Have American liberals lost their way? Adolph Reed, Jr. thinks so. It hasn’t happened overnight. It’s been a gradual decline, beginning in the period between 1935 and 1945—what Reed calls the golden age of the left. During this time, Democrats rallied around President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labor and medical care initiatives. This forward momentum carried into the Sixties, when activism—civil and women’s rights and war protests—went hand-in-hand with the left. But the 1980s saw a prominent shift.
“During the Reagan years, demands for concessionary bargaining showed just how weak and isolated labor was,” says Reed, who tackled the topic in his essay “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals,” which appeared in the March 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine. “With respect to civil rights, that’s when you begin to see deterioration of the nodes of those movements, in particular the ones that had been focused on economic or social democratic economic redistribution.”
American politics’ slide toward center didn’t end with Reagan, or even with George H.W. Bush. It would take a Democrat, ironically, to solidify many of the right-reaching trends. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the Cold War was just ending. He was a young president, the first from the baby-boomer generation. Many today view Clinton as the golden boy of the Democratic revitalization, but it would be Clinton, Reed says, who would continue along many of the same paths as his right-leaning predecessors.
“Clinton effected the consolidation of Reaganism as the dominant framework for thinking about governing and public policy in the U.S.,” says Reed. “After all, he ran on a pledge to ‘end welfare as we know it.’ He firmly accepted the primacy of the financial sector, and oversaw almost as many overseas military interventions as Reagan and the elder Bush combined.”
So what then is responsible for Clinton’s glowing legacy among Democrats? The economic boom he presided over, certainly. But the broader explanation is quite simple, Reed says: Democrats needed a win.
“It had been 12 years since there had been a Democrat in office,” Reed says. “It was really the start of when the left’s ideals became a thing of the past, and instead the main priority became just getting a Democrat into office.”
This “atrophy of political imagination,” as Reed refers to it, is responsible for much of the gridlock that has defined Congress over the past decade, and has extended into the Obama presidency. When Obama was elected, Democrats had extraordinary expectations. But “Brand Obama” was never leftist, Reed says. In fact, in order to get elected, he had to go against the Democratic tide.
“Obama always sided against the left,” Reed says. “He got elected in part by showing the right that he wasn’t going to kowtow to his electoral base. He won on the promise of a transformational, but undefined, politics, embodied by his personal experience.”
Reed says the first step to the left recapturing its earlier ideals is admitting they have a problem.
“It’s a question of cutting your losses, getting this all out into the open,” he says. “The only way to slow the neoliberal juggernaut is to really develop a politics that’s not linked to the election cycle but focuses on movement-building around a clear stand in support of the issues that connect with the Democratic and working-class electoral base.”
