Jacob Heilbrunn raises the most disagreeable spectre of the neoconservatives' classically Trotskyist re-entry into the Democratic Party (to which they are entirely alien, just as they are to the Republican Party), but it is Daniel McCarthy who really provides the long view:
For 30 years, Republicans, neoconservatives, and liberal hawks have cultivated the myth of the McGovern Party: weak on defense, ineluctably opposed to Middle American values, the party of peaceniks and perverts. Not only has this narrative distorted the Right by allowing anyone starboard of McGovern to set himself up as a conservative, it has also led Republicans to misunderstand their enemy. Paula and Monica notwithstanding, Bill Clinton was less interested in sex than in NAFTA-style managed trade. And far from being a peacenik, Clinton led the country into military actions in Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Serbia, and a plethora of other places. Clinton was no more a McGovern-style left-winger than George W. Bush was a Goldwater-style right-winger.
The Democrats have not nominated a McGovernite since McGovern himself. The senator’s understudy and 1972 campaign manager, Gary Hart, lost the 1984 nomination to Hubert Humphrey’s protégé, Walter Mondale. Left-wingers such as Jerry Brown and Dennis Kucinich have not fared as well in today’s Democratic Party as Eugene McCarthy did in the Johnson-Humphrey party of ’68. Both Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis were, by the standards of their party, moderate governors. Even John Kerry, a celebrity of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, voted for the Iraq War in the Senate and didn’t dare run as a McGovernite in 2004.
Though the party’s social liberals—feminists, abortion supporters, and gay-rights activists—have indeed consolidated their power, they often did so in alliance with the party’s right wing: the pro-business, Southern-accented Democratic Leadership Council. It was a DLC-run party that denied antiabortion Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania a speaking slot at the 1992 Democratic convention. McGovern, on the other hand, was the last Democratic presidential nominee to select a pro-life running mate. (In fact, he chose two: Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, who withdrew from the ticket when his history of psychiatric treatment came to light, and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver. McGovern’s own position was that abortion was a matter properly left to the states.) While the social Left worked out a modus vivendi with the DLC, the antiwar Left steadily lost out to humanitarian interventionists. Madeleine Albright, not George McGovern, remains the face of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.
All indications are that this won’t change under Barack Obama, even if his campaign had similarities to McGovern’s. He ran on an anti-Iraq War platform and inspired hope among many of the same groups that McGovern did. And like the South Dakotan, he had trouble with white working-class voters during the primaries—indeed, both McGovern and Obama won the Democratic nomination with less than a majority of the votes cast in the primaries and caucuses. McGovern received approximately 68,000 fewer votes than Hubert H. Humphrey; Obama, by the widest possible count, received about 176,000 fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. (Appropriately enough, the protracted Democratic nominating battle of 2008 was itself a legacy of electoral reforms McGovern had helped craft.) When John McCain added Miss Middle America—Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin—to his ticket, pundits Left and Right for a time thought Obama’s fate was sealed. The McGovern coalition couldn’t prevail in a rematch against Nixon’s silent majority.
Yet it did. In the intervening decades, the McGovern coalition had grown. And perhaps more importantly, Middle Americans faced with a choice between the semicompetent socialism of the Left and the spectacularly incompetent socialism of the Republican Right split three ways—between McCain, Obama, and staying home. Mideast war, torture, and national bankruptcy turned out to be even less popular than social liberalism.
If Republicans and liberal hawks were correct in calling Obama a new McGovern, they only succeeded in proving how repellent most Americans, including many conservatives, find today’s GOP. The trouble is, instead of the country getting George McGovern—a temperamental conservative, an anti-militarist, and a committed decentralist—we’re getting Barack Obama, who dreams of another New Deal and picked Hillary Clinton as his chief diplomat. Somehow the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists prevailed again.
Except, of course, that another New Deal would be a thoroughly good thing, strongly supported as the first one was by Western, agrarian Republicans. Economic populism and foreign policy realism won Obama the morally and socially conservative votes that put him into the White House. But appointments signalling a reversion to Clinton-style, and therefore a continuation of Bush-style, economic and foreign policies have already cost the Democrats a Senate seat in Georgia, and thus the possibility of a filibuster-proof majority.
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Are you saying that economic populism is historically as much a Republican cause as a Democratic one?
ReplyDeleteNot exactly, but more or less. FDR was a Democrat with plenty of Republican support, especially in the West, for New Deal measures.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, foreign policy realism, and moral and social conservatism, are historically cross-party causes.
A party embodying all three would clean up. Perhaps a ballot-line party of that kind might be set up in New York State? Once it was up and running, who could hope for statewide office without its endorsement?
And the Democrats should become like that again (indeed, where foreign policy realism is concerned, largely anew) at national level, especially in realtion to the Presidency. Theirs is the natural majority.