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6. The Liberal Moment
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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chaPTer 6 The liberal Moment The midterm elections of 1958 transformed the electoral landscape of the united states in ways that would resonate for decades to come. after the disaster of 1946 that had swept aside the new deal coalition of the cities, suburbs, and the south in congress the democratic Party had become beholden to its still monolithic southern base, which had provided the margin of victory in its narrow victories in 1948, 1950, 1954, and 1956. congress had failed in these years to repeal much of the anti-new deal legislation of the republican 80th congress, in particular the taft-Hartley act. after 1958 a significant change could be discerned. it was not just the sheer scale of the democratic victories: 13 gains in the senate and some 48 in the House, gains that would establish a substantial majority for the party for years to come.1 Many of the new democratic members on capitol Hill were northern liberals who had not come of age politically in the febrile years of the very early cold War, but had come to office committed to an agenda that would form the basis of the Great society in the 1960s. The democratic study Group was formed in the aftermath of the 1958 elections to establish a left-of-center powerbase in the House and exploit the greater influence urban and suburban liberals from outside the deep south would have over policymaking. significant democratic victories at the state level, including in california, would create a democratic bias in redistricting that would impede the republicans’ ability to recover from the disaster that had dramatically reduced their strength in urban america. The year 1958 would be the last time key districts in Berkeley, West los angeles, and many other american cities would be talked about as competitive. and the scale of the northern democratic majority would pave the way toward the creation of Medicare, the passage of the civil rights and Voting rights acts, and the expansion of social security and welfare programs. it is certainly the case that the electoral success of democratic candidates was far from chapter 6 124 irreversible, and only ten years later Kevin Phillips was making his influential argument predicting a new republican majority in american politics.2 nevertheless , the response of the voters to the eisenhower recession set the scene for the dramatic change in the political zeitgeist in the 1960s.3 nowhere was this political transformation more apparent than in california . democrats committed to an agenda that combined a commitment to economic and social citizenship seized power at every level of state politics from the governorship to state controller, and established majorities in the legislature that would only briefly be interrupted over the next twenty years. The victories of democrats across the state were particularly remarkable given how inconsequential the party had been just a handful of years earlier. The 1958 campaign gave democrats the chance to articulate their political worldview in clearly defined terms, using the campaign against the state’s right-towork Proposition 18 as a foil against which to set out their broader agenda of equality of opportunity, enlargement of the public sector, and the promotion of civil rights legislation. The Brown campaign’s articulation of a language of rights set the stage for an expansion of the state that would encourage the inclusion of previously marginalized sections of society into mainstream society. Their electoral success that year represented the culmination of a process of political self-definition that had gathered pace in the decade since World War ii and established california democrats as trendsetters for the emergence of a left-of-center program for the later twentieth century. The attention of political historians of california has often focused upon the 1950s and 1960s as a time in which a right-wing coalition of antiregulatory business organizations and a grassroots conservative movement established a foothold on state politics ahead of the later successes of Barry Goldwater and ronald reagan as standard-bearers of a new right politics.4 important though these studies are, they can serve only as partial explanations for the particular path right-wing politics took in the postwar era insofar as they do not examine the role that the creation of a powerful left-of-center alternative played in the establishment of a clear left-right tension in modern californian politics. Far from being a new phenomenon, right-wing antiregulatory politics was the default position in california in the 1950s, and...