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The Democrats got stuck in the Seventies Protecting abortion was never enough

The Conservatives won the long war of the Seventies (Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images)

The Conservatives won the long war of the Seventies (Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images)


November 8, 2024   6 mins

There’s a very good chance that you remember nothing at all of the Democratic 2020 primary cycle, maybe Bernie Sanders’ uncombable hair, maybe Elizabeth Warren mouthing some policy proposal that sounded smart even if no one understood it, maybe the odd moment when everybody abruptly dropped out of the race leaving Joe Biden as the winner. But if there is a moment that sticks, it would likely be when Kamala Harris took Biden to task for, of all the things in the world, busing.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

“Clinton enthusiastically buried the Great Society where Carter had done so mournfully.”

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.


Sam Kahn writes the Substack Castalia.


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M James
M James
1 month ago

Interesting to trace the trajectory of Clinton’s Third Way back to Carter. Not sure how contiguous it was through the 80’s. I wonder who, if anyone, in the Democrat party carried that torch.

Though I realize the tonal comparison of Carter to Clinton was meant as sober commentary, it made me laugh all the same.

Very thoughtful and thought-provoking article. Thank you.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
1 month ago

There are no new politics. We will always see parallels with the late 60s, 70s and 80s because this span of time saw the capabilities and choices of the state and individual reach their current genesis. The capabilities and choices largely remain the same so of course we will see the old battles being refought: big state vs small state; state control vs free markets; corporatism vs capitalism; liberalism vs conservatism; free trade vs protectionism; democracy vs socialism.

History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. Here in the UK the 70s came calling back in 2019 and we’re still living them, albeit without the music and clothes and rising living standards. We’ve had Boris Johnson do a very fine reprisal of big state idealism à la Edward Heath (PM 70 to 74) including a national emergency where everyone was forced to stay at home. We briefly saw Kwarteng attempt to stoke a demand side boom à la Heath’s Chancellor Anthony Barber. Now we’ve got Starmer and Reeves ratcheting up public spending and taxes to spur demand à la Wilson (PM 74 to 76). And we’re already seeing the limits of this with rising inflation and borrowing costs snuffing out almost all the hoped for gains. A fiscal denoument awaits us like it did Callaghan (PM 76 to 79).

Humans aren’t changing anytime soon so the only thing that will alter the current genesis of the political economy is technology. And the obvious agent for change is AI. However, there are again parallels with the past. It was thought the large scale adoption of information technology in the 80s would revolutionise how we worked and there was widespread debate about how this could either lead to mass unemployment or greater leisure depending on how politicians managed it. As we now know, information technology didn’t make much difference to the discourse of the 80s. It was the old arguments of free trade vs protectionism and small state vs big state that had the biggest impact on the 80s through to today.

As long as democracy survives we will continue to have the same political arguments as the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Long may we continue to have the luxury of being able to have those arguments. I fear though that this is how democracy withers and is taken from us. Precisely because the arguments do remain the same, along with the compromises and disappointments, we will become jaded and apathetic. By resignation and disinterest power will be transferred from us with neither consent nor opposition. Instead to be watched over by machines of loving grace or monitored by systems of technocratic of indifference?

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Don’t quite agree. Yes, the politics talk about the same things, using similar language. Yes, the macroeconomic similarities are there. But the people have changed.
In the late 60s and the 70s, people were much poorer – measured in an absolute way, not the silly modern way of relating to the median wage. So, you had small communities where people stayed for the whole of their lives, there were very few cars in the UK, hardly anyone had phones. There were newspapers and the BBC but news was more distant. Foreign travel was rare. So, since the 70s people have changed because their horizons have become world horizons and their expectations have become world expectations.
Superimpose the geopolitics onto the changed expectations and you get very fast shifts in public opinion. So the politicians are less dogmatic, more uncertain, because they have to change with the tide and appease growing vociferous minorities like feminists. To supply answers to world problems is not just about economics but just surviving until the next disaster comes along and then changing direction again.
AI is not the only thing to alter the current genesis of political economy because AI assumes that demand is the same. There must be other answers to allow for changed demographics in the future – perhaps local energy sources (as you hinted a few days ago) is the main answer. Superimposed on all of this is also the trend of middle class women not to have children, the dearth of children in the future. This can only be offset by immigration but, although immigrants will have a lot of children, there will be a whole generation where women are relegated to work in the house only – because of the religions of the immigrants. Expectations will be lower and poverty (absolute poverty, not the modern version) will increase and the weight shouldered by the state will be the highest since 1945. All of this without cheap coal and gas.

