liberal. This cautious liberalism along with a mastery of television style, sex appeal, charm, and wit enabled him to enjoy unusual popularity, even though he accomplished little as president.
Traditionally, the Democrats had been an umbrella party that included liberals, moderates, and conservatives. Big-city party bosses, who ran the party until the late 1960s, tended to be pragmatic. They were less interested in whether a candidate was liberal or moderate than in who could win. Although Kennedy had cultivated the bosses, he invented a new nomination method that employed money, television, and primaries. This new system gave liberal candidates an edge in gaining nominations. Liberal Democrats were more likely to give money to candidates, to work on campaigns, and to vote in primaries. The old system produced Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who won and governed successfully, as well as Adlai Stevenson, a shrewd choice to hold the party together in an inevitable loss to the popular Dwight Eisenhower. The new system led to Jimmy Carter, who could not govern, and George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, neither of whom could win a national election.3
After Kennedy’s assassination, the presidency fell to Lyndon Johnson, a thirties New Dealer who had survived in Texas politics by keeping his liberalism to himself.4 Johnson broke a southern Senate filibuster to pass the Civil Rights Act.5 After winning a landslide election in 1964, Johnson moved to complete the New Deal agenda. He pushed successfully for the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, the government health program for senior citizens that promised to end the nightmare by which elderly Americans lost their homes in an effort to pay high medical bills. He expanded Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, urban renewal, and funding for public education and for colleges, including the new federal student loan program. Johnson’s War on Poverty included the Jobs Corps for unemployed youths as well as neighborhood job training programs.6
Johnson’s domestic social programs were impressive in breadth and scope. In effect, all the New Deal proposals from the thirties, except national health insurance, were enacted. He had to skip universal health care because there were not enough votes in Congress to pass it, but he saw Medicare as a first step. In 1966, Johnson said, “Medicare need not just be for people over sixty-five. That is where we started.” An incrementalist, he believed that Medicare would lead inevitably to national health insurance. Expressing a view common among New Deal liberals of his generation, Johnson always thought that half a loaf was better than nothing.7
Johnson’s completion of the New Deal agenda, except for national health insurance, suggested that the old-style liberalism of Kennedy and Johnson had reached its natural limit. These liberals had always imagined, as had Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, that the government’s role was to provide a helping hand. The purpose of social programs was to make it possible for average people or the poor to enjoy the same opportunities that the upper middle class or the wealthy were able to provide for themselves. Hence, government-aided home ownership, freeways, mass transit, college loans, job training, and health care for the elderly (Medicare) and the needy (Medicaid). Capitalism was affirmed, and the social order went unchallenged.
Old-style liberalism meshed poorly with the upheavals of the 1960s. Kennedy’s death in 1963 marked the decade’s first shock. That murder shattered the country’s equilibrium, challenged liberal confidence, strained the political structure, disillusioned youthful idealists, and ultimately energized emerging radicals. Alas, Kennedy’s assassination would not be the last. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy less than five years later would complete a trilogy. The civil rights movement, college student protests, and peace marches increasingly filled the streets and appeared on the evening television news. Peaceful black demonstrations (“Freedom Now”) turned into riots in Watts and across the country (“Black Power”), and radical opponents of the Vietnam War brought chaos at home (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”). Violence escalated. At the end of the decade, H. Rap Brown, a black militant, called violence as “American as cherry pie.”8
The Civil Rights Revolution
In the last half of the twentieth century the civil rights movement was the most consequential social movement in the United States. While important for the rights of African Americans, the movement also transformed politics in both obvious and subtle ways. Ever since slavery ended in 1865, black Americans had remained second-class citizens. In the South, they were subjected to a formal legal system of racial separation and white supremacy. In the North, informal segregation was the norm, but there was access to the ballot. As a result of the Great Migration to the North, especially during and after World War II, black voters by 1948 proved pivotal in carrying such key states as New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Black migration, in many ways, put civil rights onto the national agenda.9
Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist preacher and the son of a prominent Atlanta clergyman, saw that principles of nonviolent protest could be applied to the racial problem in the United States.10 Nonviolent protest enabled African Americans to confront the role that violence had played in southern society. White supremacy in the South depended heavily on violence to crush black resistance. A devout Christian, King believed that black nonviolent protest both occupied the moral high ground and created political opportunity. Whites who attacked peaceful protesters revealed their own degradation against a moral challenge and mocked the claim that they were guardians of virtue. If whites avoided violence, they lacked the means to defeat the protests. Once black nonviolence claimed the moral high ground and neutralized white violence, the civil rights movement would prevail.
