Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third and final volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first, simply titled Gotham, came out in 1999 and was cowritten with Edwin G. Burrows. More than 1,000 pages long, it began with the fateful meeting on the island of Manhattan between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history.

Wallace then took 18 years to produce a sequel. Greater Gotham’s time frame was far more modest than its predecessor’s. Writing solo this time, Wallace zeroed in on the two decades between 1898 and the end of World War I. But like the first book, Greater Gotham contained multitudes, with fascinating chapters on everything from the subway, housing, and the Bronx Zoo to vaudeville, feminism, and child labor.

While not neglecting tales of social and cultural life, Gotham at War focuses more on the eruptions from elsewhere that shook and remade New York City. It begins in 1933 with a Brooklyn-based boycott of goods made in Nazi Germany and concludes with the decision by United Nations delegates to make the city their permanent headquarters. Like the previous volumes, its achievement lies not in its interpretive framework but rather in the wealth of detail that Wallace discovers and rolls out in a style both vivid and precise.

Taken as a whole, this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or “people’s history,” that became popular beginning in the 1960s. Now 83, Wallace was one of the founding editors of Radical History Review, the journal that helped to pioneer this emerging genre of scholarship. He had studied with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter when getting his PhD at Columbia. But like many of his New Left peers, he grew frustrated with the kind of consensus political history that was being written by liberals like his adviser, which then dominated scholarship about the American past.

Wallace wanted to write a history of the United States that foregrounded the experience of people often left out of traditional accounts: its radical and reform activists, its workers and immigrants. But he also believed it would be a mistake to write solely about ordinary people. “I don’t think you can do history and call it history and call it radical if you only look at radicals, the downtrodden trodding up,” he observed in a New York Times interview later in life: One also had to write about the elites who built and ran the structures of the economy and state that did much to keep “the people” down but that also sometimes aided their ascent.

Wallace and Burrows had originally set out to explore this rich history on a far grander geographic scale, with an examination of capitalism in the entire nation. “We had written hundreds of pages, but had barely gotten out of the 17th century,” Wallace recalled. And so “that’s when we decided to make it more manageable and tell the story through New York City.”

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The new volume offers a compelling look at the way a big city’s economy functioned in an age of global war. Wallace describes how women broke through numerous glass ceilings: wielding tools in shipyards and munitions plants, driving taxis, and clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He notes the subterfuge required to create a new weapon of mass destruction that would transform war forever: an office on lower Broadway served as the first headquarters of the top-secret program to build an atomic bomb. The enterprise was soon moved to other spots on the map, but it remained known as the Manhattan Project, “a false front” to confuse the enemy.

He makes room, too, for sketches of how New Yorkers managed to have a damn good time despite, or even because of, the momentous conflict that none could ever truly escape. The hit musical Oklahoma!, Wallace points out, was the work of two “fighting liberals” raised in New York, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who presented “a prelapsarian vision of a time when social tensions had (supposedly) been subsumed in the name of patriotic comity.” Bebop jazz, Afro-Cuban dance music, and cheap paperbacks also proliferated, as did the frantic eroticism of an old Times Square where hordes of young people, in and out of uniform, came looking for hookups and usually found them.

With his omnibus method, Wallace sometimes strains to make a New York connection to every national development that took place in the era. But he does document a wealth of fine ones—from the New York roots of the Popular Front to the story of those Gothamites who led the long and successful battle to tear down the color line in professional baseball. He introduces Lester Rodney, sports editor of The Daily Worker, who ran countless pieces advocating the integration of baseball, and describes how Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and two leftists, US Representative Vito Marcantonio and City Councilman Benjamin Davis, demanded investigations into the persistence of Jim Crow on professional diamonds. Finally, the same month that Japan surrendered in 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract.

Wallace would not have devoted so many years and so many pages to the Gotham trilogy if he hadn’t been guided by a great love for the city. He has a particular fondness for anecdotes that beam with an aggressive insouciance familiar to any lifelong New Yorker. Midway through the current volume, he tells of a German U-boat captain who had sunk many Allied ships in the Atlantic. One night in 1942, the captain’s U-boat surfaced off the coast of Brooklyn, seeking another kill:

At 10:00 p.m., just below Coney Island, he paused on the city’s very doorstep, gazing in amazement at the Ferris Wheel and the Parachute Jump highlighted against the blazing backdrop of light thrown up from incandescent Manhattan. The captain was mesmerized, and also irritated at the arrogance implicit in the luminous spectacle. Recalling blacked-out Europe, he jotted in his war diary: “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”

No one has ever known the history of New York City better than Mike Wallace or told it so well. Barring a total surrender to AI, I bet no one ever will.

At the center of Gotham at War are two stories that initially appear to be at odds. On the one hand, Wallace wants to dispute the comforting myth that, during the bloodiest war in history, America’s “greatest generation” put aside its many differences and united on the home front to destroy the twin evils of European fascism and Japanese militarism. In abundant and often captivating detail, Wallace shows the opposite: He describes the multiple battles among New Yorkers that raged before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and continued until the horrific conflict finally ended and the Cold War began. He tells about those New York City radicals, liberals, and conservatives who argued furiously about whether to enter the war at all. He examines how, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, African Americans protested passionately against their de facto segregation from good jobs and decent housing, while pacifists demanded a negotiated peace instead of unconditional surrender. He describes how some of these conflicts between New Yorkers turned violent, as when pro-Nazi thugs beat up Jews at random and vandalized synagogues in northern Manhattan.

But the book tells a story of unity as well. Charting the formation of the Popular Front in New York, Wallace chronicles how an alliance of liberals and radicals was able to manage these discontents and govern the city with support, grudging or not, from most of its people. This coalition included socialist union leaders like Sidney Hillman (who organized the first political action committee) and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the eloquent Black councilman and minister whose weekly paper often echoed the views of the stalwartly anti-racist Communist Party. The message of wartime solidarity, Wallace notes, was also promoted by “fighting liberals” from the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to Walter Winchell, a widely read columnist with a popular radio show who “linked domestic right-wingers to fascists abroad.”

Throughout most of the 1930s and the entire Second World War, two New York politicians of rare skill and charisma headed up this coalition: Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt. La Guardia served three terms as mayor, during which his administration created the institutions of a nascent social democracy, from public housing to plenty of playgrounds to the nonprofit City Center of Music and Drama. Fluent in Italian and Yiddish, the flamboyant city executive once conducted the New York Philharmonic and took to the radio during a newspaper strike to act out cartoons that the city’s children would otherwise have missed. Roosevelt, a former New York governor, was a close ally; throughout these years, he funneled thousands of jobs to city residents. His genial populism also won over tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers who in other settings might have been divided along ethnic, religious, and political lines.

In many ways, La Guardia and Roosevelt made an odd couple—at least at first. The son of European immigrants, 
La Guardia was a progressive Republican with socialist sympathies, while Roosevelt came from a wealthy and influential family of conservative Democrats. He’d grown up on an estate north of the city, near the Hudson River, that featured a stable and a horse track. Yet the two men shared the desire to forge a coalition that could narrow the gap between social classes by enacting policies that favored the needs of working people over those of the “economic royalists” who, Roosevelt asserted, “had reached out for control over Government itself.”

In New York City, La Guardia funneled money to big municipal construction projects (including the airport that bears his name), encouraged labor organizers, and expanded public housing. He was also an unyielding foe of fascists both at home and abroad. Down in Washington, FDR and the Democratic Congress passed similar measures, although the president failed to convince lawmakers to repeal the embargo against sending arms to nations threatened by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini until World War II began. But before the US entered the war, Wallace writes, “Roosevelt and his New Deal comrades had…planted a standard—a left-liberal ensign, blazoned with the colors of social democracy and antifascism—to which a critical cohort of like-minded New Yorkers would now repair.”

The local government that flew this flag embodied a popular vision of cultural tolerance and a politics aimed at providing a decent life for all. But it was something of a vanguard at a time when Jim Crow, antisemitism, and libertarian economics still held sway in many cities and states. As early as 1936, a Russian-born novelist just starting out as a popular crusader for untrammeled capitalism grouched to a friend, “You have no idea how radical and pro-Soviet New York is.” Her name was Ayn Rand.

The story of how the Popular Front, led by the mayor and his good friend in the White House, dominated public life in New York drives the narrative of Gotham at War. Wallace rarely describes any aspect of daily life unless it bears on that larger drama. He says almost nothing, for example, about how ordinary, non-activist New Yorkers survived the Great Depression, and little about how they experienced the Second World War.

One of the book’s more poignant images is the close-up of a newsstand and its doleful operator, snapped the day after Roosevelt died in April 1945. The photo, published in Look magazine, was shot by Stanley Kubrick, then a 16-year-old Jewish kid from the Bronx. Alas, the middle-aged fellow in a cloth cap and wrinkled tweed jacket glancing at the headlines remains anonymous. It’s a metaphor of sorts for Wallace’s attention to the big changes that rocked the city in these years more than to the working folks who were often protagonists in the narratives told in the first two volumes of his landmark history.

All this took place in a metropolis as critical to the war effort as any in the nation. Over 10 percent of the city’s population—736,000 New Yorkers—joined the armed forces. The city’s myriad small factories turned out a cornucopia of military goods, ranging from periscopes for submarines, to penicillin and meals for GIs, to napalm, the fiendish liquid that burns skin to the bone. “Wartime Gotham remained by far the largest manufacturing center in the nation,” Wallace reports, “unsurpassed in diversity of industries, number of factories, and aggregate volume.”

In telling these stories, Wallace makes no attempt to hitch all his mini-narratives of industry, local discord, and politics to a grand interpretation. Instead of an explicit thesis, Gotham at War takes an ultra-empirical approach. Wallace assembles a huge collage of individuals and organizations, events and businesses, to suggest his view of what occurred and why, but without announcing a larger meaning to the grand story he is telling. On this massive canvas, he also pastes lyrics from popular songs, emotional images from war posters and comic books, and a grab bag of surprising statistics.

Did you know, for example, that nearly 40 percent of the Chinese Americans in New York City were drafted? Exclusion acts passed earlier by Congress kept Chinese men from building families that would have exempted them from the draft. Wallace also notes that, in the middle of the Great Depression, the posh and venerable Union Club offered its wealthy members “a choice of thirty dishes for breakfast, any of which could be served in bed.”

Without a big idea to guide readers through more than 800 pages of text and illustrations, Wallace relies on his unparalleled knowledge of every significant aspect of the city’s past to entice those readers to keep turning his many pages. Because he writes with wit and flair, one seldom regrets the absence of a larger argument.

Analogies between the political scene that Wallace describes and the one that exists in the city today come naturally to mind. The specter of fascism looms at home now instead of abroad, but New Yorkers elected a dynamic young socialist as their mayor. Like La Guardia, Zohran Mamdani won by building a multiethnic coalition of liberals and radicals and gained the support of most unions. He has ambitious plans to provide low-cost housing and to raise wages for the many and taxes for the wealthy few. And his charismatic ebullience makes it hard to portray him as someone out to punish those who disagree with his policies.

Still, no mayor of New York can be entirely or perhaps even mostly the master of their own fate. La Guardia easily won all three of his elections. But in 1945, with both New York’s economic future and a fourth personal victory uncertain, he declined to run again. And even if had run again and won he would no longer have been certain that the money he had promised to repair and expand the city’s infrastructure would be available. The federal government would have supplied most of the funds, and with the war over and FDR in his grave, the Little Flower sensed that was not going to happen.

With the Republicans in charge of the presidency and Congress, Mamdani will not be able to turn to Washington as La Guardia did during the New Deal. The surprising warmth Trump expressed when they met in November will likely cool once the mayor tries to implement policies that conservatives in and away from Gotham will hate. And there won’t be a global war to persuade a majority of New Yorkers to rally against a common enemy determined to humble or destroy them. One can only hope that, as with La Guardia’s election in 1933, his victory will be the harbinger of a progressive surge in the rest of our country.

Before they became sycophants of Donald Trump, American conservatives revered the writings of Edmund Burke, the 18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher and parliamentarian, who penned a famous takedown of the French Revolution. Burke “aligned himself with institutions of order and stability (and tradition) when he sensed chaos, mob rule or radical experimentation,” according to historian Drew Maciag, “when those who sought power acted irresponsibly or unjustly.”

Today, most Democrats—and quite a few progressives—sound a similar alarm. They charge that the president, abetted by Elon Musk and his eager young DOGEiacs, are wrecking federal institutions established in the 1960s (like JFK’s US Agency for International Development and LBJ’s Medicaid) and even as far back as the 1930s (such as FDR’s National Labor Relations Board). They fire tens of thousands of workers without cause, and imperil benefits many Americans have taken for granted. Meanwhile, with help from the courts, Trump is doing away with affirmative action, DEI programs, and the civil rights of transgender people. Blasting away at “the climate hoax,” he and his party are rapidly eliminating any environmental program that limits the development and use of fossil fuels. And don’t forget Trump’s pardon of every January 6 lawbreaker who committed one of the most blatant attempts at “mob rule” in US history.

In protesting these outrages, liberals and many leftists have become the new conservatives. Against the radical, if utterly reactionary, experiment being run from the White House and cheered on by the MAGA faithful, everyone from Democratic leaders in Congress to the hosts at MSNBC—and even some writers for magazines like this one—resort to an anxious defense of prominent institutions. Last month, Elie Mystal hailed independent regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission as “the only real day-to-day check on unrestrained capitalism in our system of government,” while Chuck Schumer recently blasted the idea of abolishing the Department of Education by executive order as “one of the most destructive and devastating steps that Donald Trump has ever taken.”

Essential as it is to defend institutions that millions of Americans need, that alone will not address why so many working-class people—particularly, but not only, white ones—have soured on both partisan Democrats and on some causes left activists fought to win, or gains they seek to preserve. Although immigration did much to make the United States a wealthy and powerful nation, most ordinary citizens now believe Trump’s charge that “illegal” migrants threaten their jobs and culture. Only when progressives demonstrate that they care deeply about their constituents’ current and future well-being will the decent truth have a chance to break through the wall of lies. An effective political strategy must always be grounded in collective self-interest.

We have to think anew about how to win the trust of Americans who have good reasons to be cynical and angry about the current state of the nation. Just repeating the same rhetoric from the past, while simply defending agencies they know little about, won’t respond to that mood or respond effectively to the current crisis.

One approach would be to highlight programs like pre-kindergarten for all kids and tax credits for childcare that Republicans killed in the cradle when Biden was president. Another would be to champion ideas that would have wide appeal—but have never been attempted: class-based affirmative action and subsidies for rent in urban areas. And how many people not named Musk or Bezos would oppose Elizabeth Warren’s “wealth tax” on the 75,000 richest Americans which the Massachusetts senator predicts would raise close to $4 trillion in a decade?

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Any chosen policy ought to offer a fresh approach to narrowing the gap between classes and be available, like Social Security, to everyone regardless of need. The animating vision might be borrowed from the chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 song:

We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag’s flown
We take care of our own.

One can wish that nationalism would fade away, sometime in the future. But as long as most Americans identify with and want to be proud of their country, a nationalism of caring is the best alternative to the nativist scare-mongering of the MAGA mogul. Anyone whose embrace of Trumpism derives primarily from a hatred of immigrants or transgender people will be beyond the reach of this strategy. But surveys and exit polls from last fall’s election show that anxiety about the economy was far more common than fears about cultural displacement.

One cause of the discontent so evident among working-class Americans during this century will be among the most difficult—and also the most essential—to address. How will they and their children find occupations that offer an adequate income and some potential for improvement in an economy that already doles out vastly greater rewards to those with at least a college degree in a technical, scientific, or financial field? As artificial intelligence turns “good” jobs in manufacturing and health care into menial ones—or eliminates them altogether—more and more people will have to take low-paid positions in service or retail that require a relentlessly sunny demeanor that can actually breed resentment and cynicism. Part-time workers already hold an increasing number of those occupations. Unions have always had a difficult time organizing the women and men who hold down such jobs; they tend to be temporary workers and do not develop the pride in one’s craft or expertise that promotes a feeling of solidarity among, say, autoworkers or nurses.

Throughout his three terms in the Senate from Ohio, Sherrod Brown paid tribute to “the dignity of work” and won praise as the most stalwart and eloquent champion of unions in that body. In 2021, he sponsored a bill that compelled the federal government to fund multi-employer pension plans that became insolvent. In his final speech on the Senate floor, Brown insisted:

True populism is about the dignity of work—putting workers at the center. And when I talk about workers, I mean ALL workers—whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge. Whether you’re on salary or working for tips. Whether you’re going to school or raising children or caring for an aging parent. No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter what kind of work you do—your work has dignity.

Yet Brown, who lost his seat to a wealthy car dealer and tech executive, did not explain how American workers would nurture that sense of dignity while toiling at the kind of low-wage jobs available to most of those with just a high-school education or less. To drive customers around town at all hours, field anxious complaints at farflung call centers, serve coffee and pastries to rushing commuters, or package all manner of items at a massive warehouse does not often allow the simple satisfaction of a job well done, let alone provide a sense of dignity. Yet, as artificial intelligence advances, many of those jobs may not survive either. That an ever increasing share of national income goes to investments instead of wages adds another layer of insecurity to the lack of self-esteem at work. Sadly, few members of Congress show Brown’s steadfast commitment to either the dignity of labor—or to finding serious ways to address the blatant injuries of class.

Politicians and movement activists who do not merely promise to change that reality but make a serious effort to do so deserve admiration as well as electoral and popular success. Otherwise, working-class Americans will probably keep swinging between contempt for politicians in general and a passing fancy for performers who boast without evidence that they know how to make a country rife with division and discontent “great again.”

We may not have it in our power to begin the world over again,” as Tom Paine, Burke’s great antagonist, predicted back in 1776. But by talking consistently and with genuine empathy about how to solve the problem of work in the tech-driven economy—and by coming up with policies that address it—we may be able to turn back the pessimism and despair that grips both the left and the people who will decide its fate, and that of the nation.

Why should we care about “the Trial of the Century” nearly a century after it happened? Many Americans have long understood the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, for breaking a new state law that forbade teaching “the Evolution Theory” in public schools as a conflict of profound simplicity in which religious bigotry clashed with scientific reason. In it, Clarence Darrow, a veteran stalwart of the legal left, skillfully defended Scopes, a biology instructor, while William Jennings Bryan, a thrice-failed nominee for president and devout fundamentalist, clumsily led the case for the state. The trial was broadcast to the entire the nation over an enterprising radio hookup.

Since Scopes freely admitted he had done the deed as charged, the guilty verdict came as no surprise. But what the court case achieved was something else: After Darrow put Bryan on the stand and humiliated him by exposing his lack of curiosity about both evolution and the Bible, many who had followed the trial concluded that the defense had won that round of the culture wars. The peerless and pitiless H.L. Mencken attended the trial and was among them: He hissed to his many readers that Bryan was “deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard.” The 1960 film Inherit the Wind powerfully dramatized that opinion for countless kids (like me) who saw it in liberal classrooms and on TV during that decade and beyond.

In her new history of the trial, Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple freshens this familiar narrative and suggests that something different, if equally momentous, was at stake during the weeklong proceedings at a redbrick county courthouse in the foothills of the Appalachians. While arguing about the Butler Act, the state law that censored the teaching of biology, each side was also setting forth a firmly held conception of democracy. “To Bryan,” Wineapple writes, “democracy meant majority rule and states’ rights. The people in each state should decide for themselves…what should be taught in state-supported schools.” But for Darrow, “there could be no democracy without reason, which is to say, without education and an educated people.” They fought for their clashing faiths in democracy at the court and everywhere newspapers were read and radios heard. Each man and his allies feared for the nation’s future if they could not persuade the public to take their side. And it is hard not to hear the echoes of a contemporary conflict in these fears as well: between citizens who demand a set of policy measures to “make America great”—and Christian—“again” and those who believe that civic tolerance and the freedom to speak and teach the truth are what give Americans the potential to live up to the nation’s vaunted, if abstract, ideals.

To explain how the Scopes trial became such a prominent affair, Wineapple devotes nearly half her text to the individuals and movements, intellectual and political, that preceded and presaged it. She offers chapters on the Populist revolt of the 1890s and about Prohibition and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. She describes the dispute among Protestant churchmen about whether to embrace the work of Charles Darwin or condemn it. Nietzsche gets her attention too, since Mencken praised him as “the high priest of the actual,” while Bryan warned that his “philosophy would convert the world into a ferocious conflict between beasts.”

On occasion, these contextual forays seem tangential to the background of the trial itself. What bearing did Mencken’s sympathy for Germany during World War I have on his contempt for the foes of Darwinism? But Wineapple uses them as a backdrop for the main focus of her book: the famous individuals who shaped her particular period of history. Here she excels at portraying them as if they were characters in an entertaining screenplay. No one has written a richer or more dramatic narrative of the trial or its leading combatants than Wineapple has in Keeping the Faith. An esteemed biographer of Hawthorne, Genet, and the siblings Gertrude and Leon Stein, she deftly traces the long roads the two main antagonists took to Dayton.

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These paths sometimes even crossed. By the mid-1920s, Darrow had spent nearly four decades defending beleaguered figures on the left and the labor movement against their potent foes. Before the Supreme Court, he represented Eugene Debs, who had spearheaded a national railroad strike that was crushed by federal troops. He won an acquittal for Big Bill Haywood, a leader of a Western miners’ union accused of killing the anti-labor governor of Idaho. Darrow considered becoming a politician himself but decided he could do more for the cause by continuing to perform quite remarkably in court: Into late middle age, “the attorney for the damned” could address a jury both cogently and eloquently for an hour or more without glancing at a single note. And he never took himself too seriously. “When a reporter teased him about his rumpled clothes,” Wineapple writes, Darrow responded, “‘I buy just as good clothes as you boys do, only I sleep in mine.’”

A major-party politician, Bryan never warmed up to radicals, but he constantly pursued reforms that aimed to make the United States a more egalitarian land—at least for its white majority. Campaigning as the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, he called for a progressive income tax and the federal regulation of banks and opposed the forceful colonization of the Philippines. In his final campaign, he won the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor—the first time that mainstream body of unions had ever backed a contender for the White House.

Not until he ceased running for office did Bryan begin crusading for causes that Darrow opposed: the prohibition of the commerce in alcohol and the squelching of teaching about evolution in public schools. In 1915, he also resigned his position as secretary of state to protest President Woodrow Wilson’s angry notes to Germany, which Bryan thought would lead the United States to enter the First World War. Darrow, by contrast, cheered on the Allied cause soon after the conflict began the previous summer.

Darrow and Bryan also parted ways on the matter of racial equality. Unlike the celebrated trial attorney, “the Great Commoner” was a lifelong exponent of Jim Crow. That nearly all white Democrats then shared his racist convictions underlined the fact that their passion for equality always cooled at the color line. Wineapple even suggests that Bryan’s belief in white supremacy may, in part, have stirred his hatred of Darwinism: “the theory of evolution helped make indefensible the notion that racial hierarchies could be fixed, separate, and consigned to hierarchies of superior and inferior,” she writes.

There was another reason Bryan decided to make the Scopes trial what became his final stand. Part of his zeal to prosecute Scopes stemmed from his confused understanding of what evolutionists had discovered and believed. For Bryan, Darwinism was always social Darwinism: He feared that students who imbibed it as scientific truth would come to believe that human beings were nothing but animals who survived through violence and hatred and would have no reason to care for what he called “the weak and the helpless” among them. Bryan even blamed evolutionists for turning eugenics into a reputable solution to the “problem” of what the textbook Civic Biology called “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” On this Bryan was not entirely wrong, for it was that very textbook that Scopes had taught in his class at Dayton High.

Yet no matter what drew Bryan to the case, his prosecution of Scopes ultimately hinged on a set of religious arguments: He kept insisting on opposing scientific theories based on mere “guesses” against the rock of religion instead of pointing out the nefarious uses to which evolutionary science could be put. This misstep allowed Darrow and the other members of his team to shift the court’s attention away from questions of society and to instead focus on how the Butler Act erroneously assumed that a believer in evolution could not also be a devout Christian.

Dudley Field Malone—Darrow’s dapper co-counsel—gave a brilliant speech arguing for experts to be allowed to testify about the facts of evolution. The Bible is a wonderful book, he acknowledged, but it is not a work of science. “Keep it as your consolation,” he advised the jury, “keep it as your guide, but keep it where it belongs, in the world of your own conscience…in the world of the Protestant conscience that I heard so much about when I was a boy.”

When Malone finished speaking, the courtroom, packed with supporters of the prosecution, erupted in cheers. Bryan even walked up to congratulate Malone, who had served under him at the State Department, for delivering “the greatest speech I have ever heard.” But the judge refused to allow any scientists to take the stand. All that was at issue, he ruled, was whether Scopes had broken the law.

If the proceedings had ended there, it is unlikely that the trial would have resonated in memory for so long or been the subject of so much controversy. But the day after the judge shot down the chance for the jury to hear about evolution, the defense announced that it was calling Bryan to the stand as a reputed expert on the Bible. Bryan agreed, on the condition that he could later question Darrow as well.

Darrow’s rapid queries were so effective because they exposed how little his opponent had thought about the claims of the book to which he swore unqualified faith. For two hours, the defense attorney grilled Bryan about the trustworthiness of Scripture. “Do you believe a whale swallowed Jonah?” “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” “Do you think the earth was made in six days?”

Bryan avoided giving an unqualified assent to any of these questions. He admitted that the whale could actually have been just “a large fish” that God had perhaps not told to ingest a man. Neither did he speculate about how the Lord had suspended the laws of physics long enough to stop the rotation of the earth. His answers came off as evasive and defensive. Bryan knew much of the Bible by heart, but he had not studied it as would a theologian eager to correct errors of logic or judgment. On the stump and on the page, he had moved people by describing how faith in Scripture could comfort humanity and the creation of a just and peaceful world. But unable or unwilling to debate the truth of either biology or the Bible, he was no match for a shrewd adversary who asked probing questions and would not let up.

“The purpose” of Darrow’s cross-examination “is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible,” Bryan wailed. No, shouted Darrow, “we have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it.” Scopes would be found guilty, but Bryan had lost the intellectual debate. Despite his reputation as a fierce defender of the faith, his performance on the stand under Darrow’s “interrogation,” as Wineapple writes, was “sad and ridiculous, operatic and futile.” The next day, the defense and the prosecution agreed to end the trial. Bryan would have no opportunity to cross-examine Darrow.

The duel in Dayton would be the last time either man commanded a sizable national audience. Bryan died in his sleep the Sunday after the trial ended. The timing ensured that he would always be remembered for the worst moment in a career he had begun as a populist congressman from Nebraska in the early 1890s. Still, he kept enough respect among Democrats that, in 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt lauded Bryan at an unveiling of his statue alongside the Potomac River.

Darrow’s last big trial occurred toward the end of the same year that Scopes was convicted. It was the trial of Ossian Sweet, a Black physician, and a group of his brothers and friends. One of them had killed a member of a white mob, numbering in the thousands, that had sought to violently drive the Sweet family out of their home in a Detroit neighborhood that had barred African Americans from living there before. Darrow’s ardent plea to the all-white jury to dispense “justice” to an “often maligned and down-trodden” race helped acquit his clients. When Darrow died, in 1938, The Chicago Defender, a leading Black newspaper, eulogized “his ability to regard all men as his brothers: a task and a responsibility which seems incapable of comprehension by those who profess to hold opposite religious views from those of himself.” The Defender added: “This should teach the white church a lesson.”

Today, religion is just as central to the struggle over the meaning of democracy in America as it was in that Tennessee country courthouse in 1925. But it now has a strongly partisan flavor. Republicans who claim to speak for the Christian majority applaud states that ban abortion and transgender surgery and remove books about LGBTQ people from school libraries. Teaching creationism, thankfully, is no longer high on the right wing’s cultural agenda. Democrats point to polls and election results that reveal that most voters favor a woman’s right to decide on her own healthcare and trust librarians to choose a range of books for children to read. Ironically, the most powerful official in each party professes to be a devout Christian: House Speaker Mike Johnson asserts that his “worldview” is the Bible, while President Biden attends Mass nearly every week.

Just as a century ago, neither side has any taste for compromise. For the broad, largely secular left, the good news is that white evangelicals—the solid base of the GOP—number only about 14 percent of the population; in Bryan’s day, they were probably close to a majority. But if Donald Trump wins this fall, religious conservatives will likely get their way on a variety of decisions by the executive branch concerning issues they hold dear.

Culture wars seldom end with a settlement that pleases both sets of belligerents, and until the left or the right wins a lasting victory, the United States will remain a society rent in two over the role of religion in our politics. But progressives used to appeal to large numbers of serious Christians, and the only practical approach to convincing, or neutralizing, any number of believers with whom one disagrees is to find a way to empathize with—or at the very least tolerate—their fears, while routinely defeating their favored candidates at the polls. “Tolerance,” Clarence Darrow explained at the end of the Scopes trial, “means a willingness to let other people do, think, act and live as we think is not right; the antithesis of this is intolerance and means we demand the right to make others live as we think is right, not as they think is right.” We have an excellent name for a system that allows ordinary people to make their own decisions about what a minority of others would force them to do. It’s called democracy.

Mainstream Democrats and leftists are at each other’s throats again. Senator John Fetterman denounces progressives who condemn the war in Gaza and oppose strict limits on undocumented migration. Anger at President Biden’s support for Israel spawns hashtags like #GenocideJoe and pledges to vote for Jill Stein, Cornel West—or refusals to cast a ballot at all. The broad center-left coalition that united to resist Trump as soon as he moved into the White House—and then humbled the GOP at the polls in 2018 and 2020—is coming apart. Knitting it back together before November will be difficult—but vital.

Neither side seems to have learned a basic truth from the history of American politics: Democrats and leftists, liberal politicians and radical insurgents have always depended on each other to accomplish essential, if not sufficient, ends. Movements stoke the fires of mass discontent—but only the state can pass laws and overhaul key institutions. That relationship has often been rife with mistrust and contention: Dreamers of a new moral world unavoidably clash with pols who focus on winning the next election.

But they have often been able to work together for common purposes and to oppose a common enemy. In 2024, failure to find such a modus vivendi would allow a vicious authoritarian and his reactionary party to control the entire federal government again. Victory for Trump and his partisan faithful would set back the chance to build a kinder, more egalitarian, and peaceful society for years to come. Given Republican disdain for renewable sources of energy, it would also push the planet closer to environmental disaster.

Democrats and movement activists first began to cooperate over a century ago in efforts to resolve “the labor question.” In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson asked, “How are the men and women who do the daily labor of the world to obtain progressive improvement in the conditions of their labor, to be made happier, and to be served better by the communities and the industries which their labor sustains and advances?”

Working-class radicals had made that question impossible to ignore. During the Gilded Age, many were among the leaders of massive strikes against rapacious railroad firms and for an eight-hour day. Socialists were integral to forging the two national organizations of unions—the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor—that emerged at the end of the 19th century. The first Democratic standard-bearer to embrace labor’s cause was William Jennings Bryan, whom the AFL endorsed in his unsuccessful run for president in 1908.

Four years later, unions helped get Wilson elected to the White House. There he signed some of the signature reforms of the era—from an income tax on the wealthiest Americans to an eight-hour day for railroad workers, to the creation of the Federal Trade Commission—the wellspring of anti-trust enforcement. Labor organizers willing to cooperate with Bryan, Wilson, and their fellow Democrats did have to stomach the party’s fealty to the white supremacist order. The young African American radical A. Philip Randolph devoted himself instead to promoting the Socialist Party and organizing the first Black national union.

Current Issue

May 2026 Issue

When liberal Democrats returned to power in the 1930s, they forged a bond with leftists who pushed them, at last, to begin breaking with their racist heritage. The linchpin of this alliance was the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in which Communists and Socialists filled vital roles as organizers and leaders of such key affiliates as the Electrical Workers, the Auto Workers, and the West Coast longshoremen. Every union in the new federation welcomed African Americans as equal members; most also pressed Democrats to take a strong stand for civil rights. The battle against white supremacy, contended CIO spokesman John Brophy, was, at root, a class issue. “Behind every lynching,” he declared, “is the figure of the labor exploiter, the man or the corporation who would deny labor its fundamental rights.”

It was becoming increasingly difficult to be both an ardent New Dealer and a vocal defender of Jim Crow. By the end of the 1930s, half a million African Americans belonged to unions, an increase of more than 600 percent from a decade earlier.

In 1934, left organizers spearheaded a number of big walkouts for union recognition and higher pay. For several days, general strikes halted commerce in San Francisco and Minneapolis. A year later, the Democratic Congress responded by passing the National Labor Relations Act, drafted mainly by New York Senator Robert Wagner. Unions, it promised, would boost the economy as a whole: “The inequality of bargaining power…tends to aggravate business” downturns, “by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wages earners in industry.”

At a time when fascism was surging in Europe, Sidney Hillman, the socialist head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, vowed, “In the great alignment which will mean liberal forces on one side opposed to the forces of reaction, labor should take its place.” Even during the recent heyday of neoliberalism, the alliance between Democrats and organized labor has endured.

In the early to mid-1960s, left-wing activists compelled Democratic officeholders to take a stand against racism and poverty and mobilized behind the new policies they enacted. That secret socialist Martin Luther King Jr. and such SNCC workers as John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer thrust the demand for Black liberation to the front of the liberal agenda. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were the fruits of their struggle. In The Other America , Michael Harrington, an outspoken socialist, eloquently revealed the extent of poverty in the nation, motivating aides to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to create programs like food stamps and Medicaid that at least helped reduce it.

Later that decade, radicals who were female or homosexual or disabled made headlines by asserting their precious, unfulfilled right to be respected as such both in law and the wider culture. In 1972, three years after the Stonewall riot helped birth a new liberation movement, the Democratic National Convention held serious debates about gay freedom as well as abolishing restrictions on abortion. The backing of feminists and the LGBT community would soon enable the party to present itself as a tolerant force that appealed to young, mostly secular voters in particular.

