“American Social Democracy: Exceptional but Otherwise Familiar / Herman Rosenfeld” in “Social Democracy After the Cold War”
AMERICAN SOCIAL
DEMOCRACY
Exceptional but Otherwise Familiar
Social democracy takes a different form in the United States than it does in other developed capitalist democracies. There is no social democratic party — social democrats work, for the most part, in and around one of the major bourgeois parties, the Democrats. Very few social democrats even call themselves social democrats: many go by the name “liberal” or “democratic socialist” — although it is important to remember that many liberals and democratic socialists are exactly what they claim to be. Relations between social democrats, on the one hand, and the labour movement and the working class, on the other, are particularly problematic, subject as they are to the peculiarities of American political culture, history, and structures. Furthermore, social democratic reforms and the welfare state are much reduced and truncated in comparison to countries with stronger social democratic traditions, which affects the daily lives of much of the American working class. Indeed, American political structures and culture have created a unique set of circumstances that make all political experiences on the Left different in rather substantial ways from those in other countries.
Many of the larger forces that have shaped social democratic ideology, policies, and practices elsewhere have also affected American social democracy:
- the early split with the communist movement, the Cold War, and the challenge of relating to and dealing with Stalinism and state socialist models
- the Great Depression, unions, and the challenge of building a relationship with labour and the working class
- the advent of the Keynesian welfare state — which, in the US, took place in the context of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was led politically within the state by the Democratic Party
- the so-called golden age of capitalist growth and accumulation, with its drive to jettison references to socialist alternatives in favour of expanding social welfare reforms and the privileging of growth driven by private accumulation
- the social movement radicalism of the 1960s and the high tide of the capitalist welfare state period
- the crisis of the 1970s, which led to the defeat of labour and working-class institutions
- the implementation of the neoliberal counter-revolution and strategies for globalization, which renewed capital accumulation and limited the space for reforms within capitalism.
American social democracy has a spotty history of offering itself as an independent political movement, at least since the 1920s. For the most part, it has lived since World War II in the shadows and interstices of the Democratic Party. In the context of the intensification of neoliberalism reflected in the Obama Administration’s response to the financial crisis, American social democrats remain a very fractured lot, with boundaries on both the left and right that are porous and often hard to decipher.
The renewal of successful private accumulation requires both a continued repression of the labour movement and, currently, a new period of austerity targeting the public sector, unions, the unemployed, immigrants, and social service recipients. Many on the liberal right of social democracy have defected, acquiescing to the requirements of empire and class rule. Others, especially those who call themselves progressives on the Left, have raised new calls for reforms of the financial system, greater legislative rights for a wounded labour movement, job creation, and new government spending efforts, all without addressing the logic of private accumulation at the heart of the American economy.
Many of these activists see as their political goal the transformation of the Democratic Party into a European-type social democratic party. But it is questionable, even from the point of view of social democrats themselves, whether the creation of a new social democratic party independent of the Democrats would even make much sense in the current era. If the content of social democratic politics has long been shorn of its contestation with capital, creating a party based upon the resulting ideological terrain seems not to be productive. As well, the neoliberal era has so dramatically narrowed the space for short-term reforms that even a political movement based on fighting for increasing the social wage and empowering the working class through structural or other reforms would need to build a more radical and sustained mass politics incompatible with social democracy. Those who continue to argue for a social democratic party to the left of the Democrats also tend to paint unrealistic pictures of the situation in countries with social democratic ruling parties (Selfa 2008).
Further to the left of the Democrats are loosely organized groups that consider themselves to be democratic socialists but that continue to work within the orbit of the Democratic Party. They distinguish themselves from the neoliberal orientation of the Obama Administration and the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, and from the numerous right-wing state governments elected in 2010. Some have a limited practice of writing and circulating critical articles on the Web and a small number of progressive journals, or they support the odd progressive congressional primary candidate. Others participate in unions, social movements, and local and state-wide campaigns, arguing that effective electoral political activity must inevitably be linked to the Democratic Party. These groups are very heterogeneous in their political and ideological positions and their larger beliefs, as well as in how they relate to the Democrats and a small but important group of more radical socialist organizations and individuals.
It’s impossible to know how or if significant elements within these groups, along with more radical elements of the American Left, will eventually contribute to the creation of a new, larger socialist movement. One also wonders just how committed they are to remaining within the Democratic Party fold. Many critics on the Left argue that channelling electoral activity through the Democrats necessarily holds back efforts to building a political instrument that can present a socialist alternative relevant to the American working class. Others, however, claim that some sort of engagement with the Democratic Party remains necessary.
THE AMERICAN CONTEXT: POLITICAL STRUCTURES AND CULTURE
American social democracy has operated in a context that differs fundamentally from parliamentary political systems of most other countries (Davis 1999, 169). US political institutions — through the division of powers, the structure and practices of the Congress and Senate, and the federal system of power distribution — limit the ability of an elected government to act in the interest of the working class and to challenge capital. The two-party system is institutionalized in the operation of the legislative branch and is legitimated by the courts. Electoral practices — from the first-past-the-post election format to the system of primaries (itself initiated as a democratic reform) — further reinforce that system. The organized labour movement has, since the 1940s, been integrated into one of the two bourgeois parties. Furthermore, the parties themselves defy traditional notions of “left-right” axes and have been rather impervious to efforts to realign them according to that format, although the Republicans have clearly become a more ideologically united party of the Right in the early twenty-first century.
There have been important third-party exceptions: in the early part of the twentieth century, for example, the Socialist Party had electoral success and deep grassroots party activities (Teitelbaum 1995). In addition, some notable examples of social democratic third-party success at the subnational level are the Socialist Party in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s, the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota, the Washington Co-operative Commonwealth in Washington State, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, and the current Vermont Progressive Party, which has a relationship with the Democratic Party.
The working class in the United States has, at critical periods, had experiences that have made it especially difficult to create a class-oriented politics. As Mike Davis (1999, 7) notes, one must consider
the role of sedimented historical experiences of the working class as they influenced and circumscribed its capacities for development in succeeding periods. Each major cycle of class struggle, economic crisis, and social restructuring in American history has finally been resolved through epochal tests of strength between capital and labor. The results of these historical collisions have been new structural forms that regulated the objective conditions for accumulation in the next period, as well as subjective capacities for class organization and consciousness.
Davis concludes that “each generational defeat of the American labor movement disarmed it in some vital respect before the challenges and battles of the following period.”
Davis and others argue that the American working class has been weakened by an inability to challenge racial inequality, to fight for the inclusion and integration of, and collective solidarity with, successive waves of immigration, and to develop strong class institutions independent of capital. Davis refers to this as “the political segmentation of the proletariat and middle strata by racial and ethno-religious conflict” (163). The American labour movement, too, is weak and divided, scarred as it is by the setbacks and challenges that the working class as a whole has experienced. In addition, immigrants have injected new forms of radical thinking and activism into the American working class. One has only to consider the contribution of immigrants from Latin America in recent times. The difficulties of creating movements that respect racial equality and solidarity with Aboriginal peoples are also rooted in the nature of the original American experience: a settler state constructed through slavery and the dispossession and destruction of Native peoples.
In contrast, the American capitalist class is strong and adaptable and is constantly restructuring itself in ways that weaken the working class. Even more important, however, is the imperial role of the American ruling class as the dominant military, ideological, financial, and political defender of capitalism, particularly in the post–World War II period. This has contributed to a larger identification, on the part of many Americans, with American hegemony and the interests of capital as a whole. The advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s — with the concomitant defeat of the labour movement and the Left — reinforced many of the conservative tendencies in American politics and culture and introduced many new ones.
Linked to the above is the tendency to identify American political culture with capitalism and the myth of the American Dream. This, along with an ingrained habit of anti-communism, held over from the Cold War era, greatly limits American political discourse. The ethos of individual upward social mobility runs strong, even in the language of the labour movement and much of the political Left, and articulates with many of the survival mechanisms that working people have had to rely on during the neoliberal period. But these dominant cultural and political tendencies are mediated by countervailing cultural and structural realities, such as the commitment to welfare state gains, periodic collective social movements, and the labour movement itself. These latter elements remain as residual cultural realities within the working class and serve as a counterpoint to forms of American exceptionalism.
WHAT IS AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY?
The elasticity of the term social democracy makes it difficult to define. Even in countries with long-established social democratic parties, the political concept itself has undergone many changes in meaning. It was originally a catch-all term for all of those working for immediate reforms as well as an eventual socialist transformation, based within the working class, of the capitalist system. In the neoliberal era, the term has become, at best, a call for a muscular Keynesian vision of regulating markets within the accepted limits of global capitalism — bereft of a class base — and, at worst, a plea for meagre social reforms that might moderate the effects of brutal forms of competitive capitalism, which otherwise go unchallenged. Social democracy’s ties to the labour movement and the working class are indeed frayed and contested.
In the period preceding the Bolshevik Revolution, social democratic meant, in the United States, a combination of (a) a commitment to the extension of full democratic rights to working people (and, for some, to women and racial minorities), (b) reforms that limited the operation of the capitalist marketplace and protected working people from its worst ravages, (c) ties to the working class and a strategic role in building and defending their organizations, and (d) a longer-term commitment to the eventual replacement of the capitalist system with socialism. Social democrats worked through unions — in fact, some labour movements were built by pre-existing social democratic parties — as well as through co-operatives and other social movements, but their emphasis was on building electoral political parties aimed at winning national power. The terms socialist and social democrat have often been used interchangeably.