King and other movement participants sought to win rights for African Americans, who faced widespread discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. To help unlock opportunities, blacks needed to vote in large numbers. Voters could then push for social change. In the late 1960s rights activists, including King, became increasingly interested in poverty, which was seen as an issue of social justice.11 Most civil rights groups shared the same vision. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had practiced nonviolent protest since the 1940s. In 1960 southern black college students who admired King’s principles founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). While King, CORE, and SNCC provided inspiration and advice, the civil rights movement took place at the local level, where the grassroots did the organizing. The movement was a bottom-up, self-help operation.12
The civil rights movement reshaped politics in four distinct ways. First, the movement believed in and practiced moral politics. Unlike Lyndon Johnson, participants in the civil rights movement believed in the primacy of moral principles. Accordingly, adherents pursued politics in the name of social justice. Although this moral dimension was important to the movement’s essence and drive to success, it proved problematic when applied to electoral politics. Politics is often about old-fashioned horse trading and compromise. Infusing the political system with moral fervor had a cost.13
Many young white liberals—they mostly thought of themselves as liberals at that time—embraced the civil rights movement in the early sixties, and as they did so, they attached themselves to the movement’s moral principles. By the midsixties, even before the Vietnam War, these liberals increasingly wanted to take moral stands on political issues. This is not the way to get Congress to build an interstate highway or a dam, nor does it lead to a “half-loaf” law like Medicare, which helped the elderly but ignored everyone else. Instead, young liberals wanted to use governmental power to pursue social justice with transforming legislation that would end all war, stop racism, and save the planet. Liberal moral enthusiasm made such liberalism less flexible. For a brief time, Todd Gitlin, Mary King, and Tom Hayden thought along these lines.14
The second contribution of the civil rights movement to the new politics was participatory democracy. The phrase was first widely used by young white activists, including Tom Hayden, who helped organize Students for a Democratic Society in 1962, but the concept actually dates to the creation of SNCC in 1960 and, arguably, to CORE in the 1940s. Because nonviolent protest forced participants to risk arrest, group solidarity was important.15 Leaders, of course, had a say. After all, leaders were required to conduct negotiations. But when negotiations seemed futile, and activists believed that the time had come to “put your body on the line,” then the rank and file made the decision, because they were the ones who would face arrest. No one, in a moral movement, could tell another person when to protest. The movement was not an army managed from the top. It was a bottom-up, grassroots movement of ordinary people making extraordinary efforts to gain their own rights.16
Movement participants learned that narrow majorities could not make effective decisions. Instead, the entire group had to participate in meetings that lasted for hours. The grass roots, not leaders, made important decisions. Each person had an equal chance to take part, and the group hashed out all possible reasons for or against a particular course of action. At the end of the meeting, consensus would be reached. Only through this laborious process could the group be kept together. In practice, leaders learned to outwait enemies and spring proposals on a tired group that had been thrashing around aimlessly for hours. A prepackaged proposal could be sold to a rump meeting. In theory, participatory democracy meant the absence of leaders, but in practice it favored the most guileful. These leaders were also usually educated, aggressive males who liked to talk a lot—and had sex appeal.17
Democratic Party liberals—they increasingly called themselves progressives—embraced the civil rights style to impose participatory democracy on party structures. Liberals called for broad voter participation inside the party, discouraged the role of leaders at all levels, and demanded precinct caucuses to pick presidential candidates. Caucuses were arguably the least democratic form of democratic politics ever invented. They attracted far fewer voters than did primaries. Those who attended rarely represented public opinion. And a small number of activists could rig meetings. Caucuses were unfair in another way: women with children found it hard to attend.
