This is not a history of electoral wins or losses. Or, more precisely, not a history where its periodicity, its chronotype, corresponds to neatly structured packets of electoral time, the ups-and-downs of two, four and six year cycles.
This history follows what Raymond Williams called “a structure of feeling”, about a loose connective tissue of ideas, attitudes, assumptions and practices in the world that supported a liberal-progressive sociopolitics in the United States (and elsewhere) for much of the long 20th Century. This mindset underpinned electoral politics but it also suffused the life of civic institutions. It informed everyday life, shaped how people made, viewed and felt about culture. It was inside of people, even people who disdained its ideals and sensibilities. Indeed, some of the tropes and characteristic political tactics of the liberal-progressive spirit have transfused into a resurging populist authoritarianism. It was part of how individuals understood themselves, and understood themselves to be good people.
It is a structure of feeling that is fading, dying. Perhaps already dead. It was only fully coherent and connected in the latter half of the 20th Century, coming into full flower in the late 1950s and 1960s. It began to disassociate and decay in the 1980s. Something of its spirit may yet resurge or reform in the future, but that will take both new circumstances and a new will to do so.
In the first part, I traced some of the disassociated developments that became more fully connected in the 1950s, most of them not particularly created by intentional processes or conscious collective agency. In this part, I will try to explain what pulled the strands apart, again often not because of any deliberate decision to do so. Once again, I’m not going to be cataloguing those divergences in any strict order of sequence or importance. By the end of this series, I’ll have a few things to say about what has mattered most, in part because that will determine what kind of future sociopolitics we might work towards, one that might not just block the fascism that has bloomed in this poisoned moment but that could reclaim some sense of a better way forward. We can’t do that unless we understand how our foundations fell apart.
Probably the biggest blow to the foundation of a liberal-progressive worldview was the abandonment of the New Deal as a basic policy platform after 1980. This was a joint failure of liberal elites and the Democratic Party leadership that took hold in stages between 1972 and 1984. To understand how this came about, I have to pick apart a few other important themes first.
Of these themes, the most crucial is the role the Cold War played in structuring a liberal-progressive temperament. On one hand, it created an antagonistic engine within that temperament. Liberals attached themselves to the military-industrial complex in response to McCarthyism, in an attempt to prove that they were reliable tribunes of American hegemony. A major part of their strategy for doing so involved constant policing of the leftward end of the liberal spectrum, sniffing out intellectuals and public figures who had drifted too close to Communism either in the substance of their policy commitments or in their affiliations. This in turn spurred progressives to critique liberals for their proximity to conservatism—their excuse-making for slow progress on civil rights, their apologetics for the human rights abuses of American clients abroad, their gormless proceduralism in the face of domestic corruption and political misconduct. Oddly this antagonism actually bound the two tendencies tightly together—each needed the other to generate their own factional sense of civic virtue and to prove their utility to quite different bases of sociopolitical support. Liberals furrowed out a channel into institutional power, progressives kept ties to new social movements and public culture—but both constituencies also commingled a general field of meaning. Their sensibilities were interacting at a genetic level, spawning hybrid forms and concepts. They produced legitimacies for one another, aligning them against a conservatism that both opposed. It was a family relationship, as fraught as families can be, with the bitterness that household betrayals and abandonments sometimes bring—but also with the sense of being a haven, the place that had to take you in, the redoubt against real threats.
After the end of the Cold War, this basic structure remained, but without the referent to an existential threat (both ideological and geopolitical) it became incoherent, rootless, a reflex that jerked reliably on relevant stimuli but now almost always destructively. But some of the harm had been done as early as 1968, because as the establishment liberals, the New Left and the counterculture formed their triangular opposition to one another, the importance of the New Deal, of an American form of social democracy, got lost in the geometry of that antagonism. The liberal-progressive tendency got the wrong idea about what had gone wrong. First and foremost, what had gone wrong was Vietnam. The liberal need to prove themselves better managers of the Cold War fueled a heedless, stupid escalation of the conflict. The guns-to-butter ratio went haywire. Second, what went wrong is that the Great Society ended up in the hands of technocrats and planners, becoming more and more a bureaucratic and institutional project. It’s true that this was a deep part of the New Deal’s conceptual underpinnings, but all those acronyms were mostly just the front of the house for big, obvious ideas that either provided services or fueled engagement for many citizens. Some of the Great Society programs were just as big and appealing (and they are, importantly, the ones that became essential) but others drifted.