The rise of conservative movements and politicians from the 1970s on and the fragmentation between insurgent activists and liberal Democrats prevented any new alliance from forming. But a revival occurred early this century when protests against the Iraq War and the suffering of the Great Recession combined to create a fresh set of progressive movements—and to elect Barack Obama president.

In one sense, the left that thrived during the Obama years and kept growing after Trump’s election in 2016 differed from its progenitors. Unlike labor’s “new millions” in the 1930s, the Black freedom movement of the 1960s, or the anti-war movement later that decade, the newest American left rallied around no single issue that united its parts and stimulated its growth. Proponents of Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, and a new union militancy applauded one another’s demands while organizing separately. Notwithstanding their diverse passions, nearly all activists agreed that decades of conservative thinking and policies, under presidents and congresses of both parties, had turned the United States into a meaner nation in which the rich invariably got their way. Equality—in all its meanings—was their common desire.

Leading Democrats warmed to these movements rhetorically, while they hedged on passing the kind of sweeping programs that activists demanded. During the fall of 2011, Nancy Pelosi, the former and future speaker of the House, said of Occupy Wall Street, “I support the message to the establishment, whether it’s Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest.”

Two months later, Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining issue of our time…. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.” But the president made no serious attempt to get Congress to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, labor’s main legislative priority. At Pelosi’s insistence, he did make it a priority to pass the Affordable Care Act—a down payment of sorts on the universal coverage leftists had long advocated.

To have an African American as president also gave the new Black Lives Matter movement both a sense of hope and a target on which to train its frustrations with the slow pace of change. Some lashed out at Obama and other members of the Black elite, in and out of government, for preaching to young African Americans in poor communities a gospel of “respectable” speech and dress instead of enacting policies that would give them a good education and secure jobs at living wages.

At the same time, the enthusiasm for Obama’s presidency, which never flagged among most African Americans, did help gain the Black left a nationwide audience for the first time in decades. Organizers of mass protests could point to the gap between Obama’s rhetoric about racism and his lack of progress in combating the suffering it caused. As the journalist Jelani Cobb observed, “Until there was a Black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one.”

During Obama’s time in office, the most successful movement on the broad left was one with no explicit connection to class or racial equality. The LGBTQ activists who pressed for legalizing same-sex marriage managed to turn an extension of the sexual freedom espoused by cultural rebels in the 1960s into a demand for equal protection under the law. Four years after running for the presidency as an opponent of gay marriage, Obama changed his mind or, more likely, decided to help increase the speed at which the winds of politics were already blowing. In June 2015, by a single vote, the Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, agreed, and marriage equality became the law of the land.

Although Obama’s gradual “evolution” on same-sex marriage frustrated its supporters, his change of position accelerated the pace of their victory. The president’s new stance immediately became that of his party. It helped win over Black churchgoers as well as bind most young people of all races to the Democrats—when they could be bothered to vote.

Clear evidence that a mostly young left was thriving inside as well as outside the party emerged during the final year of Obama’s tenure—in the extraordinary presidential run by an independent senator in his 70s who had often criticized the incumbent for not following through on his progressive promises. When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy in 2015, he had already spent more than half a century advocating for an agenda that would turn the United States into a social-democratic nation—Finland with a lot more people and much warmer summers. By deciding to run as a Democrat, he infused the party with more progressive energy than at any time since the heyday of the Black freedom movement and the Great Society.

One result of Sanders’s campaign was that the party’s platform in 2016 leaned further leftward than any since the days when party leaders were proud to wear the liberal label. “More than anyone else,” commented the veteran progressive journalist Harold Meyerson, “Bernie created the current American left, but just as much, by running for president, he revealed its existence—surprising the nation, surprising the left, surprising himself.”

Joe Biden is hardly the best figure to bridge the current divide between establishment Democrats and a left that veers between disgruntlement and rage. I wish he had decided, after the midterms that went surprisingly well for his party, to bow out of the race and leave younger, more inspiring politicians to compete to take his place.

But aside from his policy toward the war in Gaza, he has accomplished more that leftists should cheer—and with exceedingly narrow majorities in both houses of Congress—than any Democrat since LBJ (who enjoyed a much larger majority in Congress). Under Biden, planned investments in clean energy go far beyond any previous legislation; the government has the power to negotiate the prices of ten popular drugs with Big Pharma and has capped the cost of insulin; and the administration is doing what it can to protect the right to abortion. No president before Biden gave such open support to strikes and labor organizing. And only the damn filibuster prevented the Senate from enacting the PRO Act, which would give workers who want a union strong legal weapons to prevent employers from denying them that freedom.

Although Democrats have been steadily losing the support of working-class voters, particularly white ones, their commitment to using the government to curb corporate power as well as empower employees has actually grown. A new scholarly article by Jacob Hacker and three other political scientists convincingly argues that both in its language and policies, “the party’s use of enhanced government spending and regulation to achieve society-wide economic goals continues to get pride of place.” Every workday, the pro-union majority on the National Labor Relations Board and Lina Khan, the most aggressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission in memory, provide evidence of that.

Of course, progressives should continue to protest Biden’s failure to restrain Israel’s deadly assault on the people of Gaza. But there is no reason they cannot, at the same time, make plans to do what they can to elect him and other Democrats in the fall. If in 1936, leftists could rally to the reelection campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also enjoyed enthusiastic support from the solid white South, their ideological successors ought to be able to campaign for a liberal president whose military aid to a longtime American ally they abhor.

Time and again, Americans in a hurry to reach the promised land have thrown up fresh ideas, challenged entrenched elites, engaged in grassroots agitation, and pushed liberals down paths they may otherwise have shunned or tiptoed along at a craven pace. While the passion of their creed sometimes blinded leftists to the exigencies of the moment, they cannot be separated from the history of American reform.

But a relentless drumbeat of cynicism and hostility directed at the Democratic Party will surely set back the momentum for progressive change. In 1976, amid another presidential campaign, the veteran organizer Bayard Rustin wrote:

Genuine radicalism…is not measured by how loud and abusively one can shout or by the purity and beauty of one’s rhetoric. Rather, genuine radicalism seeks fundamental change through concerted, intelligent and long-range commitment.… Wherever we look we can find fault. But the only result of endless fault-finding is that you end up in a corner with the few people who are as good and pure as you are…. Those self-appointed spokesmen who raise divisive issues to prove the superiority of their politics are not really radical. By confusing and distracting from the real sources of social change, they retard the struggle for equality and justice.

In Butte, Mont., masked men woke up radical labor organizer Frank Little, dragged him from their car, and then hanged his lifeless body from a railroad bridge. In Bisbee, Ariz., the county sheriff organized a gun-wielding posse that packed more than 1,000 striking miners into boxcars and sent them nearly 200 miles into the New Mexico desert without food or water. In the state of Washington, a local jury convicted several working men of murder after they defended their union hall from an armed raid by American Legionnaires, four of whom were killed in the fracas. In Chicago, a federal court found all 101 national leaders of that same union guilty of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act, passed to criminalize opposition to World War I. The trial judge sentenced most of them to lengthy terms in prison, where abuse against anti-war dissenters was common.1

All of the victims belonged to a single, and singular, organization: the Industrial Workers of the World. Founded in 1905, the Wobblies set forth on a revolutionary mission. By engaging in frequent strikes and constant agitation, they would gradually persuade wage earners of every race, immigrant group, and gender to join their “One Big Union.” By demonstrating their ability to wrest higher pay and better treatment from recalcitrant employers, workers led by the Wobblies would learn the virtue of class solidarity. Then, some glorious day, the IWW predicted, all this organizing would pay off: Workers would show their bosses the door, take possession of every factory, mine, warehouse, and office, and run the economy for the benefit of all.2

The Wobblies were Marxist in their analysis of capitalism but anarcho-syndicalist in the kind of society they yearned to establish: The state, they argued, should be replaced by a revolutionary union. In the catchy phrase of their best-known leader, William “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW would be “socialism with its working clothes on.” That romantic vision—backed up by courageous, militant organizing—earned the admiration of such popular writers on the left as Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Helen Keller, and Jack London, and a membership as high as 100,000.3

What excited many radicals about the IWW at its creation was the brash alternative it posed to the dominant forces in the labor movement and on the left, which had failed to mount a serious challenge to corporate rule. IWW leaders condemned the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a bastion of skilled craftsmen, for doing little to organize most industrial wage earners, and its leader, Samuel Gompers, for favoring mediation with employers instead of realizing that “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” And although the Wobblies did not tend to condemn the Socialist Party, which ran candidates in races throughout the nation, neither did they think one could topple the capitalist state by playing its rigged electoral game.4

During the first decade of its existence, the IWW incurred the hatred of capitalists, the cops, and politicians from both major parties by signing up some of the poorest workers in the United States and leading them in at least 150 strikes. The Wobblies periodically disrupted production from the silk mills of Paterson, N.J., to the wheat fields of the Great Plains and the forests of the Pacific Northwest. They also insisted on their right to speak, without a permit, to crowds on the streets of the cities where they organized. Such actions led the authorities to throw thousands of Wobblies and their supporters in jail. The persecution intensified after the United States plunged into the Great War in 1917, when the IWW refused to stop calling for and leading strikes. By 1920, the Wobblies were broken, with most of their leaders in jail and their members hounded as pariahs. The organization survived, but it never recovered.5

In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White memorializes the One Big Union by telling the lamentable story of its crushing during World War I and the Red Scare that followed. A law professor, White focuses on the legal means by which the state—on the federal, state, and local levels—tormented and persecuted its members, while offering an extended brief in defense of what the IWW was struggling to accomplish. He takes his title from The Iron Heel, a dystopian 1908 novel by Jack London about an anti-worker “Oligarchy” whose brutal rule presaged the history of fascism. Proceeding state by state and trial by trial, White describes, in vivid prose, “the vast scale and comprehensive reach” of this repression by governments and private employers, illustrating “how in wrecking lives it also wrecked the union.” While White’s narrative of this legal assault is impressive, he does not wrestle with the ways in which the IWW’s own ideology and tactics limited its growth and gave its enemies an excuse to attack it. The same Wobblies who could be such skillful organizers did little to build a strong and durable organization.6

n White’s telling, the most powerful legal weapon that prosecutors used to pummel the Wobblies was a new breed of laws designed for just that purpose: acts to punish “criminal syndicalism.” The statute, first passed overwhelmingly by the Idaho Legislature in 1917, set the precedent for other states. The bill, White explains, “made it a felony…to advocate or organize for, become a member of, or assemble with any organization that advocated” the newly created crime of using “violence, terrorism, and, notably sabotage” to bring about “social change.”7

Since the IWW’s publications did, at times, advise unhappy workers to try a bit of sabotage when their foremen or bosses sought to lengthen their hours or decrease their pay, the new laws threw the union on the defensive. “The class struggle is a physical struggle and depends on physical force,” one IWW journalist wrote. A claw-brandishing “sab cat,” hued either tabby or black, had appeared on countless Wobbly leaflets and stickers. Organizers gently prodded workers to snarl up a machine or rip up sacks of grain. Yet while the union’s rhetoric and imagery often welcomed physical conflict, rank-and-file members rarely resorted to violence, even during strikes; they knew their heavily armed adversaries could quash their movement if they did.8

In the end, however, although the IWW’s members rarely used sabotage, they were routinely prosecuted for allegedly threatening to do so. Cowed by the letter of the criminal-syndicalism laws, few juries had the courage to acquit defendants whose only true crime was to encourage working people to defend their interests, albeit in militant ways. Hundreds were arrested and jailed under these laws, and many more dropped out of the movement for fear of facing a prosecution that could have destroyed their lives.9

or historians of this era, the story that White tells is, in broad terms, a familiar one. Melvyn Dubofsky devoted several chapters to the IWW’s “Trials and Tribulations” in We Shall Be All, his comprehensive study of the union, published back in 1969. Adam Hochschild describes some of the same outrages in American Midnight, his luminous new saga of the tyranny visited on left-wing dissenters of all stripes during and after the United States entered the First World War.10

But no one before White has given us such a precise and passionate account of the IWW’s ordeal. He introduces little-known Wobbly organizers, explains the deeds that got them into such trouble with their powerful enemies, and then follows them into prison and, often, to their deaths. After being found guilty of criminal syndicalism, a California activist named Abe Shocker was dispatched to San Quentin. He resisted orders to work in the prison jute mill and was thrown into a dungeon, where he endured “weeks in darkness, on bread and water, with no bed or chair, only rags and straw on a wet floor.” Driven insane by his time in that hellhole, Shocker killed himself.11

White also sketches engaging profiles of the attorneys who toiled for the union’s cause. One was Caroline Lowe, who studied law at a Socialist college in Kansas, then represented many Wobblies in court for free while also finding time to raise funds for their defense. Lowe belongs on any honor roll of unsung heroes of the left.12

White’s account of these forgotten dissenters is stirring. So too are his tales of the injustices that the Wobblies suffered, and there is no doubt this ferocious storm of legal persecution hobbled the union’s ability to wage effective strikes and attract new members. But though White notes that the IWW’s membership was “surging” in the months just before and after Congress declared war on Germany, even at the union’s zenith, no more than 5 percent of the nation’s union members were in its fold. Many of them signed up for a particular organizing push or work stoppage and then drifted away.13

To continue striking during wartime did make the Wobblies vulnerable to repression, of course. But the failure to maintain their earlier momentum was not solely due to the iron heel of the state. Despite its adamant opposition to the war, the Socialist Party continued to wage election campaigns and denounce the draft. The administration of President Woodrow Wilson censored the party’s newspapers and banned some from the mail, and several of its most prominent spokespeople, such as Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O’Hare, were convicted under the Espionage Act and spent years in federal prison. But in the fall of 1917, Morris Hillquit, a union attorney and a leading voice in the party on international affairs, ran for mayor of New York City on an anti-war platform and won close to 25 percent of the vote in a four-way contest. Persecution by the state, however severe, was not the only reason the Wobblies were incapable of building their organization into the One Big Union of their dreams.14

n his narration of the Wobblies’ travails during the war years, White fails to look inward as well. It was not just the state and employers that hampered their efforts but also the union’s ideology and freewheeling style, which kept it from becoming a serious alternative to the AFL, much less getting anywhere close to realizing a syndicalist future. Time and again, IWW organizers made daring efforts to mobilize some of the poorest workers in the nation but left no lasting presence of their power behind. Typically, the organizers would arrive on the scene, inspire people who made little and owned nothing to lay down their tools and abandon their machines, and then did little to counter the weapons, legal and otherwise, arrayed against them. Abjuring any truce in the class war, the Wobblies refused to sign contracts with employers or build many stable locals, and as a result, their beachheads of militancy soon disappeared.15

A prime example was the big 1912 strike in the textile town of Lawrence, Mass., which White mentions only in passing. In midwinter, 14,000 workers walked out into the grimy snow to protest a pay cut at a string of woolen mills along the Merrimack River. The workers hailed from dozens of nations and spoke as many languages. They were able to hold out until spring, thanks to a strike committee as clever as it was energetic. Each sizable ethnic group sprouted its own relief brigade, providing food, medicine, and clothing to the workers and their families. The strike committee also diligently raised funds from supporters in Eastern cities, where compassion for the underdog ran strong. Friends of the union arranged for hundreds of kids whose parents were on the picket lines to stay with middle-class families in New York and Philadelphia.16

About two weeks after this “Children’s Crusade” had begun, local police blocked a large group of children who had gathered at the train station with their mothers and sponsors from embarking for Philadelphia. According to eyewitnesses, “The police…closed in on us with clubs, beating right and left…. The mothers and children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck, and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken women and children.”17

Three weeks later, battered by awful press coverage, the company essentially surrendered: In all six mills that had met with the strike committee, workers got a big wage increase and the mill owners agreed not to discriminate against any employee who had walked off the job. “The strikers of Lawrence,” declared Big Bill Haywood, “have won the most signal victory of any organized body of workers in the world.”18

The euphoria did not last long. A year following this triumph, the polyglot proletariat of Lawrence was once more at the mercy of its employers. Haywood and his fellow IWW leaders had left town soon after the strike to fan the flames of revolt elsewhere in America. The firms in Lawrence temporarily closed down several mills and encouraged each immigrant group to compete with the others for the jobs that remained. In the 1930s, employers did come to terms with a union. But this one was the Textile Workers of America, an affiliate of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which signed a contract with the companies and won higher wages and better working conditions for its members.19

The Lawrence uprising had been a thing of beauty for the textile workers and their radical spokespeople. Upton Sinclair dubbed it the “Bread and Roses” strike, after a contemporary poem which remarked that “hearts starve as well as bodies.” But the aftermath of the strike revealed that, for all its romantic élan, the IWW did not know how to win.20

hite is not merely a sympathetic historian of the Wobblies; he shares their politics and hails them as oracles of radical defeat. What the “story” of the war on the IWW “really does,” he writes, “is confirm the Wobblies’ own, darker anticipations as to the nature of capitalist rule, which align with the dismal fate of the labor movement and the radical left since the IWW’s decline, as well as the prophecies of the Wobblies’ most famous champion” ]Jack London.21

The historical reality defies this fatalistic judgment. With the help of mass strikes and liberal politicians like Robert Wagner and Franklin Roosevelt, the “dismal” labor movement, spearheaded by both the AFL and the CIO, signed up 15 million workers by the middle of the 20th century. Its unions won job security and decent pay for most of their members—none of which the Wobblies managed to achieve for more than a small number of their members.22

Of course, the American left has certainly not triumphed, but its vision and organizing played an essential role in winning Social Security and Medicare, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and marriage equality—while radicals are among the leaders of today’s exciting, if still quite modest, revival of union organizing. And if the state had outlawed all opposition to capitalist domination, as London feared, neither White’s book nor this magazine would get published today.23

The repression of the Wobblies was indeed a tragedy—the vicious squelching of an organization that strove, however imperfectly, to better the lives of working people—as well as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. But White’s pro-Wobbly take on the history of the last century undercuts the power of his meticulously documented and well-crafted narrative.24

“When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run / There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun” begins “Solidarity Forever,” the famous anthem written by Ralph Chaplin, the IWW’s poet laureate. For unions to boom again, they will need a brigade of organizers committed to the ideal of class equality. But without a realistic strategy for persuading millions to join them—and for overcoming the resistance of their powerful foes in politics, the courts, and the corporate suites—that vision will never come to pass.25

Joe Biden

oe Biden, as I’ve stated many times before, was not my first choice for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He wasn’t even in my top three. But right now, he’s my only choice for 2024. Because barring an unexpected tragedy befalling the president, I don’t intend to waste a minute thinking about the next race until after the November midterms. And maybe not for a while after that.

It’s easier to take this position, as I write in mid-August, than it would have been in mid-July. But it’s not just the Democrats’ recent surprise wins on gun safety, technology investments, veterans’ health care, and the big, if imperfect, Inflation Reduction Act, which funds groundbreaking climate initiatives, mandates Medicare drug price negotiations, and hikes corporate taxes. It’s not the great July jobs numbers—at 528,000, more than double the estimate—or the two-month decline in gas prices, which herald the deceleration of inflation rates.

And it’s not the devastating hearings produced by the January 6 House committee, or even Attorney General Merrick Garland finding a little pep in his step when it comes to investigating Donald Trump and his closest allies. It’s certainly not the encouraging election results out of Kansas, where voters overwhelmingly rejected a right-wing bid to rewrite the state constitution to ban abortion, which is buoying pro-choice Democrats nationally.

I’m not sure what Biden himself had to do with any of those victories. That’s not to say he did nothing, just to say that little to none of this success is attributable solely to his efforts (especially not in Kansas, given his anemic response to the overturn of Roe). But they all cast a little bit of a glow on Biden. And they’ve made it easier for easily frightened Democrats to imagine a midterm scenario that isn’t a crushing loss for the party—and might help them realize that any time spent bashing Biden is time not spent on those midterms. Democrats can imagine winning the Senate, if not keeping the House. They are struggling, but with inspiration and not despair, to understand whether the Kansas vote represents the kind of mobilization of female and younger voters that Trump’s election augured for the 2018 midterms—and whatever it is, how to channel it in November. Some Democrats, but not nearly enough, are focused on flipping state legislatures blue.

These are all better ways to spend activists’ time and money than imagining ideal challengers to Biden. Especially because right now, there aren’t any.

I’ve thought for a long time that progressives make a fetish out of dreaming up fiery, galvanizing candidates to run against incumbent presidents or establishment front-runners, when they should be doing the hard work of organizing and electing better people at the state and local level and to Congress. Ever since union leaders, progressive legislators, and Democratic Socialists of America cofounder Michael Harrington rallied around the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s disastrous 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter, which helped Ronald Reagan get elected, that has seemed obvious. I thought a primary bid against Barack Obama would be especially unwise, even after he disappointed the left on health care and social spending. Rejecting the nation’s first Black president would have split the party grievously, separating its most loyal voters, Black Democrats, who continued to support Obama, from the mainly white progressive base. Luckily, it didn’t happen.

The same problem exists when it comes to challenging Biden or pressuring him not to run. (By the way, in a breathless Axios story, only two congressional Democrats said he shouldn’t run; another dozen or so have “dodged” the question.) Like Obama, Biden was elected by Black voters, whose overwhelming loyalty in South Carolina turned the 2020 primaries around. They buoyed him again after he chose then-Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.

If Biden runs, he will be the overwhelming favorite among Black voters. If he doesn’t, Harris will. How do I know? Because Congressman Jim Clyburn, who elevated Obama in 2008, backed Clinton in 2016, and lifted Biden in 2020, said so. “Right now, I’m for Biden, and sec­ond I’m for Har­ris,” he told The Wall Street Journal in June, as rumors of Biden and/or Harris challengers surfaced. “I don’t care who goes to New Hamp­shire or Iowa, I’m for Biden and then I’m for Har­ris—ei­ther to­gether or in that or­der.” I saw the Bernie Sanders juggernaut halted in Clyburn’s state, in person, twice. Progressives ignore the South Carolina representative, as well as the older Black middle-class voters who listen to him, at their peril. For now, Biden seems to me to be the only person who can unite the fractious Democrats.

If Biden decides not to run—and at 79, he’s got to consider it for personal reasons, not just political ones—I’ll think this through differently. Until then, I’m focused on the degradation of our democracy, with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán seeming to helm the conservative wing of the Republican Party, and on the midterms. Right now it feels like the contest is Orbán versus Biden. Talk to me later.

Joan Walsh

Bernie Sanders

ot all the conventional wisdom should be disputed: Joe Biden is an incumbent, with all the advantages that come with the bully pulpit of the White House. Given the improving economy, Donald Trump’s legal troubles, and the backlash to Republican extremism around abortion, I’m more optimistic than most commentators on the president’s reelection chances.

Still, I can’t help but feel that we’d be better served in the long run by a strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders and the type of vision that the Vermont senator alone offers in American politics.

Bernie’s first presidential run started uneventfully. On a spring day in 2015, he announced it in front of the Capitol to a few bored-­looking reporters and then walked back to work. But in that brief address, he hit on the topics that would fill his stump speeches for his next two campaigns: He wanted to create “an economy that works for all of our people, rather than a small number of billionaires”; he lamented the fact that the “1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent”; and he asked for small contributions from ordinary people in order to overcome the influence of superwealthy families.

I was part of a Democratic Socialists of America “Draft Sanders” campaign and was the most excited person I knew about the development. But my stirring vision for the 2016 bid? “A step in the right direction” that could “strengthen the Left in the long run,” I wrote tepidly in Jacobin at the time.

Sanders did far more than that. He created a new front in American politics, one committed to fighting inequality and willing to challenge the establishments of both major parties. He offered an accessible sort of populism, one that promised to reach people who had drifted away from politics or even to the political right.

The campaigns, of course, failed; and though its participants will likely fuel the next few decades of organizing, the Bernie moment seems to have passed. Our political future, however, relies on rekindling that egalitarian and populist spirit—and we don’t yet have a better front man for such a movement than Bernie Sanders.

Recent victories like the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage shouldn’t obscure the fact that Democrats need to change. For years the party has been moving away from working-class concerns and fashioning itself as the first choice of financial and real estate interests. Instead of renewing a labor-backed New Deal coalition behind bread-and-butter messaging and universal programs, the Democrats looked to wealthier professionals for support and saw their voting bloc as a mosaic of identitarian interests.

Senator Chuck Schumer’s infamous quote—“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin”—was just one example of what was said openly in the party as late as 2016.

If Trump’s victory provided a window for reassessment, it was fleeting. Steve Phillips’s 2016 best seller Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority was but one instance of Democrats portraying demographics as destiny and projecting their own worldview onto racial minorities.

These illusions may vanish in 2024. Since the last election, many Hispanic voters have turned against Biden in key swing states like Arizona and Texas. Far from reversing working-class dealignment from the Democratic Party, both the sad spectacle of establishment Democratic politicians overseeing an unequal economy, and the maximalist rhetoric of some activists within the party, seem to be hastening it.

As an independent, Sanders has enough distance from the Democratic Party to revive his appeals for something different, a politics that tells people across America that they deserve more of the wealth that they create and that the only way things will change will be through struggle against the rich and powerful.

Must it be Bernie? I think so. Despite their promise, the Squad hasn’t yet proved electorally viable beyond deep-blue districts. Unlike Senator Elizabeth Warren’s appeals, Sanders’s message doesn’t get lost in technocratic details and actually resonates with working-class voters. And unlike Biden, Sanders marries plainspoken language with justified anger against elites.

It’s not that Sanders is a hero capable of changing politics by himself, but he’s one of the few people willing to identify the villains—greedy corporations offshoring jobs, CEOs earning millions while they lay off workers, weapons manufacturers trying to push us into war—that are standing in the way of progress. Having such a voice on presidential debate stages again would be an important step in repolarizing American politics from an endless culture war to the class war that we need.

Bhaskar Sunkara

Gretchen Whitmer

f Joe Biden decides to run again, Democrats of every ideological persuasion should applaud his choice—at least in public. Every time an incumbent president or vice president has had to endure a competitive primary, he has always won the nomination but always lost the general election that fall. The internal struggle leaves partisans exhausted, dispirited, and divided. That malaise doomed Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, and Al Gore in 2000. (Although the Supreme Court narrowly nixed a Florida recount that he may have won.)

But if Biden does bow out, his party will need a nominee who can perform a difficult two-step. She or he will have to excite the progressive base while appealing to that small percentage of independent voters who make the difference in a contest that will likely be decided, like the last two, by slim margins in a few Midwestern states. And, even if the Supreme Court had not made abortion rights such an urgent issue, it would be an excellent time to nominate a person who, unlike the previous 45 presidents, knows what it’s like to be pregnant and a primary caregiver for one child or more. Kamala Harris, alas, has shown little ability when she ran in 2020 or as vice president to rally millions of Democrats to her side or to broaden her appeal beyond those who cheer her as the first woman and person of color to hold that office.

I can think of just one potential candidate who checks all three boxes—moderate image, transformative policies, and gender identity: Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. While most of her views gladden progressives, she has avoided making statements that could get her branded as an “extremist” who would alienate swing voters. Whitmer is running for reelection this fall against an anti-abortion election denier in a state Trump lost by over 150,000 votes. At this writing, she is leading by about 10 points in the polls. Someone who can twice win one of the critical states that border the Great Lakes should be a decent bet to carry most or all of them in 2024.

One sign of her popularity is that Trump and his most ardent followers detest and fear her. Elected governor in 2018 after 14 years in the state legislature, Whitmer burst into national renown two years later when four right-wing men, enraged by the state’s Covid-19 restrictions, plotted to kidnap and perhaps kill her. Defense attorneys convinced a jury this spring that undercover agents had entrapped them, and two were acquitted of the charges. But a trial of the other two begins soon. Undaunted, Whitmer stresses the horrors she was facing. “Does anyone think these kidnappers wanted to keep me or ransom me?” she told The Washington Post recently. “No. They were going to put me on a trial and then execute me. It was an assassination plot, but no one talks about it that way.”

Over the past two years, Trump has repeatedly mocked the conspiracy against Whitmer and belittled her as “the woman from Michigan.” The FBI’s recent search at Mar-a-Lago will likely have far-reaching legal and political consequences. But with or without the cruel egomaniac who hates democracy at the head of the GOP ticket in 2024, Whitmer has proven that she will not tremble in a shitstorm.

Whitmer has become popular in her purple state by taking the kind of actions that endear most people to their governors. Despite a Republican-controlled legislature, she can take credit for repairing the state’s infrastructure (“Fix the Damn Roads” was her 2018 slogan), inducing auto firms to hire over 10,000 residents to good union jobs, and bolstering the Michigan education budget.

Not having run a national campaign, Whitmer has not had to take positions on a range of national issues, much less global ones. But on two essential matters—union power and abortion rights—her words and actions have been forceful and progressive. Against strident opposition from the GOP, she restored the prevailing wage law in Michigan that requires contractors to pay union wages. And, in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, she issued an executive order to stop the extradition to or from Michigan of anyone accused of performing an abortion. She also successfully petitioned a local judge to suspend the enforcement of a 1931 law that would make nearly every abortion a felony punishable by up to four years in jail for both the doctor and the woman involved.

Finally, Whitmer has a family background and a personal life that should enhance her political fortunes. At the age of 50, she has two college-age daughters by a first marriage and two stepsons with her current husband, who has often voted Republican. It will also be difficult to stick an “elitist” label on her. Whitmer’s parents held public office under both Democratic and Republican governors, and she attended a public high school and state universities (where she considered becoming a sportscaster)—and her daughters attend one now. The Michigan governor speaks in a relaxed, reassuring manner, with occasional bursts of wit.

All these qualities seem to drive top Michigan Republicans into a misogynistic fury. “Whitmer is a woman, but she is also an attractive woman,” wrote Ruby Cramer in The Washington Post, “and her use of executive power…seems to deeply trigger her male antagonists. The Republican leader of the state Senate, Mike Shirkey, bragged on a hot mic that he had ‘spanked her hard on budget, spanked her hard on appointments,’ and also contemplated ‘inviting her to a fistfight on the Capitol lawn.’”

Left-wing Democrats who long for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or someone who emulates them might consider the benefits of nominating a figure with proven political skills who could not be credibly slammed as a radical. Neither of the two Democratic presidents—Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson—who signed the most transformative domestic programs in modern history was the first choice of progressives when they first ran for the White House. Gretchen Whitmer should get the opportunity to be the third.

Michael Kazin

Ro Khanna

nsurgent presidential campaigns don’t start in Washington. They begin at barbecues with the New Hampshire Young Democrats, in meetings with frustrated local officials in Indiana factory towns, on community college campuses in Wisconsin, and on picket lines in Iowa. Maybe the prospective candidate writes a book that gets good reviews, and then amplifies the book’s arguments as part of a campaign to reframe the discourse of a nation that’s ready for a new conversation. That sounds a lot like what US Representative Ro Khanna has been doing this summer, as the progressive California Democrat has maintained one of the busiest schedules in American politics.

Khanna, 45, is quick to say that he’s not running against the 79-year-old Joe Biden. Asked in July, at a point when the president’s poll numbers were low and speculation about 2024 was spiking, Khanna waved away the prospect of a primary challenge. “If he runs, he has my full support, and I fully expect him to run,” said Khanna.

So why has the congressman been trekking across the country in the hot summer season of 2022, sojourning in the likely first-primary state of New Hampshire, visiting the no-longer-quite-so-likely first-caucus state of Iowa, and crisscrossing Midwestern battleground states such as Wisconsin? Why has Khanna maintained a nonstop schedule of media appearances that have made him a regular not just on MSNBC and CNN but on Fox News, where he has batted away challenges from conservative commentators with a smooth, professional style that seemed, well, presidential?

Khanna is ambitious, in the way that Democrats should be ambitious. He rarely talks about his own political prospects, but he talks a lot about how to renew the party in places where it’s been falling behind. If Biden decides to forgo a bid for a second term, it is Khanna’s determination to expand the party’s reach—on policy and on the ground in purple and red states—that makes him a uniquely appealing presidential prospect.

A veteran of the Obama White House, where he led trade missions and worked to promote US exports, Khanna taught economics at Stanford and waged pro bono legal fights in Mississippi before challenging a Democratic incumbent and, in 2016, winning a House seat representing the Silicon Valley. The son of immigrants from India, and the grandson of a union activist who was jailed with Mahatma Gandhi, Khanna gained notice in Congress as a passionate critic of US military support for Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen and the ongoing abuses of the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force. He wasn’t cautious about ripping “neoconservative hawks” and calling for “forming a new foreign policy consensus in the United States that rejects militarism and interventionism and is rooted in restraint, diplomacy, and human rights.” Khanna quickly struck up a working relationship with Bernie Sanders, as a House cosponsor of several of the Vermont senator’s domestic legislative initiatives, and in 2019 the congressman signed on as a cochair and tireless surrogate for Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid.

Khanna recognizes that, no matter what happens in 2024, the Democratic Party needs to get a lot better at defining itself in ways that make sense in working-class communities such as Dubuque, Iowa, a union town on the Mississippi River where Trump and other Republicans have been making inroads.

Talking up arguments outlined in his 2022 book, Dignity in a Digital Age, Khanna makes a case for a more equal distribution of the wealth and work associated with new technologies, and for a “New Economic Patriotism” that employs planning and government investment to strengthen traditional American industries, develop new ones, and revitalize small towns and cities where workers feel they’ve been forgotten.

“There’s a way to talk about economic patriotism that doesn’t come off as xenophobic and driving toward a new Cold War,” Khanna told me when I interviewed him in Dubuque in early August. “I think that the most destabilizing thing would be for us not to become a thriving multiracial, multiethnic democracy—and that’s very hard to do if we don’t have much more of a sense of prosperity in places that have been deindustrialized or left out.”

Khanna thinks that the way to unify the country is by spreading prosperity to those places where workers feel the federal government has failed to address the fallout from factory closures and the collapse of Main Street businesses. He argues that it is vital to merge a well-established critique of economic disparity with a plan to renew communities where people are hurting. He believes that too many policy-makers in Washington have forgotten them. “I do think that the hollowing out of the industrial base and the supply chains hit both factory towns and some of these rural communities,” he explained to me after meeting with workers and local officials in Janesville, Wis., where 14 years after the closure of a General Motors plant people ask still asking about what comes next. “Economic patriotism gets that. It’s not deviating from Bernie’s message about jobs having gone offshore, plants having closed because of trade policies that didn’t take these towns into account. But it’s adding a focus on next-generation industrial policy and then linking social progress—providing childcare, health care, education—as part of that narrative of building America.”