Caucuses embraced “persons of the people” who rose mystically from the mud, like Jimmy Carter rising from the Iowa caucuses all the way to the White House (to the ultimate embarrassment of millions of Americans). Of course, Carter was no man of the people but instead a shrewd and often devious politician who propelled his campaign forward in the Iowa caucuses largely through artful dodges. (“On a range of issues,” wrote journalist Jules Witcover in his account of the 1976 presidential race, “he showed all the elusiveness of a scatback.”)18
The third contribution of the civil rights movement to the new politics was egalitarianism. Since the movement’s goal was to tear down segregation and white supremacy, it is understandable that the movement was egalitarian. The movement accepted Thomas Jefferson’s line “All men are created equal,” assuming that “men” could be read to include all people. In the sixties, the egalitarian ethos percolated throughout the liberal community. For example, in 1962 the U.S. Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr declared that the federal courts had a right to control legislative districting. In a subsequent ruling, the court’s liberal majority held that all apportionment had to be based on “one man, one vote.” This egalitarian concept of proportionality in representation can be seen as rooted in the ideology of the civil rights movement. “One man, one vote” became a guiding phrase for the egalitarianism of the new liberalism.19
Liberals used governmental power through statutes, executive orders, agency regulations, or the courts to impose their own particular brand of egalitarianism in numerous situations. In the name of equality and fairness, colleges and employers were forced to adopt racial, ethnic, and gender quotas, despite promises from Hubert Humphrey that the Civil Rights Act (1964) did not impose quotas. Many Jews, who had been subjected to quotas in Europe, were livid. Quotas were also forced on banks. The government eventually wrecked the mortgage industry by forcing lenders to give loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of promoting equality of home ownership.20
In another sign of egalitarianism, progressive campaigns were waged to allow felons to vote, even if they were in prison. (Do the felons get to vote for the warden?) Liberal judges extended many rights to felons under the guise of equal treatment, ignoring the fact that hardened criminals had been locked up because they were dangerous to other people. Thus, the liberal governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis famously furloughed convicted murderer Willie Horton, who fled the state and ended up raping a woman and beating and binding her fiancé.21
Fourth, the civil rights movement pushed for African American voting rights, a cause the Democratic Party quickly adopted. In the early sixties, Attorney General Robert Kennedy encouraged voter registration drives in the South. Increased black registration would make southern senators more pliable on racial issues and might help John Kennedy in 1964. Much of the civil rights campaign in Mississippi from 1960 to 1964 focused on voter registration.22 Because few blacks in Mississippi were allowed to register at that time, the movement decided to organize a private registration system and hold a mock election, called the Freedom Vote. The main idea was to show that a lot of African Americans wanted to vote. The Freedom Vote quickly led to the organization of the mostly black Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP petitioned the 1964 Democratic National Convention to be seated in place of the regular all-white Mississippi delegation, which was pledged to segregation.23
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson wanted to avoid racial politics. The Democratic Party platform committee heard Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony about being evicted from her home, fired, and beaten for trying to register to vote. Hamer’s televised performance was so powerful that Johnson called a sudden press conference to knock her testimony off the air. Johnson offered the MFDP two seats at the convention. The MFDP delegates rejected the proposal. This compromise seemed like half a loaf in violation of moral principle, participatory democracy, and egalitarianism. The Democrats promised the MFDP that the 1968 Mississippi delegation would be integrated and forced to pledge support for the national platform.24
For many on the Left, the Democratic National Convention’s treatment of the MFDP in 1964 was outrageous. This was the moment when morally sensitized leftists split with liberals, and when disillusioned young liberals began to call themselves radicals. They did not care that Lyndon Johnson calculated that he could win a landslide against Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican, by keeping the racial issue under wraps. Johnson planned to use his landslide and the numerous Democrats whom he pulled into Congress on his coattails to pass unprecedented liberal legislation. Johnson’s victory matched his hopes, and in 1965 Congress passed major bills. By then, young radicals, influenced by the civil rights movement, were moving away from liberalism.
Young Radicals
During the conservative 1950s, political radicalism waned. The postwar consumer boom that lifted almost everyone’s living standard replaced the anticapitalist despair of the 1930s, and the Cold War discredited the Communist Party. Americans found it hard to ignore the postwar Soviet threat to Europe, the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.25 Then, too, Senator Joseph McCarthy and others had harassed leftists or scared them into silence. Eisenhower’s presidency suggested political moderation, stability, and tranquillity in what some called the Age of Consensus. Challenges to orthodoxy tended to be more cultural than political.26
In the early 1960s the idea of the New Left was rooted in cultural and political restlessness, as well as inspiration from the civil rights movement. While young radicals showed contempt for middle-class values by embracing sexual freedom and tolerating drugs, their two main ideas were enthusiasm for civil rights and opposition to the Cold War. Anti-anticommunism distinguished the New Left from anticommunist liberals.27 These young radicals, small in numbers at the time, also insisted that the country needed structural reform, a point the influential radical sociologist C. Wright Mills had made. Studies on the Left, a serious scholarly journal published at the University of Wisconsin, provided additional assistance in the birth of the New Left.28
Although the New Left was always loosely organized, it was often identified with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which a small group of radical college students founded in 1962. Tom Hayden largely wrote the Port Huron Statement, SDS’s declaration of principles. In that document, the University of Michigan newspaper editor laid down a vision for a national radical student movement. Attacking the Cold War as dangerous and morally wrong, SDS claimed to be “anti-anti-communist.” SDS had no ties to the Communist Party, although a few members’ parents had been communists. Mostly, SDS looked askance at the old-style liberalism of Kennedy and Johnson.29
Young radicals moved into the New Left from three main directions. One strand was composed of veterans, mostly white, of the southern civil rights movement. They had begun as opponents of racism, but exposure to the South had converted them into radical critics of the American system.30 A second strand was composed of the children of white, middle-class liberals or left-liberals. Unlike their parents, these young radicals did not accept the Cold War. “The present student generation,” wrote Hayden, “was born on the brink of war and has never seen their country at more than wobbling peace.” Kennedy’s saber rattling left them weary of the Cold War and fearful of nuclear annihilation.31 A third strand were the “red-diaper babies,” the children of communists, who retained their parents’ dislike of the Cold War and support of civil rights.32
The name New Left is itself interesting. Young radicals adopted the label to set themselves apart as a generation from communists and other leftist groups, whom they collectively called the Old Left. But the phrase New Left also suggested some continuity.33 Unlike anticommunists, New Leftists did not reject everything about the Old Left. They denounced the sectarian factions that had splintered the Old Left, and they opposed top-down parties that tried to tell members what to think or do. They did not consider SDS essential, and many young radicals never belonged to that organization. Because they were rooted in moral fervor, young radicals were more interested in leftist issues than in building any political structure. In the long run, the inability to construct and maintain organizations limited the New Left’s capacity for political success.
