Today's Democratic Party leaders have apparently forgotten … that the social programs that came of age during the New Deal had their origins in Judeo-Christian tradition, even more than in secular humanism…. But now the Democratic Party elite — the activists, the pundits, the big-bucks donors — have succeeded in pitting social democracy against the very values … that gave rise to social democracy in the first place…. Let Democratic movers and shakers take one last look at those they are demonizing, because many are their brothers and sisters, social democrats driven into exodus by party excesses….
And here’s an abridgement of my argument: Balderdash.
To be a bit more articulate, let me guide Professor Starr back to last century’s premier American historian, Richard Hofstadter, who cogently argued in his still magnificent The Age of Reform that political and economic pragmatism dwelled at the core of the New Deal – not some loose thread of Judeo-Christian tradition that frankly any Western political philosophy could lay claim to in a pinch.
Until the New Deal’s advent, observed Hofstadter, progressive thinkers on the whole were utopian moralists with their feet fixed just about everywhere except on planet Earth. Yet in the 1930s they began grappling with the "urgent practical realities" of everyday life -- more urgent than ever, of course, because of the Great Depression's toll on human welfare. With their heads forced out of the clouds, progressives tackled as best they could the problems of the newly unemployed, the long-term impoverished, farmers with goods to sell but no markets to sell in, banking and investment calamities, and so on. In short, events compelled progressives to rapidly transform from twinkling idealists to practical thinkers.
Conversely, until the New Deal it was conservatives who exuded that kind of hard, practical, dollars-and-cents ideology. No theory for these boys. They were utterly down to Earth. In point of fact, left-leaning Hofstadter found this old-style conservatism rather praiseworthy, writing that its adherents had "set up [the nation's] great industrial and communications plant and founded the fabulous system of production and distribution upon which the country prided itself."
With the onset of national ruin and the "economic experimentation" of FDR's brain trust, however, conservatives became, well, unglued. They flipped ideologically, dousing themselves less with "hard facts" of everyday life and instead with what Hofstadter called their "high moral indignation" over New Deal doings. In reaction they offered little more than "cliché-ridden" theories, "hollow" platitudes and a lot of sermonizing about our needing "better morals" -- all of which offered nothing for those experiencing real pain. Hence conservatism scooted from practical thought to simplistic idealism and thereby replaced progressivism as the party with its head in the clouds.
That’s the essential political history behind the New Deal. Its roots were watered by whatever worked. That “traditional values” cited by Professor Starr can be found in what worked is indisputable, of course, but let us not revise the New Deal’s historical essence.
I understand what the professor is shooting for – and that, simply, is an effective Democratic counterclaim to Republicans’ exclusive claim on religious values. But that’s a dangerous road to travel, as Republicans themselves are now discovering.
It is dangerous because there are too many competing religious values upon which a political party can formulate anything resembling a consensus on coherent public policy, and dangerous because of the fast-shuffling demagogic element required to successfully appeal to all manner of doctrinaire religionists. While today’s Democratic Party is still based, albeit shakily, on the pragmatic promise of the historic New Deal, the modern Republican Party is skating on the thin ice of religion-cum-politics – and its nose-diving polling stats clearly point to a fractured electorate and a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Democrats were once assailed by Karl Rovian forerunners as the party of Three R’s: Rum, Romanism and Rebellion. Yet if Republicans persist in their present-day course they’ll be doomed as the long-term minority party of Religionists, Reactionaries and Radicals.
Undeniable is that strains of the Social Gospel influenced the modern Democracy, but contrary to Professor Starr’s invented tradition, the New Deal was, at its heart, a 20th-century experiment in social stability by means of political pragmatism. We honor its legacy and can live up to it only by respecting its true genesis.