WINTER 2016

UP FROM

LIBERALISM
ISSUE 20

Citoyens
E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

Bhaskar Sunkara

Seth Ackerman
Alyssa Battistoni
Mike Beggs
Megan Erickson
Peter Frase
Connor Kilpatrick

C R E AT I V E D I R EC TO R

Remeike Forbes
M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

Nicole Aschoff
A SS O C I AT E E D I TO R

Shawn Gude
A RT E D I TO R

Erin Schell
A SS I STA N T E D I TO R

Elizabeth Mahony
R E S E A RC H E R

Jonah Walters
E D I TO R I A L A SS I STA N T

Colin Beckett
Lillian Osborne
O U T R E AC H C O O R D I N ATO R

Neal Meyer
W E B D E V E LO P M E N T

C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R S

Bashir Abu-Manneh
Jonah Birch
Sebastian Budgen
Liza Featherstone
Beln Fernndez
Eileen Jones
Matt Karp
Cyrus Lewis
Chris Maisano
Scott McLemee
Gavin Mueller
Karen Narefsky
Catarina Prncipe
Kate Redburn
Corey Robin
Miya Tokumitsu
Micah Uetricht

Daniel Patterson

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The German Social Democratic

Party therefore does not fight
for new class privileges and class
rights, but for the abolition of class
rule and of classes themselves, for
equal rights and equal obligations
for all, without distinction of sex
or birth. Starting from these views,
it fights not only the exploitation
and oppression of wage earners in
society today, but every manner
of exploitation and oppression,
whether directed against a class,
party, sex, or race.
The German Social Democratic
Partys Erfurt Program (1891)

I SS U E 2 0 | W I N T E R 2 0 1 6

Up From Liberalism
I SS U E E D I TO R

I L LU ST R AT I O N S

Shawn Gude

Luca Yety Battaglia

Contributors
Curtis Atkins holds a phd
in political science from York
University.
Mike Beggs is a Jacobin
editor and a lecturer
in political economy at the
University of Sydney.

Lily Geismer is an assistant

professor of history
at Claremont McKenna
College and the author
of Dont Blame Us: Suburban
Liberals and the Trans
formation of the Democratic
Party.

Robert Brenner is director

Shawn Gude is an associate

of the University of California

Los Angeless Center
for Social Theory and
Comparative History and
a member of the New
Left Review editorial board.

Jeremy Corbyn is the leader

of the UK Labour Party.

Jacobin Winter 2016

editor at Jacobin.

Paul Heideman is a phd

candidate in sociology
at New York University.

Adam Hilton is a doctoral

candidate in political science
at York University.

Premilla Nadasen is a
historian and the author
of Household Workers Unite:
The Untold Story of African
American Women Who Built
a Movement.
Leo Panitch is a professor
of political science at York
University and coeditor
of the Socialist Register.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the

founding editor and publisher
of Jacobin.
Hilary Wainwright is a
coeditor of Red Pepper.
Special thanks to Michael
Gould-Wartofsky.

Contents
The Not-So
Golden Age

Up From Liberalism
4
11

The Dynamics
of Retreat
Robert Brenner

The Third Way

Its Their Party
Atari Democrats

43

59

Lily Geismer

How a Democrat
Killed Welfare
Premilla Nadasen

51

The Third Way

International

23

Curtis Atkins

The Business Veto

63

Paul Heideman

Shawn Gude

The Void Stares Back

71

Mike Beggs

A Better Way

87

The Making
of Jeremy Corbyn
Hilary Wainwright

101

Searching
for New Politics
Adam Hilton

A Long Way to Go

111

Jeremy Corbyn

Up From Liberalism

Up From
Liberalism
Decades before Tony Blair and Bill Clinton took power,
Anthony Crosland posited another third way.
Crosland, a British Labour politician, gazed upon the
welfare state his party had swiftly built after World Warii
the crown jewel of which was the National Health Service
and effectively pronounced socialists work complete.
Even if further reforms were needed to loosen up Britains
famously rigid class system, Crosland wrote in 1956, the
welfare-state-plus-full-employment mix was so widely
accepted that the Conservatives now fight elections largely
on policies which 20 years ago were associated with the
Left, and repudiated by the Right.
In this changed environment, Crosland held, socialists
should let go of their traditional commitment to socializing
the means of production and focus on the present.
4

Jacobin Winter 2016

Across the advanced capitalist world, social-democratic

parties took his advice. They spent the postwar decades
building up their own countries welfare states and using
macroeconomic tools to bring about full employment and
improve living standards. But, in keeping with Crosland,
they didnt fundamentally challenge private capitals control over what, how, and where to produce, and for whom
to produce it.
With few exceptions the most prominent being the
Democratic Party these center-left formations acted as
the electoral agents of a union movement whose power
derived from its militancy.
Yet zoom out, and its easy to see now that both were still
jostling on capitals terrain. Sure, the postwar consensus
was premised on a labor movement sufficiently organized
and potentially disruptive enough to make business sweat
(so much so that even center-right parties expanded or
added new programs to stay electorally viable). But the
welfare state couldnt have sucked up an increasing share
of national wealth if the captains of industry hadnt thought
their profits would continue to swell.
This is where Croslands avowed pragmatism we
must not confuse means with ends, he maintained
revealed its impracticality. When economic crisis began
to swirl in the 1970s, the roots of social democracy showed
Up From Liberalism

themselves to be rather shallow. Full employment and an

ever-more-comprehensive welfare state suddenly conflicted
with the imperatives of business to turn a profit. And business still controlled the levers of economic activity.
It was a structural dilemma that social democracy could
not solve by simply trying to weather the storm. Either
the roots had to be plunged deeper, toward a more radical
socialism, or the entire thing would tumble.
After fits and starts, capital launched its political
response: bust unions, enact deflationary measures, allow
unemployment to rise, and roll back the welfare state.
Social-democratic parties played a central role in the
attack. In some countries, like New Zealand, center-left
formations implemented the rollbacks themselves. In most
others, they succeeded pivotal conservative governments
(like Margaret Thatchers), accepted the new order of
things, and took their turn privatizing and cutting.
With traditional social democracy off the table, Clinton,
Blair, and other Third Wayers pushed a new centrist program: reform the bureaucracy and state programs to
make them run more like the private sector, abandon full
employment to render labor markets slack, weaken ties to
organized labor, and move closer to business.
The shift wasnt to a smaller state necessarily, but a different kind of state one less focused on directly providing
6

Jacobin Winter 2016

social goods and economic security and more interested

in using government to create markets and competition
where there had been none.
For the poor and working classes, the results have been
disastrous. Stuck with stagnant wages and an indifferent
state, they tried to pad their living standards with consumer
debt even as they were more exposed to lifes vagaries.
Meanwhile, center-left parties were undermining their
own basis of support. Workers increasingly stayed at home,
seeing little point in voting for or being active in formations that now resembled their center-right foes. The mass
struggles that provided the basis for both reformist and
revolutionary left politics seemed like a thing of the past.
Recent years have brought some stirrings of an alternative. The emergence of Jeremy Corbyn represents an
unexpected opportunity to fight for socialist ideas within
the Labour Party. And in the United States, the popular
reception to Bernie Sanderss presidential campaign shows
there is a hunger among many for a politics with substance,
a politics in their class interest.
Both phenomena especially Sanderss bid are only
baby steps in the right direction. Well need a more forthright anticapitalist politics to go further. But there is at
last hope that Blair and Clintons Third Way may suffer
the same fate as Croslands.
Up From Liberalism

THE
NOT-SO
GOLDEN
AGE

The Dynamics
of Retreat
The politics that underpinned
the welfare state brought about its
very collapse.

an interview with
Robert Brenner

n 2016, after decades of defeat, it might seem odd to talk about

the limits of the New Deal, much less the expansive welfare
states constructed in Europe. In fact, to hear the progressive
end of American liberalism tell it, all we need today is a return
to that less lean era, when at least many workers felt a sense of
security and stability.
Yet the original New Deal settlement was not one tilted entirely in ordinary
peoples favor and it housed contradictions that in time would destroy it.
What would a more durable justice have looked like? And what social forces
made the New Deal and the postwar Golden Age possible in the first place?
In late December, Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara spoke to Robert Brenner,
a professor of history at University of California Los Angeles, about the myths
and realities of this often-romanticized period.

Bhaskar Sunkara: When people think about the New Deal, there are two main
accounts. In one of them, Franklin Roosevelt is the hero, leading a band of
workers against the big capitalists who had just driven us into an economic
depression. On the other extreme, there are those who make it seem like
Roosevelt was acting solely in the interest of elites smart enough to want to
save capitalism from itself. Which is closer to the truth?

Robert Brenner: I would say that the key to the emergence of the New Deal
reforms was the transformation in the level and character of working-class
struggle. Within a year or two of Roosevelts election, we saw the sudden
emergence of a mass militant working-class movement. This provided the
material base, so to speak, for the transformation of working-class consciousness and politics that made Roosevelts reforms possible.
Following the labor upsurge and radicalization that came in the wake of
World Wari, workers militancy tailed off, and the 1920s saw the American

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

11

capitalist class at the peak of its power, confidence, and productiveness, in total command of
industry and politics. Manufacturing productivity
rose more rapidly during this decade than ever
before or since, the open shop (which banned
union contracts) prevailed everywhere, the
Republican Party of big business reigned
supreme, and the stock market broke all records.
The onset of the Great Depression, which
followed the stock market crash of 1929, changed
everything. The Hoover administration had stood
paralyzed in the face of unemployment that
reached a record 25percent and devastated living
standards, discrediting the Republican Party for a
generation.
Nevertheless, the incoming Roosevelt
administration had relatively little to offer
working people. Its signature effort, the National
Industrial Recovery Act, aimed to revive industry
by propping up capitalist prices and profits
through cartels and monopolies. But it could not
make a dent in the economic crisis.
What transformed the political landscape
beyond recognition was the outbreak of what
Rosa Luxemburg would have called a mass strike
upsurge, a phenomenon she had witnessed and
analyzed at the time of the 1905 revolution in
Russia and the accompanying wave of mass
strikes. Out of the blue, starting in Detroit auto
plants in spring 1933, you got a series of ever
larger and more encompassing strikes, mobilizing
ever broader groups of workers on the shop floor
and the streets organized and unorganized,
employed and unemployed, in an ascending wave.
Programmatic demands and ideas that seemed pie
in the sky were now, with the increase in workers
power, plausible and actionable.
The strikes soon spread to the Southern
textile mills, the Eastern coal mines, and the
Midwestern steel mills. But Roosevelt stood aside
and did nothing as the companies and the local
repressive forces crushed one strike after another.
The miracle year for the workers movement
was 1934. Workers fought and won three great
urban general strikes: San Francisco (led by
longshore workers), Minneapolis (led by teamsters), and Toledo (led by auto parts workers). In

12

Jacobin Winter 2016

these struggles, as well as a series of others that

shook cities across the nation, union organizers
built their power by reaching out to workers in
other industries, mobilizing the citizenry to
support their picket lines, allying with unemployed councils, and engaging in pitched battles
with the police.
The resulting shift in the balance of power and
in political consciousness set the stage for the rise
of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio),
the ascension of the Democrats to the countrys
dominant political party, and the passage of the
New Deal reforms.
In November 1934, the Democrats achieved a
crushing landslide victory in the midterm
congressional elections, increasing the electoral
majority they had achieved in 1932. Democrats at
the radical end of the political spectrum were
elected in disproportionate number, and even a
few socialists came to office. Newly active workers
entered into urban politics and joined up with the
Democrats.
Equally important, the smashing victories in
the 1934 strikes endowed the nascent radical-led
labor movement with the confidence and capacity
to organize the United Auto Workers (uaw) and
the cio over the next three years. Roosevelt was
transformed from a standard politician into a
reformer, the carrot and stick of the new labor
movement inducing the administration to
advocate a series of historic sociopolitical reforms
that included the Social Security Act, the Fair
Labor Standards Act (which set maximum hours
and minimum wages for most workers), and the
Wagner Act (which extended union recognition
and set up routinized collective bargaining).
To what extent did this upsurge rely on preexisting
organizations, particularly the Communist Party
(CP) and perhaps other socialist forces like the
Trotskyists and the Socialist Party of America?

I think Rosa Luxemburgs understanding of the

social psychology of the mass strike must remain
the indispensable point of departure.
The point is that no amount of organizing can
by itself turn a situation of low activity and

Red Unions

The Dynamics of Retreat

The combined membership of the Communistled unions and their share of the total CIO
membership in selected years.
each figure represents
200,000 members of nonCommunist-led unions

each figured represents

200,000 members of
Communist-led unions

1939
1946
1948
1949

Source: Left Out: Reds and Americas Industrial Unions (2002)

Up From Liberalism

13

consciousness into a mass strike upsurge, and its

equally difficult to sustain a wave of mass radical
activity past a certain point. When people are
incapable of taking action together to resist their
employers, egoism, stemming from workers
atomized condition, is the order of the day.
The unexpected and unplanned explosion of
workers collective action is the key to opening up
a new period of mass activity and radical politics,
and its no accident that the waves of mass
activity, political radicalization, and social reform
that have marked US history have taken place
discontinuously, in a cyclical fashion. Think of the
Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society.
That said, organized groups of socialists and
revolutionaries have played an indispensable role
in unleashing the potential of increased worker
self-activity. They have helped provide continuity
between temporally disconnected struggles,
offered historically grounded analyses of the
current moment, and, above all, suggested
strategies for action.
The seeds of worker action during the
Depression were planted when Communist Party
and other radical trade unionists initiated the
Trade Union Educational League with the goal of
transcending the narrowness and conservatism of
American Federation of Labor (afl) craft
unionism and establishing industrial unionism, an
idea that had come to the fore in the great strike
wave of 1919.
Critically, Communist and Socialist Party
members and Trotskyists consolidated strategic
positions as worker leaders and worker organizers
on the shop floor in various industries in the 1920s
and early 30s. They were therefore perfectly
positioned to play the central roles in organizing
the three great general strikes of 1934 Communists in San Francisco, Trotskyists in Minneapolis,
followers of A.J. Muste in Toledo.
The same radical political parties and
networks of Communists, Trotskyists, and
Socialists at the heart of the 1934 general strikes
were also responsible for strategizing and
organizing a rank-and-file movement in the uaw
and the cio between 1935 and 1937.

14

Jacobin Winter 2016

For these militants, the defining principle was

the independence of the working class. This
meant, explicitly, that the new movement could
not depend on, and should expect to be opposed
by, afl union officials, the judges who mediated
industrial disputes, and Democratic Party elected
officials.
Because it had to rely on its own members, it
had to amass power through direct action on the
shop floor and in the streets, forging ties of
solidarity with other groups of workers and
preparing itself to confront (and not be bound by
the laws of ) a state that favored the bosses.
The ensuing series of union recognition
strikes organized by these forces culminated in
the victory over General Motors (gm), the worlds
largest corporation, in the Flint Sit-Down
Strike of 193637, which ensured the establishment of the cio.
Elsewhere, throughout the advanced capitalist
world, the trade union movement and trade union
organizing provided the basis for social-democratic labor parties. But there was no
breakthrough in the United States. What
accounts for this inability to build a workers party
independent of the Democrats in the US?

The rise of the militant mass workers movement

of 193335 generated the kind of political
conditions and radical consciousness that were,
and will continue to be, the prerequisite for the
formation of an American labor party.
Without this kind of struggle, the winner-take-all, first-past-the-post character of the
American electoral system makes any third party,
including a labor party, all but impossible. This is
because under normal conditions, in which a third
party cannot conceivably secure a majority, to
vote for it is in effect to throw away your ballot.
To put the point in a more general way, an
electoral strategy of voting for a third party could
never be sustained, as the right-wing party would
typically win greater electoral majorities as the
third party increased its vote share. Only if the
third party could achieve a majority all at once,
perhaps on the back of a titanic mass movement
that brought about a sudden lurch to the left

The Dynamics of Retreat

among a large section of the citizenry, would it

have a chance of succeeding. Otherwise, dull
electoral calculation ensures the hegemony of the
two-party monopoly.
At the founding convention of the uaw in
1935, the membership actually did seek to exploit
the broad radicalization taking shape and refused
to support Roosevelt and the Democrats, seeing
them as representatives of capital. But this
political act of defiance could not be sustained for
more than a brief moment and, before long, the
uaw and the cio more generally had committed
themselves to the Democratic Party on a permanent basis.
From this time on, the Democrats became the
party of labor in this limited sense of the trade
union movement, but one in which the labor
movement was from the start subordinate to
capitalist elements.
What have been the consequences of not having a
viable independent labor party?

Well, one thing should already be clear. There is

no need for a labor or social-democratic party to
win important reforms. The mass working-class
upsurge brought by itself a sufficient increase in
working-class political power and sufficient
leftward movement of working-class consciousness to oblige the Roosevelt administration to
shift its political position and pass reform
legislation.
The same groups of Communists, Trotskyists,
socialists, and syndicalists that provided most of
the leadership for the 1934 general strikes and the
mass workers movement were also behind the
fight for the labor party. They saw this as the
culmination of their program of creating an
independent rank-and-file movement for industrial unionism. In their eyes, the labor party would
form the political carapace for the emergent cio.
In sharp contrast, the social layer that
typically formed the core of social-democratic
parties labor officialdom was completely
absent from the struggle for the labor party. The
trade union leaders of the established afl were at
all times implacably opposed to it. And even those

officers from the afl unions that would break

away to help organize the cio and were at first
carried along by its militancy fought from the
start to steer the new labor movement into the
safe confines of the Democratic Party.
These officials would come to form the heart
of the social-democratic mini party that would
operate throughout the postwar period inside the
Democratic Party.
Though also responsible for much of the
reformism the Democratic Party evinced during
the postwar epoch, they saw as their first priority
repressing insurgencies from below that might
lead to confrontations with employers that could
be risky for unions and officials position within
them. With threats neutralized, the route pursued
was a safe one: use the postwar boom to (minimally) pressure capital and attempt to gain union
membership by adopting the non-threatening
tactics of electoral competition, lobbying, and
collective bargaining.
Can you sketch out the transition that carried the
labor movement from the explosive peak of its
power in the mid 1930s to the more routinized
politics of the postwar era?

By summer 1937, the movement was already in

decline, due in part to objective economic
pressures and in part to subjective political
decisions. Above all, before the middle of the year,
the economy was sinking into the second
depression, and skyrocketing unemployment was
having a devastating impact on worker
combativeness.
Well before this time, however, the newly
installed officialdom of the cio had moved to
pacify the unruly movement. The ink had barely
dried on the historic gm contract granting union
recognition when the new leaders of the uaw
prevailed upon militants to refrain from seeking
better terms elsewhere in the auto industry, in
order to avoid undermining weaker companies
competitiveness and profitability. Simultaneously,
these same officers moved to repress the tsunami
of sit-ins and wildcat strikes that shop-floor
militants, emboldened by their victory at gm, had
unleashed.
Up From Liberalism

15

Dealbreakers
The New Deal era saw some of the biggest strikes
in American history.

The California Farmworkers

Strike of 1933 was among
the most important strikes
in the history of American
agriculture, affecting
springtime harvests from the
pea fields of Santa Clara
to the cotton estates in the
San Joaquin Valley. 47,500
workers participated in strikes
on approximately 30 farms
during that spring.

The Textile Workers Strike

of 1934 began in northern
mills but quickly spread
to textile workers in the midAtlantic and southern states
as workers across the
country protested industrywide stretch outs, which
increased output by assigning
more looms to individual
workers. The strike involved
400,000 workers and lasted
twenty-seven days.

The coup de grce came shortly thereafter,

when cio leaders John L. Lewis and Philip
Murray ordered their organizers to trust in
Roosevelt in their campaign to organize the steel
industry. The break from the hitherto prevailing
strategy of rank-and-file independence could
hardly have been more evident. The outcome was
the Memorial Day massacre, in which the Chicago
Police Department, headed by Democratic mayor
Ed Kelley, shot and killed ten unarmed demonstrators and wounded thirty more in May 1937,
leading to the crushing defeat of the embryonic
United Steel Workers union.
It was the effective end of the mass strike
movement of the 1930s and marked what was, in
retrospect, the stunningly rapid consolidation
of a new cio bureaucracy. This development was
made possible by the shift taking place in the
Communist Partys political line internationally.
After being directed by Stalins Comintern,
the party switched from a program of working-class independence and self-organization to
the so-called Popular Front line, which called for
an alliance with the progressive wing of the

16

Jacobin Winter 2016

The Pacific Coast Waterfront

Strike of 1934 paralyzed the
West Coast shipping industry
when 32,000 dockworkers
struck to oppose dangerous
speed-ups and unfair job
selection. Striking workers
repulsed attacks from scabs,
hired strikebreakers, and the
National Guard for four
months, eventually inspiring
a four-day general strike
in San Francisco in solidarity.

bourgeoisie. In the US, this meant linking up

with Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the top
officials in both the afl and cio unions.
In effect, the cp militants subordinated
themselves to the emerging layer of top officials,
who saw as their highest priority winning
acceptance for the new union federation from
employers as well as the state, even if that meant
undermining the only real source of union power.
So the trade union officials, as well as the party
politicians, undermined the very social forces on
which those organizations were based and which
enabled them to extract gains from capital and
the state.

Yes. The rise of this militant mass movement

threw up a new cadre of radical leaders, while also
turning a section of the old official leadership into
radicals, at least for a moment. But as the mass
movement began to dissipate, the same leaders
looked around them and saw that they were in
danger of being squeezed between a capitalist
class on a warpath and a union membership

The Dynamics of Retreat

The Toledo Auto-Lite Strike of 1934 came to be

known as the Battle of Toledo, as 6,000 striking
workers waged a five-day insurrection against
the Ohio National Guard. The strike resulted
in federal recognition of the autoworkers union,
a wage increase, and a widespread push
for unionization in Toledo, which remains one
of the most unionized cities in the country.

becoming too demobilized to back up its leaders.

To protect the union organization on which
everything depends it seems only common
sense to make a strategic retreat so as work out
some sort of modus vivendi with the bosses.
But the conditions that make the union
leaders take a conservative stance are not only
conjunctural but also structural. Whereas the
union memberships economic fate depends on
what they can extract from employers by way of
class struggle, and thus on the power they can
exert over and against capital, the union officials
find their material base in the union organization
itself. They can survive, and even do well for
themselves, so long as they can win the acceptance
of the union by employers.
The point is that the union officials constitute
a distinct social layer between capital and labor,
with huge advantages compared to ordinary
members. Employed by the union rather than
corporations, their living standards are no longer
as dependent on the outcome of the unions
battles with employers. They have managed to
free themselves from having to work on the shop

The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 organized

in part by members of the Trotskyist Communist League
of America, the organization that would become the
American Socialist Workers Party grew out of a series
of Teamsters strikes against the major trucking companies
of Minneapolis. Minnesota governor Floyd Olson ultmately
declared martial law and deployed the National Guard
to suppress the strike, betraying the trust of many of his
populist supporters.

floor, so their working conditions are no longer

determined by the brutal day-to-day struggle over
the labor process.
It is the union organization that pays officers
salaries, establishes their career paths, and
determines their whole form of life. They therefore have every incentive to avoid an approach
to winning gains for their members that will
provoke a threatening response from the bosses.
From the end of the 1930s through the whole
of the postwar period, the labor officialdom thus
made every effort to confine the union to nonconfrontational methods of struggle that would
not get out of hand and threaten employers.
Instead, they turned to the electoral road
by way of the Democratic Party and collective
bargaining within the framework of the National
Labor Relations Board. Their highest aspiration
was to induce the government and employers
to join them in tripartite forms of corporatist
cooperation that, by way of Keynesian deficit
spending and productivity agreements, could
grow the economic pie, allow profits and wages
to increase together, and permanently transcend
distributional conflict.
Up From Liberalism

17

Meanwhile, they did everything they could

to disrupt rank-and-file mobilization. It was
a strategy that, over time, could not but corrode
the power and effectiveness of their own
organizations.
If the paradox of these reformist elements was
that their whole political approach tended to
destroy the very forces that provided them with
their power, how does one account for their
successes in the postwar period?

Well, though few now recall this, it was probably

the consensus view that, with the end of World
Warii, disarmament and the deep decline in
military spending would bring a drop off of
demand that would return the economy to
recession or even depression. Under such
conditions, the prospects for a labor movement
that had already seen its power fall off precipitously seemed bleak.
But very unexpectedly in the eyes of many,
what one got instead was the greatest economic
expansion in capitalist history, and this provided
the US version of social democracy, inside the
Democratic Party, with a new lease on life.
In the United States, as throughout the
advanced capitalist economies, the growing
surpluses provided by the postwar boom opened
the way for workers to enjoy increasing wages and
a growing welfare state without much cutting into
profits. Employers, for their part, found that they
could better maximize profits by granting workers
steady gains in the interest of continuous production, rather than redistributing income in their
favor at the cost of disruptive strikes and social
disorder.
In this situation, the Democratic Party, like its
social-democratic counterparts abroad, was able
to maintain their position as the dominant party
for another quarter century by presenting
themselves as the main advocate of labor and
social reform, naturally within the strict limits set
by the needs of profit and investment. The
Republicans, for their part, had no choice but to
compete with the Democrats on the latters
chosen ground, in what was inevitably a subordinate position.
18

Jacobin Winter 2016

Still, it should not be forgotten that the major

pieces of legislation that marked the high point of
reform in the 1960s and early 1970s could not
have been passed in the absence of the pressure
from below from the great social movements of
the period especially the black struggle and the
fight against the war in Vietnam.
This trajectory doesnt seem that much different
from that of European social-democratic parties.
Obviously, the Democratic Party is a capitalist
party, but labor parties, even without representatives of capital in their own ranks, also faced
similar constraints. What price has the US
working class faced for its failure to win a proper
labor party?

I think the way to answer this question is to

compare developments in Europe, say England,
and the United States in the years after World
Warii. In the United Kingdom, you have a
tremendous mass mobilization behind the war
effort, but by the end of the conflict, people are
exhausted, tired of the austerity, and expecting
major improvements in living standards.
The British Labour Party is thus able to win a
smashing landslide electoral victory in which it is
seen to be representing the aspirations not only of
the working class but of the citizenry more
generally. In the US, at the same time, the
Democratic Party is able to sustain its electoral
dominance. Whats the difference in the outcome
in the two places?
The advantage possessed by the labor and
social-democratic parties of the UK and Western
Europe over the Democratic Party is that they not
only could present themselves as representing
what were more or less politically unified labor
movements, but, by way of electoral mobilization
and victory, legitimately speak for a broader base
across the whole citizenry.
They were therefore in a position to fight in
the name of the entire populace for social reforms
that spoke to what were in fact common interests
and on that basis, to secure decisive advances for
everyone health insurance, retirement pension
support, unemployment protection. These

The Dynamics of Retreat

provisions came, in retrospect, to be viewed as

human needs and have been as a result quite
difficult to roll back.
In the US, similar reforms were also adopted,
and in a big way. But they were won and put into
practice not by national political parties seeking
to construct a welfare state benefiting everyone
and financed out of taxation, but by individual
trade unions who extracted them from employers
and got them inserted into union contracts as
employee benefits.
So the uaw, the United Electrical Workers,
the United Steel Workers, and the other major
unions all negotiated what you might call mini
welfare states for their members. These benefits
were then extended to much of the rest of the (less
organized) working class, as employers costs
were more than made up for by gains derived
from continuous production and labor peace.
By the early 1970s, the panoply of welfare
advances that had been won by way of union
contracts had been substantially supplemented by
the major pieces of social legislation enacted
under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. And here, too,
the union officialdom, working largely though the
Democratic Party, rather than as in Europe
through social-democratic or labor parties, were
central agents of reform although they could
not have succeeded to the extent that they did
without the mass movements of the time.
But the fact remains that the failure of the US
working class to create its own labor party had
undeniably major negative consequences. The US
welfare state constructed largely in an ad hoc
manner through the efforts of multiple individual
unions acting for themselves was significantly
less complete and durable than that brought into
being by unified working-class parties elsewhere.
Moreover, because they had to be defended by
the individual unions that had initially secured
them, the reform measures attained in the US
were also significantly more vulnerable to being
rolled back once the crisis hit than in much of the
rest of the advanced capitalist world.

But the center-left parties of Europe were also

unable to defend living standards and working
conditions.

The bottom line is that the deep decline in the

rate of profit, beginning in the late 1960s and early
1970s, and the subsequent failure of its recovery,
destroyed the precondition for the wage gains and
welfare state reforms sought by trade unions and
social-democratic parties.
Union officials and parliamentary politicians
at the heart of all these organizations, no less than
the Democratic Party, accepted unconditionally
the capitalist system. They accepted without
question that their top priority must be the
restoration of their corporations profitability.
This is because without a sufficient increase in
their

corporations rate of return, these companies could not be expected to increase the investment and employment needed to accommodate
adequate wage gains, direct and indirect, for their
members.
Its not surprising, then, that just like the
Democrats, social-democratic parties across the
advanced capitalist world moved over the past
three decades to repress demands from their
memberships for increased compensation and
social welfare benefits in order to push up profits.
The first manifestation of falling profitability
and the slowdown of capital accumulation in
Western Europe came in the 1960s. In virtually
every country trade union officials, as well as
associated social-democratic and labor parties,
responded by approving government and
corporate cutbacks of various sorts. The aim was
to restore international competitiveness and, in
turn, manufacturing profitability, at the expense
of labor.
But this acceptance of the need for workers to
make sacrifices to restore corporate treasuries did
not go unchallenged. All across Europe from
Germany to France to Italy to the UK rankand-file workers unleashed major revolts from
below against the party political and trade union
bureaucratic forces that had demanded givebacks
in the interest of revitalizing capital
accumulation.

Up From Liberalism

19

When the Going

Gets Tough
10%

By the 1970s, the postwar

boom seemed to be over.

