Have Democrats Lost Their Liberal Spirit?

By Bruce Miroff, University Press of Kansas. Posted November 14, 2007.

Intro written by Colin Greer: The following excerpt is from Bruce Miroff's book on the 1972 McGovern Presidential campaign, The Liberals' Moment. This is the first history of that epochal event in progressive politics. The book is rich in detail and its path takes us to the recognition that, for two or three generations, the leadership of the Democratic party and its guiding centrist message derives from politicos, DLC luminaries including Bill Clinton and John Podesta, who cut their teeth in the McGovern campaign and learned the wrong lessons from it.

In 1972 the American Left, -- and there was then a Left in America -- was destroyed in the same way the Right seemed to be destroyed in 1964. The Goldwater defeat was actually replicated on the Left by the McGovern defeat. The McGovern defeat was so devastating that professional politicians basically cut themselves off from the base of the people who make political life real at the local level and whose needs would push toward progressive policy if the public interest were a public priority.

Miroff shows that it is largely the McGovern campaign alumni who shaped what's legitimate and doable in Democratic Party politics since that time. They have been convinced that there is a fixed center in American political life, that this is a centrist nation and that successful politics can only occur close to that center.

This group badly misread a series of elections after McGovern. They thought Carter had been thoroughly rejected by the American public and forgot that Carter was actually rejected because of the Iranian hostage crisis, -- and lost only marginally. They thought that Ronald Reagan and the market economy defeated the Soviet Union, and so sacrilized the idea of a hawkish conservative electorate. But in fact it was the mobilized resources of the state -- large-scale public spending on the war and espionage machine that triumphed.

They also misread the Clinton victory; seeing the election of a centrist demo-republican seemed to confirm their story. In fact, Clinton won marginally in a three-way race. Throughout, as Miroff shows, the McGovern campaign alumni spawned and reinforced the demo-republicanism of the Democratic party. They saw, following their 1972 defeat, the upward swing of Republicans, the new role of big funders in the political game, and set about looking like the enemy. Miroff reports that Robert Strauss turned down the offer of McGovern's grass roots fundraising directory; the new party was looking in a different direction for its finances -- and its accountability.

Becoming the party of new professionals and new entrepreneurs, Democrats were now defined by social progressivism and economic restraint. Miroff argues this is exactly what the Republicans want them to be and why so much effort went into defeating Clinton's health care initiative; if the Democrats delivered big time to working people, they might win. Unfortunately, that was only a Republican strategic understanding.

The fact is, McGovern campaign alumni have lost any idea what really is possible in America. They keep using polls to predict and limit the future, forgetting that polls only really tell you about what is immediate. They're useful in tactical election campaigns. They're nearly useless in building a future.

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The Liberals' Moment
by Bruce Miroff

Despite the landslide defeat, the McGovern campaign bequeathed to the Democrats a talented, youthful cadre of strategists, organizers, and wordsmiths who as they aged would largely shape the evolution of the party over the following decades. [...]

The McGovern insurgency was an initiation in presidential campaigning not only for later Democratic leaders like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton but also for future Democratic strategists like Bob Shrum and John Podesta. It marked the coming of age for a new breed of Democratic activists, beneficiaries of the postwar explosion in higher education and alumni of the great causes of the 1960s, civil rights and the antiwar struggle. The 1972 campaign was the last time Democratic activists could wear their hearts on their sleeves all the way up to Election Day; the hopes they entertained, and the devastating disappointment they found in the end, were formative experiences whose reverberations are still felt in the politics of the Democratic Party. [...]

Vulnerable in electoral contests on matters of patriotism, strength in defending the nation, connection to working-class constituencies, and identification with unsettling cultural change, liberal Democrats have been branded as surefire losers by their centrist adversaries in the party. Leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council thus continue, almost as often as Republicans, to bring up the McGovern campaign as a warning of the electoral debacle facing the Democratic Party if it lets liberals back into its command. Yet centrists should not be too quick to read the story of the McGovern campaign as a validation of their philosophy and strategy. The centrist record since 1972 is only marginally more impressive than that of the liberals. Counting Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as centrists, that wing of the party has only elected a presidential candidate under highly favorable circumstances -- against weak opponents and when the economy and international events were strongly in its favor. Moreover, the Democratic Party as a whole can hardly be said to have thrived during the administrations of these centrist presidents. The McGovern campaign, derided for its failures, provides in its successes some clues to the continuing electoral (and governing) weakness of Democratic centrists -- to vulnerabilities that centrists have evaded just as liberals have evaded their own.

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Bruce Miroff is a professor of political science at State University of New York at Albany. He is the author of Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters, and Democrats and most recently of The Liberals' Moment: the McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party.

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