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social democracy
Why Is It Happening Here? And Why Now?
In the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
Apr 18, 2025
In early April, historian Harvey J. Kaye made these remarks at a conference in Barcelona, Spain. Common Dreams has published the transcript with his permission.
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, I wrote an article titled “Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?” I opened with these words:
Donald Trump’s candidacy and now, presidency, have resurrected a public discourse not heard in this country since the Great Depression—an anxious discourse about the possible triumph in America of a fascistic authoritarian regime over liberal democracy. It’s a fear that the popular writer Sinclair Lewis turned into a 1935 bestselling novel titled It Can’t Happen Here—although, as Lewis actually told it, it sure as hell could happen here in the United States.
However, it did not happen. At least, it did not happen then. Nor did it happen in 2017. But it is happening now.
Why? Arguments vary. Journalists, editorial writers, and all too many academics—so many of whom are actually liberal and progressive Democrats—say it was due to either the Democratic Party’s failure to effectively communicate the truth about the economy or working-class racism, sexism, and generally low cultural standards. What they ignore is that the making of the “crisis of democracy” began five decades ago in the 1970s.
What Americans never heard in the mainstream media was any reference to the 50-year-long class war and culture war campaigns waged by the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals against the democratic achievements of what we might call the Long Age of Roosevelt from the 1930s through the 1960s. They never heard talk of how those forces subordinated the public good to private greed; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; enriched the rich at the expense of everyone else; hollowed out the nation’s industries and infrastructures; produced a devastating recession and lethargic recovery; and pushed the environment to the brink.
So, I offer two questions. Why did it not happen in the 1930s? And why is it happening now in 2025? The short answers are:
First: It did not happen in the 1930s because in 1932 American voters elected the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency and effectively launched the most progressive decades in American history. Call it the Long Age of Roosevelt—an age that extended from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Second: It is happening now because in the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the democratic achievements of that Long Age—that is, a class war versus the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
All of which poses a critical third question. What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question?
The only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s.
Popularly known as “FDR,” Roosevelt was essentially an American aristocrat—but despite that, he rejected the “Gilded Age” order with its ever-intensifying concentration of wealth and power and its widening extremes of rich and poor. He did so because that order was denying the nation’s revolutionary promise of “a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and a democratic government of “We the People” to the vast majority of Americans.
He had entered politics in 1910 as a progressive reformer. And yet, during the next 20 years, he became not just a liberal in the American sense, but actually a social-democrat and even something of a radical. (Though he never used either word to describe himself.)
He had long worried about what conservative political rule might do to America. And in the shadow of the worst economic and social catastrophe in the nation’s history, he truly feared it would lead to some kind of authoritarianism.
However, he knew U.S. history and he recognized how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the American Revolution of the 1770s and the Civil War of the 1860s, that is, by radically transforming the country. Knowing that, he wrote in 1930, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.”
In his 1932 campaign against the incumbent president, conservative Republican Herbert Hoover, he projected a “New Deal” involving an impressive array of policies and initiatives to not only combat the depression, but also empower working people with economic security and freedom. As Roosevelt would say, “Needy men are not free men.” In fact, he audaciously suggested an Economic Declaration of Rights to redeem and renew the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
As FDR saw it, the only way to truly secure and sustain American democratic life was to progressively enhance it.
Which is exactly what he and a generation of Americans would do. They didn’t simply reject authoritarianism. They phenomenally improved the economic and physical state of the nation and—at the very same time—radically enhanced American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Moreover, encouraged by FDR himself, working people did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They actually pushed him to go even further than he may ever have planned to go—and together they initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.
Consider this. They subjected capital to public regulation and raised the taxes of the rich. They legislatively empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor (which included advancing industrial democracy). They organized and, in their millions, joined labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to both fight for their rights and advance the “We” in “We the People.” They established the Social Security system. They built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds all over the country. They vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams (and provided electric power to almost a million farms.) They repaired and improved the national landscape and environment. And they energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.