Rate of Return
on Capital
for Nonfinancial
Corporations

0
1956

1960

1964

1968

Source: Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the

Future of American Politics (1986)

In Germany, there was a wave of unofficial

strikes that completely destroyed the policy of
wage restraint backed by the Social Democrats. In
France, there was May 68; in Italy, the Hot
Autumn of 1969. In England, the miners strike
brought down the government.
This surge of working-class resistance did
slow the employers offensive and the revival of
profitability. But the deep recession of 197475
brought a major reversal, specifically a major
increase in unemployment that sapped worker
energy and reduced combativeness. The way
was thus opened to round after round of wage
restraint and spending cuts that, sooner or
later, received the backing of the official socialdemocratic and labor leaderships in every
country.
Did it all have to collapse? Was there a reformist
path out of the contradictions that youre talking
about? Or can we say that, unless there had been
some kind of anticapitalist break sometime in the
1970s, we were unlikely to prevent the situation
were suffering through today?

20

Jacobin Winter 2016

1972

1976

1980

I do think its clear today that, short of the

overthrow of the capitalist order, there were
powerful economic and political pressures that
make it unsurprising that weve ended up where
we are.
On the one hand, the economic responses of
capital itself to its profitability problem have only
made things worse. The reduced rate of return has
decreased the incentives for capitalists to invest
and employ. It has, at the same time, motivated
capital and the state to cut back on the growth of
compensation and social spending so as to jack up
profits by reducing the cost of production. The
outcome has been ever-slower growth in demand
for investment goods, consumer goods, and state
services, and this has put further downward
pressures on the rate of return.
The political responses by social-democratic
and labor parties, as well as of the Democratic
Party, have been similarly self-undermining. For
these forces, the acceptance of the inviolability of
capitalist property and profitability has made a
break from austerity unthinkable.
Nevertheless, the resulting continuation of
the plunge in aggregate demand has meant that
protecting corporations rate of return has

The Dynamics of Retreat

become ever less compatible with even the most

minimal increases in wages or social spending and
has seemed to require their absolute reduction.
Its because the operation of the financial
sector makes possible the most extreme and
dramatic upward distributions of income to the
top 1percent, above and away from almost
everyone else that the turn to finance has been
so widespread. It appears, for those who have
access, to be the most effective way to protect and
increase capitalist profits, the sine non qua for
everyone and everything under the prevailing
more of production. That financial expansion goes
together with increasingly severe financialeconomic meltdowns, as well as absolute declines
in income for increasingly large sections of the
population, is understood to be the unavoidable
cost of keeping the economy healthy.
That social-democratic parties of Western
Europe, as well as the Democratic Party, have not
hesitated to throw in their lot with the financial
sector seems superficially paradoxical. But it
follows logically from their unwillingness to
question capitalist property relations and their
acceptance, like every other player in the capitalist political game, of the primacy of profits for
the dynamism of the economy and thus working-class living standards. Acknowledging that
the ascent of finance today is part and parcel of
the descent of workers incomes is simply to
accept the unavoidability of what is seen as
collateral damage.
Still, the fact remains that the willingness of
official social democracy and labor to ally with
financial capital has enormous implications for
politics going forward, as it is creating real
openings for resistance. Support for capitalist
profitability has always been justified by the
apparent requirement of rising surpluses for
rising investment and rising living standards. But
today, with the expansion of the financial sector,
the link between profits, growth, and worker
compensation has been broken to a significant
degree.
Reformist forces have thus become engines of
predation overseeing the massive transfer of
income from the pockets of millions of workers to

the purses of a handful of financiers. This is ever

more obvious to ever larger sections of the
population. These background conditions could
help us see a break to the left of a traditional
reformism that has all but given up the fight for
reforms.
Its extremely important, it seems to me, that
Bernie Sanders goes from one place to another
getting thirty thousand people at meetings. And
Jeremy Corbyn the same. These are very
important indicators of a changing ground, so to
speak, for actual organizing.
And even without this organizing, whats great
about Corbyn and Sanders is the seeming
rejection of the whole political scene by their
supporters.

The mass upsurges of 201112 focused on the

squares in Greece and Spain already posed the
need to cleanly break to the left, beyond social
democracy, and begin to challenge capitalism
from a position of direct democracy. But they
were never able to mobilize the strength to force
through major reforms from the outside in the
manner of the US labor rebellion of the mid 1930s,
let alone constitute institutions of workers power
like factory committees.
Syriza and Podemos did aim to take power,
but they have defined taking power almost
entirely in electoral terms and failed entirely to
carry through the indispensable task of rebuilding
mass movements in factories, offices, and the
streets. As a result, their tendency has been to
replace a financialized and neoliberalized social
democracy with the traditional version, despite
the fact that for close to forty years the latter has
capitulated ever more completely to austerity.
Today we face a bit of a lull, but it is not
indicative of defeat. It seems clear to me that
alienation from and opposition to the system is
growing rapidly. What needs to be pondered is
where the new movements are going to come
from and what the form of organization is going
to be that can sustain the level of militancy and
political innovation needed to challenge
capitalism.

Up From Liberalism

21

Its Their
Party
A generation ago, socialists and civil
rights activists tried to transform the
Democratic Party. Why did they fail?

Paul
Heideman

n 1964, there were few things that Students for a Democratic

Society and Barry Goldwater agreed on.
sds was becoming a key voice of a new wave of American
radicalism, and the organizations veterans would go on to shape
the US far left for decades. In much the same way, backers of
Goldwaters failed presidential campaign that year would eventually become
key figures in the new Republican Party, turning it into a proselytizer for freemarket fundamentalism whose vigor was matched only by the evangelical
commitments of its new voting base.
Though the future trajectories of sds and the Goldwater campaign were
unknown at the time, in 1964 they were already implacable opponents. sds, convinced of the threat Goldwater represented, reluctantly agreed to campaign for
his opponent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the slogan Half the way with LBJ.
Yet sds and Goldwater did find themselves in agreement on one central
question in American politics: the place of the South. Historically a one-party
region controlled entirely by segregationist Democrats known as the Dixiecrats,
the successes of procivil rights forces inside the national Democratic Party had
thrown the regions alignment into question.
For Goldwater, it was obvious that these reactionaries belonged inside
his emerging Republican coalition. Speaking before an audience of Georgia
Republicans, the candidate assured them that he would bend every mus
cle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life of
the South.
In a time of federal civil rights laws, and the use of federal troops to enforce
school desegregation, this kind of appeal to regional self-determination had a
clear meaning. And the rationale for such an overture was equally obvious
black voters were not about to abandon the Democrats, and as such, the should
go hunting where the ducks are.
Strangely enough, sds agreed. In the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the
defining manifesto produced by the group, they called for the shuttling of

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

23

Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party.

It went on to comment specifically on Goldwater,
musing that
It is to the disgrace of the United States that
such a movement should become a prominent
kind of public participation in the modern
world but, ironically, it is somewhat to the
interests of the United States that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed
toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican Party in
the South.
sds was hardly alone on the Left in welcoming such
a shift. From liberals to socialists, the attempt to
push the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party
was widely held to be a necessary step in the project of building a more equal country, allowing the
Democrats to become a party more like those of
European social democracy.
Things did not exactly work out this way. The
defection of the South to the Republicans coincided with the conservatization of the Democrats,
and, in some accounts, even laid the foundation for
the reemergence of the Republicans as a majority
party. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss
the advocates of the realignment perspective, who
included both liberals like Walter Reuther of the
United Automobile Workers (uaw) and radicals
like Bayard Rustin, as deluded or shortsighted in
their strategy.
Indeed, their project was based on an analysis
of American society whose level of sophistication
and scale of ambition puts much of progressive
thought today to shame. And, unlike most recent
projects of the US left, it succeeded. Though many
revolutionary leftists dismissed the possibility at
the time, the Dixiecrats really were driven from the
Democratic Party, even if the consequences of that
exodus were not what sds and other radicals had
expected they would be.
Ultimately, the realignment strategy represented one of the high points of the struggle for
social democracy in the United States. For a time,
it seemed possible to transform the Democrats into
a social-democratic party. The failure of this project
should not be taken as a verdict on the failure of

24

Jacobin Winter 2016

social democracy as a strategy. Its history does, however, contain lessons for adherents of that strategy
today, as well as for socialists looking beyond it.

The Strategy
The strategy of realigning the Democrats by pushing
out the Dixiecrats and creating a party run by a liberal-labor coalition was backed by much of the union
leadership and social movements at the time. Figures
from Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King Jr noticed that the Democratic Party contained within
it both the most liberal forces in official American
politics, like Hubert Humphrey, and the most reactionary, like Strom Thurmond.
The idea that the latter could be forced out, and
that the party could be hegemonized by the former,
was an attractive one that gained plausibility as the
incipient civil rights insurgency intensified the contradiction between the two groups. By the early
1960s, realignment was the implicit strategy guiding
the work of many of the leaders of the national Civil
Rights Movement.
Inside the movement, the most important partisan of realignment was Bayard Rustin, perhaps the
most talented organizer the US left ever produced.
Rustin had been, among other things, a Young Communist, a pacifist, and an organizer for A. Philip
Randolphs March on Washington Movement for
civil rights.
By the 1950s, he was a well-known figure. When
the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955, Rustin
quickly headed down to Alabama, becoming a key
advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. A few years later,
Rustin would become the main organizer behind
the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Rustin was a tireless advocate of realignment.
He consistently argued that black Americans had
to secure real political power in order to achieve
equality. The only way to do this, he asserted, was
by transforming the Democratic Party. Traditional
methods of protest were insufficient:
We have to look at political parties differently
than we look at other institutions, like segregated schools and lunch counters, because a
political party is not only the product of social

Its Their Party

How the South

Was Lost
After signing the 1964
Civil Right Act, Lyndon B.
Johnson told an aide,
We

have lost the South

for a generation.
That would prove to be
an understatement.

relations, but an instrument of change as well.

It is the Dixiecrats and the other reactionaries
who want to paralyze the Democratic Party in
order to maintain the status quo....

1960 Presidential Election

Kennedy
Nixon
Byrd

1964 Presidential Election

Johnson
Goldwater

1968 Presidential Election

Humphrey
Nixon
Wallace

If we only protest for concessions from without, then that party treats us in the same way
as any of the other conflicting pressure groups.
This means it offers us the most minimum concessions for votes. But if the same amount of
pressure is exerted from inside the party using
highly sophisticated political tactics, we can
change the structure of that party.
Later in the decade, Rustins insistence that black
insurgents orient themselves around official politics in the US would bring him into direct conflict
with the nascent expressions of black power, and he
would eventually become one of its most prominent
black critics. In the early 1960s, however, he was still
moving with the general current of black protest.
His position on realignment was similarly popular in left milieus. In 1960, Reuther declared his
intention to bring about a realignment and get the
liberal forces in one party and the conservatives in
another. And the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party, who famously attempted to unseat the segregationist delegation from their state at the 1964
Democratic Party convention, was in part motivated
by the same perspective.

Up From Liberalism

25

All in the
Family
Average Left Bloc Voting
by Policy Area, 19331950
Southern Democrats
Non-Southern Democrats
Republicans
10%
72%
77%

Policy Area

Civil
Rights

Fiscal

81%
87%
22%

Planning

81%
89%
32%

Regulation

68%
77%
25%

Welfare
State

73%
84%
30%

Labor

42%
85%
26%

At the mid-century mark, Democrats

of all stripes aligned closely
on most policy questions, except
civil rights and labor.

Source: Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress,

19331950, Political Science Quarterly (1993)

26

Jacobin Winter 2016

Looking back on their effort, Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (sncc) and mfdp organizer Cleveland Sellers recalled that
We were thinking far beyond Atlantic City. If
our venture there was successful, we intended
to utilize similar tactics in other Southern
states, particularly Georgia and South Carolina.
Our ultimate goal was the destruction of the
awesome power of the Dixiecrats, who controlled over 75percent of the most important
committees in Congress. With the Dixiecrats
deposed, the way would have been clear for a
wide-ranging redistribution of wealth, power,
and priorities throughout the nation.
Realignments embrace by such a wide variety of
progressive forces belies its rather obscure origins.
Before Reuther and Rustin threw their considerable
skills behind the strategy, it was being promoted
by a little-known but key figure in the history of
American radicalism: Max Shachtman.
Shachtman was the leader of a heterodox
Trotskyist grouping that, although small, had helped
lead important struggles in an earlier era, such as
the fight against the no-strike pledge, enforced by
both the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio)
officialdom and the Communist Party during World
War ii.
Shachtman had come to the position that the
advance of the American workers movement was
dependent on the formation of a labor party, and
looked to union leaders like Reuther as the incipient nucleus of such a party. During the late 1940s,
Shachtman and his associates attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince Reuther and other left-wing labor
leaders to break from the Democrats and start such
an organization.
By the late 1950s, it had become clear that a split
was not on the agenda. Even before the 1955 reunification of the American Federation of Labor (afl)
and the cio in which progressives like Reuther
took a back seat to the new organizations head, the
apostle of business unionism, George Meany the
labor movement had grown more conservative.
At the same time, the development of civil rights
insurgency raised the possibility that a right-wing
split from the Democrats, led by the Dixiecrats,

Its Their Party

might be more likely than a left-wing one. The

way might then be clear, Shachtman reasoned, for
labor and its liberal allies to take over the party,
transforming it into something like a European
social-democratic party.
Shachtmans thinking gained influence through
the efforts of his followers, most importantly Michael
Harrington. Harrington had joined Shachtmans
group in the early 1950s and, as the leader of the
partys youth section, quickly became a prominent
member.
Hard-working, intelligent, and charming, Harrington gained influence in left-liberal circles, writing
for Dissent magazine and becoming chairman of the
League for Industrial Democracy, out of which sds
would be born. He befriended Rustin in the mid
1950s and forged an alliance between the older civil
rights activist and Shachtmans milieu. Together, the
three men worked to build a broad consensus in the
American left around realignment.
The material conditions supporting such a
strategy certainly existed. What political scientists
have called the Southern veto had effectively
blocked efforts to secure progressive legislation
around race or labor at the national level. Moreover,
the Dixiecrats had prevented the Democrats from
assuming a coherent political identity as the party
of American liberalism.
Thus, the partisans of realignment held, even
if the exit of the Dixiecrats cost votes in the short
term, it would allow liberals and labor to run the
party unopposed, finally creating a national political
party unambiguously committed to a left agenda.

The Party of Which People?

The realignment strategy was powerfully attractive
because it seized on major tensions in American political life in a way that connected political realities
with radical ambitions. Unlike most left strategies
today, it began neither with individual action oriented, somehow, toward social transformation nor
with visions of social transformation disconnected
from the grubby reality of society as it exists.
Instead, it latched onto what was arguably the
key political fracture in the postwar period: the split
at the center of the Democratic Party. Understanding

both the significance of this split, and why it failed to

transform American politics in the way the theorists
of realignment thought it would, requires examining
the forces responsible for assembling the modern
Democratic Party.
The preNew Deal Democratic Party was in
many ways a regional party, based in the Solid South
with support from urban political machines in the
North. Virtually the entire business class supported
the Republicans, the default party of government
for the first three decades of the twentieth century.
All of this changed during the Great Depression.
Faced with a crisis of unprecedented severity and
longevity, the political unity of the American capitalist class fractured. A large segment abandoned
the Republican Party, whose traditional economic
policies of protectionism and anti-labor repression
had failed to halt the downturn. This section of capital, though wary of labors growing power, was
open to the reforms promised by Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, and became a key base of support for his
administration.
The split within the capitalist class was not
merely the result of differing approaches to
addressing the crisis as Thomas Ferguson has
argued, it was also rooted in the political economy
of American industry. The firms that supported
Roosevelt were, by and large, from two groups:
capital-intensive industries who were internationally competitive, and internationally-oriented
commercial banks. Both groups strongly supported
Roosevelts affinity for free trade. But even more
importantly, they were better able than other sections of American capital to bear the costs of reform.
A major swath of New Deal reforms from the
public employment programs to unemployment
insurance tightened labor markets by giving
workers options other than either starving or toiling
at the price capital would pay. Other measures, such
as legislation compelling firms to recognize unions,
made it easier for already-employed workers to bid
up their wages.
For labor-intensive sectors, such as textiles
or agriculture, wage-boosting reforms seemed to
have near-apocalyptic ramifications. But for capitalintensive industries, such as oil, the consequences of
higher wages were not nearly so dire labor costs

Up From Liberalism

27

constituted a smaller share of their overall bill. For

these businesses, the ameliorative programs of the
New Deal were a sounder bet than either continued
stagnation, or, even worse, the prospect of a revolutionary labor movement.
The South fit only awkwardly into the agenda of
reform-minded capital. With a still heavily agricultural economic base, run largely on coerced black
labor, Southern politicians were, at best, lukewarm
toward the New Deals pro-labor reforms. Indeed,
they worked furiously to secure exceptions that
would allow them to keep their labor force as it was.
This helped ensure that the benefits of the New
Deal would flow disproportionately to workers in
the North.
Southern politicians were, however, far friendlier
to aspects of Roosevelts program that disproportionally benefited the South: the mushrooming
subsidies to groups like agricultural producers and
federal works programs that attempted to renovate
the infrastructure of the countrys more backward
areas. This Southern politicians could get behind
but the Republican Party, still committed to balanced budgets, was unlikely to endorse.
The modern Democratic Party, then, was born of
a strange marriage, between the most advanced and
reform-minded sections of American capital and the
most economically backward section of the country.
What united them was their support for economic
policies that went far beyond what capital had previously been willing to stomach, from subsidies to
regulation to forays into state planning.
This unity of interests, however, was accompanied by real tensions, particularly over civil
rights and labor. Initially, civil rights was the
less potent of the two. Before the late 1940s, the
national Democratic Party had done little that
would upset Southern sensibilities. Instead, clashes
centered around labor, with Southern legislators playing a key role in both blocking pro-labor
legislation and passing repressive bills like the TaftHartley Act.
As the 1950s progressed, however, and the
movement for black equality gained in strength
and scope (at the same time the labor movement was
beginning its long decline), race moved to the fore as
the partys key fault line. The movements strategy

28

Jacobin Winter 2016

of disrupting through nonviolent civil disobedience put the federal government on the defensive,
the endless stories of white supremacist brutality
proving troublesome for the USs efforts to gain
influence in the decolonizing world. The interests
of the Southern ruling class had been throw into
conflict with those of the wider ruling class.

The Realities of Realignment

The tension developed into a chasm, and then a split.
But not only did the Democratic Party move to the
right in the decade or so following the departure of
the Dixiecrats, some argue it was precisely the exit of
working-class whites from the New Deal coalition
that paved the way for such a shift.
So why didnt the outcome that Rustin and his
cothinkers sought come to pass? Explanations that
focus on factors like the voting behavior of the white
working class are ultimately too superficial to explain
the sea change in American politics since the 1970s.
It is instead necessary to attend both to the realignment strategys evolution, and to the same kinds of
political-economic forces that made the odd coalition of Northern liberals and Southern reactionaries
possible in the first place.
Legend has it that, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson
told an aide that his signing of the Civil Rights Act
had given the South to the Republicans for a generation. What Johnson saw with trepidation the
partisans of realignment celebrated.
Of course, the Dixiecrats did not leave the party
in one fell swoop. Many of the most prominent
among them, such as James Eastland, remained
Democrats until the end of their careers. Nonetheless, 1964 was a turning point. In the 1968 election,
only the independent segregationist candidacy of
George Wallace kept Republicans from sweeping
the South. The way had been cleared, it seemed, for
a liberal-labor coalition to begin turning the Democratic Party around.
The advocates of realignment had little time to
savor their victory, however. Other developments
in American politics put increasing strain on both
their strategy and coherence as a political current.
Ultimately, these developments all flowed from
the escalation of the war in Vietnam by the late

Its Their Party

1960s, one of the central issues in American politics.

While it might seem that, for the group of socialists
and pacifists pushing realignment, the war would
hardly be a cause of internal discord, it produced
a major schism.
To understand how this could be, it is useful to
recall the view of Shachtman and other realignment
advocates that labor officials like Walter Reuther
were potential leaders of a nascent American social
democracy. As Shachtman and his followers gained
influence in the wider labor movement, they broadened this stance to cover the labor leadership as a
whole.
The most important figure in this milieu and
the most important figure in the American labor
movement for the entire period of the realignment approach was George Meany, head of the
afl-cio. Meany was a labor bureaucrats bureaucrat, bragging that he had never walked a picket line
in his life and openly contemptuous of organizing
unorganized workers. Also a staunch anticommunist, Meany enthusiastically backed the war
in Vietnam (which delivered plenty of money to
afl-cio workers in defense industries) and was
deeply involved in the federations efforts to combat
communism in unions abroad.
In their efforts to remake the Democratic Party
under the leadership of the liberal-labor coalition,
figures like Shachtman and Rustin were unwilling
to take action that would push Meany out of that
coalition. This carried enormous consequences.
It meant shrinking from even some of the mainstream demands of the civil rights movement.
Affirmative action, for example, became an unacceptable position, as Meany and other officials in the
afl-cio bitterly opposed such policies in deference
to unions that still practiced black exclusion, such as
the building trades. Crucially, it also meant refusing
to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. For some, such
as Shachtman, this was hardly even a compromise.
Shachtman had moved steadily to the right over
the previous decade, and now held that American
capitalism was preferable to Soviet totalitarianism,
even if socialism was still preferable to both.
In line with this perspective, Shachtman publicly
backed the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (calling the
US-backed counterrevolutionaries good, stout,

working-class fighters), as well as the various counterinsurgency regimes installed in South Vietnam. For
Rustin, the compromise was more difficult, as he
continued to support a negotiated end to the war in
private, and defended Martin Luther Kings public
opposition to it.
Still, Rustin ultimately maintained a coalition
with pro-war forces like the afl-cio for pragmatic reasons. He refused to support any part of
the antiwar movement, and went out of his way to
attack antiwar spokespersons. He also tempered his
longstanding opposition to racism in the labor movement, declaring, I myself am, in my own capacity,
committed to end the vestiges of discrimination in
the trade union movement, but I absolutely refuse
to conduct the battle along lines that will ultimately
injure the labor movement.
The result was that Rustin, Shachtman, and their
supporters effectively stopped trying to remake
the Democratic Party at all they simply became
backers of its leadership. Meany and the afl-cio
officialdom were, on the whole, perfectly happy with
Johnsons performance as president. Moreover, as it
became clear that those attempting to build a more
left-wing Democratic Party were largely motivated
to do so by Johnsons prosecution of the war, these
realignment proponents began spending more time
opposing those trying to change the party than trying
to change it themselves.

New Politics
Not all realignment supporters were willing to follow this strategy. Led by Michael Harrington, a second group maintained its intention of remaking the
Democratic Party in the image of the liberal-labor
coalition. Their struggles to do so took them into the
heart of the party and, despite opposition from
their former comrades, they managed to secure some
real changes in party structure.
But the reforms did little to change the fundamental nature of the Democratic Party, and, in the
context of the 1970s economic crisis, werent enough
to prevent it from moving even further to the right.
The first victory for Harrington came in the early
1970s, when the Democratic Party implemented a
series of reforms intended to open up the party and

Up From Liberalism

29

A Revolution From Within

Pre-1970s

Democratic
National
Committee

Before the 1970s, the DNC was often characterized as an

example of politics without power, playing a relatively
insignificant role in most races. The real power in the party
was in the hands of state, precinct, and county leaders,
who controlled the nominating process. But in the past
forty years, the party has undergone a process of
centralization through the enforcement of national party
rules and the control of resources distributed to state
parties.

Congressional
and Senatorial
Campaign
Committees

State and
Local Party
Organizations

30

Jacobin Winter 2016

Before the 1970s, state parties controlled the nomination

process, and they ran most candidates campaigns.
Additionally, the distribution of positions was governed
by a patronage-based system. The patronage system
was undermined by the reforms of the New Politics era,
by the intervention of public sector unions, and by Supreme
Court rulings in the 1970s.

Its Their Party

A generation of activists tried to bring

democracy into the Democratic Party.

1970s Reforms

Post-1970s

The DNC is no longer dependent on state party

organizations to function. After the reforms of 1974,
the DNC was given a bigger role in campaign fundraising, voter mobilization, and financial and technical
assistance to state and local units. The committee
abandoned equal representation for each of the
states, embracing a new representational formula
taking states populations and Democratic vote shares
into account. Notably, caucuses of African Americans,
Latinos, and women also gained influence over the
DNC in the 1970s, but were formally dissolved by the
national chair in 1985.

Over the past 40 years, the DNC has also undergone a

major expansion in its membership. But the increased size
of the committee has made deliberation difficult. This
means that de facto power falls to the national chair and
executive committee, who meet prior to national committee meetings and then have their decisions ratified by the
full committee. There are also caucuses and factions that
meet informally but have little power to alter the chairs
decisions. Today, it is also responsible for planning
and managing party conventions, generating publicity
for candidates, and maintaining networks of (and data on)
state leaders, county leaders, and rank-and-file activists.

Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
have been around for over a hundred years, but they have
gained greater influence and importance since the 1970s.
Each of these committees plays a lead role in raising funds
and allocating resources for races in their respective
chambers of Congress. In addition to steering campaign
contributions from wealthy donors, PACs, and unions
toward candidates, these organizations are also permitted
to make their own coordinated expenditures.

From 19681974, new party rules forced state parties to

change the nominating process from one dominated by
caucuses to one dominated by direct primaries. Over time,
state parties evolved into what political scientists call
service agencies for Democratic campaigns. These
featured professionalized leadership and staffing, as well
as permanent headquarters, increased budgets to support
statewide candidates, and assistance to precinct- and
county-level organizations. State parties are run by state
chairs and state central committees, which are tasked
with fundraising, calling state conventions, drafting
platforms, enforcing party rules, and assisting local party
organizations at the level of the county, municipality, and
ward or precinct.

Since the 1980s, the party has also operated coordinated

campaign organizations that are jointly funded by the
DNC, state party organizations and allied interest groups
(including labor unions), as well as candidates themselves.
Perhaps the most important of these are the state
legislative campaign committees, which parallel the
national congressional and senatorial campaign committees. Legislative campaign committees now operate
independently of state central committees. The campaign
committees are made up of incumbent legislators who
perform fundraising and other functions for local and
statewide races. The most well-funded of these are found
in competitive states with high campaign costs and weak
state central committees.

Up From Liberalism

31

decrease the power of party elites. The reforms came

on the heels of 1968 election, in which a candidate
who had run in no primaries, Hubert Humphrey,
ultimately won the nomination at a convention
marked by Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard
Daleys police force cracking the heads of protesters
outside.
Disgruntled by this experience, supporters of
the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy managed
to win a vote to create a party reform commission,
which would be headed by South Dakota Senator
George McGovern. The body (called the McGovernFraser commission) instituted affirmative action in
delegate selection, required that delegates be picked
in the year of the election, eliminated prohibitive
delegate fees, and put in place a new, more transparent set of rules for delegate selection.
The immediate consequence of these rule
changes was the nomination of George McGovern
for president in 1972. McGovern had entered the
race late in 1968, but had drawn attention as a principled opponent of the war with a solidly liberal
voting record.
Drawing on the experience of the 1968 McCarthy campaign, McGovern employed a grassroots
strategy, relying on networks of volunteers to secure
the vote in key states like New Hampshire and Wisconsin and running a thoroughly antiwar and liberal
campaign. It worked.
His success in dislodging frontrunner Edmund
Muskie and winning the nomination quickly gave
way to disappointment, however. In the November
1972 general election, McGovern lost every state
but Massachusetts.
In subsequent years, McGoverns campaign
has come to stand as the symbol of a Democratic
Party gone too far to the left, alienating the silent
majority of Americans repulsed by the various
manifestations of 1960s radicalism.
From this perspective, realignment failed by
being too successful activists like Harrington
and his followers pulled the party so far to the left
that they destroyed its chances with a still-moderate
American electorate. In many versions of this story,
the advocates of party reform known as the New
Politics supporters drove the party toward supposedly middle-class concerns like feminism and

32

Jacobin Winter 2016

environmentalism, repelling its (white) blue-collar

base and eliciting the afl-cios decision not to
endorse McGovern.
But however influential, this telling bears little
resemblance to the actual history. For one thing,
labor wasnt especially powerful in the party even
before the McGovern-Fraser reforms. In 1965, with
a Democratic supermajority in both the House and
the Senate, unions failed to win passage of a bill to
ban state-level right-to-work legislation, an objective Meany had declared labors highest priority.
Labor did wield power as a behind-the-scenes
broker, trading delegate slates and endorsements
like machine politicians. The afl-cio officialdoms ability to play this role was undermined by
the McGovern-Fraser reforms.
However, it was precisely because they felt that
they werent getting a fair shake from Meanys
wheeling and dealing that unions like the uaw,
afscme, and the communications workers, supported these reforms. As such, it hardly makes sense
to characterize the New Politics reforms as effecting
a middle-class takeover of a formerly working-class
party.
Nonetheless, there is a grain of truth to the idea
that the commissions reforms helped cost the party
the 1972 election. Meanys outrage over losing some
of his backroom power translated directly into an
intense hostility to McGovern and everything his
supporters represented. That McGovern was also
a steadfast opponent of the war in Vietnam only
intensified Meanys hatred.
He demanded that the afl-cio executive board
vote unanimously against lending the federations
support. While he came up short, Meany was nonetheless able to prevent the afl-cio from playing
an active role in the campaign. Aiding him in this
endeavor were the remaining Shachtmanites, who
labeled McGovern the candidate of surrender and
used their influence to attack his support in progressive circles.
These attacks undoubtedly made McGoverns
campaign more difficult, and while many union affiliates of the afl-cio endorsed his campaign, the
organizational muscle of the federation itself was
sorely missed. Thus, though it is true that McGovern
was too far left for an important Democratic

Its Their Party

constituency, it is a gross distortion to equate that

constituency conservative union leaders with
working-class voters.
But even the loss of the afl-cio was less decisive in McGoverns defeat than the ability of his
opponent, Richard Nixon, to forge a new investor
coalition and the incumbent presidents pre-election
expansionary economic policy.
As discussed earlier, part of the core of Democratic-friendly capitalist firms consisted of multinationally oriented firms, such as global exporters
and international commercial banks. When international economic disorder intensified in the early
1970s this capital bloc began trying to stabilize the
system through increased international cooperation.
Formed by David Rockefeller in 1971 to steer
away the country from economic nationalism, the
Trilateral Commission was the main institutional
proponent of this approach. The immediate stimulus for the commissions founding was Nixons
New Economic Policy (nep), which suspended the
dollars convertibility to gold the foundation of
the postwar economic order and issued a new
series of import tariffs.
The multinational capital bloc feared potential
reprisals from other advanced capitalist economies,
greatly damaging the bottom line of export-oriented
firms. A series of attacks on Nixons trade policies
began appearing in the business press, serving notice
to the president that not all of capital was happy
with his policies.
In 1972, Nixon responded adroitly, removing
the import tariff and replacing the strongly nationalist Treasury Secretary John Connally with the
more multilaterally-oriented George Shultz. Even
more importantly, Nixon signed the Smithsonian
Agreement in 1971, establishing new currency
policies between ten of the largest capitalist
economies.
Over the course of the election year, Nixon
worked systematically to endear his administration
to the traditionally Democratic bloc of multinationally oriented firms. His success in doing so deprived
the McGovern campaign of yet another traditional
source of Democratic Party support, a source that
could hardly be identified with the values of the
American electorate.

