Can Dems reconnect with roots?
Following the mid-term drubbing which saw two seats in the state legislature lost to Republicans, Fayette County Democrats — Rep. Tim Mahoney was one — were quoted as saying that the ship could be righted by local tweaks of policy and politics.
Historically, that is not the way things work, especially when the slide is as steep as the one western Pennsylvania Democrats are now experiencing. Patterns of local political power are set nationally.
The Civil War and the Great Depression made and re-made the political map.
That’s why it’s important that national as well as local Democrats reconnect with their roots as champions of everyday Americans.
But will they, can they?
The signs are not good. An example: recently, reliably-liberal Chris Hayes of MSNBC voiced an opinion that would have been incomprehensible to several generations of Democrats.
Zeroing in on Andrew Jackson, he found that Jackson’s role in the forced removal of Indian tribes from the southern United States in the 1830s was enough to disqualify him from the ranks of presidential greatness.
The Hayes grievance is real enough. And the fact is Jackson was quite a character, a rough, tough frontiersman who never forgave and never forgot.
His penchant for dueling pistols to settle disputes troubled even some contemporaries.
Yet, he was the champion of the powerless against the powerful in his lifetime and venerated by generations of liberals and progressives following his death.
Here is Franklin Roosevelt extolling Jackson in 1938. “Jackson,” said FDR, “took up the battle of (the) pioneers of the West and South, and the battle of the inarticulate poor of the great cities. … Like Jefferson, he was called a rabble-rouser. … Jackson was fighting on the side of the people.”
FDR had his share of bad ideas. The one about aligning the two parties into narrow liberal and conservative camps was an awful one, as recent experience demonstrates. Politics should not be a religious experience, but dividing the parties into sinners and saints – rabid partisans always believe they’re on the side of the gods — has that affect. Democracy suffers, as a consequence.
But FDR was right about Jackson, a lesson lost on Chris Hayes and other 21st century progressives.
Neither party’s behavior is set in stone. For most of their history, Democrats were under the influence of a strong Southern wing and therefore were champions of states’ rights. This created a dilemma for a party which also included a Northern big city wing.
When in the 1920s student-politician Edward Dumbauld of Uniontown asked H.L. Mencken to address Harvard Democrats, the acerbic newspaper columnist doubled over in laughter.
The idea, posited by Dumbauld, a future federal judge, that Democrats were the unalloyed saviors of the nation was ludicrous, Mencken told the Harvard law student. “Bourbon Democrats” and the sons of Davey Lawrence and Tammany Hall were too dissimilar to expect any good result.
A decade before Mencken’s rhetorical flourish Woodrow Wilson had departed the White House. For decades Wilson was considered one of the truly great presidents. More recently, he’s been kicked to the curb, the result of liberal disgust with his role in re-segregating Washington, D.C., in the early decades of the 20th century.
Wilson should certainly be faulted for his sins of ommission: by accounts, he permitted several cabinet secretaries to go their own way, on the theory that department bosses should run their own shops. The result was a separation of the races, and an ugly blot on an otherwise fine — yes, even great — historical record.
“In the middle period of great inequality — when the richest 1 percent owned half its wealth — (Wilson) worked honestly to protect the less favored … of his countrymen,” writes Wilson biographer Scott Berg.
Back to today: GOP hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz has recently been boasting of support from blue-collar Americans in 2016, though the Republican cupboard regarding the people who vaulted Jackson, Wilson, Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy to power looks mighty bare.
The question is, what about the Democrats? Will they manage to weld together a grand coalition that also includes the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters, of former steelworkers and miners?
Times change. Nobody expects a second “Old Hickory” to occupy the White House. But is someone in the Jackson tradition out of the question?
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books of local history: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.