A Short Note On The Democratic Party And The Progressive Left....

[The Magistrate]

312. Among Other Things, Sir

Your post illustrates that, were I to write to the level of specificity you seem to thing I ought to have, the result would have had to be a twenty page essay at minimum, which is not an investment of time I am inclined to make.

To take just a few of your examples.

I doubt you appreciate just how far to the right Wilson was in some respects. Even allowing for the standards of the day, he was a detestable racist and red-baiter. He ended employment of blacks in the government, and endorsed 'Birth of a Nation' as a consummate lesson in history. He presided over outright persecution of immigrants and leftists. It is not just that he sent U.S. troops to fight Bolsheviks in Russia, but that he did so in the firm conviction he was fighting the 'hidden hand' of Jewry in league with Germany, which wielded the Bolsheviks against Democracy and Christendom. This is just an off the top sample; I could go on concerning the wretch at great length indeed. I find it hard to take as informed comment a statement President Obama 'performs to the right' of him.

The dynamics of the New Deal were very different than you seem to suppose. President Roosevelt had to make great concessions to conservative opinion and power, much of it within the Democratic Party and rooted in the 'Solid South' essential to national success for the Party. Coming out of the south, Huey Long presented a serious challenge, presenting a program of hostility to corporations and outright redistribution of wealth that was quite popular with voters Mr. Roosevelt had to depend on, and Mr. Roosevelt fought him tooth and nail. Mr. Thomas, the great Socialist campaigner, was particularly fiery in denouncing New Deal programs as half-measures and mere reformism wholly inadequate to the needs of the times. His comments repay re-reading today; they remain quite cogent. Mr. Roosevelt deserves credit for acting in the best aristocratic tradition of noblesse oblige on the one hand, and on the other for having the wisdom to recognize it was better to head off revolution with judicious concession rather than do so by an iron fist as so many of his class urged, but he should by no means be mistaken for man who governed from the left, or was of the left himself.

Regarding Lyndon Baines, I can only surmise a considerable tint of rose has crept into your looking back on the days of youth. At the time, any liberal, certainly any left radical, could bend your ear for hours on just what Johnson was, and that even before a word about the war was mentioned. He was a bought and sold creature of big oil and defense interests, he was a red-baiter of the lowest water, he had hamstrung Democrats in the Senate under guise of leading them, he was corrupt both personally and politically, his Great Society program was a sham which achieved, and was designed to achieve, nothing of substance, even the passage of civil rights legislation was forced on him by national revulsion at the murder of President Kennedy. I will grant that time has softened my view of the man somewhat, but at the time I would not have called him a liberal or a man of the left, and far from the best the Democratic Party could show, and I have not materially changed my view.

It would not, you may by now surmise, be wise to imagine I am a worshipful acolyte of President Obama; I could compile a lengthy bill of particulars detailing where he has fallen far short of what I would like to see. I will not, because I see no benefit coming from the exercise; he was, and remains, the best man available for the office, and greatly to be preferred to his enemies. Nor do I see any benefit in nostalgic conjurings of a past which never actually was. I simply do not accept the view that there was some golden age of yore in which the Democratic Party "...was labor union activists and supporters. It was civil rights heroes, it was pro-public-education, it was pro workers' rights, pro-economic and social justice." Part of it was, and that part was not often in the ascendant for any length of time, if at all.