The final reason for Nixons resounding victory

in 1972 was the political business cycle of that year.
For decades now, scholars of American politics have
noticed the tendency of economic policy to become
reflationary in election years, effectively boosting the
campaign of the incumbent (or his party).
Nixon furnished a particularly notable instance
of this pattern in the years before the 1972 election.
From 1970 to 1972, the Federal Reserve, chaired
by close Nixon associate Arthur Burns, expanded
the US money supply at an average rate of 7percent a year. With the money supply expanding so
quickly, businesses could easily acquire money for
investment, powering rapid growth in the economy.
Nixon also embarked on a program of strong fiscal
expansion, pushing the growth rate to climb from
about zero in 1970 to almost 7percent in 1972.
Even with the specter of inflation lurking, a
McGovern triumph in the context of such rapid
economic growth would have been astounding. After
taking into account the afl-cio officialdoms abandonment of McGovern and Nixons wooing of the
multilateral investment bloc, McGoverns loss is
entirely explicable.

Realignment at Last?
By the mid 1970s, the realignment strategy had lost
much of its appeal. Shachtman and Rustin allied
themselves with the extant power blocs in the party,
essentially reconciling themselves to the existing
order.
Harrington and his supporters, however, had not
given up the fight, even after the McGovern debacle.
The Watergate scandal had given the strategy a
shot in the arm, ushering Nixon (and then Ford)
out of the White House, bringing Jimmy Carter in,
and enhancing Democratic super-majorities in the
House and Senate.
In 1976, Harrington strongly supported Carter,
declaring in a debate with Socialist Workers Party
candidate Peter Camejo that if Carter wins, he
will owe his victory in considerable measure to the
working class politically organized as a class. At the
beginning of his term, it seemed like Carter agreed.
On the Democratic agenda were long-term liberal
projects such as a federal Consumer Protection

Up From Liberalism

33

DNC Leadership
Structure Immediately
After 1970s Reforms
Additionally, the reforms of the 1970s
extended representation on the
committee to no more than
75 additional members, including
elected officials and leaders
of party auxiliaries (such as the
National Federation of Democratic
Women, the Young Democrats,
and the College Democrats). These
reforms also mandated equal
representation of men and women.

Democratic
National
Committee
Chair of Democratic
Governors Association
+ 2 members

Secretary

Executive
Director

75 Additional
Members

Democratic State Legislative

Leaders Association
+ 2 members

Five Vice
Chairs

State
Chairs
Treasurer

National
Chair

Communications
Director

National Finance
Chair

Executive
Committee
Chair of National
Democratic
Municipal Officials
Conference + 2
member

Chair of Democratic
County Officials
Conference
+ 2 members

The Democrats
introduced an executive
committee, which
meets more frequently
than the full national
committee.

34

Jacobin Winter 2016

Chair of
Democratic Mayors
Conference
+ 2 members

It is customary for incumbent presidents

(or presidential nominees) to designate the
national chair. To win the designation,
however, the prospective chair tends to require
the support of a majority of the DNC,
of the major factions within the Democratic
coalition, and, one might add, of its
most important investors. As the DNC gained
greater power and influence within the
party in the 1970s, so too did the national
chair, who now makes most of the decisions
that matter for national campaigns
in consultation with the DNCs executive
committee. New rules required that
the chair serve on a full-time basis, thereby
disqualifying elected officials and state
party chairs.

DCCC and DSCC

The congressional and senatorial
campaign committees chairs
are elected by the Democratic
caucuses in the respective
chambers of Congress.

Its Their Party

Delegates
Old system (pre-1970s reform)
County/precinct caucuses send delegates
to congressional district caucuses.
Congressional district caucuses send
delegates to state party conventions.
State party conventions send delegates
to represent the state at national
conventions.

New system (post-1970s reform)

Democrats vote in congressional district
primaries and statewide presidential
primaries.
District delegates are allocated
proportionally based on the results
of the district primaries.
At-large delegates are allocated
proportionally based on the results
of statewide primaries.

State Central
Committees
State party organizations are
governed by Democratic state central
committees. Membership criteria
for these committees are determined
on a state-by-state basis, but
members tend to be elected by party
organizations at the level of the
county, the congressional district,
the municipality, and the ward
or precinct. In addition, state central
committees include ex-officio
members, i.e. elected officials and
the representatives of major
constituencies.
Central committees periodically elect
state party chairs and state executive
directors. State party chairs continue
to exert influence over the nominating
process by serving as super delegates or PLEO delegates (see
below) to national conventions. There
is also an Association of State
Democratic Chairs, which exerts
further influence over the national
party (e.g., by electing a president
to serve on the DNC executive
committee).

Agency, labor law reform, and a federal full-employment bill (a central project for realignment advocates
since the 1960s).
Carter, however, took power amid a period
of economic turbulence unknown since the Great
Depression. Corporate profits, which had been
declining since the late 1960s, dipped near 2percent
in the early 1970s, before rising again to an anemic
4percent for the next few years.
As profits tanked, US firms looked to cut labor
costs. Resistance to unionization skyrocketed. A
decade earlier, many companies had acquiesced
in the face of unionization elections, declining to
challenge the results 42percent of the time. By 1978,
firms were contesting 92percent of such elections.
Companies also resorted to playing dirty more often,
firing pro-union employees at rates that far exceeded
those of previous decades. As in the Great Depression, the imperative to reduce labor costs fell most
heavily on labor-intensive firms.
However, the 1970s were unlike the Depression
decade in a crucial aspect: there was no threat of a
radicalized labor movement to convince firms who
could absorb higher wages that it was worth compromising. While labor radicalism spooked elites
through the 1930s, a rank-and-file rebellion at the
outset of the 1970s quickly receded as unemployment rates crept up.
Thus, while the same divisions of interest that
laid the basis for the 1930s compromise with labor
were present in the 1970s, the level of working-class
insurgency that activated these divisions was absent.
Lacking such a movement, capital-intensive industries potentially open to another informal accord
were not about to complain too loudly about their
colleagues efforts to strip workers to the bone.
The same period also saw an unprecedented level
of business organization. The Business Roundtable,
now the leading organization of American capital,
was formed, and existing organizations such as the
National Association of Manufacturers and the
Chamber of Commerce experienced a resurgence
in membership.
The impetus was both the recession itself
which revived memories of the Depression and
a wave of regulatory legislation in the preceding
years, such as the creation of the Occupational

Up From Liberalism

35

Safety and Health Administration (osha), which,

unlike previous legislation, which only targeted individual sectors, affected all firms, creating a common
interest for capital to rally around.
Business was ready for a fight.
That fight came quickly, in the 1977 congressional season. First on the agenda was the creation
of a consumer protection agency, which had previously passed in Congress but was vetoed by Ford.
Everyone assumed the legislation would be approved
easily. Business, however, put together a tremendous
effort to defeat it, and the bill failed in a lopsided
vote, 189-227. Of the newly elected Democratic
representatives, 60percent opposed the measure.
Next up was common site picketing, which
allowed an entire worksite to be picketed if there
were grievances against any employer at that location (a rule particularly important for construction
unions, who often worked at places with multiple
subcontractors). Also the victim of a previous Ford
veto, common site picketing met the same fate as
the consumer protection agency.
Unions biggest priority that year, however,
was labor law reform. Reeling from capitals new
intransigence, labor sought to stiffen the penalties
for various unfair practices during union elections.
George Meany declared that the afl-cio was
going to fight harder for this bill than any bill since
the passage of the Wagner Act.
The skirmish did, briefly, bring to the surface the
kinds of schisms between sections of capital that had
been so crucial in the New Deal. Capital-intensive
firms in the Business Roundtable advocated neutrality in the fight, preferring to save their legislative
muscle for battles more central to their vital interests. But labor-intensive firms prevailed in the vote
among the groups leadership, 19-11.
Unburdened by the dilemmas created by working-class militancy, the capital-intensive segments
of the class went along for the ride. Despite a Democratic supermajority, a filibuster ultimately thwarted
the bill.
The final legislative defeat came disguised as a
victory the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins
Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.
Long an objective of the liberal-labor coalition,
full-employment legislation was seen as one of the

36

Jacobin Winter 2016

most important steps toward building progressive

social policy in the US.
By the time Carter signed the act, however, it
had been completely defanged. While the original
legislation mandated the president move towards
full-employment levels and included provisions
enlisting the federal government as the employer of
last resort in case efforts to stimulate private-sector
employment failed the final bill simply called
on the president to report progress toward fullemployment and lacked any language around direct
creation of public jobs.
What had begun as an effort to force the president to produce an economy of abundant jobs ended
up being little more than a declaration of his discretion to do so discretion that would, ultimately,
never be used. The legislative linchpin for those
leftists still holding on to visions of realignment
had finally passed, with practically no effect on the
American political economy.

Right Turn
In some accounts, such as Paul Pierson and Jacob
Hackers Winner Take All Politics, businesss increasing political mobilization is the principal reason
labor suffered these defeats the implication being
that, had labor been better organized, less divided,
and less encumbered by the Meanyite officialdom,
it could have successfully resisted the offensive. But
what such a conclusion ignores is the way the crisis
itself reshaped the political terrain.
With all sections of capital increasingly resistant to labor, the pressure for a compliant policy
agenda ran through channels well beyond business
lobbying, exerting direct pressure on the executive
itself. The last two years of the Carter administration
provide a devastating case study of this pressure
at work.
Carters tenure had begun in the fashion typical
of Democratic presidencies in the postwar era. His
administration was so stocked with representatives
of multilaterally-oriented capital that the association between Carter and the Trilateral Commission
became a standing joke. The turbulence of the 1970s,
however, broke apart the old Democratic coalition
once and for all, propelling Carter to the right and

Capital Strikes Back

6,230

Its Their Party

Complaints Issued in Unfair Labor

Practice Proceedings

1975 was the beginning

of a major assault
on organized labor.
3,064

1975

setting the stage for every Democratic administration since.

The first shock to the administration came
through the defection of the oil companies. As
the capital-intensive industry par excellence, oil
had been a Democratic stronghold since the New
Deal, making the opec oil crisis particularly
dicey. opecs oil embargo forced up energy prices,
leading to pressure from consumers for price controls. The Democratic congress had obliged under
Ford, and though Carter managed to attract much
of the industry back to the fold with talk of deregulation, suspicion now existed where there had once
been none.
When oil prices skyrocketed again in the
summer of 1979, the pressure on the administration became unbearable. Put simply, Carter had
to choose between the interests of the oil industry,
a key Democratic constituency, and energy consumers sensitive to price rises, which included the
great majority of the electorate, as well as a large
section of capital. Carter chose the latter, endorsing
a windfall tax on oil profits as a means to address
the growing budget deficit. United in opposition

1980

1985

to such a surcharge, the oil industry thus began its

association with the Republican Party.
The flight of oil made Carters administration all
the more vulnerable to pressure from other sections
of capital. Facing increased international competition in product markets, large sectors of corporate
America began pushing for reductions in their tax
rate. These tax cuts made it impossible for federal
spending to continue at its previous levels.
Confronted with the demand to slash the budget
from a wide range of the business community, Carter
acquiesced. The austerity so often associated with
the Reagan presidency actually began with Carter,
under whom spending on welfare, for example,
contracted more rapidly than it ever would under
Reagan.
Carter also moved to deregulate huge sections of
American industry, including the airlines, trucking,
and, perhaps most saliently today, banking. Faced
with an increasingly dissatisfied business class
(despite their recent legislative victories), Carter
acted aggressively to placate their concerns,
attacking the interests of his own electoral base so
ferociously that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy

Source: Fiftieth Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board (1985)

Up From Liberalism

37

was motivated to mount a brief primary challenge

to the incumbent president.
Finally, Carter took a hard right turn on foreign
policy. Reeling from the blow of the Iranian Revolution, which had overthrown a loyal US client regime,
the president promised that the US would deploy
military force to defend its interests in the Middle
East. It is one of the few promises in American politics that has been kept.
Carter also reversed the dtente between the US
and the USSR, initiating an American arms buildup
and successfully goading the Soviets into a bloody
war in Afghanistan in the hopes of giving them a
Vietnam-style quagmire.
Today, it is a widely held assumption of the
liberal-left that the rightward turn in American politics was launched under Reagan, and spearheaded
by right-wing Christian groups such as the Moral
Majority. A different version of the same story holds
that it was Nixon who started that shift by mobilizing
the silent majority against the Civil Rights Movement and the Left. Both of those narratives rest on a
basic misconception. In fact, it was not a Republican,
but Jimmy Carter who began this process. And he
did it at a time when he commanded majorities in
both houses of Congress.
One reason the myth of Republican ascendancy
is so pernicious is that it suggests that it was voters
who drove American politics to the right. Underlying
this view is the notion that what really caused that
move was the break-up of the so-called New Deal
Coalition, which collapsed because of the increasingly reactionary bent of racist white workers.
It is certainly true that the 1970s saw the emergence of a racist backlash against the gains of the
Civil Rights Movement. But it wasnt led by racist
white workers, and it didnt destroy any New
Deal coalition. In fact, working-class Americans
remained left-wing on a broad range of political
issues well into the 1980s. If anything, the Democrats defeat at the hands of Reagan reflected how
isolated from their voters they were becoming.
The culprit wasnt reactionary white workers
electing Republicans. It was elites and officials, Democrats and Republicans alike. That doesnt mean the
decline of the Civil Rights Movement and collapse of
the labor radicalism of the early 1970s didnt matter.

38

Jacobin Winter 2016

Without those kinds of radical movements, capital

remained more or less united, without the kinds of
splits that can open up space for the Left.
Far from Harringtons hope that Carter might
represent a respite from ruling-class aggression,
and a chance for labor to have, at least, half a seat
at the table, Carters presidency initiated the all-out
attack on the New Deal order that Nixon and Ford
had only hinted at. The window for realignment
had closed.

Realigning Expectations
The story of realignment harkens back to a time
when large-scale historical projects still animated
the US left. Even though it is apparent in retrospect
that the strategy never had much of a chance, it is
possible to look back with respect at the strategic
thinking that motivated Rustin, Harrington, and
their comrades. They astutely identified one of the
major fault lines in American politics, and developed a way to shake that fault line such that when
the dust settled, something like an American social
democracy would exist.
Today, this kind of thinking has all but disappeared. To be sure, there are many who continue to
labor in the shadow of Harringtons vision, who often
speak of intensifying the contradictions between
the Democratic Partys base and its investors by
backing left candidates within the party. Whats
missing from this orientation is any sense of the
momentum of the party.
The contradiction between the partys base and
its investors has existed since the birth of the modern
Democratic Party in the New Deal. It has persisted
through the Great Society, through the New Politics
era, through Carter, all the way up until the present.
Again and again, this contradiction alone has proven
inert, unable to change the basic structure of power
within the party.
In the late 1950s, it was obvious that tensions
between Dixiecrats and the rest of the party were
coming to a head. And if the internecine schism
between base and investors could not turn the party
leftwards then, when accompanied by the civil rights
revolution, theres little reason to believe it will do
so today, in our far drearierhistorical moment.

Its Their Party

Gloomy as this conclusion is, the history of

realignment also offers if not hope, then at least some
sense of the grounds on which hope can be built.
The strategy was correct in looking for divisions in official politics. It failed, ironically, in not
recognizing the divisions that made its strategy
even possible the fractures in capital that
allowed a more accommodating sector, fearful of
losing everything to working-class insurgency,
to compromise with labor. This concession was
the condition of existence for the Democratic
Party, and when its own conditions of existence
were undermined in the crisis of the 1970s, that
compromise ended.
The contemporary left should aspire to do what
the realignment strategy tried to accomplish to
recognize the different interests that exist within
capital, and leverage them to our own ends. To be
successful in this endeavor, however, and to avoid
the sorry end of postwar realignment, it will have to
organize on the basis of two truths that Harrington
and his cothinkers ultimately forgot.
First, working-class insurgency is the only force
that renders the contradictions between capitals
dynamic and capable of serving the Left. Second,
whatever power labor manages to assert against
capital, whether on the shopfloor, in a capitalist
party like the Democrats, or even in an actual socialdemocratic party, will always be partial, and subject
to dismemberment as soon as capital is able. While
Harringtons intellectual work stresses this, the
project he helped built did not reflect it.
The failure that ensued was nothing to celebrate.
The absence of an American social democracy is
not only responsible for the brutal and devastated
character of working-class life in US society it has
also yielded a feeble revolutionary left.
Deprived of the robust class-wide organizations
built and preserved by social democracy elsewhere,
the revolutionary left has perpetually struggled with
the most extreme forms of political isolation, and
the political and organizational pathologies that
accompany it. The sectarianism and splintering that
afflict the radical left are not, as is sometimes smugly
implied, a cause of the radical lefts powerlessness.
They are instead a symptom of a situation in which
splitting over obscure questions of doctrine carries

no real consequences for the Lefts ability to change

anything.
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 movements 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
doesnt 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.

Up From Liberalism

39

THE
THIRD
WAY

Atari
Democrats
As organized labor lost strength, the
Democratic Party turned to professionalclass voters to shore up its base.

Lily
Geismer

n late 1992, the Democratic Leadership Council (dlc) published a blueprint for a new America entitled Mandate for
Change. Issued as the groups former chair prepared to assume
the presidency, the document was intended as a guide to the
progressive ideas and themes that energized Bill Clintons winning campaign and an outline of a new governing agenda for a new era in
American politics.
Animating that agenda were several core principles: economic growth generated in free markets as the prerequisite for opportunity for all, equality in
terms of opportunity, not results, and a rejection of both the liberal emphasis
on redistribution in favor of pro-growth policies that generate broad prosperity
and the Rights notion that wealthy investors drive the economy. Clinton himself blurbed the book, praising the authors new governing philosophy based
on opportunity, responsibility, and community. At last, the president-elect
declared, the Democratic Party was moving beyond the old Left-Right debates
of the past.
Mandate for Change also contained a narrative of political history that
validated the dlcs own efforts to remake the party. The authors depicted a
Democratic coalition pulled asunder in the late 1960s over issues of race,
war, and cultural alienation. It was Clinton, the authors gushed, who had
rescued the party from disarray and oblivion. dlc founder Al From recycled
the Clinton-as-savior narrative in his memoir, arguing the New Democrats
philosophy and strategy had brought the Democrats in from the wilderness.
Yet while the party had indeed been transformed since the late 1960s, the heroic
tale of rebirth obscured a much more complex restructuring.
These changes should be viewed neither as the betrayal of the Democratic
Partys purpose in the late 1960s nor as a product of the dlcs political genius.
Rather, they reflect a broader shift in the balance of power within the party.

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

43

$76,054,151

Oil & Gas

Presidential Campaign Contributions

by Industry, 19922012

Silicon Valley

iOU

Insurance

The tech industry is a major force

in electoral politics, contributing
millions to both parties.

Hollywood

Commercial Banks

Auto

Defense

Mining
Pharmaceuticals

Air Transportation

$2,230,810
1992

44

1996

Jacobin Winter 2016

2000

2004

2008

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

2012

Atari Democrats

Since the 1960s, suburban knowledge professionals

and high-tech corporations have supplanted urban
ethnics and labor unions as the partys core constituency. This shifting base intensified structural
inequality and constrained the partys ability to
deliver progressive reforms.
While suburban knowledge workers make up a
small portion of the electorate and an even smaller
percentage of the national population, they have
come to hold a disproportionate amount of political power especially within the Democratic
Party. This cohort tends to vote in high numbers,
contribute to campaigns, engage in issue-based
advocacy, and receive outsized media attention.
Engineers, tech executives, scientists, lawyers,
and academics in postindustrial, high-tech enclaves
across the country from the Route 128 to the
Research Triangle and Silicon Valley broadly
share a political agenda that combines economic
and cultural issues. They generally favor environmental protection, low taxes, freedom of choice,
promotion of high-tech industry, education as a
means to advancement, and expertise as a solvent
for social problems. Richard Florida, who initially
coined the term creative class to describe this constituency, characterizes their politics as generally
liberal-minded. Above all, he argues, knowledge
workers are staunchly meritocratic and opposed to
inequality of opportunity. While that commitment
has at times driven them to favor collective remedies
to social problems, at other points, it has provoked
sharp antipathy toward labor unions.
Such opposition to one of the New Deals principal tenets confirms one thing: though American
liberalism hasnt disintegrated since the 1960s, its
undergone a clear metamorphosis, reshaping its
home in the Democratic Party along the way.
The roots of the professional classs growth go
much deeper than is immediately evident. In fact,
they go back to the New Deal itself. Often depicted
as the heyday of social democracy in the United
States, the New Deal did consist of initiatives such
as the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, and the Works Progress Administration,
which brought factory workers under the Democratic tent. But at the same time the New Deal
solidified support from generations of industrial

workers, it also initiated a set of policies and ideas

that would eventually empower suburban knowledge workers by giving them substantial privileges
and resources. These policies exacerbated forms of
structural inequality that have defined and plagued
American society ever since.
In the effort to create economic security and
opportunity and stabilize market forces, bureaucrats under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman
developed a range of public policies to encourage
single-family homeownership for whites outside
central cities. Black and brown families received
no such privileges. As historians and other scholars
have carefully documented, the result postwar
suburbanization was systemic residential segregation by race and class.
Though a creation of state intervention, the invidious consequences of these policies were framed
within a free-market discourse by the real-estate
industry, popular culture, and even the government.
Such obfuscation of the actual causes of continued
segregation encouraged white suburbanites to understand their decisions about where to live as individual choices and rights. They were less likely to
see how their own actions took advantage of state
subsidies that perpetuated forms of racial and economic inequality.
The New Deal agenda also placed technocratic
ideas at the heart of its programs. Advocates of these
apparently apolitical mechanisms of governance
came to populate state agencies, contributing to later
shifts in the Democratic Party and in the nations
economic and spatial dynamics. The Roosevelt
administration substantially increased the funding
of science-based research at universities like mit,
Harvard, and Stanford for military purposes. During
the Cold War, the government further boosted this
funding in the form of federal research and development grants, which swelled the size of universities
and spawned numerous technological breakthroughs
along the way.
Beyond the ivory tower, the rising outlays fueled
the explosion of technology and electronics companies in office parks and labs in the metropolitan rings
of cities, which physically, economically, and socially
reshaped areas ranging from Boston and New York
to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. The rise

Up From Liberalism

45

of these new businesses and labs laid the foundation

for the high-tech revolution.
These developments also precipitated a shift
in the politics of labor. Knowledge workers, not
manufacturing workers, became the fastest growing
occupational sector in this post-industrial society,
as David Bell famously labeled the postWorld Warii
economic landscape. Despite the fact that over a
third of all workers belonged to a union at the beginning of the 1950s, labor-saving technologies, the
movement of many companies to right-to-work
states in the South, and the suppression of labor
activism initiated an ongoing drop in unionization
rates across the country over the 1950s and 1960s.
In addition, an increasing political divergence grew
between labor leaders and rank-and-file members.
This combination of factors led unions to gradually
lose their influence within the Democratic Party.
At the same time, a new kind of liberal and Democratic politics began emerging within suburban
office parks and single-family homes. Whitecollar knowledge professionals were employed in
overwhelmingly non-unionized fields such as engineering, law, and academia that emphasized the
meritocratic principles of expertise and advancement through individual skill principles some
saw as antithetical to trade unionism.
This rejection of the social-democratic ideal of
collective bargaining did not entail a rejection of
liberalism. The engineers, scientists, academics,
and other professionals who moved to the kind of
suburban clusters of which Bostons Route128 is an
archetype often defied the typical postwar image of
the conservative, white, middle-class suburbanite
who actively opposed civil rights and integration.
Residents in these affluent, highly educated communities supported, and often organized, around civil
rights issues. They tended, however, to advocate
for causes such as fair housing, which was premised
on the meritocratic ideal that anyone with means
deserved the right to live where they chose. They
favored policies that created equal opportunity
and fostered individual rights, instead of those
designed to eradicate the structural underpinnings of racial segregation and economic inequity.
In fact, these liberal suburbanites often opposed
construction of low-income housing in their own

46

Jacobin Winter 2016

communities. And many refused to support metropolitan school integration, which was anathema to
their abstract faith in equality of opportunity and
posed a potential threat to their property values and
childrens education.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the priorities
of suburban knowledge workers were beginning to
receive a stronger hearing from Democratic politicians especially George McGovern. While
Richard Nixons rout of McGovern in the 1972
presidential election often serves as a symbol of
the partys disarray following the tumult of the late
1960s, the South Dakota senator was one of the first
Democrats to recognize the burgeoning clout of this
constituency and the larger changes in the power
balance of the party.
This awareness emerged, in part, from McGoverns role overseeing reforms to the Democratic
Partys delegation selection process following the
1968 election. The McGovernFraser Commission
established a set of guidelines designed to promote
the fair representation of minority views and ensure
that elected officials, party regulars, and union
leaders in smoke-filled backroom dealings could
no longer dominate the delegate selection process.
Some scholars have suggested these changes contributed to the fragmentation of labors political
voice, and ended union leaders role as kingmakers
and power brokers in Democratic Party politics (as
exemplified by afl-cio leader George Meany; other
unions, such as the uaw, supported the reforms).
These changes exacerbated tensions between Democratic politicians and segments of organized labor,
with Meanys afl-cio deciding not to endorse
McGovern. It simultaneously gave postindustrial
professionals more political sway.
In his bid for the presidency, McGovern engaged
in concerted outreach to engineers and other science-based professionals. He backed it up with
targeted policies, calling for research and development spending to concentrate on improving the
environment, schools, and technology sectors (especially small start-ups) instead of on defense. The
appeals worked. McGovern was the first Democratic
presidential candidate to do better with white-collar
than blue-collar voters, winning 42percent of knowledge professionals around the country and making

Atari Democrats

Rebooting
Politics
Silicon Valley Contributions
by Sector, 20082016

$ 67,549,194

$41,023,879

$28,810,204
$22,063,713

Computer Software

Internet

Data Processing & Computer Services

Computer Components & Accessories

Computer Manufacture & Services

$12,622,367

Source: Center for Responsive Politics

considerable gains in affluent suburbs. A precursor

to the New Democrats approach and platform, the
1972 election marked a key moment in the movement of the partys center of gravity away from its
traditional urban union base and toward professional-class suburbanites.
In the subsequent years, Democratic politicians increasingly refined McGoverns strategy.
Leading this pack was the cohort of Democratic
politicians known as the Watergate Babies, which
included California governor Jerry Brown, Colorado
senators Gary Hart and Tim Wirth, and Massachusetts congressman Paul Tsongas and the states
governor Michael Dukakis. These politicians had
all earned the support of a white suburban base
through issue-oriented, reform-minded platforms,
and all sought to distance themselves from the old
politics of the New Deal. Their shared platform
combined liberal stances on foreign policy, civil
rights, feminism, and especially the environment,
with a commitment to stimulating entrepreneurship
and private-sector growth.
In the 1980s, with the increasing eclipse of the
traditional New Deal base, many of the Watergate
Babies began to place an even greater emphasis
on the private sector particularly the high-tech
industry, earning them the label Atari Democrats.
The cohort expanded to include Tennessee senator Al Gore and Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt,
who joined other Atari Democrats in touting the
importance of public-private partnerships and developing better relationships between government
and business, especially tech companies. While
many of these tech-minded Democrats believed in
extending opportunity, they thought market-based
and privatized programs were more effective in the
post-industrial economy than New Dealstyle remedies. The solutions of the thirties, their mantra
went, will not solve the problems of the eighties.
The focus on expanding the high-tech sector and
keeping taxes low made the Atari Democrats popular
among suburban professional voters. This approach,
however, produced an economically and geographically uneven distribution of economic growth that
privileged middle-class professionals and enhanced
structural inequities. The emphasis on creating jobs
in high-tech companies and related service-sector

Up From Liberalism

47

Socially Liberal
Employees at major tech companies
overwhelmingly donate to Democrats
over Republicans (October 2015).

