How Previous Radicals Failed to Realign the Democratic Party

Interesting long essay at Jacobin by Paul Heideman about how the left tried to remake the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s and why it failed. While I can quibble with some points–as one might expect at this publication there’s some downplaying of racist politics in favor of emphasizing that the labor movement wasn’t radical enough and I don’t really think Nixon won in 1972 because of his close ties to corporations–overall, I find this a pretty valuable essay in thinking about the limitation of the left in American politics. It certainly fits in with some LGM talking points around Jimmy Carter governing unacceptably to the right of his governing majorities in Congress and the important of organized capital in repealing key aspects of the New Deal state. Some conclusions:

American social democrats have also suffered from the failure of realignment. The absence of a real American reformism has left would-be social democrats largely holding on to the coattails of the unreformed Democratic Party. Again and again, this has occasioned the spectacle of committed radicals, including Harrington, campaigning for politicians, like Carter, who oppose everything they believe in.

The problem with this dynamic is not so much that radicals sully themselves with the impurities of compromise — some measure of compromise is necessary in any kind of electoral participation. Rather, it is that in arguing that workers should defend their interests by voting for progressive Democrats when possible (or neoliberals when there are no progressives), American social democrats orient politics on a sphere in which it is actually impossible to defend those interests.

The argument always goes, of course, that social struggles outside the electoral sphere are necessary as well. But as anyone who has ever been inveigled to support the lesser of two evils knows, somehow the emphasis on those forms of struggle never reaches the frenzied pitch of election year appeals.

Any political action comes with opportunity costs, and the costs of a strategic focus on electing Democrats have been grave — from the labor movement’s inability to defend itself against attacks from “their” party to antiwar movements that disappear when a Democrat comes to office. Configuring left politics around electoral action, in the absence of any kind of social democracy, inevitably results in a situation where, as Robert Brenner puts it, reformism doesn’t even reform.

The failure of realignment, then, contains lessons for socialists who fall on both sides of the old “reform or revolution” argument. Its history should not be taken as a verdict against reformism. Indeed, the story of realignment serves to clarify what, exactly, will be required for a successful American reformism. Because ultimately, the kind of grand strategic vision that animated realignment is a prerequisite for both those who wish to see, at long last, social democracy in the United States — and those who wish to go beyond it.

But even if you aren’t interested in building a socialist politics in the United States, the essay is worth your time.