The Left Wing of the Possible?

"In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a 'positive image' of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social-democratic author Irving Howe described those 'socialists' who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: 'They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin says that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is "not a democratic socialist but a social democrat."

But Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot offers caution about "The Future of the Left in the 21st Century."

"The Core 200-Year Mission of Democrats"

"When Democrats advance equal dignity and rights for everyone—and focus primarily on the economic interests of working people—they win. When Democrats divide themselves and other Americans along regional, class, and ideological lines—or bicker internally over cultural divisions and downplay unifying economic policies—they lose."

John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot reviews Michael Kazin's What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.

And Ruy Teixeira describes the Democrats of the past year as "How Not to Build a Coalition."

While Teixeira also states that Democrats should always ask themselves, "What Would the Working Class Say?"

"One Has to Crush Bad Leaders at the Polls"

"It raises two big questions: Why wasn't Johnson thrown out of office for making those choices, and should he have been? She answers the first with erudition and cogency. The second she essentially leaves open, reminding us that even some of the lawmakers who reviled Johnson hesitated to remove him. Their ambivalence helps explain why no president has ever been convicted of 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' or why impeachment, often viewed as a necessity to stop a lawless leader, may prove almost impossible to execute successfully."

Michael Kazin at The New Republic reviews Brenda Wineapple's The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

"Marx Has a Larger Epistemological Claim on Our Attention as Well"

"Marx has a larger epistemological claim on our attention as well. Just as one cannot discuss human psychology intelligently without coming to grips with Freud's work, despite its flaws, Marx's historical analysis of class relations remains a powerful way to understand the enduring economic inequalities of his time and ours. As a prophet of socialism, he was a bust. He drew only vague sketches of what an egalitarian order should look like. This made it possible for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk to use his words to justify the horrors they committed in peasant societies quite different from the industrial ones where Marx had expected socialism to triumph.
"Still, he captured some basic truths about the capitalism he believed was doomed to expire. Perhaps the most lasting of these truths is the relentless destruction of traditions—whether oppressive or comforting—that is the hallmark of modernity. In 1848, when Marx described capitalism as a revolutionary force, he did not realize how it would not just endure but grow."

Michael Kazin at The New Republic reviews Gareth Stedman Jones's Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion.

"The Champion of Causes Not Yet Won"

"The SPA ran thousands of candidates for offices both high and low. It even managed to elect a couple of congressmen as well as dozens of mayors in locales as diverse as Milwaukee; Berkeley, California; and the little railroad town of Antlers, Oklahoma. Many of the reforms the party advocated ended up becoming law.

"Beginning in 1900, Eugene Victor Debs ran five times for president, never gaining more than 6 percent of the popular vote. The charismatic former union leader crisscrossed the nation, stretching out his long arms as if to touch the admiring crowds whom he urged to destroy 'the foul and decaying system' and erect a 'cooperative commonwealth' in its place. But Debs' platform also included such 'immediate' demands as women’s suffrage, a progressive income tax, an eight-hour day, a ban on child labor, and a vote for the residents of the District of Columbia that no longer seem radical at all."

Michael Kazin in Slate connects Bernie Sanders to Socialists in twentieth-century American politics.

"A Philosophy That Wedded Capitalism to Christianity"

"'Spiritual mobilization' is his effort to recruit other ministers to the cause. So he is serving, in many ways, as a frontman for a number of corporate leaders. His main sponsors are Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, they all heavily fund this organization. But what Fifield sets out to do is recruit other ministers to his cause. Within the span of just a decade's time, he has about 17,000 so-called minister representatives who belong to the organization who are literally preaching sermons on its Christian libertarian message to their congregations, who are competing in sermon contest[s] for cash prizes and they're doing all they can in their local communities to spread this message that the New Deal is essentially evil, it's a manifestation of creeping socialism that is rotting away the country from within. Instead they need to rally around business leaders and make common cause with them to defend what they call 'the American way of life.'"


Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air interviews Kevin M. Kruse about his new book One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America.




"Despite the argument Kruse makes beginning with his subtitle, 'corporate America' played no significant role in conceiving any of these initiatives"


Michael Kazin reviews the book in The New York Times.

"Nothing Sanders Said Discouraged the Consensus"

"One way for Clinton to marginalize Sanders or even push him out of the race would be to move closer to Sanders’ populist positions. Could the Clintons, who are famous (or infamous) for marginalizing the party’s left and realigning it with Big Money (NAFTA, deregulation, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers), actually swing back to the left in 2016? They may think that they don’t need to, because Clinton’s economic policies only need a bit of 'refreshing,' and because a Hillary candidacy will turn into a referendum on women’s rights just as 2008 became a referendum on racism. They may be right if the Republicans cannot leash their mad-dog chauvinists. But if the nominee is Jeb Bush? The campaign then would seem to many Americans one over over dynastic succession, in which case the economic issues—and the 'Bernie factor'—could become decisive."