Social democracy was redefined in the Depression and New Deal eras, not only in the United States but in Europe and elsewhere. In Europe, social democratic parties retained their long-standing ties to their respective labour movements and vied for government power and a role in managing capitalist economies. American social democrats, however, moved away from their traditional political vehicles and merged, for the most part, with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. During this period, European social democratic parties either dropped their commitment to transforming capitalism or relegated such projects to vestigial reference points. But a number of them continued to commit to projects of dramatic increases in the social welfare state and elements of nationalization and labour market regulation; these parties remained nominally and financially (but clearly not ideologically) independent of capital. American social democracy moved toward accommodating both private capital accumulation and its modest social welfare agenda.
From this point on, until the neoliberal era, one key component of American social democrats were those who defined themselves as “liberals.” Committed to moderate state regulation of the private market economy, these liberals sought to maintain links to the working class and to the oppressed strata and sections of the labour movement. They supported the implementation of welfare state reforms and the adoption of Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to prevent a recurrence of the Depression and to stimulate growth and prosperity. American liberalism also had a mass popular base among workers and the middle class. Social democrats, however, weren’t the only liberals — the term also refers to elements of capital that generally supported moves away from the traditional conservative economics and social policies that dominated the United States in the pre-Depression era. Social democrat liberals were called, and often called themselves, “left” and “labour” liberals, and they argued for more interventionist forms of regulation, a more robust and effective welfare state, and greater rights and a larger role for labour. They also supported the Cold War and US hegemony in the postwar period and into the post-state socialist era. Communist Party members and their “fellow travellers” also often called themselves liberals and opposed the Cold War.
In the labour movement, the leadership of the unions belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) almost unanimously endorsed the Democratic Party and defined themselves as liberals. The older, more conservative wing of the American labour movement, however, tended toward a closer reliance on business and was often reticent to define itself even as “liberal.” Still, American unions, for the most part, embraced the Democratic Party as their political instrument. Left liberals travelled a difficult road in dealing with the social contradictions that rocked American society in the later postwar period: civil rights radicalism, the New Left, the Vietnam War, and the stagflation crisis that gave birth to neoliberalism.
With the adoption of neoliberalism as the dominant form of bourgeois class rule, many liberals adopted the Third Way tendency inside the Democratic Party, personified by Bill Clinton and his allies. They, too, acted in ways that were similar to many European social democrats. The term liberal is all too flexible and has numerous political meanings. Indeed, liberalism, as the common US term for moderate social democratic reform, has changed, as has the concept of social democracy itself. In a political environment where the space for even moderate reforms to the capitalist system has shrunk and notions of class have been relegated to the margins, liberalism tends to take the form of a call to “progressive competitiveness” and to socially progressive positions.
All the while, a second group of American social democrats, including various elements associated with the Trotskyist movement and its fractured progeny, emerged from the Socialist Party — after working through both Trotskyism and the Democratic Party — to keep alive a different form of social democracy. Some of these continued to define themselves as social democrats, with a meaning similar to that of postwar- and neoliberal-era European social democrats. Some moved beyond social democracy to create a new tendency of radical socialism. And others ended up moving dramatically to the right and forming a component of the neoconservative movement of the 1980s. Needless to say, those belonging to this last group no longer use the term and, after a short period, renounced their past (Sorin 2002, 227).
Finally, a third group that calls itself “democratic socialist” consists of people who genuinely seek a radical challenge to capitalism through both electoral and extra-parliamentary means and who share a critique of neoliberalism and US imperialism. They cohabit with an anti-neoliberal but Keynesian group as well as with a group of those who remain tied, in a nostalgic way, to the gains of the period of liberal dominance in the postwar era. These latter two groups — both of whom still retain at least a verbal commitment to strengthening and defending the labour movement — continue to define as social democratic. Like their colleagues in Europe and elsewhere, American social democrats had, by the 1970s (if not earlier), dropped their commitment to an alternative to capitalism in practice and abandoned it in theory shortly thereafter.
THE ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
American social democratic politics evolved historically on a number of levels. On the ideological and political level, it moved from a radical systemic critique to Keynesian reform and then to a modified accommodation with neoliberal capitalism. In its institutional form, it moved from building independent electoral social democratic parties to integration with the Democrats, later combining political work in the Democratic Party with a series of autonomous political groupings and networks. All the while, it interpenetrated in various ways with the labour movement and the working class.
Socialist Party Roots
The early political vessel for American socialists was the Socialist Party of America, founded at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was relatively small compared to the two major parties but had an important cultural influence in working-class centres across the United States (Howe 1985; Teitelbaum 1995). Containing many different political tendencies, the Socialist Party included a social base of trade unionists, social reformers, farmers, and immigrant communities. It elected members to the House of Representatives, and its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, polled 900,000 votes in 1912 (6 percent of the popular vote). Debs was a revered working-class leader whose opposition to US participation in World War I landed him in jail. The party tended to argue against short-term reforms and was effectively blind to the particular issues of racism. State repression and the advent of the communist movement weakened and shattered the influence of the Socialist Party at the beginning of the 1920s.
Unlike the Communists, but like its counterparts in Europe, the Socialist Party maintained that socialism could be attained by electoral means. Aside from its endorsement of Robert LaFollette’s presidential run in 1924, the party ran independent electoral campaigns. Moreover, the party’s perceived association with the Communist movement and with state socialist regimes such as Stalinism and the Soviet Union became a central challenge to American social democrats in defining themselves and their movements.
The Depression and the New Deal
The Depression, the New Deal, and the postwar period each played a critical role in shaping the political identity and practice of the main forms of American social democracy. American socialists were among the leaders in the creation of the CIO’s brand of industrial unionism — the key social movement of the Depression era. Their partnership at critical moments with elements of the Roosevelt Administration, a group of progressive capitalists, and bourgeois intellectuals helped to shape the contours of the American welfare state and what came to be known as the New Deal. Their ideological adoption of liberalism and a mild commercial Keynesianism, their political incorporation into the Democratic Party, and their activities in the postwar period helped shape the nature and limits of the social democratic movement well into the 1970s.
The sit-down strikes and the mass unionization drives of the 1930s were made possible by a number of factors: the tireless organizational work of activists — both Communists and socialist-inspired workers; leaders such as John L. Lewis and others; an opening created by the Roosevelt Administration, frustrated by the failed National Recovery Act (NRA) period; the adoption of the Wagner Act; and a mass desire by workers to unionize. The floodgates of unionization began to take off in the wake of the Wagner Act, which legally and symbolically legitimated industrial unionization, and the sit-down strikes and CIO organizing plugged into existing workplace struggles over speedup and the unilateral power of supervision. Many of the workplace infrastructures were already in place, having been built by leftists and other activists. CIO leaders sought to control and institutionalize their structures. People who led these struggles included communists such as Wyndham Mortimer, social democrats such as the Reuther brothers, and Trotskyists such as Farrell Dobbs (Davis 1999, 56–58).
But Roosevelt’s move to legitimate industrial unionism was itself the result of a number of other factors. Roosevelt ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility and orthodox conservative economics. His first approach to challenging the Depression, the NRA, was based upon a corporatist alliance with business interests and openings to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions. In the context of increased worker organizing from below, Supreme Court invalidation of key elements of the NRA, and the defection of conservative elements of capital, Roosevelt became more amenable to accommodating the CIO and its spokespeople. The administration also began to cobble together an alliance with “capital-intensive industries, investment banks and internationally oriented commercial banks” — a group of capitalists more amenable to responding to the labour movement (Ferguson 1989).
This period resulted in the so-called Second New Deal, which brought in not only the Wagner Act but the basic elements of the truncated American welfare state, including unemployment insurance, social security, and the various employment and infrastructure programs. But the form and ideology behind these actions reflected a particular kind of social democratic thinking, combining the concerns of corporations, unions, and government mandarins.
Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address in 1944 included what came to be known as the Second Bill of Rights. It articulated a series of social democratic principles that reflected many of the promises of substantive rights being put forward in most capitalist democracies (such as those in the British Beveridge Report), including the right to a job at a living wage, a home, an education, and medical care. The programs reflected ongoing collaboration between corporate and labour leaders and members of the Roosevelt Administration, such as Sidney Hillman, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis, and Senators Norris, Wagner, and LaFollette, as well as political operatives and New Dealers Frances Perkins and Harold Ickes (Fraser 1989, 59 and 68). The key ideological cornerstone wasn’t social justice, class power, or even fairness and equality but the need to stimulate the economy based upon increasing mass demand.
Soon after the victories of organizing General Motors, the CIO backed off from further sit-downs and the administration moved toward the right. In 1938 Roosevelt moved away from deepening New Deal reforms and closer to the AFL. New Deal liberals lost control of congress to “a resurgent bloc of Republicans and ‘Bourbon’ Southern Democrats” (Davis 1999, 68; see also Selfa 2008, 52). The administration also sought support for a more interventionist foreign policy from capital and other conservative political forces, and made a drastic cut to public relief in 1939, which sparked a round of riots and state repression.
