All praise to Jeff Cowie and Nick Salvatore. They've dared to look deep into the pit of progressive hopes in modern US history and have emerged with something important and new to say about that much debated, much lamented subject. And they get certain big things right. The hegemony of individualism, the historic weakness of the labor movement, divisions of race, and the ways in which most white Christians apply their religious faith have all interacted to limit what, in Europe, are called the prospects of social-democracy and, in this country, usually go under the name of modern liberalism. Their concluding suggestion that reformers may find in “the fluid alliances of the Progressive Era” a more helpful analogy than in the class-based coalition led by FDR is a welcome provocation, although they don't choose to elaborate on it.

But I want to take issue with Cowie and Salvatore on three points—two historical, the other contemporary. First, I see the New Deal as just one phase in the evolution of American liberalism, not the summit to which all prior versions led and from which subsequent attempts have retreated. The populism of William Jennings Bryan wedded Democrats to bottom-up economic policies from antitrust to the income tax (and won the support of the AFL); the progressivism of Jane Addams, Woodrow Wilson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Robert LaFollette the elder expanded the circle of concern to the urban poor, to civil rights, and, however imperfectly, to the victims of colonial rule. The New Deal brought industrial workers, Catholic ones in particular, into the liberal coalition and abandoned the old liberalism's distaste for statist remedies. But it built on those antecedents and, in turn, laid the basis for Great Society measures like Medicare and the Civil Rights Act that changed the lives of as many Americans as Social Security and the NLRA.

All the achievements mentioned in the last paragraph have proved quite durable—a fact that ought to dilute the strength of individualism as an explanatory device. Of course, self-reliance remains intrinsic to the ideology of American politics. But the classic paradox mentioned by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril back in 1967 remains as true as the day it was written: most Americans are ideological conservatives but operational liberals.Footnote ¹ Put simply, Americans hate big government, but they love federal spending—as long as it benefits them and anyone else they regard as morally worthy: particularly the elderly, children, and veterans. Moreover, notwithstanding their conservatism on issues of gender and cultural expression, deeply religious Americans—of all faiths and political leanings—have tended to favor the state when it operates as a “good shepherd.” Thus, at an empathetic level, modern liberalism may not be so out of step with Godly America after all.

Despite their rhetoric, the three conservative Republicans elected president since 1980 understood these political realities. Ronald Reagan and both Bushes emulated Dwight Eisenhower's famous 1954 comment to his brother Edgar, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” Just after winning reelection in 2004, George W. Bush did announce a plan to privatize Social Security, promising that no one's benefits would be reduced. But leaders of both parties quickly deflated that trial balloon. For all his belief in American exceptionalism, Bush should have learned from his fellow conservative leaders in Europe, few of whom would even consider dismantling the more lavish state programs in their nations. As Alan Wolfe has put it, “A conservative in America…is someone who advocates ends that cannot be realized through means that can never be justified, at least not on the terrain of conservatism itself.”Footnote ²

Of course, one shouldn't overestimate the strength of liberalism—in any era. As Thomas Sugrue and other fine historians of postwar America have taught us, in local politics, whites of all classes tended to define their self-interest in self-protective ways. Even unionists who routinely voted for liberal Democratic nominees for president opposed open housing, court-ordered busing, and property taxes—and voted for politicians on the Right who championed those causes. Two generations of community organizers tried to convince ordinary people of all races to turn their anger against predatory corporations instead of one another. But their victories tended to be small and temporary. Just as the activist Right mistakenly believes it can banish the desire of most Americans for a limited welfare state, so the activist Left has too often romanticized working-class “communities” as founts of progressivism.

Second, I believe Cowie and Salvatore underestimate the positive impact the cultural rebellion that first surged during the 1960s has had on American society. As they make clear, this revolt was largely an outgrowth of the black freedom movement, although its stress on “personal politics” was often at odds with the communitarian spirit of the black church, which was essential to inspiring and mobilizing the movement.

