This commentary is part a series presented in conjunction with the Center’s feature exhibition, Headed to the White House.
As Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders battle for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, the contest is unfolding on the field of liberalism. One only needs to recall the political moment in 1992 when Bill Clinton ran for the presidency as a centrist, disavowing a liberal identity, to recognize how much the Democratic Party’s ideological terrain has changed. It would have been unimaginable in 1992 that a self-proclaimed democratic socialist would be a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination—or that a candidate named Clinton would seek to position herself close to him on the issues.
How and why did the Democratic Party gravitate toward liberalism since Bill Clinton’s first run for the presidency? To answer this question, we must go further back than 1992, all the way back to the 1960s. Two momentous occurrences in that decade reshaped the Democratic Party in an enduring fashion: the civil rights revolution and the war in Vietnam.
Propelled by the remarkable mass movement for civil rights, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had to abandon the Democratic Party’s increasingly feckless effort to hold together a paradoxical coalition that included segregationists and their African American challengers. Embracing the civil rights cause and sponsoring landmark civil rights legislation, these Democratic presidents and their congressional allies won the loyalty of African Americans for the long run.
At the same time, fully aware of the profound political cost, they initiated a process whereby the white South, the secure base of the Democratic Party in presidential elections since the Civil War, began to shift to the Republican side. In the North, too, racialized politics drove away former white working-class supporters of the Democrats, now recruited for the GOP by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Once African Americans opened the door toward fuller recognition of equal rights, other movements for equality soon followed. In the losing presidential campaign of 1972, Democratic nominee George McGovern’s coalition included militant activists from the women’s movement and the nascent movement for gay liberation. The Democratic Party was increasingly associated with “identity politics”—with the controversial causes of groups that heretofore had been marginalized in American politics.
The other momentous issue rocking the Democratic Party in the 1960s was the war in Vietnam. Although “Americanized” and massively expanded by a Democrat in the White House, Lyndon Johnson, the political protest against the war mainly took place within the president’s party. Insurgent anti-war candidates—Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972—mobilized millions of Democrats against the war and the mentality that had shaped its conduct. The mass base of the Democratic Party was transformed through these crusades, increasingly becoming opponents of interventionism and advocates of peace in international affairs.
In the aftermath of the civil rights revolution and the war in Vietnam, the base of the Democratic Party had become more liberal, not only through new adherents among people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and peace activists, but through the departure from the party of southern conservatives, northern white workers, and Cold War hawks.
Yet in the near term, the new electoral alignment was unfavorable for Democrats in presidential elections. From 1968 to 2008, the party only held the White House for twelve years. People of color were still a relatively small slice of the electorate, the issues about which feminists and LGBT activists cared were not popular according to the polls, and the Democratic Party was saddled with the reputation, happily bestowed on it by Republicans, as weak on national security.
At the top of the Democratic Party during this era, among its presidential candidates, there was an understandable—but also opportunistic—incentive to distance the party from its increasingly liberal base. Jimmy Carter was the original New Democrat positioned in the center; Walter Mondale pushed for reduction of the federal deficit; Michael Dukakis claimed that he offered competence rather than ideology; Bill Clinton called himself a Third Way Democrat, neither liberal nor conservative; Al Gore concealed his passionate environmentalism; and John Kerry portrayed himself as a decorated veteran in Vietnam rather than an antiwar activist returning home. Repeatedly, to the dismay of rank-and-file liberals, Democratic candidates evaded or denied the liberal label, even as Republican candidates enthusiastically embraced its conservative counterpart.
It was President George W. Bush who put an end to the era of Democratic equivocation. Bush’s trio of presidential disasters—the war in Iraq, the hapless response to Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crash of 2008—tarnished the Republican approach to domestic and foreign policy while firing up Democrats with new hope.
Further, the same political factors that had cut against Democratic candidates for decades had begun to shift in their favor. Racial minorities were now a significantly larger slice of the electorate, while public opinion was becoming more favorable toward cultural positions previously shunned, especially on same-sex marriage. In the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination of 2008, the three leading candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards, all adopted the language of liberalism again.
Although many left-leaning Democrats would dispute it, President Barack Obama arguably has governed as the most liberal Democrat at home since Lyndon Johnson and the most liberal abroad since Franklin D. Roosevelt. The alternatives presented to Democratic voters in 2016 have been limited to the liberal end of the political spectrum: move considerably further to the left with Bernie Sanders or incrementally further with Hillary Clinton. No longer can Democratic presidential candidates emulate Bill Clinton and seek political shelter in the center. The top of the party, its presidential nominee this fall, will be closely aligned with its base.
Bruce Miroff is Professor of Political Science and Collins Fellow at the University at Albany, SUNY. Among his books are The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (2007) and Presidents on Political Ground: Leaders in Action and What They Face (forthcoming in summer 2016).