A fan of Khanna’s argument, Jeff Shudak, the president of the Western Iowa Labor Federation, explained, “As someone with family, a home, and generations of deep roots in my community, I appreciate that Khanna understands the importance of place. It’s not that easy for workers to just pick up and move when a job or a plant goes away.”

Assuring that federal policies and investments focus on aiding regions of the country that have experienced economic neglect and instability is central to Khanna’s vision. He’s worked with tech companies to move work to rural communities such as Jefferson, Iowa, and he’s been in the forefront of efforts to bring microchip production back to the US—and to make sure new plants are located in communities that have suffered deindustrialization. “If Democrats are the party of economic renewal, of economic patriotism,” he said, “I really do believe we can connect with people all over this country.” That’s an optimistic vision, to be sure. But, as Khanna knows, Democratic presidential candidates who win big—like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama—tend to be optimistic.

John Nichols

Yes

here are two good reasons why every American progressive should be a patriot. One is emotional, the other practical—and they reinforce one another.1

I love my country. I love our passionate and endlessly inventive culture of music, sports, literature, and film, which has thrilled and influenced people all over the world. I cherish our civic ideals of social equality, individual freedom, and populist democracy—as well as the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice.2

But you need not share my emotion to recognize a political reality: One cannot engage effectively in the democratic process without being part of a community of feeling. And for most Americans, their nation, with all its flaws, is a community they are willing to defend.3

Iconic figures on the left have always understood this. They have demonstrated that American patriotism could serve tolerant, egalitarian ends as well as racist, authoritarian, and imperialist ones. Tom Paine praised his adopted homeland as an “asylum for mankind,” which gave him a forum to denounce regressive taxes and landed aristocracies. Frederick Douglass based his hopes for the abolition of slavery on “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions” as well as an interracial movement for freedom. Eugene Debs described socialism, in the American idiom, as “the equal rights of all to manage and control” society; while Mother Jones, the great labor organizer, accused coal mine operators of crushing the self-respect of their workers. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed during the Montgomery bus boycott that “if we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong” and “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”4

Most of these figures, in their own ways, also engaged in a transnational effort to advance equality and tolerance. But each also depended on the power and legitimacy of American ideals to gain mass support for the changes they desired.5

Back in the days when the US military was scorching Indochina and killing its people, I abandoned the conviction that one could be both a patriot and a moral person. I didn’t burn any flags, but neither did I condemn those who did. However, I grew increasingly worried about the contradiction between the utter transformation we New Leftists sought to bring about and our increasing alienation from the mass of our fellow citizens we would need to join us in fighting for that better USA. When I read, in 1970, the Black leftist Julius Lester’s reflection that “American radicals are perhaps the first radicals anywhere who have sought to make a revolution in a country which they hate,” it seemed both profound and painful.6

Patriotism will continue to flourish, whether or not progressives embrace it. When left intellectuals and activists abandoned speaking in terms of American ideals in the late 1960s and after, they lost the ability to speak convincingly to their fellow citizens. Although left intellectuals can take credit for spearheading a multicultural, gender-aware revision of the humanities and social sciences, their record outside the academy has been far less impressive. The right has long set the political agenda, in part because its partisans spoke forcefully in the name of American principles that knit together such disparate groups as anti-union businessmen, white evangelicals, Jewish neoconservatives, and traditionalist Catholics.7

We should take the brutal treatment of Uyghurs in China as seriously as we regard the police killings of Black people at home. And climate change obviously cannot be stopped or reversed within national borders. But political power still resides with nation-states and their governments—and will for a very long time to come. No planetary government is on the horizon.8

Leftists don’t need to chant patriotic slogans or affix flag pins to their lapels or handbags. But to rail against patriotism and its symbols is to wage a losing battle—one that marginalizes us and sets us against the overwhelming majority of Americans.9

Past progressives have bequeathed a rich storehouse of statements about how to join activism to Americanist ends. Langston Hughes, for instance, expressed his vision during the Great Depression:10

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above….
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!11

Throughout history, and still today, the most effective way to love our country is to fight like hell to change it.12

Michael Kazin13

No

his past January, an Indian family died during their attempt to illegally cross into the US from Canada. Canadian police found their frozen bodies in a field—father, mother, and two children—just 12 yards from the border. They may have thought that the blizzard and poor visibility would work in their favor, keeping them hidden from the eyes of the US Border Patrol.14

I recount this story because it depicts the hypocrisy of liberal patriotism. Belief in the equality of human beings and a commitment to the welfare of less fortunate others, this example shows, are readily abandoned when it comes to the rights of those who are deemed “others” by accidents of inheritance and geography. A country with a border regime that has made instant detention normal even for asylum seekers is not one that values dignity for all humans. Commentators like British author George Monbiot have likened patriotism to racism. In his essay “The New Chauvinism,” Monbiot points out that patriotism produces a proclivity to attack other countries and that national allegiance does nothing to reduce human suffering. The United States and its “patriotic” wars are examples of this phenomenon. Monbiot asks rhetorically, “If patriotism were not such a powerful force in the US, could Bush have invaded Iraq?”15

As right-wing populism gains strength, some have called for the US left to embrace patriotic sentiments and not leave “love of the flag” to white supremacists. This is misguided, because the result would be to eviscerate the left’s already limited commitments to supranational humanitarianism and ending the catastrophes caused by the United States’ patriotic wars. One example is the relative silence of liberals in the face of President Biden’s decision to seize Afghan currency reserves and distribute half the funds to the victims of 9/11. The terms of this plan demonstrate that compensating Americans for an attack that occurred over 20 years ago (and in which no Afghan was directly involved) is valued more than helping the millions of people in Afghanistan on the brink of starvation. Biden’s plan invokes patriotism to cover up the administration’s outrageous cruelty and indifference to mass death. The American invasion, the botched withdrawal, and the theft of Afghan money have left Afghanistan with a famine that could kill hundreds of thousands—but those who carry out diktats in the name of patriotism seem entirely comfortable with this.16

Nationalism, from which patriotism is drawn, is deeply invested in maintaining different duties of care and then justifying that difference by attributing a greater sense of “deservedness” to citizens than to interloping others. Those “others” may be the migrants who perish just yards from the US border. They may also be among the millions of Afghans who had to endure a US invasion and occupation and must now watch as money that could provide humanitarian assistance is distributed to victims of a terrorist attack in which they had no hand. Patriotism not only gives unearned entitlement to those waging war but also places collective blame on those against whom the war is waged. If you dally with patriotism, then its mother, nationalism, will come along and tell you that noncitizens deserve their misfortune.17

The left must be committed to devising a better balance between a state’s responsibilities to its citizens and its responsibilities to the world community. In the past, the social welfare state has been an argument in favor of left patriotism in that it pursues a just, redistributive agenda. This premise must be rethought and its claims to justice questioned as long as the criteria for citizenship remain limited to parental lineage and geography of birth. One possibility would be a thicker concept of citizenship that deemphasizes arbitrary factors and creates new pathways to citizenship. In its absence, the US must at least make more allowances for asylum seekers, refugees, and economic and climate migrants. The argument for this is not patriotism but an internationalism that values human beings no matter where they are or who their parents are.18

The increasing primacy of the virtual realm in shaping our lives already points to a future in which the world will not be as bound by geographical borders. This truth, even aside from any substantive commitment to equality and justice, proves how foolish it would be to slide back into the xenophobia that patriotism implies. If we can work with, talk to, befriend, and love others who do not share our geography, then why should our ideas of community or belonging be based on territory and lineage? The nationalisms of the moment—racist, rabid, and loud as they may be—are vestiges of a past when the nation-state was supreme.19

We do not inhabit that world any longer, and our efforts to force its constructs on our evolving world can only result in tragedies like the one that befell the Indian family trying to make it to America. Patriotism is an unjust, dated concept that values tribalism over equality and human dignity.20

Rafia Zakaria21

Authors on the left are prevalent in academia, while liberals and centrists are dominant in much of the national media—apart from Fox News and its imitators, of course. But conservatives have long been adept at producing best-selling books that shape public opinion and even galvanize movements. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, educated two generations on the right about the alleged virtues of untrammeled capitalism; the Austrian-born economist’s disciples included the likes of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Goldwater did not actually write The Conscience of a Conservative, the slim paperback issued under his name in 1960 (it was ghost-written by L. Brent Bozell Jr.). But the manifesto, which made the Arizona senator’s fervent case against the moderate liberalism then prevailing in both parties, quickly sold over 3 million copies and propelled him to the GOP presidential nomination four years later. In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the classicist Allan Bloom assaulted university curricula and student mores with a blend of outraged hauteur and nostalgia for an anti-relativist past. And while subsequent politicians and pundits may not have replicated Bloom’s high-minded, erudite style, echoes of his arguments can be found in many of the culture war screeds against academia that have been issued over the past three decades.1

Mark R. Levin’s American Marxism, a polemic against all manner of progressive ideas and movements, may rival its predecessors in popularity. Published this past summer, it spent weeks perched at or near the top of the best-seller list. But American Marxism represents a distinct dumbing-down of the kind of book-length attacks on the left that have appeared over the past century. Hayek and Bloom produced rigorous critiques of the liberal ideology and left policies they abhorred, which required them to take the time to learn about them. Levin just slaps the label of “Marxism” on the various political phenomena he detests—from critical race theory and “genderism” to environmental justice, teachers unions, and the bias of the liberal media. He also accuses the Democratic Party of embracing these ideas and institutions and “adopting Marx’s language of class warfare” in order to put its own “interests…before those of the country,” thereby destroying what makes (or made), in his view, America so great. American Marxism is a virtual digest of familiar attacks on all the favorite targets of the contemporary right, and it suggests the depths of the right’s commitment to depicting its opponents not just as wrongheaded but as sworn enemies of the nation itself. Of course, liberals and leftists revile conservatives, too. But most of us refrain from accusing the entire Republican Party of harboring treasonous thoughts or wanting to overthrow the republic (the January 6 insurrectionists notwithstanding).2

evin devotes most of the chapters in his book to a particular head of the “Marxist” hydra he aims to slay with his invective. He moves from Black Lives Matter to “Hate America, Inc.” (radical educators) and from “‘Climate Change’ Fanaticism” to “Propaganda, Censorship, and Subversion” (the liberal media). Marx makes an occasional appearance, but contemporary left-wing professors (including The Nation’s Jon Wiener) get the lion’s share of references, whether or not they identify as Marxist. Levin’s point is obvious: The bearded author who spent far more time in the British Library than he did fomenting rebellion wrote the bible of anti-capitalism and obedience to the state. Americans who “cloak themselves in phrases” and names like “progressives,” “Democratic Socialists,” “Antifa,” and “The Squad” are just adapting his evil gospel to our own time.3

When it comes to the old Rhinelander himself, Levin appears to have no genuine understanding of what Marx wrote and believed. How else could he accuse the “degrowth movement,” a rather obscure group of climate activists who supposedly long for “a pre-industrialized environment where progress comes to an end,” of being in thrall to a theorist who viewed capitalism as a necessary stage in economic development? Marx, after all, was a pointed critic of the “utopian” socialists of his own time, who endeavored, he and Engels wrote, “by small experiments” on the land “necessarily doomed to failure…to pave the way for the new social Gospel.”4

To expect Levin to wrestle as seriously with Marx as Bloom grappled with Nietzsche, or Hayek with Harold Laski and other social democrats, would be to mistake today’s right-wing agitators for yesterday’s neoconservative men and women of ideas. Instead, Levin deploys “Marxism” as a collective zombie: Garbed in the bloody rags of failed tyrannies abroad, it’s meant to frighten his readers (“who love their country, freedom, and family”) into taking action against the “haters” who “pursue a destructive and diabolical course for our nation, undermining and sabotaging virtually every institution in our society.”5

uch rants, of course, are standard fare on talk radio and on TV shows hosted by the likes of Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and their feverish emulators on other right-wing cable channels. Levin himself has a sizable audience on both; his daily radio show alone claims 8 million listeners. I suspect most of the people who bought this volume or one of his six previous New York Times best sellers did so more out of fan loyalty than because they expected to learn anything new.6

One consequence of such low expectations is that the author can get away with prose that often resembles the raw contents of an oppo research file more than an earnest attempt to make a persuasive argument. Paragraph-long quotes from leftists he despises and conservatives he admires fill most of the pages. Levin is also fond of quoting lengthy passages from his other books, and he repeats the same arguments so often and in such similar terms that even enthusiasts might be tempted to skim through the text, nodding on occasion in jaded affirmation. Few of his faithful readers may pause to wonder why the author identifies Herbert Marcuse, a pillar of the Frankfurt School whose writings were a hit with the 1960s New Left, as a member of something he calls the “Franklin School.” Others will conclude that he just didn’t bother to do the reading.7

Portraying himself as a rational exponent of individual liberty, Levin disdains social movements as havens for unhappy people who flock together to build an unhappier world. His list of misfits bizarrely includes George Soros, LeBron James, and Colin Kaepernick—none of whom are normally considered to be “impervious to the uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around” them. Levin lifts those lines from Eric Hoffer, a popular conservative skeptic during the Cold War period, who scorned mass movements for attracting the “fanatic,” who “sees in [them] the source of all virtue and strength” and “cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense.”8

That Levin cites Hoffer admiringly is an act of blatant irony, whether intentional or not. The shock jock is, after all, a leading voice on the Trumpian right, whose adherents believe the 2020 election was stolen and that vaccine mandates are a form of tyranny. And he goes on to devote a long section of his final chapter, “We Choose Liberty!,” to detailed recommendations on how to wage a mass struggle against the intersecting forms of the “Marxism” he loathes. For example, Levin urges citizens to bring lawsuits against state or private “entities that tortiously interfere with your use of your property” in the name of curbing climate change. In a backhanded tribute to the activists protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions, he calls for a BDS offensive by “American patriots” to pressure corporations and governments to cease all financial backing for “Marxist movements.” Levin thus indulges in the tactical repertoire of the collective movements whose very existence he abhors.9

et the shoddiness of Levin’s presentation and arguments should not obscure the power of his message. American Marxism belongs to an influential tradition of right-wing rhetoric that the economist-philosopher Albert O. Hirschman called the “jeopardy thesis.” The opponents of mass suffrage in the 19th century and of the welfare state in the 20th both argued, according to Hirschman, that “progress in human societies is so problematic that any newly proposed ‘forward move’ will cause serious injury to one or several previous accomplishments.” For Levin, the glory of the United States resides in the capitalist republic that the founding fathers established. All his “Marxists,” whatever their superficial differences, burn with the ambition “to destroy American society and impose autocratic rule.” They are engaged in nothing less than a “counterrevolution to the American Revolution.”10

The jeopardy thesis is not the only way conservatives, past and present, have sought to counter the appeal of the left’s embrace of social progress, whether of the reformist or radical kind. Hirschman identified “perversity” and “futility” as other types of rhetorical attacks commonly used by the right over the centuries: Changes that radicals and liberals view as necessary will, their ideological adversaries contend, either produce the opposite of what they desire or simply fail to achieve their lofty objectives, such as the equality of opportunity or outcomes.11

But sounding an urgent alarm has an advantage that other modes of right-wing persuasion lack. The jeopardy thesis has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to fire up a backlash among liberals themselves against people and groups further to the left. The fear of socialism, at home and abroad, convinced some liberals as well as most conservatives to ally with state authorities to repress the speech of radicals and get them fired from their jobs during the red scares that followed both world wars. In the 1970s and ’80s, the Eagle Forum, led by Phyllis Schlafly, defeated the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by accusing feminists of seeking to destroy the nuclear family, outlaw alimony, and force women in the military to undergo the perils of combat.12

Levin accuses Black Lives Matter of being the latest iteration of what Schlafly and her ilk opposed: “violent Marxist-anarchist movements of the past.” Here he’s also echoing Ronald Reagan, the premier icon of the modern right. “One of the foremost authorities in the world today has said we have ten years,” Reagan declared in 1959, when he was merely a B movie star turned corporate spokesman. “Not ten years to make up our minds, but ten years to win or lose—by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.” Seven years later, Reagan used absurd alarums like that one to get elected governor of California by a landslide.13

o debunk American Marxism is a simple pleasure, but its popularity does point to an absence on the intellectual left. Our clan has rarely produced books that appeal to as large an audience and with an analogous intent—to make plain, in passionate but accurate detail, the danger the mass right poses to the nation and the world. For better or worse, that is not the kind of political book most intellectuals or activists on our side seem comfortable writing.14

Authors on the left have a long and rich tradition of creating protest literature. But what stands out tends to be acute reportage, not sweeping explanations of why the other side is so wrong morally and practically—and of how to defeat it. From Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to Michael Harrington’s The Other America and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, left authors have specialized in exposing particular outrages, not in making sustained attacks on large and systemic bulwarks of malevolence. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, which tells the nasty tale of how plutocrats like the Kochs funded the contemporary right, belongs to this honorable genre.15

But lacking precise, eloquent takedowns of every big thing the GOP and the reactionaries who rule it stand for, the left has had difficulty making gains outside its ideological bubble in the big cities and deep blue states and among people with college degrees. The result is that many Americans probably have no clear idea of why the left vehemently opposes not just Trump and his minions but the whole range of policies that conservatives espouse—or why those initiatives have turned the United States into a meaner, more grossly unequal, and perilously undemocratic nation.16

ind out what a historian thinks about the New Deal, and you will quickly find out what they think about the virtues and failures of the liberal state writ large. For Arthur Schlesinger Jr., how Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the worst downturn in US history “was a matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer economic collapse,” and the aggressive actions he took restored Americans’ faith in that system. For Howard Zinn, on the other hand, the gush of new federal programs merely ended up reinforcing the shaky grip of the reigning capitalist order. When the New Deal ended, he argued, “the rich still controlled the nation’s wealth” and “the same system that had brought depression and crisis…remained.” Recently, the conservative writer Amity Shlaes dismissed the very notion that FDR and his allies were either liberal heroes or repairers of a damaged status quo. Instead, she blasted the longest-serving president in US history for caring “little for constitutional niceties” and ramming through policies that were “often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”2

In Why the New Deal Matters, the historian Eric Rauchway gives us his own interpretation and suggests how liberalism might rebound in the present. For Rauchway, the New Deal altered US society in ways that many Americans neither realize nor appreciate but that often endure. One of the most learned and nimble analysts of the New Deal, Rauchway acknowledges that what Roosevelt and his liberal successors managed to achieve fell quite short of the bold appeal that FDR had made to Congress in his 1944 State of Union address: to “explore the means for implementing [an] economic bill of rights” that would establish “a new basis of security and prosperity…for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” But Rauchway illustrates what the New Dealers did accomplish by examining four areas of the country—two on the coasts and two in the agricultural midland—where they initiated ambitious programs that changed the daily lives of millions. His final chapter details how many of the sidewalks, schools, and post offices that still exist on “the street where you live” were results of the New Deal’s efforts to build a lasting infrastructure to serve ordinary people.3

Behind Rauchway’s historical travelogue lies a powerful argument: Roosevelt and his allies believed that democracy would triumph over reaction and fascism only if ordinary Americans accepted their dependence on one another and embraced programs grounded in that principle. “The results of that effort remain with us,” Rauchway writes, “in forms both concrete and abstract; the New Deal therefore matters still because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it.”4

hy the New Deal Matters begins in the unlikely setting of Arlington National Cemetery, that vast military graveyard carved out of what had been Robert E. Lee’s 1,100-acre antebellum estate. There lie the remains of two World War I veterans who traveled to the nation’s capital in the spring of 1932 with thousands of their jobless brethren to demand that Congress immediately pay them a bonus they were not scheduled to receive until the middle of the next decade. Local police, dispatched to quell what the Hoover administration took to be a radical mob, shot and killed both men. Hoover’s secretary of war then ordered regular troops commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to demolish the protesters’ encampment on the fringes of the capital city.5

The infamous crushing of the Bonus Army, whose members made a lot of noise but committed no violence until they were attacked, occurred in the thick of a presidential campaign, and as Rauchway reminds us, images of troops assaulting unarmed veterans with tear gas and razing their encampments helped seal Hoover’s fate. As his opponent, Roosevelt might have railed against the incumbent’s cruelty and awful judgment. Yet FDR cleverly turned the sorry event into a prime example of why Americans like those former doughboys—and the economy as a whole—so badly needed a New Deal. He promised programs that would “restore the buying power…of many.” After winning in a landslide, FDR and his new administration quickly took the unprecedented step of putting millions of Americans to work on federal projects that provided a decent income and, in many cases, taught skills that would later allow them to find good jobs in the private sector.6

Rauchway next takes us to the Clinch River, a site that neatly embodies FDR’s goal of serving the needs of citizens by putting some of them to work building the infrastructure all of them needed. In the 1930s, the river watered the homesteads of family farmers in eastern Tennessee who mostly lacked electricity and whose small plots were vulnerable to flooding and erosion. Under the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration launched a new agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority, that constructed a series of 20 dams. The energy they generated lit up the homes and barns of residents for quite modest fees. The TVA also stabilized the river’s flow and spawned excellent oases for camping, boating, and fishing.7

In describing the Norris Dam, the linchpin of the mammoth project, Rauchway turns briefly into an admiring art critic. The structure’s Hungarian-born architect, he notes,8

used a method of finishing the concrete that would create alternating squares, a checkerboard motif adapted from Viennese architecture. In this application the pattern would hide imperfections in the concrete and also break up its otherwise featureless surface. The immense structure thereby acquired a humanly comprehensible scale.9

Although he admires FDR’s presidency, Rauchway eschews the kind of unalloyed tributes that liberals like Schlesinger once paid to all the works of Roosevelt the Great. “Black southerners took a more mixed view of the TVA,” he notes, than did the white families whose lives were made easier by cheap power or the artists who lauded its projects as the apotheosis of modern design. African American construction workers in the Clinch watershed earned lower wages than their white peers and had to labor in less skilled jobs. They were barred from living in the lovely model towns built for their white counterparts. Still, many felt the conditions worth enduring. As the Black author J. Saunders Redding observed after traveling through the region, “their poor little was the greatest plenty they had ever known.”10

The TVA was not the only New Deal program whose aid to Americans of color fell short of giving them the kind of assistance they needed and deserved. For the Navajo, the Bureau of Indian Affairs brought a new respect for their Indigenous traditions—as well as new roads and sewers, hospitals and schools. “We should be proud and glad,” wrote John Collier, the bureau’s white commissioner, “to have this different and Native culture going by the side of ours.”11

Yet Collier also had his own notion of how the Navajo should earn a living, and he had the power to get his way. In the early 1930s, he enforced a New Deal law that sharply reduced the herds of sheep and goats of the Navajo in the Southwest. Collier meant well: The culling boosted the value of each animal after a time of rampant deflation. But he failed to appreciate the anger of those who resisted what they correctly feared would, in Rauchway’s damning judgment, “set Navajos ruthlessly on the road to a wage economy that looked much like any other in America, only poorer.”12

In the North as well as the South, the New Deal posed a fraught dilemma for Black people, who had even less hope of living apart from the institutions dominated by white elites. Rauchway’s last stop on his ’30s history tour is Hunter’s Point, a historically Black neighborhood on San Francisco Bay that was once the location of a sprawling shipyard. During the Depression, the federal government supplied such communities with relief funds and jobs. Back in Washington, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes also persuaded FDR to set up an informal body of advisers, dubbed “the black cabinet,” to keep the president and his aides aware of what African Americans thought and needed. Leaders of the erstwhile party of Lincoln could not compete with such aid, material and symbolic, and they seldom even tried. In the election of 1936, Roosevelt swept nearly every Black precinct on the way to one of the biggest landslides in electoral history.13

Yet despite his support among Black voters, Roosevelt accepted the tacit discrimination against African Americans embodied in the provisions of the National Labor Relations, Social Security, and Fair Labor Standards acts in order to get the backing of the Southern bloc in Congress, which included the chairmen of the most powerful committees. None of these acts covered workers who toiled on farms or in other people’s homes—major sources of Black employment at the time. New York Senator Robert Wagner and his fellow Northern liberals protested these exemptions, but rather quietly, lest their colleagues from Dixie reject the bills. In anguish, these most progressive New Dealers acknowledged that their hope of making lynching a federal crime stood no chance of overcoming the inevitable Southern filibuster. Not until Black people built a mighty national movement in the decades after World War II would they secure more than the “poor little” the Democratic elite was able—or willing—to grant.14

t the end of Why the New Deal Matters, Rauchway poses an obvious but pressing question: Can the New Deal serve as a model for how Democratic officeholders and their supporters might change the nation today? When Joe Biden was running for the party’s nomination last year, he promised an “FDR-size presidency.” Spurred by the urgency of ending the pandemic and stemming climate change as well as boosting the economy, he was able to sign the American Rescue Plan, which dispatched $1,400 checks to a majority of Americans and gave a big boost in the child tax credit to many families. He also proposed a massive infrastructure bill and endorsed the sweeping PRO Act, which would remove major obstacles to organizing unions in the private sector.15

But, of course, the structural obstacles to enacting Biden’s Newer Deal are formidable, and even more so when it comes to turning FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights from a grand wish list into reality. When he took office in 1933, Roosevelt could depend on huge majorities on Capitol Hill, which grew even larger in the elections of 1934 and ‘36. When Congress passed the Social Security and National Labor Relations acts, there were a scant 25 Republicans in the Senate—half as many as exist to do the bidding of Mitch McConnell today. Next year, the Democrats may even lose the narrow margins they now enjoy. As William Galston, a determined centrist at the Brookings Institution, notes about the more powerful, more egalitarian liberal state that Biden and his administration are proposing: If achieved, “it will not only be transformational but celebrated in history as such. It will have leveraged the thinnest possible political majority into very large accomplishments.”16

Through no fault of his own, however, Biden lacks a critical element that made Roosevelt’s coalition so successful. Democrats took control of the federal government during the pit of the Depression and held it through World War II because they were able, as one political analyst put it at the time, “to draw a class line across the face of American politics.” Above all else, they had the support of a sizable and growing base of organized workers. Hungry for a measure of control over their labor during the Depression, wage earners flocked to join unions belonging either to the old AFL or the upstart CIO, whose ranks were full of talented left-wing organizers who proved effective at organizing workers in almost every basic industry, from textiles to steel to mining, regardless of their race. From the onset of the Depression to the Japanese surrender, the labor movement swelled from 3 million to 15 million members. And in national elections, most unionists voted for the party that had helped to spur this remarkable expansion.17

By contrast, the labor movement today represents only 10 percent of all workers, and just 6 percent of workers in the private sector. Biden has stated flatly that he wants “to encourage union organizing”—a pledge that FDR never explicitly made. But unlike in the 1930s, there is no galvanic uprising of workers, and today’s largest and most vigorous progressive movement focuses on the harsh and persistent injuries of race, not class. In her best-selling book The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee observes that unions can be effective institutions for persuading white working-class voters who back right-wing politicians like Donald Trump that their Republican votes deprive themselves and their children of truly affordable health care, excellent schools, and other public goods that solidarity across racial lines would make possible.18

hile the lack of a robust labor movement hampers Biden’s ability to mobilize working people behind his plans, there is one intriguing historical parallel between the election that made FDR president and the one that put Biden and Kamala Harris in the White House almost 90 years later. In 2020, Biden and Harris won over 15 million more votes than had Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine in the previous presidential contest. It was the greatest such leap of support for a major party since 1932, when FDR received nearly 8 million more votes in his landslide victory than had his fellow Democrat Alfred E. Smith when he lost badly to Herbert Hoover four years earlier.19

Donald Trump’s chaotic term and his defeat in 2020 both fit rather neatly into the model of presidential regimes developed by Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist from Yale. Each chief executive, Skowronek writes, governs in an era of “political time” during which one party—or, at the least, its ideology and program—is either gaining or losing power and popularity. In his view, just five presidents—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan—were “reconstructive” figures who made a decisive break with the dominant political ideas of their time. In the cases of James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, it took a set of cataclysmic events—the coming of a civil war and the onset of the Great Depression—to reveal their inability to address or resolve the crisis of the old order.20

Like Hoover, Trump faced an emergency that shook the entire country and failed to grasp its depth or respond to it effectively. That led most Americans to reject his leadership and see the status quo as morally bankrupt, ready to be tossed into the dustbin of history. “Instead of fixing things up and giving the regime a new lease on life,” Skowronek explains, such failed presidents “have consistently driven their parties to the breaking point and emboldened their opponents. Internal wrangling…has pushed the regime to indict itself and fomented its political implosion.” Both Hoover and Trump also faced large and sustained protests that helped persuade Democrats that voters would welcome a decisive break with their rule.21

If Trump does prove to be the last chief executive of a neoliberal era that began with Reagan’s election in 1980, future historians may understand the debates among Americans during his term as the birth pangs of a new regime. As Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a sizable federal welfare state, which Democrats and even Republicans like Nixon elaborated upon, so Biden will have the opportunity to enact such fundamental changes as a permanent child care allowance, free community college, a law making it far easier to organize unions, and a transition to an economy based on renewable energy. Back in January, Skowronek described the political landscape to the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg: “The old Reagan formulas have lost their purchase, there is new urgency in the moment, and the president has an insurgent left at his back.”22

The New Deal, as Rauchway makes plain, was installed in American government and politics for the simple reason that most voters liked what it did for them. The GOP had to grudgingly accept its main programs if it ever hoped to return to power. “As one popular joke had it,” Rauchway recounts, “Republicans professed to believe that the New Deal was a wonderful thing—and nothing like it should happen again.” It’s up to every progressive, as well as every Democratic politician, to prove them wrong.23

We Americans live in a debased version of democracy in which basic parts of the federal government betray, by design, the principle of majority rule. Wyoming elects the same number of senators as California does, although Wyoming’s entire population is not much larger than the city of Fresno’s. When voting as a bloc, five members of the Supreme Court can negate any act passed by Congress; barring an unlikely impeachment, every justice, once confirmed by the Senate, remains on the bench until she or he retires or dies. To alter the framework of the Supreme Court or the Senate would require a constitutional amendment that the legislatures of as few as 13 states could prevent from being ratified.

Yet neither is the greatest insult to popular sovereignty. That would be the fact that it takes just 270 electors—individuals whose names are virtually unknown to the public—to formally decide who will be one of the most powerful human beings on earth. A candidate can win a plurality of the popular vote, as did Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and yet the decision of who becomes president can still come down to a small set of electors in one or two states. And no minimum vote is required to win any state’s electoral votes: If a horrendously massive earthquake killed most Californians this fall, Donald Trump could legally win all of that state’s 55 electoral votes by edging out Joe Biden by a margin typical in a low-scoring baseball game.

Unlike with the other venerable pillars of our less-than-democratic order, most Americans have seldom thought the Electoral College worth preserving. Surprisingly, the very men who drafted the Constitution also had their doubts. The ungainly apparatus got welded into the document as a compromise between those framers who wanted Congress to pick the president and those who wanted to leave it up to state governments. The system they came up with was nobody’s first choice.

Over the past two centuries, Congress has repeatedly debated enacting major changes to the Electoral College or scrapping it; on a few occasions, lawmakers came agonizingly close to doing so. James Madison, the most influential figure in the drafting of the Constitution, was never fond of the Electoral College and sought to replace it with a national popular vote (which in his day, of course, would have been limited to white men). In nearly every opinion poll conducted from the 1940s to the present, majorities have favored switching to that simple and—ever since women and Black people got the right to vote—quite democratic alternative.

One of the chief virtues of Alexander Keyssar’s remarkable new book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? is that it conclusively demonstrates the absurdity of preserving an institution that has been so contentious throughout US history and has not infrequently produced results that defied the popular will. No presidential contest has ended up in the House of Representatives since 1824, when that body chose John Quincy Adams after a multicandidate race in which his nearest competitor, Andrew Jackson, won a plurality of both the popular and the electoral vote. But on four other occasions, fewer ballots were cast for the winner than the loser, and in the exceedingly close elections of 1884 and 1916, the switch of a few thousand votes in a single state would have handed victory to the less popular nominee.

More galling, those anonymous electors have usually also had the liberty to defy the people’s choice by voting for someone who did not carry their state or did not even run for the presidency at all. This is a prospect that a recent Supreme Court decision sought to correct, in a unanimous ruling that a state can compel electors to abide by the pledge they made to support their party’s nominee. “The State instructs its electors that they have no ground for reversing the vote of millions of its citizens,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan. “That direction accords with the Constitution—as well as with the trust of a Nation that here, We the People rule.” Despite this ruling, 17 states, including ones that tend to swing, like Florida and Ohio, still allow electors to vote their conscience.

he premise of Keyssar’s book is an uncommon one for a historian to pursue. Few scholars spend their time seeking to explain something they wish had happened but never did. Even writers who probe the perennial question of why socialism never gained a mass following in the United States as it did in Europe still have a good deal to say about such topics as the popularity of Eugene V. Debs and the vital role played by Marxist radicals in the labor movement and the crusade for racial justice. But the centuries of fruitless effort inspired Keyssar to create a scholarly masterpiece. No other historian has so persuasively explained the utter failure to ditch or change a process that, as he puts it, “is ill understood by many Americans, bewildering to nearly everyone abroad, and [was] never imitated by another country or by any state of the United States. Many countries have struggled with the problem of electoral reform, but few, if any, have done so with such lack of success over so prolonged a period.” This is clearly not a book for anyone who believes the moral arc of politics is long but always bends toward justice.