$105,000

Hillary Clinton
$78,000
$60,000

$52,000

Bernie Sanders
All GOP
Candidates

$46,000

$27,000
$14,000

$11,000

businesses made employment overly dependent

on the boom-and-bust cycles of the post-industrial
economy. And though the high-tech industry did
create a set of (generally non-unionized) jobs that
paid well, these opportunities often demanded a
high level of expertise, experience, and training.
In response, many critics charged that the party
had abandoned the issues of class. Yet in championing the high-tech economy and individualist,
suburban quality-of-life values, the Atari Democrats hadnt jettisoned class politics. They merely
advocated policies that reflected the class interests
of the partys rank-and-file base, which had shifted
from autoworkers to knowledge workers.
Few figures better personified the new orientation than Michael Dukakis. As Massachusetts
governor, he made explicit overtures to the leaders
of the high-tech sector, emphasizing partnership
as central to fostering a healthy economic climate.
His administration worked to broker deals between
high-tech companies and Boston-based venture
capital firms, leading to a surge of new software,

48

Jacobin Winter 2016

Cisco employees

Apple employees

Facebook employees

Google employees

Other

Apple employees

Facebook employees

all tech company

employees

Google employees

$8,000

data processing, and computer manufacturing corporations in the state, and helping turn around its
economy. By 1985, Massachusetts had the highest
percentage of service-sector workers and the highest
average per capita income of any state in the country.
Dukakis, his supporters glowed, had created a
Massachusetts Miracle.
In 1988, Dukakis rode the wave of high-tech
growth to the Democratic presidential nomination,
making the successful revival of the Massachusetts
economy the centerpiece of his campaign. He coupled promises of stimulating high-tech growth
across the country based on the Route 128 model
with concern for quality-of-life issues like traffic
and air pollution, sprawl, and rising drug and
crime problems. Though he lost the election after
being defamed in the infamous Willie Horton ad
and derided as the quintessential Massachusetts
liberal, his platform won him a following among
white-collar professionals in the metropolitan areas
of the Sunbelt, West, and Northeast. Four years
later, the dlcs golden boy, Bill Clinton, placed

Source: Whos Silicon Valley Backing for President, Newsweek (2015)

Atari Democrats

high-tech growth and suburban professionals at

the forefront of his policy vision in his own presidential bid.
There they have remained there ever since. In
presidential elections in particular, the emphasis
on stimulating high-tech growth and expanding
opportunity in order to win educated professionals
persists as the linchpin of the Democratic Partys
electoral strategy. This approach, however, has further alienated lower-income voters, many of whom
see no reason to turn out on Election Day. The result
is an even larger income gap and class bias between
nonvoters who tend to be more supportive of
unions and public spending on jobs and health insurance and higher-income voters, who are less in
favor of such positions.
These voting patterns, in turn, shape the strategy
of the Democratic Party ultimately amplifying
the power of its affluent and educated voters. For
instance, while the Obama campaign did make new
voter registration a priority, it concentrated most
of its attention and resources on gaining the support of upper-middle-class knowledge workers. In
both 2008 and 2012, in battleground areas like the
suburbs of northern Virginia, Denver, and North
Carolinas Research Triangle, Obama routinely
combined messages of equality of opportunity with
promises of spurring high-tech employment and
entrepreneurship, providing tax cuts to the middle
class, and improving education.
Throughout his presidency, he has often fused
the ideals of meritocratic individualism with classblind notions of equality of opportunity, stressing
that the United States should uphold its founding
ideals that promise if you work hard and meet your
responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where
you come from, what you look like, or who you love.
These statements mask the structural impediments
that make such goals difficult to achieve for most
poor and working-class Americans and demonstrate
the distance of the Democratic Partys message from
the everyday realities of their lives. Yet such rhetoric
has proven crucial to Obamas popularity among
knowledge workers in the suburbs and creative class
enclaves across the country.
In both elections, Obama handily won areas
with a high concentration of advanced degrees and

secured the support of high-tech workers nationally by an overwhelming margin. He earned at

astonishingly high rates the votes and campaign
contributions of workers at companies like Google
and Microsoft, building on the relationships forged
between tech companies and the Democratic Party.
While in office, Obama developed close and personal
ties with many of Silicon Valleys leading tycoons,
routinely giving his ear to figures like LinkedIns
Reid Hoffman, a well-known promoter of entrepreneurship and Internet-based networks as solutions
to the countrys economic woes.
In her 2016 campaign bid, Hillary Clinton has
strengthened these ties, surpassing candidates from
both parties in individual donations from employees
at the ten highest-grossing companies in Silicon
Valley, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and
eBay. Yet these relationships are proving increasingly tricky to navigate. Many Americans no longer
see Silicon Valley as a symbol of opportunity and
democracy but instead as a bastion of elitism. This
attitude has contributed to the success of Bernie
Sanderss bid. Sanders has placed the issue of
wealth inequality at the center of the Democratic
Partys agenda for the first time in generations.
Still, while Sanderss populist platform and stump
speeches express support for organized labor, it is
educated professionals (or aspiring professionals)
not blue- and pink-collar workers who have
mostly turned out at his rallies and donated to
his campaign.
Whether Sanderss candidacy constitutes the
beginning of a lasting resurgence of economic progressivism in the party remains to be seen. But what
is certain is that the class base of the Democratic
Party will continue to shape its policies and commitments. As it stands, the Democratic Party is
much more than a repository of liberal values. Its a
party that consistently favors its upper-middle-class
base in both presidential campaign platforms and
its governing agenda.
Those committed to transformative change,
then, should be skeptical of the Democrats ability
to deliver more than tepid reforms without a substantial shift in the partys class composition. A
party without a working-class core cant be expected
to improve the prospects of the working class.

Up From Liberalism

49

The Third Way

International
Throughout the 1990s, Democratic
Leadership Council figures launched a
campaign to take their ideology global.

Curtis
Atkins

n October 1998, flush with victory after Tony Blairs triumph

in the previous years elections, the British sociologist Anthony
Giddens published his now famous manifesto, The Third Way.
In just over 150 pages, the volume announced to the world a
new political faith.
Appearing in an era when the spirits of socialism and communism still
haunted the Left, Giddenss call for a renewal of social democracy was meant
to close the book on the past and begin a new chapter in the history of social
progress. Everything was new the new economy, New Labour, New Democrats, the New Middle.
In reality, it was all a rather post-hoc affair. The electoral left had been
adapting itself to the neoliberal world of free markets and privatization for years
already, but a unified, transnational ideological narrative for the reorientation
had been missing.
Giddens said his task was to provide the British Labour Party and other
European social democrats with theoretical flesh to cover the skeleton of
their policymaking. Though his book later became a central reference point for
scholars of New Labour, what it really signaled was Third Ways achievement
of buzzword status.
The same month Giddenss book was hitting the stands, Bill Clintons policy
guru Al From declared in the Democratic Leadership Councils journal, The
New Democrat, that the Third Way was now the worldwide brand name for
progressive politics for the Information Age.
The effort to provide center-left politicians like Clinton and Blair a stronger
theoretical foundation for what they were already doing had accelerated following
New Labours 1997 election victory and the coming-to-power of similarlyoriented social democrats elsewhere.
Together, the intellectuals and politicians that constituted the center half
of the center-left equation were about to embark on what they saw as the final
campaign against left-wing fundamentalism in their parties.

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

51

The timing of the campaign to codify the Third

Way as an international ideological project was
initially driven by concerns of legacy and political
continuity. The global embrace of the New Democrat message of opportunity, responsibility, and
community occurred when Clinton was well into his
second term, prompting his dlc to more earnestly
consider its own future in a post-Clinton world.
Having become so identified with the policies of the president, the organization began to
re-envision itself as a participant in (and in some
respects, originator of ) a global revolution in the
politics of the Left. The dlc was eager to sharpen
its image as something more serious than simply
an electoral vehicle for conservative-minded Democrats or Clinton acolytes. It began to see itself as
the American franchise of a worldwide movement
the pioneer of a new ideological project for the
center-left.
Though it had been one of the first of this new
breed to use the phrase Third Way, placing it into
the Democratic Party platform as far back as 1992,
the dlc had rarely employed the term as a descriptor
for its politics up to this point. The New Democrats
had assembled a rich conceptual map, but they had
not often applied a label to the ideology they created.
This changed following the international adoption of
their framework by other center-left parties. With
a number of domestic policy achievements under
its belt, the dlc pivoted to promoting its role as
the leader of an international Third Way project.
For Bill Clinton, the embrace of his brand of
politics by other world leaders could not have come
at a more opportune time. When impeachment and
scandal were threatening to become the things his
presidency would be remembered for, the sudden
international interest in Third Way politics presented an opportunity to forge a larger and more
respectable legacy.
Working with From and the dlc, the White
House eagerly began promoting the Third Way
through meetings with foreign leaders and international conferences attended by academics and
party leaders.
The first such international meeting around the
dlcs ideas years before the term Third Way was
popular had been in January 1993, when Blair and

52

Jacobin Winter 2016

his ally Gordon Brown had been part of a Labour

Party delegation meeting with the Clinton transition team to discuss the New Democrats success in
changing their party. Still in opposition, they were
looking for tips on seizing the initiative on crime
from British Conservatives and emphasizing private
sector growth in their economic messaging.
From recalled how when they met again four
years later in 1997, now-Prime Minister Blair pulled
a piece of paper from his pocket. Opportunity,
responsibility, community, Blair remarked. These
are the notes from our first meeting during the
Clinton transition.
As far back as 1993, then, the dlcs core concepts were already being carried abroad. They were
at the heart of Blairs New Labour agenda from its
inception.
November 1997 saw the first convening of an
official bilateral meeting on the future of New
DemocratNew Labour politics, hosted by Blair
at Chequers, the prime ministers country house
retreat. The conference was called to discuss how
to consolidate a new progressivism that would
ensure the Third Way did not end up being a transitory electoral marketing scheme, a danger Blair
called winning power but not the battle of ideas.
First Lady Hillary Clinton led the nine-member
US delegation that included From, government
officials such as Larry Summers, Frank Raines, and
Andrew Cuomo, as well as journalist Sidney Blumenthal and political scientist Joseph Nye. On the British
side, among others, were Blair, Brown, Giddens,
Peter Mandelson, and David Miliband.
Discussions between representatives of the New
Democrats, New Labour, and others seeking to affil
iate themselves with the tendency continued over
the next year and a half. When Blair visited Washington in February 1998, he met with Vice President
Gore and From to discuss the Third Way. In May and
June that year, President Clinton held discussions on
center-left policies with Italian prime minister Romano
Prodi and Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso.
Speculation was rife that Clinton and Blair
were out to undermine the Socialist International,
the global alliance of social-democratic parties,
and replace it with a full-fledged Third Way
International.

The Third Way International

The embrace of the dlcs ideology by wellknown foreign politicians further strengthened
and legitimated its conceptual framework within
the Democratic Party at home. The growth of the
global Third Way movement was employed as an
instrument to try and coopt the New Democrats
domestic opponents. Seeking to unite the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton called a meeting of
various figures from across the factional divide at
the White House in the summer of 1998 to debate
the Third Way and win over converts to the New
Democrat outlook. Among those attending were
Ruy Teixeira from the Economic Policy Institute,
Elaine Kamarck and Bruce Reed from the dlc, Representative Dick Gephardt, who had by now traveled
far from his dlc roots and become a staunch free
trade opponent, and afl-cio head John Sweeney.
Another retreat hosted by Blair in the fall saw
the first lady and From travel again to Chequers.
And at the opening of the un General Assembly in
September, a Third Way forum was hosted by New
York University in conjunction with the dlcs sister
think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Headed
by Will Marshall, the event featured the Clintons,
Gore, Blair, Giddens, Prodi, Swedish prime minister
Gran Persson, and the Bulgarian prime minister
Petar Stoyanov.
Marshall and the ppi then hosted a one-day conference on Third Way policy in Virginia in January
1999 at which From and David Miliband planned a
dlc-sponsored event to be held following the nato
summit in Washington that April. Both Clintons,
Blair, German chancellor Gerhard Schrder, Dutch
prime minister Wim Kok, and the new Italian prime
minister (and former head of the Italian Communist
Party) Massimo DAlema attended the post-nato
meeting. Virtually alone among West European
social democrats, Frances Lionel Jospin declined
the invitation.
From opened the conference by defining how
the leaders gathered should present the Third Way
in their countries and reiterated its core concepts.
Its first principle and enduring purpose is equal
opportunity for all, special privilege for none.
Its public ethic is mutual responsibility. Its core
value is community. Its outlook is global. And,

its modern means are fostering private sector

economic growth....
The Third Ways international profile began rising dramatically over the next year. Reporting on
the coalescing alliance following the meeting, the
Guardian observed that the most elite club in
the world is becoming extremely fashionable. On
the eve of the 1998 European elections, Blair and
Schrder issued a joint statement, Europe: The Third
Way / Die Neue Mitte, calling on social democrats
across the continent to accept the logic of modernization and adapt to changing conditions.
Leaving behind what they characterized as leftwing ideological straitjackets, the leaders presented
the British/German model as a benchmark for fellow
socialists. Their statement constituted the seminal
attempt to implant the Third Ways conceptual
framework across Europe.
The program was meant as an obituary for old
left politics, but it was not particularly original.
The Blair/Schrder statement mirrored dlc messaging. It included an acceptance of equality of
opportunity over equality of outcome, a contractual understanding of welfare benefits as conditional
on personal responsibility, an end to class struggle
and a rekindling of community and partnership,
a stronger role for the private sector in driving economic growth, flexible labor markets, a state that
would not row, but steer a supply-side welfare
regime focused on investment in human capital
rather than redistribution, and a more responsible attitude toward public debt. The statement
concluded by characterizing the politics of the Third
Way as Europes new hope.
Not all European social democrats were eager
to sign on to a British-led and American-inspired
redefinition of socialism, though. In France, Jospin,
who had earlier declined the invitation to From and
Milibands Washington conference, commented,
The French left, like France, imitates no one.
The Third Way program in both its original
dlc version as well as its European progeny was
jarring because of the extent to which it traded traditional left principles for those of the New Right.
Clinton, Blair, and the rest of the Third Wayers told
the Left it could no longer turn to an old set of big

Up From Liberalism

53

Tony Blair deepened the neoliberal turn in British

politics by continuing to bolster the wildly
unpopular Private Finance Initiative (PFI) a New
Labour policy aimed at replacing public services
with public-private partnerships. Blair set into
motion the gradual privatization of core services
like the National Health Service, which was
transformed from a publicly managed system into
a fragmented network of autonomous, competing
hospitals, threatening common Brits access to
affordable healthcare.

Friends in
High Places

UK

Bolstered by Bill
Clintons Third Way
internationalism,
a slew of world
leaders help redefine
social democracy
in the 1990s.

Italy

In 1993, as finance minister, Fernando Cardoso

cut healthcare, education, and regional
development spending by 50%. As president, he
amended the constitution to deregulate the
banking sector and allow for the Wall Street
takeover of the Banco Central do Brazil. His
efforts to reform social security by raising the
retirement age and severely limiting access to
public pensions were repulsed by the Brazilian
legislature.

YEARS IN POWER

Brazil

Sweden

Netherlands

Germany
92

Wim Kok used the Dutch polder

model a consensus-based
system bringing together
employers associations, trade
unions, and the government
to push through a number of
neoliberal reforms, including
massive privatizations of public
services. From 19902001,
privatization proceeds in the
Netherlands equalled an
astounding 14.5 billion. In 1990,
thenfinance minister Kok met
with South African leader Nelson
Mandela immediately after his
release from prison, dismissing
Mandelas desire for a South
African Marshall Plan and
advocating neoliberal economic
policies instead, famously
remarking no economy can
develop separately now.

93

94

95

96

97

government policies and expect them to work in

a globalized world.
Instead of ironclad pledges of fealty to particular
policies such as public ownership, economic planning, or demand management, social democrats had
to be guided by the values which had supposedly

54

Jacobin Winter 2016

98

99

00

01

02

always inspired them. Whether it was the New Democrats, New Labour, or Die Neue Mitte, the same
conceptual core of opportunity, responsibility, and
community appeared again and again.
As far back as 1990, Clinton and the dlc had
declared in the New Orleans Declaration that

The Third Way International

When Gordon Brown assumed the premiership after
Blairs resignation, he spent his first weekend as prime
minister in the company of Alan Greenspan and Rupert
Murdoch both noted architects of the neoliberal
consensus, neither of them citizens of the UK.

A social democrat in name only, Gran

Persson forced Swedish workers to accept
lower pay by pushing through responsible
pay agreements and scolded other
European nations for their Keynesian
economic interventions, telling them they
should have taken advantage of the good
years [during the Growth and Stability Act]
to put their finances in order. While scaling
back the Swedish welfare state and
privatizing the central bank, Persson
advocated accession to EU economic policies
in order to ensure a good climate for
investment and production.

At the helm of a center-left coalition supported by Italys major

trade unions, Romano Prodi cut state spending by 15 billion,
imposed a greater tax burden on workers, and scaled back
public services, especially in higher education. These reforms
protested by hundreds of thousands of workers and students
were intended to bring Italy into compliance with the Lisbon
Agenda, a European Union development plan devised in 2000
when Prodi was president of the European Commision.
Meanwhile, Massimo DAlema Prodis foreign minister and a
former senior member of the Italian Communist Party
offered Italian ports to US military vessels and took an active
role supporting Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War.

Gerhard Schrder set in motion a neoliberal reform program that led

Oskar Lafontaine, then chairman of Schrders own Social Democratic
Party, to resign in protest. While chancellor, Schrder helped negotiate a
multibillion-euro development deal for a pipeline to bring Russian oil
directly to Germany, then promptly assumed leadership of the
corporation entrusted with the construction and maintenance of the
pipeline upon leaving office, sparking accusations of corruption and
profiteering.

03

04

05

06

07

they intended to echo the language of conservatism.

The Third Way advocates pledged their devotion
to the mission of expanding opportunity, not government. The war on poverty was replaced by a
politics of inclusion that would phase out social
welfare. The compensatory role of social assistance

08

09

10

11

12

13

and affirmative action were denigrated. The lauding

of individual initiative and upward mobility refuted a
focus on problems of group inequality and the search
for social solutions to discrimination.
Economic security would be achieved through
free trade, not protectionism. Strong defense had to

Up From Liberalism

55

be maintained on the world stage while the prevention and punishment of crime would define domestic
security policy. Concerns of the oppressed were
to be sidestepped, as the integration of minorities into the economic and cultural mainstream
was preferred to racial, gender, or ethnic separatism. And finally, citizenship was to be redefined
in line with communitarian principles, entailing
responsibility as well as rights. A strong reliance on moral and cultural values would govern
public behavior.
What Blair and other European Third Way
social democrats borrowed from America was not
just a campaign slogan or political marketing. The
replacement of long-standing left commitments to
equality, economic security, and solidarity represented a thorough ideological repudiation of the
foundations of social democracy.
The debate over the Third Way was always, fundamentally, a battle of ideas that played out against
the backdrop of massive political and economic
change. Reagan and Thatcher had unhesitatingly
acted to extend and shape the global economy
in a neoliberal direction following the crisis of
Keynesianism. In the 1980s, the New Right, in true
Gramscian style, was already consolidating its own
historic bloc and the Third Way eventually emerged
as a part of it.
By the turn of the century, the battle for the soul
of social democracy was over. The Left had stood
opposed, but with greatly diminished social forces,
it was powerless in the face of Third Way advance.
In the end, there were few opponents for
Clinton, Blair, and others to contend with in their
own parties. There was little resistance to the final
codification of the Third Way in November 1999.
The flurry of meetings and panels that From, Marshall, and others had been organizing over the
previous years finally culminated in an international
conference held in Florence under the slogan, Progressive Governance for the 21st Century.
In his opening remarks, Clinton elaborated the
importance of Third Way thinking for governing the
new global economy and took the chance to again
reinforce the New Democrats opportunity-based
conception of equality, their emphasis on individual
responsibility, and the communitarian values they

56

Jacobin Winter 2016

counterposed to the traditional class-based outlook

of the Left.
We think ideas matter. We think its a great
challenge to marry our conceptions of social
justice and equal opportunity with our commitment to globalization. We think we will
have to find what has often been called a Third
Way, a way that requires governments to empower people with tools and conditions necessary for individuals, families, communities,
and nations to make the most of their human
potential.
The skeptical view of globalization that Clinton
and the other Third Way leaders were battling on
their left demonstrated its influence a week later
when protests sunk the World Trade Organization
meeting in Seattle over the human and environmental costs associated with the global free-trade
regime. Seattle showed that although they had
conquered the field within their own parties, the
Third Wayers still had to contend with dissent in
the streets.
The line-up of keynote speakers in Florence
included most of the same names as the earlier
forum after the nato meeting, with the exception
that Jospin finally made an appearance. Though
generally on board with much of the substance of
the discussions, he continued to express unease
with the Anglo-American-led redefinition of social
democracy.
In a pamphlet issued just days before the conference, Jospin declared he was for modern socialism
but not the Third Way:
If the Third Way lies between communism and
capitalism, it is merely a new name for democratic socialism peculiar to the British.... If, on
the other hand, the Third Way involves finding
a middle way between social democracy and
neoliberalism, then this approach is not mine.
Regardless of Jospins discomfort around particular labels, the Florence conference represented, in
essence, the launch of a loosely-bound Third Way
International. The conversion of European social
democracy to New Democrat ideology was now
complete.

New from

Syriza

Jallad

Kevin Ovenden

Tasneem Khalil

Inside the Labyrinth

Death Squads and State Terror in South Asia

With a Foreword by Paul Mason

A fascinating, humane, caustic analysis of Greece and the rebirth

of its left, which contains inspiration and hazard-lights for progressives everywhere.Guardian
PaPer $21.00

The Secure and The diSpOSSeSSed

How the Military and Corporations Are
Shaping a Climate-Changed World
edited by nick Buxton and Ben hayes
Were at a crucial moment. We can deal with the climate crisis
either as a moment to build new global unity, or to further divide
the planet between wealthy, profiteering elites and everyone else.
This book will help you understand the possibilities, and hopefully
move you to join the fight for justice.Bill McKibben
PaPer $32.00

The practice of security forces acting as judge and executioner

has led to numerous enforced disappearances and extrajudicial
killings in South Asia. Khalil has documented such cases as a
journalist in the past, and his book is an important message to
states to ensure accountability and respect of human rights.
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director, Human Rights
Watch
PaPer $22.00

SOuThern inSurgency

The Coming of the Global Working Class

immanuel ness
Southern Insurgency vividly describes what workers in India,
China, and South Africa have done to make their unions more
effective. Lets hope that these compelling case studies of rankand-file struggle and bottom-up change lead to more of the same
where its needed the most.Steve Early, author of Save Our
Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress
PaPer $28.00

DistributeD by the university of ChiCago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

How a Democrat
Killed Welfare
Bill Clinton gutted welfare and criminalized
the poor, all while funneling more money
into the carceral state.

Premilla
Nadasen

ill Clintons 1992 election was meant to be a turning point in

American politics. Liberals breathed a sigh of relief, believing
him to be a much-needed break from the Reagan-Bush era of
small government and social welfare cuts. But the optimism
surrounding Clintons election and favorable assessments
of his time in office since ignore the destruction his administration brought
to poor and working people, especially African Americans, and mask not only
the continuation but intensification of anti-poor policies. Rather than offering
a reprieve from punitive austerity, Clinton took the Reagan-Bush agenda a step
further. If his administration was a turning point, it turned us in the wrong
direction.
In 1994, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act, the largest crime bill in history, which allocated $10billion for prison
construction, expanded the death penalty, and eliminated federal funding for
inmate education. The act intensified police surveillance and racial profiling,
and locked up millions for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession. It helped
usher in the era of mass incarceration that devastated communities of color (for
which Clinton himself has recently apologized).
Clintons simultaneous expansion of federal law enforcement and shrinking
of the federal workforce to its lowest level in thirty years reallocated taxpayer
dollars from employing people in social service jobs to putting more cops on
the streets. The starkest example of the many racist and anti-poor measures
directed at African Americans and passed during his administration was the
1996 welfare reform bill, which transformed welfare from an exclusive and
unequal cash assistance system that stigmatized its recipients into one that
actually criminalized them.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
ended traditional welfare by turning a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

59

Please, Sir, I Want

Some More
Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF) is the last cash
assistance program left, but it
has been cut dramatically.

Number of families receiving AFDC/

TANF benefits for every 100 families
with children in poverty
82
68

AFD C

TANF

26

96
79

81

83

85

87

89

91

93

95

Dependent Children (afdc), into block grants, or

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (tanf).
tanf established tougher mandates on poor single
mothers and gave states more flexibility in how they
spent welfare dollars (opening the door for increased
discrimination against minorities). It prohibits
anyone from receiving assistance for more than two
consecutive years or for more than five years over the
course of their life. The act also requires aid recipients to be employed, in most cases, at least thirty
hours a week to get their welfare checks, amounting
to an hourly wage well below the legal minimum.
Once recipients reach their program time limit,
tanf forces them even further into the labor market
with little consideration of how they could ensure
their children are properly cared for or whether
paid employment will earn them an adequate wage.
Many more are not even able to find work. A 2012
report by the Urban Institute concluded that for
recipients with barriers to employment, tanf did
little to help them find jobs.
Sweeping in scope, tanf contains clauses to
bolster marriage, mandate job training, and offer
parenting classes. The flexibility that was a

60

Jacobin Winter 2016

97

99

01

03

05

07

08

11

13

hallmark of the welfare reform bill enabled states

to shift welfare funds away from direct cash assistance toward child care programs or subsidies for
companies hiring welfare recipients, meaning that
a greater portion of public welfare dollars went to
the private sector. States were pressured to reduce
welfare rolls now the singular quantitative measure of success for the program and used multiple
strategies to deter the needy from applying for aid.
They implemented complicated and demeaning
application procedures and relied on fingerprinting
and drug testing to weed out the criminal element
even though there was little evidence of widespread criminal activity among recipients.
The net result was that all recipients and applicants were assumed to be potential criminals.
Surveillance of low-income women punished black
women in disproportionate numbers, resulting in
more black children in foster care and black women
in prison. Today, welfare and law enforcement work
together to closely monitor the parenting of poor
mothers.
These punitive policies were not new, but rather
an extension of a long, racialized attack on welfare.

Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2015)

How a Democrat Killed Welfare

afdc was not controversial when it was instituted

in the 1930s. Many people subscribed to traditional
ideas about gender roles, believing that poor single
mothers without a male breadwinner should be supported by the state in order to enable them to stay
home and care for their children. The overwhelming
majority of recipients at the time, however, were
white women. Women of color were considered
less deserving of assistance. State and local social
administrators of afdc, especially in the South,
systematically excluded African Americans and
Mexican Americans from welfare receipt through
suitable home clauses and employable mother
laws, which denied assistance to mothers who didnt
keep proper homes or who it was believed could
get a job and become self-supporting.
As black migration to the North intensified,
more women of color applied for assistance, resulting
in opposition to the welfare program. Journalists
wrote about welfare fraud and the problem of
black migration, and there were growing calls to get
people off the rolls. In 1967, the Johnson administration instituted a Work Incentive Program (win),
the first-ever mandatory federal employment rule
for afdc, requiring states to direct a portion of
their welfare population to employment programs.
This landmark legislation shifted the role of welfare
away from support for single mothers toward one
of requiring those mothers to take paid employment outside the home. Although symbolically
important because it signaled a new direction in
federal policy, win was never adequately funded nor
effectively enforced. The welfare rights movement
in the 1960s and 1970s opposed the mandatory work
rules and fought for higher monthly benefits, tempering some of these regressive policies. But only
temporarily.
The punitive approach to addressing poverty
was a result of the way race and poverty had become
intertwined in the national debate. In the 1960s,
urban social disorder, black demands for economic
equality, and federal anti-poverty initiatives drew
the nations attention to the persistent problem of
black poverty. But the dominant liberal approach
explained poverty as a product of black culture,
reinforcing the notion that certain poor people were
responsible for their own poverty.

Most notoriously articulated by Daniel Patrick

Moynihan in The Negro Family: The Case for
National Action, the culture of poverty argument
suggested that a dysfunctional family structure in
particular single-parent families was a primary
reason for persistent African-American inequality.
The solution became one of attempting to instill
proper values of work and marriage in black men
and women. Poor black women were demonized as welfare queens, a trope popularized by
Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, which implied
that black women chose welfare over work and
milked the system for all it was worth. This rhetoric was used to justify sweeping cuts in welfare
spending.
Likewise, Clintons welfare reform bill was
rooted in a culture of poverty argument, evidenced
by his racially coded language of dependency and
people taking advantage of the system. Stereotypes
about women were the foundation of the 1996 welfare reform debate. Clinton alluded to the fear of
black street crime, drug use, crack babies, the breakdown of the family, and the drain on public dollars.
His primary goal in dismantling afdc, as he put it,
was to end the cycle of dependence and achieve
a national welfare reform bill that will make work
and responsibility the law of the land.
Clinton did not offer a departure from either
earlier liberal policies that blamed the poor for
their poverty or neoliberal economics. Instead, he
turned what had been a few piecemeal reforms into
a systematic overhaul of federal policy that led to
the criminalization of the welfare poor. He redirected state resources away from financial support
for the needy and toward surveillance and criminalization. In an era of market worship, those who
couldnt demonstrate self-reliance or independence
were identified not only as unworthy of assistance,
but as a potential threat to the core institutions of
American society.
Clintons dismantling of welfare, couched in
a language of personal responsibility and public
policy correction, was the culmination of a trend
among both Democrats and Republicans to deter
and discourage poor women of color from applying
for assistance. In this regard, there was little new
about the New Democrat.