All of which seriously antagonized capitalists, and led the richest men in America to organize the Liberty League and spend great sums of money trying to portray FDR as a communist and thereby prevent his reelection in 1936. But they utterly failed to secure popular support.
Roosevelt did not ignore their efforts. He famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” Indeed, when accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, he delivered the most radical speech in American presidential history. Speaking to a stadium crowd of 100,000 and millions more national radio, he said:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
I absolutely love that speech, and American working people loved FDR. One Southern textile worker spoke for the majority of his class when he wrote to Roosevelt, saying, “[You are] the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Still, for all of the humor, FDR took the anti-democratic threat seriously. In 1938—just before the midterm congressional elections— he went on radio and warned:
As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.
Yes, FDR and those whom Americans would come to call the “Greatest Generation” left much to be done—especially regarding race and gender. But they had equipped themselves to defeat fascism overseas in the 1940s and learned how to democratically rebuild the nation.
Furthermore, the democratic upsurge of the 1930s did not cease during the war years. Americans continued to organize and enlist in labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations.
Encouraged by all that they had accomplished, Roosevelt called on Americans to envision an America and a world characterized by four fundamental freedoms, the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship and Freedom from Want and Fear—which became a theme of the war effort.
And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, he articulated his fellow citizens’ postwar aspirations by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights to include a right to a job at a living wage; a comfortable home; medical care; a good education; recreation; and economic protection during sickness, old age, and unemployment. A proposal that was enthusiastically embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Farmers Union, and all the leading civil rights groups.
But Roosevelt did not assume they could easily secure it. Thinking of the corporate bosses, he predicted the likelihood of fierce “right-wing reaction.” But he also warned—in words that should speak loudly to Americans today—“If such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”
FDR won a fourth presidential term in 1944, but passed away in April 1945. Still, the Age of Roosevelt did not come to end. As much as capitalists, Republicans, and Southern Democrats made the most of the Cold War to obstruct the further advance of democracy and social democracy, a generation of Americans, and their children, would not forget what they had accomplished. And in the 1960s, Americans witnessed a new democratic upsurge challenging every aspect of national life.
Pushed by the resurgent activism, and inspired by FDR’s New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, President Lyndon Johnson called for the making of a Great Society and a War on Poverty. A liberal Congress led by Greatest Generation veterans moved to enhance American democratic life.
Congress passed historic civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing acts, and a major reform of the nation’s immigration law. It also made healthcare a right for the elderly and the poor, significantly expanded educational opportunities for children and young people, and enacted laws and created agencies to clean up and make the environment, marketplace, and workplace safer (EPA, OSHA, CPSC). At the same time, the Supreme Court guaranteed and strengthened the constitutional separation of church and state and moved to liberate women to control their own bodies. Plus, many state governments built new schools and universities and, in the Northern and Western states, expanded industrial democracy by granting collective bargaining rights to public workers.
That’s why it didn’t happen. Now to why it’s happening now.
All of this terrified Southern white supremacists, political and religious conservatives, and corporate bosses—and in the early 1970s they were mobilizing to not just counter the democratic surge but also reverse the democratic achievements of the Age of Roosevelt.
Though a series of crises, most notably, defeat in Vietnam, an Arab oil embargo, and an economic recession, shook up Americans, polls showed they remained committed to social-democratic ideals. In fact, workers were staging strikes on a scale not seen since the late 1940s. Yet not only did the Democratic Party fail to mobilize them, younger, prominent Democratic politicians such as Coloradan Gary Hart—soon to be known as neoliberals—were turning against the FDR tradition and the New Deal coalition in favor of engaging professionals, women, and minorities.