To tell his story, Keyssar has crafted an absorbing, if dispiriting, narrative about the durable obstacles to structural change in the United States. Running through this long history of failed reform schemes were the often intersecting realities of the two-party system and a fear of the potential power that Black voters could wield after Emancipation. Many Republicans and Democrats admitted the inequity of awarding a state’s entire electoral vote to whoever won a mere plurality of its ballots. But a filibuster-proof majority balked at endorsing any of the plans on offer that would have scrapped the state-based system of winner take all. They knew awarding electoral votes by congressional district or by the proportion each candidate won in a state could destroy an advantage precious to their party’s chances to win the presidency.

Thus, Southern Democrats in the late 19th century asserted that any proportional division would trample on the right of states to control their own elections, which was enshrined in the Constitution. One group of Dixie congressmen, contradicting the name of their party, derided the idea of a popular vote to decide the presidency as embodying “the false assumption that our government was intended to represent the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States.” In 1889 an overly sanguine Republican predicted that with proportional elections, “the solid South, that bugbear of our politics…would immediately disappear, together with many of the attending evils of sectional hatred and race prejudice.” Yet by the early 20th century, when Southern legislatures had effectively disenfranchised most Black citizens, GOP politicians had found their own reason to oppose such reforms. If Democrats were going to sweep the South every four years, then the GOP needed to ensure that states like Massachusetts and Wisconsin would remain bastions of a solidly Republican North.

Only during those brief periods when partisanship waned did lawmakers from different regions come close to passing measures that would have brought an end to the Electoral College. The first near miss occurred in 1821. By then, the aristocratic Federalists first organized around Alexander Hamilton had all but disappeared, allowing politicians from the party that Madison and Thomas Jefferson had founded as the Democratic-Republicans to thoroughly dominate the so-called Era of Good Feelings. In 1820, after James Monroe was reelected as president without facing a challenger, the Senate approved, by more than the required two-thirds vote, an amendment mandating district elections. After months of delays and debates, the House favored the idea, too—but with six fewer votes than were needed to send the amendment on to the states for ratification.

According to Keyssar, the lawmakers who resisted had a variety of motives. Some feared that future gerrymanderers could skew the shape of districts to favor one candidate or defeat another. Others were just accustomed to a system that had temporarily made their party the only one in the land. A congressman from South Carolina justified his nay vote by quoting Hamlet: “It is better…to bear those ills we have than to fly to others that we know not of.” Coming from a state where enslaved people were the majority, he probably never imagined that Black people would someday have a hand in making such decisions.

century and a half later, the opportunity for overhauling the Electoral College returned. For much of 1968, George Wallace, the militant racist from Alabama who ran on a third-party ticket, was riding so high in the polls that it seemed entirely possible he could win enough states to force the House to choose the president. In the end, Richard Nixon won a clear majority of the electoral votes. But the fear that in a future contest, members of the lower chamber might have to negotiate with Wallace or another rogue independent mobilized support for a constitutional amendment that would replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote, supplemented by a runoff election if necessary. Leading figures in both parties jumped on board, and the amendment even found support in the pages of the conservative National Review. The editor of the major daily paper in Charlotte, N.C., happily reported that the “creaky old system has few defenders left.”

Alas, given the need for a supermajority, the old system ended up having just enough. In the fall of 1969 the House passed the amendment with ease; just 70 representatives voted against it. A Gallup poll at the time found that more than four-fifths of the public endorsed the change as well. But as so often in the past, Southern senators used delays and a filibuster to kill the opportunity to abolish a major obstacle to democratic rule. Leading the opposition was Sam Ervin from North Carolina, a longtime champion of segregation and other right-wing causes. Three years later, liberals would applaud him for heading the select committee that helped uncover the slimy facts of the Watergate scandal. Ironically, a top official of the NAACP withheld support from the effort, too: He did not want to abandon the potential power Black people had to swing the vote in big Northern states and insisted that, so soon after the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was up for renewal in 1970, guaranteeing the franchise to African Americans in the South should come first.

For the remainder of the 20th century, the cause of reforming the way presidents get elected fell prey to the apathy of most politicians, who found no reason to keep flogging a losing cause. “It is a waste of time to talk about changing the Electoral College,” said Jimmy Carter in 2001. The former chief executive predicted the institution would last for another 200 years. The Nebraska legislature did decide in 1991 to award its electoral votes to the winner of each congressional district in the state. And in 1992 the fear that Ross Perot’s strong third-party run would prevent any of the presidential candidates from achieving an electoral vote majority spurred the Senate to hold a major hearing about altering the system that made such a contingency possible. “It is nonsense,” declared Mitch McConnell, then just an ordinary Republican senator, “to have the House of Representatives choose the president.” But after the Texas billionaire’s 19 percent of the popular vote won him not a single state, the embers of concern turned cold.

uring this century, opinion on the merits of a national popular vote, as on nearly every issue that matters, has broken down along partisan lines that grow sharper with each presidential tweet. That George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 made it to the White House despite winning fewer votes than their Democratic rivals has turned most Republicans into big fans of the Electoral College. Hugh Hewitt, who teaches constitutional law when he’s not writing hymns of praise to his authoritarian leader on The Washington Post’s op-ed page, recently defended the Electoral College as “one of the two load-bearing walls on which the Constitution is built.” His column mentioned none of the faithless electors in 2016. Hewitt’s students might ask their professor why he did not consider the judgment of Madison, the chief architect of that 230-year-old textual edifice, before writing those foolish words.

In contrast, Keyssar reveals throughout his book how complex historical wisdom can be. Rarely does he offer just a single explanation for why the various efforts to reform the Electoral College or do away with it have failed to gain the necessary votes in Congress or why, for years at a stretch, their proponents saw little point in trying. The impression he leaves is of a polity in which incremental moves that enhance democracy, like the Voting Rights Act, are possible, while efforts to cure the fundamental infirmities of the system keep coming up against such barriers as the “balance of power between the states and the national government”—which are encrusted with centuries of jurisprudence and defended by politicians whose power might be threatened by change. “The history recounted here has a Sisyphean air,” Keyssar admits near the end of his book.

Fortunately, eternal frustration has not always been the fate of the right to vote, the subject of his book published in 2000. In it Keyssar described, with just as profound a knowledge of his subject, how mass movements of white workers, women, African Americans, and their legislative allies gradually expanded the franchise until, by the late 1960s, it was available to all adult citizens, save the incarcerated and most felons who had served their time.

But because there has never been an insurgency to demand a national popular vote, the Americans who keep straining to push that rock up the steep constitutional hill are nearly all politicians, academics, and journalists. Few ordinary voters care enough about how the president gets elected to organize around the issue; they just prefer a candidate who shares their beliefs and promises to serve their interests and perhaps will make them feel good about their government and their country. “The nation has become more democratic since 1787 and more committed to political equality, but the Electoral College has not,” Keyssar concludes. And so we endure with the most ridiculous system for producing our head of state and government on earth.

Every great historian revises history in his or her own way. Eric Hobsbawm replaced narratives about the making of the modern world that focused relentlessly on the political games played by powerful men with a rich tapestry of social and economic history. Gerda Lerner explained how women defied patriarchal rule with everyday acts of resistance and public confrontations. W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, and Ira Berlin made it impossible to write US history without understanding the pivotal role of African Americans, enslaved and free.

For nearly half a century, Eric Foner has been challenging and overturning the benighted assertions made about the most studied and contentious period in US history. Nothing has been more important to the development of American society and politics than the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yet until the 1960s, most influential scholars conceived of the era as a sad departure from America’s grand march of progress toward political liberty and economic plenty. They claimed that the “war between the states” could have been avoided if sage voices of compromise had only been able to silence the hotheaded abolitionists and their secessionist counterparts. Their view of Reconstruction tended to be even more wrongheaded, rendering a decade of biracial democracy as an era dominated by vengeful Yankees who headed south to stir up racial antagonisms, echoing the pro–Ku Klux Klan narrative of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Foner has dedicated his career to demolishing these assumptions about how the Civil War happened and how the victors shaped what came after. Inspired by the black freedom movement of the 1960s and its successors, he has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other historian of his generation, how central emancipation was to the political conflicts that eventually exploded into civil war. In his most influential work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, published in 1988, he showed that the struggle for equality and freedom continued long after the Confederacy died, even if its victories were frustratingly incomplete.

The Second Founding, his new book about the trio of landmark constitutional amendments all ratified less than five years after Lee’s surrender, demonstrates his talent at unearthing insights about the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, in particular how Americans defined and acted on the ideals of freedom and democracy. It’s a slim volume that synthesizes the vast library of works devoted to Reconstruction. But he uses that rich scholarship to highlight the radicalism of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and how, over the past 150 years, clever and powerful conservatives have diligently sought to undermine their egalitarian promise. As Foner reminds us, the “key elements of the second founding, including birthright citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and the right to vote, remain highly contested…. Rights can be gained, and rights can be taken away.”

Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after Reconstruction, Foner’s new book is also a guide to nearly all of his scholarship, which examines not only the rights and better living conditions gained through extended contests for power but also the ambiguous consequences of what were, as a rule, only partial victories. The sensibility that drives his work was likely born out of his experiences on the left and the frustrations of a period of American radicalism that helped do away with legal apartheid and spearheaded movements for gender equality and the protection of the environment but also failed to mount a serious challenge to the conservative tilt of both major parties.

This sensibility was also a family inheritance rooted in the experiences of his father, Jack Foner, and his uncle Philip Foner. Both men wrote important works on African American and labor history but, as sympathizers with communism, suffered from an early rehearsal of McCarthyism during World War II, when the New York State Legislature led an investigation that resulted in the loss of their jobs as professors at City College. Given this legacy, Eric Foner has always recognized that while most Americans viewed their nation as the “embodiment of freedom,” the contest to define and act on that idea “has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the future.” He expresses these judgments in what another eminent historian, Christopher Lasch, called “plain style”: direct and vivid prose without a trace of specialized language, which anyone with a passing interest in the subject can read, learn from, and enjoy.

orn in 1943, Foner began his career as a historian by answering a critical question that hardly any American historian had thought to ask before: How were the leaders of the new party that nominated Abraham Lincoln and governed the nation through the bloodiest conflict in US history able to unite? In the run-up to the Civil War, there were three distinct camps of Republicans, each with its own constituency and distinct reasons for opposing the expansion of slavery. On the left were the abolitionists, who initially refused to participate in a political system they considered evil to its core and who insisted on immediate emancipation by any means necessary. To their right were the former Democratic and Whig politicians who had abandoned their parties in search of an organization that could stop the growth of slavery but who favored a less immediate plan to eradicate the “peculiar institution,” which they believed would die out in the states where it had long existed. Many abolitionists had lambasted the same politicians for whom they now campaigned—and the antagonism had often been mutual.

Foner’s answer to that complex question, delivered in a dissertation written at Columbia University and published as his 1970 book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, was that the moral activists and veteran office seekers who created the Republican Party built their coalition around a shared ideology that transcended their differences. Each group could agree that the expansion of slavery posed a serious threat to the interests of ordinary white craftsmen and farmers in the North—who, after all, composed the majority of citizens and voters in that region. What all three groups wanted was free soil, free labor, and free men.

This new ideology, Foner argued, “gave northerners of divergent social and political backgrounds a basis for collective action. It provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.” But it did not eliminate the differences between those Republicans who continued to work for racial equality and those who cared mostly about breaking the grip of Southern planters on the nation’s economic and political life. At a time when the data-driven social history of families and communities was all the rage among other young scholars, Foner persuasively insisted that big ideas and national politics still mattered.

Foner next turned his attention to another subject with a familial resonance, the history of American radicalism. He began with the American Revolution and intended to conclude with the New Left. However, he got so immersed in the life of Thomas Paine, one of the nation’s earliest and most prominent radicals, that he wound up devoting an entire book to him and never did get around to unraveling, at length, the rest of the left’s often tortured, occasionally triumphant past. The work he produced, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, returned to a theme found in his first book: the dialectic between moral purpose and political exigency. The English stay-maker turned pamphleteer pioneered notions about work, political freedom, and self-governance that future leftists would champion, but he was also a supporter of the new Constitution, written largely by men who sought to limit the power of the plebeian masses.

Despite these ambiguities in Paine’s politics, Foner persuasively argued that he was a radical forerunner: “Modern in his commitment to republicanism, democracy and revolution….modern in his secularism, modern in his belief in human perfectibility…modern in his peculiar combination of internationalism…with his defense…of a strong central government for America.” As in his book on the making of the Republican Party, Foner placed ideology at the core of his analysis. People start revolutions, he suggested, only when they acquire the ability to express their desires for fundamental change in fresh and enthralling ways.

ver the next decade, Foner returned to the Civil War, but his next major book focused on its aftermath. Adding to his fascination with ideology, Reconstruction is also a work of sweeping social and political history that helped revise how most historians—as well as much of the reading public—understood this crucial period. Most history textbooks rehashed it as a sorry tale of vengeful white Northern radicals who bestowed the vote on ignorant freedmen to punish white Southerners, leading to a period of political corruption and disorder. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars started to chip away at this bigoted and historically inaccurate portrait, pointing out that the fledgling biracial state governments in Dixie taxed big planters to pay for roads, schools, and hospitals that benefited everyone. But the idea, dripping with racist condescension, that Reconstruction was a “tragic era” had largely survived the legal demise of Jim Crow.

Foner destroyed that notion so completely that no serious historians—even those on the right—have attempted to revive it. Drawing on a wealth of documents written by and about freedmen and -women, he thrust to the center of the drama the determination of black people to exercise political power in the South and to assert their right to a share of the wealth and property their labor had created. Expanding on a thesis Du Bois developed in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, Foner showed that the struggle for true emancipation required economic as well as political equality. With the inconstant aid of federal agencies like the Freedmen’s Bureau, some African Americans went on strike for higher wages, while others squatted on fallow land, demanding that the government fulfill its promise to grant them homesteads so they could be truly independent of their former owners.

Throughout this grand narrative, Foner reveals how the actions of powerful men in both the North and the South closed down the possibilities for a social and economic transformation that black Americans helped open up in the South. In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens, the veteran abolitionist who was an influential Radical Republican leader in Congress, introduced a measure that would have confiscated Confederate lands and doled them out in 40-acre lots to freedmen and their families. But many of the same Republican colleagues who had rallied to pass the 13th and 14th Amendments balked at the idea of redistributing the wealth of traitors now that the war was over. Even most Radical Republicans, Foner wrote, “believed that in a free labor South…black and white would find their own level.” Giving freed people what one lawmaker called “a perfectly fair chance” should not mean challenging the unwritten rules of the capitalist economy. The defeat of Stevens’s plan doomed the potential for building a democratic order in the South and unintentionally sowed the seeds of a century of American apartheid.

More than 30 years after its publication, Foner’s book remains a thrilling piece of historical imagination as well as a vital work of pathbreaking research. It transformed Reconstruction from an epilogue to the drama of civil war into the pivot on which the future of African Americans, the South, and the nation turned. Unfortunately, in the late 1870s, the arc of history turned back to injustice as white politicians in the North abandoned the experiment in biracial democracy and let former Confederates take back control in Dixie.

In his next major work on the Civil War era, Foner examines our greatest president’s struggle throughout his political career with the question of how to bring about black freedom. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in 2010, applied the historian’s fascination with ideology to a question that countless authors inside and outside the academy had argued about for more than a century: how the self-made man from Illinois evolved from a local politician who assumed the inferiority of black people and merely hoped to stop the “peculiar institution” from spreading westward into the president who led what became a war to abolish slavery. To eradicate the sin of human bondage, Lincoln declared at his second inaugural in 1865, about a month before his murder, might require that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

Although Foner clearly admires Lincoln, the book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history, bore out the logic of his subject’s modest statement in 1864 that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” As a young politician, Lincoln was content to leave the decision of whether to abolish slavery up to each state. During his first months in the White House, he made no protest when Congress passed a constitutional amendment that would have stopped the federal government from interfering with slavery where it existed. Less than two years later, however, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Then, in 1863, he oversaw the recruitment of close to 200,000 black soldiers, most of whom had recently been freed or escaped from bondage.

As with his first book, Foner explains a feat of ideological conversion. His incisive tracking of Lincoln’s speeches and writings about slavery, combined with a matchless grasp of the political exigencies of war, results in a narrative simultaneously intimate and of major historical consequence. It is probably as close a study of Lincoln’s mind on this critical matter as can ever be written, and Foner’s judgment balances a biographer’s praise with the contextual sobriety of a historian: “If Lincoln achieved greatness, he grew into it.”

he Second Founding draws on a theme that has animated all of Foner’s work, the gap between the nation’s lofty ideals and the way those in power, abetted by the prejudices and fears of ordinary people, fail to act on or deliberately sabotage efforts to embody them in durable laws and institutions. Here, he dwells more than ever before on the complex yet profound consequences of additions to the Constitution that, on paper, may appear rather straightforward attempts to secure the gains of Reconstruction into perpetuity.

The import of the 13th Amendment, for example, seems simple enough. It abolished slavery and any other form of “involuntary servitude,” save for those convicted of a crime. Recently, critics of mass incarceration, such as Ava DuVernay with her documentary 13th, have made the amendment an emblem of the country’s long history of legal racism. Yet Foner also points out how fundamental a departure the amendment was at the time from the constitutional norms that had existed since the ratification of the founding document nearly 80 years before. The 13th Amendment did not just end slavery; it “created a new fundamental right to personal freedom, applicable to all persons in the United States regardless of race, gender, class, or citizenship status.” In Congress, most Democrats, marrying foul racism with a defense of states’ rights, warned that if valuable possessions in the form of human beings could be wrested from their owners without compensation, nothing would prevent power-hungry Republicans from seizing other forms of property.

Foner then turns to the even greater consequences of the 14th Amendment. He recounts how the Republicans who controlled Congress enacted it over the irate protests of President Andrew Johnson, a dedicated white supremacist who passionately opposed giving black people any rights besides the right not to be owned. Johnson’s partisan adversaries passed a series of acts that compelled any former Confederate state that wanted to elect people to Congress again to ratify the amendment, which included giving black men who lived within their borders the right to vote. The Republican majority added the guarantee of citizenship to any child born in the United States—an entitlement only a few countries bestow today.

But Foner pushes further in making clear how the expansive language of the amendment also allowed champions of the rising corporate order to institute “freedom” of a quite different kind. The first section of the amendment famously bars states from depriving “any person” of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process of law” and prohibits states from denying “the equal protection of the laws” to their residents. Because the drafters did not define “person,” Supreme Court majorities regularly used it to strike down laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures to regulate big business. In 2011, when Mitt Romney snapped at a heckler, “Corporations are people, my friend,” he was evoking that pro-capitalist doctrine of “personhood.”

Foner shrewdly points out that hardly any of the Republican-appointed justices who used the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against working- and middle-class interests had been among the corps of antislavery activists and politicians who conceived of the amendment and advocated its passage. But in the final decades of the 19th century, the GOP moved closer in spirit to the tycoon-loving body that nominated Mr. Bain Capital than the party led by the president who vowed that the Civil War would usher in a “new birth of freedom.”

When Foner moves on to the 15th Amendment, he tells a similar story of splendid intentions written into law before being undermined. The clear statement that the right to vote cannot be “denied or abridged…on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” failed to prohibit other sorts of restrictions on the franchise. By 1900, canny racist politicians employed devices like poll taxes, requirements to interpret arcane parts of state constitutions, and old felony convictions to disenfranchise most African American men in the South. As the memory of Reconstruction faded, neither the Supreme Court nor federal lawmakers felt any pressure to reverse the actions of these saboteurs. Digging into Congress’s debates about the amendment in 1869, Foner finds that even its Republican sponsors understood how weak its provisions might prove to be. One senator grumbled that “it left untouched…’all the existing irregularities and incongruities in suffrage’, other than those explicitly directed at blacks.”

An ironclad statement that guaranteed suffrage to all adult men would have been much harder to subvert. But the amendment’s sponsors feared that three-quarters of the state legislatures would never ratify language that so clearly took away their power, enshrined in Article I of the Constitution, to decide which of their residents had the right to vote and which did not. When it came to interpreting the law, to quote Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master—that’s all.”

or a historian so instrumental in moving the mainstream of American historical writing leftward, Foner can be warmly empathetic toward the work of earlier scholars whose personal politics differ rather markedly from his. This is, in particular, the case with Richard Hofstadter, his graduate school mentor at Columbia, whose approach to history he praised in a 1992 essay.

In the postwar years, there was no more admired or popular author of American history in the country. Yet two decades after his death in 1970, at the age of 54, Hofstadter’s scorn for what he viewed as the nostalgia and xenophobia of Gilded Age populism; his neglect of the histories of women, the working class, and black people; and his increasingly defensive liberal opinions alienated many young historians. It didn’t help that Adlai Stevenson was the contemporary politician this cautious liberal admired most. Hofstadter’s reputation among left-wing scholars has, in fact, only declined further since then. A few years ago, at a scholarly conference, someone in the audience shouted that Hofstadter was a terrible historian. No one told him to shut up.

In his 1992 essay, Foner does not mention such rising disdain, but he does explain Hofstadter’s influence on his own intellectual and scholarly career. Hofstadter, he insists, crafted works imbued with graceful prose and provocative arguments about everything from the emergence of mass parties to the influence of social Darwinism to the “paranoid style” of the right, and he did so while demonstrating an ability “to range over the length and breadth of American history.”

Having broken with the economically determinist Marxism of his youth, Hofstadter put at the center of his work what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “common sense,” including an appreciation of how difficult it could be for radicals to break through this ideological consensus. In The American Political Tradition, published in 1948, Hofstadter argued that, in a variety of ways, nearly all of the nation’s leaders, from the founding fathers to Franklin Roosevelt, promoted the hegemony of market society and made radical alternatives to it seem downright unpatriotic. With such ironic chapter titles as “Thomas Jefferson: The Aristocrat as Democrat” and “Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal,” Hofstadter’s book challenged the sanctimonious regard for America’s leading men—and sold over 1 million copies. “It is indeed ironic,” Foner reflects, “that one of the most devastating indictments of American political culture ever written should have become the introduction to American history for two generations of students.” (Indeed, on the epic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis, now a longtime US congressman from Georgia, brought The American Political Tradition along in his knapsack.)

In paying tribute to Hofstadter, Foner inadvertently offers some insight into what makes his own work so critical to understanding the political ambiguities at the heart of America’s past and present. Both he and Hofstadter came out of the Marxist left, but both placed ideas about how the United States was governed at the center of their work. Both regretted the gap between the promise and practice of mass democracy in the past, yet both wrote out of what Hofstadter called “a concern with some present reality.” As writers, both scrupulously avoided dumbing down their narratives or resorting to even a smidgen of jargon. Foner’s essay about his late adviser concludes, “His writings stand as a model of what historical scholarship at its finest can aspire to achieve.” The author might well have been describing himself.

As long as there has been a US government, white Southerners have done their best to dominate it. They shoehorned the three-fifths clause into the Constitution, expanded slavery beyond the banks of the Mississippi River, started an armed rebellion to preserve that evil institution, created terrorist outfits like the Ku Klux Klan to sabotage Reconstruction, installed an American version of apartheid, and then fought the modern civil-rights movement with bombast, filibusters, and violence. In the 1960s, when a Democratic president and Congress finally passed laws that nullified the most blatantly racist statutes in the South, resentful whites below the Mason-Dixon Line began migrating to the Republican Party, which betrayed its Lincolnian roots in return for a sizable new constituency. The Mississippi voters who elected Cindy Hyde-Smith, a latter-day admirer of the Confederacy, to the US Senate last fall were merely extending a long, benighted tradition.

Yet in that same region often lurked another set of impulses that today’s progressives might cheer. In 1877, during a nationwide railroad strike, a Memphis newspaper asserted that the federal government should be “wrested from the hands of those who manipulate it to their own aggrandizement and to the oppression of the masses.” It was only one of many newspapers to champion the cause of organized labor. Three decades later, every major piece of legislation that President Woodrow Wilson signed to regulate big business—from a major anti-trust act to an eight-hour day for railroad workers—was crafted by a Democrat from one of the states that barred most African Americans from voting. Later, when Franklin Roosevelt sat in the White House, such landmark New Deal achievements as Social Security, the minimum wage, and protections for labor organizers would not have become law without the backing of explicitly racist lawmakers from Dixie.

The authors of two new books—David Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John Lapinski in Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction and Devin Caughey in The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave—take up this apparent contradiction and show how it helps to explain why the region switched from being the stronghold of one party to the base of its adversary.

Both books also come to a similar conclusion: that most white voters in the South, as well as the politicians they elected, were fine with egalitarian economic policies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries so long as they didn’t threaten to disrupt the Jim Crow order. Some endorsed these policies for purely instrumental reasons—as the price of sustaining an alliance with Democrats from the urban North who needed to win the votes of industrial workers. But others believed, with ample justification, that industrialists and Wall Street financiers ran the economy solely to benefit themselves, at the expense of small farmers and wage earners. Of course, the only exploitation these voters cared about was that suffered by white people, and this “egalitarian whiteness”—the concise term used by Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski to describe this combination of racial supremacy and working-class egalitarianism—helped keep the South solidly Democratic through the first half of the 20th century.

It is fitting that these historically minded works of political science bear the imprint of Princeton University Press. After all, the university’s most famous president was a distinguished political scientist who grew up in Dixie and, as the nation’s 28th president, instituted some notable reforms while also overseeing the segregation of a large part of the federal bureaucracy.

outhern Nation is the more ambitious of the two volumes. Its authors examine not just how Dixie Democrats forged and fought for a common agenda in Congress built around both white supremacy and taxing the rich, but also how much this agenda ended up shaping domestic policy writ large. When lawmakers from the South strongly favored a bill, such as the Federal Reserve Act or the 16th Amendment allowing Congress to impose an income tax, it passed. When they opposed a bill, such as the one proposed by Republicans in the late 1880s that would have enabled federal officials to supervise the conduct of elections all across the country, they nearly always managed to kill it.

And Southern politicians kept winning on Capitol Hill even when their party didn’t control the White House or either chamber of Congress. By the early 20th century, most Republicans had essentially given up the battle to secure the right to vote that the 15th Amendment had guaranteed to black men—a right that the Democrats, who ruled every Southern state, had gradually stripped away from them. Moreover, some GOP leaders were quite willing to endorse that effort: In his 1909 inaugural address, President William Howard Taft confidently proclaimed, “The danger of the control of an ignorant electorate has…passed. With this change, the interest which many of the Southern white citizens take in the welfare of the negroes has increased.” It is hard to overestimate the power of a bloc of lawmakers united by the aim of preserving a racial order and able to use their mastery of the rules to wear down, if not convert, the opposition.

The authors of Southern Nation make their argument through a rigorous analysis of scores of legislative conflicts and outcomes. In less skillful hands, this could make for a long slog through a series of arcane disputes among politicians whom even most historians of the period ignore. But Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski know how to tell a good story, which on occasion also turns out to be a rather dramatic one. In 1922, for example, Congress had a sizable Republican majority, and the party, which still retained traces of its abolitionist heritage, seemed poised to pass an anti-lynching bill that black activists and journalists like Ida B. Wells had long advocated. It would have been the first significant blow against legal racism since the end of Reconstruction, in 1877. The bill’s sponsors even persuaded one border-state Democrat, as well as seven of his Northern colleagues, to support it. But Southerners in the Senate found ways to slow down the process and threatened to filibuster the measure if it came up for debate on the floor. By the end of the year, the GOP’s leaders had surrendered and moved on. As the authors note, “The belief that the South could unilaterally, and relatively easily, defeat civil rights legislation would endure for decades.”

Dixie lawmakers also kept regulations placed on a critical part of the economy from undercutting the Jim Crow order. In 1906, Congress—then under GOP control—passed the Hepburn Act, a landmark measure that set an upper limit on railroad rates and required the transport firms to file annual reports with the Interstate Commerce Commission. Southern lawmakers made clear that they hoped to vote for the measure but would filibuster it to death if it included language that did away with segregated passenger cars. Progressive Republicans acquiesced to their Democratic colleagues. “After the deed was done,” the authors write, “a black paper from Indianapolis mocked the sight of the ‘old parties join[ing] hands on the color line.’”

Southern Nation’s single-minded emphasis on the grim achievements of a determined group of Dixiecrats neglects the influence that Democrats from other regions had on the party’s increasing commitment to anti-corporate and pro-labor causes. During the early 20th century, the bosses of New York’s Tammany Hall called for the municipal ownership of utilities and the inspection of factories and groomed progressives like Alfred E. Smith and Robert Wagner to become leaders, first in New York State and then on a national scale. In his three runs for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan, who hailed from Nebraska, courted unions and argued for passing a strongly progressive income tax and clapping the violators of antitrust laws in jail. During his 1908 campaign, Bryan won the endorsement of the American Federation of Labor—the start of a long, if often troubled, marriage between the Democrats and organized labor.

Even so, the authors of Southern Nation are right to emphasize the considerable sway of segregationists over the party in the first half of the 20th century. No leading Democrat from the North or West was willing to risk dividing his party by standing up for the rights of black people. “Egalitarian whiteness” even wormed its way into some of the landmark bills of the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, written by Wagner, excluded workers who toiled in agriculture or other people’s homes—the only occupations available to most black people in the South at the time. When first enacted, Social Security also left those same groups out in the cold.

But even as Northern Democrats wrote such racist exclusions into law, their Dixie brethren were beginning to doubt that Roosevelt and the coalition he built really had their best interests at heart. As the mass suffering of the Depression faded, a growing number of Southern politicians voiced alarm that the interracial unions of the CIO, which undergirded the Democrats in the industrial North, might shatter the Jim Crow order if they organized successfully in the South as well. When, in 1947, a bipartisan majority passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted strikes and boycotts and allowed states to pass “right-to-work” laws, only four Southern Democratic senators voted to uphold President Harry Truman’s veto.

Though most Democrats did not yet realize it, this vote marked a momentous disruption in the strong transregional coalition that had governed the nation since the early 1930s. The gap widened in 1948, when Hubert Humphrey and other liberal Democrats succeeded in getting a strong civil-rights plank added to the platform on which Truman would run that fall. Furious at this break with the party’s fidelity to Jim Crow, a group of segregationists bolted from the Democratic convention and nominated a States’ Rights ticket headed by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. From the end of Reconstruction until the 1950s, Democrats had won every single Senate election and nearly every House seat in the South. But by the time George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, conservative Republicans held a majority of those offices. The consequences of that rightward turn produced a sea change in American politics.

n The Unsolid South, Devin Caughey uncovers the roots of this transformation in the many combative primaries fought among Southern Democrats in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Party officials either prohibited blacks from voting in these contests or made it difficult or even dangerous for them to do so. But the primaries, in which only a white “selectorate” (as Caughey calls it) took part, still turned into pitched battles between those who defended the New Deal and hoped to expand it and those who warned that a party led by FDR and his liberal successors was beholden to powerful unions that could not be trusted to uphold white supremacy.

One of the starkest examples in Caughey’s book comes from a rural district in South Carolina. In 1948, Hugo Sims, a World War II veteran in his late 20s, took on John J. Riley, the incumbent congressman, who often voted with right-wing Republicans. Although Sims had the backing of the local CIO textile union, he ran on banal slogans like “The man who gets elected will be the one who knows and is liked by the most people” and swept the primary. Once he got to Washington, Sims supported every significant measure that the Truman administration proposed. The young pol insisted that he could “work out a liberal program a Southerner can run on and get elected.” But he neglected the growing hostility of his white constituents to Truman’s Fair Deal, which included presidential statements of support for civil rights and the desegregation of the armed forces. “We call it the Raw Deal down here,” snapped one white farmer. In the 1950 primary, Riley took on Sims again; this time, he crushed his young rival by 20 percentage points.

A decade before this, another young Southern congressman, one Lyndon Baines Johnson from Texas, had already learned the dangers of poking at the vitals of the racist order. In 1938, Johnson watched Maury Maverick, a liberal firebrand from San Antonio, lose his bid for renomination after he became the only Southern member of Congress to endorse a federal law against lynching. “I can go [only] so far in Texas…my people won’t take it,” Johnson complained to a fellow New Dealer. “Maury forgot that and he is not here…. There’s nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” Yet in the late ’50s, Johnson risked angering his own constituents and broke with his Southern colleagues to help pass a civil-rights act, the first since Reconstruction. By then, however, he had become the shrewd majority leader of the Democratic Caucus and wanted desperately to be president.

While Caughey’s study is empirically impressive, it lacks the popular touch that makes Southern Nation a pleasing, if lengthy, read. Those unfamiliar with social-science methods who come across such chapter subtitles as “Details of the Group-Level IRT Models” and “Variation Across Issue Domains” may decide that The Unsolid South is not for them. But Caughey’s granular text explains as well as any previous history why white Southerners were primed to vote for a conservative Republican like Barry Goldwater years before he ran for president in 1964. Except for just two occasions—when segregationist George Wallace ran as an independent in 1968, and when Jimmy Carter ran as a Democrat in 1976—a majority of white Southerners have cast their ballots for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since then.

hese richly detailed books provide a sober, enlightening analysis of why Southern Democrats endured so long and prospered—before abandoning their partisan home for the embrace of a Republican Party led by the likes of Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Bushes. But the authors seldom mention those episodes in the Southern past that, taken together, enable one to imagine a different, interracial, and more egalitarian path for the South.

In the 1880s and early 1890s, black and white Southerners organized in segregated branches of the Farmers’ Alliance and in the People’s Party to battle the harm that “the money power” was doing to the livelihood of small farmers. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, the Highlander Folk Center in rural Tennessee nurtured interracial movements for labor and black freedom that eventually helped shake up the entire region in the 1960s. And last fall, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Beto O’Rourke in Texas all came close to writing a far more hopeful chapter in Dixie’s electoral history.

