Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Conclusion

 

I have been accused over and over of being harsher on the left in my political then the right. The reason I have been is not because I view their ideology worse then the other side. On the contrary, I have no problem with progressive values not only today but historically. Our country has always been better when it chooses to lead the masses rather than follow and Progressives have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to values.

But over and over again when it comes to the left, we see that their approach to democracy has been the other side of the coin when it comes to conservatism: no matter which political party they are a part of, they are always in the minority. And in a democracy, being on the right side of history is meaningless if you don’t have a method to get your goals accomplished. And from the abolitionists to the Radical Republicans to the La Follette Progressives and the Gideon’s Army of Henry Wallace there has never been a democratic method to their righteousness. The old adage “I’d Rather Be Right Than Be President’ doesn’t apply to political leftists the same way. They know they’re right, so they don’t want to be President or even in a position to get legislation passed by just means. If that means running roughshod over anyone who gets in their way, even if that happens to be the majority of the American people, well, they’ll thank us for it down the road.

Almost from the start so many political leftists have argued in the combination of jeremiad and iconoclast, from Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens of the Radical Republicans to Robert La Follette of the Progressives to William Jennings Bryan. Their ideology is right more often then not but they would rather preach their gospel to the faithful then try to broaden their message and win elections and get their goals accomplished. As a result, they have just enough of a following to control certain aspects of the party mechanism but never enough to win on their own and get their ends accomplished. La Follette made it very clear the year he joined the Senate that getting legislation through Congress was not his ultimate goal, that he had little use for democracy as it worked at the time and that no President had a platform progressive enough to satisfy him. He wasn’t always right but he was never wrong even when he contradicted himself in his voting, such as when he voted against entry into World War I and against ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. For most of his career in Congress La Follette viewed himself alone as what Progressivism should represent and those who stood against him were enemies of progress.

Had La Follette been willing to work with a Progressive like Theodore Roosevelt rather than view him as an obstacle, the progressives might have eventually become the overriding wing of the Republican Party. Instead the battle he had with TR for the Republican nomination in 1912 was so brutal that he refused to see the larger truths that it was more a battle of personality then anything else. Had he led his progressive with TR into the Bull Moose Party, they might have had a better chance of winning the Presidency in 1912 and perhaps become a national party in their own right. Instead La Follette chose to essentially sit out the 1912 campaign. He was the definition of so many of today’s progressives who don’t vote because they truly believed both parties are the same. The Bull Moose platform wasn’t but La Follette was so blinded by his contempt for his enemies that he destroyed his long term ambitions.

T.R. can’t be held blameless either, of course. Had he been willing to get out of the way in 1912, he would likely have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. But as with La Follette, there was a refusal to compromise and a decision that the party had to be all about him. When he had no use for it four years later, it collapsed and the consequences were far greater then one election. T.R’s defection from the causes was part of the slow process of the left leaving the Republican party and the party moving more to the right. They would mostly be in the center for the next half century but eventually the moderates completely left which has led to the fact that the far right is the entire Republican Party.

Of course some progressive Republicans did end up going to the Democratic party. One of the most prominent was Harold Ickes, who after La Follette’s 1924 third party run endorsed Democratic candidates. Eventually he became a key member of FDR’s administration. Many of La Follette’s followers, including George Norris and Burton Wheeler – La Follette’s running mate in 1924 – would become key supporters of the New Deal.

Yet part of me wonders if La Follette had lived until 1932, whether he would have gone that far. La Follette spent his entire career arguing that no President could truly accomplish a Progressive platform other than him. One could easily see him shrugging of the New Deal the same way he did Wilson’s platform as ‘weak sauce’ and that one Roosevelt was as bad as another. He would no doubt have seen the fact that so many of his ilk following FDR in 1932 as tantamount to treason, even if his own son chose to do so. Even in the midst of the greatest crisis of our time, I could see La Follette choosing to sit the 1932 election out.

And this same level of intractability was to be found in many of his followers. Ickes was an often prickly presence in FDR’s administration with little use even for men like Henry Wallace. His loyalty to the Democratic Party was almost entirely to FDR  and when Truman forced him to resign as Secretary of Interior he took it personally. He spent much of the next two years openly campaigning against Truman, first in giving his reputation behind Henry Wallace, but refusing to join his campaign. He sat out the Democratic Convention and it was not until October that he half-heartedly endorsed Truman, mainly because he detested the alternative. He didn’t believe for a moment Truman could win. He died before the 1952 Presidential campaign could begin but it’s hard to imagine him having any patience for any candidate who came afterward.

