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Is There No Democratic Left in America? Reflections on the Transformation of an Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Alonzo L. Hamby
Alonzo L. Hamby
Affiliation:
Ohio University
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Extract

Historians historicize. They attempt to understand the present and make educated guesses about the future by looking to the past. This attempt at prognosticating “the future of the democratic left” primarily in the United States begins with a broad-brush history of “the left” as equalitarian idea and political movement in the modern world, examines its development in the United States within a context of “American exceptionalism,” discusses its transformation in the 1960s, and assays its struggles in the “present day” of the last three decades. A once-revolutionary impulse, it suggests, has surrendered to the necessity of incremental entitlement politics. As a result, it has subjected itself to the hazards of the pragmatic test, the awkwardness of interest-group politics, and the distinct possibility that even success in the quest for universal social provision would fail to alter existing patterns of inequality.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 15 , Issue 1: Special Issue: The Future of the Democratic Left in Industrial Democracies , January 2003 , pp. 3 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2003

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References

Notes

1. Baldwin, Stanley, This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935), 3–6.Google Scholar

2. Norman Thomas article, New York Times, 18 June 1933.

3. In 1960, for example, a young British Labour activist, Betty Boothroyd, worked in the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy; later elected to the House of Commons, she became its first female Speaker. In Britain's general election of 1997, noted American political consultants advised both Conservative and Labour campaign strategists.

4. Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Affluent Society (Boston, 1958), chap. 23, 250.Google Scholar

5. Norman Thomas retired after the 1960 campaign. Thereafter, the Socialist party abstained from running presidential candidates. Functioning as an educational organization, it became in practical terms a caucus of policy advocates on the left wing of the Democratic party.

6. Davies, Gareth, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence, Kan., 1996).Google Scholar