For now, however, most white Southerners continue to embody the same paradox that their ancestors did: They’re happy to benefit from the federal programs enacted by Democrats over the past century, while scorning the idea that the federal government should help black folks in equal ways. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, the last Democratic senator from South Carolina (he retired in 2005), was fond of telling an anecdote about one of his white constituents who embodied this view. It is worth repeating in full:

A veteran returning from Korea went to college on the GI Bill, bought his house with an FHA loan, saw his kids born in a VA hospital, started a business with an SBA loan, got electricity from TVA and, later, water from an EPA project. His parents, living on Social Security, retired to a farm, got electricity from REA, and had their soil tested by the USDA. When his father became ill, the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare, and a life was saved with a drug developed through NIH. His kids participated in the school lunch program, learned physics from teachers trained in an NSF program, and went to college with guaranteed student loans. He drove to work on the Interstate and moored his boat in a channel dredged by Army engineers. When floods hit, he took Amtrak to Washington to apply for disaster relief and spent some time in the Smithsonian museums. Then one day, he got mad. He wrote his senator an angry letter. “Get the government off my back,” he wrote. “I’m tired of paying taxes for all those programs created for ungrateful people!”

Only Democrats, of any race, who can speak truth to such Southerners and make them like it will finally put the long, painful dilemma of Dixie politics behind us.

I used to hate Hubert Humphrey. Fifty years ago, the only part of this once-renowned liberal’s career that mattered to me was his unflinching support for the despicable war in Vietnam. In late August of 1968, I traveled to the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest his nomination for president. That fall, with other radicals, I organized a demonstration urging everyone to boycott the election. “Vote with your feet, vote in the streets!” we shouted as we marched up to the State House in Boston.1

In my small, disruptive fashion, I probably helped elect a president who made American politics a whole lot worse. Under Richard Nixon, the nation began to move rightward, a shift from which we are still struggling to recover. And Mr. Watergate took four years to withdraw our troops from Vietnam, after another 20,000 US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians had died. So I struggle with the question of whether leftists like myself, and anti-war liberals as well, should have stopped chanting “Dump the Hump” and did what we could to defeat that greater evil and perhaps manage to preserve the New Deal order for at least a few more years.2

Arnold Offner’s new biography, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country, helps to clarify why that question remains a devilishly challenging one. The author, whose previous books concerned diplomatic history, supplies all the evidence one could want to prove that Humphrey played a major role in leading his party—and, to a degree, his country—to reject Jim Crow and embrace a number of social-democratic policies. Yet Humphrey’s decision to become the most prominent Democratic cheerleader for the US atrocity in Indochina also turned his life of liberal achievement into a tragedy. Not everything he did in politics before the 1960s was virtuous. But when Humphrey devoted himself to selling President Lyndon Johnson’s war, he suffered a dual defeat: He failed to convince the public, and he sabotaged his chance to become president—the ambition that had, for the most part, spurred his hawkishness in the first place. Far more significant, however, was what his defeat represented: the end of an era when liberal Democrats were the dominant force in US politics.3

he Humphrey tragedy can be divided into four acts. The first begins with his birth in 1911 and ends with the nationally broadcast speech in 1948 that made him a liberal hero.4

Humphrey grew up in the upper Midwest, the fertile seedbed for such progressive stalwarts as Jane Addams, Robert La Follette, Eugene Debs, and William Jennings Bryan. His father, Hubert Sr., owned a drugstore in Doland, South Dakota—a town so small that it contained only a dozen businesses. Hubert Sr. also found time to teach Sunday-school classes imbued with the Social Gospel and to serve as mayor of his hamlet and then as a member of the State Assembly. Raised as a Republican, the political home of most Midwestern Protestants since the Civil War, Humphrey’s father bolted for the opposition party after hearing a Bryan speech, and he never looked back.5

Unlike his father, Hubert Jr. had no intention of dividing his time between politics and pharmaceuticals. After excelling in classes and debate at the University of Minnesota, he considered becoming an academic. But during World War II, he leapt into that state’s New Deal politics and began a climb to a leadership role in the Democratic Party.6

In 1944, Minnesota’s Democratic Party merged with its left-wing Farmer-Labor Party, which had run the state during part of the 1930s and whose leaders wanted to transcend corporate capitalism. The alliance was an uneasy one at first, but Humphrey managed to please both sides enough to get elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945, at the age of just 34. In City Hall, his aggressive efforts to build housing for war veterans, negotiate fair settlements in local labor disputes, and root out corruption in the police department made him a favorite for higher office.7

Most Americans outside of Minnesota first heard of Humphrey in 1948. At that year’s Democratic Convention, he played a major role in writing a section of the platform that committed the party, for the first time in its history, to enacting a federal civil-rights bill. On the last day of the convention, the young mayor stood at the podium and declared, “The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People—human beings—this is the issue of the 20th century.”8

Delegates from two Southern states walked out in protest and began to organize the States’ Rights (or “Dixiecrat”) party. But Humphrey’s eloquent stand, heard by millions on the radio and by others on the new medium of television, made him an idol to all those Americans who wanted to “march down the high road of progressive democracy” with him. That fall, Humphrey swept into the US Senate, following a campaign in which he gave some 700 speeches and had the strong backing of organized labor.9

umphrey’s second act began in Washington and lacked the heroism of the first. He first served in the Senate for 16 years, maneuvering consistently, if not effectively, to enhance his own presidential prospects. Often, both his ambition and his principles led him to take positions that backed up his 1957 statement that he was “a liberal without apology.” Humphrey tried to scrap the prevailing immigration law that discriminated against anyone not from Western Europe. In 1954, he initiated what became the Food for Peace program and kept fighting for civil-rights legislation throughout that decade. Outside the South, most Democratic activists were hungry for candidates who could bring back the kinds of passion and programs that had energized the New Deal, and the senator from Minnesota was eager to lead the revival.10

But when it came to the Cold War, Humphrey took pains to show that he could be as unbending in his belligerence as any right-wing Republican. In 1954, adding a red-hunter line to his résumé, he sponsored a nasty piece of legislation that outlawed membership in the Communist Party. Civil libertarians condemned it, as did many liberal lawmakers in both parties. “We do not have to abdicate the Constitution to catch Communists,” remarked Estes Kefauver, an influential Democratic senator from Tennessee. The act passed that year but was rarely invoked or tested in court. Ominously, that same year, Humphrey also denounced the State Department for giving away “half of Vietnam” to the communists after Ho Chi Minh’s forces defeated the French.11

His well-publicized record as a Cold War liberal was not enough to win him the presidential nomination in 1960. Humphrey’s race against John F. Kennedy, who had money to burn and glamour to spare, was like a sturdy plow horse attempting to best a thoroughbred in the Kentucky Derby. That May, JFK won a crushing victory in the West Virginia primary—where pundits thought his Catholicism would work against him—and the nag from the Plains immediately withdrew from the race. Humphrey returned to the Senate, where he took the lead in making the Peace Corps permanent and ratifying the treaty to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere.12

n 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, Humphrey took a different path to the White House, and the third, climactic act of his life began. He reasoned, writes Offner, that “as a poor man from a small state and without rich friends,” he would first have to be elected vice president. So, throughout that spring and summer, Humphrey worked relentlessly to gain Johnson’s favor.13

Together with GOP Senate leader Everett Dirksen, he led the effort to kill a Southern filibuster against LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights Act, which passed in July 1964. To prove his fealty to Johnson, who feared losing the entire South, Humphrey then squelched an attempt by the biracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at that year’s national convention instead of the racists who made up the state’s official delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer, the charismatic MFDP activist, scolded Humphrey for worrying about his own future instead of the rights of black Americans. “I’m going to pray to Jesus for you,” she told him.14

By thwarting the MFDP’s challenge, Humphrey managed to get his own prayers answered: LBJ chose him as his running mate. Privately, Johnson let it be known that any man he picked for the job would have to abandon the last shred of independence—or, in his vivid vernacular, “I want his pecker to be in my pocket.” By the time Humphrey took the oath of office, he had performed the metaphorical excision required.15

Offner’s lengthy account of his subject’s years as vice president will make many readers cringe. Although Humphrey first doubted the wisdom of LBJ’s escalation of the war, he soon became its most ardent promoter. The vice president, according to a cabinet member and close friend, was determined to be “a good boy at all times.” He praised Johnson for offering the Vietnamese enemy “an Asian New Deal” and compared the US commitment to the Saigon government with that of Franklin Roosevelt to Churchill’s Britain during the Second World War. In The New York Times, columnist Tom Wicker quipped that the vice president’s relentless flacking had earned him “a place at the White House table, just above the salt.”16

The war undid LBJ’s administration. After winning 61 percent of the vote in 1964, Johnson nearly lost the New Hampshire primary four years later and decided to pull out of the presidential race.17

During his own run for the White House in 1968, Humphrey worried that a break with Johnson would destroy his chances, although LBJ did little to help his campaign and may even have hoped that Nixon would win. The vice president delayed issuing his own peace plan until it was too late to have an effect on the race. “You know,” Humphrey confessed to an aide, “I’ve eaten so much of Johnson’s shit in this job that I’ve grown to like the taste of it.” His nearly four years of unprincipled groveling at the most critical time of his career almost made me wonder whether Offner meant the subtitle of his book—“The Conscience of the Country”—as a joke.18

n his fourth and final act, Humphrey attempted to rebuild the progressive reputation he had squandered as LBJ’s lackey and as a Cold War hawk. After being reelected to the Senate in 1970, he introduced a bill to extend health insurance to every citizen. He also co-wrote, with Augustus Hawkins, a black congressman from Los Angeles, an act that guaranteed a job at a decent wage to every American able to work. The health bill failed to pass, and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act got watered down into a promise with no plan or resources to carry it out. But it did mark Humphrey’s return to his earlier passion for social and economic change.19

In 1972, the erstwhile hero, having turned against the war, ran for president again. However, most liberal Democrats understandably preferred George McGovern, the South Dakota senator who had once been Humphrey’s protégé yet had strongly opposed the war in Vietnam when the vice president was defending it. With labor support, Humphrey battled for the party’s nomination all the way to the convention, but McGovern won on the first ballot. After this defeat, Humphrey spent the rest of his life in the Senate, returning to the domestic liberalism that had made him both famous and popular.20

Besides the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, he crusaded for full employment and a higher minimum wage and introduced a bill to guarantee every American child the right to nutritious food. Early in 1976, Gallup reported that most Democrats again wanted the Minnesota senator to be their nominee for president. But after agonizing for months, Humphrey decided that he had neither the funds nor the passion to go through the ordeal again. He told New York Times columnist James Reston that he would look “ridiculous” if he ran a fourth campaign that managed only to divide his party and hand the election to the incumbent, Gerald Ford.21

Diagnosed with cancer midway through 1977, Humphrey died early the next year. By order of President Jimmy Carter, his body lay in state under the dome of the Capitol, where thousands came to view it on a frigid winter day. The postmortem plaudits from his colleagues were lavish and sincere. “He was never elected president,” remarked Senator Edward Muskie, his running mate in 1968, “but now he’s being honored like one. He’d like that.” As much as any reform he’d advocated or won, Humphrey’s unrequited desire to grab the brass ring of state defined him to the end.22

umphrey’s personal tragedy was also a key episode in the very public tragedy of American liberalism. Liberals could not have avoided engaging in the Cold War. Stalin and his successors were enemies of democracy and individual freedom, and they also posed a threat to American interests abroad, competing for the allegiance of peoples and governments around the world. But in creating a vast empire of American bases and allies that spanned the globe, liberals like Humphrey didn’t help matters, falling prey to their own delusions about American beneficence. They also came to believe that any inhabitant of a poor, exploited land who fought for “national liberation,” whether they were inspired by Marxism-Leninism or not, was somehow part of a conspiracy hatched by the Kremlin, Mao, or Castro. As Carl Oglesby, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, explained in 1965, Cold War liberalism23

depicts our presence in other lands not as a coercion, but a protection. It allows us even to say that the napalm in Vietnam is only another aspect of our humanitarian love—like those exorcisms in the Middle Ages that so often killed the patient. So we say to the Vietnamese peasant, the Cuban intellectual, the Peruvian worker: “You are better dead than Red. If it hurts or if you don’t understand why—sorry about that.”24

As a result, the war in Vietnam became a liberal one—led by liberals, justified by liberal rhetoric, and caused by liberal misunderstandings of national liberation struggles—and it was liberals who rightly got the blame when it ended in ignominy and defeat.25

By the 1980s, that debacle, together with the failure of Democrats in the White House and Congress to address stagflation and the energy crisis, helped turn a majority of Americans against candidates like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whom Humphrey had once scorned as “George Wallace sprinkled with eau de cologne,” voters rejected the vision of a larger and more generous welfare state that Humphrey advocated and worked for, even if such achievements as the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and federal aid to schools and colleges remained popular. The platform that Humphrey had run on in 1968 included grand promises to make the income tax more progressive, to secure health care and housing as a right of every citizen, to strengthen labor unions, and to extend the anti-poverty program. But those worthy ideas were preceded by a vow to keep fighting in Vietnam so that the “aggression and subversion” of communists would not “succeed.” Not surprisingly, the Democratic campaign could not draw the media’s attention to any other issue.26

Half a century later, I do regret that I could not see Humphrey as anything but a stooge for a policy that I abhor, in retrospect, just as much as I did then. But in its sobriety, a historical perspective can also minimize or ignore the importance of the moral resolve to shout “there is some shit I will not eat,” as E.E. Cummings famously wrote in a poem about a conscientious objector during World War I. It’s a shame of substantial consequence that, as vice president and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1968, Humphrey was unwilling to tell the truth about Vietnam. He might have become, at that decisive moment, the true conscience of his country—a badge of political courage that might have vaulted him into the White House after all.27

An earlier version of this article referred to Humphrey’s 1968 running mate as Edward Muskie; his first name, in fact, was Edmund. The Nation regrets the error.

Jimmy Carter was surely one of the unluckiest presidents in US history. He took office in 1977 with an economy racked by stagflation and dependent on imported oil; a foreign policy humbled by the debacle of the Vietnam War; a Democratic Party split between Northern liberals and Southern conservatives; and a country in the grip of rampant cynicism on the question of whether the federal government was able to solve any serious problem at all. Outside the White House, Carter also faced a growing political right united around Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, and eager to pounce on any missteps or signs of weakness.1

Even a shrewd politician would have found it difficult to successfully navigate these obstacles to accomplish big things and get himself reelected. Carter had captured the 1976 nomination and defeated President Gerald Ford by appealing deftly to the country’s post-Watergate disgust with Washington “insiders” (although he blew a huge lead in the polls and received barely half the popular vote). That year, neither major-party nominee raised much private money; each ran his campaign almost entirely on the funds provided by the millions of Americans who checked a donation box on their tax returns. What a world we have lost.2

Once Carter moved into the White House, the erstwhile nuclear engineer and peanut producer proved to be an absolutely wretched politician. His campaign had promised “A government as good as its people,” as enticingly hollow a specimen of soft populism as has ever been concocted. Yet he had no idea how to translate even that anodyne pledge into anything resembling an attractive set of policies or a governing coalition that would support and defend them.3

Instead of a coherent strategy, Carter pursued a disparate set of projects, often with little popular backing, that he was sincerely convinced were necessary for the well-being of the nation and the world. Some of these were laudable, then and today. He granted amnesty to draft resisters and sought to conserve energy and protect wilderness areas. He promoted human rights and, despite resistance from conservative senators like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, championed the treaties that would eventually turn over exclusive control of the Panama Canal to Panama. But other of his initiatives were either based on dubious logic—pursuing a balanced budget; deregulating the airline and trucking industries—or, in the case of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, did nothing to resolve the underlying issue at stake: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One also led to a globe-shaking fiasco: Carter’s decision to stand by the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, after the Iranian Revolution erupted continues to roil our domestic politics and our relations with the Muslim world. And when young Iranian insurgents seized the diplomats and citizens at the US embassy in Tehran and held many of them hostage for 444 days, they handed Republicans a strong weapon with which to bash the incumbent president as soft and helpless.4

Carter made things worse by showing contempt for partisan differences. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once scorned him as “the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland.” The liberal historian was only half right: Carter did oppose the sweeping national health-insurance plan advanced by Senator Ted Kennedy, explaining that “I need to enhance an image of fiscal responsibility,” and he peered at older social programs through an austerity-tinted lens. But he broke away decisively from his upbringing in the Jim Crow South by enforcing the Voting Rights Act and naming African Americans to high positions in his administration, among them the secretary of health, education, and welfare and the ambassador to the United Nations. No president before him had appointed more women to significant federal jobs, from cabinet secretaries to judges. Only one woman sat on a federal court when Carter entered the White House. By the time he left, he had appointed 40 more—including a pioneering advocate for women’s rights named Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who would later become the second female justice to serve on the Supreme Court.5

Stuart Eizenstat, who advised Carter on domestic affairs and remains his friend to this day, has made a mighty effort to document all these decisions and a great deal more. He hopes a narrative as thick and detailed as this one will persuade readers that Carter’s single term as president was among “the most consequential in modern history.” “Far from a failed presidency,” Eizenstat writes, Carter “left behind concrete reforms and long-lasting benefits to the people of the United States as well as the international order.” To support this redemptive mission, Eizenstat’s publisher has coaxed blurbs from a roster of mostly retired heavies from both major parties: Alan Greenspan, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger, among others. Madeleine Albright chimes in with a foreword praising Carter as “a great man…our country was lucky to have him as our leader.”6

Unlike the former secretary of state, however, Eizenstat isn’t reluctant to criticize his hero from time to time. “To be truly effective,” he writes on page 2, “a president cannot make a sharp break between the politics of his campaign and the politics of governing if he wants to nurture an effective national coalition. This,” he continues, “Carter not only failed to achieve—he did not want to.” Yet Eizenstat goes on to devote most of his very long book to describing how, despite this flaw, the brilliant man from Plains, Georgia, managed to make lasting changes that benefited the nation and the world.7

arter’s flops still overwhelm the narrative, as they did for most of the Americans who lived through his term. Eizenstat attempts to bury the failures in apologetic context, arguing that Carter had inherited too many weighty problems for him to solve. But whatever the obstacles to a more successful outcome, a botched policy remains a botched policy. Eizenstat describes, for example, the three-year struggle to pass comprehensive energy legislation at a time when oil prices often spiked and Americans seemed at the mercy of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). It was a task the president, quoting William James, had called the “moral equivalent of war.” Less inspiringly, Carter scolded Americans for being addicted to “self-indulgence and consumption.”8

By the time his Energy Security Act passed in 1980, the president had squandered a good deal of political capital. With his approval rating hovering around 30 percent, Carter nevertheless managed to pass a bill that, as Eizenstat asserts, created “explicit incentives to produce clean alternative energy sources.” However, few Americans were in the mood to celebrate—and at the behest of oil and coal producers, future administrations have been able to render those incentives as expendable as the president who, for his televised address, famously urged Americans to turn their thermostats down.9

In recounting Carter’s disastrous Iran policy, Eizenstat adopts a similar tone of Sisyphean exasperation. After the CIA helped restore the shah to power in a military coup in 1953, Iran had been America’s closest partner in the Middle East. So how could Carter abandon someone who was “an increasingly unpopular autocratic leader but a strategically vital ally”? And who could have predicted that the shah would be toppled by a revolution led by theocrats? “One could fill an ocean with what the United States did not know about developments in Iran,” Eizenstat laments.10

Like his big-shot blurbers, Eizenstat assumes that America’s role in the world was essentially benign and remains so to this day. Yet millions of Iranians never forgot the role that the United States played in overthrowing the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, installing a police-state monarchy in its place. To Eizenstat, this is a mere historical detail that might have been successfully overcome if our spooks had not been so credulous. In the end, the author asserts, Carter did not “lose Iran”; the shah “lost his own country.” But what about those officials in Washington who put him back on the throne in the first place, and then worked for decades to keep him there?11

izenstat hasn’t written a book that the sizable cohort of readers who rush to buy presidential biographies by the likes of Ron Chernow and Robert Dallek will probably find enjoyable. But political scholars will be grateful for his careful descriptions of how the administration’s policies were made or unmade, advanced or defeated, as viewed from his perch in the White House. Insider accounts have their drawbacks, but reliable histories of the powerful cannot be written without them.12

However, future authors will have to look elsewhere for explanations of Carter’s most significant flaw: his failure to understand that he needed both a loyal political party and an energized partisan base to convert his good intentions into lasting results. When Carter took office, the Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress were nearly as large as they had been during the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the mid-1960s. To be fair, Carter’s party was severely divided; white conservatives from the South clashed with pro-labor liberals from the Northeast and Far West. Two years before the 1980 election, Ted Kennedy was already attacking him for attempting to trim the federal budget “at the expense of the elderly, the poor, the black, the sick, the cities, and the unemployed.” Yet Carter somehow expected the quarreling Democrats to rally behind whatever he decided to do. Before Johnson’s presidency was doomed by the Vietnam War and white backlash to his civil-rights policy, the former Senate majority leader had been a shrewd and effective party builder; Carter later confessed that he “was never comfortable” playing the same role.13

Granted, few Democratic presidents have kept their base excited for long. Since its creation in the 1820s, the Democratic Party has nearly always represented a more heterogeneous constituency, demographically and ideologically, than its rivals. Only when the party’s leaders have kept their various groups reasonably happy and in harness during and between national campaigns have Democrats dominated national politics. Andrew Jackson accomplished that feat back in the 1830s. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did it during their first terms and midway through their second ones. Lyndon Johnson repeated their success, but only until the Republicans made big gains in the midterm contest of 1966. Even Barack Obama wasn’t able to persuade enough of the white liberals and people of color who’d flocked to the polls to elect him to turn out for the Democrats running for Congress and the state legislatures just two years later.14

By his own admission, Carter never shared this partisan goal. He did nothing to galvanize the Democratic rank and file, even during his reelection campaign, and his ham-handed approach to organized labor was a particularly glaring flaw. Forty years ago, unions represented nearly a quarter of workers in the private sector (as opposed to less than 7 percent today), but the growth of manufacturing abroad and an offensive by anti-labor firms at home had caused their clout to wane. When the new president took office, union leaders made it clear to him that their main goal was for Congress to enact changes in the law that would make it easier for a majority of workers in a given workplace to unionize. Eizenstat himself told his boss, “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this matter in terms of our future relationship with organized labor…. I think it can help cement our relations for a good while.” But Carter, who hailed from a right-to-work state, gave the idea a decidedly lukewarm reception: “Labor Law Reform? For what is that a euphemism?” he asked another aide.15

The House did finally pass a compromise reform bill, but at the president’s urging, the Senate put off its vote so the administration could focus on getting the Panama Canal treaties ratified. This gave corporate lobbyists time to mount a powerful campaign against the labor bill—and a filibuster killed it. During the 1980 primary campaign, leaders of the United Auto Workers and several other big unions expressed their disgust by endorsing Ted Kennedy instead of the president who’d let them down. Like every other serious challenge to a sitting president within his own party, it struck a mortal blow to the incumbent’s chances of winning in November.16

n one sense, Carter’s political misfortunes may have been less his fault and more the playing out of a cyclical pattern in presidential history. As the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek has argued, Carter could not reconstruct a political order whose crumbling had been a prerequisite for his victory. The cynicism about the malfunctions and malfeasance of “big government” that, in part, had boosted Carter into power also hindered his ability to chart a new course that would not alienate key figures in his own party.17

Carter, writes Skowronek, “found himself in a political no man’s land.” The New Deal system was falling apart, but no one knew how to patch it back together or build a new one. As president, John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover had been the victims of similar circumstances, although the orders they failed to preserve were quite different from Carter’s. For such men, adds Skowronek, “the attractions of the loner-as-leader shine brightly. But such presidents have never been able to reorder national affairs. Once in office, they appear incompetent and in over their heads. Their disruptions characteristically drive the implosion. Reconstruction follows, but under other auspices.”18

Jimmy Carter has lived a longer and better life than most ex-presidents. He has done useful and honest work around the world and taken progressive stands on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to torture to gun control. But his political ineptitude while in office helped enable an icon of conservatism to take power and speed up a transformation of government from which we are still struggling to escape. One can only hope, and work, for the day when the despicable entertainer who now resides in the White House will suffer the same electoral drubbing that his flawed but decent predecessor did in 1980. The next reconstruction cannot come soon enough.19

This spring, a mere 172 years after his death, Andrew Jackson was back in the news. In March, Donald Trump made a quick visit to the Hermitage, the once-sprawling plantation that our seventh president had outside of Nashville. Jackson, Trump declared, was “the People’s President,” a man who “shook the establishment like an earthquake.” Several weeks later, Trump gave an interview in which he made the bizarre claim that Jackson “was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,” and went on to tweet that Jackson “would never have let it happen” if he’d still been sitting in the White House.

Notwithstanding Trump’s ignorance of a historical time line that he should have learned in middle school, his choice of a favorite predecessor is rather fitting. Like Trump, Jackson stirred a fury of populist discontent directed at the country’s financial and political elites and sought to refashion America’s political geography—transforming a so-called “era of good feelings” into a period of heightened partisan and regional conflict. Like Trump, Jackson viewed himself as the direct representative of “forgotten” Americans and tended to scorn the other two branches of government as potential usurpers of popular sovereignty. And one would not dispute the historian Richard Hofstadter’s description of Jackson if it were made of our sitting president: “He was a simple, emotional, and unreflective man with a strong sense of loyalty to personal friends and political supporters.” While Trump, the born-again Republican, lauds Jackson and hangs his portrait in the Oval Office, Democrats shun the memory of the man who was long an icon of their party. Treasury Secretary Seth Mnuchin shows no sign that he’ll reverse the Obama administration’s decision to replace Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, but there’s little doubt what his boss would have him do.

For contemporary historians, Jackson poses—or at least ought to pose—an interpretive dilemma. Beginning in his lifetime and stretching into the middle of the last century, prominent historians like Francis Parkman, Charles Beard, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. heralded Jackson as a virtual avatar of American democracy: someone who, in Schlesinger’s words, “came, like the great folk heroes, to lead [the people] out of captivity and bondage” to the greedy bankers and haughty neo-Federalists. Yet today, hardly any member of our clan would echo their view of Jackson as a fearless champion of ordinary Americans. Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson, a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946, failed to mention that his hero actively supported “bondage” of the most literal kind: Jackson owned more than 100 slaves and favored expanding the “peculiar institution” into Texas and beyond. While arguing that Jackson was a proto–Franklin Roosevelt fighting “to restrain the power of the business community,” the great liberal historian also entirely neglected Jackson’s policy of forcefully removing the Cherokees from their ancestral lands in Georgia, coveted by whites, to the mostly uninhabited plains of what would become Oklahoma. Thus, in the wake of a more sober, post-1960s understanding of the centrality of race and empire in the antebellum era, historians have come to seriously reconsider the image of Jackson as a fearless champion of ordinary Americans.

But to view “Jacksonian democracy” as nothing but a dangerous myth or the facade for a violent racist order is equally myopic and misses the ways in which Jacksonian Democrats helped transform American politics. Jackson’s election in 1828 did indeed come, as Trump noted at the Hermitage, “when the vote was finally being extended to those who did not own property.” Of course, that didn’t include women, African Americans, or Native Americans, and it fell so far short of the democratic ideal.

Jackson’s rise also marked the onset of a political system in America based on mass parties. The shrewd creators of “the Jackson Party,” soon renamed “the Democracy,” assembled a broad coalition that stretched from Walt Whitman and white radical artisans in the urban North to Jefferson Davis and his fellow defenders of slavery in the agrarian South. With majorities among small farmers and European immigrants, the Jacksonian Democrats controlled US politics for most of the next three decades, building disciplined party machines in many cities and states; only the coming of civil war exposed the folly of believing that the nation could, as the Whig turned Republican Abraham Lincoln put it, “endure, permanently half slave, half free.”

In his new book, Avenging the People, J.M. Opal doesn’t strike a balance between these two Jacksons, though he does capture the first one well. Concentrating on his subject’s relentlessly ambitious, often violent life before he moved into the White House at the age of 61, Opal presents us with a Jackson who has very little in common with Schlesinger’s: not a champion of ordinary Americans, but rather the ruthless exponent of policies that expanded slavery and pushed Native Americans out of their homelands. For Opal, the key to understanding Jackson and his influence lies in the relentless ambition of a self-made man bent on conquest—of land, fame, and political power.

orn to poor Scotch-Irish immigrants and orphaned at the age of 14, Jackson began his climb in a frontier region that was almost constantly at war. The teenager enlisted in the patriot forces during the Revolution and was captured by British troops. In the first of many battles with authorities he considered illegitimate, Jackson earned a scar on his forehead when he angrily refused to clean the boots of a red-coated officer of the crown. No one else in his immediate family lived to see the end of the war.

In 1787, the year the Constitution was written in Philadelphia, Jackson finished “reading law” and was admitted to the North Carolina bar. The next year, he moved to Tennessee, much of which was then a terrain of brutal, if intermittent, combat between white and Native Americans. Opal vividly describes how, in the 1790s, Jackson, acting both as a judge and militia leader, participated in the slaughter of Native men, women, and children.

Jackson’s image as a man “who had served well during the most trying times” helped him launch a political career. It didn’t hurt that he was also a protégé of the territory’s governor. Jackson got himself elected to the House of Representatives and then to the Senate before returning to Tennessee with hopes of getting rich. He speculated on plots of land, selling some at a healthy profit and growing cotton on the rest. Naturally, Jackson purchased black men and women to do the actual labor; he never seemed to regard them as anything other than useful and hard-working commodities. In 1804, Opal writes, one of his business partners “made at least one trip to the downriver slave markets, looking to ‘carry on negroes in exchange for groceries,’ as Jackson put it.”

All this occurred before Jackson vaulted to national renown in 1815 as the commander of a volunteer army that defeated British soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans, the final confrontation in the War of 1812. He had earned a reputation for tenacity and decisiveness as a major general in the Tennessee state militia—for which his troops fondly dubbed him “Old Hickory.” But the 1815 battle at the mouth of the Mississippi, while epic, was also unnecessary: The combatants were unaware that a peace treaty had already been signed in far-off Ghent. Yet millions of Americans longed for a military hero, and after New Orleans, Jackson fit the bill.

For all its richness, Opal’s narrative adds little to the scholarship produced by the regiment of Jackson biographers and historians who preceded him. But he certainly has an eye for the telling anecdote and a knack for capturing in a few words the essence of Jackson’s vengeful character: “He imagined the worst about his enemies, and then let the excruciating images spin around his mind, tormenting him until either he or they had to die.”

Opal also offers a big idea to frame his lively prose. Jackson, he argues, was hardly the thoughtless figure Hofstadter described, who believed that might always made him right. Instead, Old Hickory had a more sophisticated view of power: He legitimated his aggression in politics and war by invoking the concept of the rights of sovereign nations, which Opal claims Jackson derived from prominent 18th-century works by the English jurist William Blackstone and the Swiss philosopher-diplomat Emer de Vattel. Both drew a bright line between “civilized” societies and “savage” ones. Blackstone thought it was the duty of the former to “force” the latter “to respect the laws of humanity.” If, as on the Tennessee frontier, the state couldn’t do the enforcing, then, Opal writes, “lawful people in lawless places”—figures like Jackson—should “do what had to be done, becoming in effect their own sovereigns.”

That Jackson leaned on such prominent thinkers as Blackstone and de Vattel does help make his own popularity among some of the leading intellectuals of his day, including the historian and statesman George Bancroft, more understandable: After all, the fiery general who defeated a British army and exterminated thousands of indigenous people had also been a successful attorney and judge. But Opal fails to adequately demonstrate how the “law of nations” consistently animated Jackson’s behavior; nor does he explain why a good many other Americans who read Blackstone and de Vattel belonged to opposition parties and protested the policy that led to the Trail of Tears.

Perhaps one reason why Opal doesn’t develop this theme is that his narrative arrives at Jackson’s presidency only at its conclusion. As a result, his book scants the major decisions—Jackson’s veto of the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, in particular—that once led generations of Democrats to hold dinners in his honor and helped land him on the $20 bill in the first place. In his time, Jackson was hardly a scourge of “the business community,” which included many Southern planters and men of commerce in the North who shared his zest for trade and acquiring land. But he did have an abiding antipathy toward the captains of high finance and toward powerful men who, unlike him, were born to wealth and had attended college.

During the 1830s, Jackson turned his refusal to recharter the Bank of the United States into a grand populist drama, the language of which now sounds remarkably familiar in the wake of the Great Recession. “It is to be regretted,” he thundered in 1832, when vetoing the bank’s recharter, “that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Unlike the Wall Street moguls whose risky investment schemes crashed the economy in 2008, the Bank of the United States did spur needed development and was intelligently run. But Jackson argued successfully that it was unjust for a publicly created institution to grant loans and invest capital wherever its well-to-do directors decided to do so. Among antebellum Democrats, the suspicion of financial institutions ran so deep that many even opposed the issuing of paper money, then the province of banks, instead of relying on specie—coins made of silver, gold, and other metals.

The economic logic of their position was shaky at best. It assumed the superior virtues of a preindustrial nation of small farmers that was rapidly receding into memory and myth. “Here, the democrat is the conservative,” the novelist James Fenimore Cooper reflected in the 1830s. It also enraged urban businessmen, who relied on easy credit, and emboldened anti-Jackson politicians to organize the new Whig Party to oppose what they considered the tyranny of “King Andrew the First.” But the class-conscious sentiments behind Jackson’s “Bank War” also became one of his most significant legacies, helping to fuel the progressive campaigns of William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette, and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Bashing Wall Street and its government cronies in the name of the hardworking majority also did much to build popular
support for a progressive income-tax amendment and the Wagner Act; it was this part of Jackson’s legacy that earned the Democrats the title of “the party of the people.” The party’s founders in the 1830s believed that the federal government needed to stay out of most economic matters; but unlike conservative Republicans today, they did so because they thought that an interventionist government benefited the rich and the well-connected. What Opal calls “the glorious absence of a powerful state” also appealed to many of Jackson’s constituents, including Irish and German immigrants who had fled monarchies that imposed onerous taxes on the poor, and crushed them when they protested. In keeping with this tradition, the Democrats have pursued policies (more often than not) that sought to protect the interests of working Americans, even if it has meant reversing the view of the federal government held by Jackson and his disciples.

o fully understand Jackson’s legacy, we cannot neglect the parts that might still please us in order to emphasize the parts that we abhor. In the service of pursuing Jefferson’s vision of the United States as an “empire of liberty,” Jackson conquered lands occupied by people of another race and built the world’s first mass political party on a coalition that preserved chattel slavery. Yet as a self-made man who railed against the well-born elite, he also persuaded many white farmers and wage earners—both immigrants and the native-born—that a lack of privilege should not prevent them from thriving.