But the basis of a new form of American social democracy had been set in place. It was tied to the Democratic Party, which now took on a new hegemonic role; it was a party claiming to represent working people and the downtrodden, all the while representing the interests of a specific bloc of capital. For the time being, that bloc retained an interest in growth through the use of Keynesian counter-cyclical spending policies. Committed to growth, economic stability, the right to unionize, and moderate welfare state reforms, the Democrats built on an ideological cornerstone of what was referred to as “liberal/labour” policies. Clearly, this was a form of social democracy. It stood for a moderation of a troubled free market system, a limited social welfare system, and government action to stimulate demand, with a strong labour movement component. In many ways, it was similar to policies being tried by social democratic parties in Europe, but in the US, it was tied to a bourgeois-led party and was much weaker in its scope (Selfa 2008, 53).
The modest changes that took place during the New Deal era became one cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s hegemony over the labour movement and made it the political home for most social democrats. As the war approached, social democrats such as UAW leader Walter Reuther argued for forms of planning that would include the labour movement, the state, and capital. While it would have meant important limits on the unilateral power of capital, Reuther’s vision still relied on partnership with capital, retention of private ownership and accumulation as the key foundation of economic growth, and a faith in technology and productivity growth. Describing the UAW leader’s plan for “500 Planes a Day,” historian Nelson Lichtenstein (1989, 126; italics added) writes, “It contained hallmarks of the strategic approach so characteristic of labor-liberalism in the 1940’s: an assault on management’s traditional power made in the name of economic efficiency and the public interest, and an effort to shift power relations within the structure of industry and politics, usually by means of a tripartite governmental entity empowered to plan for whole sections of the economy.”
Although informed by half-hearted efforts to include labour in real planning during the war (such as provisions for price controls that were never applied) — and soon abandoned by capital — Reuther never gave up his belief in that kind of model. On the other hand, after the aborted General Motors strike of 1948 — when, under Reuther’s leadership, the UAW attempted to tie wage increases to the prices of vehicles — and in the face of the political defeat of the postwar period, his practice, from the postwar period until his death in 1970, was characterized by a private set of welfare guarantees tied to the competitiveness of private employers (Boyle 1995).
Lichtenstein (1989, 126–27) uses terms like “labor-liberalism” and social democracy almost interchangeably. He describes the former as “a species of political animal hardly existent today.” It “saw organized labor as absolutely central to the successful pursuit of this political agenda.” The agenda in the 1943 CIO Political Action Committee’s “People’s Program for 1944” called for “big-power co-operation, full employment, cultural pluralism and economic planning.” This was done in co-operation with labour-liberals in the Democratic Party and administration.
Both the New Deal and the war experience dramatically undermined the existence of a possible independent political identity for social democrats to the left of the Democratic Party. The Communist Party, under Browder, abandoned its earlier independent revolutionary education and organization in factory cells and, styling itself as the left wing of the New Deal, embraced the Popular Front. The party also supported the no-strike pledge in the name of defending the USSR during the war. Union activists and socialists of various sorts, for the most part, abandoned the Communist Party and supported the Democrats, but many continued to organize against employers in spite of the no-strike pledge of the war.
According to Davis (1999), the CIO Political Action Committee cemented the link between the CIO and the Democrats. The leaders saw it as a way to mobilize support for the liberal wing of the party and a revival of elements of the New Deal. The administration saw it as a way to cement support from the union bureaucracy. Communists and many leftists saw it as a way to force the Democratic Party to become more of a left-wing party by forcing Dixiecrats out and bringing moderate Republicans in — this would not be the last time that efforts to transform the Democrats would be tried and would fail. The Socialist Party continuously ran candidates but opposed the war throughout the entire period as an imperialist war. Needless to say, it lost much of its base.
The Postwar Era
In the immediate postwar period, employers backed off from the promises of co-operation and planning. Truman’s cabinet was more hostile than Roosevelt’s to labour and efforts to continue and deepen New Deal reforms. The administration took a strong line against a series of strikes by labour that demanded wage increases and an extension of unionization. Over Truman’s veto, the Republican Congress passed the draconian Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed cross-picketing, opened the door to “right-to-work” laws, brought in rules to allow the exclusion of Communists and radicals from unions, and signalled a dramatic attack on the labour movement. Truman and ensuing Democratic administrations half-heartedly attempted to respond to labour demands to overturn Taft-Hartley but never succeeded.
The Cold War contributed to the transformation of the Democratic administration and the overall tenor of politics, and this affected the labour movement and social democratic politics. The move of capital away from forms of planning and collaboration with labour ended hopes for a more interventionist economic policy and contributed to a further narrowing of the scope of social democratic politics as a whole. The strengthening of conservative forces in both the Republican and Democratic parties drove liberals and social democrats even further into the arms of the Democrats — as opposed to developing independent political vehicles (Davis 1999, 68). Truman concentrated on isolating and challenging the Soviet Union internationally, in the process furthering the interests of US-based capital, which was concerned with creating an open system for the development of private investment in Europe and elsewhere; the Democratic Party increasingly represented those interests.
The Cold War helped to create an environment of fear and opposition against radicalism of any kind and thus cast a pall over American politics. Building upon the nationalism that had arisen during the war, the Truman Administration embarked on a crude effort to demonize communism and the USSR, and later China, and to frame American plans to remake the postwar world into a capital-friendly environment as being necessary for economic growth and jobs at home, as well as for freedom and democracy. Aside from the pressures of the Cold War, the various position changes and opportunism of the Communist Party, along with the disillusionment of many with Stalin, contributed to a defection of some progressives into the Democratic Party.
Social democratic leaders of the CIO became increasingly convinced that the ravages of the Depression could be prevented from reoccurring, economic growth could be stimulated, and the welfare of CIO members, as well as the working class as a whole, could be assured by sharing the bounty of successful private accumulation. For many of them, it was a short move from a “socialism” of moderate planning along with employers and the state to a social democracy of becoming the handmaidens of private sector growth. The Cold War environment provided a space for CIO leaders to ingratiate themselves with both employers and Democratic Party politicians; this was seen as the only practical way of working toward protecting and possibly extending their gains. It also helped them defeat their internal union opposition, whether they were communists or other radicals. The postwar era saw a generation of social democratic leaders in unions such as the UAW, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) waging the Cold War within their unions and across the CIO, purging not only individuals but entire ideological traditions, and with them, key forms of struggle.
The failure of tentative steps outside this model helped to consolidate a certain type of liberal politics inside the union movement. That politics was built on a widely described bargain: labour would accept the necessity of employers running their workplaces, developing their productivity and profits, and deciding on their own competitive strategies. Efforts to organize entire industries such as auto, steel, and trucking also sought to force employers to pay similar wage and benefit levels across these sectors. Taking wages out of competition would pressure employers to compete by increasing productivity and deepening technological transformation. In this way, social democratic labour leaders did have their own notions of competitive strategy. The boss would share the productivity gains and allow the union to deal with ongoing workplace concerns through collective bargaining. On a higher level, labour leaders applauded American competitive success and worked through the Democratic Party to argue for moderate extensions of the social benefits won through the New Deal, improved labour laws, and watered down versions of social democratic demands. They also vigorously supported American foreign policy, the Marshall Plan — both ideologically and as a boon to jobs and economic growth, the Korean War, and aggressive anti-communism, and collaborated in breaking independent unionism abroad.
While much of this served CIO membership well in the short run, it undermined the radical underpinnings of the movement that had organized the CIO during the 1930s. Rejecting a class-oriented ideology, mass organizing was unable to take off. Efforts to organize African Americans and to organize in the South — through short-lived campaigns such as Operation Dixie — were miserable failures since the unions refused to work with radical and communist-led groups and activist centres, instead working with racist politicians and employers to weaken them.
As a number of analysts have noted, the labour movement’s unwillingness to define its project in terms of a wider vision of class (taking up the struggles of groups such as women, people of colour, people of the South, and the rural poor) and its refusal to organize a party to the left of the Democrats helped to define organized labour in terms of “interest group” politics (Lichtenstein 1989; Davis 1999; Ferguson 1989; Selfa 2008; and especially Katznelson 1989, 192). The Democratic Party coalition included elements of capital (internationally oriented and capital intensive) and northern urban political machines working alongside reactionary Southern oligarchs. The predominance of the latter often drove liberals and labour political interests into seeking legislative alliances with moderate Republicans from northern and eastern states.
In the longer run, the elimination of radical activists, thinkers, and forms of struggle from the main body of the labour movement made it extremely difficult to respond to the challenges raised when the postwar boom ended and the system entered a new crisis. By defining itself as an interest group of sorts, the American union movement and its social democratic spokespeople also assured the movement’s future isolation when it would be in great need of allies in the face of the later neoliberal assault. The labour movement played an important role in the election of Truman in the highly contested 1948 election.