After the 1960s, largely separate from the hothouse of national politics, the Left gradually reinvented itself. Most young activists shed their ultrarevolutionary illusions and began “the long march through the institutions” that German radical Rudi Dutschke advocated in 1968. The Left's influence on daily life, while it lacks the drama of mass insurgency, has been profound, particularly on people born after the 1960s. “The most enduring aspects of a social movement are not always its institutions but the mental attitudes which inspire it and which are in turn generated by it,” wrote British historian J.F.C. Harrison in 1969.Footnote ³

Consider the fact that most ordinary Americans enjoy a degree of personal freedom that was considered ultraradical in the 1960s. Women can pursue a variety of occupations, gays and lesbians in most urban areas no longer have to lie about their sexuality, racial identity poses no legal barrier to full participation in civil society, and the urgency of protecting the environment is taken for granted.

“Making values explicit” should be the central task of politics, declared the 1962 Port Huron Statement: “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” That sentence (its gender bias aside) captures, with an aptly romantic tone, how both radicals and left-liberals believe a better society would be built: Americans would liberate themselves by expanding the definition of freedom itself. This impulse sometimes led to forms of “identity politics” that descended into self-parody. But an expanded and durable meaning of “freedom” won the day. Today, most people under thirty—even a good many who vote Republican—reject all forms of race-baiting, homophobia, and gender discrimination. As Richard Rorty once put it, the 1960s Left greatly diminished the amount of sadism in American culture.

Thus, individualism can be a liberatory force as well as a brake on social-democratic dreams. With all due respect to Michael Harrington's comment in 1973, the cultural revolution actually did more to subvert traditional conservatism than vice versa. Perhaps the last great American socialist just wrote too soon?

Finally, there's the perennial question of what is to be done. The Progressive Era may be a good analogy for what to expect, or at least to hope for. At least the “new Gilded Age” of plutocrats acting badly and corporations getting away with murder seems to be ending. As I write, in the spring of 2008, liberals have taken the offensive, arguably for the first time since the mid-1960s. The three major Democratic candidates for president—Clinton, Obama, and Edwards—all took positions on healthcare, taxation, education, labor, and foreign policy to the left of any party nominee since McGovern. And, unlike the latter, whomever the Democrats nominated had an excellent chance to win. Since the heyday of Bryan and Wilson, liberals have combined the rhetoric of populism with welfarist policies. Thanks, in part, to the manifest failures conservatism has suffered under the leadership of first Newt Gingrich and then George W. Bush, that combination appears to be working.

One reason is that race may no longer be the insurmountable barrier that long kept the Left on the defensive. In the daily life and structure of the labor movement, in most corporations and professions—as well as in the culture of the young—multiculturalism has become a given, despite what people may mutter under their breath. This environment made Obama's strong campaign possible; the idea of nominating a youngish biracial figure with a “funny name” and liberal positions would have been inconceivable as recently as the early 1990s. “White America got used to black people turning up everywhere, except next door,” writes the novelist Darryl Pinckney. The Obama campaign managed to give many Democrats and some independents a sense that “something historical was happening, that an unprecedented national narrative was taking shape.”Footnote ⁴

Analogies, in the end, are a poor substitute for thinking about the exigencies and possibilities of the future. To build a majority coalition in a postindustrial, globalized nation will require a program and mode of persuasion distinct from those which worked, to a degree, in previous eras of liberal advance—the Progressive years, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Organized labor will remain at the core of that coalition only if it manages to propose attractive solutions to the pervasive insecurity of the job market and not merely to the economic needs of specific groups of workers. And as long as the “war on terrorism” continues and dovetails with the new nativism, the discourse of individual rights will continue to energize movements on the Left, as much as one might wish that the concept of “solidarity” resonated with Americans as much as it does with people in other nations. Finally, progressives, whatever their own beliefs, will have to get comfortable with Americans who base their politics largely on their religious faith. As Marx wrote, “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world…”Footnote ⁵ For better and worse, it has been around since the beginning of civilization and has proved a more supple instrument for political change than Marxism or any other secular philosophy.