Michael Tomasky: A Historical Argument Against Despair
On the day in late April when Barack Obama gave his speech at Cooper Union urging financial regulation reform, The Huffington Post, one of the most important liberal websites we have, could hardly have made more clear to its readers what it thought about Obama’s appeal to his audience. "Two Presidents, Two Messages to Anti-Reform Bankers," ran the headline over photographs of Obama and Franklin Roosevelt an hour or two after the President wrapped up his speech. Obama, the sub-headlines explained, urged bankers to "Join Us," while Roosevelt had said: "I Welcome Their Hatred."...
...[O]ur political culture affects the way we think about the past...Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down....
The clubs regularly used by liberal critics who hammer the Administration for its tentativeness and caution are the New Deal and the Great Society. He must be more like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson; there were proud liberals who didn’t vacillate, didn’t muck around with this bipartisanship foolishness, and licked their chops at the prospect of a good fight, as evidenced by the "I welcome their hatred" quote, which FDR directed at the "economic royalists." We were also treated, especially in the Administration’s first six months, to regular comparisons to Roosevelt’s famous Hundred Days: "By this time, FDR had . . . "
The Hundred Days were a wondrous thing, there is no denying it. But today, when we ask why Obama couldn’t just do that, we misunderstand the context in which they occurred. Roosevelt took office with an unemployment rate of 24 percent. For Obama the number was 7.6 percent. FDR also became the president of a desperately poor nation. It’s hard to make a precise comparison, because good economic numbers on household income go back only to 1947, but some economists who’ve looked at the question have determined that the median household income in 1933–in today’s dollars–was in the range of $15,000 to $20,000. That figure today is right around $50,000, and the poverty threshhold today for a family of four is about $22,000. In other words, not only were incomes far, far lower then, but most people were poor–if not officially, then effectively. And one in four workers had no work. That is light years away from today’s America, even post-crisis, and it made for a desperate situation in which all manner of experimentation was welcomed by a public that often literally couldn’t eat. So the Hundred Days set about changing that–but did not, at least as regards the unemployment rate, which stayed above 20 percent until 1936.
The New Deal was not a seamless narrative of aggressively liberal steps in which conservatives were sent scampering. It was full of starts and stops, and it took a long time. There were many reasons for this, but a chief one had to do with Roosevelt himself–seen by the more impatient reformers of his day as equivocal and adhering to too few core beliefs, exactly the way some see Obama today. Alan Brinkley, in Liberalism and Its Discontents, reminds us that the general historians’ view of Roosevelt, quite far removed from that presented in the sound bites and summaries employed today, was that of "a man without an ideological core and thus unable to exercise genuine leadership." Huey Long, who sat out on FDR’s left flank, complained of this in a quote in which he invoked his ideological nemesis, the Senate majority leader from Arkansas: "When I talk to [Roosevelt], he says, ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ But Joe Robinson goes to see him the next day and he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine’ to everybody."...
...The New Deal is a great success story. I mean merely to convey that modern liberalism was hardly consummated or made whole in FDR’s first two years–indeed, insofar as Social Security in the form we know it today needed 20 years to take shape (for example, agricultural workers, employees of nonprofits, and the self-employed weren’t added to the system until 1954), the New Deal is best seen as the start of a process that unfolded over two or three generations and three presidential administrations. Roosevelt enjoyed massive majorities in Congress (44 Senate seats and 219 House seats–yes, those were the Democratic margins!–in 1933-34), and he made his indefensible deals with the Dixiecrats, which would be unthinkable today and which to some extent tarnish many of his accomplishments. But even then, with all that in his favor, real change came slowly. And by the way: the famous speech in which FDR welcomed the hatred of the "economic royalists"? It wasn’t delivered during the Hundred Days, or his first year in office, or his second. He delivered it in October 1936–in the heat of the reelection campaign, to gin up his base...
The Great Society, the second club, was different. It was indeed "the perfect storm" of liberalism, to borrow the phrase of G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot in their book, The Liberal Hour. But even here, the hurricane of activity in 1964-65 needed years to gather strength. One could argue that the seeds of the Great Society were planted in the Senate election of 1958, a landmark event, as described by Michael Foley in his The New Senate. That election brought several outright liberals–Eugene McCarthy, Edmund Muskie, Philip Hart, Thomas Dodd, Ernest Gruening, and others–to the conservative Senate. It and the next two–the 1962 class, of course, included Ted Kennedy–shifted the balance of power in that body dramatically (remember also that there were liberal Republicans in those days). Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, another seed was planted in 1961, under John F. Kennedy, when a vote was forced in the House of Representatives to expand the Rules Committee. Rules was under the chairmanship of Virginia’s Howard Smith, a remorseless segregationist who never would have let civil rights legislation reach the floor of the House, except for this vote, forced upon by him Kennedy and Johnson and a somewhat reluctant Sam Rayburn, which put more liberals on his committee (and it might not have happened at all–it was an extremely close call, with a final tally of 217 for, 212 against).
And so the legislative blitzkrieg that looks to us today, if we accept conventional wisdom, like something for which the famous Johnson Treatment was solely responsible was in fact the result of many factors over several years, and much chip, chip, chipping away....
We grew up with a set of assumptions. If you were born in the United States between, say, 1945 and 1965, you were raised in a basically liberal political culture when liberalism was the default position. You studied the New Deal, or were instructed in it by your parents and grandparents, as I was (neither of my grandmothers could even say "Hoover" without spitting the name out like a mouthful of turpentine), and you thought: This is how it is. This is America. We were once a conservative country. But that was then. We’ve put it away. Progress–progressive progress, if you don’t mind the redundancy–was inevitable.
When Reagan came, you thought: aberration. Maybe we did go a bit overboard here and there, and, let’s face it, Jimmy Carter was not an effective president. So this is a corrective. Temporary. Things will sort themselves out. That was how it looked in August 1988, when Michael Dukakis was 17 points ahead of George H.W. Bush, and when many hoped that President Dukakis’s tenure would be followed by President Cuomo’s. In the America in which we were raised, that was how things would have gone and were fated to go.
Thirty years later–actually, about 27 years later, or three or so years ago–I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations? True, we had Bill Clinton in the meantime. Poor Clinton never plays a central role in these narratives, and I think today we’re gaining enough historical distance that he is starting to deserve better: His presidency may not have constituted a golden age of progressivism in the way selected Roosevelt and Johnson years did, which remains the reason we focus more on those two, but it was certainly a comparative golden age for the country. Still, as we know, the right marched onward during the Clinton years. And then of course came Bush. The idea we young people of the 1980s once entertained–the idea that the Age of Reagan was somehow false, anomalous, a torn page in an otherwise seamless development of plot–had now to be reexamined, in light of the speed with which Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove undid so many (thankfully not all) of the ideas and policies we had been raised to believe were inviolate....
I remember that I am supposedly writing an essay against despair–against ennui and drift, and against the idea that progressives should be unhappy or irritated with the current state of affairs. So the fair question arises: How does this arid interpretation of progressive history accommodate a posture of optimism in the present day?...
The use or misuse of history as a blunt weapon is a trope that guarantees despair. If this Administration’s moments are always to be compared with liberalism’s greatest hits, it will never measure up, and the effect will be to signal to rank-and-file progressives that their values are constantly being sold short (I notice no one compares Obama outright with the segregationist-coddling FDR or the Vietnam-bombing LBJ, comparisons from which he would emerge favorably). But this is about something more important and lasting than any single president. We are in a pitched ideological battle that seems virtually certain to continue for many years. In that battle, despair will produce only defeat.