As the postwar era moved into the 1950s and the era of the Eisenhower Administration (1952–60), social democratic labour leaders, first through the CIO and later through the AFL-CIO, developed an institutionalized relationship with Democratic Party legislators. Accepting the norms of the postwar compromise, the pattern repeated itself into the 1960s: labour would argue for full employment, greater state pump-priming geared toward job creation, and repeal of Taft-Hartley. The Democratic majority would inevitably be unable to accommodate this agenda due to its dependence on Southern reactionaries and its alliance with capital. Labour and its liberal allies inside the party would never challenge the fundamental premises of their relationship to the Democrats because of both their internalization of its ideological limitations and their fear of electing the even more reactionary Republicans. As Davis (1999, 199) notes, unions became the “captive base for an anti-communist ‘liberal’ wing of the Democratic Party, whose capacity to enact substantive reform was permanently constrained by both the weight of the Democratic right wing and the exigencies of Cold War bipartisanship.”
In the reading of some analysts (Ferguson 1989; Selfa 2008; Davis 1999), the inability of the labour Left and its intellectual coterie to wean itself away from the Democratic Party coalition makes it highly questionable to describe its politics as a kind of social democracy in any real sense. This is in contrast to social democrats such as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe who argue that the role of the CIO, and later the AFL-CIO, inside the Democratic Party was a kind of functional equivalent of a social democratic party, “a labor party of sorts” (Harrington 1972, 267).
The Socialist Party stopped running presidential candidates in 1956 and began major debates about how to build and relate to the Democratic Party. In 1958 elements from the recently dissolved Independent Socialist League, led by Trotskyist Max Schachtman, joined the Socialist Party. Schachtman brought Michael Harrington with him. Over time, this group moved toward advocating working within the orbit of the Democratic Party, calling for a strategy of working to transform it into a genuine social democratic party. Originally, the strategy of joining the Socialist Party was motivated by the desire to create a multi-tendency party, which, in the view of these activists, would become a space for Trotskyists, disillusioned members of the Communist Party, and independent socialists in a decidedly non-revolutionary era. This position was contested, and among the dissidents from within this movement grew a more radical group that became the forerunner of the American International Socialists, and later Solidarity and Labor Notes. The Socialist Party continued to field its own candidates but, like its liberal cousins, it moved closer to the Democrats.
The Sixties and Seventies
The different elements of American social democracy, broadly defined, faced the new challenges of the 1960s and 1970s in similar ways. Whether we refer to the labour movement, liberal politicians and intellectuals, or self-identified social democrats in their own organizations and the Democratic Party, the tendency, for the most part, was either to try and stay within the framework of the New Deal reforms and postwar compromise or to adjust to the new realities through a new accommodation and moderate adaptation under the dominance of private capital accumulation and the Democratic Party. Ultimately, this strategy failed, leaving social democratic elements even more fragmented, disorganized, weakened, compromised, and unable to situate themselves in the new reality of the neoliberal era.
In these decades, American social democracy faced a genuinely new set of circumstances. A historic civil rights movement that bubbled up from the grassroots accomplished a social revolution in the South, radicalizing as the 1960s moved on. An anti-war movement responded to the imperialist war in Southeast Asia and brought a new space of opposition to the lingering Cold War orthodoxy. A New Left made up of young people arose, as did a new militancy in the working class, particularly among young workers. The public sector was unionized during this period.
The labour movement was, on the whole, sympathetic to the fight against segregation in the South and was waiting to see whether a genuine mass movement would build. As the movement successfully shook the foundations of Jim Crow, a system of codified racism and colour-based oppression, and became the centre of the news, an increasing number of labour leaders such as Walter Reuther publicly identified with it and contributed needed resources. Whereas the right-wing AFL-CIO leaders such as George Meany only grudgingly accepted the importance of Jim Crow’s defeat, the general working-class base of organized labour supported the movement and shared the revulsion over the fascistic attacks on the Freedom Riders, voting rights activists, and anti-segregation marches.
Things changed as the movement radicalized and African American communities engaged in rebellions in northern cities. Labour leaders on the left of the movement became more critical as they and their organizations were challenged by radical activists within their ranks. Walter Reuther, the UAW president, for example, presided over a union that professed full support for integration, yet life in many union sections, locals, and key workplaces included forms of racism and discrimination enforced by both management and local union leaders (Boyle 1995). As the 1970s began, African American workers became increasingly isolated in the most oppressive workplaces, and in Detroit and in key workplaces movements sprang up that challenged the hypocrisy of the “liberal” union leadership.
Reuther’s response to both the radicalization and the destructive urban riots of the mid- and late 1960s was to argue for the development of government spending programs to rebuild inner cities in partnership with private capital — reminiscent of the kinds of approaches taken in the war and postwar period to rebuild the country. A moderate version of his proposals was adopted by Lyndon Johnson in his Model Cities program. Other features of Reuther’s approach were a commitment to full employment and a faith in the productive capacities of private capital — a notion that technocratic solutions could deliver outcomes that would co-opt the radical component of the African American communities. One effect of the lack of a left social democratic response by the labour movement to the African American rebellions in the urban North was that key elements of African American communities came under the tutelage of moderate liberal business interests and ended up relying on “corporate-dominated foundations” and media for resources (Ferguson and Rogers 1986, 64).
Liberal intellectuals were supportive of the first phase of the civil rights movement, and the liberal political establishment was divided about what to do. More progressive elements, especially young people, supported and actually joined the movement, while much of the establishment — such as the Kennedys and Senate liberals — gave lip service to a movement that they feared could still threaten the basic Democratic Party coalition. When it became impossible to ignore, John F. Kennedy did provide aid to Martin Luther King and the movement, but it wasn’t until after Johnson came to power that action on the legislative front actually came to pass.
Liberals of all stripes generally recoiled at the radicalization of the civil rights movement and the urban riots. This included the right wing of the labour movement, especially where organizers raised demands regarding access to building trades jobs that the overwhelmingly white AFL unions dominated. The approach of social democrats within and around the Socialist Party was similar. Leading social democratic thinkers, including Irving Howe and Michael Harrington, had great difficulty understanding and relating to the black radicalism of the later sixties and early seventies. This is not to say that the content of African American radicalism was grounded in a clear set of political programs or was geared toward building a class-based political challenge to capitalism. Indeed, it was quite confused and tended toward various forms of nationalism (Sorin 2002).
The civil rights movement was only one — albeit the most important one — of the social movements that came out of the 1960s. As in other developed capitalist countries, a generation of postwar growth also witnessed a rise in working-class militancy, albeit manifested in ways peculiar to American social realities. The decade saw the growth of public sector unionism, legitimated by federal legalization in 1961, and the period from 1966 through 1979 was one of widespread labour upheaval. Average weekly wage levels reached their high point in the postwar era in 1972 (Moody 2007, 64, 79). Employment and spending on education increased (Hobsbawm 1995, 284). New social programs such as Medicare and Great Society anti-poverty programs were brought in. At the end of the decade and into the 1970s, younger workers engaged in strikes over workplace and working conditions.
The Johnson Administration (1963–68) responded to the wave of social unrest with a series of reforms, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, and the so-called War on Poverty, which sought to address elements of African American poverty in large cities. The structure of the Great Society reform agenda, however, actually weakened the potential of the working class and the radical elements within African American communities. Johnson, like Kennedy before him, responded in ways that sought to articulate the interests of the bourgeois elements in the Democratic coalition, along with those of the poor, essentially subordinating the latter to the former.
Johnson’s anti-poverty program was developed under the tutelage of business interests and sought to enhance the ability of African American communities to access opportunities within existing economic and political structures. While developing centres of black leadership in urban communities, the stratum that coalesced around Office of Economic Opportunity programs became dependent on the largesse of Democratic Party resources. They later served as a functional equivalent of the old urban machines that were replaced in large cities as the AFL-CIO became the main force there (Ferguson and Rogers 1986; Davis 1999). The programs were completely focused on African American poverty issues and were divorced from any larger program of state intervention in the marketplace to guarantee full employment for the entire working class. This became a point of conflict between whites and blacks, and was a major concern for social democrats such as Reuther.
The reforms were funded not by increased corporate or progressive income taxes but by social security taxes, which were in fact highly regressive payroll taxes. Along with tax cuts for the wealthy, this overwhelmingly placed the burden of paying for these programs on working-class people. In the context of the highly divisive political atmosphere of the time, urban violence, the radical rhetoric of key militants in the civil rights movement, the lack of anti-racist education and mobilization of white workers by their political and union leaders, and the conclusion of many black working people that whites were not their allies, major divisions developed within the working-class movement. This opened the door to the demagogic appeals of the right-wing populism of Wallace, Nixon, and others (Katznelson 1989; Boyle 1995).
Along with the cultural rebellion of college-age youth, the New Left developed as a movement in the late 1960s, challenging the claims of liberal democracy and later embracing various strands of political radicalism. Social democrats within the union movement, political liberals, and those around the Socialist Party orbit responded to the young radicals in much the same way as they did to the trajectory of the civil rights movement. Howe, for one, was repulsed by the challenge to the norms and hypocrisy of liberal democratic politics, the rejection of anti-communism, and the search for new forms of political action and vehicles. He and others were particularly concerned about the refusal of the early New Left activists to critically analyze Stalinism. They also found problematic the confrontational forms of political action as practiced by the younger activists. Similar intergenerational differences are at play in today’s social democracy in the United States.