Sadly the Progressive Candidate that has the most pertinence to today’s politics is Henry Wallace. Like all progressives, he had a loyal following and would listen to almost no one else. The fact that he wasn’t a politician would be considered a strength by today’s leftists, not a weakness. The most devoted followers of him were intellectuals and celebrities. His strongest support came from New York and California – the coastal elites. The level of how the Progressive convention played out is the definition of how one could see any convention of leftists working – intellectuals talking to half-empty galleries and refusing to accept the slightest dissent from their ridiculous positions. Even the fact that there was no path to victory and that they chose not to support viable candidates for Congress and gubernatorial races is completely in keeping with the leftist mindset of purity above all else. They had one goal: to deny Harry Truman electoral victory. They failed at that, cut themselves out of power in Democratic circles and helped bring about the worst of the McCarthy era.

And from that point on, the left has basically decided that the only role that they want to have in electoral politics is to disrupt the order of things. One sees in Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire challenge in 1968 that would eventually drive LBJ from office. That McCarthy had no interest in running for President and no campaign for the nomination after LBJ chose not to seek renomination going forward did nothing to dissuade young leftists from endorsing him. That they chose ultimately to stay home rather than vote against Richard Nixon is something the left has refused to acknowledge even today. The left’s current political standpoint can be seen solely to play spoiler. There is a line from Wallace’s 1948 run to Nader’s run in 2000, Jill Stein’s in 2016 – and the fact that ten percent of Sanders’ voters chose to vote for Trump that same year.

Aside from that, the left has decided to abdicate any role they have in electoral politics going forward, actually seeming annoyed at even the idea of having to participate in it. What they have essentially done for more than half a century is to endlessly rewrite the history of America so that there are only villains and the left has essentially, since their arrival in the country, been innocent bystanders. They are fine arguing America is a racist, xenophobic, nation, only interested in serving the corporate interest and that democracy is a sham. Part of me wonders if they do so with the attitude of sour grapes that the rest of the world has rejected what they know to be right.

Henry Wallace might be amused to know that there is an entire bloc of intellectuals arguing that his positions were right after all. They have little to do with the actual Henry Wallace – they ignore his links to the Soviets and his actual ineptitude towards every aspect of political life. Instead he is a straw man for their arguments that the Cold War was entirely an American invention. It was one of the most hysterical things in Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States where he told us that Stalin would have lived up to his word at Yalta and that he was basically a man of honor. Even Wallace-ites like Pete Seeger eventually admitted the errors of their ways when they saw the gulags in Soviet Russia. For all the arguments against imperialism in the twentieth century, Stalin’s actions in the immediate aftermath of World War II always get a free pass. Today’s left is frequently more compassionate to Stalin then Wallace was.

Even the few leftists who stick with the Democratic Party are rewriting history so that all Republicans are evil and always have been. There will be no mention of Bob La Follette in any progressive newsletter, no mention of Radical Republicans and if TR comes up at all, it’s to argue that he was a bigot. Today’s left would not have argued against the one moral highpoint of Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign – his swing through the Jim Crow South. “You really want to risk your life for those people?”  Today’s left views the South as a country that should have left behind after the Civil War and that all the residents deserve what they get. They will deny that they were the most reliable Democratic voters for eighty years because that means acknowledged the flaws in the idol they currently are supporting. Even the progressives in the South would rather Republicans win elected office than vote for Democrats that they consider only giving them half a loaf. A century later, they still hold to Bob La Follette’s vision of how the world should work and it’s no more tenable today than it was then.

What all three third-party progressive campaigns for President show us is that, sadly, the fundamental message at the core of the left has not changed. Their moral righteousness has always eclipsed the number of people who believe in them and their decision that compromise is a dirty word. If they were willing to work within the system, try to expand beyond the base they had, or be willing to listen to conflicting points of views, they might be able to have greater success and managed to have a bigger impact on the political landscape. Instead, they focus their energy on complaining about the status quo, berating both sides as equally evil even though some of them think one is notably worse, insist on purity campaigns and constantly refuse to acknowledge their principles could survive reality. Social media has made it simpler for them to listen ‘more and more to fewer and fewer people’. They constantly find people like Henry Wallace and say the tragedy of our country is no one listened to him. The reason for their bond with Wallace is because of what he and all these other men did – they refused to listen to anyone who disagreed with them, and it made their goals, however well-meant or righteous, impossible to achieve. That is the true tragedy of these Progressive campaigns – not that any of today’s progressives will ever admit it,  even to themselves.