shinra-bansho
Member
This is I guess the Democratic version of make America great again. The New Deal wasn't universal in its application. And the reason it fell apart is similar to the reason that means testing doesn't go down well with a lot of white voters.
A long excerpt from a 2008 working paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz.
A long excerpt from a 2008 working paper by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz.
The New Deal Democratic worldview was based on a combination of the Democrats historic populist commitment to the average working American and their experience in battling the Great Depression (and building their political coalition) through increased government spending and regulation and the promotion of labor unions. It was really a rather simple philosophy, even if the application of it was complex. Government should help the average person through vigorous government spending. Capitalism needs regulation to work properly. Labor unions are good. Putting money in the average persons pocket is more important than rarified worries about the quality of life. Traditional morality is to be respected, not challenged. Racism and the like are bad, but not so bad that the party should depart from its main mission of material uplift for the average American. That worldview had deep roots in an economy dominated by mass production industries and was politically based among the workers, overwhelmingly white, in those industries. And it helped make the Democrats the undisputed party of the white working class.
Their dominance among these voters was, in turn, the key to their political success. To be sure, there were important divisions among these votersby country of origin (German, Scandinavian, Eastern European, English, Irish, Italian, etc.), by religion (Protestants vs. Catholics), and by region (South vs. non-South)that greatly complicated the politics of this group, but New Deal Democrats mastered these complications and maintained a deep base among these voters.
Of course, the New Deal Coalition as originally forged did include most blacks and was certainly cross-class, especially among groups like Jews and southerners. But the prototypical member of the coalition was indeed an ethnic white workercommonly visualized as working in a unionized factory, but also including those who werent in unions or who toiled in other blue collar settings (construction, transportation, etc.). It was these voters who provided the numbers for four FDR election victories and Harry Trumans narrow victory in 1948 and who provided political support for the emerging U.S. welfare state, with its implicit social contract and greatly expanded role for government.
Even in the 1950s, with Republican Dwight Eisenhower as President, the white working class continued to put Democrats in Congress and to support the expansion of the welfare state, as a roaring U.S. economy delivered the goods and government poured money into roads, science, schools and whatever else seemed necessary to build up the country. This era, stretching back into the late 40s and forward to the mid-60s, was the era that created the first mass middle class in the worlda middle class that even factory workers could enter, since they could earn relatively comfortable livings even without high levels of education or professional skills. A middle class, in other words, that members of the white working class could reasonably aspire to and frequently attain. So New Deal Democrats depended on the white working class for political support and the white working class depended on the Democrats to run government and the economy in a way that kept that upward escalator to the middle class moving. Social and cultural issues were not particularly important to this mutually beneficial relationship; indeed they had only a peripheral role in the uncomplicated progressivism that animated the Democratic party of the 30s, 40s and 50s. But that arrangement and that uncomplicated progressivism could not and did not survive the decline of mass production industries and the rise of postindustrial capitalism.
During the Sixties, these new demands on the welfare state came to a head. Americans concern about their quality of life overflowed from the two-car garage to clean air and water and safe automobiles; from higher wages to government guaranteed health care in old age; and from access to jobs to equal opportunities for men and women and blacks and whites. Out of these concerns came the environmental, consumer, civil rights and feminist movements of the Sixties. As Americans abandoned the older ideal of selfdenial and the taboos that accompanied it, they embraced a libertarian ethic of personal life. Women asserted their sexual independence through the use of birth control pills and through exercising the right to have an abortion. Adolescents experimented with sex and courtship. Homosexuals came out and openly congregated in bars and neighborhoods. Of these changes, the one with most far-reaching political effects was the civil rights movement and its demands for equality and economic progress for black America. Democrats, both because of their traditional, if usually downplayed, anti-racist ideology and their political relationship to the black community, had no choice but to respond to those demands. The result was a great victory for social justice, but one that created huge political difficulties for the Democrats among their white working class supporters.
But if race was the chief vehicle by which the New Deal coalition was torn apart, it was by no means the only one. White working class voters also reacted poorly to the extremes with which the rest of the new social movements became identified. Feminism became identified with bra-burners, lesbians and hostility to the nuclear family; the antiwar movement with appeasement of the Third World radicals and the Soviet Union; the environmental movement with a Luddite opposition to economic growth; and the move toward more personal freedom with a complete abdication of personal responsibility. Thus the New Deal Democrat mainstream that dominated the party was confronted with a challenge. The uncomplicated commitments to government spending, economic regulation and labor unions that had defined the Democrats progressivism for over thirty years suddenly provided little guidance for dealing with an explosion of potential new constituencies for the party. Their demands for equality, and for a better, as opposed to merely richer, life were starting to redefine what progressivism meant and the Democrats had to struggle to catch up.
there was no guarantee, of course, that gains among these new constituencies wouldnt be more than counter-balanced by losses among their old constituencythe white working classwho had precious little interest in this expansion of what it meant to be a progressive and a Democrat. And indeed that turned out to be the case with the nomination and disastrous defeat of George McGovernwho enthusiastically embraced the new direction taken by the partyin 1972. McGoverns commitment to the traditional Democratic welfare state was unmistakable. But so was his commitment to all the various social movements and constituencies that were re-shaping the party, whose demands were enshrined in McGoverns campaign platform. That made it easy for the Nixon campaign to typecast McGovern as the candidate of acid, amnesty and abortion. The white working class reacted accordingly and gave Nixon overwhelming support at the polls, casting 70 percent of their votes for the Republican candidate.
