The soul of the Democratic Party has always belonged to capital

Henry Wallace was an ambitious left-winger in Roosevelt’s Democratic Party who, as secretary of agriculture and then as vice president, helped make radical the New Deal of the 1930s. His ultimate defeat by the right of his own party shows the obstacles the insurgent left has always faced within the Democratic Party.

by Paul Heideman

Part 1

It used to be said that you could tell a lot about a leftist’s politics by asking them when they thought the Soviet Union went bad. Anarchists and social democrats said 1917, Trotskyists 1928, Maoists 1956, and if you were in the Communist Party (CP), the answer was never.

There’s a similar dynamic at work in left narratives about the Democratic Party. Did it go bad with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s? Or with Carter’s embrace of austerity? Or, as some more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party”? Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics.

John Nichols’s new book, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, draws the line very early indeed, with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944. 

The book is written explicitly as an intervention into current debates over the future of the party, and its argument that for most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was degenerating, is reflective of the radicalism of one pole of that debate.

For Nichols, Wallace represents the real soul of the New Deal Democratic Party. A proud progressive, dedicated anti-racist, and passionate anti-fascist, Wallace attempted to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy, only to be stymied by more conservative forces inside the party. 

This narrative occupies the book’s first half, while the second half covers the history of the party in the seven decades following Wallace’s defeat in 1944. The result is a readable introduction to both Henry Wallace, one of the most interesting American politicians, and the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals.

Source, links:

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/henry-wallace-democratic-party-nichols

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