Instead of splitting the two Jacksons, we should be figuring out how to understand them together—as they were in reality. Jackson’s “democracy” was clearly liberating for some and repressive for others. It was also popular: A majority of Americans supported slavery and shared his choice of adversaries and friends. In 1819, Congress held a long debate about whether to censure Jackson for his rogue invasion of what was then Spanish Florida. Here’s why, according to Opal, the lawmakers in Washington decided to back off: “Rooted in the extreme devotion of white households from enemy [Native American] country and the proliferating institution of slavery, [Jackson’s support] reached into the raucous seaports of the east coast, the camp meetings of frontier towns, and the officer corps of the U.S. Army and Navy. It included women as well as men, children as well as parents. It was…largely southern and western but also urban. It was, in a word, Jacksonian.”

One cannot appreciate Jackson, the tough-talking populist and partisan, without understanding that his popular appeal was as much due to his defense of slavery, his years of killing Native Americans, and his simplistic grasp of economics as it was to his rhetorical defense of white workers and small farmers. In truth, much of American history has epitomized this dilemma: freedom built on the backs of the enslaved and exploited, justice and injustice bound together in the hearts of the same people and institutions. Trump will never truly understand the nature of this bedeviling paradox, even as he embodies it.

The same might be said about a onetime hero of anti-plutocratic populism who was fond of invoking Jackson’s vision of mass democracy. In 1892, Thomas Watson—the white Georgian who was one of the leaders of the Populist Party, which campaigned on freeing the US economy from the grip of the “money power”—lamented that American politics would have been different if Old Hickory were still around: “Oh, for an hour of that stern old warrior before whose Militia Rifles the veterans of Waterloo melted away, and before whose fiery wrath the combined money-kings bit the dust!”

In his admiring reference to the Battle of New Orleans, Watson got his chronology wrong: The confrontation at Waterloo, Napoleon’s final defeat, occurred six months after Jackson’s victory at the mouth of the Mississippi. But in the years to come, Watson would accurately represent the dual nature of Jackson’s appeal. Still railing against big business as a member of the Democratic Party, he had also become, by the early 20th century, one of the country’s most notorious haters of Catholics, African Americans, and Jews.

In this ferociously partisan and ideologically divided country, there is at least one big thing on which most Americans who care about politics agree: We have an establishment, and we ought to dis­establish it. Bernie Sanders claims he is running against the Democratic version; Hillary Clinton counters that Sanders is the established one, since he has served in Congress for a quarter-century. Conservatives, whomever they back for president, rail against a Washington establishment that supposedly conspires in some suite on K Street or in a backroom of the Capitol to anoint Republican nominees for president and scuttle laws to shrink the federal government. In March, a reporter for McClatchy traveled across “middle America” and made what he deemed to be a momentous discovery: “the deepest divide,” wrote David Lightman, is not between the two parties or their most committed followers. “It’s between Us and Them—the people versus The Establishment.”

One should respect the appeal of this populist idiom. Attacks on “the Establishment,” like those on its malevolent cousins—“the special interests,” “the big people,” and “the Washington insiders”—can inspire campaigns and movements that vow to “take back” the government from officials who betray the interests and values of their constituents. Most Americans who join such insurgencies are not legally unrepresented; they have the right to vote and organize against the powers that be. Still, the feeling of disenfranchisement is genuine, and it helps spur them to take action.

But liberals and leftists should not confuse a ubiquitous trope for a social and political reality. To train one’s ire on “the Establishment” is to embrace, implicitly, a baby-simple analysis of how power works in the public sphere, one that makes it hard to have a serious discussion about what it would take to transform American society. A left focused on our growing economic inequality more than at any time since the Great Depression needs a better understanding of the massive obstacles that stand in its way.

The history of the term itself is fraught with vagueness, grandiosity, and a bit of purposeful misdirection. In 1955, the British journalist Henry Fairlie, writing in The Spectator, used it to describe “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” In his country, where most high bureaucrats sported an Oxbridge degree and the House of Lords still had veto power over some legislation, the locution quickly caught on. The centuries-long existence of an established church—the Church of England—no doubt smoothed its path.

It didn’t take long for one of Fairlie’s counterparts on this side of the Atlantic to repeat his performance—­albeit with a deftly satirical twist. In 1962, Richard Rovere, a prominent political journalist, wrote a lengthy piece for Esquire titled “The American Establishment” that pronounced judgment on who belonged and who did not. Rovere’s earnest, research-heavy analysis fooled many readers into taking him seriously. They must have skated over references to “a leading member of the Dutchess County school of sociologists” and to an unofficial “Executive Committee” whose membership could be determined by how often “a man’s name” appeared “in paid advertisements in, or collective letters to, The New York Times.”

Rovere turned the very imprecision of the concept into an alleged virtue. “The Establishment,” he wrote, “can be thought of in many different ways, all of them empirically valid in one or another frame of reference.” As if to confirm that nondefinition, his fellow Americans rushed into the fray. Soon, one heard about a “straight” establishment that enforced antidrug laws, a “male” establishment hostile to feminism, and a dizzying variety of political establishments that kept various groups down. In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly’s book-length attack on the “kingmakers” of the “Eastern Establishment” of the Republican Party sold over 3 million copies and helped win the GOP nomination for Barry Goldwater. In 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States claimed that “the Establishment” had hoodwinked and brutalized the vast majority of Americans “throughout the history of the country” and yet “has been unable to keep itself secure from revolt.” Zinn’s book, which has sold over 2 million copies, defined this elite no more specifically than did Rovere’s essay. Yet few in the radical scholar-activist’s legion of admirers seem to care.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Schlafly, Zinn, and their ilk did not try to define the source of evil too closely. The history of modern presidential politics has debunked the notion of a shadowy and well-financed establishment that has the ability to get its way. Most industrialists and big investors opposed Woodrow Wilson’s election in 1912 and 1916, all four of FDR’s victorious campaigns, and Harry Truman’s come-from-behind triumph in 1948. The moderate Republicans who came to power with Dwight Eisenhower tried to prevent Goldwater from winning the party’s nomination in 1964 and then failed to stop Ronald Reagan’s bid for it in 1980. “Many in the business world,” notes the historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “thought Reagan’s ideas overly simplistic and his promises of tax cuts dangerously inflationary.” In 1992, Bill Clinton was the darling of the Democratic Leadership Council, financed by several big firms. But during the primaries, most of organized labor—then the backbone of the party—supported other candidates. And in 2008, Barack Obama snatched the nomination away from Hil­lary Clinton, the supposed darling of “DC insiders.”

If there’s a crafty, pro-corporate Democratic establishment at work in the 2016 campaign, it’s been quite ineffective. Why else would Bernie Sanders have been able to raise as much money as Hillary Clinton and win a slew of caucuses, where operatives who know how to work the system are essential? And if endorsing Clinton makes an organization part of a Wall Street–coddling establishment, then why did the Congressional Black Caucus, Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Service Employees International Union all come out for her? Those groups would be the core of the kind of fighting, culturally diverse social-democratic party that Sanders wants the Democrats to become. On the other hand, the notion that the only avowed socialist to serve in Congress for almost a century belongs to a clique of Washington insiders is utterly absurd.

Something like a party establishment does hold sway in a few states. In Nevada, for example, it is difficult to snag a Democratic nomination for Congress if Senator Harry Reid opposes you. But in most states, a candidate who can raise enough money and hire talented consultants can make a competitive run for nearly any office.

The Citizens United ruling freed the rich to donate as much as they desire to super PACs that support the politicians of their choice. During the current campaign, it also prevented any putative Republican establishment from uniting behind a single presidential candidate. As Chris Christie and Jeb Bush demonstrated, if you have one or more super PACs behind you, you can keep running for months, winning nowhere—until the money runs out. And superwealthy individuals like Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, and Meg Whitman can fund their own campaigns, further undermining the ability of a party elite to narrow the field. Trump’s ascension has exposed the myth of a potent Republican establishment as much as the Sanders surge did for the opposing party.

The sole area of national politics in which, arguably, an establishment once existed was foreign policy. Except during major wars, most Americans have neither the time nor the means to follow what’s happening in other nations, and they feel no urgency to do so. During the middle decades of the 20th century, this gave the Council on Foreign Relations and its well-connected members extraordinary influence. Such prominent figures in the CFR as Henry Stimson, Harvey Bundy, and Allen and John Foster Dulles did much to promote intervention on Britain’s side in World War II. Then CFR members like McGeorge Bundy (Harvey’s son), Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger played key roles in formulating US strategy during the first two decades of the Cold War. Anyone who read Foreign Affairs, the CFR’S journal, would have gotten a pretty good sense of the main ideas guiding the actions of the US government and its allies.

But the bloody debacle in Indochina brought this tidy arrangement to a ragged end. As the journalist-historian Godfrey Hodgson has written, “the prolonged agony of Vietnam…divided and discredited the foreign policy Establishment and, by robbing it of its reputation for wisdom, destroyed its influence.” Many elite Democrats soured on military intervention, while neoconservatives in groups like the Committee on the Present Danger demanded a belligerent posture toward the Soviet Union and in defense of Israel. “The Establishment’s greatest failure,” Hodgson observed, “resulted from its indifference to and its lack of understanding of the spirit of a leveling age.”

While it no longer wields much clout, the CFR still appears to view current politics more with disdain than comprehension. Last fall, I was invited to speak about populism, both past and present, at the CFR’s annual dinner. I argued strongly that, whatever their flaws, angry protests by ordinary people are valid expressions of mass discontent that call for an empathetic response from those in power. The reception to my remarks from the audience of 300 or so well-heeled members was mostly hostile or amused. Former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, who is currently cochair of the CFR, challenged the very notion that “populism” might be anything other than a synonym for ignorance and demagoguery.

* * *

Any substitute for the vapid critique of “the Establishment” will have to reckon with both the structures and the ideology that keep an unjust system going. This is a key insight of every major theorist of power in capitalist societies from Karl Marx to Max Weber to C. Wright Mills. In his 1956 book The Power Elite, Mills occasionally used the term to describe the “higher circles”—military, economic, and political—which, he argued, ran the major institutions in America. But most people, he emphasized, accepted the status quo. In contrast, contemporary attacks on the establishment mainly express fear and resentment toward insiders. Status is an element of power, to be sure, but only a partial one.

On the one hand, each major party is a coalition of interest groups and constituencies that jostle for influence. As both Sanders and Trump charge, corporate lobbyists and individual billionaires play an outsize role in the whole process. Yet if they routinely got their way, Social Security would be a private program, and Mitt Romney would be campaigning for his second term in the White House.

In fact, the most critical decisions of state are influenced by an economic dynamic more powerful than the acts of a group as well financed as the US Chamber of Commerce or the preferences of individuals as wealthy as the Koch brothers. Those who run businesses covet politicians and policies that give them the confidence to borrow and invest with the expectation of making profits and fueling growth. As the political theorist Fred Block wrote back in 1977, “Business confidence is based on an evaluation of the market that considers political events only as they might impinge on the market.” That tunnel vision is a big reason why same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, while labor unions in the private sector struggle to survive.

Railing against the establishment also ignores the mass resistance to ways of thinking that would have to undergird a truly democratic and egalitarian society. The hope that we can bring about fundamental change by exposing an immoral cabal and crushing its power fails to confront the deeply held belief in the essential fairness of capitalist society. The tenacity of this conviction helps explain why Americans keep electing politicians who promise a good job to anyone willing to work hard and blame the breaking of promises on a mere failure of political will. There’s a feedback loop between the political and economic institutions that sustain inequality and an ideology that forecloses alternatives like the social democracy that exists, albeit under stress, in much of Western and Central Europe.

Republicans who prattle on about “the Establishment” will never attempt to untangle the web of structures and ideas that sustain what they proudly, if inaccurately, call the “free enterprise” system. Nor does Bernie San­ders’s bashing of wealthy insiders get at the real obstacles to advancing toward a society that would ensure a decent life to every American.

Until we are able to speak more realistically about those obstacles and why they persist, protesting the establishment will obsess and frustrate us the way the Cheshire Cat did Alice when she asked him to help her find her way through Wonderland:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

Like that elusive portly feline, the establishment has taken up residence in our political minds, even while its substance vanishes, leaving nothing behind but a derisive smile.

Earlier this month the social media teams for the two Democratic presidential candidates got into a heated—if not quite illuminating—spat on Twitter and Facebook about the meaning of progressivism. The Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted, “You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive”; while Hillary Clinton’s account replied that “an important part of being a progressive is making progress.” When asked about the exchange the following night, in an MSNBC debate, the candidates did not shed much more light on the question. “The root of that word ‘progressive’ is ‘progress,’” Clinton observed.

In search of nuance, we asked four historians to comment on how Sanders and Clinton each fit within in the context of the Progressive tradition, and what their respective candidacies might augur for its future. —Richard Kreitner

In Search of a Lost Ideology

Historians have long had trouble agreeing on what Progressivism really meant. After all, the various middle-class reform efforts of the early 20th century included Prohibition, labor reform, efforts to make sure that food and medicine were not adulterated, regulations of workplace safety, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, among many others. Even the Jim Crow laws of the South might be seen as one manifestation of Progressivism: an attempt by social elites to “organize” what they saw as the disruptive elements of their society, albeit in poisonously repressive ways. In a 1982 essay, “In Search of Progressivism,” historian Daniel T. Rodgers observed that various efforts to construct a coherent political ideology to characterize the early-20th-century political movement known as Progressivism had failed: As he put it, “progressivism as an ideology is nowhere to be found.”

When presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spar over which one is more progressive, they don’t have the reality of the Progressive movement of 100 years ago firmly in mind. Each candidate has his or her own reasons for trying to claim the word. For Clinton, it is a way of trying to win over the young, left-leaning voters who overwhelmingly support her opponent, while Sanders uses it to associate himself with a resurgence of democratic populism. Today, the term mostly offers a way of talking about left politics without using the word “liberal” (with its unpopular top-down connotations, and its history of critique by the right) or—even worse—the word left.

Nonetheless, there are some ways in which our own moment does closely resemble that of the early 20th century: in terms of rising income inequality, growing public anxiety about the political role of business, and a widening sense that business interests are cavalier with public safety and hostile to the public good. Although there are many points of commonality between Sanders’s campaign and the Progressive efforts of the last century—the criticisms of business, the advocacy for greater regulation—in one key way, his campaign seems very different. The intense political emotion, the sense of disillusionment with the present, and the idea of the necessity of broad-scale transformation are all at odds with the politics of early-20th-century Progressivism, which was deeply concerned with the threat of upheaval from below. In this sense, although not in others, the Clinton campaign may be more in keeping with Progressivism as it has been classically understood: While her proposed reforms are far less bold than those of the Progressives, she seeks, as they generally did, to channel political unrest, while leaving underlying social inequalities untouched.

A New Wave

In order to understand where Sanders and Clinton fit within the Progressive tradition, it’s vital to know who the Progressives were and what they represented. Such questions have bedeviled generations of historians because there are no easy answers. Workers and farmers formed the largest constituencies of Progressive Era reform. But urban middle-class activists, white and black, male and female, also made their mark on the Progressive tradition. Progressives shared a belief in social improvement by way of public or collective action, focused on a wide array of social ills, and offered a variety of remedies and reforms: from a graduated income tax to public kindergartens, from eight-hour day laws to municipal ownership of utilities.

A consideration of the Progressive presidents of the early 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, shows why drawing boundaries around a Progressive tradition can be a hazardous undertaking. Roosevelt attacked the outsized role of corporate power, and called for a national system of health insurance and for pensions for retirees. Yet Roosevelt also had good friends on Wall Street, betrayed African Americans’ civil rights, and was an ardent imperialist and warmonger. Wilson presided over such watershed reforms as the income tax, the Federal Reserve Act, the direct election of senators, and the extension of suffrage to women. Yet Wilson was also a white supremacist who oversaw the segregation of government offices in Washington, and whose “war to make the world safe for democracy” did not accomplish its stated goal, to say the least.

Both Sanders and Clinton have their Progressive Era heroes. Sanders has a plaque of the Socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs mounted on the wall of his office. Like Debs, Sanders embraces the secular faith in human solidarity, and calls for sweeping reforms to create a more equitable and humane society. But that doesn’t make Sanders a 21st-century version of Debs, who worked to create a “cooperative commonwealth” resting on the power of the unions, alliances, and cooperatives of workers and farmers. Though Sanders speaks of a “political revolution,” how far that extends beyond a more or less traditional presidential campaign is often difficult to discern.

Clinton, meanwhile, has cited the work of Jane Addams on behalf of immigrant children as the type of service that has inspired her. Addams was a Progressive reformer who sought the middle ground between capital and labor, between Debs and the railroad corporations. A political career, of course, was closed to Addams, who spent her life devoted to often small and partial steps to improve the lot of the urban poor. Clinton is a powerful politician who seeks the middle ground between Wall Street and its critics, and who sees compromise and halfway steps as the preferred road to progress.

The future of progressivism will unfold at the same time as the political system undergoes a realignment. In recent decades, the Republican Party has steadily evolved into a conservative party, purging its progressives and moderates and cornering the political market on white racial resentment and xenophobia. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is shedding its ancient reliance on the white-supremacist vote, and today embraces multiple progressivisms that have pushed the party’s positions on domestic policy to the left since a Clinton last occupied the oval office. A similar shift has yet to occur on foreign policy, as progressives within the Democratic Party, from Obama to Clinton to Sanders, continue to embrace the prerogatives of the US war machine. But perhaps a new wave of progressive renewal will bring to the fore more humane and universal notions of equality and social justice.

As Goes the South…

The future of progressivism is inextricably linked with the future of the American South. The current Democratic primary campaign is only one example of this. But even more important is the likelihood that come November, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and other Southern states will revert to what they have been for most Democratic Party presidential candidates in recent decades: states to be ignored.

In most states of the Deep South, the Democratic Party is a mere shell, barely competitive in national elections. Such a political vacuum disserves and disenfranchises millions of citizens—overwhelmingly African Americans—who need a government that works for them. To allow this neglect to continue would be an egregious mistake.

The birth of a sustainable movement in the South has been a dream of the progressive-minded for generations. After the Civil War, Reconstruction offered a chance for the South to remake itself into a more egalitarian region, before political violence by Southern whites and exhaustion among Northern whites brought it to a premature end. Subsequent attempts to challenge the conservative (often Democratic) status quo regularly collapsed: The Western-dominated Populists of the 1890s failed to rally Southerners of any race to their cause over the long term; widespread textile strikes in 1934 fell victim to a lack of local institutional support; the CIO’s postwar “Operation Dixie,” which attempted to unionize thousands of Southern workers, couldn’t overcome racial hostility; and, finally, attempts by African Americans in the late 1960s to remake the Southern political landscape, through the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party or Alabama’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization (the original Black Panther Party), fell short.

More recent campaigns like Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential runs further demonstrated the perils and the possibilities of progressive politics in the South. Although Jackson’s presidential campaign had the support of large amounts of African-American voters in 1984, and forged an even more diverse coalition (including poor whites) in 1988, he was still unable to win the nomination—or even to win significant concessions from the Democratic leadership. During his 1992 presidential run, Bill Clinton used a speech by the rapper Sister Souljah before the Rainbow Coalition to distance himself from Jackson, thereby solidifying support among moderate white voters. Meanwhile, liberal and left-wing elements within the Democratic Party struggled to resist the leadership’s sharp turn to the right, a pivot spurred by consideration of the limits of electability in post-Reagan America.

Neither Democratic candidate is untouched by this complicated history. Bernie Sanders endorsed Jackson for president in 1988, and his focus on class issues is an echo of many of the concerns Southern progressives have had for decades, not least the 1966 “Freedom Budget” proposed by civil-rights leaders A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. Hillary Clinton, who promises to address the concerns of Black Lives Matter activists and to resume the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, observed Southern politics firsthand while she was first lady of Arkansas. If Clinton is sincere about these initiatives—and considering how much she will likely owe African Americans if she wins on Super Tuesday, she will not have much choice—there will be further opportunities for Southern progressives to push for even more significant change.

It is time for progressives to assume a more active role in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Movements such as the Fight for $15, which has made a strong showing in Atlanta, and the Moral Mondays protest movement in North Carolina show the desire for a resurgence of progressivism in the region. Demographics alone will not be destiny, but the forging of coalitions between African-Americans and a growing Hispanic population, along with working-class and middle-class whites, offer a promising beginning. If the Sanders campaign for a “political revolution” leaves a lasting legacy in the South, progressivism will be revitalized in the region as never before. But this has to happen regardless of who wins next week, or in November. The Democrats can win national elections without the South. But they will not have the political will, or the muscle, to effect truly progressive change without Southerners.

Both/And

At the risk of being disagreeable, let me start by disagreeing with the premise of this forum: Trying to figure out where Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton fit into the history of “progressivism” only muddles the key differences between them. It can hardly be otherwise, since the term has had such a promiscuous life in American politics. A century ago, racist Southern Democrats and the founders of the NAACP both embraced it. A few decades later, so did the Communist Party. Sometime in the 1990s, it became a fallback identifier for pretty much anyone The Nation and its journalistic kin smiled upon.

Fortunately, excellent substitutes are available.

Hillary Clinton is best described as a liberal. Like liberals from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, Clinton wants to use the federal government to improve the lives of the majority of Americans. Like nearly every Democratic presidential candidate since the 1970s, she makes special pitches to women, non-whites of both genders, and the LGBT community. But she largely views social movements as creatures to be wooed and managed. What she really cares about is shrewd, effective governance. Like every liberal president (and most failed Democratic nominees) since Wilson, she wants the United States to be the dominant power in the world, so she doesn’t question the massive sums spent on the military and on the other branches of the national-security state.

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is a leftist. Although he has been winning elections since 1981, Sanders resembles his hero, Eugene V. Debs—the Socialist who ran five quixotic races for president, the last time, in 1920, from a prison cell—far more than he does a standard-issue career politician. Other pols identify with “revolution” and claim their campaign is a “movement.” But Bernie really means it. He is perpetually on the attack against undue power and misused privilege, armed with an unvarnished class-conscious message that, until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, had long been absent from the public square. He advocates policies he knows even a Congress controlled by Democrats would be quite unlikely to implement: breaking up the biggest banks, making public colleges and universities free to all, outlawing private donations to campaigns, and more. Except for increasing aid to veterans, he seems cold toward every part of the military establishment. His true foreign policy is, in effect, a domestic policy that would turn the United States into another Norway.

Despite these fundamental differences between Clinton and Sanders, the fierceness of their rivalry should not obscure a central truth of political history: Leftists and liberals have always needed each other to push America toward becoming a more humane, more equal place. Radical activists and intellectuals promote fresh ideas, challenge entrenched elites, dedicate themselves to grassroots organizing, and push liberals down paths they might otherwise have avoided or tiptoed along at a craven pace. Liberals build governing coalitions that enact measures, from the progressive income tax to the Civil Rights Act to Obamacare, which improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

It would be a serious mistake for “progressives” of any stripe to ignore this symbiotic relationship. Leftists backing Bernie ought to realize that the route to a social-democratic Promised Land will be long, arduous, and uncertain. Clintonian liberals should embrace the passion for a transformed America that has always been essential to making meaningful reforms in the existing one. Neither can ignore the certain consequence of an internal battle that lasts beyond the time when one of the two candidates secures enough delegates to win the nomination: a federal government under the total control of a Republican right that is determined to undo nearly everything liberals and leftists have achieved.

If the left were not somewhat unhappy with Barack Obama, it would not be much of a left. That, in effect, is the underlying point of Eric Alterman’s excellent survey of the obstacles confronting a presidency the typical Nation reader could rush to celebrate. From the legacy of Bush-era incompetence and corruption to the partisan discipline of the GOP and the Roberts Court to the influence of lobbyists, one marvels that the president has accomplished anything at all. Progressive historians may well praise Obama and the Democrats for passing healthcare reform, a major stimulus and stiffer financial regulation in the face of so many structural and ideological barriers.

Still, when Senator Richard Durbin admits that the barons of banking "frankly own" the most powerful legislative body in the world, he is revealing how stark is the crisis that progressives confront. Eighteen months ago, many of us thought Obama’s tenure might rival the triumphs of FDR’s first term and of LBJ during the halcyon days of the Great Society. Now one merely hopes he will be able to blunt the GOP’s offensive long enough to win four more years in office.

But as Alterman suggests, the way to confront this reality is not to kvetch that Obama is not living up to our fondest hopes. Amid the euphoria of 2008, too many Barackophiles—of which I was one—failed to realize that no presidential campaign, whatever its rhetorical flourishes, can substitute for a social movement. Both FDR and LBJ had to respond to potent insurgencies on their left—industrial labor for Roosevelt, black freedom for Johnson. Each of these movements gestated for decades before emerging as a force that could make or unmake a presidency.

Since the feminist awakening of the 1970s, we have had several grassroots campaigns—successful ones, like the battle against apartheid; apparent busts, like the much-hyped crusade for global economic justice; and some that are still fighting for their causes (global warming, gay marriage). But there has not been a mass campaign, much less a movement, capable of addressing what should be the central domestic issue of our time: the yawning gap in income, education and healthcare between the economic elite and a majority of working Americans. Abundant analysis on this issue can be found in periodicals and websites on the left. But to translate a terrible problem into an inescapable issue requires organizations that can mobilize millions. And with private-sector unionism in perhaps terminal decline, it is not clear who will provide the organizing muscle.

While the left cannot instantly conjure up the movement we need, it can revive the tradition of speaking in credible, urgent, moral ways about the need to enact policies to aid the great majority. Alterman refers to Bush’s "ideologically obsessed presidency." What enabled these obsessives to have their way—until the Hurricane Katrina debacle—was that their ideology reigned for decades. To most Americans, the idea of slashing taxes and cutting back on regulation sounded like common sense.

Amid the frustrations of Obama’s term, those notions seem dominant once again. In July Don Blankenship, in whose West Virginia mine twenty-nine workers died this past spring, told an audience at the National Press Club, "Corporate business is what built America, in my opinion, and we need to let it thrive by, in a sense, leaving it alone." Such an obscenity—and the worldview that lies behind it—should be publicized as widely as possible.

Progressives and their sometime allies in the White House do enjoy one advantage over their opponents: unlike in the heyday of Reaganism, the American right cannot pose a single serious answer to any problem plaguing the United States or the world. Give the Great Communicator his due: communism was a tyrannical system, and liberals in the 1980s did discount the practical virtues of entrepreneurial innovation.

But a Republican Party and a conservative movement that follow the lead of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are dwelling in a land of perilous delusions. We need people who can broadcast that fact repeatedly and in imaginative ways—and who are rooted as much in old factory towns and fast-growing exurbs as in places like Manhattan and Berkeley. Once the left starts doing that, clever politicians will follow—at least part of the way.

“If something is not done shortly, this country is going the way of…Italy, Germany…or Russia, and it is high time we did something,” exclaimed Irénée du Pont, one of the more prominent conservatives of the 1930s. Many of his fellow Americans agreed there was good cause to be alarmed: a new Democratic president was proposing an unprecedented expansion of federal power that would increase taxes on the well-off and dole out benefits to the jobless and other unfortunates. Several spokesmen on the right made more ominous vows: “So help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair once occupied by Washington,” declared Father Charles Coughlin, who commanded one of the largest radio audiences in the nation.

There is nothing particularly novel about today’s protesters, including one failed vice presidential candidate and the chairman of the Republican Party, who have been screaming that Barack Obama is a closet socialist–or fascist–whose plans for reforming the healthcare system will destroy their freedoms and perhaps kill off their loved ones. They are just the latest representatives of a long national tradition: fear of a strong central government that periodically leads some Americans to make extraordinary leaps of logic and challenge the power of the alleged leviathan.

This tradition is, in fact, as old as the nation itself. During the 1760s colonists along the Eastern Seaboard were convinced that King George III and his ministers meant to abolish their liberties and yoke their economy to the venal desires of the imperial court in London. They made a revolution to thwart this wicked plot, one that historians now agree never existed. Even after the Constitution was ratified, Americans were more comfortable when state and local governments levied taxes and enforced moralistic laws like Prohibition than when the feds tried to do the same thing.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of conspiracy thinking went on. In 1860 most white Southerners were certain that Abraham Lincoln, newly elected president, was, like John Brown, encouraging slaves to murder their masters. This fear helped make secession–and civil war–inevitable. Almost a century later, Senator Joseph McCarthy, then near the height of his popularity, charged that George Marshall, a decorated general and former secretary of state, was enmeshed in “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Some figures on the left have made outsize accusations of their own. In the 1990s Maxine Waters, the liberal Congresswoman from California, charged the CIA with flooding the streets of South Central Los Angeles with crack cocaine. And Oliver Stone’s cinematic exposé of a fanciful civilian-military plot to assassinate JFK did quite splendidly at the box office.

But the habit has always been more common on the right, and with good reason. Most liberals and radicals want the federal government, the only national institution chosen by the people at large, to satisfy social needs that business will not meet and private charities lack the resources to fulfill. Although socialism has never been a very popular faith in the United States, the American left’s call for a stronger, more caring government does echo its more class-conscious counterparts in other industrial and postindustrial nations.

And conservative movements that stoke panic about the designs of big government have often won the day. In the 1870s Democrats who attacked Radical Republicans for imposing “Negro rule” on the South did much to sap Northern white support for Reconstruction; the result was a brutal segregationist order that endured for almost a century. The same fear that white Americans are losing control to blacks and recent immigrants has animated other wild attacks on federal power over the years, one reason it took so long for Congress to pass strong civil rights and voting rights bills. Redbaiting has done effective service as well. In the late 1940s the American Medical Association helped defeat Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance by publishing an erroneous quote by Lenin declaring that “socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.” If all this be paranoia, the right has certainly made the most of it.

But such mendacious offensives do not always succeed. During Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in the White House, du Pont and other corporate moguls funded a lobby, the American Liberty League, which did its worst to deny him re-election. The league even included two former Democratic nominees for president. But the Depression had made most people suspicious about the laissez-faire dogma of big business, and FDR easily parried its charges.

Father Coughlin seemed to pose a more serious threat. The eloquent priest, who was Rush Limbaugh in a Roman collar, attracted a cross section of disgruntled white Americans, and the New Deal could not have triumphed without the support of his base among ordinary Catholic voters. But when Coughlin spoke at rallies, the pleasantly modulated rhythms of a parish cleric were replaced by the boastful ranting of a demagogue. On newsreels seen by millions of moviegoers, it was he, not the president, who seemed like an American version of Mussolini or Hitler.

Roosevelt, in contrast, exuded empathy for a nation in distress. During one of his earliest fireside chats, he invited Americans to “tell me your troubles.” The cascade of mail he received yielded significant political benefits. One white textile worker from North Carolina told a reporter that FDR was “the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.” Never before had so many wage-earners, small farmers and their families allowed themselves to expect so much from the government. The New Deal didn’t end the Depression, but it did co-opt populist movements–of labor, the elderly and small farmers–that fed off the anger resulting from economic collapse. Votes from those constituencies kept liberal Democrats in the White House for two unbroken decades.

Barack Obama has found it more difficult to turn away the contemporary edition of the fanatical right. Conservative ideology has been in the saddle for three decades now, and the recession began too late in the Bush administration to entirely discredit its free-market dogma or those who speak on its behalf. The abundance of slick, if inaccurate, ads against healthcare reform also shows that businesses afraid of falling profits remain as central to the modern right as they have been since the movement sprang to life in the late 1940s.

Ironically, the very ineptitude of conservative governance in the recent past makes Americans more open to the right’s arguments now that it is out of national power. Why trust the federal state to do anything it promises? The last “big government” program that aided a large number of Americans was Medicare, enacted almost forty-five years ago–so long that some deluded recipients don’t recognize it as a public program at all.

If Obama and his progressive allies hope to defeat the latest assault on federal power, they will need to go beyond the president’s artful ambivalence about the subject. Like FDR, they will have to talk about government as the property of all the people and push through programs that make its benefits palpable to the great majority. The liberal left is larger than at any time in years; but it remains fragmented by age and race and stymied by a lack of coordination between bloggers and NGOs, who speak mainly to the middle-class young, and unions and community organizers, who struggle to serve workers and the poor. For all its flaws, the national state is the only common political ground we have. To make that case does not advocate socialism; it advances democracy.

One should avoid the temptation to dismiss Daniel Flynn’s new book, A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, $27.50), as merely another blunt weapon in the perpetual clash of ideological adversaries. It’s true that Flynn generally views the history of the left through the crude lens of a propagandist: he considers the Unabomber a member of the environmental movement, claims Lee Harvey Oswald was a “communist assassin” and insists that federal largesse makes Medicare recipients “a burden to everyone.” And Flynn so loathes the sexual libertinism of the Beats that he resorts to physiognomy, of all things, to explain the most flamboyant among them: “If ever a face projected the seediness and perversions of the brain behind it, Allen Ginsberg’s did.”

But these are predictable moves–tics, really, is the more accurate term–for any author who decides to stamp his political faith on the title of a history text. From the other side of the aisle, Howard Zinn has long been lobbing a different, but no less explosive, grenade. In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn eschews personal slurs in favor of vulgar Marxian ones, such as the charge that the American Revolution and Civil War were both elite devices for holding off “potential rebellions.” Neither he nor Flynn bother to consider their retrospective enemies, be they alive or dead, on their own terms, lest a few inconvenient facts compromise their sense of certainty.

For the past three decades, Zinn’s book has drawn millions of readers and inspired thousands more. Flynn is unlikely to enjoy such success, in part because the market for agitprop history from the right is already glutted with apologias for Joe McCarthy and odes to Ronald Reagan. What’s more, anyone who has swallowed what Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Bernard Goldberg write about the sins of the contemporary left will probably find little additional nourishment in Flynn’s buffet of assaults.