Up From Liberalism

61

The Business
Veto
The demise of social democracy
shows the precariousness of any
project of reform under capitalism.
Shawn
Gude

n the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election, media outlets

spoke with one voice: New Deal liberalism was dead. Given the
choice between Walter Mondales tax-and-spend liberalism and
Ronald Reagans morning-in-America conservatism, voters had
decisively sided with the incumbent president.
The only alternative for Democrats now was to modernize. Anything but a
wholesale rethink of the partys more social-democratic commitments would
invite future electoral disaster.
The conventional wisdom had also fingered the culprits: the Democratic
Partys base. Attacking what they termed interest-group liberalism, commentators insisted that the party become a broad tent, moderate enough to win a
general election and allergic to particularistic concerns.
None of this held up to scrutiny. As Vicente Navarro noted in Socialist
Register at the time, the Democratic platform was more conservative than it
had been in years despite the fact that never before [had] liberal and even
radical forces (such as labor, blacks and Hispanics, feminists, ecologists, gays)
been as active in the 1984 Democratic Party convention. And even with Reagans resounding victory, polling suggested that the electorate hadnt jolted
right only 35percent supported substantially cutting social programs to
shrink the deficit.
However, the mainstream diagnosis quickly took hold, and the Democrats
adopted its advice. In the years to come, spurred by a shifting business coalition, the party of the New Deal would even more dramatically reorient itself.
During Bill Clintons presidency in particular, the Democratic Party became
a standard-bearer of the Third Way a politics that eschewed big government liberalism in favor of targeted public investment and privatized programs
and looked to finance and technology industries to create prosperity. Barack
Obama, for all the post-election depictions of him as the second coming of
Franklin Roosevelt, has read from roughly the same script.
This sea change in the Democratic Party has had enormous implications for
the direction of American politics. But it also points to something even deeper:

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

63

the precariousness of any project of popular reform

under capitalism.

Follow the Money

The New Deal consensus that collapsed in the early
1980s emerged in the throes of the Great Depression,
amid immense upheaval unemployed worker actions, sit-down strikes, campaigns for social security.
But the New Deal wasnt just a workers New
Deal.
The portrait of Roosevelt leading a band of ordinary people, the whole of the business community
arrayed against him this is an airbrushed contrivance. Most of corporate America may have been
no friend of Roosevelts, but he had his own set of
economist royalists corporations like Shell and
ibm and General Electric, Lehman Brothers and
Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
What was key, Thomas Ferguson and Joel
Rogers argue in Right Turn, was the nature of this
party investor bloc. Because its members made
their money in capital-intensive rather than laborintensive sectors, a robust union movement didnt
pose an existential threat. If it meant potentially
avoiding more severe disruptions, the oil baron
could accept a level of union potency the textile
owner could not abide.
Some of the New Deals crowning achievements
carried the fingerprints of Roosevelts well-heeled
backers: a committee bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller Jr drafted the Social Security Act, Chase Bank
and other industry adversaries of J.P. Morgan provided the push for the Glass-Steagall Act (which
established the firewall between investment and
commercial banking).
A few decades later, when Lyndon Johnson was
grafting his Great Society policies onto the New
Deal welfare state, the same investor bloc again
pledged its support. With seemingly unending
economic growth on the horizon, with profits
racing ahead, with Democratic presidents committed to negotiating favorable trade deals, it
behooved these elite actors to spread some of the
wealth around. But on their terms. Major new programs received their revenue not from the pockets
of corporations, but payroll taxes. Aid to the

64

Jacobin Winter 2016

cities was spent in ways amenable to bankers and

developers.
Yet many of these policies, though filtered
through the sieve of dominant interests, also
delivered genuine benefits to core Democratic constituencies. Despite a regressive funding mechanism,
Medicaid enhanced the lives of its beneficiaries.
So too with Medicare, passed over the wails of the
American Medical Association. And urban projects like expanded public transportation benefited
working people not just real-estate developers.
Such polices at least partially reconciled interests
elite and popular the hallmark of any dominant
party in, as Ferguson phrases it, money-driven
political systems. The donor class provided the
cachet and funding the party needed to function, the
mishmash of organized interests delivered the votes.
Chief among those organized interests was the
labor movement. But their power peaked early. That
unions were an influential party player over the following decades was based entirely on the swift gains
they had accumulated in the spurt of Depression-era
and postwar labor agitation. The 1947 Taft-Hartley
Act checked that rise. It mandated the expulsion
of union radicals, legalized right to work, and
severely constrained workers freedom of action.
A conservative labor bureaucracy watched
the subsequent drop in union density with startling equanimity. Frankly I used to worry about
the membership, about the size of membership,
afl-cio President George Meany said in the early
1970s. But quite a few years ago, I just stopped
worrying about it, because to me it doesnt make
any difference.
By the mid 1970s, the foundation of the partys coalition had begun to crumble. And the union
movement had neither the will nor the means to
reconstitute it on a different basis.

Things Fall Apart

Surging growth in the 1960s gave way to economic
torpor in the 1970s. And companies felt pressure
on all sides. Though organized labor had lost its
strength, relatively low unemployment in the late
1960s and early 1970s bolstered workers power on
the shop floor. They responded by going on strike

The Business Veto

at rates not seen since the immediate postwar years,

often demanding not just better pay but more control over the work process.
Simultaneously, US firms were faltering after
years of dominating international competitors.
Other advanced capitalist countries had finally
recovered from postwar devastation, and their companies were outstripping US firms to an extent that
went beyond the simple rebound effect. The most
significant net result, especially for private capital,
was that profits bottomed out. Corporations rate
of return peaked in 1965 and didnt recover through
the entire 1970s.
With the economy humming along, the Democratic Party had survived the fractious battle over the
Vietnam War. But in the profit-starved environment
of the 1970s, with US companies position in the
world economy in decline, such squabbles became
increasingly irresolvable.
Regulation and social spending tenets of the
postwar system so broadly accepted that Richard
Nixon, an archconservative, felt compelled to create
the Environmental Protection Agency and propose
a national health plan along the lines of Obamacare
quickly popped up as points of contention.
Both meant more costs for capital. Even for the
enlightened sectors of American business, those
costs were no longer prudent and placatory but
unreasonably profligate. With competition heightened, companies couldnt simply make consumers
absorb elevated prices.
To cope with the new environment, business
sought maximum flexibility and that meant an
offensive against organized labor. From 1970 to
1980, Ferguson and Rogers report, the number of
charges against employers for terminating workers
involved in union activity doubled.
When Jimmy Carter entered the Oval Office in
1977, the New Deal coalition that had set the contours of American political and economic life for
decades was wilting. When he left after defeating
the doyen of New Deal liberalism, Massachusetts
senator Ted Kennedy, in the 1980 Democratic
primary the economy was still stuttering. An
inflation hawk presided over the Federal Reserve.
And deregulation and deep social welfare cuts had
started to set in."

Meanwhile, elites fretted about whether the

Iranian Revolution and other convulsions presaged an inhospitable profit-making climate in the
Third World. The time was ripe for more military
spending. As for social programs? Not so much. For
its elite backers, New Deal liberalism had outlived
its usefulness.
Still, on the cusp of Reagans election there
was no great mandate for conservative economic
policies. In 1979, 79percent of respondents polled
agreed that there is too much power concentrated in the hands of a few large companies for
the good of the nation. The same survey found
that 51percent of Americans thought business
as a whole is making too much profit. Sixty percent even believed the state should impose a cap on
corporate profits.
Yet after he came to power, Reagan promptly
with the support of scores of congressional Democrats and now backed by many of the moneyed
interests that had absconded from the New Deal
coalition slashed taxes on corporations and the
wealthy and expanded the social spending cuts
Carter had started. At the same time, Reagan served
up heavy doses of defense spending and anticommunist saber rattling.
When the 1984 election came around, Reagans
Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, could only
attract support from a small segment of the business
community: real-estate developers (whose coveted
urban aid was getting squeezed by military expenditures) and investment bankers (angry at Reagans
placidity toward the ballooning federal deficit).
With little business backing, one response would
have been to try to activate the base and turn out
disillusioned low-income voters with economically
progressive appeals. Mondale instead played the
role of belt-tightener. At his presidential nomination
acceptance speech, typically the province of soaring
oration and rousing policy promises, he called for a
tax increase to close the budget deficit, explaining,
Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He wont
tell you. I just did.
While some hailed Mondales self-assured
admission as an uncommon triumph of honesty
over campaign trail perfidy, the average voter could
be forgiven for wondering how that would help her.

Up From Liberalism

65

Greed Is Good
Before 1998 the US had one of the most regulated
finanical services sectors in the world. Bill Clinton
would undo all that.
Unrestricted: a full range of activities
in the given category can be conducted
directly in the bank

Regulatory
Treatment of the
Mixing of Banking,
Securities, and
Insurance Activities
and the Mixing
of Banking
and Commerce
(1997)

Unrestricted: 100% ownership

permitted
Permitted: unrestricted,
but ownership limited based
on bank's equity capital
Restricted: less than 100%
ownership
Prohibited

Permitted: a full range of activities

can be conducted, but all or some must
be conducted in subsidiaries
Restricted: less than a full range
of activities can be conducted in the
bank or subsidiaries
Prohibited: the activity cannot
be conducted in either
the bank or subsidiaries

Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
USA
Securities

Insurance

Source: The Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Advent of Broad Banking,

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (2000)

66

Jacobin Winter 2016

Commercial
Bank Ownership
of Commercial
Firms

Commercial
Bank Ownership
of Commercial
Banks

The Business Veto

On Election Day, Mondale lost all but his home state

of Minnesota.
Although Democrats took back the Senate in
1986, power had clearly shifted from a Democratic
Party solicitous of business interests to a renovated
Republican Party that was the unrivaled guardian of
corporate America. And, because realignment means
nothing if not the weaker party playing on the stronger
partys terrain, the hue and timbre of Democratic
policies came to resemble those of Republicans.

Enter Clinton
Our primary objective was to show the American
public that if long-term, tough-minded, Republican
business leaders would go against their norm and go
withClinton,then theres no way hes a traditional
tax-and-spend Democrat.
So explained Bill Clintons point person for business and high-tech constituencies, upon releasing
the names of four hundred executives backing the
former Arkansas governor in the 1992 presidential election. We figured that an endorsement by
respected chief executives, whose judgment people
trust, would give us that extra level of credibility,
and we feel we have succeeded, the staffer added.
The language was as intentional as it was revelatory: the party had reached a point where its
standard-bearers campaign was poaching terms
of derision from New Deal liberalisms foes.
The Third Way had arrived.
Unlike the mid-century third way between communism and capitalism, this centrist current sought
a middle course between postwar social democracy and free-market capitalism. While happy to
modestly invest in things like education, Third Way
acolytes thought the public sector needed a jolt that
only markets and privatization could provide.
Clinton personified the Third Way, down to the
composition of his elite base. Vowing to get America
growing again, Clinton placed Silicon Valley at the
center of his 1992 campaign and courted executives
like Apple Computer chairman John Sculley.
The overtures worked. Over poached salmon
at Mr. Sculleys 15-acre spread just outside Palo
Alto, the New York Times reported, a phalanx of
tech leaders made the decision to support Clinton,

flattered he had asked them to help formulate his

tech policy and desirous of the public-private partnerships Clinton and other like-minded Democrats
were eager to deliver.
While the presidential aspirant wasnt the first
national Democrat enticed by a partnership with
technology companies (computer firms had also
been a wellspring of support for Michael Dukakis
in the 1988 election), Clinton was alone in having
many on his side in a winning bid.
Less novel but more powerful, investment
bankers like Robert Rubin and Pete Peterson
converged around Clinton early in the 1992 presidential race. Rubins fundraising prowess was
especially impressive he contributed far more
than $100,000 to the campaign and raised many
times that, Ferguson notes. (Money from Walmart,
Tyson Foods, and other home state businesses also
lined Clintons coffers.)
The former Goldman Sachs executives reward
was the top post in the newly created National
Economic Council. Like the Democratic-leaning
financiers of the past, Rubin and company valued a
strong dollar policy and free trade. But their position
on regulation indicated that times had changed.
As early as 1995, Rubin by then treasury secretary was urging Clinton to repeal the Glass-Steagall
Act. He got his way in 1999, and the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act deregulated the derivatives market a year later. Pitched as scrapping
outdated statutes in an information age, the unshackling of financial markets fit in perfectly with the
broader Third Way ideology. And, not coincidentally,
with the material interests of its investor bloc.
Rubins ilk also altered their stance on social
spending. In decades past, increased expenditures had
left these sorts of investors unruffled. But Third Way
politics is austerity politics, balanced-budget politics, manage-not-expand-the-welfare-state politics.
Not surprisingly, when Clinton took office
winning the presidency with the lowest share of
the popular vote since Woodrow Wilson in 1912
deficit reduction crowded out a modest stimulus
package. And to close the gap, he didnt wrest back
the money Reagan had handed to the rich in the
early 1980s he coupled a modest tax hike with an
aggressive push to flatten public-sector spending.

Up From Liberalism

67

The Invisible State

Millions of Americans
have unwittingly benefited
from state programs.
Percentage of beneficiaries of specific programs who report
that they "have not used a government social program."
64.3%

529 or Coverdell Tax-Deferred Savings

60%

Home Mortgage Interest Deduction

59.6%

Hope or Lifetime Learning Tax Credit

53.3%

Student Loans

51.7%

Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit

47.1%

Earned Income Tax Credit

44.1%

Social Security (Retirement & Survivors)

43.1%

Pell Grants

43%

Unemployment Insurance

41.7%

Veterans Benefits

40.3%

G.I. Bill

39.8%

Medicare

37.2%

68

Head Start

28.7%

Social Security Disability

28.2%

Supplemental Security Income

27.8%

Medicaid

27.4%

Welfare / Public Assistance

27.4%

Government-Subsidized Housing

25.4%

Food Stamps

Jacobin Winter 2016

Clinton and his Third Way brethren cast aspersions on government bureaucracy in particular, the
juxtaposition of a postindustrial economy lean,
flexible, dynamic and an antediluvian federal government dominating their thinking. They pledged to
build a government that works better and costs less.
They wrote books and reports with titles like Rein
venting Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
is Transforming the Public Sector and From Red Tape
to Results. They pushed privatization and voucherization, advocated empowering local charities to
deliver social services and promoted marketbased environmental regulation like cap and trade.
What they didnt do was formulate policies
that, in the best of the social-democratic tradition,
transparently delivered benefits to citizens along
universal lines, giving a broad swath of the population a shared self-interest in an effective, enlarging
welfare state.
As political scientist Suzanne Mettler writes
in The Submerged State, funneling spending and
financial incentives through the tax code or relying
on private contractors obscures the benefits that
government doles out, distorting peoples perceptions about who receives state support and therefore
making it more difficult to form progressive coalitions. By contrast, obviously public, universal
programs like Medicare build constituencies that
can then readily defend those programs, activating
democratic citizenship rather than leaving it to die
in the deep recesses of the Internal Revenue Service.
Convinced of the states incompetence, flush
with cash from Wall Street and Silicon Valley or
maybe just too busy going after welfare recipients
Clinton showed no interest in initiating ambitious
new programs that could improve peoples lives.
Single-payer was a non-starter, for instance, given
his significant funding from the health industry. Its
byzantine proposed replacement confused many
and energized few.
If new policies create a new politics, as political scientist Paul Pierson puts it, then Clintons
contribution was to help lock in the drift toward
opaque policies that militated against broad progressive coalitions. In 1981, the year Reagan entered
the White House, social tax expenditures a good
proxy for policymakers distributing government

Source: The Submerged State (2011)

The Business Veto

benefits through the tax code rather than transparent

programs numbered eighty-one. By 2010, they
were up to 151, Clinton having tilled the soil for their
considerable growth in the 2000s.
Above all, this was Clintons legacy: solidifying
the right turn, declaring himself a modernizer as he
wooed high tech and finance. When the president
proclaimed in his 1996 State of the Union address
that the era of big government is over, both the
statement and the bipartisan applause with which
it was greeted signaled the cementing of a new conservative consensus. And his closed-door deal with
House Speaker Newt Gingrich to partially privatize
Social Security serendipitously thwarted by Clintons sex scandal provided further confirmation
that the policy shift media elites urged after the 1984
election had come to pass.
Even the Great Recession hasnt dislodged the
Clintonite capture of the Democratic Party. Without
bedlam in the streets and strikes in the factories like
in the Great Depression, President Obama has been
content to simply update the Third Way for postcrash realities: a little regulation here, some stimulus
there, but the underlying framework and the elite
base that makes it possible essentially untouched.

Explaining the Right Turn

Conventional explanations see the lunge to the right
in economic policy over the last few decades and assume that the electorate lunged in the same direction
that the average voter, thinking that government
spending and cultural liberalism had gone too far,
threw in with the Right. If only American political
institutions were so responsive.
The problem is, the electorate isnt a static,
unmediated body. Its composition and character
mutate from year to year. Only organization
whether carried out by unions or parties or some
other civil society actor can transform it from
an amorphous mass into discrete groups capable of
advancing their preferences and interests.
But organization takes money. The inequality of
power and resources that defines capitalism, then,
ends up shaping the very makeup and capacities of
the electorate who can organize and who cant,
who shows up to the polls and who stays home, which

worldviews receive expression in the media and

which dont.
In other capitalist countries, workers responded
to this democratic bind by leveraging the resources
of the labor movement to build mass parties financially and organizationally independent from capital.
American labor never got that far. Non-elites have
always played the junior role.
So when Democratic business interests tired of
New Deal policies which they had helped shape
every step of the way they could tear up the pact
they made with the partys rank-and-file. When
they sought a balanced budget instead of new social
spending in the Clinton years, they got what they
wanted.
Its this relationship of subordination that
explains the countrys rightward shift. Full employment, public investment, taxing the rich each
attracts considerable support. The issue, as the pundits say, is political will.
Further compounding the problem has been
the expansion of the submerged state. Third Way
antipathy toward big government programs notwithstanding, it is universal, directly provided state
programs that prove most sustainable and most
capable of generating mobilized constituencies.
Social Security effectively turned the elderly from
an electoral afterthought into one of the countrys
most powerful voting blocs.
But the problem isnt just a matter of policy.
The stumbling block is more fundamental to capitalist democracies. Because capitalism is ordered
around the principle that before anything can
operate first capitalists must expect a profit, policies will invariably be written with business in
mind first. Its a restriction that constrained the
best of European social democrats in the twentieth
century and would just as surely hamstring an independent, working-class party today. We need an
anticapitalist politics, then, that can break through
this impasse.
Without permanently revoking their veto
power, business interests wont just continue to
nix the radical reforms socialists desire. Theyll
perpetually subvert that most basic condition of
democratic rule that ordinary citizens, not corporate paymasters, set the agenda.

Up From Liberalism

69

The Void
Stares Back
Has the decline of the mass party
caused the decline of democracy
itself?

Mike
Beggs

he year was 1997. Bill Clinton was beginning his second term,
Tony Blairs New Labour was coming to power in Britain after a resounding victory, and European Union member states
were putting together the Stability and Growth Pact (vowing
to keep government deficits below 3percent and debt below
60percent of gdp).
Meanwhile, Alan Blinder was asking the readers of Foreign Affairs whether
government was too political that is, too much under the influence of elected
politicians competing for votes. A respected economist at the top of his game,
Blinder had served on Clintons Council of Economic Advisers and then as vice
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
His time at the central bank had gotten him thinking. While the Federal
Reserve made important decisions that affected lives across the country and
beyond, it was deliberately isolated from elected officials interference. Monetary policy was no field for amateurs, and the central bank had to do things the
voting public may not support but which served its long-term interests.
Blinder was troubled by one nasty little thought: similar arguments could
be made for many functions of government. Health policy, environmental policy,
tax policy what area could not be improved by expert decision-making, free
from the meddling of Congress and the White House?
Dont get Blinder wrong. He didnt want to disenfranchise the population,
but, rather, to give their values and long-run welfare more effective expression in government. In his scheme, value judgments would still be made by
elected representatives, but technical judgments were left to the technocrats,
allowed to pursue the broad objectives set by the representatives who appointed
them. The voters were cast as both Ulysses sailors and the sirens: binding
government to the mast so it couldnt respond to them later. In case of regret,
they could always choose to undo the shackles, though that process should be
neither easy nor quick.

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

71

In the same issue of Foreign Affairs, Fareed

Zakaria set out a parallel argument. Democracy
and liberalism were not the natural twins we once
thought they were. In the West, democracy had
historically grown up with a cultural commitment to liberal values: rule of law, a separation
of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of
speech, assembly, religion, and last but not least
property.
But this link could no longer be taken for
granted. Democracy had spread further than constitutional liberalism, and so, from Peru to the
Palestinian Authority, from Sierra Leone to Slovakia,
from Pakistan to the Philippines, we see the rise of
a disturbing phenomenon in international life
illiberal democracy.
What if, Zakaria asked, racists and fascists prevailed in the free and fair elections of the Balkans?
Would you rather live in democratic Haiti or the
liberal semi-democracy of Antigua? Should we
promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East
if this created regimes that would almost certainly
be more illiberal than the ones now in place? In
Zakarias account, it was the liberal part of liberal
democracy that had led to the flourishing of the
West, and when the two sides come into conflict, it
was the liberal part that should be defended.
The basic argument was far from new. If
Zakarias pitch seemed fresh and contrarian, it was
because of the timing. For decades, the democracy
part of liberal democracy had been a pillar of
the Wests self-image and appeal during the Cold
War. Arguments for non-democratic liberalism certainly appeared, but they were never common in the
opinion pages. With the Cold War over, they could
perhaps come to the fore.
Zakaria was able to quote from many of the liberal classics about the dangers democracy posed to
liberty: Kant, Mill, Madison, Tocqueville. In fact, the
argument was so old that solutions had been baked
into the institutions of Western democracy. Zakaria
pointed to the American constitutional structure
itself as a solution to the problem of democracy:
What is distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather how
undemocratic it is. Of its three branches of

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Jacobin Winter 2016

government, one arguably paramount is

headed by nine unelected men and women with
life tenure. Its Senate is the most unrepresentative upper house in the world, with the lone exception of the House of Lords, which is powerless.... To further check national power, state
and local governments are strong and fiercely
battle every federal intrusion into their turf.
Blinder and Zakaria were making different arguments, but the two dovetailed nicely. For Blinder,
the solution to the irrationalities of democracy was
more decision-making by unelected experts; for
Zakaria, it was institutional checks and balances to
keep certain things out of the voters grasp. Their
interventions captured not just the fantasies of ambitious clerks but the spirit of the age.

The Partys Over

Many feel that democracy has been eroded across
the Western world. Elected officials have come to
seem more constrained, and the options presented
to voters are narrower, at least with respect to economic policy. More people have disengaged from the
democratic process. The mask would-be governing
parties present to voters is distant from the face
revealed once in office.
Peter Mairs Ruling the Void gives some solidity
to these feelings. It is, unfortunately, an unfinished
work: Mair, an Irish political scientist, died in 2011
with the manuscript still in progress. Editor Francis
Mulhern later assembled the book from draft chapters and a few of Mairs papers, building from the
core argument Mair laid out in a 2006 New Left
Review article.
The sketch has been filled out in some areas,
but sadly we are left with only an outline of the
rest. Though it takes on the hollowing of Western
democracy as a whole, the details are drawn mainly
from Europe particularly the European Union
project and it was already somewhat dated upon
publication: the eurozone crisis barely registers. But
the past few years of European politics all validate
Mairs argument another grand coalition in Germany, a cabinet of unelected technocrats in Italy,
grinding austerity across the continent regardless

The Void Stares Back

Bankstas Paradise
As central banks are given more independence
from democratic institutions, fighting inflation
not unemployment becomes the top priority.

Spain

Average Inflation

8.5
New Zealand

Italy

UK

Australia

Norway,
Sweden,
France

Denmark
Japan
USA

Canada

Belgium

Netherlands

3.0

Switzerland
Germany

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

Index of Central Bank Independence

Source: Central Bank Independence and Macroeconomic Performance: Some Comparative Evidence,
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (1993)

of the government in power, the rise of outsider

parties both left and right, and the Syriza U-turn.
It may seem odd to forecast the end of the age
of party democracy at a time when, by many measures, democracy is more pervasive than ever before.
In 1900, almost no country in the world extended
universal suffrage. By 2000, almost two-thirds did,
covering 58percent of the worlds population.
The 1990s saw a great wave of enfranchisement
in the former Eastern Bloc, and ngos were dispatching countless observers and activists to foster
democracy in the developing world. As political
scientist Juan Linz put it: after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, no anti-democratic ideology appeals to politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders (with the
possible exception of ... some Islamic countries) as
an alternative to political democracy.
But, Mair argues, even as democracy spread, it
had thinned in the rich West. Formally, things were
much the same: the franchise was not rolled back
and elections continued to happen. But the form
contained less of the substance, if the substance of
democracy was collective popular decision-making

about government policy.

Elections offered fewer real choices between
alternative visions or strategies of governance
especially when it came to economic policy. Mair
lists a number of familiar symptoms of voter disengagement. Quantitatively, there is lower voter
turnout, and much lower party membership and
identification. Qualitatively, there is widespread
contempt for politicians and indifference toward
the political process.
Rising abstention and alienation suggests that
the political choices on offer are not enough to
motivate people to pay attention and vote. As for
anti-political hostility: as Alexis de Tocqueville once
observed in the case of the old French aristocracy,
it is easy to breed contempt for those who continue
to claim privileges on the basis of functions they no
longer fulfil.
Indifference or hostility to conventional politics is not confined to those outside the system, but
expressed in the media, among technocrats, and
by elected officials themselves. The predominant
flavor is the centrist disdain for both partisanship

Up From Liberalism

73

and populism, where root problems are identified as

dysfunctional pandering to ideological party bases
and irresponsible promises to voters.
Nowhere is this stronger than in the parties
themselves, where electoral logics have thrown up
centrist leaders who must resist their popular base
as well as the opposition. Mairs illustration is New
Labours rhetoric about not being in politics and
depoliticizing decision-making but examples
abound, from Clintons triangulation in the United
States to the Third Way taken by center-left governments elsewhere.
Another fixture is the outsider insurgency that
denounces political duopolies, elites, and politics as usual. These campaigns might seem to run
counter to the other, homogenizing expressions of
anti-partisan anti-populism and sometimes they
do, typically in reactionary directions but sometimes
to the left. But often outsider rhetoric is simply a
cover for more centrist policy the popular party
outsider is the perfect face to present to disillusioned voters.
For Mair, the decline of party government is the
heart of a problem that public indifference follows
and comes to reinforce. He situates his argument in
an older tradition of political science, which emphasizes the importance of party differentiation for
genuine democracies.
In many systems, parties have little or no explicit
constitutional recognition: they are not part of the
formal rules of the game, but emerged as a strategic
response to the democratic situation. It is parties
that organize politics into a national context of
interests and ideals. Without them, even attenuated popular sovereignty would be impossible on
such a large scale.
The form of representation implied by raw constitutional rules, where individual regions return
representatives on a geographic basis, disconnects
it from the kinds of decisions that parliaments and
governments make which are less frequently local
than systemic and national. Party organization is a
necessary mechanism for collecting voter preference
and transmitting it to national policy.
That is, at least, the ideal. But the mere existence
of parties is not enough to ensure that choice at the
ballot box means a genuine choice in policy. Parties

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Jacobin Winter 2016

must also vie for office in competitive elections and

offer distinct policy alternatives. Policy should be
made by the party in government, and elected representatives must remain accountable to their party.
Leaders should be recruited by and through parties,
rather than being popular or technocratic ringers.
These are the conditions that have broken down.
This structural dysfunction flows from a narrowing of options for economic policy, which Mair
puts down to globalization:
Parties were always more likely to matter in
the so-called Golden Age of embedded liberalism, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, when
they were relatively unconstrained in shaping the policy outcomes that might matter to
their electorates.... By the late 1970s and early
1980s, however, the domestic capacity to control the economic environment was already in
decline.
While Mairs argument is an outline, it is not hard
to fill in the color. If governments had less room to
move, parties had less room to credibly promise
movement. Over time, formations adapted to these
conditions and economic policy became more or less
bipartisan. But parties could still point to important
distinctions that justified turning out to the polls,
even if cosmetic differences in personality and rhetoric came increasingly to the fore.
Retreat of the parties or, really, the parties
of the Left did not mean the retreat of the state.
Economic policy continued to be formulated, but
it became the duty of technocrats in treasuries and,
most of all, central banks. The job for elected governments was to keep their fiscal policy disciplined and
enact reforms to rationalize the interface between
state and economy.
At the same time, something akin to natural
selection ensured that the dominant economic policy
voices within the parties of government identified
with the technocratic consensus. In many countries, the economic rationalist finance minister
or treasurer, unpopular within his center-left party
but respected by the press, has become a familiar
archetype.
Their perspective is much like Alan Blinders in
Foreign Affairs: there is no real disagreement among

The Void Stares Back

serious people about what economic policy should

do. Not everyone is serious, however; not everyone
understands economics. It is a complicated business, and many voters do not have the education to
understand their rational long-term interests and
though the bourgeois press is helpful, fewer people
are paying attention to it.
For the technocrats lodged in the densely packed
center, this produces both minor and major concerns. The minor one is that short-term electoral
considerations pull ones party colleagues away from
economic rationality, especially in election years.
The major one is that the partys voters could be
led drastically astray by demagogues.
To prevent these scenarios from happening,
serious economic policy debate was cordoned off
from unserious politics. Central bank independence, a tried and true method of limiting popular
control, was especially common, proliferating and
deepening in the 1990s and 2000s. The European
Central Bank, established to administer the euro in
1998, went the furthest it made its appointments
and governance decisions at least two levels removed
from any directly elected body.
The European Union takes up a full quarter of
what we have of Mairs argument. For Mair, the
architecture of the European system exemplifies the
isolation of decision-making from electoral democracy. By harmonizing many aspects of policy across
the eu, it has reduced the space for policymaking
by national governments. By delegating executive
powers to European agencies, it has reduced the
power of national agencies.
Mair asserts that the two channels of potential democratic influence through the elected
European Parliament and through national government influence on the Council of Ministers and the
European Council are effectively blocked by the
fragmentation of powers, and a mismatch between
the issues presented to voters and the actual powers
of their representatives. Meanwhile, politicians at
the national level are often happy to cede difficult
decisions to the European level, which can act as a
heat sink for unpopular technocratic policy.
The European architecture born in the 1990s,
seemingly maturing in the 2000s, and showing
severe strain in the 2010s is very much a creature

of the technocratic ascendancy. Mair traces the ideology that has flowered alongside it, with thinker
after thinker relocating the definition of democratic legitimacy away from voting and toward the
idea, as Giandomenico Majone put it, that efficient policies are basically legitimated by the results
they achieve.