That doesn’t matter so much, but the idea that the federal government should simultaneously maintain the capacity to fight a major proxy war and build out a social democracy was plainly incoherent. This let Nixon and Ford lightly swap out a law-and-order discourse as an alternative to social spending, but more devastatingly, as the fiscal management provided by either party ran smack into the wall of stagflation and the oil shock, it set the New Deal up to be the fall guy for a global economic crisis that social democracy had not caused. Liberals never had to really learn the lesson that antiwar Democrats had tried to provide, and progressives never really got clarity about what had gone wrong with some of the design of the Great Society until it was far too late. 1972 became an even worse lesson than 1968, especially for liberals, who concluded that progressives were nothing but a menace in electoral contests, and anything that sounded progressive needed to be treated like a threat. So the shared mindset let a rooted, bottom-up kind of social democratic vision drift out of their grasp in the early 1980s, to be replaced by a kind of tactical calculus that had no strategic element to it at all.
The Cold War is important here too in the sense that it called for the creation and maintenance of a global-scale vision of American soft power (and provided considerable resources in service to that vision that sustained careers in multiple sectors). That kind of soft power was fundamentally a product of the liberal-progressive mindset and the experience of developing and maintaining it fed back into the development of the mindset. Here American intellectuals on the left, whether they wanted to or not, were actually providing service in their travels and activities abroad—if they went off to various countries funded by governmental and civil society institutions to build their cultural and social capital, they demonstrated that the United States was one of those kinds of big, clumsy empires that could be horribly dangerous (as much by accident as on purpose) but that was also so unafraid of its own value commitments that it was as likely to encourage internal critics to represent it abroad as anyone else. The loss of the Cold War broke that engine as well. Liberal and progressive networks outside the U.S. started to fission away from one another, drawing on different resources and having less and less sense of overlapping purpose.
In the first part of this series, I noted the importance of professionalism and its achievement of bourgeois respectability in the 1960s and 1970s. When Reagan-era conservatism became openly hostile to unionization, it was almost bound to eventually undercut professionalization as well, because professionals had pursued parallel strategies for capturing particular kinds of service markets through credentialization. The conservative attack on universities was fueled by other and older kinds of political hostility to student movements and left-wing faculty, but it gained extra momentum as the very idea of professional monopolies over services were attacked not just from the right and left but also as the rents that professionals were seeking began to rise relentlessly. Some of that increase was out of the control of professionals—changes in the fixed costs their institutions had to bear (energy, health care) and the cost of regulatory compliance—but it was also one of the dividends of professionalization itself. Just as unions had in the 1950s and 1960s, professionalization was ensuring that people got compensated for the expense and difficulty of obtaining their credentials and for the value of the services they provided. And then, perhaps, beyond that. That eroded respect and legitimacy precisely because the abandonment of a simple, elemental commitment to social democracy started really eating into the financial underpinnings of professional institutions—health care and education in particular. That loss of respect in turn robbed the liberal-progressive mindset of one of the underpinnings of its central positioning in the wider society.
That runaway growth of a regulatory state was another erosive force. As the idea of government lost its connection to securing broad equity, to some kind of redistributive favoring of a big middle-class, liberal-progressive thought curdled into a much more aimless and balkanized attachment to regulatory activity, which amounted to an endless fascination with particular lineages of legal activity and bureaucratic attention. That made enemies that no one intended to make—for example, the key insight of Rick Perlstein’s book Before the Storm, on Goldwater-era conservatism, that small-town business owners were genuinely being crushed as early as the Eisenhower Administration by new regulatory burdens that weren’t aimed at them. (It’s been a valid point ever since, as Washington state Congressional representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has been pointing out recently.) I’ll come back to this in the next installment, but for the moment, the important thing is simply that as the regulatory state grew more extensive and elaborate, the space for an organic connection to the basic ethical-cultural vision of the liberal-progressive tendency shrank.