Meanwhile, corporate executives, already feeling under siege by federal agencies and labor unions, were experiencing a “profits squeeze” due to the emergence of foreign competition (especially from Germany and Japan). Which led key figures to call on their class comrades to wake up, join together, and launch what the British Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband would call a “class war from above” against government regulation, taxes, labor unions, and what they referred to as the “adversary culture” of environmental and consumer-rights groups, college students, the media, and university intellectuals.
Soon enough, old and new business organizations from the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission (whose members included the future Presidents Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter), undertook major advertising, public relations, and lobbying campaigns calling for deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the size of government—all in favor of “free enterprise.”
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said.
At the same time, they not only set out to destroy the labor movement by means both legal and illegal (via union-busting consultants and lawyers), but also to invest in pro-business think tanks, public intellectuals, and both Republican and Democratic politicians. And prominent “super-rich” reactionaries funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions like school prayer and abortion and white working people around calls for “law and order.”
If all that was not enough, corporate bosses were moving their operations South and overseas to avoid state regulations, taxes, and union wages. Communities suffered; unions were broken; and wages and benefits were frozen, reduced, or lost. To try to survive, workers, who could not vote to raise their wages, began to vote all the more for conservative politicians who promised to cut taxes.
Unions and environmental and consumer rights groups sought to defend and advance democratic achievements, but the Democratic President Jimmy Carter called for “austerity” and liberating business and turned his back on labor and the environmental and consumer movements in favor of cutting government programs, lowering taxes, and deregulating capital—which effectively paved the way for the so-called “New Right” Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and the age of neoliberalism.
The story of the ensuing decades is that of continuing class war from above and neoliberalism. Of course, we expected it from capital and conservative Republicans. But what Carter the Democrat started, the next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, pursued aggressively. He too betrayed labor by pushing Congress to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement that further devastated American manufacturing in the Northern states. That was just the start. He deregulated the communications industry, enacted a mass incarceration crime bill, ended “welfare as we know it,” (a.k.a Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which began with FDR), and further deregulated banking. When the next Democrat President, Barack Obama, won the White House in 2008 he not only did not fight for the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) which would have made it far easier to create a union.
He also failed to prosecute Wall Street bankers for possible crimes that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Obama pushed through a healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, that gave huge concessions and profits to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and attempted to push through a bill creating a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.
At the same time, in state after state, conservatives have acted to override or circumvent a woman’s right to choose by enacting laws intended to make abortions almost impossible to secure. In state after state, Republicans have sought to suppress the votes of people of color, the poor, and students by enacting voter ID laws. And after years of trying, they finally succeeded in getting a conservative Supreme Court to disembowel the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plus, in state after state, the corporate and conservative rich have smashed labor unions and effectively suppressed the voices of workers by enacting so-called right to work laws—even, as in Wisconsin in 2011, rescinding the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
There have been movements from the bottom up: Wisconsin Rising, Occupy, The Fight for $15, the Moral Monday Movement, the anti-fracking and block-the-pipelines campaigns, and Black Lives Matter. They raised hopes, but they failed to garner the active support of the Democratic Party.
Notably in 2015 one major poll showed that the majority of Americans wanted radical change. Yes, RADICAL change. But the Democratic Party both in 2016 and 2020 found ways to deny the most radical candidate, Bernie Sanders, the nomination. I truly believe Bernie could have beaten Donald Trump both times. But working people, the working class, was, to put it mildly, really fed up with the party that had once been the party of the American working class, that had worked to empower labor and the working class.
Polling continually shows that the working class wants what FDR proposed in 1944. And yet neither party is speaking to working class aspirations. The Republican Party has been speaking to and rallying working-class anxiety and anger. The Democrats have been speaking to professional and upper-middle-class concerns.
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said: “As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.”
What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question? That the only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s. Act to radically enhance American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Social Democracies Keep Top Spots on World Happiness Report as US Falls to Record Low
In the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
Mar 21, 2025
For the eighth consecutive year, the World Happiness Report on Thursday found that the countries with the happiest people are those that use their resources to invest in social welfare—and documented a precipitous drop in satisfaction among people in the United States, where President Donald Trump is pushing to destroy public services in the interest of further enriching the country's wealthiest people and corporations.