The Not-So-Golden Age

To argue that party democracy has shriveled implies
a contrast with a healthier age. Mair does not fall
victim to false nostalgia.
At times, as in the passage quoted above, he does
compare the void of the 1990s and 2000s with the
so-called Golden Age of embedded liberalism in
the 1950s and 1960s. Yet he clearly acknowledges
that his argument descends from one already firmly
entrenched during the earlier period. The idea that
political decision-making sometimes lay beyond the
reach of the ordinary citizen was a familiar theme
in the political science of the 1960s. His position,
he writes, owes much to Schattschneiders [1960]
The Semi-Sovereign People; more than a half-century later, his thesis can now be put in a stronger
and less hesitant form, as even semi-sovereignty
is slipping away.
C. Wright Mills The Power Elite (1956) and
Ralph Milibands Parliamentary Socialism (1961)
and The State in Capitalist Society (1969) were more
damning about the condition of capitalist democracy
in their time than Mair is about the present. Radical and Marxist analyses go unmentioned by Mair,
whose points of reference stay within the bounds of
polite, mainstream political science. The concept
of capitalism is missing, and the crucial economic
dimension to his argument is left undeveloped.
Mairs story depends on the idea that economic
conditions increasingly constrained governments
beginning in the late 1970s. In this he departs from
an idealism common on the Left, which ascribes
the transformations of the 1980s and 1990s to the
success of neoliberal ideology. Instead, with much
vagueness, Mair simply blames globalization.
But in a capitalist society, much of the actual
governance of life has never been subject to democratic influence. Rather, owners and managers of

Up From Liberalism

75

Might as Well Stay Home

Voter turnout is in dramatic decline across Europe.
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Sweden
Switzerland
UK

1950

1955

1960

capital, running private organizations in pursuit of

profit, make many of the calls.
Ever since the classical political economists
explained how markets could coordinate the selfinterested activity of the many, economics has
guided statecraft. Governments and the agencies of
the state are strategic actors with particular powers
in a system they do not control, and strategy depends
on some understanding of that system. Capitalist
statecraft has always been more or less technocratic,
because economic logics mean that some political
strategies work better than others, and some will
fail utterly.
Still, this does not mean the economy mechanically determines economic policy. Even if the system
were somehow perfectly understood, a variety of
potential strategies would exist.
The existence of the system itself also depends
on the state: at a minimum, property law and its
enforcement. These nightwatchman duties constituted most of the economic program of early
liberalism, along with the sound money of the
gold standard.
In theory, there is nothing stopping sovereign
power from altering or repealing the legal framework

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Jacobin Winter 2016

1965

1970

on which capital depends. Once upon a time, democracy was seen as a genuine threat to capitalism. This
fear motivated the composition of all the eighteenthand nineteenth-century classics Zakaria draws from
in his defense of the basic liberties against the
encroachment of illiberal democracy. The prospect
of extending the vote to the propertyless terrified
the propertied. And not without reason redistribution and regulation were the point of getting the
vote for many who fought for it.
Take, for instance, an 1842 debate in the British
House of Commons following the presentation of
a Chartist petition calling for universal male suffrage. Most speakers assumed that a truly popular
vote would mean repudiation of the national debt
a substantial portion of existing wealth and a
redistribution of property. The Tory prime minister
ranted about a petition, so prepared by a designing
and cowardly demagogue ... so full of trash and
delusion.
Then, there were Whig reformers making the
liberal case against democracy. Need it be said, as
Thomas Macaulay put it, that they had no want of
sympathy for the interests of the humbler classes?
Lord John Russell proclaimed in equal measure his

The Void Stares Back

Years of record-low turnout, 19502005

1975

1980

1985

respect for the petitioners and abhorrence of the

doctrines set out in the petition.
The problem was simply, however regrettably, a
matter of political economy. Dissipate wealth across
the population, and it would eliminate the wage
fund out of which labor is paid, and so throw the
working classes into a still worse condition than
that in which they are at present placed. Redistribution of land and capital, said Macaulay, would
not only ruin those who are rich but also make
the poor poorer. The Chartists were like starving
Indians pleading at the granary: open the doors
out of misplaced kindness and you only make a
scarcity a famine.
Democracy was all very well in America, with its
constitutional checks and balances, and where just
about everyone had their piece of property anyway.
And it would hopefully be all very well in Britain too,
one day decades hence, when the working classes
had been educated about the realities of political
economy and become less susceptible to the sway
of socialist demagogues.
Had the Ghost of Democracy Future shown
Macaulay and Russell the nation to come under
universal suffrage, they would probably conclude

1990

1995

2000

2005

that they had been right: the vote had been extended
gradually, in line with education and moderation,
and property remained safe from the rabble.
Nevertheless, the ghost would also reveal the
transformations of the political landscape wrought
by the working-class vote and the rise of the labor
movement. By the late 1920s, when the franchise
had been finally extended to women and the unpropertied, the gold standard was under strain all
the more after Churchill restored the pound to its
pre-war gold parity in 1925 and intensified deflation
in an already depressed Britain.
The gold standard was to the nineteenth century
what the independent, inflation-targeting central
bank would be to the late twentieth, insulating monetary management from political pressures. But it
depended on wage flexibility, and by the 1920s labor
had the power to resist the burden of adjustment.
Many economists of the day saw unemployment as
a symptom of the lost flexibility, and expected it to
eventually break the money-wage to its equilibrium
level. Instead, it would break the gold standard.
Amid all of this, the Whigs would notice John
Maynard Keynes, a Liberal and thus their political heir in some respects. The crisis of the gold

Source: Ruling The Void: The Hollowing Of Western Democracy (2013)

Up From Liberalism

77

standard was the context for Keyness revolution

in economics, and in 1925 he recognized why the
old order was crumbling: No section of labor will
readily accept lower wages merely in response to
sentimental speeches.... We are depending for the
reduction of wages on the pressure of unemployment
and of strikes and lockouts.
While Keynes liked to poke fun at gold as a
barbarous relic, the standards defenders were
not simply mindless followers of tradition. Many
reactions to Keyness ideas for managed money
developed along the lines articulated by his friend
Bob Brand: I should myself still prefer to rely on
the gold standard, defective as it is ... than entirely
on the skill and economic knowledge of bankers
harassed by politicians.
The Ghost of Democracy Future takes the Whigs
forward another three decades, past another, greater
war. Keynes is dead, but his name is everywhere:
many economists call themselves Keynesians, and
full-employment is the declared aim of policy. With
the establishment of macroeconomics, we see the
true arrival of the technocrats: sound money and
sound finances are replaced by active monetary
and fiscal policy; statistical agencies collect all kinds
of data, and professional economists multiply within
the expanding bureaucracy.
A certain mythology which Mair half-heartedly endorses with his so-called Golden Age of
embedded liberalism treats the postwar era as
one of social democracy and Keynesian stimulus that
was rolled back and reversed by a neoliberalism
ascendant since the late 1970s.
The truth is more complicated. The size of the
typical state, as measured by taxation and expenditure, grew tremendously during and after World
War ii. This trajectory has not been reversed since
the 1970s. Only the growth has been halted, as of
course it had to at some point.
In addition, central banks and governments are
just as committed to demand management as they
were in the 1960s. Full-employment has simply been
defined downwards to the level of unemployment
consistent with low and stable inflation.
In fact, policy in the postwar period was often
designed to restrain consumption rather than stimulate it. Macroeconomic rationality meant targeting

78

Jacobin Winter 2016

the right level of effective demand. Compared with

the gold standard, Bretton Woods created room
for policy maneuver, but fixed exchange rates still
limited the extent to which a country could run a
balance-of-payments deficit. This, in turn, often
forced a commitment to price stability.
From early on, economists realized that fullemployment could threaten price stability by keeping the labor market tight and worker bargaining
power strong. Turning the knobs of macroeconomic policy was complicated, involving the use of
unreliable instruments of limited strength in conditions of fundamental uncertainty to hit a number
of often-contradictory targets.
The policy models of Jan Tinbergen, winner of
the first Economics Nobel, offer a window into the
view from the technocratic center:
In the situation of that year [1950] and as far as
the model used was a true representation of the
Dutch economy, the calculations showed that
the target set would require a wage decrease of
5%, a decrease in profit margins of some 13%,
an increase in labor productivity of 4% and an
increase in indirect taxes equal to 2% of prices.
Both the wage decrease and the profit reduction seemed to be beyond the boundary conditions.
A long list of alternative targets was then
studied. Accepting a boundary condition of no
reduction in the nominal wage meant the necessity of still heavier reductions in profit margins and a heavier increase in indirect taxes;
accepting a boundary condition of no profit
margin reduction implied impossible requirements as to labor: either a reduction in real
wages of 13% or a reduction of employment by
the same percentage.
Thus did class struggle appear in the policy frame.
Policy instruments were compromised not
only by technical limitations, but also by the lines
of defense drawn by the groups affected by them.
These defense lines could be political groups could
mobilize to influence the government, electorally
or otherwise, and set limits on the use of particular
instruments or the acceptable range for particular
targets. Or they could be economic groups with

The Void Stares Back

The Partys Over

Party membership is
also in dramatic decline
across Europe.

End of Period
Start of Period

France (197899)

Italy (198098)

power in a market could shape the parameters of the

system in which policy operated. Broadly speaking,
capitals economic defense lines were built on its
control of private investment, while labors were
rooted in its organization and its bargaining power
in tight labor markets.
When labor had the strength to throw these
imperatives into active contest, policymakers found
themselves struggling to reconcile multiple goals. In
particular, the political commitment to full-employment often came into conflict with the relative price
stability required by fixed exchange rates.
That left three options. The first was to manage
expectations downwards. It was common to argue,
for example, that full-employment and price stability
could not be simultaneously met. This was a technocratic attempt to shift political defense lines to
persuade the electorate to accept lower horizons on
the grounds of economic necessity.
The second possibility was to develop new, supplementary instruments to turn parameters into
policy variables. Some, like Tinbergen himself,
proposed that the full-employmentprice stability
problem might be solved with centralized money-wage determination. Third, policy could be
turned toward weakening the economic defense
lines of labor or capital.
In the 1970s, the end of the long boom and the
onset of stagflation heightened the tensions of policy.
In conditions of depressed growth, somebody had
to lower either their expectations or their capacity
to fulfill those expectations.
We all know what happened next. Expectations
were managed downward: the aspiration of full-employment was abandoned, or redefined to mean the
level of unemployment compatible with price stability. And, of course, the forces of labor were beaten

UK (198098)

-64.59% decrease in party

membership
-51.54%

-50.39%

Norway (198097)

-47.49%

Finland (198098)

Netherlands (198000)

-34.03%

-31.67%

Austria (198099)

Switzerland (198097)

Sweden (198098)

Denmark (198098)

Ireland (198098)

Belgium (198099)

Germany (198098)

Greece (198098)

Spain (198000)

Source: Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 19802000 (2001)

-30.21%

-28.85%

-28.05%

-25.52%

-24.47%

-22.1%

-8.95%

+166.67% increase in
party membership
+250.73%

Up From Liberalism

79

17.6%

Unemployment rates
for OECD countries

No Job For You

15%

During the 1970s economic

crisis, the advanced
capitalist world abandoned
full-employment policies.

10%

France
Germany

Canada

USA

5%

UK

196064

80

196572

Jacobin Winter 2016

197379

198087

198895

199699

Sources: OECD and ILO

200008

The Void Stares Back

into submission, permanently higher unemployment

accepted as the new normal.
And yet, in no sense has the macroeconomic
revolution in policy been rolled back. If it seems
that way, its only because we focus on the rhetoric
of free marketeers in politics and economics rather
than watching what politicians and policymakers
actually do.
Macroeconomic management is taken every
bit as seriously as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. In
many ways, it has been consolidated. The power of
the central bank has been strengthened. Regulation
financial and otherwise has not so much been
shrunk as rationalized. What has changed are the
targets, the lower sights for macroeconomic policy,
and the weakened position of labor. Similarly, the
technocrats have been in charge of economic policy
since at least World Warii. The shift since the 1980s
has been the aims: theyre more austere and less easy
to sell to the public than full-employment.
Mairs argument about the decline of party government is convincing. We should be clear, though,
that it has entailed a caving in of the left toward the
center, rather than something more symmetrical.
We should also not overstate the extent to which the
social-democratic and labor parties of the postwar
era were responsible for the full-employment interlude. The macroeconomic revolution was bipartisan
in most political systems of the West. And, again,
during the long boom, this often meant policies of
restraint rather than stimulus, swinging against high
rates of private investment.
Even in the purely technocratic system of macroeconomist fantasy, there remained multiple,
competing strategies. There was a genuine left
Keynesianism, which might have met the contradictions of full-employment differently. Centralized
money-wage bargaining could have politicized distribution, and Keyness call for the comprehensive
socialization of investment might have been taken
literally. Any viable strategy would have had to
deal with the economic and political defense lines
of capital, which come mainly from its control of
investment.
But nowhere was this the program of a mainstream party. It would probably have been politically
unstable and immensely difficult: any challenge to

the power of property needs to be pushed ever forward if it is to have any chance of avoiding the fate
of such macroeconomic efforts during the golden
age: surrender and acceptance of the low road to
macroeconomic stability.

Filling the Technocratic Void

Are we still in the void of Ruling the Void? Mairs
book is mostly a pre-crisis one, a work of the long
1990s. Blinders call for government to act more
like a central bank would not have been out of
place in 2007, a year when the memoirs of maestro of prosperity Alan Greenspan debuted at
the top of the nonfiction bestseller list. Now, it is
hard to say.
Mair foresaw the rise of populist anti-political
challenges to the technocratic center. But before
his death, these mainly had a reactionary tint. What
would he make of the emergence in Europe of genuine left parties with mass appeal? Of the surprise
popularity of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders?
Though his sympathies are obviously with the Left,
he gives us no explicit strategy for facing the void.
Perhaps the prospects for the immediate future
seemed too bleak.
Much of the radical left responded to the decline
of mainstream laborism and social democracy by
putting its energies into the politics of the street,
largely dismissing party-building as a waste of
time. In many ways, this was a sensible response. In
staking out the technocratic center, the mainstream
parties found ways of inoculating themselves from
internal left pressure. The alternative going it
alone with a new party of the left was extremely
difficult to get off the ground, especially in first-pastthe-post voting systems.
But extra-parliamentary politics has demonstrated its own limitations.
First, it is at a distance from power. Its effectiveness depends on putting pressure on the very parties
of government the Left has vacated (or been pushed
from). Protest campaigns depend on making something an issue, shifting the electoral calculations
around it. They may be quite successful in doing
so. But at best, they leave all initiative and policy
design to the parties.

Up From Liberalism

81

The Void Stares Back

As Mair remarks, parties used to articulate the

interests of ideologically similar non-party movements and institutions; with this channel broken,
the movements have to play parties off against each
another for influence. However, movements of the
Left cannot credibly set the center-left against the
right everybody knows that come Election Day,
theyll be turning out the vote for the lesser evil.
Second, the activist left risks becoming comfortably separated from the mainstream. For people,
politics is the electoral process, the back and forth
of party politics, government and opposition. What
goes on in that frame determines the bounds of what
most people think of as politically possible. Outside
it, activists can build movements that look spectacular, but their reach is often limited and devoid of
the capacity and discipline that comes from meeting
people where they are and listening and helping
articulate their aspirations.
Socialists in the West have generally haunted
the margins of mass labor parties and movements,
engaging within the broader left out of a genuine
commitment to winning reforms that better the
lives of people under capitalism. But we have also
always made the case that without an assault on
capital and its power, the potential for reform will
be less than reformists presume, and always at risk
of being wrested back. Regrettably, expropriating
the expropriators is still a platform with minimal
electoral appeal.
In the postwar period, the most plausible
socialist strategies involved the radicalization of a
popular social-democratic government that ran up
against the limits set by capitalist control of investment. On balance, this is still more plausible than
the alternatives. So, the crisis of social democracy
has been the real crisis of socialism, much more
than the fall of an Eastern Bloc in which few still
vested hope.
Mair helps us understand the decline of the
social-democratic party, and therefore the conditions for its potential rebirth. Parties do not simply
reflect a set of preferences that are out there in the
electorate they help shape and articulate those
preferences. Parties have to be successful on two
fronts: they must build and maintain electoral popularity, and they need effective policy strategies

that account for the economic context in which the

capitalist state is embedded.
The crisis of postwar social democracy was first
of all a crisis on the second front. The high growth
of the long boom had made full-employment and
the labor strength that flowed from it compatible
with some degree of price stability. When that broke
down, any viable response required an attack on the
economic defense lines of capital and wealth its
mobility, its control of investment decisions, its power
in the labor market. Half-measures were doomed,
because capital flight could quickly punish them (e.g.,
in the UK in 1976 and France in the early 1980s).
But building the alternative on the fly, amid confusion about whether the straitened circumstances
were here to stay, was never going to be an easy task.
The Left would have first needed to build support
in the electoral arena for a battle for which few were
ready, and in favor of policies no one was sure would
work anyway. That it ended in failure is no surprise.
The long postwar boom was a unique period in
capitalist history, with macroeconomic conditions
that cant just be willed into being with the right mix
of policies. But with little power to try to hold onto,
we now also have the luxury of focusing on patient
rebuilding rather than crisis management.
Two objectives will be especially important:
developing a workable economic strategy for the
medium term, and activating and organizing the
forces needed to accumulate electoral power. Parties, as Mair reminds us, are the crucial link between
the two (though what that means for socialists will
vary across time and country, depending on the configuration of electoral systems and the state of party
politics). Further, the technocratic common sense
of the 1950s and 1960s reflected not just political
will and ideology, but also the economic weight of
labor. So reconstructing the organizational capacities of the working class on the shop floor or, more
accurately, at the hospitals and schools and fast-food
restaurants will be another central priority.
The result of our efforts will look very different
from the left social democracy of a bygone age. It
will be a long project on multiple fronts, with many
setbacks along the way. But we already knew that.
And politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. It is hard
to imagine the technocratic void lasting forever.

Up From Liberalism

83

A
BETTER
WAY

The Making
of Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn drew on the historic
struggles of the Labour left and new social
movements to power his successful party
leadership bid.

Hilary
Wainwright

he sudden electoral success of a handful of radical left leaders Greeces Alexis Tsipras and Spains Pablo Iglesias in
the European periphery, and now Jeremy Corbyn in Britain,
a heartland of market politics is more a testament to the
hollowing out of the political system than a demonstration of a
viable political alternative.
Indeed, even while celebrating Corbyns victory made all the more
delightful by its totally unexpected character, not to mention the angry panic
it has provoked among the establishment I cant help but be haunted by the
fate of Tsipras, whose victory was cheered with equal exuberance less than a
year ago.
The differences, to be sure, are immense: Tsipras led a young party of which
he had been a founder; he faced little opposition from within his party; and in
public meetings he acted with the charisma of a conventional populist politician.
In the end, though, his problem was that he and his party were in government,
not in power. Moreover, as is now clear, Syriza did not have a strategy to build
enough power to counter its opponents both elites throughout the European
Union and capitalists in Greece.
But Corbyn, if still years away from a general election, faces a lack of control
over the party he ostensibly leads, despite his unprecedented electoral mandate. Party elites refuse to cooperate with indeed, positively sabotage a
figure who for decades challenged them from the backbench as one of the most
rebellious left-wing members of parliament.
Three key questions arise. First, how could someone so openly and determinedly of the radical left triumph in the leadership contest of a party that has
always contained and, under Tony Blairs New Labour, seemingly crushed
the Left? Second, do the circumstances of this extraordinary victory point
to sources of power that could be mobilized to transform the Labour Party in

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

87

the direction of Corbyns new politics? Finally,

can Corbyns insistence that there is an alternative
translate into a practical electoral strategy?
Whats clear is that for Corbyn to succeed, the
majority of working people would have to believe his
government could not only end recent austerity, but
could enlist huge portions of the populace to enact
a programmatic alternative to both New Labour
and the Tories everything from stopping privatization and introducing democratic forms of public
ownership to ending casual and precarious work and
legislating decent pay and working conditions for all.
In other words, Corbyns prospects turn on
whether he can reverse the traditional logic of electoral politics, whereby the people cede their power
to their political representatives. Corbyns new
politics is about political representatives using the
platform of the state to empower popular forces.

How Corbyn Won

Institutionally, Corbyn owes his victory to a series of
reforms: first those pushed through by the Campaign
for Labour Party Democracy the organization
championed by Corbyns close friend and fellow
socialist, the late Tony Benn and, more recently,
the changes to the leadership election process enacted under Corbyns predecessor, Ed Miliband.
He needed all the help he could get. After all,
while Labour was founded as a workers party, its
institutions were designed in part to ensure that
radicals never won power.
From the time of Labours formation in 1906,
the partys members of parliament were responsible
for choosing a leader among their ranks. Ralph Miliband, author of Parliamentary Socialism and father
of Ed, described this primacy given to the legislature as parliamentarism by which he meant not
simply abiding by the conventions of parliamentary
politics but deferring to them absolutely. The trade
union leaders, who had created the party with the
sole purpose of gaining representation in parliament,
shared this devotion.
A shared interest, and a potential source of
tension, was thus built into Labours dna. On the
one hand, the immediate desire of trade unions to
improve the material position of their members

88

Jacobin Winter 2016

within the limits of capitalism meant that winning

parliamentary seats to consolidate and extend
worker rights was paramount (but also as far as politics went). On the other hand, the links between
Labour and workers industrial organizations were
built into every level of the party, creating a potential
channel for radical struggles and demands that challenged the nature and existence of capitalism itself.
Indeed, fleeting moments when industrial struggles pushed the limits of capitalism and gestured
toward a vision of socialism can be seen in the preambles of many trade union constitutions. These
aspirations were also present in Labours founding
constitution, which committed it to the eventual
common ownership of the means of production,
distribution and exchange. But the actual power
structure of the party displayed a perpetual fixation
on the short term, and the imperatives of attaining
immediate electoral goals suppressed any latent tension between trade union and parliamentary leaders.
This alliance effectively imprisoned the organized left. To be outside the party orbit, as the British
Communist Party found out, was to be doomed to
the political margins. Yet to throw ones lot in with
Labour meant regularly putting on hold challenges
from the left for the sake of electoral unity. After each
election, it was back to square one for the Labour left.
In the 1970s and into the 1980s, the partys left
finally appeared to be gaining some ground, the beneficiary of the deepening radicalization of the trade
unions, members and leaders alike. Growing support for Benn in the early seventies stemmed from
the trade union backlash against the pre-Thatcher
Thatcherism of Edward Heath, the Conservative
prime minister whose government fell in 1974 due
to a resilient miners strike.
These increasingly left trade unions formed
a rare alliance with Bennite constituency Labour
parties. The coalition won reforms to democratize
Labour at party conferences including a 1981
vote establishing the election of the party leader by
an electoral college of unions, Labour members,
and members of parliament, rather than just the
parliamentary party. That year, Benn came within
a percentage point of beating Denis Healey, the
well-respected leader of the Labour right, in the
deputy leadership election.

The Making of Jeremy Corbyn

Ultimately, however, the switch to an electoral

college selection process didnt dramatically modify
the power structure of the party. Members now
had some say instead of none, but the actual voting
mechanisms remained weighted in favor of the
members of parliament. Moreover, the inclusion
of trade unions in the leadership election where
they marginalized internally dissenting views by
voting as a bloc effectively consolidated the alliance between union and parliamentary leaderships
on which Labours very existence depended.
In the 1950s and 60s, conservative forces in
Labour accepted the unions right-leaning bloc of
votes. But the unions move leftwards in the 1970s
and early 80s led some on the Right, including Blair,
to reassess that position. They now wanted to sever
the partys links with the unions altogether.
When Ed Miliband won the leadership contest
in 2010, vowing to break from New Labour, he triumphed partly because he managed to win more
support among unions than his Blair-supporting
brother David. This put New Labour leaders on
further alert for opportunities to weaken the unionparty link.
A somewhat shadowy group of New Labour
mps and their media allies saw their chance when
a local parliamentary selection process in 2013 was
tarnished by accusations of trade union corruption. While strongly rebutted, alleged chicanery
did enough damage to convince Miliband to favor
a rule change that ended the electoral college and
turned the leadership election into a one person,
one vote contest.
Under the new rules, mps could nominate candidates but otherwise had no more power than the
individual member, affiliated union member, or
supporter (a new category in which people could
vote after paying 3pounds or, if they were members
of an affiliated union, nothing at all). At the time,
Miliband declared that 300,000 trade unionists
active in the party is preferable to 3million paper
trade unionists affiliated to the party.
Corbyns election has proven Miliband more
perceptive about trade union members than New
Labours mandarins, whose fixation on party activists and unions as the source of Labours problems
and whose dream of a US-style politics led them to

believe that increased public involvement as supporters, US primary style, would pull the party
toward the center.
The reality soon became clear. As the Labour
leadership election meetings traveled around the
country, Corbyns campaign gathered momentum,
and an unpredicted public a movement searching
for a home, as some commentators put it surged
into the church halls and community centers of every
city and town, sometimes climbing in through the
windows to be part of the excitement, or waiting in
an overflow outside for Corbyn to make his second
appearance of the night.

The Roots of a Hybrid Movement

The scattered movement that came together around
Corbyn has deep roots. In the 1970s, Benn advocated in a pamphlet a new politics that was at
once international a response to the worldwide
rebellion against the US war in Vietnam and focused on the very British problem of Westminster
parliamentarism and the Labour Party. [T]he student power movement, the Black Power movement
and the discontent among trade unionists are very
powerful and important new forces in society and
the Labour Party has got to enter into a creative
relationship with them, Benn wrote.
In the decades since which saw the destruction of Benns attempts to radically reform industry
as a government minister, Thatchers bludgeoning
of organized labor, and New Labours attacks on
the partys left a generation of activists have
grown up for whom a creative relationship with
the Labour Party is inconceivable. In a modest but
often effective way like their political cousins,
the indignados in southern Europe and Occupy in
the United States they have defined their own
politics, directly intervening in society without the
mediation of political parties. Some of these activists including from UK Uncut, Climate Camp,
and Occupy London ended up constituting the
creative linchpin of Corbyns campaign (similar to
many indignados active involvement in Podemos).
Then there is the older generation, Corbyns own
generation, shaped by the new politics that influenced
Benn in the late 1960s and 70s. They were drawn

Up From Liberalism

89

into the Labour Party by Benn, repulsed by Blairism,

and on the eve of the war on Iraq held the local meetings, gave out the leaflets, and booked the buses
that brought two million onto the streets in 2003.
(Corbyn himself was an active supporter of Stop the
War, the national organization behind the antiwar
demonstrations. He became its chair in 2011.)
These elder activists found their voice again
through Corbyns reluctant candidature for Labour
leadership. In a potent mix, they provided the
local infrastructure that was then amplified by the
younger activists outreach on social media. They
were further aided by large numbers of trade unionists who have been fighting Thatcherisms various
iterations for the past forty years but never received
the partys support.

So can this hybrid movement make the Labour

Party theirs? Or is the movement formed in the space
that Corbyn opened up just squatting soon to find
the electricity cut off and the bailiffs coming round
with police reinforcements?
For now, the two main sources of energy party
members and credibility with the wider public are
flowing relatively well. A recent YouGov opinion
poll of Labour Party members, for example, found
that Corbyns support had increased to 66percent
since his election. And although many of Corbyns
opponents predicted a December3 by-election in
the northern town of Oldham would be a disaster for
Labour, the party increased its share of the vote with
a local moderate candidate to whom Corbyn and
his grassroots supporters gave their full approval.

Party in Power

Labour
Power
Founded in 1900 to be
the political organ of
the British working
class, the center-left
Labour Party is now
one of the UKs major
parties.

1900 The Labor Representation

Committee (LRC) is formed
by trade unionists to sponsor
left-wing parliamentary
candidates.

Percentage of Popular Vote

1.8%
1900

Labour Party Leadership

Seats in Parliament

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Jacobin Winter 2016

1906 The LRC wins

29 seats in the general
election and adopts
the name Labour
Party.

5.7%

1905
Keir
Hardie

Arthur
Henderson

The Making of Jeremy Corbyn

The campaign against Corbyn has been based

mostly on the purported lack of electability of the
longtime member of parliament (mp), though the
Blairites are also fired by disbelief how could
the Left still be alive after all those years of defeat?
But alive it is. The appeal of Corbyn, like that
of his longstanding ally and now shadow chancellor
John McDonnell, does not spring from the kind of
charisma that sets a leader apart from supporters,
leaving them in passive awe. It is Corbyns closeness
that is the source of his attraction and strength. He
celebrated and empathized with people at his meetings, telling the recognizable stories of their daily
lives, or those of people like them, and demonstrated
with his leadership bid that it is possible to mold
those shared experiences into the foundation for a
collective power, an active, solidaristic hope (Jez
We Can, his campaign slogan went).
Corbyns honesty and unpretentious style continue to resonate with the general public. Despite all

the personal attacks against him for not bowing

properly, not dressing properly, not singing the
national anthem properly the arrows have largely
failed to hit their target.
The most vivid example of Corbyns new politics has been his conversion of Prime Ministers
Questions into a Peoples Question Time, crowdsourcing his queries so they come from Doreen in
Wythenshawe, Mark in Coventry, or Sharon in
Leeds. Cameron has been unable to dismiss these
questions in his usual arrogant manner without
fear of a public backlash. In the first weeks of
Corbyns leadership, the Peoples Question Time
helped stabilize his position and convince some
doubters of his genuine commitment to political
renewal.
And then theres his mandate. Blairites have
to sleep with the fact that their candidate won only
4.5percent of the vote, compared to Corbyns
59.5percent. The other candidates were all far

Coalition/National Government

The Representations of the

People Act expands voting
rights and triples the
British electorate, from 7.7
million to 21.4 million.