As Johnson increasingly escalated American intervention in Vietnam, the Great Society reforms were ended. The war fuelled the alienation and anger of young people, and the anti-war movement provided a base for the veterans of the New Left. Until the Tet Offensive in the summer of 1968, most liberals remained tied to Johnson’s war, still hoping for a renewal of the reforms, if not caught up in the logical extension of the Cold War ideology they had practiced for the previous twenty years. Labour leaders were divided, with the Meany types in full support. Harrington and Howe and their supporters opposed the war but stubbornly refused to support calls for unconditional withdrawal since they believed it would result in the consolidation of a “Stalinist” regime in Vietnam.
After the Postwar Boom
The end of the postwar boom began a period of economic and political crisis. In the context of increasing international competition, rising costs of raw materials from an emboldened Global South, and a general slowdown, the structural gains of the working class over the previous two decades threatened capital accumulation. The crisis took the form of stagflation. Out of this experience, capital and its political parties embraced neoliberalism.
In the US, neoliberalism initially took the form of the Volcker shift under Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1979, which was prefaced by regressive tax cuts, limits to social programs, and a distancing from the AFL-CIO of the administration, which saw labour as one interest group among others. This paved the way for the Reagan era, which saw open attacks of working-class gains through the demonization and imprisonment of the leaders of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.
The Reagan Administration acquiesced to capital’s push for cuts to corporate and higher-bracket income taxes while increasing military spending and payroll taxes on working people, which reflected over 90 percent of the tax increases in the 1970s (Ferguson and Rogers 1986, 100–101). This helped to widen the wedge created in the earlier period between better-off, mostly (but not exclusively) white workers in the higher-paid sectors and the poor, the recipients of social programs.
The exciting social movements of the late 1960s went into decline and, in the absence of left-wing alternatives, once-radical activists joined the Democratic Party. Rather than bring the dynamism of social activism into the party, however, this move contributed to the end of social movement activism (Davis 1999, 297). Without radical political organization and analysis, and in the absence of any real discourse of class, unionized workers were weakened and isolated. This opened up more space for the right-wing populist appeals developed into an art form by Nixon, Wallace, Reagan, and subsequent Republicans.
The Democratic Party had a short dalliance with anti-war politics in the 1972 McGovern campaign. It was only partly supported by liberals, social democrats, and progressive elements within labour, such as the public sector unions and the UAW. The AFL-CIO and many social democrats stayed neutral. Later, many liberals moved toward acceptance of neoliberal reforms. For example, “[Edward] Kennedy had seen some of the damage caused to Democrats by extremism on the Left, and he was determined to work inside the political process to get things done. He was also open to new ideas, like deregulation, that did not fit neatly into the traditional Democratic agenda” (Zelizer 2010). Liberal senators, such as Metzenbaum and Kennedy, both voted for tax cuts to the wealthy. The centre of gravity inside the Democratic Party then moved toward business-oriented formations such as the Democratic Leadership Council, which sponsored Clinton as the Democratic candidate in 1992. Edward Kennedy offered a half-hearted alternative to Carter in 1979, along with the short-lived Progressive Alliance, led by UAW president Doug Fraser. After Carter easily defeated Kennedy’s bid at the Democratic Convention, the Progressive Alliance soon disappeared.
Reagan’s election in 1980 signalled the political defeat of American liberalism, with social democrats and the left in the Democratic Party on the defensive. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition of 1984 was a last effort in the neoliberal era to promote a social democratic agenda through the Democratic Party, an agenda that was urban based, inclusive of African Americans, and geared toward increasing social spending, job creation, and cuts to military spending (Davis 1999, 274). Even here, most white liberals, labour leaders, and the main body of social democrats — now split from the old Socialist Party and working inside the Democratic Party — supported the mainstream Democratic candidate, Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. A number of former leftists from the failing Maoist movement joined the party to support the losing cause of the Rainbow Coalition (Elbaum 2002).
For the labour movement, little changed during this rather sorry period. Long-term right-wing leader George Meany resigned in 1979, only to be replaced by the hapless Lane Kirkland. The latter continued the Cold War, employer-collaborationist approach of his predecessor, as alternative strains within the union movement slowly grew in the face of a series of seemingly endless defeats.
Factions Explode the Mother Ship
By the end of the 1960s, the Socialist Party had divided into three caucuses. One advocated a more socialist-oriented perspective and called for independence from the Democrats. Another, led by Michael Harrington, argued for maintaining a social democratic perspective and working to transform the Democrats from within. And a third, led by Harrington’s former mentor, Max Schachtman, called for a right-wing populist political orientation supplemented by a muscular anti-communist, militaristic foreign policy.
In 1972, the Socialist Party shattered into three successor groups. The left-most rump formed its own party, which eventually became today’s Socialist Party USA. It remains a small group that runs candidates for mostly educational purposes.1 Harrington’s group formed a centre for social democrats that went through a number of transformations. In 1982, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the New American Movement (itself an organization of New Left socialists, who sought to apply socialist principles in an American cultural context) to form the Democratic Socialists of America. The latter, whose political practice remained centred within the Democratic Party and which still plays a role in 2012, evolved into an interesting mix of democratic socialists and social democrats. The Schachtman group eventually split into right-wing Cold War social democrats, many of whom continued to play important roles in unions for some time, and a smaller cohort of neoconservatives, who staffed elements of Reagan’s and Clinton’s imperialist bureaucracy and right-wing intellectual centre in the 1980s and 1990s.
One can only speculate about why the Harrington and Schachtman groups ended up the way they did. Harrington’s ideology was an interesting mix of social democracy, democratic socialism, gradualism, and American liberalism. While he continued to argue until the end of his life for an eventual longer-term transformation of capitalism, he had great difficulty articulating how to put forward and fight for structural reforms, address the challenge of governing within a capitalist system, and move toward a radical challenge to capitalism. His analysis of the Mitterrand government’s experience in France clearly showed that, when push came to shove, he could see no way of moving beyond the structural constraints of private capital accumulation or even neoliberalism (Harrington 1986, 178). Considering the contradictions in his thinking and the real limitations of his political approach, one can understand why he was unable to move beyond a project to transform the Democrats.
The Schachtman group is different. Like many independent socialists, Harrington and Irving Howe, particularly the latter, were always haunted by the challenge of trying to define a socialism that respected and integrated the historical gains of liberal democracy (thus rejecting the authoritarian model of Stalinism and the orthodox Trotskyist movement) while not limiting themselves to being apologists for capitalism and supporters of the Cold War and the imperialist policies linked to it. They were never completely effective in this endeavour. Schachtman and his cohorts, clearly obsessed by the horrible realities of Stalin and the opportunism and hypocrisy of the Communist Party, and reacting to the radicalism of the New Left, moved to a complete rejection of socialist ideals.
American Third Wayism
American social democracy has, in a sense, had a strong Third Way component ever since the New Deal era. But the counterpart to the Third Way turn in Britain and Western Europe — the acceptance of the need for social democracy to embrace not only capitalism, which it had already done in the 1950s and 1960s elsewhere and in the 1930s in the US, but neoliberalism — came during the Carter and Clinton periods. These presidents claimed to be different from both the hard Right of Reagan and the liberal Left. Clinton signed NAFTA and bargained American participation in the WTO. He approved the infamous welfare “reform” that forced poor people off the welfare rolls into the low-wage precarious labour market and implemented financial deregulation and tax cuts. Furthermore, instead of a real peace dividend in the wake of the end of the Cold War, his foreign policy protected international capital under cover of a supposed defence of human rights.
Clinton oversaw the transformation of Democrats away from identifying with a shrinking labour movement and toward becoming a neoliberal instrument of mild social tinkering and growing competitiveness, especially in the financial sector. He was part of the neoliberal-oriented, business-friendly element in the Democratic Party, unlike those more sympathetic to liberals in the labour movement such as Kennedy and those further to the left. Elected in the George H. W. Bush recession, Clinton promised to correct some of the injustices of the Reagan era, all the while calling for a balanced budget. His campaign was helped — and moved rightward — by the independent candidacy of right-wing populist Ross Perot. Re-elected in the Wall Street bubble that also saw the growth of computer industries and further low-wage growth, his second term accommodated itself to the Republican-dominated Congress led by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”
While representing key sections of the capitalist class, Clintonism attracted elements of the new middle class, Wall Street, and working-class Americans, including many African Americans. But inside the party, conflicts remained between Clintonites and anti-racist, old-time left-leaning liberals and social democrats led by Jesse Jackson, as well as with Democratic Socialists of America–oriented activists and members of Congress, and those on the left of the labour movement (AFSCME, UAW, SEIU, and so on). But while they deplored the abandonment of Keynesian policies, full employment, and the complete acceptance of neoliberal globalization, these elements supported Clinton in elections. New AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a reform candidate who ran against the old AFL-CIO establishment, supported Clinton’s election campaigns but was critical of free trade without side deals and protections for labour. Some of the working class supported Republicans because of wedge social issues and the lack of delivery by Clinton on his promises, although the growth spurt that occurred during his administration did keep many of them voting Democrat. Clinton pandered to the socially and economically conservative Republican Congress, and the Left consistently refused to create social movements to challenge either.
