Have Democrats Lost Their Liberal Spirit?
A new book explores the McGovern campaign and what Democrats have -- or have not -- learned from it.
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.
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