The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols

      The Fight for the Soul

      of the Democratic Party

      The Fight for the Soul

      of the Democratic Party

       The Enduring Legacy ofHenry Wallace’s Antifascist,Antiracist Politics

      John Nichols

      First published by Verso 2020

      © John Nichols 2020

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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      Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-740-1

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-741-8 (UK EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-742-5 (US EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957421

      Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

      For my mother, Mary K. Nichols, the truest

      progressive I know, and for David Panofsky,

      who told me about his uncle Erwin

      Contents

Preface: Why We Concern Ourselves with the History of Political Parties

1. The Prophetic Politics of Henry Wallace

       How FDR’s Vice President Anticipated the Dangerous Times That Have Engulfed America

2. Hope in a Time of War

       Four Freedoms, One World and the Dream of Overcoming Our Imperialisms

3. “You Drew Blood from the Cave Dwellers”

       Wrestling with Demagoguery and the Wealthy Men Who Finance Authoritarianism

4. The Fight against American Fascism

       Henry Wallace and the Consequences of Speaking Truth to Power

       5. July 20, 1944, 10:55 P.M.

       When Democrats Began to Abandon the New Deal

       6. Into the Wilderness

       Birth of the Not-as-Bad-as-the-Republicans Democratic Party

       7. The Great Unwinding

       Hypocrisy and Double Talk on Race, Cold War Compromises and the Degeneration of the Democratic Party

       8. The Party That Lost Its Way

       But for the Vietnam War, the Dream of a New New Deal Might Have Been Renewed

       9. “I Want Us to Be that Party Again!”

       How the Democratic Party Might Recover Its Soul in the Twenty-First Century

       Acknowledgements

       A Note on Sources

       Index

Preface

       Why We Concern Ourselves with the History of Political Parties

       America’s future is linked to how we understand our past. For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act.

      —Howard Zinn

      Political parties have histories. In many countries, these histories are told with reverence and respect for their roles in breaking the bonds of colonialism or battling fascism, in defining the character of a country or in opposing malignant tendencies. Not so in the United States. The histories of our major political parties are rarely told. Rather, parties are understood as mere shells into which great men and women climb when they need a place on the ballot or a separate fund-raising apparatus. Dixiecrat segregationists decamp from the Democratic ballot line to the Republican line, transforming both parties. The youngest of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats lived long enough to watch in horror as the rules they had established to protect Americans from Wall Street speculation were undone by Bill Clinton and his “New Democrats.”

      The path I took in writing this book began with a consideration of how the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Reconstructionists of the 1860s became the party of Donald Trump and the xenophobic white nationalists of the 2010s. I wondered how it had changed so drastically that it made a lie of Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 observation that “should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

      There are no more Eisenhowers in the Republican Party, and that explains a lot. The supposed “adults in the room,” the Paul Ryans and the Mitch McConnells, undoubtedly recognized the absurdity and awfulness of the Tea Party agenda of 2011, yet they adopted it largely without question. They thought they could control the right-wing base of their party. Instead, they forged a party that was ripe for takeover by Trump, a charlatan who wore his bigotry on his sleeve. If the Republican Party bartered off most of what was noble in its history long before Trump began to seriously consider a presidential bid, the hustler who wrote The Art of the Deal merely closed the deal.

      But what of the Democratic Party? In the 2010s, the Democrats were as inept and visionless as the Republicans were calculating and cruel. When Trump assumed the presidency after a 2016 election that the Democrats should have won by a landslide, bolstered by a Republican Congress that was ready to follow the lead of a desperate and damaged narcissist, the crisis came into focus. It was not the Republican Party that was ruining our politics. Rather, the lack of a coherent and appealing opposition to the Republicans was the problem.

      So what were the roots of that crisis? It is too shallow to blame Hillary Clinton or the bumbling strategists that mounted her 2016 campaign. It is too easy to point an accusatory finger at the consultants and candidates who kept losing to the empty suits that Mitch McConnell was