The lessons from 75 years ago Democrats ignore at their peril

Democrats suffer when they pull their punches, author of new history of long-forgotten progressive tells Andrew Buncombe

Henry Wallace might have been president, but for Democratic Party officials who thought him too progressive (Getty)

In the summer of July 1944, a man called Henry Wallace got to his feet and spoke to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with a vision.

“The future,” he said, “belongs to those who go down the line unswervingly for the liberal principles of both political democracy and economic democracy, regardless of race, colour or religion.”

Wallace was vice president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he may have been his successor in the Oval Office had FDR had his way. But FDR was weakened, grievously ill, and party bosses who considered Wallace too progressive, too left wing, pressured him instead to accept as his running mate a senator from Missouri called Harry Truman. FDR died nine months later.

Wallace is today a largely forgotten figure. Some mistake him for George Wallace, the racist segregationist governor of Alabama whose politics stood in stark contrast to those of FDR’s deputy. His birthplace in rural Iowa, a simple farmhouse, sits on what is termed a “minimum maintenance road”.

Yet, Henry Wallace and his progressive view of the US and the world, may be more relevant than ever as the Democrats seek to oust Donald Trump six months from now. That, at least, is the theme of a new book about Wallace, which argues history shows the party suffers when Democrats fail to articulate a cogent, authentic and impassioned vision to voters. Democrats fail, says author John Nichols, when the party “pulls its punches”.

“My argument is that the Democrats harm themselves and the country, when they pull their punches at critical moments when they don’t push as hard as they need to,” Nichols tells The Independent.

“Politics is about getting power. And then about using power. When Democrats have pulled the punches on using power when they have tended to be more centrist, they’ve almost always been punished at the next midterm election.”

As evidence, he points to defeats suffered in 1978, two years after the election of the centrist administration of Jimmy Carter, to the midterms of 1994 when Democrats suffered under the centrism of Bill Clinton, and in 2010 when Barack Obama’s centrist, Wall Street-friendly Democrats took a battering. Even Truman’s party’s was trounced in the midterms of 1946.

The patten, says Nichols, reveals the Democratic Party can can win power but cannot get “traction and perpetuate itself in a meaningful way”.

Nichols is national affairs correspondent for The Nation, a progressive magazine, and not everyone will share his view. Yet the issue he examines in The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, published by Verso, could barely be more timely.

The faultline within the party between centrists and progressives, between the likes of Jesse Jackson and Clinton, John Kerry and Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, has again taken centre stage as the party prepares to challenge Trump.

While centrist Joe Biden, 77, is the presumptive candidate, the figure of Sanders, 78, hangs over affairs. While he has suspended his run and endorsed Biden, he is continuing to gather delegates, with a stated mission to influence the party’s policy platform this summer and push it left.

He has already started to have an effect. Biden has shifted his position on several issues, and made a pitch to the supporters of Sanders, declaring: “I hear you”.

Nichols believes perhaps Sanders’s greatest contribution by running in 2016 and 2020 was not simply about making mainstream ideas that had once been considered fringe. Rather, he says it was that he was able to excite and energise young people.

“[He] was really the inspiration for a new generation of young candidates,” he says. “And when I interviewed Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and others … the overwhelming majority of them referenced Bernie Sanders, and many of them talked about democratic socialism and about this far more progressive, far more aggressive approach to politics.”

He adds: “Something quite remarkable occurred in that period of 2016 into 2018, which was the clear assertion of a progressive wing within the Democratic party.”

After recounting a visit with Sanders to Wallace’s birthplace in Iowa, he and the Vermont senator looking out over “cornfields and wind turbines”, he turns to the woman many consider his ideological successor and flag carrier.

Having followed her day all day as she campaigned for progressive candidates during the 2018 midterms, he and AOC, elected to Congress at the age of 29, sit down to talk close to midnight.

“There is a hunger for an assertive, strong, ambitious, defined effort to establish and advance economic and social and racial justice for working class Americans,” she tells him. “That requires a plan. It requires ambitious ideas.”

Nichols is inspired, and given optimism by AOC’s energy and passion, even at that hour. But is he being naive to think Biden is going to win in November, if he agrees to policies such as universal healthcare, the green new deal, and the cancellation of student debt?

The book was written before the former vice president became the de facto nominee and before the coronavirus pandemic upended life.

Yet, even while the virus and the nation’s response to it has proven true to many of Sanders’s assertions about the strident inequality that besieges America – those who have access to healthcare and those who do not, those who can work from home, and those now among the 30m unemployed – it is unclear that Biden will prevail no matter what his agenda.

While the president’s approval rating was hit by his flailing performances at the daily briefings for the Covid-19 taskforce, many pundits believe if the economy gets back into action, if the infection rate flattens and if he is able to control the message, the nation could be set for another four years of Trump.

“I don’t think Trump will win reelection. I think he’s in a very vulnerable place. It’s not assured that he’ll be defeated but I think there’s a real chance that he will be,” says Nichols. “One thing that might might give Trump an opening is a tepid, ill-defined Democratic Party.”

He adds: “If the Democratic vision isn’t very clear and very dynamic, that leaves Donald Trump, who’s a master communicator whether you like him or not, a great deal of space in which to create his own narrative.”

Nichols says when voters go to the polls in November, or cast their ballot by mail, the nation will be juggling not just a massive public health crisis, but economic devastation.

“The challenge for Biden and the Democrats is to fill that space and say we have vision for how to come out of this, we have a vision for how to build the future. If they fail in that regard, they will not merely fail their own party, they’ll fail the country.”

He adds: “If Trump pulls this thing out. It won’t be because of anything Donald Trump did. It will be because the Democrats failed.”