Brett H
Brett H
1 month ago

Fairly realistic and sensible appraisal of things as we stand and where we’re going.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
1 month ago

On a side note, people were poorer in materials terms but often not in terms of education, healthcare and housing. And women entering the workforce played a big role..

Caroline Galwey
Caroline Galwey
1 month ago

Fair point on the whole, but I’ll just point out that in the 1960s-70s, when I was a child and teenager, most people in Britain DID have cars (even if only one old banger per family) and telephones (landline in the hall). More didn’t have central heating, and healthcare was rough and ready, but unlike now, there was a solid expectation of steadily rising standards of living.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago

Maybe in London. I lived on a council estate in a small town. There were five cars for about 200 houses. Twelve doors down from us there was a car. This neighbour helped everyone in the area. There were even no buses for about 10 years. They built the estate on the outskirts of the town before there was a bus service. There was no school for about 10 years.
I had a friend four door away. He had a pylon in the front garden. I asked his mother why this was sitting there in the garden and she said that they had come from a townhouse with no electricity. They were so happy to have electricity that they didn’t care about the pylon.
My uncle ran away to sea and finished up in the USA. A few years later he turned up with his American wife in a flashy American car and the whole neighbourhood came out to see it. (About 1968).
I see old films based in London and there were cars everywhere. I suspect this was the old thing: everything in London and nothing in the rest of the country. My wife was from a coal mining area and she confirms that there were no cars in her area either.

Martin M
Martin M
28 days ago

That is vaguely reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago

The council estates by my house didn’t even have roads to park on.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 month ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

What has changed is Stormin Starmer’s wardrobe. He is now the best-dressed leader in the West thanks to Lord Alli.

Benjamin Greco
Benjamin Greco
1 month ago

The democratic party is not going to reconstitute itself with new faces and new ideas, it doesn’t have any. It is going to continue to rely on identity politics, grievance politics, and social justice woke politics. It has nothing else.
And remember it may not have to change. If the sad cycle of American politics continues Trump will fail and is popularity will nosedive, then the Democrats will retake the House 2026 and a stronger more competent Democrat without Harris’s 2020 baggage and propensity for word salad will be competitive and win in 2028. Trump’s margin of victory was larger than usual, but it was far from a landslide.
Winners are always optimistic after an election and there are always calls for the losers to change, but nothing changes. We are no longer governed by parties we are ruled by multi-national corporations, and they prosper under our current dysfunction. Trump won’t buck them and neither will any future Democrat.

Martin M
Martin M
28 days ago
Reply to  Benjamin Greco

That is absolutely correct. Although Trump considers everything he wins to be a “landslide”, the fact is that this election was nothing like the 1984 election, in Which Reagan won every State bar one.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
1 month ago

The reason why politics seem stuck in the 70s is because the so-called ‘neoliberal’ reforms of that era definitively failed in 2008. Since then the system has continued in a zombified form on the government lifeline. But nobody has been able to effectively argue for a good alternative so far. And after the pandemic the problems only accelerated. It’s no longer just a class issue, the economic system itself is failing.
So it is completely wrong to think that “The long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close”. It is really just starting as the republicans under Trump are now also embracing their own flavour of ‘anti-neoliberal’ rhetoric! Meanwhile the democrats are wise to dump unpopular cultural issues and finally come with a strong economic focus in case the republicans fail to deliver.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago

If the writer is expecting introspection from the Dems, it’s not gonna happen. When they’re not calling voters all sorts of names, they are engaging in self-indulgent fear porn over mass roundups and death camps. This is not a party so much as a mind virus which cannot comprehend that not everyone buys what it’s selling.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Like a drunk waking up in an alley, the left realizes the legacy media turned into an unfrequented dead end as all the smart energy disengaged and switched to social media — with a big thank you to Elon Musk, one of the great men of history.

El Uro
El Uro
1 month ago

Dear readers!
If you are so pessimistic about the future and so sure that you are powerless to change anything, the only thing I can offer you, gentlemen, is a well-soaped rope

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago

Harris raising the issue of bussing was probably a response to Obama backing his former VP and a desire to shame Obama for doing so. That was why she raised the issue of race and emphasised that she was half-black and Biden in contrast was white. It was 21st century identity politics and not 60s or 70s politics.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
1 month ago

Yes and the Bidens have loathed her since then.

Sawfish
Sawfish
1 month ago

Do other UnHerd subscribers see the UnHerd articles as swizzle sticks, and the Discussion section as being the drink, itself?

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
1 month ago
Reply to  Sawfish

It’s the same thing at reason. The articles are hard to read a lot of the time.

Matt B
Matt B
29 days ago
Reply to  Sawfish

Perhaps the discussions are combed by moonlighting writers looking for what to write in their day jobs?