Wayne O'Leary

Progressives, Moderates and Capitalists

One of the unacknowledged realities affecting the Democratic Party in its struggle against Donald Trump and the Republicans is that, unlike the GOP, Democrats (current campaign rhetoric notwithstanding) are not truly united. Their shared contempt for Trump and company disguises deep party divisions that have simmered for a number of years and are just now reaching critical mass.

The GOP has not faced a similar ideological split for roughly a half-century, ever since the conservative revolution begun by Barry Goldwater and completed by Ronald Reagan ended the influence of liberal Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller in the party. It’s Donald Trump’s GOP now, but he didn’t make it the right-wing faction it is today; he merely personalized it and created a cult. The doctrinal framework was put in place by Goldwater and Reagan, and then institutionalized by Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.

Republicans have no remaining internal disagreements on ideology, except maybe on tariff policy; the Tea Party movement saw to that. Even Never Trumpers have no quarrel with the Donald’s program, but merely with his grotesque style and garbage-pail language. If he would clean up his personal act, they’d be fine with the essence of Trumpism. There are no Republicans, no matter how squeamish about the politics of insult and disparagement, who oppose high-end tax cuts, economic deregulation, corporate giveaways, and government privatization; they’ve wanted laissez-faire Trumponomics in its pure form for years, and now they’ve got it.

The Democrats are a bit different. They are genuinely divided over theory and policy, although in their desire to defeat Trump, they’re trying to paper over the differences. It’s not just a quarrel over Sanders-style democratic socialism, although that gets all the attention; the differences are more fundamental and run deeper, and they long precede the current carnival of the multiple presidential candidates. In fact, the disagreements extend back to the mid-20th century.

The late historian Alan Brinkley traced them to the breakdown of liberalism’s New Deal consensus of the 1930s, inherited from the Populists and the Progressives, which began to unravel during the war years and especially after 1945. In his groundbreaking “The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War” (1995), Brinkley stressed the impact of the wartime alliance between government and business that led many New Dealers to prematurely believe corporations had become socially responsible and newly enlightened capitalists could be trusted. This produced an accommodation in which reshaping capitalist institutions was replaced as liberalism’s primary goal by a focus on expanding individual and group rights.

As Brinkley saw it, postwar liberalism shifted from “fundamental cures” to “partial remedies” — from combating the dangers of concentrated economic power and the limitations of the market to a less controversial, less confrontational pursuit of full employment, mass consumption, and compensatory social insurance and welfare. Planning, regulation, cooperative arrangements, and anti-monopoly crusades were replaced by workaday fiscal policies aimed at taming the business cycle. Along the way, the original anti-corporate New Dealers in the Democratic Party were displaced by social liberals anxious “to move race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality to the center of political life.”

Ultimately, Brinkley concluded, the postwar attempt to transition from fundamental New Deal reform to a less hard-edged liberalism proved a failure. Consumer-oriented fiscal policies floundered after 1973 in the face of global competition, environmental degradation, and deindustrialization. Meanwhile, welfare-statism failed to solve inner-city deterioration, while the new rights-based identity politics produced mainly cultural division. The notion that America’s capitalist industrial economy could “take care of itself” and banish inequality without structural reforms aimed at redistributing economic power and wealth proved a chimera. It led, Brinkley foretold a quarter-century ago, to American liberalism’s (and the Democratic Party’s) current problematic circumstances.

The division between “progressives” and “moderates” presently roiling the Democratic presidential race arose directly from the fault lines exposed in the latter-day evolution of the New Deal. Despite being swept aside during their party’s postwar reorientation, the early New Dealers were never entirely forgotten; their precedent-setting influence lingers, and the progressive candidates of 2020, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are their successors and legatees. Likewise, the so-called moderates of 2020, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and others, are the present-day versions of the lukewarm New Dealers who pushed the Democratic Party in a more incrementalist, less overtly reformist direction in the decades after 1945.

The key distinction here is economic; it’s essentially about where politicians stand on the whole question of America’s capitalist system and its fairness. True Democratic progressives in 2020 want to make fundamental adjustments to the economic structure. Moderates, conversely, have no real disagreement with the existing system; their position is that American capitalism as presently constituted is perfectly adequate, its only problem being selective lack of access. If participation and advancement by underrepresented groups and minorities can be guaranteed, they feel, no structural reforms are warranted; therefore, any shortcomings can be rectified through identity politics initiatives.

Yet being in the forefront of identity politics does not make a candidate “progressive.” That credential can only be earned by a serious critique of the underlying economic system itself and a willingness to take on its power structure. Corporate America and Wall Street have no problem opening up a rigged economic system to compliant new personnel; their argument is with those who would target the legitimacy of their ill-gotten assets and accustomed prerogatives, namely, the Democratic left.

Consequently, substantial Wall Street money is being committed for 2020 to Biden, Buttigieg, and Harris as the Democratic moderates least likely to derail business as usual or take away the lucrative financial punch bowl. The three are deemed worthy successors to the previous two “moderate” Democratic presidents, Clinton and Obama, who brought watered-down New Deal policies into the modern era.

Under Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, at least some remnants of the original New Deal remained operative. Under the Carter administration, that began to change, and by the Clinton and Obama years, moderate New Dealism was largely whatever served the interests of globalized big business.

The cycle is now complete; the Democratic New Deal Alan Brinkley saw as still vital up to 1940 has ceased to exist. The question at hand is whether Democrats will happily salute its passing with the usual lip service, or try to effect a revival of their old-time political religion.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2019

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