Clinton is gone, but Barack Obama has some similarities: he is a political outsider who claims to be able to couple the interests of business with modest reforms to the welfare state. He remains committed to a restoration of a competitive American economy in the context of neoliberal globalization. At the same time, he faced, and continues to face, the most dangerous economic crisis since the Depression. Moreover, regardless of his refusal to identify with fundamental changes to the system and mobilization of the social forces that could bring such changes about, as an African American he must at least promise some improvements to the conditions of the urban masses. This need to deliver something to the president’s base could weaken the natural tendency of the administration to articulate reforms in the spirit of reinvigorated neoliberalism. In the context of the fierce opposition from the hard Right, this poses new challenges for American social democrats — and those in the union movement, the Democratic Caucus, and the different social democratic organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.
AMERICAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY TODAY
For those looking at American social democrats from the outside, the nagging issue remains their ties to the Democratic Party. Why, in the homeland of world capitalism, would a movement that in every other country has organized itself separately from the traditional parties of the capitalist classes be combined with such a party? We have already seen that the political institutions in the United States strongly favour the existence of the two-party system, but, as Mike Davis and others have argued, there is no reason why an independent, class-based party couldn’t have contended in the electoral terrain. In the era prior to the New Deal, there were many such projects, at least on the local level.
An important part of the answer to this question involves the political and cultural constraints of living and working in the imperial homeland of world capitalism. There is no doubting the general identification of much of the working class and the leadership and activist core of the labour movement with the American imperialist agenda, as well as the role of that identification in facilitating ties with a bourgeois political party. This is a compelling argument, coupled with the particular experience of the New Deal era and the articulation of political interests among reforming capitalists, liberal intellectuals, and social democratic class leaders. After the New Deal, the relationships that developed during the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War further delegitimized political alternatives, while simultaneously reinforcing the role of the Democratic Party as an instrument for achieving short- and long-term goals. Other elements to be considered include new wrinkles such as the recently passed California Proposition 14, which makes it almost impossible for anyone but the wealthiest or those tied to the two major parties to run for election. Even getting on the ballot is difficult, quite apart from the incredible cost of running for election, the hostility of the labour bureaucracy to any efforts to the left of the Democratic Party, and the weakness and irrelevancy of the labour movement as an electoral force.
Yet another dimension is the fact that the Democratic Party is, after all, a bourgeois party that legitimates the existing system through an ingenious articulation of the interests of select elements of the working class and groups of women, communities of colour, and social minorities, along with certain fractions of the big bourgeoisie. This is nothing new, but when the social democratic wing of the working-class movement is integrated into this type of party, it develops a particular practice, worldview, and means of joining its agenda to that of capital, mobilizing and disciplining the working class in ways that legitimate and facilitate the status quo in the operation of government and the economy. Certainly, European social democratic parties have similarly accommodated themselves to governance of capitalist systems. However, the autonomy from capital in the organic operations of their parties has affected the manner in which they governed, related to working-class institutions, reconciled their programs of social reform with the needs of capitalist economies, and argued for different and bolder ways of reforming the economy, all the while maintaining the domination of private capital.
As social democratic movements around the world changed, after decades of being tied to parties that were either governing or alternating in power with more conservative parties, their identification with the interests of the working class as a whole, as well as their organic ties to their respective labour movements, dramatically weakened. This has culminated in the Third Way era, where neoliberalism came to be assimilated and championed by social democratic parties. Given that experience in other countries, it would seem highly unlikely that American social democrats would break with the Democratic Party. In reality, many mainstream US social democrats became nothing more than liberals in the 1950s and 1960s, and lost any organic links to a working-class constituency. Even the reforming elements who identified with this political orientation became further subdued.
Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, and the Democratic Party
Notwithstanding the above, it would be wrong to give the impression that all American social democrats can be subsumed under the category of “mainstream liberals.” Traditional American liberalism has, for the most part, become a rara avis, as the space to champion both the rights of working people and the competitiveness of the capitalist economy has become narrow indeed. One can think of such names as the late Paul Wellstone, Dennis Kucinich, and Maxine Waters, political figures who have defended the rights of working people and the poor, called for the extension of the social safety net, argued for publicly sponsored job creation programs, and generally opposed militarism. Most people identify the term liberal in this era with those who argue for progressive positions on social issues, rather than with a crusade for social justice. But the tradition of and the political space for the classical postwar liberal is long gone today.
Yet in recent years, activists with a social democratic orientation have started movements to develop political organizations outside of the Democratic Party. Two such projects were the US Labor Party, founded in 1996 by a renowned labour activist, the late Tony Mazzochi, and the New Party, active from 1992 to 1998. The Labor Party concentrated on developing independent campaigns at local levels. It had support from the odd national leader and local American union, but only if its candidates didn’t run against Democrats or if a candidate had a legitimate chance of winning. It was also supported by a number of centres of left-wing political dissidents in and around the labour movement. The party raised key social democratic demands such as single-payer Medicare, extension of social security, and legislated union and health and safety rights. It faded with the decline of union militancy and the death of Mazzochi. Where it still exists today, it mainly supports Democratic Party candidates and single-payer Medicare.
The New Party was at one time associated with a network of community reform movements such as Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It combined organizing and engaging in electoral campaigns on local levels with providing another space for Democratic candidates to run, sometimes creating opportunities for left-wing dissidents to engage in the primary process. It, too, has faded throughout most of the country. There are also other small, local examples of third-party local candidates, as well as the Ralph Nader national presidential campaigns, more recently run under the banner of the Green Party. Nader developed some solid social democratic issues in his run in 2000 but was the target of strong attacks by those who blamed him for Bush’s first election.2
Other centres of social democratic activism reflect political orientations that style themselves as “progressive” and “democratic,” some of which include more radical left-wing positions. In 2004, during the George W. Bush era, a new group of social democrat–influenced Democratic legislators and activists formed the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) out of the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. This group acts as a PAC (Political Action Committee) operating inside the Democratic Party and in social movements. Its purpose is to revitalize the Democratic Party “built on firm progressive principles”; its mission is not to replace the party with an independent social democratic party but to transform it into a more progressive voice. This, of course, is thoroughly consistent with the failed projects of most social democrats since World War II. While the PDA (www.pdamerica.org) is relatively unconcerned about the alliance with capital that the Democratic Party represents, it is anti-war and critical of Israel, and it supports bold state-intervention initiatives, albeit from a left-Keynesian perspective, to address the need for jobs and social justice. Many of its supporters and members engage in various single-issue movements, from opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to Palestine solidarity, immigrant rights, and the job creation movement.
A blogosphere of American social democrats and such magazines as American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation, and In These Times reflect perspectives that range from left liberal — calling for revised approaches toward the war in Afghanistan, stronger regulation of the financial sector, and a new popular front (Kazin 2010) — to endorsements of sweeping Keynesian-inspired job creation, environmental transformation, and single-payer Medicare, to more radical and socialist demands. As well, various academic and policy-oriented activists who can roughly be called left social democrats have contributed new ideas for revitalizing the American economic and social fabric. They include such people and organizations as the Economic Policy Institute and the authors of A Progressive Program for Economic Recovery and Financial Reconstruction (http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01521).
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a member of Socialist International, is a more complex phenomenon.3 With seven thousand members and a thousand activists, it is the largest social democratic formation in the United States. Declaring itself to be democratic socialist in orientation, the DSA holds political positions that reflect both social democratic and socialist approaches. It is far from disciplined, and its members range from those who work for immediate reforms within a traditional social democratic orientation to those who aim to build a socialist alternative to capitalism and support a more radical set of immediate demands that go beyond a Keynesian orientation.
Many DSA members participate in social movements and trade unions, although they are overwhelmingly college graduates with a low level of working-class participation. While little coordination exists among DSA members who work in different unions and movements, the organization includes a remarkable mix of veterans of the Harrington-Howe era of American social democracy, former and current members of socialist left-wing groups, and a youth wing that includes Marxist-inspired democratic socialists and social democrats. The DSA has no official press, although it does publish the magazine Democratic Left and a labour newsletter. It also organizes occasional educational sessions and forums in different communities.
To get a sense of some of the contradictions within the DSA, one has only to look at the content of its website and political materials (www.dsausa.org). One can find a presentation by noted socialist educator, activist, and DSA member Bill Fletcher Jr. on the need for a socialist party, mass activism, and education as well as a presentation from the Left Forum on the need for a new Economic Bill of Rights, which includes mostly Keynesian-type demands. But the latter also includes comments by Joseph Schwartz, the DSA’s vice-chairperson, to the effect that these rights can never be attained without taking over private capital and transforming the economic system.
While the DSA, for the most part, remains tied to an electoral practice within the Democratic Party, some of the older social democratic elements in the organization are still inspired by Michael Harrington’s vision of transforming the Democrats into a social democratic party of the European type, whatever that means in today’s context. Many DSA members, however, simply see no alternative to working through the Democrats, given the limitations of the American political system. A small minority questions the utility of this kind of political activity but can’t see how one can move beyond it. If one identifies electoral activity reflexively with the Democrats, then it is easy to argue that electoral activity itself needs be avoided.