1918 The Labour Party ratifies

its party constitution which
includes the controversial
Clause IV, calling for the
common ownership of the
means of production.
29.7% 30.7%

33.3%

21.5%
7.6%

7.1%

1910

1915

George Ramsay
Barnes MacDonald

Labour
Conservatives
Liberals
Other

Arthur
Henderson

1920
William
Adamson

J. R.
Clynes

Ramsay
MacDonald

Up From Liberalism

91

behind the victor as well, with the second place finisher receiving just 19percent.
Though there is no shortage of pushy mps
who fancy themselves a moderate successor, none
can rival Corbyns backing among party members
and supporters. Sober commentators judge him
to be secure for years to come and likely to survive possible electoral setbacks for Labour in the
London mayoral elections or the devolved elections
in Scotland.
Moreover, the late November vote over airstrikes in Syria indicated that Labour mps are
beginning to listen to their growing constituency
memberships. Only sixty-six Labour mps voted
against their leader and for the airstrikes in spite
of media predictions that the figure would be one
hundred or more.
This was not a result of the harassment of which
pro-Corbyn people are being accused, but simply
that government-imposed parliamentary boundary
changes (and consequent reductions in the number
of mps) mean that mps will have to compete against

1924 The Liberal Partys

disintegration strengthens the
Conservative Party, forcing Labour
out of oce after less than a year.

each other to be reselected. Under Corbyns leadership it is the members who decide. (Though it
was Miliband who ended Blairs habit of imposing
candidates on local parties through the national
executive.)
In sum, even with significant intra-party antipathy and constant attacks from the media, the new
party leaderships position is stable due to strong
backing from Labour members, growing credibility among voters, and the resilience and energy
of Corbyn and McDonnell, sympathetic mps, and
young activists. Whether Corbyn has enough space
to begin setting the agenda, however, is another
story.

Sources of Momentum
Corbyns institutional attempt to sustain the energy of his campaign aptly called Momentum
intends to create that space (and subdue hostile
party forces in the process). The organization is
led by the same generational mix that drove the

1929 Second Labour government

is elected. Margaret Bondfield is
appointed minister of labour, becoming
Great Britains first female minister.
38%

37.1%
30.8%

1925

1930

1935
Arthur George Lansbury
Henderson

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Jacobin Winter 2016

Clement
Attlee

The Making of Jeremy Corbyn

campaign: people formed by the Bennite struggles

for inner-party democracy in the 1970s and the
new cohort of direct action organizers schooled
in the principles of open, horizontal forms of
organization.
Momentum is an effort to give an affirmative answer to the question of whether there were
sources of power activated in the lead-up to Corbyns extraordinary victory that could be harnessed
to transform the Labour Party. The character and
work of Momentum also bears on the question of
whether Corbyns insistence that there is an alternative to New Labour and Tory rule can be turned
into a practical strategy for electoral office. Both
hinge on whether and how a different kind of Labour
Party can be forged, capable of winning a general
election despite the greatly diminished might of the
industrial working class.
Gaining leadership of a party that has atrophied and whose campaigns largely consist of
direct, unmediated appeals to potential supporters
is very different from the long march through the

194045 A coalition
government of the major
parties is convened under
Winston Churchill to support
Great Britains war eort
against Nazi Germany. Future
Labour prime minister
Clement Attlee is appointed
Lord Privy Seal and later
becomes Great Britains first
deputy prime minister.

1940

institutions, as the socialist activist Rudi Dutschke

once put it. These institutions were created in a
very different society that no longer exists, so a successful march requires changing society, changing
the Labour Partys relation to society and only
then beginning to remake the Labour Partys own
organizations.
The mismatch between these necessarily overlapping processes was evident at a founding meeting

194551 Attlees administration

nationalizes major industries and utilities
and institutes the cradle to grave
welfare state.
49.7%

46.1%

48.8%

1948
The National
Health
Service is
formed,
socializing
British
healthcare.
1945

1950

Up From Liberalism

93

of a local branch of Momentum in Hackney, an

eastern district of London once the site of large
factories with well-organized workforces. Now the
largest employer is Hackney Council; everyone else
works in the City of London, delivery and transport,
shops, restaurants, or a large number of small creative workshops and partnerships.
The meeting was a microcosm of the different
strands of thinking and practice in the making of
Momentum, as well as their limits. Chaired in the
spirit of the new politics of consensus and openness, everybody spoke who wanted to, but no one
could speak twice. This facilitated a process by which
every position was laid out, and those who were
trying to explore new ideas and express uncertain
directions had the chance to speak as well. It was
good-humored and respectful, and the spirit was one
of unity and common cause despite sometimes-sharp
differences.
Several older activists spoke with the certainty
and precision of experienced stalwarts back on home
territory: now that weve won the leadership, they

insisted, its a matter of changing the party resolutions to conference, replacing right-wing mps,
and so on. The familiar formula was expressed with
great confidence that it would produce the desired
left turn in the party, ready for government.
Others spoke from campaigns based mainly
outside the Labour Party: Stop the War, the antiausterity Peoples Assembly, and others, stressing
the importance of building these movements to
change politics and hoping that Hackney Momentum
would strengthen these campaigns by enlarging a
common base of support.
Still others brought to the meeting urgent problems requiring immediate collective action, most
notably an attack on schools. They hoped Hackney
Momentum would become a hub for mobilization.
Some were more tentative. A young man complained
that the meeting was dominated by a language of
socialism, of class to which he could not easily
relate. An older woman stressed the importance
of learning from local people, of reaching out and
finding out what was going on in neighborhoods and

1955 Attlee retires as party head

and is succeeded by Hugh
Gaitskell, a representative of the
partys right wing.
46.4%

1964 Harold Wilson, who would come

to represent the most conservative
tendency in the party, wins election
by a close margin.
48%

44.1%

43.8%

1950s and 60s Debate over Clause IV of the

1918 Labour Party Constitution divides the
party as Labours commitment to
nationalization is questioned from within.

1955

1960

Hugh
Gaitskell

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Jacobin Winter 2016

1965
Harold
Wilson

The Making of Jeremy Corbyn

streets and discovering peoples needs. At the end,

people met in clusters of shared interests to discuss
what Momentum could do.
The meeting indicated that there is a desire to
come together to create some kind of collectivity
around Corbyns principles and the need for change,
but it didnt look like it could lay the foundation for
agenda-setting initiatives quite yet.

A New Terrain
One of the lines of attack against Corbyn is that
his leadership means a return to the 1980s, when
Labour supposedly veered too far to the left. As a
result, the story goes, the party lost a series of elections until New Labours heroic rescue.
There is little basis in fact for this account, but
there is an interesting contrast to be made between
Corbyns situation today and that of his mentor,
Tony Benn, more than three decades ago. Benns
campaigns took place at the moment when neoliberal policies were taking their hold over British

The Campaign for

Labour Party
Democracy (CLPD)
is formed,
demanding reforms
to empower the
partys rankand-file.
43.1%

1970

1973

politics. But the central institutions of the socialdemocratic postwar settlement a national
economy, the welfare state, national collective bargaining, and trade union involvement in corporatist
industrial policies were still in place, if precariously
so. Changing the Labour Party in order to intervene
in industry, expand the welfare state, protect jobs,
and improve working conditions made a good deal
of sense.
In contrast, Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership at a time when neoliberal politics has come
to dominate the Labour Party and taken over the
UK state, stripping it of its more social-democratic
features. Moreover, by eviscerating the welfare state
and the infrastructure of a progressive tax system,
neoliberal economics has all but destroyed the material basis for the provision of public good, or even
of a moderately just, regulated, and redistributive
national economy.
The prevarications of both former Labour leader
Ed Miliband and his presumed successor, Andy
Burnham, prove the point. Their goals are social

The CLPD succeeds in

instituting mandatory
reselection of members of
parliament (MPs) with the
support of several British trade
unions, including TGWU, AUEW,
and NUPE.

37.2% 39.2%

1979 Margaret Thatcher of the

Conservative Party becomes prime
minister, initiating two decades of
neoliberalism that would see the
weakening of British unions and the
rolling back of welfare measures.
1981 CLPD succeeds again,
instituting a new selection
process for Labour leader
in which CLPs, TUs, and
MPs vote. 27.6%

36.9%

1975

1980
James
Callaghan

Michael
Foot

Neil
Kinnock

95

democratic, but the world of a mixed economy, in

which the profits of a productive capitalist sector
could be taxed and redistributed to provide universal
welfare, social security, and public infrastructure for
the benefit of all, within a relatively closed, predictable, and controllable economy, no longer exists. It
has been replaced by a financialized global capitalism
in which capital flows shape politics rather than vice
versa. And in the case of eurozone countries, treaties
or austerity packages imposed from on high serve
to prevent progressive reforms.
In the past, social democracys symbiotic relationship with Keynesian macroeconomics worldwide
shaped the internal debate in the Labour Party and
other social-democratic parties. The question was
about how far center-left governments should push
the mixed economy toward socialization. Meanwhile, capital was willing share the spoils of rising
profits, preferring this to worker unrest.
This context began to change as the postwar
economy confronted deep problems the 1973 oil
price hike, stagflation, an intensification of global

1980s A pitched battle between the Labour

Partys left wing (led by Tony Benn) and its
right wing (led by Denis Healey) rages during
the entire period of opposition.

competition, financial instability, and the increasingly militant demands of workers. Businesses
response was swift and punishing: a massive wave of
factory closures and cuts that devastated municipal
government and public housing and, consequently,
working-class communities.
Capital killed the postwar accord and its
not coming back. Victories can be achieved here or
there for example, against water privatization or
for protective legislation but only when strong
extra-parliamentary movements pressure the state
and win support from sympathetic politicians.
Fortunately, in the UK and other countries ravaged by unfettered capitalism, there are many signs
of a new kind of resistance.
Typically this involves mobilizing all possible
sources of counter-power economic, social, cultural and different levels of political power, local
as well as national and, very occasionally, continental. In particular, these efforts dont just try to
become or to lobby an elected government. They
seek instead to disrupt the day-to-day oppressions

Tony Blair continues to move

the party toward the center,
finally scrapping Clause IV in an
attempt to appeal to middle
England.

1995

1986 A CLPD push to open political oces to women and

non-white candidates intensifies. The main demand for a
female candidate to appear on every Parlimentary shortlist
is achieved. Several shortlists are comprised only of women.
34.4%
30.8%

1985

1990

1995
John
Smith

96

43.2%

Jacobin Winter 2016

Tony
Blair

The Making of Jeremy Corbyn

and injustices on which the neoliberal order depends

and to create new, emancipatory relationships of
mutuality and democracy out of resistance, amid
the wreckage of social democracy.
Many non-state initiatives try to build a social
economics based on common or cooperative forms
of ownership, challenging on a dispersed and micro
scale the logic of profit and private capital and illustrating the potential viability of an economy based on
socialist principles. Others work to create networks
of cooperatives and collaborative partnerships in
energy, agriculture, food production, culture, and
more (sometimes backed by progressive municipal
councils). Alliances of workers and communities
whose resistance saved public services from privatization (for example, water) attempt to organize
these services along democratic and communist
lines.
Precarious workers long neglected by traditional trade unions hotel and restaurant workers,
delivery workers, self-employed workers, and independent cultural producers of all kinds build

economic power on their own. And sometimes

unions, in turn, introduce new organizational
forms and branch out beyond traditional methods.
Unite the UKs largest trade union and a backer
of Corbyn in the leadership contest has started
community branches, organizing unemployed
people and supporting local community-based
campaigns. The union is also using direct action
tactics learned from UK Uncut and others to pressure suppliers of companies with whom the union is
negotiating.
People who relied on the welfare state and are
hit especially hard by austerity for instance,
disabled people and people facing fuel poverty
are self-organizing, connecting to broader
alliances and pressing demands on mps and
councilors. Increasingly, citywide networks and
convergences are choosing the city as the level
most favorable to organizing both a platform and
material strength.
And while they often favor parties and figures
like Podemos and Corbyn, the people behind these

One member, one

vote (OMOV)
policies are widely
adopted after years
of CLPD lobbying.

2003 Blair supports

US President George
W. Bush in calling
for war in Iraq.
40.7%

35.3%
29.1%

2000

2005

2014

30.5%

2010
Gordon
Brown

Edward
Miliband

Up From Liberalism

97

initiatives also value their autonomy as a vital condition for efficacy and sustainability.

A Different Kind of Democracy

Were it to assist these kinds of initiatives what
could be termed grassroots productive democracy rather than just state-led social democracy
Momentum could bring about a far-reaching
movement, laying the groundwork for a Corbyn
win in the 2020 general election. The creation of
such a movement could simultaneously set in motion the dynamics for supportive and transformative
post-election alliances.
Scotlands Radical Independence Campaign
is an exemplar in this respect: it was a non-party
social movement that brought together a diverse
range of campaigning and productive civic organizations to organize for a yes vote in the countrys
referendum.
Especially pertinent for the Corbyn campaign
have been the initiatives of Common Weal, which
was set up to generate and disseminate grassroots
economic alternatives. They developed a new language of mutuality and collaboration a we
against the competitive market I furnishing
living models of a socialism that does not revolve
exclusively around the state (even if it does require
the support of a different kind of state). This they
share with Corbyn, who has a plural understanding
of social ownership, regulation, and intervention.
They have also provided sustenance to the belief
that there can be something better than the current
state of affairs breaking the fatalism that leads people
to vote for the status quo or abstain and spurred
in people a sense of confidence about their agency
and abilities, another feature of Corbyns socialism.
This new kind of democracy should incorporate
labor as well. But for that to happen, the division
unions traditionally erected between the economic
and political must fall. It might have made sense at
the end of the nineteenth century, when trade unions
seeking parliamentary representation set up the
Labour Party. Now, however, as workers engage in
struggles that push their unions in a more directly
political direction, theres an opportunity to erode
the outdated demarcation. Activists including

98

Jacobin Winter 2016

those from Momentum can speed along the

process, assisting in the creation of economically
transformative initiatives, fusing the political and
economic to bring about systemic change.

Something Different
Corbyns original campaign for the leadership
contained within it the inchoate method and tools
of radical change. The veteran mp ran within his
own party, looking to rise to its highest post on his
own radical terms. But he also stepped outside the
party, mobilizing social forces that previously found
Labour repellant.
Similarly, Momentum needs to reach beyond
the familiar campaign politics of the Left not
abandoning the conventional modes entirely but
combining them with economic initiatives and
self-organization endeavors that can develop the
capacities and create the resources through which
to build power to transform society (as well as win
electoral office to manage the state).
As for Corbyn, he built the language of his campaign around the experiences of his constituents and
their stories of (often extreme) deprivation. Hes
given voice to their plight in the House of Commons,
using Peoples Question Time to underscore the
unjust policies of the current government. Similarly,
in the run-up to the election, Corbyn could collect
positive, inspiring examples of people building an
alternative: the ways in which English, Scots, and
Welsh are self-organizing, the collective initiatives
people are launching to take care of themselves and
their neighborhood in short, the basis of new
sources of working-class power in communities and
in new forms of work.
Corbyn has already caused a seismic shift in
Labour politics and taken the media and the establishment, Labour and Tory alike, by surprise. As
one journalist from Sky tv told me when the insurgent candidate was gaining momentum, Corbyn
has completely upset our template. The reporter
delivered the remark with extreme perplexity. We
shouldnt be astonished if Corbyn and his young
supporters, unaccustomed as they are to political
convention, ultimately deliver even broader change
on a national level.

You give us a fifty.

Well give you the
thorough Bolshevization
of American culture
Guaranteed.

jacobinmag.com/donate/ Jacobin Foundation

388 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217

REASON in Revolt

Searching
for New Politics
The Democratic Party has a history
of throwing up barriers to workingclass organization that Bernie Sanders
will find hard to overcome.
Adam
Hilton

or the past six months, its been hard not to feel the burn.
Stepping into the political space opened up by Occupy, Vermont
senator Bernie Sanders has done what many thought impossible:
inject a class discourse into the Democratic nomination race.
But it is a telling bit of historical amnesia that Sanderss call
for a political revolution does not bring to mind the last time a self-described
political revolution was engineered within the Democratic Party: the New
Politics movement.
Born amid the Democratic Partys crisis in 1968 and drawing together
activists from antiwar, civil rights, and feminist struggles, as well as the laborleft, New Politics diagnosed the limits and failures of Democratic policies as
the product of an insufficiently democratic party. The reformers sought to build
an ideologically coherent, disciplined organization that could formulate and
implement a popular, social-democratic program a project they described
as democratizing the Democratic Party.
The scholarly consensus on the New Politics movement has been overwhelmingly shaped by neoconservative intellectuals, many of whom were active
opponents of the reforms as they took hold inside the party. In their eyes, New
Politics was symptomatic of the generalized excess of democracy afflicting
advanced capitalist countries at the end of the postwar Golden Age.
Oddly enough, these critics accounts typically emphasize the class character of the New Politics movement. The reforms, they argue, empowered a
new class of white-collar elites at the expense of the working-class base of the
New Deal coalition, as evidenced in the afl-cios opposition to the changes.
However, these critiques, and their echoes in liberal commentary, muddle
much of the movements history. New Politics did trigger intense though
far from universal opposition from the trade unions upper ranks. But this
had little to do with any white-versus-blue-collar conflict in the party. Rather,
the decision of many labor leaders to oppose party reform was about defending

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

101

their institutional privileges with the Democratic

leadership, dominance within the union movement,
and ability to control the democratic insurgency in
its own ranks.
While the New Politics project was much more
sweeping in its intra-party ambitions than Sanderss,
the experience has much to tell us about the Vermont
senators campaign and the limits of any project to
transform the Democratic Party.
History does show that reform efforts from
below can reshape the Democratic Party in certain
ways. But, more importantly, it also underscores
the shortcomings of a strategy based on nominating
certain presidential candidates or passing radical
platforms. Actually overhauling the Democratic
Party would mean reconfiguring its internal power
relations as well as its relations with the state. The
Democratic Party lacks not only the interest but also
the institutional capacity to act as a class vehicle in
American politics and that wont change.
Ultimately, however, the New Politics effort
is more evidence that a transformation of social
relations of the kind imagined by most socialists, as
well as Sanders, demands a party of a new type, one
rooted in the class interests of workers, capable of
acting as a democratic force in society.

Democratizing the Party

The New Politics movement originated in the
Democratic Party crisis of 1968, when antiwar party
insurgents who had tried to work within the system
found themselves shut out. While the antiwar primary campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and
Robert Kennedy had proven surprisingly successful
in the wake of Lyndon Johnsons abrupt withdrawal,
the party still nominated Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, who had not contested a single primary,
on the first ballot.
For left activists, the selection bespoke a party
system more responsive to the will of party leaders
than to mobilized party activists. The vice president
hadnt cobbled together a grassroots coalition on
his way to the nomination process hed shielded
himself from accountability for his pro-war stance
and successfully navigated the closed party caucuses
and conventions. The violent bungling of the 1968

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Jacobin Winter 2016

convention in Chicago and Humphreys narrow

loss to Richard Nixon in the general election only
heightened the turmoil within the party.
All of this helped transform a party crisis into a
crisis of party democracy. Vocal critics both inside
and outside the establishment charged that the
Democrats were hostile to grassroots participation, unrepresentative of popular policy preferences,
and unfair in its internal operating procedures. The
official party commission tasked with investigating
the problem concluded that the 1968 party crisis
revealed an organization impervious to the will of
its rank and file.
Attempting to unify the party and avoid another
Chicago, the Democratic National Committee
adopted the recommendations of the reform commission. Never again would a nominee make it to
the top of the ticket like Humphrey had.
The subsequent reform process opened the party
by installing a universal set of rules and regulations
governing the selection of convention delegates at
the state and local level. Some were fairly uncontroversial statutes, such as holding local party meetings
in publicly disclosed locations and codifying transparent party procedures.
But other measures more fundamentally altered
who made decisions in the party, and how. Affirmative action mandates were instated based on race,
age, and gender. The presidential nominating system
began allocating convention delegates on the basis
of a candidates proportional degree of support in
state caucuses, conventions, and primaries (instead
of winner-take-all mechanisms).
The freedom of party leaders or state committees to handpick delegations was also severely
curtailed, and the privilege of Democratic officials
and officeholders to attend presidential nominating
conventions as unelected and unpledged voting delegates was eliminated entirely. Party elites were
thus forced to compete for delegate seats on a level
playing field against any interested party activist
or newcomer. The resulting system of open rankand-file participation, the reform commission
reported, amounted to nothing less than a political revolution.
The power shift from party leaders to rank-andfile activists was on display at the 1972 convention.

Searching for New Politics

The number of top Democratic officeholders

attending as convention delegates dropped precipitously, with many losing their seats to new, antiwar
entrants. Meanwhile the number of women, minorities, people under thirty, and rank-and-file workers
increased many times over.
The sweeping changes were reflected in that
years Democratic platform, which read: We must
restructure the social, political and economic relationships throughout the entire society in order
to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth and
power. This included reviving the labor-liberal
vision for a full-employment economy, which
would guarantee a job for every American that
seeks work, with the federal government acting
as employer of last resort and providing adequate
income for those not able to work.
But if removing barriers to participation at
the grassroots level was a vital step toward greater
internal party democracy, reformers recognized it
was only a partial victory if rank-and-file members
couldnt hold officeholders accountable.
New Politics activists thus demanded that those
elected under the Democratic Partys banner govern
in line with the priorities and principles laid out in
the party platform. For a party that over the previous
130 years had been nothing more than a loose confederation of independent state parties a structure
that permitted wide divergences of interest and
ideology this constituted a radical departure.
By transforming the platform from a vague
hodgepodge of platitudes into a binding agreement between Democratic public officials and the
partys activist base, New Politics tried to construct
a truly national Democratic Party with the institutional capacity to discipline its state-level affiliates
when their methods and objectives failed to conform to the national program. Punitive actions
included having the Democratic National Committee deny all support, financial or otherwise, to
those candidates who have, in effect, abdicated their
leadership role in our party by abandoning our basic
principles as embodied in our Democratic national
party platform.
Central to the attempt to give officeholders a
shorter leash was the newly established biennial
midterm policy conference, a venue where political

differences and policy alternatives could be hashed

out without the added pressure of nominating a
presidential candidate. Kansas City hosted the inaugural conference in 1974, with delegates ratifying
the first-ever party constitution and listening to top
Democratic leaders account for their performance
in office.
But even before a newly democratized Democratic Party could be consummated, opponents of
New Politics had mobilized to limit its influence.

Labor and the New Politics

Because they were pushing such a radical plan, it
should come as no surprise that New Politics faced
severe opposition within the party. Perhaps more
surprising was its principal source: the top officials
of the afl-cio.
Since the New Deal, the labor movements
national leadership had been working to realign
the party further to the left, mostly by attempting to
replace its southern conservative wing in Congress
with liberal Democrats supportive of progressive
labor legislation. This had been a strong motivation
behind the failed attempt to unionize the South in
the early postwar years as well as the leaderships
continued financial support for civil rights organizations (often transmitted without the knowledge
of their white rank-and-file members).
But in 1972, most of the trade union leadership reacted in horror as they watched movement
activists from the antiwar, civil rights, student, and
feminist struggles pour in through the doors of the
Democratic Party.
Why the antipathy? While conservative cold
warriors like afl-cio president George Meany
expressed strident opposition to New Politics
antiwar and egalitarian values, the anti-reform position of most labor leaders sprung from their desire
to retain the existing system of elite brokerage. As
Lane Kirkland, long-time afl-cio secretary treasurer and later president, explained:
There was an arrangement a tacit, invisible
but real arrangement before the rules were
changed [by the New Politics].... We had a bargaining relationship with the leadership of the

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103

party. In the old days, the party leaders knew

that, in the general election, they needed labor
to draw some of the water and hew some of the
wood.
In return, the Democrats got a ground game. By
the late 1960s, labor was functioning as a surrogate
campaign organization, canvassing door-to-door,
staffing telephone banks, coordinating registration drives among union and nonunion households,
facilitating get-out-the-vote efforts, and distributing
literature. As southern conservatives began bucking
the party leadership and the famed urban machines
of the turn of the century eroded, labors role as an
organizational pillar of electoral support became all
the more important.

Wont Catch Me Dreaming

However, by 1972 the afl-cios relationship

with the Democratic leadership was in crisis on
multiple fronts. First of all, the New Politics movement had removed the presidential nomination from
the control of party leaders. The pathway to party
influence no longer ran through the smoke-filled
backrooms of the convention hall, but through the
more diffuse field of precinct caucuses and primary
elections a terrain requiring the kind of rankand-file education and mobilization at which the
top-heavy American labor movement was particularly disadvantaged.
Second, further democratization of the party
threatened to shift the balance of forces within
the labor movement itself. While the New Politics
reforms had shrunken labor leaders role in selecting
presidential nominees, the industrial, service, and

Young Trump supporters and young Sanders supporters

agree on one thing: the American Dream is dead.
Sanders supporters

44%

Trump supporters

39%

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Jacobin Winter 2016

Searching for New Politics

public sector unions could more easily adapt to this

new constraint than their craft union counterparts.
Not only were these unions memberships
increasing better equipping them to exert political influence through participatory party organs
but their social bases tended to reflect those of
the New Politics movement: youths, women, and
people of color. A coalition of these unions led
by the United Auto Workers (uaw) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (afscme) saw in the New Politics
movement the chance to renew a robust laborliberalism in American politics.
Finally, the New Politics project to democratize
the party risked throwing gasoline on the fire already
burning in labors rank-and-file; feminist, black, and
countercultural insurgencies were flaring up against

the union leadership, even in the more progressive

unions like the uaw. As journalist James Wechsler
wrote at the time, this was the more profound
issue at work in the reformers democratic project:
If the Democratic Party can successfully execute this process of democratization, the idea
could become infectious. It might even invite
emulation by those trade unions whose conventions still resemble Soviet party congresses.
Imagine what would happen to the life-style of
some ancient labor bodies if they were required
to consider adequate representation for the
young, and the black, and to admit women to
their higher councils.
Contrary to the neoconservative narrative about
New Politics purported elitism, the number of union

Percent who believe American Dream is alive

Clinton supporters

54%

Cruz supporters

69%

Source: Harvard Public Opinion Project (December 10, 2015)

Up From Liberalism

105

members directly participating in party conventions

as elected delegates increased from 4percent in 1968
to 20percent in 1972. For trade union leaders, the
problem was that they had no control over these new
labor delegates. As the afl-cios own political consultant put it at the time: Labor had more delegates
and less influence than ever before.
The growing divisions over political vision and
strategy within the afl-cio (from which the uaw
had already withdrawn in 1968) exploded following
the 1972 convention, when Meany bent the afl-cio
executive council to his will and withheld the federations endorsement of Democratic nominee Senator
George McGovern, a prominent figure in the New
Politics movement. In open defiance of the federation president, the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers, the Communication Workers
(cwa), and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers
formed a Labor for McGovern committee to campaign on his behalf.
The rebellion sent shockwaves through the labor
movement. By the end of August, almost a third of
the afl-cio constituent unions had broken with
Meany and endorsed McGovern. Some of the most
prominent liberal unions the Amalgamated Meatcutters, afscme, the cwa, and the Machinists
also withdrew their financial contributions to
the afl-cios political organizing committee. But
despite the labor-lefts push, the lack of support from
labor bigwigs hampered McGoverns prospects in
November.

The Anti-Reform Backlash

The 1972 presidential contest saw the New Politics
movement suffer a devastating blow. Nixon won in
a landslide. The startling rebuke at the polls didnt
just break the reform movements momentum
it provided New Politics opponents a compelling
reason to restore elite control: a democratized party
cant win elections.
The coalition of anti-reformers, organized
under the banner of the Coalition for a Democratic
Majority (cdm), appropriated the democratic language of the New Politics to make their case, casting
the old system of backroom brokerage as among the
most vital of Americas democratic institutions and

106

Jacobin Winter 2016

the post-1968 reforms as promoting the interests of

an unrepresentative liberal elite of professors and
well-heeled students.
The solution, the cdm argued, was to forget
about fads and narrow causes and return to the
business of electing a government. The purpose of
the Democratic Party was not to serve as a vehicle for
transforming social relations, but winning elections.
The Meany wing of the trade union leadership, crowing that their anti-McGovern stance
had been vindicated by the election results, made
common cause with the anti-reformers. Their first
victory came with the unseating of the Democratic
National Committees first female chair, whom
McGovern had appointed. Next, they successfully weakened party accountability mechanisms,
striking from the dncs reformed constitution the
mandatory obligation to convene midterm policy
conferences to formulate the party program and
policy agenda.
Ironically, the costs of checking the more ambitious aspects of the New Politics project became
most evident in the policy area the labor leadership
cared about most deeply: full-employment.
As the postwar Golden Age came to an end,
structural unemployment and price instability
confounded policymakers as traditional Keynesian
macroeconomic prescriptions revealed their limitations. Amid the crisis in confidence, a broad coalition
of New Politics activists and the labor-left mobilized
behind the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment
Bill. The bold legislation called for mandatory
employment targets and the expansion of the public
sector to absorb labor market surpluses. Enshrining
in law the right of workers to find employment
enforceable through federal courts the measure
also contained provisions to establish comprehensive planning bodies and regional infrastructure
projects.
While few of its supporters were thinking
in socialist terms, Humphrey-Hawkins had the
potential to become what Andre Gorz once called
a non-reformist reform. By enhancing workers
bargaining position, full-employment gives rise to
inflation, which requires price controls and planning mechanisms, hence expanding state regulatory
capacities, and so on potentially shifting the

Searching for New Politics

Better Red Than Dead

Sanderss support has skyrocketed since last fall,
and young people dont mind the socialist label.
Which candidate is your first
choice (voters aged 1829)?

balance of power within the state and wider society

toward workers.
At the 1976 Democratic convention, the New
Politics forces were weakened but still strong at
the grassroots. Figures across the party endorsed
Humphrey-Hawkins, including Meany and presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, who called the
staggering unemployment rate the greatest problem facing the American people today. After his
election, however, Carter began distancing himself
from the legislation, coming under increasing pressure from his advisers and the business community
to sacrifice concern with joblessness at the alter of
anti-inflationary austerity measures.
Carters about-face seemed to invite a public
relations disaster at the 1978 midterm party conference, a meeting mandated by the 1976 convention.
While the midterm conferences had already been
considerably defanged by the anti-reform forces,
White House memos reveal that the administration
went through considerable trouble to control all
proceedings ... screen all proposals ... and screen
any resolutions proposed for a vote.
But for all the worry it caused Carter, the conference ended up revealing that even the left-leaning
unions were deeply integrated into the system of elite
brokerage that New Politics had sought to break.
In the weeks before conference delegates assembled, wary of publicly confronting the president,
the full-employment coalition began to splinter.
This was no surprise. After all, due to the
absence of any formal mechanisms to discipline
officeholders, labor policy success depended largely
on leaders personal relationship with the Democratic president.
The Communication Workers, for instance,
abruptly pulled out of a uaw-organized strategy
meeting ahead of the party conference. As the dnc
informed the White House, they [the cwa] are not

Source: Harvard Public Opinion Project (December 10, 2015)

47%
Clinton
Sanders

41%
35%

1%
Spring 2014

Fall 2015

24%
More Likely

Does Bernie Sanderss

democratic socialist label
make you more or less
likely to vote for him (1829)?

