How Unions and the Left Brought Each Other Down

Make no mistake: the real enemy of both Labor and the Left is repugs and the corporations who own them. But 40 years ago we stopped fighting them together and let them put us at each other's throat.

Digby: 

Joan Walsh wrote a very nice piece about McGovern that's well worth reading. This excerpt speaks to my point above and, I think, may explain to some younger folks the dynamic that created so much of what we see today:

When I asked labor historian Jefferson Cowie in an interview whether he could identify one crucial moment in the Democratic Party’s post-’60s unraveling, I expected him to fudge like a good academic, but he surprised me; he had one: “The 1972 decision by organized labor…to destroy McGovern. Because that solidified a moment. It said, ‘We can’t work with the unions,’ to the left and to the women’s movement and the rest. It said organized labor is just about guys like George Meany, and Mayor Daley, it’s really the same monster, we can’t deal with them. And that creates a natural alliance between the New Left and the New Democrats, who were much more sympathetic to important issues of diversity than to labor.”

McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, would pioneer the idea of “New Democrats” who owed no allegiance to labor. When he ran for Senate in 1974, Hart titled his stump speech “The End of the New Deal.” That same year he proclaimed that his new generation of Democrats were not just ”a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” slandering labor’s longtime champion. A young Bill and Hillary Clinton got their start on the McGovern campaign, and it’s hard not to see the impact of McGovern’s defeat on Clinton’s careful centrism and Democratic Leadership Council politics. The DLC was formed in direct reaction to Walter Mondale’s 1984 loss, which was even more lop-sided than McGovern’s. But it was designed to eradicate McGovernism from the party – to define Democrats as tough on crime and welfare, friendly to business, hawkish on defense – everything McGovern supposedly was not. It also involved the party running away from its proud New Deal legacy, and defining itself more as what it wasn’t than what it was.

We now bemoan the loss of the labor movement in America and for good reason. But the rift between labor and the left during that earlier era deprived both of a necessary ally. Labor thought perhaps in those days that they were powerful enough that they could ally themselves with the right on cultural issues without weakening their political clout. And after the defeat of their idealism, the left thought they could co-opt business and industry for their own aims. Both were completely deluded about the reactionary nature of the American Right.

Joan sees the coming back together of the left and labor in the Obama coalition of 2008. I wonder if that's true. And even if it is, it's with a much diminished labor movement and a Party as divided as ever on issues of war and peace. It was a very costly rift.

George McGovern was a fine politician and a good man. Like Joan, I think he may have deserved a better party than the one he had.

Firedoglake on the Hiding of Liberalism:

Obama comes at the end of a 30-year cycle of narrowing and narrowing what passes for the liberal agenda. The landscape was so different in the 1970s that Nixon was calling for a guaranteed income. Now when Democrats are really feeling bold, they highlight policies that they are proud to reveal were based on Republican ideas of just a few years earlier, things like the Heritage Foundation’s health care plan or the market-based solution of cap and trade. I would disagree that liberalism – although that’s probably the wrong phrase – has disappeared. It’s just become hidden beneath a thicket of campaign contributions from wealthy donors. The decline of unions as a political counterweight means that Democrats chase big money, and not surprisingly they respond to big money concerns. Issues like poverty, hunger, and need go unremarked upon on the national stage, even while they remain core concerns at the community level.

Defenders of the current Democratic Party would say that the structures set up through the Great Society have sustained the poor through the Great Recession, eliminating the need for more or better programs. They would point to this Congressional Research Service study showing a 33% increase in anti-poverty programs since 2008 (with “anti-poverty” defined incredibly broadly by Sen. Jeff Sessions, who commissioned the study to ensure that the welfare state looked as big as possible). The automatic stabilizers for the poor worked, they would say. And a majority of the new spending came from the stimulus, which contained lots of boosts for the poor. Heck, the Affordable Care Act, they would argue, represents a transfer from the pockets of those tapped to pay for the legislation to subsidies so poor and near-poor people can purchase health insurance.

You can assess these arguments on their own. But I would say that the agenda at the upper echelon of the Democratic Party has narrowed over the past 50 years, and it’s not like the safety net is so stable and robust that there’s nothing more to do. In fact, our social safety net is among the tiniest in the industrialized world. But poor people don’t have lobbyists, and that’s how Washington works these days.

Liberals and Unions are not just natural and traditional allies; we are essential allies.  Labor and the Left are symbiotic. Only working and fighting together can we prevail; apart, we cannot even survive.