Conversations with DSA members give the impression that they have no sense of a crisis over the prevailing political paradigm within the DSA, so it is unlikely that there will be any critical debates over the course of its collective political practice anytime soon. Although most DSA members seem to be critical of the Obama Administration’s orientation, some thought that his election would bring about the possibility of another New Deal while others were skeptical from the beginning. This, of course, mirrors similar divisions in the American Left overall. The general consensus is that a movement must be built to push Obama to move toward bolder reforms and more progressive policies.
Within the DSA and across the political spectrum of the American Left, those who argue for engaging with the Democrats — that is, social democrats and democratic socialists — are divided about how to work with the Democratic Party. One key line of demarcation is whether they wish to make the Democratic Party more effective, progressive, and radical, or whether they see working in the party as a tactic to connect with workers or other constituencies that eventually need to become part of a larger socialist movement. Unlike socialists, social democrats as a whole still believe that the Democrats can be transformed — but what they wish to transform it into is not very interesting.
Socialists are divided about whether or not working inside the party makes sense, but they generally agree on their strategic goal of eventually building a larger, independent socialist party. Major differences remain, however, over whether this requires participating in Democratic primaries or local organizations, or even supporting campaigns of progressive Democrats for Congress, local office, or the presidency.
The Right Rises Again
Moving into the November 2010 Senate elections, Obama had successfully passed his compromised health care package, which was to operate through a system of private corporations, without a public option of any kind. Despite its limitations, it was bitterly opposed by Republicans and some “Blue Dog” right-leaning Democrats, as well as the more progressive and social democratic–oriented Democrats on the left (although many of the latter ultimately ended up supporting it). The social democratic left, though rather critical of the deal, was divided about whether it represented a glass half full or half empty. The modest stimulus package, part of the bailout of the finance and the auto industries, had also by this time run its course.
With Obama’s seeming unwillingness to address the growing gap of income and wealth, increasing profit levels of banks and corporations and the deepening unemployment crisis became huge issues for the social democratic left; going into the congressional and state elections of 2010, these issues had rather demobilized and demoralized much of the Democratic base. Simultaneously, the lack of organized movements or left-wing alternatives from below enabled the far Right to organize and build a base of white, upper-middle-class and disgruntled working-class supporters around an orthodox neoliberal economic platform and a call for minimal government. The result was a victory for Republican conservatives, who took over the House, reducing the Democratic majority in the Senate and winning a number of key state governorships and legislatures. Out of a total of thirty-seven gubernatorial races in 2010, the Democrats won thirteen and the Republicans twenty-three (with the other going to an independent).
Shortly thereafter, the tenor of the main political and media voices shifted noticeably to the right. The Republican House caucus called for a national austerity agenda characterized by deep cuts to social progams and limits on government borrowing. State governments — Democratic as well as Republican — began an attack on public services and the rights of unionized public sector workers that threatened the very survival of public sector unionism itself.
The coffers of state governments, and those of the municipalities in those states, were already starved of funding through the effects of both the recession and the end of the moderate stimulus package from the federal government. But the new austerity offensive sponsored by states was unprecedented and went beyond any real concern for maintaining government finances. It was also deeply unpopular (Cooper and Thee-Brenan 2011). States with new Republican majorities such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Indiana led the way, but those with strong Republican governors — and even those with Democratic legislative majorities and governors — followed suit (Tavernise and Sulzberger 2011; Pérez-Peña 2011; Levenson 2011; Cooke 2011; La Botz 2011).
Wisconsin: Attacks and Resistance
Wisconsin — the home of the progressive traditions of La Follette, municipal socialism, the New Left, and more modern left-wing politics, as well as a hard right-wing populism identified with McCarthyism and today’s neoliberalism — became the touchstone of the attacks, as well as a symbol of a new labour and popular resistance that began from below. Republican Governor Scott Walker, with a majority in both houses of the legislature, issued a frontal attack on public sector unions and social service recipients. He sponsored a so-called budget repair bill that drastically limited the scope of collective bargaining for public sector unions, ending automatic dues deduction and forcing annual recertification. The bill purposely exempted police and firefighters in order to target and isolate the rest of the public sector. The governor also targeted programs for the poor and funding for public education.
While similar attacks occurred in other states — leading to resistance movements of various kinds — the Wisconsin events became a central focus of the struggle. The huge and creative protest that arose from below challenged the notion that the American labour movement was effectively dead. As tens of thousands of union supporters protested the despicable legislation, it became clear that layers of the working class, unions, and the general Left in the United States were prepared to build new and different forms of fightback. The struggle included occupations of the State Capitol, daily marches, and youth-inspired civil disobedience. It brought out private sector workers and unions, high school and university students, and tens of thousands of public sector workers and supporters. The firefighters and (for a time) the police supported the struggle. Democratic legislators hid out in neighbouring states, denying Walker the needed quorum to pass the law. Eventually, he used a legislative manoeuvre to get the changes voted in. At that point, the protests subsided, and the movement shifted toward an emphasis on recall elections. The first round of recall votes, held in July and August 2011, targeted nine state senators, three Democrats and six Republicans. The outcome was moderately productive, with the Democrats holding on to all three of their challenged seats and the Republicans losing two of theirs, but it was not enough to overturn the Republican majority. At the end of March 2012, after a series of successful petition drives, recall elections for Governor Walker, the lieutenant governor, and four more Republican state senators (one of whom subsequently resigned) were announced. These will take place on 5 June.
There were smaller protests against similar attacks in Ohio, where the movement succeeded in placing a referendum on the ballot, which allowed people to undo Republican Governor Kasich’s bill, SB 5. The bill, which was overturned in the referendum on 8 November 2011, would have stripped public sector workers of both the right to strike and collective bargaining. Since then, in February, Indiana passed a right-to-work law, which curtailed the rights of all unionized workers in the state.
Lessons and Debates from the Resistance Experience
The mass struggles in Wisconsin and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere were a major step forward. The excitement and exuberance felt across the labour movement, the larger progressive community, and the Left were palpable and justified. However, they were also emblematic of a set of political and organizational challenges, contradictions, and weaknesses facing the Left and the labour movement.
The government attacks were unprecedented. They included major, historically significant attempts to attack the foundations of public sector unionism and further unravel key aspects of the gains of the liberal–social democratic era. With the defeat of private sector unions, the public sector remains the last bastion of unionism in the US. Many of the state governments proposed restrictions on voting accessibility and not-so-subtle attacks on the poor and people of colour. Much of this was challenged in the streets by a new movement that included coalitions built across the organized working class. While in Wisconsin, at least, most of the right-wing attack remains in place, the perpetrators (and especially their business backers) now know that such actions will carry a political cost. More importantly, a new generation of young people, students, rank-and-file union members and low-level union officials, and working people have had a taste of collective resistance and political activism. This is key for the future of social democracy (Dave Poklinkoski, personal communication, 8 September 2011; see also Poklinkoski 2011).
Despite this surge of activism, the movement in Wisconsin and those inspired by it in other states and cities have not succeeded in either stopping the attacks or in building the political infrastructure necessary to change the larger political climate. The debates around these deeper issues involve familiar and long-simmering questions: How can a more effective set of mass movements be built to topple the right-wing state government agendas? How can movements be created to unite the disparate elements across the working class? What should be the role of the Democratic Party and electoral political activity, and what should characterize the relationship of both to the Left? And how can the capacity of the labour movement be rebuilt? All of these would be answered differently depending on the perspective of different elements of the Left, be they socialists, social democrats, or middle-of-the-road liberals.
The Wisconsin demonstrations and recall efforts did not address the weaknesses that led to the petering out of the mass resistance and the failure of the recall efforts. Social democratic and left-liberal analysts praised the Democratic legislators whose flight across the state border helped postpone the passing of Walker’s agenda. They put great stock in the recall campaign. Their larger perspective on Wisconsin’s resistance is geared toward strengthening the progressive forces within the Democratic Party and the latter’s capacity to challenge the Republicans in upcoming state, congressional, and presidential elections. While it is true that they tend to support the building of the kind of movements that were created in Wisconsin to oppose the anti-union agenda, their overall political strategy is to have these movements act as a kind of critical pressure point on Democrats to force them to act in a more progressive manner or to galvanize the party into a more activist opposition to neoliberalism (Hayden 2011; Nichols 2011a).
Left-wing socialists pose deeper questions. They argue that ending the mass resistance reflected deeper weaknesses that need to be addressed over time. These include the divisions between public and private sector workers; the lack of education among the general public about the causes of austerity and its roots in the capitalist system itself; the need to build links between the poor, communities of colour, the unemployed, and recipients of social programs with the labour movement; and the lack of any longer-term plan to organize campaigns inside and across unions to work toward bolder and more effective forms of civil disobedience, such as general strikes. They point out that the recalls could have served as mass education campaigns about the social forces and structures underpinning austerity, possibly organized by some of the new organizations such as We Are Wisconsin. Instead, the recalls relied on the lowest common denominator and were crafted by those who usually run Democratic Party electoral campaigns. Appealing to the threats to the American Dream and the middle class, they denounced Walker for fomenting unnecessary divisions. In fact, they often avoided political education completely, instead concentrating on “getting out the vote” (Poklinkoski, personal communication; Brenner and Slaughter 2011; La Botz 2011).