The top four happiest countries in the world were the same this year as in 2024, with Finland taking the top spot followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden.
The report, compiled by the Wellbeing Research Center at University of Oxford along with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, found that the U.S. is continuing to fall down the list—ranking at 24, one spot lower than in 2024. In 2012, when the World Happiness Report was first published, the U.S. held the 11th spot.
The researchers measured several variables that contribute to people's happiness, including social supports, freedom to make life choices, and perceptions of corruption within their country.
Across the world, researchers recorded a drop in "deaths of despair"—preventable deaths from substance use disorders, alcohol abuse, and suicide. But the U.S. was one of two countries—the other being South Korea—where these deaths "rapidly rose," with an average yearly increase of 1.3 deaths per 100,000.
This year's World Happiness Report focuses largely on "the impact of caring and sharing" on people's happiness, noting that the prevalence of volunteering and helping strangers was high in some of the happiest countries, while social isolation in the U.S. was tied to high levels of unhappiness.
"In the United States, using data from the American Time Use Survey, the authors find clear evidence that Americans are spending more and more time dining alone," reads the report's executive summary. "In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day—an increase of 53% since 2003."
But the Costa Rican ambassador to the U.S., Catalina Crespo Sancho, noted at an event hosted by Semafor presenting the annual report, that the way the Costa Rican government invests public funds has helped push it into the top 10 happiest countries for the first time, with Costa Rica ranking sixth in the world.
"We're one of the few countries in the world that does not have an army," said Crespo Sancho. "All that money, they invested in things that our Nordic countries here have been doing for many, many years... Education, social services, health access."
Residents of the happiest countries named in the report benefit from significant public investment in healthcare, education, childcare, and other public services, and live in societies where the divide between the richest households and working people is far smaller than in the United States.
Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and the Netherlands all score below 30 on the World Bank's Gini Index, which measures income inequality, while the U.S. has a score of 41.3, indicating a wider gap between the rich and poor.
The report was released two months into Trump's second term in the White House, which has already been characterized by efforts by Trump and his billionaire ally, tech mogul Elon Musk, to gut public spending on healthcare, education, and the environment in order to fund tax cuts for the richest households. The Republican Party is also aggressively pushing attacks on bodily autonomy in the U.S., passing abortion bans and so-called "fetal personhood" measures as well as laws barring transgender and gender nonconforming people from accessing affirming healthcare.
According to the report, in the U.S., "the downward trend in life satisfaction is particularly steep among young people under 30, especially women."
The report also contextualized the victory of Trump and rise of far-right movements like the president's nationalist, anti-immigration MAGA movement, noting that far-right supporters of "anti-system" political leaders like Trump "have a very low level of social trust."
For the populist right, this low trust is not limited to strangers, but also extends to others in general, from homosexuals to their own neighbors. The xenophobic inclination of the populist right, well-documented worldwide, seems to be a particular case of a broader distrust towards the rest of society. Right-wing populists throughout the world share xenophobic and anti-immigration inclinations. The Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party, the Finns Party, the Freedom Party of Austria, Greece's Golden Dawn, the Northern League and Fratelli in Italy, the National Rally in France, and a fraction of the Republican Party in the U.S. are all built on strong anti-immigration foundations.
Meanwhile, "far-left voters have a higher level of social trust," leading them to support "pro-redistribution, pro-immigrant" political groups that offer an alternative to the political establishment with "more universalist values."
In the United States' two-party system, citizens "with low life satisfaction and low social trust" tend to "abstain" from political engagement, according to the report.
"The fall in life satisfaction cannot be explained by economic growth," reads the report. "Rather, it could be blamed on the feelings of financial insecurity and loneliness experienced by Americans and Europeans—two symptoms of a damaged social fabric. It is driven by almost all social categories, but in particular, by the rural, the less-educated, and, quite strikingly, by the younger generation. This low level of life satisfaction is a breeding ground for populism and the lack of social trust is behind the political success of the far right."
