There They Go Again: Change and Continuity in American Liberalism

Three decades ago, during the waning days of the golden age of political history, scholars frequently debated a good question about the nature of American liberalism: To what extent was the New Deal a continuation of the Progressive movement, whatever that was, and to what extent did it represent a significant shift? From the perspective of the late 1960s, historians who emphasized the changes rather than the continuities seemed to have the better of the argument. FDR and many other New Dealers considered themselves the heirs of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but, as Otis L. Graham, Jr. showed, most “old progressives” who remained active during the 1930s judged the New Deal welfare state too coercive. And whether or not New Dealers were generally less moralistic than the typical Progressive, as Richard Hofstadter contended (and I would maintain that they were equally moralistic about different issues), they were—out of necessity—more hospitable to urban ethnic groups and political machines. ¹

Although the question was not resolved, it elicited so much interesting scholarship that a corollary inquiry looked like a historiographical natural: To what extent was Great Society liberalism continuous with the New Deal and to what extent did it represent a significant shift? With political history in eclipse, however, the answers have lately been left to pundits and ideologists. Neoliberal commentators like E. J. Dionne join Newt Gingrich and other conservatives who have made their peace with FDR in arguing that the Great Society brought decisive changes—often for the worse. Specifically, beginning with the Johnson administration, the federal government grew too big, economic entitlements eroded the work ethic, and demands for rights superseded acceptance of personal responsibilities.

To his credit, Gareth Davies takes this second question seriously and understands that research is required to reach sensible answers. Unfortunately, his own answers are unduly influenced by current neoliberal conventional wisdom. According to Davies, there was a momentous shift from “opportunity liberalism” to “entitlement liberalism” during the 1960s, but Lyndon Johnson was not to blame. Leaders of the civil rights movement, antipoverty activists, and left liberals in Congress were. Ultimately they advocated a guaranteed annual income, which postulated an “entirely different conception of dignity and dependency” from that underlying the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (p. 235). This gospel of entitlement left the Democrats “astonishingly distant from the dominant work ethic of middle America” (p. 4).

After citing praise for the work ethic by old Progressive reformers and too briefly discussing New Deal attitudes toward entitlement and dependency, Davies begins his story in earnest with the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). The antipoverty warriors at OEO were guided by an “authentic if misguided faith . . . that human ingenuity could engineer universally beneficent social change through economic expansion” (p. 30). Initially, instead of emphasizing poverty among African Americans, the Johnson administration was at least as concerned with those whom Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz called “miners and hill folk” (p. 45). Before the Watts riots in August 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan stood out among LBJ’s advisers in suggesting that black poverty was so different from white poverty that special remedies might be necessary.

As urban uprisings, the white backlash, and the Vietnam War tore apart Johnson’s coalition, proponents of an enlarged antipoverty effort both focused on African-American ghettoes and defended basic subsistence as a right unattached to work. Davies surveys this trend among black leaders, social workers, government employees, and congressional liberals. While chiding all of them, he is clearly most annoyed by the “opportunism” (p. 200) of white politicians like Senators Abraham Ribicoff, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. Courting black voters and seeking ways to distance themselves from Johnson, they moved liberalism left into the “New Politics” while the bulk of the electorate moved right. Legislation in 1967 freezing federal funds for Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), “welfare” in popular parlance, showed how out of touch many liberals were even...