His book is, nonetheless, one worth taking seriously. Unlike his fellow partisans, Flynn has spent some time in libraries and archives, and he strains to turn this erudition into a larger interpretation of the phenomenon he detests. Occasionally, an insight does pierce through the fog of his rhetoric: “The American Left is at its most effective when it accepts that it is an American Left,” he writes. “When it forgets where it comes from, the American Left plays to an internal audience eager for purity but unconcerned with persuasion.” On the whole, however, his book is an intriguing failure–one that reveals a certain bewilderment among conservative activists at the persistence of their enemies’ influence.

Flynn cannot decide whether to ridicule the left or to fear it. His chapters on the nineteenth century are filled with odd details about utopian socialists (he labels them “communists”) whose loony antics presaged future tyrannies. Flynn is particularly scornful toward John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community in the 1840s, where the practice of free love and a ban on private property were “a dress rehearsal” for the “utopian delusions of Russia and Germany.” (Hitler did away with capitalism? Well, no matter.) Predictably, Flynn also has fun at the expense of “the loud and colorful sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin,” who, in the 1870s, tapped the wealth of Cornelius Vanderbilt to start a weekly that dabbled in spiritualism and radical feminism and battled with Marxists who thought the duo incurably “bourgeois.”

But as Flynn’s narrative enters the twentieth century, it takes an abrupt and unexplained turn. By some strange alchemy, the ineffectual far left turns into the progressive movement, and then the New Deal. No longer ridiculous or marginal, the left has secured the power to impose its will on a curiously receptive, or at least docile, populace. Flynn frets that the “fantastic” muckraking of socialist Upton Sinclair in The Jungle alarmed the public and forced Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, the opening wedge for a “regulatory state.” He views the job creation agencies of the New Deal–the WPA, the CCC and the PWA–as akin to Hitler’s construction of the autobahn and implies that FDR kept winning elections only because he put so many Americans on the dole. Roosevelt “transformed America into Tammany Hall.” Before Americans realized it, the left was running the country and running it into the ground.

During the heyday of the New Deal, GOP politicians and corporate publicists made similar charges about “creeping socialism.” But those attacks failed to turn back liberalism, and conservatives learned a critical lesson from their failure: you can’t defeat a popular opposition by blaming the people for supporting it. So the right took a populist turn during the post-World War II Red Scare. Activists started to brand the left–whether liberal or radical–as elitist, weak and un-American. From Joe McCarthy to John McCain, they have seldom looked back. But Flynn, gloomy about the apparent triumph of statist programs, never got the message. “Just as Social Security absolved individuals of the responsibility to save for retirement,” he writes, “Medicare absolved them of the responsibility to save for medical care when they needed it most.” The consequence is that Flynn can only fulminate against the widespread backing for universal social programs, a sentiment he can neither abide nor understand.

Flynn is trapped by an ideological contradiction that, unlike his unpopulist stance, has also snared many of his brethren on the right. He condemns the left for undermining individual freedom with its coercive, leveling state and also for advocating individual liberty in sexual matters–gay liberation and abortion rights, specifically. The Warren Court’s epochal ruling in the 1965 Griswold case, which found a right to privacy in the Constitution, was, he declares, “the slippery slope upon which state laws reflecting the traditional morality of the people fell.” Flynn claims to belong to the “cowboy” heritage of America–“open, freewheeling, mind-your-own-business”–against the “Puritan” one that assures citizens that “We know best.” But his book reveals that, depending on the issue, he belongs to both traditions.

His passionate, undeveloped assertions about the past may even puzzle his intended audience. After all, even those Americans who tell pollsters they are conservatives–a plurality for decades now–take for granted the limited welfare state constructed from the era of World War I to the 1960s, which has been protected, on the whole, by every administration since, even by ostensibly “conservative” ones like those of Reagan and both Bushes. Few Americans praise “big government,” but most expect, or at least hope, that public officials will keep the economy prosperous, deliver good education to their children, a decent income and cheap medical care when they retire, and provide swift and efficient aid whenever disaster strikes. Rhetorical fashions come and go in politics, but FDR’s vow to deliver “security” and “freedom from fear” still conveys what most Americans want from their politicians. An increasing number–particularly among the young–also reject Flynn’s brand of puritanism.

Conservatives, of course, can still gain a hearing and votes by talking about traditional resentments and fears–whether of tax-eating bureaucrats, illegal immigrants or a liberal, black presidential candidate who spent part of his childhood in a Muslim country. But those who worship at Reagan’s altar no longer hope to “make the world over again,” the line their icon used to borrow from Tom Paine. True to their name, they cling once more to the supposed virtues of old.

New York City

I wish I could say I was surprised that The Nation assigned a hatchet man to trash my book The Intellectuals and the Flag: the ever on-message Daniel Lazare, who’s sputtered against my work for years [“Pledging Allegiance,” March 20]. On his Long March to expose apostasy and dig up Fragments of the True Left, no scruple impedes Lazare.

Because Lazare is perhaps The Nation‘s back of the book’s main go-to guy for heresy hunts, it’s worth a fair number of words to see how shoddy his work is. His method is part fabrication, part demonology, part projection. Even when he tenders an idea, he warps it with his steel-trap either-or mind. Thus, when he makes the reasonable point that one could respond to the attacks of September 11 “as a New Yorker, as a human being, as a secularist or as an anti-imperialist”–that is, one didn’t have to respond as an American, perish the thought–he overlooks the many passages in my title essay where I do respond precisely as a New Yorker, a human being and, in fact, as an anti-imperialist, as well as an American. Lazare thinks I had to choose. That’s his thuggish mind, not mine.

Lazare is a champion cherry-picker–he should apply for a job in Dick Cheney’s office. In his many paragraphs of rant against what he takes to be my view of patriotism, there appear exactly two quotations from my book. Since Lazare is too busy to quote me, I refer the interested reader to a sentence in which, truth be told, I anticipate the likes of Lazare: “Viewing the ongoing politics of the Americans as contemptibly shallow and compromised, the demonological attitude naturally rules out patriotic attachment to those very Americans.” Lazare illustrates the same point when he imputes to me the view that “responding as an American meant seeing 9/11 in essentially nationalist terms as a case of turbanned foreigners visiting evil on an innocent United States.” Every claim that he puts in my mouth in this sentence is false–and refuted in the book.

Lazare is so contemptuous of the contrast I draw between patriotism and nationalism that he can’t be troubled to note it. So I end up on his anathema list along, I suppose, with the fellow who said, “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it”–Mark Twain, who was also, I believe, a human being, a secularist and an anti-imperialist, as am I, though I may not have recited the loyalty oath prescribed by Inquisitor Lazare.

Most loathsomely, Lazare concocts the impression that I offer “a halfhearted defense of the war in Iraq,” and that my “thesis” is “that the war was a well-intentioned, if badly executed, attempt to rid the world of a noxious tyrant.” This is where tendentiousness rounds the corner and heads for dementia. Here is how Lazare works: He quotes exactly nothing from my book that says such a thing. There is nothing: I wrote against the war, spoke against it in many venues, marched against it, vigiled against it. Here is one sentence from the book: “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’…I felt again the old anger and shame at being attached to a nation–my nation–ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, playing fast and loose with the truth, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government-slathered) interests yet quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.” On the next page, I criticize the Democrats for ducking the issue in 2002.

While Lazare was busy foraging for an essay of mine in Mother Jones to trash, he might have found many in which I argued against the war. Instead, he offers this: “Citing his fellow Dissent-nik Paul Berman, Gitlin bravely inveighs against Islamic fundamentalism as ‘a poisonous, nihilist, totalitarian creed allied, in its ideological DNA, to fascism and communism.’ But he neglects to explain why, if Islamic fundamentalism and Soviet Communism are ideological brothers, they would fight a war to the death in Afghanistan.”

But the very next sentence after the one Lazare cites reads: “Unlike him [Berman], I concluded that its [Islamism’s] roots are principally non-Western and that the wrong interventions–as against Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny–are likely to backfire.” By the way, by Lazare’s illogic, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany could not have gone to war with each other; nor the Soviet Union and China; nor Saddam’s Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran.

Lazare is a professional subject-changer and barrel-bottom scraper. I criticize the likes of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said for finding nothing good to say about US interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, whereupon Lazare objects that Chomsky is a “critical patriot” and Said was an “old-fashioned liberal.” So? I write that totalist ideologies proved murderous, and Lazare, in his fourth-grade gotcha! manner, objects that democracy, socialism and science are also “totalist” (his scare quotes)–yet also liberating. QED! But of course democracy and science are not at all totalist, for they make room for dissent–as would socialism too if it were democratic.

Lazare thinks I wrote in Mother Jones against “Blaming America First” because I was “incensed” that my friend Katha Pollitt had written against flying the flag, and that I implied that Pollitt and her co-thinkers derived pleasure from the suffering around them. In truth, I was not writing about Katha, nor was I incensed about her views–in fact, we appeared together, amicably, arguing against an Iraq war on Democracy Now!, though we did disagree on some particulars. I was indeed incensed by Chomsky, who on the day of the mass murder was too busy denouncing Bill Clinton’s 1998 attack on Sudan to express more than a perfunctory word about the Americans (and others) pulverized. Lazare then says I attacked Chomsky and Said as “foolish or disloyal.” In fact, I attacked them as foolish, not disloyal. It is Lazare who is obsessed with loyalty–to what shimmering idea he does not get around to speaking.

But Lazare, in full jihad mode, flies past my observation, in the same Mother Jones piece, that “the American flag sprouted in the days after September 11, for many of us, as a badge of belonging, not a call to shed innocent blood.” He extracts what he detests in one Mother Jones piece and doesn’t mention my other Mother Jones work at all, including my polemic against the 2002 Bush National Security Statement.

Meanwhile, one-third of the pages of my book concern David Riesman, C. Wright Mills and Irving Howe, intellectuals who in their work aspired to comprehensiveness, comprehensibility and political use. Another one-third make arguments about postmodernism, cultural studies and university values. Lazare is too busy fulminating against my (shall we say) disloyalty even to pay any of this any mind. A mind like an ice pick cannot be bothered.

TODD GITLIN

New York City

Until I read Daniel Lazare’s review of Todd Gitlin’s The Intellectuals and the Flag, I foolishly believed that Gitlin was an opponent of the war in Iraq. Maybe I believed this because Gitlin argued in a September 2002 New York Times op-ed article that “liberals should oppose this administration’s push toward war in Iraq.” Or maybe I believed it because, in a talk he gave at NYU in November 2002, he said that war in Iraq was likely to bring about “carnage and a boost to terror,” that “wars must be a matter of last resort” and that despite the “monstrous tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the use of force for ‘regime change’ is not proportionate, nor is it justified.” Or maybe I believed it because in the title essay of the book reviewed by Lazare, Gitlin says that Bush and his entourage “bamboozled the public,” that they were “lying,” “cherry-picking the evidence,” “covering up the counter-evidence” and “playing the bully’s game of triumph of the will.” Until I read Lazare’s review, I had no idea that all of this added up, as Lazare puts it, to a “half-hearted defense of the war in Iraq.” That Gitlin is very sly! Thank goodness we have sharp-eyed and intellectually scrupulous critics like Lazare to expose him.

BRIAN MORTON

Chevy Chase, Md.

Any future historian seeking a prime example of idiocy on the American left will have to look no further than Daniel Lazare’s tirade against Todd Gitlin’s latest book. Here she will find Gitlin, a consistent and eloquent opponent of the Iraq War, described as a member of the “foreign policy establishment” and an ally of “authoritarianism.” Here she will find Lazare mocking the very idea that left-wing patriotism can be anything other than a surrender to jingoism–although such worthies as Frederick Douglass, Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr. invoked American ideals to support their demands. And here she will find evidence that certain radicals gain more satisfaction from hating a prominent progressive like Gitlin than in figuring out how to rescue the positive aspects of national traditions from the right-wing government that speaks in their name. The Intellectuals and the Flag is a splendid contribution to the revival of a credible left that might actually play a part in changing our country. Lazare’s review is a mélange of falsehoods and baseless rants that reminded me of the kind of hack jobs once performed by Stalinist writers like Mike Gold and V.J. Jerome. It should have no place in the most popular weekly on the current American left.

MICHAEL KAZIN

LAZARE REPLIES

New York City

Todd Gitlin has written a long, furious blast of a letter, so I’ll be as clear and calm as I can in reply. It is beyond me why Gitlin characterizes my point about the importance of perspective as “thuggish.” I think it’s obvious: The “optic” one chooses to view a particular event helps determine one’s perception, analysis and response. In Gitlin’s case, choosing to view 9/11 through patriotic lenses fairly insured that he’d join in the mood of belligerent nationalism that was sweeping the country and that he’d be incensed at those who refused to do likewise. The astonishing charge of “schadenfreude” that he hurled at certain unnamed leftists in his notorious Mother Jones article a few months later was the inevitable upshot. Not even Bush or Cheney went this far. Yet Gitlin not only refuses to apologize but is now furious that I would even bring it up.

Gitlin writes that “Lazare is so contemptuous of the contrast I draw between patriotism and nationalism that he can’t be troubled to note it.” But in fact I quoted him at length on the subject of “democratic patriotism.” I just didn’t find his comments very convincing. Gitlin describes me as loathsome, tendentious and demented for suggesting that the arguments in The Intellectuals and the Flag add up to “a halfhearted defense” of the Iraq War and adds that I quoted “exactly nothing from my book that says such a thing.” But while noting his statement that the Bush Administration’s reasons for going to war were “shabby, sloppy and evasive,” I also quoted him as saying that “the other powers’ approach” to the problem of Saddam was deficient and that removing Saddam was not without its “virtues.” Despite Bush’s shortcomings, in other words, Gitlin managed to find something good to say about the invasion’s chief goal while arguing that no one else was able to come up with anything better. I think “a halfhearted defense” in this context is entirely accurate.

Although I didn’t say so in my review, I might point out that Gitlin went on in his book to describe the invasion not as wrong, but as merely “botched”–which suggests that, had it been properly executed, he might very well have been in support. I might also point out that he set off a round of booing at the 2003 Socialist Scholars Conference when, on the eve of the invasion, he told the assembled leftists to brace themselves because the outcome might turn out to be better than they were expecting. Needless to say, he was wrong. Gitlin no doubt thought he was being very sage in criticizing not only Bush but leftists who, he thought, were soft on Saddam. But the charge was groundless and only succeeded in infuriating the war’s opponents.

Gitlin accuses me of failing to quote the distinction he draws between Paul Berman’s thesis that Islamic fundamentalism, communism and fascism are all brothers under the skin and his own position that Islamic fundamentalism’s “roots are principally non-Western and that the wrong interventions–as against Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny–are likely to backfire.” I didn’t quote it, because I thought it was a minor qualification that added little to the overall discussion. But maybe I should have, if only because it exemplifies so much of what is wrong with his writing. After all, what does the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism have to do with overthrowing a Baathist regime that was predominantly secular and nationalist? Not only is the statement that “wrong interventions…are likely to backfire” a tautology (can wrong interventions do anything but backfire?) but it is also a purely pragmatic argument that, by limiting itself to the likely consequences of such actions, avoids any question as to their underlying morality. The point is not whether intervention would work (whatever “work” means in this context) but whether it would be right or wrong in the first place.

A few other points: Gitlin says I am wrong to argue that if fundamentalism and Soviet Communism were brothers under the skin, it would beg the question of why they “would fight a war to the death in Afghanistan.” He replies that ideological brothers often go to war with one another and cites Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II as an example. But this statement leaves me puzzled. Is he saying that the Nazis and Soviets were ideological brothers as well? If so, he should be aware that the only people who maintained this position at the time were a few isolationists calling for a plague on both their houses and quietly hoping that Hitler would be left alone to finish the job against Stalin. Most others, including nearly everyone on the left, recognized that despite certain superficial similarities at the top, the war between Germany and Russia was between fundamentally antagonistic social systems. If Gitlin disagrees, perhaps he should explain why.

Finally, I’m glad that Gitlin and Pollitt are friends, but I still find his comments about Noam Chomsky to be despicable. I don’t know Chomsky and actually disagree with a fair amount of what he has to say. Yet I’m absolutely confident that he was as appalled and outraged at the slaughter of the innocents on 9/11 as everyone else. If he brought up Sudan, it was only to make the vital point that while the victims were innocent the US government was not, and that Americans should demand that it come clean about its many unsavory activities in the Third World. If more dissidents had succeeded in making themselves heard in those days, we would be a lot better off now. But they were quickly silenced by people yelling “schadenfreude” and other terms of abuse, and so the war effort continued unimpeded.

Hatchet man…fabrication…loathsome: Gitlin insists that patriotism is an ideology of tolerance but grows angry and abusive when confronted with someone who disagrees. What’s wrong with this picture?

Regarding Brian Morton and Michael Kazin, it’s clear that Gitlin has been e-mailing his Dissent colleagues to get them to respond. I wonder what left-wing stalwarts on the editorial board we’ll be hearing from next–Paul Berman? Martin Peretz? Perhaps Mitchell Cohen will write in to explain why he supports the war, while his co-editor Michael Walzer clears up the mysteries of his own anti-antiwar position. The 2002 Times op-ed article Morton cites was actually a hack job that attacked “intellectuals and activists on the far left” who, according to Gitlin, “could not be troubled much with compassion or defense.” Once again, he portrays leftists as anti-American ideologues unmoved by 3,000 deaths, which is undoubtedly why the Times chose to run that absurd piece. Kazin’s letter is even worse–an obnoxious, bullying screed that insists we all acknowledge Gitlin as “a consistent and eloquent opponent” of the war merely because Kazin says so. As for the charge of Stalinism, I’ve been the most fervent of anti-Stalinists ever since joining a Trotskyist cell in Madison, Wisconsin, at age 20 (a long, long time ago, unfortunately). In neolib-speak, “Stalinist” seems to be a general term of abuse for anyone daring to challenge the left-wing credentials of the various stuffed shirts who write for Dissent. Wherever he is, I’m sure that Uncle Joe is enjoying the compliment.

DANIEL LAZARE

It’s a literary tradition to claim that a quiet desperation is the fate of the white-collar worker. Herman Melville on Bartleby, the unwilling scrivener, C. Wright Mills on the office drones of the 1940s and ’50s, and the authors of such recent books as The Corrosion of Character (Richard Sennett) and White Collar Sweatshop (Jill Andresky Fraser) all describe people whose jobs are superficial and whose status is unstable. The bosses above accumulate the profits and power; the manual workers below at least know they are making or serving products nearly everyone needs. But the salaried masses have only their anxieties and the occasional ambition, usually frustrated, to go into business for themselves.

Now comes Barbara Ehrenreich to probe a deeper level of white-collar pain: men and women who lose or quit their corporate jobs and routinely spend months, even years, trying to find another. Bait and Switch is the logical sequel to Nickel and Dimed, her revelatory 2001 book about the blue-collar poor. Nickel and Dimed is one of the most significant works of social criticism any American leftist has written since the 1960s. With humanity and shrewd wit, Ehrenreich described her stints of voluntary toil in several of “America’s least attractive jobs”–from cleaning houses to clerking for Wal-Mart. Without a smidgen of condescension, she confirmed how difficult it is to survive on nonunion wages, demolished the myth of the kinder and gentler workplace and sold a million books–proving that an impressive number of Americans care enough about economic injustice to read a scathing, compelling account of the toll it takes on the class below.

But few of the people who read Nickel and Dimed earn their keep with a mop or by stocking shelves, and most live neither in a trailer park nor in a grimy, pay-by-the-week motel. So to explore the lives of “people who were once members in good standing of the middle class,” Ehrenreich put together a phony résumé, purchased a few new outfits and began searching for a job in public relations. That goal seemed logical too. After all, Ehrenreich is a veteran journalist and, as she notes, “PR is really journalism’s evil twin.”

Unfortunately, she never got to flack for a big corporation or trade rumors with her fellow white-collars by the coffee machine. After struggling for almost a year on the job market, Ehrenreich failed to land a position. By her account, she was “admirably flexible, applying at one point for a job as PR director of the American Diabetes Association and then switching sides and offering myself to Hershey’s.” But her age and several ominous “gaps” in her made-up career did her in.

She started the job-seeking process by sampling the world of job “coaches” and “networkers,” and only made it out in time to write this book. As in every inferno of psychobabble, her experience was at once ludicrous and depressing. Ehrenreich spent time with a coach who used dolls of Elvis and of characters from The Wizard of Oz to divine her personality type; another gave her a battery of simple-minded tests and then declared that the results proved her client to be “the commandant…a natural leader!” The same peppy coach advised the skeptical Ehrenreich, who is over 60, to cleanse her résumé by lopping two decades off her age and eliminating all references to jobs she held before the 1990s.

These were solitary escapades, but to network with the well-dressed unemployed was to enter a sadder circle of hell. Ehrenreich describes several of the gatherings she attended, which dressed up the age-old clichés of self-reliance in the oddly complementary lingoes of aggression and “spirituality.” There was the “boot camp” in Atlanta where a would-be Dr. Phil told the assembled job seekers to “find the one place out there that will nurture and value YOU!” and then chided them for not being team players. There was the PowerPoint obsessive, an Alec Baldwin look-alike “only without the sexual edge” who counseled a band of doleful networkers to think of themselves as being “in transition” instead of out of work. “You’re executives here,” he told the group, which was supposed to furnish the necessary steel to confront a bank about to foreclose on one’s home. And, inevitably, there was a “fellowship lunch” at which the Ten Commandments got passed off as advice for job seekers. Ehrenreich, a confirmed atheist, refrained from challenging her Christian hosts to justify how they could turn the First Commandment (“You shall have no other gods before Me”) into an injunction to “show proper respect for authority”–namely, the boss.

Unemployed white-collars signal their despair when they spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars traveling to and attending such sessions. The organizers secure a steady income for themselves by gulling the unlucky into devoting at least as much time to searching for a job as they would spend actually working at one. As Ehrenreich observes, these con artists manage to reproduce one of “the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders–orders which are in this case self-generated.” Fortunately, she’s on their case, exposing the cant spewed out by corporate culture, while never forgetting that clever ridicule is always more convincing than righteous rage.

Still, there’s something disturbing about how she regards the poor souls she met along the networking trail of tears. Like Mills in his classic study, White Collar, Ehrenreich has a hard time empathizing with such people. In Nickel and Dimed, she wrote with respect, even affection, about the women with whom she cleaned toilets and peddled blouses. These underpaid but essential workers, she wrote in an exquisite phrase, are “the major philanthropists of our society.”

In contrast, Ehrenreich despises the kind of corporate shill she was pretending to want to be. And her loathing tends to rub off on the men and women who desired similar positions for themselves, who equated a secure one with achieving the good life. Ehrenreich also slights the ingenuity required in many PR jobs; in a market society, the selling of images can be as exciting and creative, if not as socially useful, as investigative reporting.

But Bait and Switch rarely quotes or describes other job seekers. The few who do emerge from the shadows are bewildered by their plight, unable to perceive that they are wasting their time and money sitting “in windowless rooms while someone–most commonly a white male in his fifties or sixties–stands at the front testifying, preaching, exhorting, or coaching.” Ehrenreich would “rather be waitressing.”

Why do they sit there suffering? The only answer Ehrenreich offers is that these people swallow the ideology that it’s every job hunter for herself. “It explains the winners’ success in the most flattering terms while invalidating the complaints of the losers.” Job coaches peddle the line that, in the fickle world of the postmodern corporation, only the “relentlessly cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient” will find secure positions, and the desperate do their best to conform.

But is aggressive individualism so irrational a belief for those who want to make it in big business? After all, professionals in every field–be it journalism, information technology or PR–are judged by how they perform in competition with their peers. Only for writers as talented as Ehrenreich can railing at the system bring anything but failure.

That cheerless fact is the reason few corporate white-collars are likely to follow her suggestion that they lobby for extended unemployment benefits and universal health insurance. One doesn’t have to identify with the boss to see the benefits of spouting the company line, and progressive activists are not common inside the headquarters of the Fortune 500.

The only way to change this reality is to change the goals for which professionals are hired. The black freedom movement created jobs for thousands of civil rights lawyers and affirmative-action officers, and the green upsurge launched new careers for conservationists and environmental policy makers. Until there’s a broad revival of the American left, most resisters among the white-collar unemployed will emulate Bartleby’s immortal response to his employer: “I would prefer not to.”

Say what you will about the sins of the Bush Administration. But credit it with one small but welcome accomplishment: It has moved Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to give a vigorous lesson about the peril of keeping an arrogant moralist in the White House. The great liberal historian made his name by writing long, sympathetic, popular books about great liberal politicians: The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt, A Thousand Days, Robert Kennedy and His Times. Meanwhile, Schlesinger was never shy about making some history himself; he helped found Americans for Democratic Action, advised Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for President and was a special assistant in the Kennedy White House. At 86, he remains a passionate liberal who is friendly with leading Democrats and is eager to point out the follies of the Bushian right.

Yet, away from the bestseller lists, Schlesinger has often been a counselor of caution–about the twin dangers of breakneck ideology and unrivaled power. His cold war classic, The Vital Center, urged fellow liberals to resist Stalinism with as much fervor as they spurned the anti-Communist right. The Imperial Presidency, published just as Watergate became a crisis, stuck a lasting name on the grab for supremacy by the executive branch. And in The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger took radical multiculturalists to task for viewing American nationalism as little more than a device for the oppression of ethnic minorities.

His books, always written with supreme confidence and arresting prose, have seldom found favor in the pages of this magazine. Most leftists wrote off Schlesinger as the court historian of the liberal establishment, at least when such an animal truly existed. But his most thoughtful and provocative work has always been critical of dogmatic and domineering officeholders rather than a tribute to liberal heroes. Inspiring much of that writing is the ironic judgment Schlesinger learned from his friend, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: Moralists who divide the world between absolute evil and spotless virtue usually impede the progress of the good. As Niebuhr wrote, smack in the middle of the Korean War and at the height of McCarthyism, “A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice.”

How apt that sounds half a century later. The debacle in Iraq provides, for Schlesinger, a perfect illustration of why would-be messiahs make bad Presidents. Based on intelligence that was little more than a compilation of wishful thinking, George W. Bush went to war for an idea–that “converting the Arab world to representative democracy” was both feasible and right. In so doing, he made a radical change in the doctrine of American foreign policy. Instead of containing and deterring potential enemies, as during the cold war, Bush declared that the United States had a duty to make war so that others would not do the same.

Schlesinger delivers this now-familiar indictment with a dash of wit. He compares Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to the relentless “precogs” in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, who can “see” crimes and stop them before they occur. But, writes Schlesinger, “in the real world, preventive war depends on accurate intelligence, which is all too often unavailable, supplemented by dubious historical analogies.” The Bush team imagined the invasion of Iraq would look like the liberation of France or Italy near the end of World War II; instead, it stirs memories of Vietnam.

Although there’s nothing particularly original about Schlesinger’s argument, he does ground it in a more sober historical critique than most antiwar critics have offered. Unilateralism, he points out, is a venerable tradition in US foreign policy. Until World War I, George Washington’s doctrine of no “permanent alliances” governed America’s relationships with the outside world. Woodrow Wilson broke the habit of going it alone when he sought to pin the nation’s security to a powerful League of Nations. But his own unbending moralism sabotaged the enterprise, and it wasn’t revived until the 1940s, when the more pragmatic FDR converted a wartime alliance into the United Nations, and Harry Truman mobilized the anti-Soviet governments of Europe into NATO.

In contrast, George W. Bush harks back to those nineteenth-century Presidents who believed America should act only by itself and for itself. Yet, at the same time, he longs to convert the world to freedom, Republican style. No wonder his precog war has been such a disaster.

Useful as they are, Schlesinger’s reflections are not honest enough about the past. The scholar who did much to glorify the Kennedys still views the historical record with the blinders of a partisan. He fails to reckon with the preventive, unilateral battles that liberal Democrats fought in the name of defeating Communism. Schlesinger neglects the proxy invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (which, as a White House official, he warned against) and glosses over the war in Indochina, which most US allies opposed and which neither JFK nor Lyndon Johnson asked the UN to sanction. Only in Europe did American policy-makers really work in partnership with like-minded leaders. And that alliance succeeded only because its adversaries in the Soviet bloc were fast losing the allegiance of their own people. The reality in Cuba and Vietnam was quite different; even many foes of state socialism regarded Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as authentic fighters for national independence.

Other essays in this little book go beyond the pitfalls of going it alone. Schlesinger issues a rebuke to those who would stifle dissent in wartime. He shows that, from John Adams’s Sedition Act to John Ashcroft’s Patriot Act, such measures fail to achieve their ends and make their architects look nasty in the light of history. Less cogent is an essay that proposes an overly complex scheme to replace the Electoral College. Yet another makes the unremarkable observation that, in the sweep of world history, democracy is a young form of government that is now imperiled by “religious fanaticism” and “the politics of identity.” Like most op-eds, such pieces are not likely to change many minds or hold their value for long.

Fortunately, the citizen-scholar saves his best thinking for last. After surveying the errors of policy-makers, past and present, Schlesinger asks, “What use is history anyway?” His answer is a nugget of good sense. Historians are neither useful for predicting the future nor for reducing the past to a single, overriding variable–be it class struggle, religious faith or the advance of free markets. What they can do is to explain why an empire faltered or a revolution turned dictatorial–and point to features of those events that often recur, although the details of each case cannot.

His larger point echoes what Niebuhr preached and Isaiah Berlin argued in his luminous, if repetitive, studies in intellectual history: Those who believe they have found the key to history inevitably lose their way in a swamp of self-righteousness, from which tyranny grows. Leftists who dismiss this as a refusal to take sides fail to realize that irony remains an essential tool for an American political historian. Because our nation’s ideals are so audaciously universalist and transcendent, they will always disappoint, even anger those who take them seriously.

Schlesinger concludes, “History should lead statesmen to a profound and humbling sense of human frailty–to a recognition of the fact, so insistently demonstrated by experience and so tragically destructive of our most cherished certitudes, that the possibilities of history are far richer and more various than the human intellect is likely to conceive.” That wisdom, he quickly adds, does not relieve us “from the necessity of meeting our obligations.” The last word is undefined, perhaps to indicate its moral complexity. Schlesinger, who is writing the second volume of his memoirs, has not retired from the craft of history writing. But those sentences should endure as a fitting epitaph for a life of often profound, always contentious work.

“You are the heirs of one of the country’s great traditions, the Progressive movement that started late in the nineteenth century and remade the American experience piece by piece,” Bill Moyers told a throng of liberal Democrats who recently gathered in a Washington hotel to plan the defeat of George W. Bush. What made Progressivism so great, according to Moyers, was its nonviolent war on the Gilded Age plutocracy, which, aided by such clever rogues as Mark Hanna, had “strangled” the promise of social equality “in the hard grip of a merciless ruling class.”

It’s an eminently usable past. If Karl Rove styles himself a twenty-first-century Hanna, fashioning a new era of Republican dominance, then why can’t the postmodern left be the second coming of Robert La Follette and Jane Addams–those inspiring figures, in and out of office, who challenged the politics of laissez-faire cupidity and began to make the United States a fairer, more humane society?

Only a hopeless pedant would dismiss the value of history as a motivating force for the living. But contemporary “progressives” would be wise to look more closely at the white middle-class crusaders who coined the name before they rush to emulate their achievements. Michael McGerr’s consistently intelligent, superbly crafted survey, A Fierce Discontent, is a fine place to start.

The Progressives, McGerr explains, had ambitions that stretched far beyond mere crackdowns on trust-builders and graft-takers. With income and inheritance taxes and a ban on child labor, they sought to narrow the class divide that yawned between the factory tenement and the mansion on the hill. They yearned to purify the body politic through an aggressive politics of the body–which meant banning prostitution, limiting divorce and abolishing the “liquor traffic.” And behind each specific reform lay a grand desire to replace the self-serving individualism of American culture with an ethic of service and responsibility. Although the insurgency included Catholics and Jews, it always had the flavor of a Protestant crusade. Most reformers abandoned the evangelical faith of their childhood, but their messianic zeal for perfecting society could not have been any stronger if they’d founded a new church and written their own Bible.

This portrait might unsettle some of the liberals who cheered Moyers’s address, delivered at a conference that vowed to “Take Back America.” Janus could have been the Progressives’ patron saint. In their stern regulation of big business and attempts to redistribute wealth, they were the forerunners of New Deal liberals. But on cultural matters, most were militant Victorians, aspiring to reshape the nation into a well-ordered, hard-working, self-disciplined community. In one of his many White House exhortations, Theodore Roosevelt urged the “steady training of the individual citizen, in conscience and character, until he grows to abhor corruption and greed and tyranny and brutality and to prize justice and fair dealing.”

Lofty visions of self-improvement always look better in speeches than when chiseled into law. For certain white reformers (most, but not all of them, from Dixie), “taking back America” meant building the elaborate machinery of Jim Crow. McGerr realizes, of course, that segregation deprived African-American citizens of their hard-won constitutional rights. But many of its architects, he points out, sincerely believed they were protecting black people from the routine sadism visited on them by the insecure white majority. “Ours is a world of inexorable divisions,” wrote a leading Southern Progressive. “Good fences make good neighbors.” The most powerful black man in America agreed, at least in public. Secretly, Booker T. Washington was funding boycotts of Jim Crow streetcars in several Southern cities.

Progressivism has always been a difficult beast for historians to tie down. How can a narrative lucidly round up all the different species of reformers–from Marxian preachers to polite racists to upper-class suffragists to moralizing scolds to a hyperactive President who won a Nobel Peace Prize yet was in love with war? Richard Hofstadter and Robert Wiebe set the standard several decades ago with interpretations (The Age of Reform, published in 1955, and The Search for Order, in 1967) drenched in the irony of unintended consequences. They described how a generation of sanguine altruists was blind to the clever antics of well-heeled conservatives–witness the hijacking of the recall and initiative in California–and the resistance of ordinary folk to being perfected–cf. the failure of Prohibition.