Progressive Patriotism for July 4, 2024
Progressives understand that people can disagree with their government and still love their country and its ideals. But, as we’re seeing now, they don’t necessarily agree on the ideals.
Jul 04, 2024
What does it mean to be a patriotic American at a time when democracy itself is under serious threat?
Although they disagreed on many issues, the Founding Fathers were adamant that they didn’t want this new country to be run by an all-powerful king. Yet here we are, 248 years later, with a reactionary Supreme Court that essentially gave the president dictatorial powers, ruling that he is above the law.
Of course, many of the founders were skeptical of democracy. They created institutions, including the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College, that were never intended to completely reflect the voice of the people. We’re now seeing how these elitist institutions can be used to destroy democracy and replace it with a plutocracy.
To some, patriotism means “my country—right or wrong.” To others, it means loyalty to a set of principles, and thus requires dissent and criticism when those in power violate those standards.
Even the founders, though, would be aghast at how far former President Donald Trump, his reactionary followers, and most Republican politicians have gone to establish an authoritarian state.
Since the founding of the country, one of the core beliefs of patriotic Americans has been that elections should determine who becomes president and that it is important to ensure the orderly transfer of power. But insurrectionists at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021—urged on by and loyal to President Trump—attempted to violate this sacred tenet of American democracy. What’s worse, they carried American flags. The criminal justice system has put some of those insurrectionists in prison, but Trump has not only praised them as patriots; he’s indicated that, if he’s elected in November, he would pardon them.
Public opinion polls reveal that a vast majority of Americans believe that big business and the super wealthy have too much power in American politics. They are more favorable toward labor unions than at any time in over a generation. They believe that the federal government should play a stronger role in protecting consumers, workers, and the environment from corporations that act irresponsibly. But we have a Supreme Court, a Republican presidential candidate, and one of our two major parties who don’t share those democratic values.
Indeed, if Trump is reelected, he will use the tools of government—including the FBI, the Justice Department, the military, and the IRS—to unleash his revenge on protesters, the media, immigrants, Democrats, and all others he considers his opponents, labeling all of them as “un-American” radicals.
The great irony is that, throughout our history, radicals—leftists and progressives—have been the most patriotic Americans.
To some, patriotism means “my country—right or wrong.” To others, it means loyalty to a set of principles, and thus requires dissent and criticism when those in power violate those standards.
One version of patriotism suggests “Love it or leave it.” The other version embraces “Love it and fix it.” For progressives, dissent and protest are patriotic.
This is a longstanding debate in American history.
As president and as a candidate, Trump fetishizes the American flag, other American symbols, and the concept of patriotism broadly while displaying a shallow, ahistorical, and sometimes downright bizarre understanding of what they meant. At a 2016 speech to the American Legion in Cincinnati, Trump said, “We want young Americans to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.” He promised the war veterans that he would work “to strengthen respect for our flag.” He pledged that: “We will be united by our common culture, values and principles, becoming one American nation, one country under one Constitution saluting one American flag—and always saluting it—the flag all of you helped to protect and preserve, that flag deserves respect.”
Once, at a campaign rally in Tampa, as his cult followers chanted, “Build that wall,” Trump interrupted his speech to give a bear hug to an American flag on the stage behind him—apparently as a way to demonstrate his patriotism.
“We want to make sure that anyone who seeks to join our country, shares our values and has the capacity to love our people,” Trump said at a rally at the Kennedy Center in 2017.
“We all salute the same great American flag,” Trump said in his 2017 inauguration address—a line he has repeated in many speeches since then.
To Trump and his followers, the flag is synonymous with “America First”: deporting undocumented immigrants and caging their children in detention centers, restricting visitors from Muslim countries, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and other international agreements, and engaging in friendships with like-minded dictators.
