The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (review)

Explaining the seeming demise of postwar liberalism has preoccupied a generation of political scientists, historians, and journalists. Miroff ’s fascinating and insightful Liberals’ Moment provides a new answer in Sen. George McGovern’s failed 1972 presidential bid. Long overlooked as merely a landslide defeat, Miroff demands that McGovern’s campaign receive serious consideration because, even more than the election of 1968, it signaled a turning point and “introduced the era to come (2).” He persuasively argues that the campaign of the last unabashedly liberal candidate helped to define the contours of the contemporary Democratic party as it transformed its base from blue-collar urban ethnics to issue-orientated suburbanites, shifted its foreign-policy position, and influenced its adoption of a centrist image and agenda.

Miroff avoids both the conventions of a traditional campaign study and the standard empirical analysis of political science, offering, instead, what he dubs a form of “political therapy” (7). His nuanced analysis illuminates the ambiguous and important lessons of the McGovern candidacy. Not only does it bridge disciplinary divides; it also makes the book accessible and relevant to both scholarly and nonacademic audiences.

Part I offers a narrative of the events of the campaign. Miroff reveals how McGovern through his vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War built a well-organized grassroots movement of middle-class and educated activists that led to his unlikely capture of the presidential nomination. Part II provides a thoughtful consideration of the larger meanings of the campaign, particularly the fatal flaws in its “left-center” strategy and its formidable opposition. Miroff stresses that structural dilemmas doomed the McGovern camp, but he also convincingly contends that President Nixon’s 1972 strategy—“a textbook for attack politics” (229)—provided a series of Republican successors with a “successful template” of how to distort liberalism and discredit Democratic candidates (141).

In the final section, Miroff shows how that landside loss has continued to haunt the party, leaving every subsequent Democratic candidate with an “identity crisis,” torn between ideological convictions and political calculations. Furthermore, he asserts that the 1972 election had a devastating effect on the politics of Gary Hart, Bob Shrum, John Podesta, and Bill Clinton, all of whom began their political careers working on McGovern’s campaign and all of whom took the lessons of its failure to heart. Tracing the political odyssey of these “McGovernites,” he suggests that their conscious efforts to distance themselves from the liberal image and message has produced a “muddled” centrism that may be slightly more palatable to voters but lacks the conviction and passion of their mentor (303).

Miroff conducted nearly fifty interviews with campaign participants, including McGovern himself, enabling him to paint a candid and textured portrait. This methodological strength, nevertheless, creates a conceptual limitation. Miroff repeatedly invokes the trope of the “McGovern insurgency” and alludes to the importance of the grassroots army of suburbanites and college students, but most of his discussion focuses on the campaign’s upper echelons. Shifting his vantage away from the campaign headquarters more frequently might have helped to extend the important implications of his argument beyond the arena of presidential elections and into the complex political landscape of the period as a whole. Ultimately, however, Liberals’ Moment proves essential reading for anyone interested in the past or future of the Democratic Party and the fate of American liberalism.