McGerr is not averse to irony, but his book dwells more on the social history that activists confronted than on the foibles of overreaching. For example, he shows how the attempt to “transform Americans” looked to a poor Jewish immigrant named Rahel Golub. Golub gladly accepted medical aid from settlement-house workers but was puzzled by a visiting college girl who pestered her with “eager questions”–and she recoiled at missionaries who tried to convert her to Christianity. Drawing on a small library of good histories published since the 1960s, McGerr takes full measure of how women shaped the course of social change–as reformers, intellectuals, wage-earners and seekers after a myriad of pleasures, both new and old.

Unlike his scholarly forebears, McGerr offers no big idea to make sense of the era. Hofstadter argued that most reformers were anxious about their declining status in an order run by new-rich industrialists, while Wiebe focused on the rise of do-gooder bureaucrats who sought to bring social harmony out of chaos. But McGerr paints on a larger canvas than they did, and his ambitious meld of character, policy and context should make his book a landmark in the field. A Fierce Discontent may even do something to reawaken public interest in the turn-of-the-century crusaders themselves, who have often seemed a rather grim and confusing lot.

McGerr also has a perceptive response to the tricky question of why, by the 1920s, the Progressive flame had flickered so low. The key, he contends, was the rise of a new definition of individual freedom. In the nineteenth century, freedom meant the liberty of people and property from an authoritarian state. Now it meant the ability to enjoy the fruits of mass culture. Increasing numbers of Americans were stepping out to dance halls, vaudeville theaters, baseball games, department stores, picture shows and a celebrated art exhibition that featured Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which one puzzled viewer likened to “a lot of disused golf clubs and bags.” Meanwhile, autos, airplanes and telephones were altering received notions of time and space.

The young men and women, from all classes and races, who reveled in these commodities and adventures grew unwilling to let work, however virtuous its purpose, rule their imagination as well as their days. McGerr doesn’t adequately explain why this epochal change, which began to occur in the late nineteenth century, didn’t rob reform of its energy long before the doughboys sailed home in triumph from the battlefields of France. But he does give a rich account of how the dream of personal liberation “unsettled the nascent order of progressive America” and sapped movements for collective uplift. Not for the first or last time did the pursuit of individual happiness trump yearnings of a more earnest, selfless kind.

If there’s a flaw in McGerr’s thoughtful study, it’s his virtual silence about party politics–the point of departure for Moyers’s rousing speech. Individual reformers and movements could thrust an issue like child labor or corporate bribery into the headlines. But only when Democrats and/or Republicans embraced it for their own purposes could a lasting change occur. Despite the lofty reputation Teddy Roosevelt has gained (thanks, in part, to John McCain and Edmund Morris), it was the Democrats who most consistently fought for class-based reform during the Progressive years. They were particularly active in restraining corporate power and passing laws to aid wage-earners and small farmers–while excluding most black people from taking part in politics at all. The fact that William Jennings Bryan led his party’s populist charge from the Cross of Gold speech in 1896 up to the eve of World War I suggests how deep were the evangelical roots of the fierce discontent.

But no faction of Progressives was able to meet the challenge of what McGerr calls “the promise of liberation.” Nor, it should be added, have their would-be emulators done so today. Citizens who value self-expression above all else make poor recruits for social movements. The post-1960s left has certainly helped to free millions of Americans from the pressure to conform to the straight white ideal. But a respect for diversity is only one element of a good society. Contemporary progressives have yet to figure out how to speak as compellingly about material decency for all Americans as they do about freedom of the self. When they do, the heirs of Mark Hanna will begin to fear for their future.

During the harsh New York City winter of 1909-10, 20,000 garment workers marched and picketed to win recognition of their union. “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law it is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow,” a magistrate hectored one young seamstress. “You are on strike against God.” To which George Bernard Shaw responded from across the ocean, “Delightful. Medieval America always in intimate personal confidence of the Almighty.”

There is nothing simple about sin, particularly in a land where piety has always been a public enterprise. For that justly forgotten judge, every class-conscious sweatshop was a breeding ground for anarchy. Thankfully, few Americans could swallow the image of the Lord as an authoritarian employer; He had, after all, so many other evils to combat.

And so many eager helpers, stirring up righteous trouble from all points on the political map. Consider the bounty of activities Shaw could have mocked in the early years of the past century. Prohibitionist clerics organized to ban “the liquor traffic,” sentinels of womanly virtue (from both genders) tried to stamp out prostitution and abortion, and churchgoing segregationists adopted Jim Crow laws to protect the white South against the designs of “savage” blacks. On the left, Christian Socialists cursed capitalism as an evil system that enthroned money-changers and mocked the Sermon on the Mount. When the federal government jailed Eugene Debs for speaking out against World War I, one minister from Ohio hailed the radical leader as the “vicarious victim of Society’s sins…his life is a continual crucifixion.”

The very diversity of crusaders and the fecundity of their targets suggest that Shaw was a better wit than historian. In the United States, the battle against secular evils was and remains a thoroughly modern adventure. Lacking a unified state church, Americans have felt free to define sin almost any way they wish. At the same time, the evangelical Protestant majority has insisted that iniquity be considered a matter both of private and public behavior.

During the 1740s Jonathan Edwards, the great theologian and preacher, implored his fellow New Englanders to cease their wicked habits and cling tightly to “the God that holds you over the pits of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect…and is dreadfully provoked.” But he also fretted that their transgressions were imperiling the future of a Christian commonwealth founded to be a “city upon a hill,” yet perpetually at risk from hostile nations without and material corruption within. As George Marsden writes in his learned, lucid biography, Edwards “spent vast amounts of time concerned about both Roman Catholicism and the Indians and their respective and very different places in God’s plans.” He was also an ascetic who ate as little as possible and resolved “never to lose one moment of time” in “unprofitable” pursuits.

Such dual obsessions–for the fate of oneself and one’s society–have seldom been the monopoly of either right or left. Whatever their ideology, most serious activists harbor a taste for moralism in extremis. No faithful Nation reader was surprised that the same right-wing minister who inveighed against “secular humanism” also demanded that Bill Clinton be thrown out of office for committing adultery. But what about the abolitionists who called the Constitution a “covenant from Hell” because it smiled on slavery–and, preaching that “total abstinence from sin” was “necessarily attainable,” condemned the hard-drinking habits of Irish immigrants? Indeed, how many contemporary foes of the tobacco lobby can resist giving individual smokers the evil eye?

It takes an audacious scholar both to narrate and try to make sense of this long, tangled history of moralists and their causes. In Hellfire Nation, James Morone makes a brave, provocative attempt. He begins with the Puritans’ dilemma–how to square the sanctity of hard work with the deviltry of selfish consumption. Then he meanders leisurely through epochal conflicts over slavery, sexual purity and alcohol, and takes briefer glances at the Social Gospel, the Red Scare and the contemporary Christian right.

Morone is a political scientist by trade, but he writes with the zest of a popular historian, alert to the telling detail and the apt quotation. He points out, for example, one reason why, in the early 1870s, the YMCA’s Anthony Comstock thought it was urgent to launch a campaign to outlaw contraceptives. The price of a condom had sunk from close to half a dollar in the late 1850s to just 6 cents apiece. Morone adds, “Comstock enthusiastically raided purveyors; he wrote for advice about birth control, then nabbed physicians who mailed him a response. After just two years the Comstock ticker stood at 60,300 rubber articles seized and destroyed.”

There’s an obvious pitfall awaiting any liberal secularist who tells such stories. A glib condescension can slip into one’s prose, leaving the impression that the God-infested zealots shouldn’t be taken too seriously. On occasion, Morone gives in to the temptation himself. “People began thumping Bibles again,” he cracks about an antebellum revival. But, for the most part, he succeeds in capturing the fears and visions of Christian activists who shared, in Richard Hofstadter’s wonderful phrase, the “idea that everyone was in some very serious sense responsible for everything.”

As with many a contemporary scholar of American studies, Morone’s own moral tale turns primarily on matters of race and gender. The repression of black people, recent immigrants and sexual dissidents lies at the center of his well-crafted narrative. He describes the war between abolitionists and slaveholders to define whether black people were heroic victims or perpetual children. He retells, in throbbing detail, how white prohibitionists used images of swarthy, foreign-born saloonkeepers and gin-guzzling black field hands to install their key demand in the Constitution. And he makes clear that the fear of predatory men and fallen women drove pious activists a century ago to mount a “modern witch-hunt” against brothels, abortionists and any politicians deemed to be lax on vice. As a result, the red-light districts closed down and many prostitutes took to the streets, where their health and livelihood were far less secure than in the bad old days of brazen madams and urban bosses.

Unintended consequences plagued each crusade, and Morone is certainly correct to note that “tribal anxiety” has been endemic in a nation that has always been multicultural, in demography if not conviction. But he’s too quick to reduce what he calls “moral panics” to their political meaning. What has motivated crusaders from Jonathan Edwards to Pat Robertson is a desire for personal and collective salvation, not simply social control. Morone says little about how their religious beliefs shaped their worldly activism. Doesn’t it matter that Edwards, as a rigorous Calvinist, believed God had already selected which individuals He would save, while Robertson, as a Pentecostal, believes anyone can receive the blessing of the Holy Spirit?

The author also neglects abundant evidence that public piety has repeatedly crossed the color line. Frederick Douglass was a vigorous advocate of temperance, as were most middle-class black churchgoers. And The Autobiography of Malcolm X is, among other things, an eloquent testament of the power of virtuous living to liberate the minds of oppressed people.

A larger problem is that Morone’s view of history is strangely ahistorical. He thinks more about recurring cycles of moralizing politics than about how conflicts about sin have changed the nation over time. “It’s the same thing every time,” he writes, “Previously excluded people surge forward. Class, race, and gender roles go up for grabs.” That’s a reflection on the 1960s but could have appeared almost anywhere in the book. For Morone, a panic about sliding morals yields a spate of new regulations that require a new corps of bureaucrats to administer them. The enforcers inevitably overreach themselves and provoke a mass backlash against their authority.

The struggle for prohibition is Morone’s classic example: “Exhort people to abstain. Condemn the stubborn drinkers who won’t listen–usually the latest underclass. Prohibit. Watch the violence escalate, and then see prohibition collapse, leaving behind a political legacy. Pause and repeat.” Foes of the liquor traffic, he observes, boosted federal power years in advance of the New Deal and “may have helped fertilize the political culture” for FDR and his allies. Indeed, the Dry Army waged one of the longest and most controversial grassroots campaigns in American history.

Yet no one seriously thinks about reviving it now. Nor could a latter-day Comstock gain a mass audience or a Congressional majority to enforce his dread of sexual license. Of course, too many drug users still end up in prison, and some abortion providers risk assault or worse. But, through the last half of the twentieth century, American culture gradually but surely grew more tolerant of individual behavior that diverged from the sanctified bourgeois norm.

By now, the wheels appear to have fallen off Morone’s cycle. Gay men, lesbians, unmarried couples and interracial lovers of all persuasions enjoy a freedom unimaginable fifty years ago. Without sexy talk and seductive images, most television networks would have little to show that makes a profit. Christian conservatives loudly condemn these changes–while most no longer uphold the segregationist views of their ancestors. But they have been powerless to reverse them, and outside their own circle they often look silly for trying.

Unfortunately, adherents of a progressive brand of moralism have even less clout than Jerry Falwell and his brethren. Morone writes that “an undiluted version of the Social Gospel” animated a range of activists in the 1960s, as liberals and radicals of all faiths worked to abolish war and to transform hierarchies of race and gender. But the rhetoric of collective responsibility sounds hollow to many people today, unless it is tethered to a war of self-defense against terrorists. And the born-again Christian who sits in the Oval Office appears to own the franchise on that one. How many Americans are even aware that both the National Council of Churches and Conference of Catholic Bishops took strong stands against a unilateral invasion of Iraq?

For the left, the burden of the past that Morone illuminates is that Social Gospelers have always been on the defensive in a religious culture where individualism reigns. Evangelical Protestants fervently preach that the relationship that counts is a personal one–between the believer and the Almighty–and many a Catholic and adherents of other faiths embrace that credo too, despite their more communitarian traditions. Those who insist on collective sin and collective redemption rarely find themselves in the majority–as both pro-labor priests in the 1930s and civil rights ministers in the 1960s discovered. It’s no accident that the stronger welfare states in Europe developed after World War II in nations that either had a Catholic heritage–like France and Austria–or had mostly abandoned an evangelical one–like Norway and the Netherlands. In such places, secular solidarity grew from or took the place of a pious community.

Perhaps another crisis like the Great Depression will bring back the idea that it is urgent once again for Americans to organize for social justice. In the meantime, the increasing diversity of religions here should gradually weaken the primacy of Christians who think like George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. But Hellfire Nation offers convincing evidence that no political advance has ever taken place in the United States without a moral awakening flushed with notions about what the Lord would have us do. It’s enough to make a secular leftist gag–and then grudgingly acknowledge the power of prayer.

Bully in the Pulpit?

The following is a forum on Ellen Willis’s “Freedom From Religion,” which appeared in the February 19 issue.
      —The Editors

Los Angeles

I am a spiritual man. I believe politics must arise from a spiritual source as well as an ideological one. The great movements in our history have been spiritually motivated, at least in part. I also want the religious institutions engaged in the questions of justice and morality every day of the week.

But there are problems with the new politics of religion about which Ellen Willis writes. One is the danger of the private religious sphere replacing the public sector, a new kind of privatization that is not accountable. The second is that these religion-based projects will be charitable in nature and will not express political rage–because they will be tax-exempt, dependent on government. Third, social programs and movements should be independent of any pressure to adhere to a religious doctrine to qualify.

What is needed is Old Testament rage, not a clerical seizure of the public sector.

TOM HAYDEN
Tom Hayden is a former California State Senator.

Washington, D.C.

Ellen Willis makes two intertwined arguments. The first is a forthright defense of the separation of religion and the state, inflamed by George W.’s plan to fund “faith-based” service agencies. The second is a sweeping attack on those liberals and leftists who speak kindly of churches and devout churchgoers, ignoring their undemocratic beliefs and arrogant practices.

Anyone who truly cherishes the First Amendment should indeed be wary of Bush’s desire to use tax money to proselytize Americans who are short on money and hope. But it’s not only secularists who are concerned. Liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis and faithful conservatives like Kate O’Beirne worry that manna from the Feds will compromise what Wallis calls the “prophetic voice” of religious bodies. Early in the nineteenth century, the very absence of a state-sanctioned church encouraged Americans to create and follow a wildly heterogeneous variety of creeds (and none at all). People who take their faith seriously would be foolhardy to give up the independence that served them so well in the past.

Willis’s broader polemic against “religious orthodoxy” reveals how little she understands the spirituality she abhors. In challenging all manner of received authority, the rebellion of the 1960s also transformed the rituals of many churches and synagogues–and started many young people on a personal search for “meaning” that social movements by themselves could not satisfy. Today, the conflict between the devout left and the devout right–over economic issues like a living wage as well as an acceptance of homosexuality and support for abortion rights–is as intense as the one in which Willis does battle. And it’s probably a more significant fight, given the minority of Americans who articulate their moral beliefs in strictly secular ways.

Strangely, Willis never seems to wonder why the “alternative moral vision” grounded firmly in the Enlightenment (which we share) captures few contemporary hearts and minds. The secular left has found nothing to replace the socialist dream and struggles to mount a persuasive challenge to the far-too-worldly gospel of free markets. Karl Marx, no friend of organized religion, nevertheless understood that, for ordinary people, religious faith was “the heart of a heartless world.” If Willis hopes to build a more humane society, a bit of empathy for the spiritual choices of ordinary Americans might come in handy.

MICHAEL KAZIN
Michael Kazin’s latest book (with Maurice Isserman) is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. He teaches history at Georgetown University.

Washington, D.C.

Ellen Willis is right but does not go far enough. Even without Bush’s faith-based initiatives the Catholic Church not only demanded but received exemption after exemption from providing the most unexceptional forms of reproductive health. No emergency contraception for women who have been raped. No voluntary postpartum sterilization for women who are having what they hope will be their last child. No fertility treatments for women who would like to have a child.

These services are legally denied by Catholic hospitals and they are often eliminated in secular hospitals that merge with Catholic institutions. Catholic Charities of California has sued the state, seeking an exemption from a state law that requires employers–other than religious institutions engaged in narrowly defined religious activities–to provide contraceptive coverage to its employees. At the same time Catholic Charities nationally receives about 75 percent of its income from government sources. Catholic hospitals receive the bulk of their funding from government sources and tax-exempt bonds.

But the simple claim of conscience by a Catholic institution or the assertion of “church teaching” is enough for most legislators to just give the church whatever it wants as well as tax dollars. There was no national interest in protecting women’s consciences when the Clintons included in their health reform package a conscience clause for healthcare provider institutions allowing them to deny any service they deemed immoral and still be eligible for government grants and contracts. Catholics are against this. Eighty-two percent believe that if a Catholic hospital receives government funds it should be required to allow its doctors to provide any legal, medically sound service they believe is needed. But for most legislators the power of the 300 US Catholic bishops is much more important.

For the bishops to try to have their cake and eat it too is politics as usual. For ultraconservative Catholic groups to claim that any criticism of the Catholic Church is Catholic-bashing is part of the game. For our leaders, Democratic and Republican, to keep serving them more cake is unconscionable.

FRANCES KISSLING
Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

New York City

The First Amendment was enacted not merely to keep the state off the back of religion. One of its prime functions was to keep religions off one another’s back and to stop them from using the state as their agent.

Let us not imagine that this problem has long vanished. Two or three years ago, I was supposed to share a platform with John Cardinal O’Connor on the subject of Jewish/Catholic relations at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York. The Cardinal was so ill he sent his speechwriter to read his remarks. I responded then, and later in an Op-Ed in the New York Times, by asking a very direct question: What would happen to my religious liberty as a rabbi if the campaign by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the evangelical Protestants to outlaw abortion completely and under all circumstances passed into American law? As a rabbi, I am commanded–not permitted, but commanded–to advise a pregnant mother whose life is in danger that she must have an abortion. On the question of who comes first, the mother or the unborn child, Judaism, even its most Orthodox versions, insists that the mother’s right to life is pre-eminent. The ultimate aim of the “pro-life” believers is to outlaw abortion completely. It is thus an attack on my religion. The First Amendment of the Constitution was enacted to make sure that I would not meet a triumphant collection of cardinals and bishops, and evangelical preachers, celebrating a victory of “natural law,” as they interpret it, over the Talmud.

Even more fundamental, the notion that morality is safe only in the hands of the religions does not stand in the face of historical evidence. No society in which a church was dominant has ever emancipated the Jews. In the past two centuries or so, Jews have achieved political equality in the West, but everywhere, without exception, the forces that granted this freedom were fought by the majority religions. The major faiths of the world have learned, or are still learning, to live with one another as equals, but not because they have had new revelations from on high. On the contrary, this kinder and gentler aspect of their natures has been evoked by mercantilism and then by the Enlightenment, that is, by the very secular forces from which we would supposedly be saved by the major religious traditions in the name of their superior morality. In our day Roman Catholics and Orthodox have been slaughtering one another in the Balkans, and joining in the murder of Muslims, in the name of religion, and Muslims in the region have been no kinder. It is not self-evident that we will be cured of our ills if there is more control of public life by the various faiths.

In my ears, a recent statement by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the contemporary keeper of orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church, continues to ring. He pronounced non-Christians to be “defective people.” Pope John Paul II, despite some urging, did not disavow this assertion. I would suggest that those who want to cure our ills by asking for a return to “that old-time religion” need to be made to examine very closely what they are calling on our society to affirm.

ARTHUR HERTZBERG
Arthur Hertzberg, Bronfman Visiting Professor of the Humanities at New York University, is the author, most recently, of Jews: The Essence and Character of a People. He is currently working on a memoir.

Cambridge, Mass.

Ellen Willis and I share much in common: our disdain for the religious right, our distrust of the Bush Administration’s motives behind its new “faith-based” solutions–and our complete and unbending opposition to those religious claims that, when acted out, bring real and substantial harm to those whose views are not the same.

But Willis can’t stop there–and yet should have, because taken as a whole her essay is so utterly lacking in historical understanding of religion’s roles in America, so devoid of nuance in recognizing the immense varieties of experience, belief and religiously inspired political action, and ultimately so intolerant that she ends up willfully blind to the freedom-, justice- and equality-creating contributions religious ideals, language and actors have made to American life. Bereft of that, she disqualifies herself from being taken seriously. Her ideas, for example, that American religion perforce relies on “absolute truth” while “democracy, by contrast, depends on the Enlightenment values of freedom and equality,” and that democracy has thrived here because it has “preserved relatively clear boundaries between public and private,” and thereby kept “conflict between secularism and religion…to a minimum,” mean she’s never read Tocqueville or Perry Miller or Gordon Wood or Sydney Ahlstrom or Kevin Phillips’s recent Cousins’ Wars on religion’s centrality in creating and sustaining our democracy, nor even vaguely begins to understand why and what divides American Christianity over literalist, inerrantist and historical/critical readings of the Bible itself–or why it’s important to American politics.

Telling us that unless religion stays a chastely private “matter of personal conscience,” it almost always and everywhere breeds intolerance that threatens democracy itself means Willis has never read Eugene Genovese on evangelical Christianity’s emancipatory and sustaining role in the lives of African-American slaves. Certain that any religiously based assertion of a public voice serves power and bigotry means she’s never read Herbert Gutman on faith’s role in the lives of early industrial workers and how it helped them fight for unions and fair treatment before the law. Busy doing other things, apparently she’s never picked up Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or ever glanced through the private journals of Union soldiers who in their faith found the courage and reason to destroy slavery. Convinced that religion enforces only sexual and gender orthodoxies, she can’t imagine why religiously organized colleges were the first to admit women or provide them advanced professional training.

In seeking to assure us that the best of all possible democratic worlds is one in which we enjoy “freedom from religion,” she leaves us with no coherent explanation of what inspired the abolitionist movement, or early suffragists, or the temperance movement, or how the Progressive Era emerged. She gives us no way to understand why US Catholic bishops endorsed extensive worker ownership of the means of production in 1919 or why Father John Ryan was known as “Father New Deal,” or how as Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, Jewish and mainline Protestant leaders worked together successfully to transform the then-common references to America as a “Christian nation” into a “Judeo-Christian” one, or how theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr led the early homefront mobilizations against Hitler well before Kristallnacht, let alone World War II.

Closer to the present day, Willis leaves us no way to affirm how the Kings and Abernathys and Lewises as well as the Berrigans and Coffins and Coxes and Hines–and the millions of white and black Americans–who found in their religious faith the reasons to battle racism and segregation or the horrors of the Vietnam War. Nor does she help us understand what, in the 1980s, sent Catholic nuns and Quakers and thousands of other religious Americans to Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala, or inspired the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters on nuclear arms or on economic justice. Nor can she tell us why it is religious groups today that are in the forefront of the anti-death penalty movement, or living-wage campaigns, or massive debt relief for impoverished Third World nation campaigns, or why they were the principal supporters of reuniting Elián González with his father.

Nuanced when it comes to explaining the aesthetic behind Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, Ellen offers only unnuanced contempt to those she derides as “the earnest centrists and liberals who are doing [the] dirty work” of Bush and the Christian right by thinking religion has an important role to play in America’s public and political life. Wrong in her history, wrong in her analysis, she is wrong in her judgments.

But how could she not be wrong? Living in a country where more than 90 percent of its citizens have always told pollsters they believe in the existence of God, Willis cannot see which traditions therein speak for justice, and those against, which seek freedom, and which do not, which love democracy and which do not–let alone how to build a progressive politics that can build on the shared values of the secular and religious alike. Blind, Willis cannot see; deaf, she cannot hear.

Led by this kind of thinking, progressivism should stop pretending even to be political–and settle permanently into the sort of dinner-table rant Willis’s essay represents.

RICHARD PARKER
Richard Parker teaches on religion, politics and public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Washington, D.C.

Ellen Willis refers to a Joe Lieberman speech in which he mentions an incident after a talk I gave at Harvard on religion and public life. I don’t know where Lieberman heard the story, but he got it wrong. Let me give the true account as a way of responding to Willis’s piece. At an informal gathering of left intellectuals in the Harvard/Boston community discussing faith and politics, I was asked, “But Jim, what about the Inquisition?” I was a little surprised by the question, after laying out the history of progressive religion’s contribution to myriad movements for social reform. I replied, “Well, I was against it at the time–and I am still opposed to it. Now unless you want me to raise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge every time you bring up national health insurance, why don’t we move on to a better conversation.” The questioner smiled, got the point, and we did move into quite an intelligent discussion between religious and nonreligious progressives about common concerns. It’s too bad that Willis missed the opportunity to do that.

In my own religious upbringing, I heard many people equating anybody on the liberal left with the most oppressive and totalitarian of regimes. But when I became involved in civil rights, antiwar and other social-justice movements, I discovered many people on the left quite committed to democracy, pluralism and human rights. It was quite comforting. Apparently, Ellen Willis hasn’t yet figured out that there are religious people committed to the same things. She thinks we are all committed, instead, to special privileges for religion in the political arena. I guess she doesn’t get out much, or hasn’t bothered to read her history, or just can’t bear realities that don’t fit her pre-conceived ideological agendas.

It is tedious the way that “secular fundamentalists” like Willis continue to caricature and belittle religion and people of faith. Ellen, we are indeed motivated by our faith to seek justice and peace. But in the public arena, we don’t make arguments based on others’ accepting the “absolute truth” of our faith. We make cases appropriate to a pluralistic society. King’s vision of the “beloved community” came directly from his biblical faith, but he argued for civil rights and voting rights on the basis of what was good and right for a democracy. Many of us make similar claims in similar ways all the time, even if it is faith that compels us to do so.

It’s also very old and, frankly, politically stupid, to keep repeating the abuses of religion as if religious people didn’t know or even agree. Yes, their owners gave the Bible to black slaves to turn their eyes toward heaven and away from their earthly plight. But in that same book, the slaves found Moses and Jesus, who helped inspire their liberation struggle. Some of us have been among the chief critics of oppressive religion for years but, at the same time, have lifted up its progressive practice and potential. Do we really need to keep reciting that progressive religious history? I think the Ellen Willises must know it and just choose not to pay any attention. Nothing will keep the secular left more irrelevant in America. Martin Luther King Jr. neither hid nor imposed his religion but rather used it as a social resource to transform America. That’s exactly what many of us are doing today. And you know what, we don’t need The Nation‘s permission to do so.

JIM WALLIS
Jim Wallis is editor of Sojourners magazine, author of Faith Works and convener of Call to Renewal, a federation of faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty.

New York City

I applaud Ellen Willis’s smartly reasoned critique and agree heartily about the dangers such politics present to democratic and feminist values. Two points that Willis neglects, however, show a more complicated view of the bipartisan, pro-religion landscape we face in the Bush II era.

My first point has to do with the link between the culture wars and macroeconomics. It is surely true that religious groups and politicians across the spectrum (from Jim Wallis and Floyd Flake to the Christian Coalition and the Vatican) are rushing to legitimize public support for “faith-based programs” in order to reclaim moral authority and “a privileged role in shaping social values.” But the struggle over sexuality, gender definitions, parental control and popular culture is also tied to the struggle over public resources. At the macroeconomic level, the newassertiveness of religious institutions as stakeholders in the polity takes place in the larger context of globalization and the rapid privatization of social services formerly provided by the state.

Privatization wears many faces, including those of the so-called nonprofit as well as the corporate profit-making sector. In the United States, for example, Catholic/non-Catholic hospital mergers have proceeded at a nearly geometric pace since the mid-1990s, according to a series of studies by Catholics for a Free Choice. The result is that in numerous counties across the country, Catholic hospitals that systematically deny essential reproductive health services are the only provider hospitals in town. Likewise, with the attack on public schools and universities and erosion of their resources, parochial schools come to be seen–and advertise themselves in full-page New York Times ads–as a better-quality “choice” for poor black and Latino as well as middle-class children. All this is about not only control over social and sexual values but also the grab for tax dollars and the marketization of religious institutions. The strategic implications are clear: Progressives fighting for “freedom from religion” need to ally with groups opposing privatization in education and health.

My second point has to do with the potential constituency for such an opposition movement and carries a more optimistic note. I was the daughter of an observant Reform Jewish family who grew up in the heart of the conservative Christian, anticommunist Bible Belt in the 1950s. When I try to trace the roots of my liberal and left radicalism in later years, I find their earliest core in the alienation and anger I felt in public schools where Christian symbols and “Athletes for Christ” were compulsory fare and religion not only defined who you were but was itself defined in evangelical Christian terms. The resurgence of religiosity in politics today may pretend to be stylishly multicultural, but if the sanctimonious Joe Lieberman is any indicator, we can be sure that “correct” religion–and correct “faith-based programs” for the public coffers–will represent the Judeo-Christian mainstream. Even Willis neglects to mention Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, Buddhists and so on in her comments about devaluing the citizenship of “others.” And her persistence in using “church” as a generic substitute for religion only underscores the ubiquity of certain exclusionary assumptions in the dominant political discourse.

My optimism comes from my childhood experience in a similarly conservative era. I predict that the movement to institutionalize and fund “faith-based programs” by the state will create its dialectical opposite. Not only secularists and Jews but a whole generation of immigrant young people–Indians, Vietnamese, Egyptians, Pakistanis–will become radicalized toward secular antiracist feminisms and the left. The sexual dimensions of religious politics (e.g., funding for “abstinence-only” sex education), whose importance Willis rightly emphasizes, will only intensify their fervor.

ROSALIND POLLACK PETECHESKY
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, professor of political science and women’s studies at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, is the author of Abortion and Woman’s Choice and the forthcoming Women and Global Power.

Chicago

As an ordained Baptist minister and former pastor, I largely agree with Willis’s principled and spirited defense of democratic secularism. But I’ve got a few bones to pick, only a couple of which I’ll address here. While both left and right critics in their arguments about religion and politics often use the example of the black church, few ever get it just right, including Willis. She charges Stephen Carter with rewriting history by equating “the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. and the black church.” To be sure, a lot of folk outside the black church were involved in that movement, but the central, even defining, influence of black religion on the civil rights struggle can’t be missed. Counterposing “secular activists” like Rosa Parks–a devout Methodist–and John Lewis–an ordained minister–to black church activists is a serious misreading of just how much the gospel of freedom influenced many religious blacks who were leaders and foot soldiers in the NAACP, CORE and SNCC.

Unlike the Christian right, black Christian activists have mainly resisted the impulse to make ours a Christian nation. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black Christians were inspired by their religious beliefs to fight for equality and freedom for all citizens, even those who did not share their religion. That’s why King opposed school prayer. He didn’t want the state telling anyone that they had to pray, or whom to pray to, even if it turned out to be the God he worshiped. King understood the genius of secularism: It allows all religions to coexist without any one religion–or religion at all–being favored. Plus, King had a healthy skepticism about the white church, which lent theological credence to slavery and Jim Crow. He sided with the state against the church when the former intervened to keep white Christians from bombing black churches.

But Willis could also learn the skepticism that King and many black Christians had for the Enlightenment. Reason proved no better than religion in regulating the moral behavior of bigots. And proclaiming a devotion to freedom and equality meant nothing if black folk weren’t even viewed as human beings worthy of enjoying these goods, either by religious whites or enlightened secularists. For many black folk, it wasn’t whether white folk were religious or secular that mattered; it was whether they were just or not. To paraphrase Jesus, Willis and the rest of us should not only see the bad trees in religion’s eye, but spot the forest that plagues the secularist’s vision as well.

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
Michael Eric Dyson, the Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor at DePaul University, is the author of I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (Touchstone).

WILLIS REPLIES

New York City

Richard Parker, Michael Kazin and Jim Wallis all ignore what I actually said and impute to me views I don’t hold–some of which my article explicitly disclaims. I did not write a broadside attack on religion or religious people but an argument against the current broadside attack on secularism and secularists, particularly the claim that secular society is antidemocratic and violates believers’ rights. While quarreling with the notion that religion is the sole or primary inspiration of social movements–which writes secular activists out of history–I acknowledge the political contributions of the religious left, the common interests of religious and secular leftists, and the fact that many religious progressives oppose the antisecularist politics I criticize. Far from expressing abhorrence of spirituality, as Kazin charges, I note that in our postpsychedelic age many people who favor a secular society and are not religious in the conventional sense have their own conceptions of the quest for transcendence. (I include myself in that category.)

I do not, as Parker suggests, claim that religion has had no influence on American democracy–or American democracy on religion. Nor do I argue that religious and democratic sentiments are mutually exclusive. My contention that there is “an inherent tension” between the two is a response to the argument made by Stephen Carter and others that a democratic government should make special accommodations to religious belief because of its absolute nature. To recognize a tension, however, is not to deny the existence of efforts to transcend or reconcile it. In an odd misapprehension, Parker has me saying democracy has thrived by preserving clear boundaries between public and private, thereby minimizing conflict between secularism and religion. My point is essentially the opposite: that minimizing religious-secular conflict depen ded on confining the practice of democracy to a narrowly construed public, political sphere, and that the spread of democratic principles to “private” life–especially sex, gender and childrearing–has greatly intensified the conflict. Parker ought to do a better job of reading before presuming to lecture me on the supposed gaps in my bibliography.

I don’t dispute Michael Eric Dyson on the centrality of the church to the civil rights movement, but would argue that secular ideas and organizations were also important. In fact, one laudable function of the Southern black church during the civil rights era, as with the Catholic Church in Poland in the 1980s, was to give shelter and space to a diverse assortment of dissidents, religious or not. I agree that secularists have no monopoly on morality or clear vision. As part of another group not considered fully human, I’ve experienced the gap between the profession of Enlightenment principles and their practice. But it’s only because the principles exist that I can demand that they apply to me.

Pace Tom Hayden, I believe the only truly radicalizing force is people’s desire to change their own lives for the better. In my experience, moral outrage all too quickly becomes self-righteous authoritarianism.

Thanks to Frances Kissling, Rosalind Petchesky and Arthur Hertzberg for their valuable additions and to Wallis for supplying the context of Joe Lieberman’s use of his remarks.

ELLEN WILLIS