To Trump, anyone who disagrees with him is unpatriotic, perhaps even un-American (or even, gasp, a socialist or Marxist).
Former President George W. Bush questioned the patriotism of anyone who challenged his war on terrorism. In his 2001 State of the Union address, for example, Bush famously claimed, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” He introduced the Patriot Act to codify this view, giving the government new powers to suppress dissent.
In contrast, President Barack Obama said: “I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.” He observed that, “loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger.”
Obama was echoing the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who declared, in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.”
President Joe Biden has said that “we’re all part of a chain of patriots” who fought for democracy, freedom, fair play, peace, security, and opportunity. Patriots, he explained, seek “the right to equal justice under the law; the right to vote and have that vote counted; the right to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and know that our children and grandchildren will be safe on this planet for generations to come; the right to rise in the world as far as your God-given talent can take you, unlimited by barriers of privilege or power.”
That is so different from Donald Trump’s insistence that patriotism is about fealty to one man and his government.
Progressives understand that people can disagree with their government and still love their country and its ideals. The flag, as a symbol of the nation, is not owned by the administration in power, but by the people. We battle over what it means, but all Americans—across the political spectrum—have an equal right to claim the flag as their own.
In 1968, in a famous speech against the Vietnam war, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the Socialist Party, proclaimed, “I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it.” That is the appropriate way for Americans to express their patriotism and protest the white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and reactionary forces that have recently gripped our country.
Most Americans are unaware that much of our patriotic culture—including many of the leading symbols and songs—was created by people with decidedly progressive sympathies.
Indeed, throughout our history, many American radicals and progressive reformers have proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values—economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world’s oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia, and social injustice only fueled progressives’ allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.
Two of the greatest patriots in American history were Francis Bellamy, the Christian socialist who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, and Katherine Lee Bates, the poet who penned “America the Beautiful,” who was not only a socialist but also a lesbian.
Bellamy, a Baptist minister who lived from 1855 to 1931, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892 to express his outrage at the nation’s widening economic divide. He had been ousted from his Boston church for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist, and for his work among the poor in the Boston slums.
It was the Gilded Age, an era marked by major political, economic, and social conflicts. Progressive reformers were outraged by the widening gap between rich and poor, and the behavior of corporate robber barons who were exploiting workers, gouging consumers, and corrupting politics with their money. Workers were organizing unions. Farmers were joining forces in the so-called Populist movement to rein in the power of banks, railroads, and utility companies. Reformers fought for child labor laws, against slum housing, and in favor of women’s suffrage. Socialists and other leftist radicals were gaining new converts.
In foreign affairs, Americans were battling over the nation’s role in the world. America was beginning to act like an imperial power, justifying its expansion with a combination of white supremacy, manifest destiny, and the argument that it was spreading democracy. At the time, nativist groups across the country were pushing for restrictions on immigrants—Catholics, Jews, and Asians—who were cast as polluting Protestant America. In the South, the outcome of the Civil War still inflamed regional passions. Many Southerners, including Civil War veterans, swore allegiance not to the American but to the Confederate flag.
Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of two bestselling radical books, Looking Backward and Equality, believed that unbridled capitalism, materialism, and individualism betrayed America’s promise. He hoped that the Pledge of Allegiance would promote a different moral vision to counter the rampant greed he argued was undermining the nation.
Trump may want to require American schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but his vision of America is a far cry from Bellamy’s—or any progressive who fights to push the country to live up to its ideals.
When composing the Pledge, Bellamy had initially intended to use the phrase “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” but concluded that the radical rhetoric of the French Revolution wouldn’t sit well with many Americans. So he coined the phrase, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” as a means to express his more egalitarian vision of America, and a secular patriotism aimed at helping unite a divided nation.
Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000. A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891, the magazine hired Bellamy to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools.
Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.
Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age.