Tom Hayden in The Nation says that "Bernie Sanders is inching closer to deciding to run for president as a Democrat in 2016."


And Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls on Sanders to run.

All the Way, or Hero or Villain?, the Return

In The New Republic, David Greenberg and Michael Kazin debate Lyndon Johnson.
(Title from 2007)

"Equal Rights and Jobs NOW"

"The UAW leader and his fellow unionists also knew the civil-rights movement’s most eloquent leader was on their side. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently spoke to labor audiences and consistently advocated their demands, while pressuring them to make equal opportunity a reality inside as well as outside their ranks. He wanted the U.S. to emulate havens of social democracy like Sweden, whose powerful workers’ movement had helped secure health care for all and an 'equitable division of wealth.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic discusses the role of unions in the 1963 March on Washington.

And Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect tells the "story of the radicals behind—and in front of—the demonstration that changed America."

"The First Liberal Democratic President Took Office Exactly 100 Years Ago This Spring"

"Yet Wilson, together with his allies on Capitol Hill, also laid the foundation for the 20^th century liberal state. He signed bills that created the Federal Reserve and progressive income tax rates, secured humane working conditions for merchant seamen and railroad workers, restricted child labor and curbed the power of large corporations. After the U.S. entered the war in Europe, his administration began operating the railroads, lifting the hopes of leftists who had long advocated public ownership of what was then a rich and vital industry.
"In 1916, Wilson accepted renomination with a speech that defined political conflict in terms that remain surprisingly fresh. Our programs, he told his fellow Democrats were 'resisted at every step by the interests which the Republican Party … catered to and fostered at the expense of the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a reaction which will save their privileges, for the restoration of their sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have lost.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls Woodrow Wilson "The Forgotten President."

"Not the Kind of Change Friedan Hoped Her Book Would Inspire"

"Sandberg also seems primarily concerned with the economics of gender. But there's a key difference: Friedan didn’t share a view from the corporate boardroom. Her first political home was the labor movement, and she found her way back to it in the mid-1990s. Then in her 70s, Friedan participated with gusto in campus teach-ins to promote the new, reform-minded leadership of the AFL-CIO. 'I have a pretty good historic Geiger counter,' she told a packed audience at Columbia University. 'It clicked thirty years ago' when The Feminine Mystique helped create the modern women’s movement. 'And that counter is clicking again, because I think we are on the verge of something new: a movement for social justice' which might 'transcend the separate interests, the special interests, even the very good interests of identity politics that have been at the cutting edge of democratic progress.' Friedan wasn't able to realize her vision of justice—such is the fate of American leftists. But it was always a far cry from the individualized notion of justice proferred by Sandberg."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic considers Betty Friedan's legacy upon the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.


"Competent female executives run better companies than incompetent male executives, but they’re no more likely to make universal day care the law of the land. If Davos Woman had dominated feminist discourse when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed nearly 130 female sweatshop laborers in 1911, would she have pushed for the legislation that came out of that tragedy—the fire codes and occupancy limits that made workplaces safer for women, and men, for generations to come?"

And Judith Shulevitz reviews Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

"Not Just to Minister to the Slaves, but to Do Away with Slavery"

"An absolute pacifist, she incurred the resentment of Church authorities for opposing U.S. involvement in World War II and subsequent forays into Korea and Indochina. She mentored the Catholic activists who broke into a government office and poured homemade napalm on draft files in 1968 to protest the Vietnam war. And Day was such a resolute champion of labor that, in 1949, she even backed a gravediggers’ strike against a Catholic cemetery in New York City. When the powerful archbishop, Francis Cardinal Spellman, ordered seminary students to break the strike, she denounced him for bringing 'so overwhelming a show of force against a handful of poor working men.' What Spellman did, she added bitterly, was 'a temptation of the devil to that most awful of all wars, the war between the clergy and the laity.'
"Like any good anarchist, Christian or not, Day had no faith whatsoever in the desire or ability of governing authorities to create a moral, egalitarian society. At the recent bishops’ meeting, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago recalled asking her, just after the 1960 election, how she felt about having a Catholic in the White House 'who can fight for social justice.' 'I believe Mr. Kennedy has chosen very badly,' she snapped. 'No serious Catholic would want to be president of the United States.'"

Michael Kazin at The New Republic reports that American bishops have endorsed sainthood for Dorothy Day.

