Two items caught my eye today, reminders that American liberalism used to be far different from its current progressive incarnation. That it vanished so completely after the 1970’s, having dominated the country’s politics for about forty years, is an odd, under-analyzed historical phenomenon.
The first item came from John Hinderaker, one of the PowerLine blogging quartet. It was inspired by a conservative twitterist’s cheeky remark: “I think we made out pretty well in the Taibbi/Greenwald for Kristol/Wilson trade.” Mr. Hinderaker added:
Like other conservatives, I am grateful for the support we get from these liberals on issues like free speech, government overreach and the corruption of the liberal media. But this prompts a melancholy reflection: remember the good old days when the battle between liberals and conservatives was fought, more than anything else, over marginal income tax rates? Just 40 years ago, most Democrats believed in free speech and supported the Constitution.
Now, in contrast, we are fighting for our lives. Despite the clownishness of the Biden administration and the modern Left, the goalposts have moved a long way in their direction. Conservatives are being silenced on the most important information platforms, our Constitution is under overt attack, and the Democrats are a whisker away from making election integrity illegal.
For now, we obviously need to fight these life or death battles. But how long will it be before we return to the days when tax cuts and Social Security reform are the issues that divide the parties?
By serendipitous coincidence, the center-right Tablet last week posted a piece by Michael Lind, a liberal who, like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, often finds himself opposing left-wing ideological trends. In “America’s Asymmetric Civil War”, Mr. Lind analyzes the clash as one within, rather than between, states, pitting two elites against each other:
The social base of the Democrats is neither a few liberal billionaires nor the more numerous cohorts of high-school educated minority voters; it is the disproportionately white college-educated professionals and managers. These affluent but not rich overclass households dominate the Democratic Party and largely determine its messaging, not by virtue of campaign contributions or voting numbers, but because they very nearly monopolize the staffing of the institutions that support the party – K-12 schools and universities, city and state and federal bureaucracies, public sector unions, foundations, foundation-funded nonprofit organizations, and the mass media. By osmosis, professional and managerial values and material interests and fads and fashions permeate the Democratic Party and shape its agenda.
While the liberal Big Rich cluster in silver apartments and offices in trophy skyscrapers in the inner core of blue cities, the elites of the outer suburbs and exurbs tend to be made up of the Lesser Rich – millionaire car dealership owners, real estate agents, oil and gas drilling equipment company owners, and hair salon chain owners. This group of proprietors – the petty bourgeoisie, to use Marxist terminology, compared to the Democratic haute bourgeoisie and its professional allies – forms the social base of the Republican Party, despite efforts by Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marco Rubio of Florida, and others to rebrand the GOP as a working-class party.
Mr. Lind doesn’t like either elite. His description of the “Lesser Rich” has touches of sympathy:
Unlike the flagship tech oligopolies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, whose executives and employees fund and sometimes staff the Democratic Party’s political operations, many small business owners struggle to keep up with the jargon and paperwork required to deal with elaborate environmental regulations or proliferating race and gender quotas in federal record-keeping and subsidies. In addition to helping their urban core constituents, Democratic policies, to the extent that they harm Republican businesses and industries, increase the Democratic share of national wealth, which can then be deployed further against the party’s Republican rivals.
That sympathy is nonetheless constrained. “But the fact that the local business owner can discuss hunting and fishing with his employees or may attend the same church does not moderate the ferocious hostility of most of the red-county gentry to anything that would raise the cost of labor for their businesses – a higher minimum wage, unionization, paid vacations, paid parental leave.” He asks, in a tone of lament:
If hourglass Democrats are dominated by urban managers and professionals linked to the national and global economies, and the diamond Republicans by moderately rich local business elites, then who speaks for the two-thirds of Americans who are working class, who lack college diplomas and must work for wages? The answer is: nobody. At 6% and falling, private sector trade union membership in the United States is lower than it was under Herbert Hoover.
The only time that the working-class majority had any real influence in American politics, as well as in their workplaces, was between the 1940s and the 1980s, when private sector unions were a force that both parties had to reckon with. Private sector unions have been annihilated in the last half-century in the United States because hatred of organized labor is one of only two areas of agreement between socially liberal Democratic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, CEOs who donate millions to Black Lives Matter, and small-town Republican sweatshop owners and overseers who think Social Security and Medicare constitute “socialism.”
If my purpose were to argue with Mr. Lind, I would point out that the hostile force that has deunionized the private sector has been workers who overwhelmingly have no desire to be “represented” by labor unions that are themselves run by members of the elite that runs the Democratic Party. But that’s a discussion for another day. Mr. Lind is certainly right when he says that the kind of liberalism that existed from the late Forties, after it was freed from the dead weight of FDR and his cronies, until some time in the Seventies or Eighties – a liberalism that didn’t aspire to transform the country but simply to give the working class a larger share of the pie – today has all the political pertinence of the Divine Right of Kings.
The conclusive proof of the extinction of that liberalism is that no one has any notion of what it would espouse if it did exist. With all due respect to Senators Hawley and Rubio, their “working class party” ideas amount to welfare for people who aren’t quite poor enough to receive it now. On the other side are arrayed zealots for socialism, the most effective formula for impoverishing workers that has ever been devised by the malignant ingenuity of man.
If the profession of history emerges from the present era with a few uncorrupted practitioners, some of they may have the interest, insight and diligence to address this mystery. I cannot begin to unravel it.
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