Sean Wilentz: Bill Clinton’ Promise: The Reinvention of American Liberalism
Since the end of World War II, every Democrat who has sought the presidency has attempted to update the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. In announcing his candidacy 20 years ago, Bill Clinton called his reformed liberalism “a new covenant.” By this he meant a revitalized connection between government and the citizenry that rejected the Reagan Republican idea of right-wing, laissez-faire economics, but that also re-emphasized what Clinton called “the solid, middle-class virtues of hard work, individual responsibility, family, community, and faith.” The phrase “new covenant” did not stick, but the idea behind it remained the guiding light of the Clinton Administration for the ensuing eight years. During that time, it offered Democrats and the nation a reopened path to the future that had been blocked since the distempers of the late 1960s and in particular since the tragedies of 1968.
Some of the unraveling of the New Deal political coalition had already occurred before 1968, in fits and starts. Plainly, though, Lyndon Johnson’s embrace of the civil rights movement in 1964, followed by the presidential candidacy of George Wallace four years later, insured the movement of the great bulk of the white South into the Republican Party, a party that is today dominated by its highly conservative Southern white base. And, in 1968, the Democratic Party’s crack-up over Vietnam opened what became a deep division between relatively affluent and highly-educated northern “new politics” liberals and the party’s traditional blue-collar and white rural liberal base. That division long outlasted the Vietnam War, fed by the growing impression that liberalism was an elitist conceit dedicated to draining the middle-class in favor of the poor — Reagan’s “welfare queen.”...