9%
Less
Likely

66%
No Difference

Up From Liberalism

107

interested in taking on the wh especially since

the Telecommunications Act, the one piece of
legislation they care deeply about, is coming up
in the next Congress.
With the reform coalition fractured, the
ability of party institutions to bring the president
to heel was limited, and with the conference controlled by the White House, the programmatic
commitment to revive full-employment laborliberalism was diluted to the point of rhetoric.
When Carter signed the Humphrey-Hawkins
Act on the eve of the party policy conference, he
passed into law what its principal House sponsor
called a shell of its original self.
Valiant efforts to transform the conference
into a meaningful, participatory party organ persisted. But the president aided by much of the
trade-union leadership had outmaneuvered
the fragmenting New Politics movement.

The Lessons of New Politics

What can the New Politics episode tell us about
Sanderss insurgency? On the one hand, it reminds us that despite a massive perhaps unprecedented groundswell to transform the
Democratic Party, the 1970s reformers could
only force through limited change.
Some of these, to be sure, were laudable.
Young people, women, and people of color forced
their way into a party whose hierarchy was in
1968 overwhelmingly white, male, middle-aged,
and middle-class; party leaders were stripped of
their monopoly over the presidential nomination
process (a loss of party power they still have yet
to fully recover, despite the gradual reintroduction of unelected super delegates); and public
participation to determine presidential nominees
increased by the millions.
Party reformers, however, came up short
in accomplishing their ultimate goal: building
an ideologically coherent and disciplined organization that could democratically formulate
and implement a popular program. Doing so
meant challenging the institutional privileges of
both the party leadership as well as the leaders
of highly undemocratic trade unions, who

108

Jacobin Winter 2016

were struggling to suppress their own rank-and-file

upsurge.
Traditionally, the radical left has, with good
reason, pilloried union bureaucrats for their
conservatism. But the New Politics experience
demonstrates that we shouldnt be blind to the ways
in which institutional contexts mediate class forces.
Even the most progressive union leaders often
to the left of their own rank-and-file on important
issues are constrained by the undemocratic model
of elite brokerage in which labor is embedded, pressuring leaders to limit their demands to what they
can win for their dues-paying members.
There is little reason to believe that unions are
capable of transforming this structure on their own.
Labor leaderships have few incentives to increase
the expectations or democratic capacities of their
members, which could jeopardize their institutional
power. Memberships are often too fragmented,
insecure, and resource-poor to launch a sustained
challenge inside their unions.
The limited success of the New Politics movement was a product not only of the oppositional
forces they faced but their own incapacities, most
of which stemmed from the strategic choice of the
Democratic Party as a terrain of struggle. While they
were able to introduce greater participation in the
party by removing procedural barriers to entry, they
failed to create the basis for a new kind of political
participation.
In other words, it was not enough to throw open
the doors to the party without also developing a
strategy to pull people in. Such a project would have
had to reach past the leadership of even the most
progressive unions to build the democratic capacities
of workers to engage creatively in organizing their
communities and workplaces. In sum, the Democratic Party would have had to be transformed into
an agent of democracy in society.
New Politics thus points to the necessity of a
party of a different type, one that takes responsibility for cultivating the democratic capacities of
its constituents and the organized integration of
communities and workplaces. The Sanders campaign could perform a valuable task in raising
consciousness, but it cannot on its own accomplish
the indispensable task of building the political

Searching for New Politics

The Safe Bet

Most unionized workers belong to unions
that have endorsed Hillary Clinton.
AFT
3,200,000

Union Members

NEA
AFSCME

Other

International Association of Machinists

and Aerospace Workers, United
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners
of America, Operative Plasterers
and Cement Masons International
Association, Union of Painters & Allied
Trades, United Union of Roofers,
Waterproofers and Allied Workers,
International Union of Bricklayers and
Allied Craftworkers, and United
Association of Journeymen and
Apprentices of the Plumbing, Pipefitting
and Sprinkler Fitting Industry

National
Nurses
United

CWA
APWU

Unions endorsing
Clinton

capacities of those who would benefit most from

egalitarian policies. This is far beyond the scope of
any electoral insurgency.
Jeremy Corbyns Labour Party has made interesting moves in this direction by undertaking an
initiative to rebuild the constituent parties at the
grassroots level. However, any parallel project
within the Democrats is inconceivable because the
party, unlike even the hollowed out Labour Party,
has neither an organizational presence, nor any real
meaning at the local level. In the likely event that
Sanders does not outcompete Clinton in the primaries, there are few institutional spaces where any
forward momentum could be maintained.
Even if trying to transform the Democratic Party
is a fools errand, Sanderss candidacy should not be
dismissed, let alone ignored. The familiar argument
that left support for a Sanders-like candidate only
forestalls independent class action fails to make
the meaningful distinction between supporting a
candidate as an end in itself and using the candidate

Unions endorsing
Sanders

to promote a new political perspective.

Campaigns such as Sanderss can have an
important demonstration effect, pointing out the
deficiencies of nominally progressive Democrats.
And they can, with some luck, get people talking.
But the role of the socialist left should not be to just
cheerlead Sanders over Clinton, but to use that campaign to put in perspective the serious challenges we
face in building a truly progressive politics within the
Democratic Party and the necessity of constructing
a political alternative outside of it.
Sanders has reintroduced socialism as a positive
identification in the political mainstream for the first
time in decades. While many might not define it in
the same terms as him, his campaign has created
the space for the American left to move the conversation in a radical direction. This entails not only
articulating a vision of a different, more egalitarian
society but also the political vehicle one rooted
independently in the interests of workers to get
us there.

Source: Clinton Clinches Labor Majority, Politico (October 2015)

Up From Liberalism

109

A Long Way
to Go
Jeremy Corbyn on his surprising rise
to the top of the Labour Party
and the challenges he now faces.

an interview with
Jeremy Corbyn

f political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour

Party has always been one of the most dogmatic not about
socialism, but about the parliamentary system. Thats how
Ralph Miliband opened his classic 1961 text Parliamentary
Socialism, a critical analysis of the party that most of the British
left wanted to capture.
Miliband was skeptical of that plan. But during the great upsurges of the
early 1980s which saw the growth of a radical Labour left led by Tony Benn
and others, as well asthe miners strike of 198485 he resisted the arguments
of intellectuals and politicians alike, who viewed Trotskyists and Bennites as
the sourceof Labours problems, rather than a staid leadership.
Thatsupposed realism would win the day, paving the way for New Labour
and the further rightward drift of the party. Sure, some stalwarts struggled
from within, but most wrote off the Labour left, and when Tony Benn passed
away at the age of eighty-eight in 2014, it seemed that the project to which he
devoted his life had no future.
This was the backdrop for Jeremy Corbyns Labour leadership campaign last
summer, and why his success was so stunning. Corbyn is a genuine radical and
Labours most left-wing leader since at least George Lansbury in the 1930s. His
victory was a testament to his tireless work in social movements and principled
stances as a parliamentarian, but his intentions and those of the talented team
around him cant change the party alone.
Corbyn will need to contend with Labours conservative parliamentary
group and find innovative ways to restore the partys mass base. Its a daunting
test, to say the least.
In November 2015, Socialist Register co-editor Leo Panitch and Red Peppers
Hilary Wainwright spoke with Corbyn on a train to London from Birmingham
where he had been meeting with union shop stewards. They discussed what the
leader has accomplished so far and the challenges ahead.

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia

Up From Liberalism

111

Andy Burnham

The Miracle
Jeremy Corbyn won the 2015
election for Labour leader
by an enormous margin,
winning support from both
union affiliates and registered
supporters.

Members 55,698 Registered Supporters 6,160

Affiliated Supporters 18,604

19%

Yvette Cooper
Members 54,470
Registered Supporters 8,415
Affiliated Supporters 9,043

17%
Liz Kendall
Members 13,601 Registered Supporters 2,574
Affiliated Supporters 2,682

4.5%
Jeremy Corbyn
Members 121,751
Registered Supporters 88,449
Affiliated Supporters 41, 217

59.5%

Leo Panitch: Your remarkable campaign for the

leadership not only doubled Labours membership
but galvanized some four hundred thousand
people overall to associate with the party. This is
unheard of anywhere in terms of party mobilization on the Left in recent decades. What do you
think it reflects about the possibilities for a new
politics, not only in Britain but also more broadly
especially in Europe?

Jeremy Corbyn: I think our campaign excited

people who were very depressed by the election

112

Jacobin Winter 2016

result and the analysis that was being offered at

the end of it, which was essentially that Labour
wasnt managerial enough and we had to be better
managers in order to do better in the future. I only
really got on the ballot paper because of a
combination of people from those who just
absolutely wanted an alternative to be put forth,
to those who thought that there ought to be a
democratic debate in the party.
This kicked off the social media campaign that
encouraged others to get involved. We finally
made it onto the ballot which required

A Long Way to Go

thirty-five members of parliament (mps) to sign

on to a nomination with one vote to spare and
one minute to go. Then at the hustings where the
party leadership debates were held, the point of
view I put forth got quite a good reception.
And as we started organizing fringe meetings
around them, the campaign suddenly took off.
The first one was Nottingham, where we organized a meeting in a room for 100, and 300 turned
up. From then on they just grew, and so by the
end of July, beginning of August, we were getting
1,000 people at every rally we organized. Most of
them were filled up with one days notice. One
place, we filled a hall for 1,500 with only four
hours of notice on Facebook.
LP: Is it your sense that the same type of thing is
happening elsewhere?

JC: Yes. Because this wasnt anything to do with

me. This was to do with people wanting a different
way of doing politics particularly the young
people who came in and were very enthusiastic.
Our campaign was a combination of the young
and the old, very little in between the middle-aged werent there. They were either under
thirty or over sixty, most of the people that came
in to work on the campaign, and the phone
banking they did was quite extraordinary.
There was one of them where I witnessed this
eighteen-year-old Asian girl with a burqa a
Muslim Asian girl explaining to a ninety-year-old white woman how to operate the
mobile phone to make calls, and they were both
getting on just fine. And it was kind of lovely. We
had four hundred people on a phone bank one
night. It was quite extraordinary. Im not sure
how much phoning they did they did a great
deal of chatting to each other.
Most of our funding was raised by crowdfunding and small donations (the average
donation was 25), and we got union money. So
about half of it was union funded, and the other
half was fundraised.
Hilary Wainwright: What was it exactly that you
were tapping into in the public consciousness?

JC: The basis of the campaign was anti-austerity

that was the whole basis of it.
HW: And the appeal for the new politics, the
new way of organizing politics how do you see
the connections between these two themes?

JC: Oh, theyre two sides of the same coin.

Austerity is essentially making the social systems
of all of Europe pay for the banking crisis, and
with this comes a popular sense of either resignation or anger. So the idea that there is an
alternative, that we can do things differently, is
very important. That is why we have had the most
unremitting attacks on us from day one of the
campaign. Some of it is so bizarre its funny.
LP: Worse than what Tony Benn experienced?

JC: Hard to tell different time, different age. It

feels bad at times, although I just never respond to
any of it, whereas Tony tried to at times, and I
think thats a mistake. I mean, I dont blame him
for it. At that time, those days, I was with Tony in
responding to all this. But if you respond to these
kinds of ludicrous personal attacks, you then end
up in a swamp or a trench with these people.
Ill give you an example. Last Sunday I was
accused of not bowing properly to the queen. I
decided I wouldnt respond. Had I responded, the
debate would have been about at what angle one
should bow. And by now, five days on from it,
anyone who hadnt followed the story closely
would say, why is the leader of the Labour Party
engaged in a public debate about how one should
bow to the queen? Theyd think, is that all hes
interested in? Im about to lose my house and he,
the leader of the Labour Party, has got nothing to
say about that.
So I just took the view from the very beginning that Im not responding to any of it.
HW: That links to a question I was going to put,
which was that you have this reputation thats
sometimes symbolized for example in Steve
Bells cartoons in the Guardian of you as the wise,
calm wizard facing Darth Vader in Star Wars or

Up From Liberalism

113

the wise wizard in Harry Potter. You appear

fearless. Have you always been fearless, or did you
learn it in your thirty years as an MP? When youve
been taking on powerful interests? Have you ever
been fearful?

JC: There are two points here, really. One is that I

have this eighteenth-century religious view that
there is some good in everybody. Sometimes you
have to search quite hard for it. Sometimes its
very hard to find, and you wonder if it really is
there.
Secondly, because Ive never had any higher
education of any sort, Ive never held in awe those
who have had it or have a sense of superiority over
those who dont. Life is life. Some of the wisest
people you meet are sweeping our streets.
A friend of mine, a building worker (he sadly
died, committed suicide last year I was very sad
about that, and Im very sad I wasnt there for him
at the time) whose house was very simple, lots of
reused this and reused that, and somebody said to
him: Jim, why do you live like this? He said,
very wise: I live simply, that others might simply
live. And you think, hang on, thats actually very
profound.
So youve got to have a bit of respect for
people. I do have a respect for people, and I
actually genuinely enjoy meeting the wide variety
of people I do. My constituency has probably
about seventy different languages spoken within
it, people from all over the world. Theres the
great, theres the good, and theres lots of people
who have been in the prison system. Theyre all
there.
What is fundamental is your attitude towards
your environment, your attitude towards other
people. Interestingly, the first leader of the
Labour Party, Keir Hardie, who was a more
thoughtful man than hes often given credit for,
was much more bothered about education and
opportunities for women than about
nationalization.
LP: Before you were elected in 1983, you were
already associated with the attempt to change
the Labour Partys old statist and parliamentarist

114

Jacobin Winter 2016

politics. Tony Benn had articulated in the 1970s

the notion that the real problem is not about
more state or less state, its about a different kind
of state and, above all, a much more democratic
British state capable of introducing a cooperative,
egalitarian, and democratic economy. He would
be so proud of you for having achieved what he
wanted so badly to be the Labour Party leader
committed to this.

JC: I wish he was still here. I knew Tony very, very

well for a very long time. The difference between
Tony and me was that whereas he was one of those
very unusual politicians who was actually very
successful in a conventional career pattern, I have
been monumentally unsuccessful in the conventional career pattern.
The first time I met Tony was the 19691970
period, when he was reflecting on his experiences
as a cabinet minister in the sixties. What was
interesting about him then was that, whereas
most of the cabinet ministers reflecting on the
experience talked about the ministerial car, the
mendacity of the opposition, and how they were
going to win again, Tony had quite different and
more interesting personal reflections on what he
had done or not done.
LP: Yes, and on the basis of such reflections, he
wrote a Fabian pamphlet in 1970 called The New
Politics: A Socialist Reconnaissance, in which he
surveyed all the anti-authoritarian social
movements in the late sixties Black Power, the
womens movement, antiVietnam War and
said, we need to bring that spirit into the party,
thats what were missing.

JC: I remember those discussions with him, and

then I worked very closely with him in the mid
seventies on industrial democracy. Sometimes he
was idealistically too excited. Hed sort of say:
Yes, its all going to happen now.
LP: You were quoted in Tonys diaries as saying
that you attributed the defeat in the 1983
election to the great incompetence of the party
machine. So what I want to ask you is, did you

A Long Way to Go

An Injury to All
mean this in the sense of its incapacity to project
the promise of the new politics you shared with
Tony beyond the active party membership? And
does this remain the case today?

JC: I honestly cant remember saying that, but I

can imagine the thought processes I was having,
which was that the party in 83 presented a very
interesting electoral platform but lots of people in
the party were quite frightened of it. And the
Tories were running essentially a fairly xenophobic election surrounding the Falklands War,
which we never challenged.
We also were faced with the sdp (Social
Democratic Party) being set up by those leading
Labour parliamentarians who left the Labour
Party at that time, so it was a very interesting
period. I felt the party didnt really understand
what was happening.
LP: But what about the incompetence of the
machine?

JC: In some cases just the actual organization on

the ground was very poor.
LP: Are you worried about this now?

JC: No, not at all. The party now is in a very

different place. The ground operation, as we call
it, in the general election was actually very good.
LP: Was it?

JC: Oh, yeah. We had more people active than

many I can remember. I went to quite a lot of
constituencies, key constituencies. And the
membership is now much bigger its double
what it was.
What I am worried about now is that the party
needs to reach out and involve a wider range of
people. Thats my main message. Ive just been
speaking in Birmingham, to a very big Unite shop
stewards conference. I said, actually, every one of
you in this room is an expert, every one of you has
an opinion, every one of you has optimism, every
one of you has hopes. I want a party structure and
a union structure that allows your intelligence to
Source:

Union participation in leader elections for

Labour has fallen dramatically as non-union
participation swells.
800,000

Union members

Non-union
members
0
Blair
(1994)

Brown
(2010)

Corbyn
(2015)

come forward and be part of our policymaking.

So we dont go through to 2020 where I, as the
leader, go away and write a manifesto. We go
through to 2020 where its patently obvious to
everyone in the country what our manifesto is
going to be on housing, on health, on jobs, all
those things because everybodys had a part in
it. So the need is to reach, to widen our organization to make us a community-based party.
LP: And you think the partys regional organizers
know how to do this?

JC: Well, its not so much do organizers know

how to do it do we all know how to do it? Im
not an expert on this, but Ill try. Were going to
try various experiments in how we reach out and
how we involve people, how we use social media,
how we use digital tools to share ideas and
knowledge.
The idea is that we have a community
conference on policy in which some people are
there, some people are on Skype, some people are

Up From Liberalism

115

the Prime Ministers Question Time in the House of

Commons, weve asked people what questions
they want us to ask you. Tim, from Barking, has a
question about the democratization of the state.
He asks, what your views are on a federal UK,
given that new politics and democratization
surely involve the sharing of power?

on a live-stream feed, some people are sending in

emails, whatever. All saying something because
theyve all got something to say.
Its reaching out to people and understanding
that what we couldnt do in 83 was win parts of
the national media because the story was written
by the Radio 4 Today program and the Sun.
Radio4 Today is still there, and its influential.
The Sun is still there, and its influential. But
theyre both much less influential than they were.
I do this weekly YouTube video the lowest
viewing figures weve had have been four hundred
thousand, the highest weve had is over a million.
So were doing all of that, and Im spending a lot
of time as well traveling around on trains, like
this.

JC: Yeah, Im glad that question has come up

because of the problems that have arisen out of
the UK being such a highly centralized state. It is
changing, because Scotland is obviously very
different now as government in Scotland is
devolved, it now has tax-raising powers which
they may or may not want to use. But whatever
the outcome in Scotland whether independence or otherwise England is still not
decentralized at all.

HW: This links in to what weve done to prepare

for this interview. Inspired by your approach to

There Is Power in a Union

The power of British unions has been in free-fall
for decades.
Union Membership

50.2%

43.3%

37%

Collective Bargaining
Agreement Coverage
27.5%

0
96

116

96

00

Jacobin Winter 2016

02

04

06

Source:

08

10

12

14

A Long Way to Go

George Osborne is offering city devolution to

some places, over which I have some concerns
because it is devolution to big cities and it doesnt
necessarily include adequate funding of the
services that have been devolved. So you could
end up with a form of devolution that doesnt
include any kind of financial autonomy or
alternative source of income. You negotiate every
year on limited funding with a central government which relies on you running even more
services on its behalf.
The other end of the scale is the total federal
model that Germany has, with not only the very
powerful Lnder [state] levels of regional governments but also very powerful cities and a
relatively weak federal state.
I think there is a very interesting debate on
federal models to be had here. I dont want us to
go into government in 2020 saying simply that we
are going to think about it. So Ive asked Jon
Trickett to set up a constitutional convention,
which hes doing its underway now. It is
looking at powers of government, powers of
parliament, powers of the House of Lords, an
elected second chamber.
Then issues of rights and accountability in
society, bill of rights kind of thing protecting
the Human Rights Act but moving on from that,
of course, to how you sort English regional
government. Because there are no effective
regional voices, it means there is a disproportionate level of capital investment in London and
the southeast compared to the northwest and
northeast, for example. The East Midlands
actually does the worst of every region.
I put some ideas together on this during the
leadership campaign as one of our consultative
papers. I did thirteen consultative papers on lots
of different stuff. They are on the Jeremy for
Leader website. Look at those and youll see some
ideas there. All of those are open to comment. The
difficulty we have at the moment is simply the
capacity we have to respond to all this, because of
the volume of stuff were getting in.
LP: And to raise the stakes even higher, what
about democratizing European institutions?

JC: Well, European institutions: I want us to

approach the European referendum on the basis
of demands for a social Europe, demands for
workers rights across Europe, demands for
environmental protection across Europe, and turn
it into a debate about: do you want a free-market
Europe that controls people, or do you want a
Europe where the people control the market?
Essentially advancing that kind of alternative.
Now Im not sure how far weve got with that
debate theres a long way to go. Im having a lot
of discussion with a lot of union people on this at
the moment. Our problem is simply the capacity
to respond to everything. After only two or three
weeks in office, we discovered we had a backlog of
a hundred thousand emails sent to me. We had a
backlog of a thousand invitations to speak at
places all over the country, and all over the world
for that matter.
We started from scratch with our office, so
just the sheer management of issues related to this
is huge. Its now much better, its getting better.
Weve got more staff in place, a better team in
place. Its growing, but it is quite difficult.
Also Im quite concerned that if I spend time
in the office someone will always find something
for me to do. Theres always a crisis that needs
your urgent attention. If I wasnt there, either the
crisis wouldnt happen or it wouldnt need your
urgent attention. But the fact Im there means
that it becomes my problem, not somebody elses.
So Im quite assertive about the need to
ensure I go traveling around the country. Im
doing basically three days traveling every week.
So were going everywhere. I did over a hundred
events during the leadership campaign and by the
end of the year, I will probably have done four
hundred to five hundred public meetings.
HW: How do you organize the input you get
through those meetings?

JC: Thats the hard part. It cant all reside in my

brain its not capable of retaining all this
information. That is actually the problem area,
how we deal with all this.

Up From Liberalism

117

No Good Options
Voter turnout has declined across the board,
but especially among workers.
Voter Turnout (19452015)

81.59%

57.56%
45

50

51

55

59

64

66

70

74

And so, when weve finally got the rest of the

team in place, were going to look at much more
interactive websites and interactive ideas. A lot of
it is depending on computers and social media.
You couldnt do this without computers and social
media.
I think back to the Tony Benn deputy
leadership campaign in 1981. I think of the
miners strike in 1984. I think back to the industrial democracy movement in the early 1970s. All
of which I was very involved with, but they would
have been so much more successful and so much
better if wed had better forms of communication.
We had to write letters to everybody, and spent a
lot of time licking stamps.
HW: This leads into another question concerned
with the party. Its from Thomas Barlow: his
question is, how are you going to open up the
party both the party apparatus and the
Parliamentary Labour Party to democratic
inputs and participation in policymaking? And I
might add, how far could your own Islington
North constituency party (CLP) be a participatory model for the rest of the party?

118

Jacobin Winter 2016

79

83

87

92

97

01

05

10

15

JC: Theres no perfect model, but what I say to

anyone active in the party is that weve recruited
200,000 new members, but please dont take
them to the branch meetings. You get to your
average branch meeting and youre discussing the
minutes of the last meeting its not necessarily
very attractive.
My constituency party is not perfect, but we
have a very large membership. Weve got 3,300
members in my clp and 2,000 registered
supporters. Weve got 5,000 people, and the
Labour vote is 30,000 so one in six of the
Labour vote are members of the party.
HW: So how do you involve them?

JC: We have thought a lot about how we conduct

meetings. Our normal monthly meeting has a
guest speaker, a discussion, a report from me, and
then after an hour and three quarters, we do the
business in twenty minutes.
LP: So have you sent this out to other CLPs, to the
regional organizers?

JC: This is where its going. Weve organized a

very interesting national executive away day
where Ill be presenting ideas on this.

A Long Way to Go

UK Voter Turnout by Class (2015)

75%
66%

All Voters

Upper / UpperMiddle Class

LP: This isnt widely known ...

JC: It will be, dont worry. The word will get out
there, and one day the bbc will mention it.
HW: Maybe you could do a little film of sort of
your local party in action showing what meetings
could be like.

JC: Yeah, but the whole thing should not be

personal around me.
HW: Then, moving on beyond the personal, how
far could this model influence the Parliamentary
Labour Party so the issue is less whether MPs
will be reselected as candidates for the next
election by each of their constituency parties, but
more that they face local parties that are so full
of energy and capacity that they cant resist the
new politics agenda by clinging to the old politics.

JC: Abraham Lincoln had a point when he said:

With charity to all and malice towards none, we
go forward.
LP: Are there red lines you wont cross, apropos of
this?

Source: Ipsos MORI (2015)

69%

LowerMiddle Class

62%

Skilled
Working Class

57%

Unskilled Working /
Non-Working Class

JC: Yeah, I mean, my views on nuclear weapons

are very well known. My views on social justice
are very well known. My problem is all my views
are extremely well known on everything.
To be fair, you get a lot of noise from a small
number of members of the Parliamentary Labour
Party. But theres a much larger group that are
actually very interested very interested in who
has joined the party, very interested in the fact
that their membership has doubled. Some are
nervous, some are concerned, some are excited.
Were all humans. We have to try and understand
people.
My natural, default position is to work with
somebody, not against them. It does make my life
quite busy.
HW: This relates to another crowdsourced
question that is from Finn Smith, who is asking,
how do you envisage changing the present
political culture? He says that youre respected
because youre humble, modest, and caring but
youre up against a dominant narrative of
personal gain, competition, private entrepreneurship. How do you change the mentality of this
neoliberal sort of narrative?

Up From Liberalism

119

JC: Well its about the psychology of our society.

Its exactly where we started. Is socialism just
about state power, state control, state ownership,
and so on, or is socialism about a state of mind of
people?
I think the response across Europe to the
humanitarian crisis of Syrian refugees is very
interesting. The Hungarian government are not
very nice people, and very nasty towards asylum
seekers and refugees. But when those poor
Syrians were trying to walk through Hungary to
get to Austria, ordinary people came out and gave
them clothes and water. They couldve been
throwing rubbish at them. They couldve been
attacking them. They werent. There is a basic
humanity towards other people.
Of course, you have to unlock this when young
people are brought up to understand their history
and their culture largely in terms of consumerism,
competition, and self-advancement. So my
absolute passion is that, starting with preschool
facilities, the emphasis should be on schools as
places of social interaction, where people learn to
play together, and where they are asked, is the
advance of a community the ability of somebody
to get very rich at the expense of others? Or is the
advance of the community when there is nobody
homeless, nobody unemployed, nobody sleeping
rough?
We have to insist it is only about getting
ahead if we all get ahead. Somebody said to me,
You dont speak for aspiration. So I said, Oh
yeah I do, Ive got a real aspiration. And he said:
Okay, so whats that? And I said: For everybody to have a house.
HW: What about how to appeal to UKIP voters.
Does it require redefining patriotism?

JC: No, it just requires reaching out and saying,

well actually, the housing shortage is created by
not enough houses, the doctors shortage is
created by not enough doctors, the limits on
school places by not enough school. Stop blaming
people. Look to ourselves to how we solve it.

120

Jacobin Winter 2016

LP: So, it sounds like you are actually enjoying

yourself in this new leadership position?

JC: Yeah, of course I am.

LP: Seriously?

JC: Yeah, I was pushed into this, but Im happy

I was.
HW: Are there any surprises? I mean, is it as you
expected? Or are there things that are different,
for good or ill?

JC: I feel constantly concerned that Im spending

all this time doing everything involved in all my
leadership activity, and sometimes I feel a tear
between that and my responsibilities to the
community that I represent.
So I have a weekly fight over the schedule set
out in my diary. Thats where I do get quite
assertive, because I insist on spending time with
those people and groups I always have represented even while now also traveling across the
country and also I make sure that I have time
for myself. Half a day, or a day a week, so I can dig
my allotment.
HW: Ok, just one final question. You are known for
your exemplary lack of sectarianism. You work
with whoever is on board for the cause. You
worked with the Greens, for example, in Stop the
War, on anti-austerity platforms, and so on. Now
people are worried about the partys electoral
approach to the Greens, and in particular whether
the Labour Party should stand down in the next
election from challenging their leader, Caroline
Lucas, in the Brighton constituency where she is
now MP.
How does a non-sectarian ethic extend to
that level as a party leader?

JC: Thats tomorrows problem, thats not

todays. Weve got to build the ideas, then develop
the movement, and then well see. Today is what
weve achieved so far.

Not Your Usual

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REASON in Revolt

In economics, there are two

solutions. Either you are a Leninist.
Or you wont change anything.
Franois Mitterrand