New Leftists had four main goals. First, they sought global peace through a conciliatory foreign policy (“Kumbaya,” sang Joan Baez). Second, they embraced the civil rights movement’s agenda. Third, they wanted the government to create vast new programs to build housing, create jobs, and expand education. They were especially interested in ending poverty, which they saw as the root cause of America’s racial problems. Fourth, they wanted to change the economic system to redistribute wealth. While some were orthodox Marxists who wanted government ownership of the means of production, others favored a Swedish-style welfare state with private ownership, steeply progressive taxes, and vastly expanded government services. In either case, they wanted more governmental power in pursuit of social justice.34
At the same time, young radicals held existing liberal-controlled government in contempt. New Leftists believed that special interests, usually wealthy capitalists, had captured and corrupted elected officials, government bureaucracies, and regulatory agencies. They blamed liberals, who held power in the sixties, for being pressured or co-opted by powerful forces into unwise compromises that sold out the public and, especially, the poor. Young radicals believed liberal co-optation thwarted the will of the larger community. Disliking compromise, these moralists were especially outraged at the idea of accepting half a loaf.35
Radical complaints were part of an assault on hierarchical authority. Young leftists, borrowing from the civil rights movement, sought empowerment for the poor, advocated greater government intervention, and urged massive redistribution of wealth. Taken as a whole, these three positions posed contradictions. All three policies would have required additional large bureaucracies, which the New Left attacked for being unresponsive. Heavily influenced by nonviolent protest, they believed that effective politics was morally based and required both personal action and direct participation. This grassroots, bottom-up approach, which came out of civil rights, clashed with the demand for government action and redistribution, which was top-down and required bureaucracy for implementation.
Young radicals borrowed a lot from the civil rights movement, including the idea of participatory democracy. They failed to see that the unstructured format and temporary passion that breathed life into a social movement were problematic for stable governance in a democratic political system. Participatory democracy formed an important part of the New Left’s search for community.36 Despite, or maybe because of, this strong desire for community, politics meant personal action.
Finding inspiration in the moral fervor of the civil rights movement, SDS urged a massive overhaul of the domestic economy. SDS was radical in that it rejected the status quo, accepted the technique of the sit-in to force change, and imagined a society remade socially, economically, and politically. Several early members of SDS, including Hayden, had aided the southern civil rights movement. When visiting the South, they had been shocked by massive southern black poverty. Similar poverty could be found in northern cities. Accordingly, SDS in 1964 set up the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), whereby students worked to change poor communities by living in the midst of the poor. Almost all these community-based organizing programs failed, either because students tried to tell the poor what to do or because the projects collapsed when the students left. The programs did, however, influence some of Johnson’s War on Poverty legislation.37
By embracing participatory democracy and presenting students as an identity group worthy of representing itself politically, SDS inspired the broader student movement of the 1960s. Much of the movement had ties to SDS, especially at Columbia University in 1968.38 That was the year young radicals erupted in a fury over the Vietnam War. Some moved further left to become Maoist or Castroite revolutionaries. Others admired the Black Panthers, a militant African American group that talked about “picking up the gun.”39 In 1969, SDS splintered into factions and disintegrated. During the 1970s, radicalism faded, and in the more conservative 1980s it all but disappeared, except in certain enclaves such as Madison, Wisconsin, or Berkeley, California, where radicals successfully entered local politics. When they did so, they infused the Democratic Party with New Left ideas about participatory democracy, community-based decisions, civil rights, identity politics, expanded government programs, hostility to the military, progressive taxation, antibusiness policies, and economic redistribution. Over the long run, the radical legacy helped reshape the Democratic Party along New Progressive lines.