"The Government Should Not Support the People"

"But the misery of his countrymen and women did nothing to shake Cleveland’s laissez-faire convictions. He refused to support any relief measure and instead urged Congress to reaffirm the gold standard, which he thought would lead inflation-wary businessmen to start hiring again. In 1894, when railroad workers stopped trains around the country in a sympathy boycott, Cleveland dispatched the U.S. Army to break the strike and persuaded a court to put the leaders of the protest in jail. His job, Cleveland might have said, was 'not to worry about those people.' After all, he would 'never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'"

At The New Republic, Michael Kazin compares Mitt Romney to Grover Cleveland.

And in Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan compares Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan.

Who Is Paul Ryan?

"What makes Ryan so extraordinary is that he is not just a handsome slickster skilled at conveying sincerity with a winsome heartland affect. Pols like that come along every year. He is also (as Rich Yeselson put it) the chief party theoretician. Far more than even Ronald Reagan, he is deeply grounded is the ideological precepts of the conservative movement—a longtime Ayn Rand devotee who imbibed deeply from the lunatic supply-side tracts of Jude Wanniski and George Gilder. He has not merely formed an alliance with the movement, he is a product of it."

Jonathan Chait in New York reacts to the news that Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as a vice-presidential nominee by reposting an earlier Ryan profile.

Timothy Noah, Noam Scheiber, Michael Kazin, Nate Cohn, and Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic react as well.

As do David Frum and Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast.

As do Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker.

As does Paul Krugman at The New York Times.

And Daniel Larison reacts at The American Conservative.

"A Fading Force in American Life"?

"Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism. Young people who have attended college, a growing percentage of the population, are more secular still. Catholicism has held its own only because the Church keeps gathering in newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, few of whom are likely to show up at a Santorum rally. To their surprise, Putnam and Campbell discovered that conservative preachers infrequently discuss polarizing issues from the pulpit. Sermons about hunger and poverty far outnumber those about homosexuality or abortion."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic argues that the Christian Right is in decline.


"The concept of 'one nation under God' has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that 'this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.' After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal."

And Kevin M. Kruse in The New York Times depicts an early victory for "Christian libertarianism" in the 1950s.


"Yes, the warhorses of the Christian Right are showing their age, but a younger generation of culture warriors, some more radical than their elders, are just beginning to come into view. The Christian Right has been buried many times by secular observers since its advent as a powerful political movement in the late 1970s. It’s far too early to write yet another obituary."

But Ed Kilgore in The New Republic challenges Kazin.

"How Should Liberals Feel about Occupy Wall Street?"

Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Michael Kazin, and others at The New Repubic offer answers to the above question.

"They Have to Figure Out Ways of Connecting Their Ideas to American Ideals"

"The left in Europe arises out of a more traditional class structure, and the left parties there were formed on the basis on those class divisions. Most European countries had feudal societies before they transformed into nation-states. When those societies became capitalist, they retained many of the old divisions both in terms of people's consciousness and in terms of the new social structure. Peasants and lords became workers and employers. So, the parties there tended to fall along class lines much more than in the United States, and people growing up on either side of the class boundary fueled the movements on the left. Even though the differences between the labor or socialist parties and the centrist or right-wing parties have diminished over time, the vision of a socialist society is still alive in many European countries. In America, however, socialism and communism were never more than marginal beliefs."

Mandy Van Devin in Salon talks with Michael Kazin about his new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.

The Populist Evasion

"This is what he said to me in an email:
"'In the history of the modern right, producerism (which is the core of populist ideology) has almost always been linked with racism. Wallace and Reagan (and many others) appealed to white wage-earners by attacking pro-busing judges and liberal pols who they charged were taking the people's money and wasting it on lazy minorities. The racial undercurrent never lay far from the surface.'"

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect asks Michael Kazin to respond to David Brooks's defense of anti-Obama protesters.

The Great Commoner's Revival

"Imagine the ideal democratic nominee for president. He’s twice won election in Nebraska, one of the reddest of states, and is just as popular across the South and Midwest. He’s a charismatic, energetic orator. He’s also a stalwart progressive who has taken tough stands against corporate crime, to aid labor organizers, and to raise taxes on the wealthy. His marriage is loving and cooperative, and his three children long to emulate their father. Although a war veteran, he’s an eloquent advocate of peaceful solutions to international conflicts. Most significantly, he’s a devout churchgoer and lay minister who preaches that every true Christian has a duty to transform a nation and world plagued by the arrogance of wealth and the pain of inequality."

Biographer Michael Kazin pitches William Jennings Bryan as a model for today's Democratic Party in The American Prospect. But historian Kevin Mattson is skeptical.

And Ed Kilgore in The Washington Monthly reviews Kazin's book.