In 1923, over the objections of the aging Bellamy, the National Flag Conference, led by the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the opening, “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” to “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” Ostensibly, it was revised to make sure that immigrant children—who might have thought that “my flag” referred to their native countries—knew that they were pledging allegiance to the American flag.
In 1954, at the height of the Cold War—when many political leaders believed that the nation was threatened by godless communism—the Knights of Columbus led a successful campaign to lobby Congress to add the words “under God.”
A year after Bellamy composed the pledge, the same social conditions and political sympathies inspired Bates to write the poem “America the Beautiful,” which was later set to music written by Samuel Ward, the organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey. (The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang their song at Trump’s inauguration.)
Like Bellamy, Bates was a Christian socialist. A well-respected poet and professor of English at Wellesley College, Bates (1859-1929) was also a lesbian who lived with and was devoted to her colleague Katharine Coman, an economics professor. They were both part of progressive circles in the Boston area that supported labor unions, advocated for immigrants, and fought for women’s suffrage. She was an ardent foe of American imperialism.
“America the Beautiful” was initially published in 1895 to commemorate the Fourth of July. The poem is usually heard as an unalloyed paean to American virtue. But a close reading of her words makes it clear that she had something more in mind. She wrote:
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain,
The banner of the free!
Bates hoped that a progressive movement, inspired by both religious and secular beliefs, could overcome the Gilded Age’s greed.
Most Americans are unaware that much of our patriotic culture—including many of the leading symbols and songs—was created by people with decidedly progressive sympathies.
Consider the lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus was a poet of considerable reputation in her day, who was a strong supporter of Henry George and his “socialistic” single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the Earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American Dream.
In the Depression years and during World War II, the fusion of populist, egalitarian, and anti-racist values with patriotic expression reached full flower.
Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1936, contrasted the nation’s promise with its mistreatment of his fellow African-Americans, the poor, Native Americans, workers, farmers, and immigrants:
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath
But opportunity is real, and life is free
Equality is in the air we breathe.
In 1939, composer Earl Robinson teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write “Ballad for Americans,” which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This 11-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the “nobody who’s everybody” and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.
Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, became, through this work, a voice of America.
Broadcasts and recordings of “Ballad for Americans,” (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, however, “Ballad for Americans” has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV.
Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and “A Lincoln Portrait,” both written in 1942, are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events. Few Americans know that Copland was a member of a radical composers’ group as well as a gay man.
Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land,” penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie, a radical, was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin’s popular “God Bless America,” which he thought failed to recognize that it was the “people” to whom America belonged.
The words to “This Land Is Your Land” reflect Guthrie’s belief that patriotism and support for the underdog were interconnected. In this song, Guthrie celebrated America’s natural beauty and bounty, but criticized the country for its failure to share its riches. This is reflected in the song’s last and least-known verse, which Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen included when they performed the song in January 2009 at a pre-inaugural concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial, with President-elect Obama in the audience:
One bright sunny morning;
In the shadow of the steeple;
By the relief office;
I saw my people.
As they stood hungry;
I stood there wondering;
If this land was made for you and me.
During the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the government’s policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” repeating the phrase “Let freedom ring” 11 times.
Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, “The Power and the Glory,” that coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. The words to the chorus echo the sentiments of the anti-Vietnam War movement:
Here is a land full of power and glory;
Beauty that words cannot recall;
Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom;
Her glory shall rest on us all.
One of its stanzas updated Guthrie’s combination of outrage and patriotism:
Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of her poor;
Only as free as the padlocked prison door;
Only as strong as our love for this land;
Only as tall as we stand.
This song later became part of the repertoire of the U.S. Army band.
In recent decades, Bruce Springsteen has most closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From “Born in the USA” to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), to his anthem about the 9/11 tragedy (“Empty Sky”), to his album Wrecking Ball (including its opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own”), Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals.