The Rise of Identity Politics
While the civil rights movement included persons of all races, the heart of the movement was black. Primarily about African Americans’ demanding rights for themselves, the movement necessarily asserted black identity. Once blacks had gained the right to vote in the South, rights activists, considered heroes in their own communities, often were elected to office. Marion Barry, active in the Nashville movement, won election as mayor of Washington, D.C., and Andrew Young and, later, John Lewis went to Congress from Atlanta. Charles Evers, half brother of the slain Medgar Evers, became mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a predominantly black small town.40
Most civil rights leaders were Democrats. The national Democratic Party seemed more welcoming, many white liberal Democrats had supported the movement, and polls showed that Democrats supported nonviolent sit-ins much more strongly than did Republicans. After Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, voted against the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds, blacks overwhelmingly backed Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater’s vote cost black votes, but he carried five Deep South states and laid the groundwork for the Republican Party among whites in those states.41
Democrats in the North had long practiced ethnic politics, and African Americans in the South could be seen simply as a new ethnic group. Movement participants, however, had a different take on their own importance. They pushed the Democratic Party to adopt a rights-based, egalitarian agenda: affirmative action set-asides for federal contracts, proportional racial representation in appointive political or governmental bodies, and judges who would enforce black rights.42 This new kind of rights-based politics replaced traditional ethnic politics and became known as identity politics. Some civil rights leaders believed that all politics was about race and rights. They expected African Americans to stick with Democrats, even if they preferred Republican policies on taxes, defense, or abortion.43
For African Americans, identity politics worked. Not only were a large number of new black leaders elected as Democrats, but also the Democratic Party took African American demands about rights seriously. For Democrats, moral politics and egalitarianism mattered. As black influence grew, the party embraced the concept of using governmental power to advance social justice. By 2000, African Americans accounted for close to 20 percent of all Democratic votes and were far more important in many states. The result in 2008 was the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president. Whenever Democrats held power, they advanced the rights-based agenda that identity politics demanded.
A second powerful form of identity politics that emerged in the sixties came from feminists. Ties to the civil rights movement were strong. In the early sixties, women who worked in the movement noticed that male leaders consistently ignored women. Expected to make coffee, wash dishes, answer phones, and type letters and memos, women did the movement’s grunt labor but got little credit. Change, however, was in the air. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a bestseller that challenged stereotyped women’s roles and especially the role of the suburban housewife. That same year Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, a law that required employers to pay men and women the same money for the same work. This was the first federal law ever passed against gender discrimination.44
Inside the civil rights movement, a number of women came to recognize that women, as well as blacks, had issues about their rights. Casey Hayden (then the wife of Tom Hayden) and Mary King, both white women who did a lot of office work, decided to take a stand. At a civil rights conference in Waveland, Mississippi, in 1964, Hayden and King issued an anonymous manifesto attacking movement men for ignoring, patronizing, and humiliating movement women. Stokely Carmichael dismissed the complaint by telling the conferees, “The position of women in SNCC is prone!” While he got a big laugh, early feminists noted the condescension and sexism.45
In 1964 the Civil Rights Act prohibited gender discrimination. Representative Howard W. Smith, a conservative southern Democrat, put the provision in the bill either in the hope that the gender clause would sink the bill or because he wanted to protect southern white women. By 1966, Friedan and other self-proclaimed feminists had created the National Organization for Women (NOW), which organized politically for women’s rights by seeking passage of new federal and state laws. They were an elite that wanted to use increased governmental power to advance their agenda. Eventually, NOW split over abortion rights (a minority opposed abortion) and lesbian rights (many women declined to equate feminism with lesbianism).46
Feminists, like black civil rights activists, became closely tied to the Democratic Party and quickly entered politics. Shirley Chisholm went to Congress in 1968, Bella Abzug in 1970, and Geraldine Ferraro in 1978. Ferraro became the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1984. Democrats gave feminists a chance to embrace identity politics, and the party gained votes from women, opening up a “gender gap” among voters. On rights grounds, Democrats appealed for women’s votes, even among women who might have had good reasons to vote Republican. For example, a wealthy woman who feared high taxes might naturally favor the Republicans, but if she thought of herself primarily as a feminist defending women’s rights, then she might vote Democratic. Or a devout woman who considered abortion immoral might vote Democratic, even for a candidate who favored abortion, to advance other women’s issues, including job opportunities.47