Another kind of related shrinkage that had the same impact was the increasing threat to public goods, first from Reagan-era neoliberalism and then from tech capitalism’s encirclement and acquisition of public institutions and services. The liberal-progressive world was fundamentally built out from 19th Century struggles to make a public and to tie the world of the public to an expanded democracy. But post-Reagan liberals and progressives were able to pack their toys and go home if they felt insufficiently catered to or recognized in public institutions, and that increasingly meant that they did not always notice or even care (at least at first) as public goods disappeared or were stolen by a new wave of capitalist enterprises.
That story is, like most of the postwar making and unmaking of the liberal-progressive orientation, also generational. The mindset rose and fell with the heroic mythification of the Baby Boomers: it informed their own messianic sense of themselves and that sense was transferred in lesser and ebbing degrees to Generation X and the Millennials.
This point in turn brings me to the golden thread that wraps up all of these trends together. What made the mindset powerful in its circulation through civic and political life, in the making and dissemination of culture and sensibility, was that it connected the economic lives and fortunes of all the people who partook in some sense in a common vision of American virtue with their social worlds and their making of meaning. Through the 1950s into the early 1990s, liberal and progressives were first and foremost in the same places, crossing over each other’s paths. They were in audiences together, reading the same things, talking to—and sometimes yelling at—one another. In a recent LRB essay, Vivian Gornick tells a story about liberals and radicals being in the Village Vanguard one Monday night in the mid-1960s only to be traumatized by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) telling them they were all a bunch of phonies who were going to be up against the wall when the revolution came. With time and perspective, it’s easier to see that Jones was not outside that audience—that even his condemnation was part of the liberal-progressive sensibility. He wouldn’t have shown up at an exclusive Midtown men’s club, a meeting of the Young Republicans, or a country music concert in Virginia with the same message. What would have been the point? Various kinds of radicals depended on condemning the complacency or collaboration of liberals for their legitimacy but that in turn depended upon liberals being there with them to hear the message. Liberals took every opportunity to show their facility as gatekeepers, whether it was sending notes to the FBI about colleagues they suspected of being Communists or picking a fight with Sistah Souljah or dumping Lani Guinier as a nominee, but again, they did it knowing they were being heard (and would hear of what came of doing so).
That, more than anything else, is what started to fracture after 1980, and not only because a lot of the glue provided by the Cold War, by public goods, by professional respectability, and so on started to fracture. It started to fracture simply because that’s what was happening in the culture. No one was in the same audience after a while. There were 500 channels on cable and then suddenly there were a million places to be online. And perhaps more importantly, liberals and progressives were physically on the move like never before. That had fueled a growing and shared kind of cosmopolitan frame of reference but it also incidentally meant that people weren’t all in the same places talking, arguing, blaming, condemning one another. Those reflexes still functioned, but through intermediaries and brokers, at physical and cultural distance.
The New Deal was gone, without any coherent underlying infrastructure of purpose or values to replace it. The Cold War was over, and the logic it provided to a contentious shared sense of geopolitical purpose and civic value disappeared with it. The social foundations of liberal-progressive life were slipping away under neoliberalism, and the mindset was increasingly attached to practices and interests that distorted or destroyed its basic propositional coherence. And the people who held the mindset, who referenced it as guidance and justification, were more and more not in the same place, more and more not not entitled to anoint themselves generational messiahs, more and more off in their own worlds of challenge and regret.
Which leads to the next part: what, if anything, could have been done differently in the face of all these changes?
I think the lawyers are conspicuously absent from your call outs here, Tim, and I wonder why that should be. Shakespeare already knew that the law was going to be a stumbling block if not an outright iron wall. And we’ve surely been seeing the outcome of 1980s legal “outreach” to the Right in what’s been going on in the 2020s. When Amiri Baraka planned who was going up again that wall, I imagine that he agreed with Shakespeare—which might have surprised them both.