Steve Van Zandt is best known as the guitarist with Springsteen’s E Street Band and for his role as Silvio Dante, Tony Soprano’s sidekick on the TV show, The Sopranos. But his most enduring legacy should be his love song about America, “I Am a Patriot,” including these lyrics:
I am a patriot, and I love my country;
Because my country is all I know.
Wanna be with my family;
People who understand me;
I got no place else to go.
And I ain’t no communist,
And I ain’t no socialist,
And I ain’t no capitalist,
And I ain’t no imperialist,
And I ain’t no Democrat,
Sure ain’t no Republican either,
I only know one party,
And that is freedom.
Since the American Revolution, each generation of progressives has expressed an American patriotism rooted in democratic values that challenged jingoism and “my country—right or wrong” thinking. They rejected blind nationalism, militaristic drum beating, and sheep-like conformism.
Throughout the United States’ history, they have viewed their movements—abolition of slavery, farmers’ populism, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and others—as profoundly patriotic. They believed that America’s core claims—fairness, equality, freedom, justice—were their own.
America now confronts a new version of the Gilded Age, brought upon by Wall Street greed and corporate malfeasance. Americans are upset by the unbridled selfishness and political influence-peddling demonstrated by banks, oil companies, drug companies, insurance companies, and other large corporations. They are angry at the growing power of American-based global firms who show no loyalty to their country, outsource jobs to low-wage countries, avoid paying taxes, and pollute the environment.
As president and now as an ex-president, Trump tapped into a new wave of hate and bigotry. Trump may want to require American schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but his vision of America is a far cry from Bellamy’s—or any progressive who fights to push the country to live up to its ideals.
Throughout American history, progressive movement had won major victories and also experienced setbacks. When those setbacks occur, it is understandable that people sometimes lose hope, and even give up the fight. But our history also teaches us that we can’t give up, because we must keep the struggle alive for a new generation.
One lesson of our history is that America’s corporate ruling class is not invincible, that racist and reactionary movements can be defeated, that public opinion can change, and that electing progressives to office helps thwart right-wing assaults on our democracy. It is possible to imagine a better world.
But it doesn’t happen overnight. The socialist writer and organizer Michael Harrington used to say that activists for justice had to be long-distance runners. But we prefer the metaphor of a relay race. Each generation does what it can to change society, and then hands the baton to the next generation to continue the struggle for justice.
The recent rulings by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court against abortion, affirmative action, student loan forgiveness, voting rights, the ability of the federal government to regulate corporate abuse and other issues—including granting the president immunity from criminal charges—are surely disheartening. It is important to see these setbacks as part of a reactionary backlash against early progressive victories. So, too, the growing efforts by white nationalists and religious zealots to ban the teaching about Black and LGBTQ lives and history in our public schools are backlashes against previous civil rights and LGBTQ victories. The reactionaries can try to push back, they can weaken them, but they can’t entirely erase or nullify those victories.
Trump and his MAGA followers, along with his allies on Wall Street, among big corporations, and among the gun lobby, are waging a rear-guard effort to turn back the clock on the victories on the labor, civil rights, feminist, LGBTQ, and environmental justice movements since the 1960s. These movements are still alive. Occupy Wall Street changed how Americans thought about corporate power and wealth inequality. Recent public opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americans—even a majority of Republicans—think that big corporations and the super-rich don’t pay enough taxes and have too much political influence. Black Lives Matter woke many Americans up to the reality of police abuse and other forms of systemic racism. The Dreamers immigrant rights movement, the Green New Deal movement, the #MeToo movement, the Fight for $15 campaign, the growing upsurge of union organizing, the burgeoning tenants rights movement in cities across the country, the persistent battle for Medicare for All, and the growing number of progressives and democratic socialists elected to office in Congress, and in municipal and state government, are all part of a new wave of activism around progressive ideals.
They all embody the Pledge of Allegiance’s idea of “liberty and justice for all.” They reflect America’s tradition of progressive patriotism. They recognize that conservatives don’t have a monopoly on Old Glory.
Happy July 4.
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