Social democratic and liberal activists tend to praise the labour movement for engaging in the struggle. Left-wing socialists, however, tend instead to look at what transformations are necessary for unions to become the effective instruments of real change. They call for the defence of public sector unionism as well as social programs and argue that education and mobilization inside unions and across communities need to precede a larger, new offensive strategy that the unions are currently unable or unwilling to muster.
Obama and the Larger Political Environment
During the period from Obama’s election through the summer of 2011, the dominant political voices were shaped by the Right. Obama adopted what appeared to be a kind of Clintonian triangulation strategy, which infuriated and engaged many liberals and social democrats. The Nation’s William Greider and others even mused about the possibility of starting a new political movement within the ideological confines of social democracy (Greider 2011; Nichols 2011b).
Obama appeared to accept the discourse of debt reduction and agreed to trade off an extension of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for extending Unemployment Insurance benefits. He continued appealing to bipartisan problem solving in a context where Republicans were intransigent and moving further to the right. The Obama Administration offered almost no response to demands from trade unionists, the liberal wing of the Democrats, social activists, and socialists to address the slowing economy, housing foreclosures, and mass unemployment.
In July, when the Republicans threatened to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, the president waffled. At one point, he offered to make cuts to key social programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Ultimately, he agreed to almost $1 trillion worth of spending cuts over the next decade in return for an increase in the debt ceiling (“The Debt-Ceiling Deal” 2011). While President Obama’s compromise agreement supposedly avoided cuts to key social programs as well as tax increases (at the insistence of the Republicans), the left in the Democratic congressional caucus, as well as social democrats and those further to the left, opposed it (Nichols 2011c; Greider 2011).
In a change of strategy, in early September, Obama came up with a job-creation plan, followed by a deficit-reduction proposal. The former called for modest spending increases for infrastructure, schools, and teacher hiring; an infrastructure bank; and cuts to payroll taxes. The deficit-reduction proposal called for increased tax rates on those with incomes over $250,000 after the Bush cuts expire. The proposal was embedded in a left-populist rhetoric, calculated to inspire elements within the Democratic voting base and presenting somewhat of a challenge to the no-tax rhetoric of the Republicans. Obama also proposed $580 billion in cuts to health and welfare programs, with $248 billion coming from Medicare and $72 billion from Medicaid (Nichols 2011d).
Using his new populist appeal, the president sought to draw a rhetorical distinction between himself and the Republicans. In a speech at a Colorado high school made up of poor Latino students, he said: “If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the middle class, I will accept that; I’ll wear that as a badge of honor, because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade now” (quoted in Landler 2011). Obama spent much of September 2011 travelling by bus across the American heartland, touting his newly found political persona.
Many of the various elements within the large progressive community praised the president’s relative pugnacity toward the Republican Right and called for a much larger and more audacious spending package. Many were also critical of the proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The Response of the Social Democratic Left
During this entire period — stretching from the November 2010 Senate elections toward what might become a more populist phase of the Obama Administration — the strategy of much of the social democratic left evolved. It moved from a nervous impatience with the direction of the Obama presidency, to a more outspoken critique, to the sponsorship of a number of projects geared toward mobilizing the various strata among those who were victims of the deepening economic slowdown and financial crisis, and pressuring the administration and the Democratic Party.
These projects have various degrees of autonomy from the Democratic Party. Almost all retained a familiar ideological and discursive framework associated with liberal–social democratic notions, including nostalgia for the postwar era of growth and relative equity, appeals to individual upward social mobility opportunities through references to the American Dream, and defence of a middle-class ideal. The demands of these various projects also involved efforts to introduce tax equity of sorts, protection for those facing foreclosures, counter-cyclical spending, infrastructure programs, limits on trade liberalization, defence of public sector unionism and social programs, regulation of the financial sector, and a reluctance to challenge the reliance on private accumulation as the principal engine of economic growth (http://contract.rebuildthedream.com/; Borosage and Vanden Heuvel 2011; Greider 2011; Hayden 2011; Kazin 2011).
Some of the union projects include political organizing by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), through its Fight for a Fair Economy; the Communications Workers of America (CWA), through its proposed We Are One campaign; the AFL-CIO, whose president, Richard Trumka, has called for “a full-time, around-the-calendar political program” (Nichols 2011a); and the National Nurses Union, with their Blame Wall Street campaign. New coalitions have also emerged in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states. All of these organizations are geared toward resisting attacks on union rights and pressuring political candidates to oppose the right-wing agenda. On paper, at least, they call for engagement with their members as well as with people in their communities, but how successful they will be — and how independent of the dominance of Democratic Party interests they will remain — is yet to be seen. Like these groups, the left of the Democratic congressional caucus has also remained critical of the Obama strategic direction.
Other projects, such as the Contract for the American Dream (http://contract.rebuildthedream.com/) and the petition to run primary challenges to Obama as a way of pressuring him to move toward the left (Nichols 2011e), merge with similar appeals on the social democratic left. They hope to operationalize the longstanding strategic argument raised by most people on the Left, including many socialists: namely, that mobilizing social movement pressure from below against Obama is the way of forcing the kinds of progressive reforms necessary to get out of the crisis and move beyond the limits of neoliberalism. The experience of the social movement pressure on the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s is almost always invoked as a model of sorts.
Almost all of the projects mentioned in this section remain tied to a larger effort to transform the Democrats into a party of progressive change, often emphasizing the New Deal roots of that party’s alleged progressive nature. For example, John Nichols (2001e), writing about the proposed slate of primary challengers to Obama, talks of the plan to “give voice to the fundamental principles and agenda that represent the soul of the Democratic Party, which has increasingly been deeply tarnished by corporate influence.”
In the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement burst out across North America, with its base in Zuccoti Park in the heart of New York’s Wall Street financial district. It was a unique protest movement that challenged inequality, the role of the financial sector, and the oppressive job market, in the wake of the financial crisis. While it didn’t coalesce into a coherent political movement, at the very least it forced the overall political discourse to accommodate concerns about inequality and the obvious impoverishment of so many working people. It also built all kinds of links to the labour movement and other activist projects.
How the issues raised by the Occupy movement will affect the larger political terrain is unclear. There is a general trend across the left of the political spectrum for political actors to claim the legacy of Occupy as their own. Whether it will contribute to strengthening the labour movement, Democratic Party electoral interests, social democracy, left-wing populism, or a renewed socialist movement is yet to be seen. Challenges to austerity and the gross levels of income disparities can be articulated with all kinds of political projects on the left (Early 2011; Fletcher 2012; Yates 2012).
CONCLUSION
When people look at the Third Way identity of much of social democracy today and say, “This isn’t social democracy,” they are wrong. This is social democracy, just as North Korea and China illustrate what communism has become. Mainstream social democracy as a political movement — whether American, European, or Asian — has become independent of a true working-class base (considering all of the principal segments of that class today). It no longer argues and organizes for major reforms within capitalist society; it accepts, for the most part, the limitations of neoliberal globalization; and finally, it has no relation to any transformative project against capitalism (Katznelson 1978; Aronowitz 2006, 19).
But that doesn’t mean that social democratic voices have no place in the larger political discourse of the United States or elsewhere. The demands and reforms raised by left-leaning social democratic activists and thinkers are often central to the real needs of working people. There will always be those who argue that you must work toward a more humane and workable capitalism that points to the ideals of the postwar era: fair markets, more egalitarian income distribution, social justice, a more managed system of markets, and constant progress (Walzer 2010, 37–43).
The problem is that this perspective is incompatible with the workings of neoliberal capitalism, and this incompatibility is reinforced in the United States by social democrats’ organic ties to capital through the Democratic Party. Those who put forward reform agendas that fail to take into account certain realities are doomed to accommodate the real structural exigencies of competitiveness regardless of their intentions. Those realities include the need for initiating more radical structural reforms that limit the power of capital, reconstituting a class project out of the segmented elements of the working class, and encouraging forms of struggle in the workplace and the community terrain that reflect a class struggle perspective.
This is so for political and structural reasons. Without moving beyond the limits of Keynesian tinkering, capital will be able to dismiss even the most moderate of demands as beyond the pale. Furthermore, the boldest and widest programs for reinvigorating the infrastructure of American cities, increasing state spending, addressing dramatic inequality in income and waelth, and fully controlling financial markets will never see the light of day politically as long as those who argue for them remain trapped within the Democratic Party orbit. Perhaps proponents of such programs can use Democratic primaries or other spaces to put them forward, but the partnership with capital that is integral to the Democratic Party will never allow them to become policy — at least in a form that can lead to any real transformation. This is even more likely in an era when the Republican Party has staked out such a radically conservative terrain, pulling the Democrats further to the right.
Much is being said today about the necessity of building social movements to pressure the Obama Administration to engage in a genuinely Keynesian reform agenda. Perhaps what is critically needed is something that did exist (notwithstanding all of its limitations) in the New Deal era — a series of parties and movements that identified capitalism as the fundamental problem and argued for an alternative social system. Maybe it is time for democratic socialists within the broader social democratic formations to open up a dialogue with socialists involved in the various social movements (such as labour, community struggles, anti-poverty coalitions, immigrant rights, Occupy, and the US Social Forum) and in other more openly socialist formations (such as Solidarity, ISO, FRSO, and Committees of Correspondence) to generate a socialist underpinning for a new political project that challenges the system.
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