INTRODUCTION: THE ERA OF RACE REDUCTIONISM
The 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination condensed around two distinct visions of social justice. One, advanced by Hillary Clinton and the party’s corporate wing, accepted the limits of the neoliberal regime of upward redistribution even as it embraced fairness for nonwhites, women, gender-nonconforming people and other specified populations within the system. The other, asserted by Bernie Sanders, reaffirmed the public-good framework—established during the New Deal and carried through the postwar period—that was crucial to both the exponential growth of the American middle class and the modern civil rights movement.
Although I enthusiastically cast my ballot for Sanders in Illinois’s 2016 Democratic primary and look forward to voting for him again in 2020, when Senator Bernie Sanders announced his presidential campaign in April 2015, I feared the Democratic Party and the corporate media would succeed in their efforts to cast him as a novelty candidate. I have always appreciated Sanders’s politics, but I had presumed that a quarter-century of neoliberal hegemony had crowded out space for a return to the public-good-oriented domestic agenda that he championed.
To be clear, I refer to Sanders’s platform as “public-good-oriented” rather than “democratic socialist,” not because I have an aversion to socialism or dispute the candidate’s self-identity and long political history on the left. Rather, casting Sanders as a democratic socialist or social democrat obscures the fact that the Bernie Sanders who campaigned for the Democratic nomination ran on a platform in step with the best of New Deal liberalism.
Today, Sanders’s calls for free public higher education, universal health care, tax hikes on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, massive reinvestment in the nation’s infrastructure and an invigorated union movement sound like a plan to infuse alien Scandinavian social democratic policies into American democracy. However, in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the quarter-century or so following World War II—the era that most Americans reflexively think of as the golden age of the middle class—Sanders’s political platform would not have been so unusual for a Democratic presidential candidate.
During the New Deal (1933–40), American workers won a number of concessions from capital that would help pave the way for the postwar expansion of the nation’s middle class. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the Social Security Act (SSA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) would afford the workers covered by these laws: a much-strengthened right to collective bargaining; insulation from financial hardship wrought by termination, workplace injury, the loss of a wage earner, or just growing old; a forty-hour work week; and a floor below which workers’ wages could not fall. In the same decade, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would create long-term mortgages, making homeownership possible for most white workers for the first time in the industrial era.
World War II dampened the New Deal’s social democratic potential—which was always restrained by Roosevelt’s overarching mission to create a sustainable model of capitalism—both by stifling labor and civil rights militancy and by displacing the “regulatory state” model of government stewardship of the nation’s economy in favor of the more conservative, growth-oriented “compensatory state” model.1 So, while the New Deal may have been as close to social democracy as the United States has ever been, the comparative strength of American capital by World War II ensured that New Deal liberalism would be far removed from socialism. Still, President Roosevelt and the New Dealers did advance a vision for a social corporatist democracy that sought to mitigate capitalism’s harshest implications for American citizens while alleviating the tensions between industrial capitalism and republican democracy. Thus, in his final State of the Union on January 11, 1944, President Roosevelt laid out what he termed a “Second Bill of Rights,” updated for the industrial age, which would establish the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home and health care.2
While Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights was in step with the sensibilities of most Americans by the end of World War II, it would not come to pass. Indeed, by 1947, a combined Republican and Dixiecrat congressional supermajority swiftly rolled back workers’ rights and tamped down labor militancy. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947)—which eliminated the closed shop, card check and sympathy strikes while placing restrictions on unions’, but not corporations’, political activities—was crucial to this project.3 But despite intense opposition from Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, President Truman’s 1948 presidential platform promised to build on the New Deal’s economic liberalism. Truman’s “Fair Deal” called for the repeal of Taft-Hartley, national health care, full-employment policies, the expansion of public works and comprehensive housing legislation. Truman would likewise become the first Democratic president to adopt a formal civil rights platform—which included a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and federal anti-lynching and voting rights legislation.4
Truman won reelection, but the combined Republican and Dixiecrat majority in Congress foreclosed the Fair Deal. Nevertheless, even Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s America continued to reflect the New Deal’s influence. Indeed, by the late 1950s one-third of the workforce was unionized. Unionized workers, and even a growing number of nonunionized workers, had access to employer-sponsored health insurance plans—which major employers had just begun to establish as an alternative to a taxpayer-funded health care system. Robust state contributions to public higher education ensured that tuition at public universities was either free or extremely inexpensive. And the highest marginal income tax rate was about 91 percent.
In the mid-1960s, when the American middle class was on even firmer footing, the union movement was still strong; tuition at public universities remained either free or inexpensive, and the highest marginal income tax rate was then about 75 percent. The Johnson administration’s Great Society, moreover, extended health care to two classes of Americans—the aged and the poor—who did not have the benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance.5 And the public-good framework that informed the above would prove indispensable to the civil rights movement’s major legislative victories—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968—even if these acts were incapable of redressing the structural economic sources of racial disparities.
The Keynesian consensus—as the aforementioned period is called—birthed and nurtured the American middle class of lore. But the zeitgeist of that era was, in many ways, far removed from the political-economic orthodoxies of the conservative neoliberal era, ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the wake of stagflation (1973–75). Perceiving government intervention in labor and housing markets for the public good as an encumbrance on otherwise rational markets, neoliberal Republican and Democratic administrations—from Reagan to Trump and from Clinton to Obama—have, to one degree or another, whittled away at the social safety net, consumer protections and workers’ rights that were the product of the Keynesian consensus.
The poor have certainly paid the price for neoliberalism’s rejection of the public-interest model of governance, but so too have America’s working and middle classes. Since the mid-1950s, the share of the American workforce that is unionized has declined from a high of more than 30 percent to fewer than 10 percent today.6 The decline of the union movement has contributed to a massive upward redistribution of wealth since the late 1970s. In 1965, the average CEO earned forty times as much as the average worker; today, that number is more than 300 times as much. Since 1980, wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners have risen ten times faster than those of the bottom 90 percent of workers. Today, the top 5 percent of households possess nearly 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 60 percent of American households have actually lost wealth over the past few decades. And the atrophy of the public sector—wrought by privatization schemes and tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest citizens and corporations—has not only contributed to the decay of America’s infrastructure, but state budget cuts to public higher education have likewise resulted in soaring college tuition costs.7
All of this is to say that there really was an outsider candidate in 2016