Professor Reeve Huston is associate professor of history at Duke University, where he teaches courses on the history of American politics and capitalism. He has written books about democratic movements and the bounds of politics in the early 19th century, including Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York. As part of the Lemur’s election series, Professor Huston spoke to me about American political and economic history in the past fifty years, including the neoliberal consensus and the decline of unions, the evolution of new Democratic and Republican coalitions, and the history of reactionary movements, among other subjects. We hope you enjoy.
The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lemur: What’s on your mind as the election approaches?
Huston: One of the things that I’ve noticed is that in electoral politics—particularly in a winner-take-all system like ours—you win by winning 50% of the voting population plus 1, and in order to do that you have to build a coalition. And coalitions are fragile things. I mean it’s impossible to win an election here by endorsing the aims of militant wage-earners and completely alienating all business owners or vice versa.
So yes, political parties are in the business of promoting policy but they’re also in the business of silencing debate and demands and grievances. Because some grievances and demands completely disrupt party coalitions. In the post-1980 United States—and we’re starting to come out of it, but that’s our inheritance what happened between really 1975 and 2008.
Neoliberalism
L: Meaning neoliberalism?
H: Yeah, the neoliberal consensus. Where even the Democratic Party got behind neoliberal reform and the idea that markets are what cause economic growth, so we have to give them a lot of freedom if we want economic growth. The Clinton White House and most of Clinton’s economic advisers were very skeptical of the labor movement. They saw them as distortions of the natural functioning of labor markets. Certainly they were more regulatory than Republicans when they were in power, but they were still fairly skeptical of regulation overall.
L : So what do you think about the fact that the current Democratic President, Joe Biden, walked a picket line, and a lot of his industrial and economic policy is fairly pro-worker. Also Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president, has gotten the majority of union endorsements in the 2024 election (but not all of them). In many cases, it seems the rank-and-file of these unions is pro-Trump and the leadership is pro-Biden-Harris. So how pro-union is the Democratic Party now?
H: That’s a really good question. They’re way more pro-union now than they were even 20 years ago. I think that a lot of that is due to the work of Occupy Wall Street. They didn’t change anything in terms of policy, but they changed the conversation.
L: Right. And then you have Bernie Sanders—
H: Yeah, and even Obama, who was the ultimate neoliberal, who never wanted to talk about class and economic divisions, started talking about the 1%. And that created a lot of space for Bernie and the Squad, and people like that. Obviously it’s a series of issues. It’s not just economic and class, it’s also racial issues and Black Lives Matter is really important there.
But let’s talk about neoliberalism a little bit. Those policies were not popular among the party rank-and-file. NAFTA was never supported by a majority of voters (although public opinion on the policy changed over time and sometimes a plurality of voters supported it).
L: So how did it get passed?
H: Because they’re not the people paying attention! One thing to keep in mind is that lobbyists don’t control Washington, but they do control it in those places where this is not a lot of grassroots mobilization. And lobbyists have an advantage—citizen lobbies and economic interest groups that aren’t backed by large amounts of money come and go. They’ll have lobbying day once a year, but the business lobbyists are there every day—
L: Permanent K Street–
H: Exactly. A permanent presence. And they get to play the long game. Unions have a permanent presence, too, but they don’t have nearly as much clout as business lobbyists. And if you take advocacy groups like the Poor People’s Campaign, one of the most active economically and racially leftist groups, led by Reverend William Barber (who’s from North Carolina, actually), he’s trying to revive Martin Luther King’s notion of the Poor People’s Campaign, sort of a multiracial poor and middle-class people’s reformist campaign to beef up living standards through the welfare state, greater labor protections, things like that.
L: And do you think the kind of language employed by those kinds of groups is having an effect at all, say, on Kamala Harris’ campaign?
H: Here’s the thing: it’s a very fluid situation in the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party. But it is clear that there has been a ton of discontent over neoliberal policies. Particularly, NAFTA and GATT [Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade]. The opening up of U.S. markets to Chinese and other Asian productions. And that policy was responding to a problem that was already there: the loss of U.S. mass-production consumer manufacturers’ oligopoly on world markets for cars and washing machines and stuff like that. But the policies made the problem a lot worse: it’s just cheaper to produce your goods in Korea or northern Mexico or any number of places, and U.S. industry has pretty much been gutted. It really took off after NAFTA and the opening of the U.S. to China.
And a lot of people are suffering because of that. I think that’s a major grievance that is there. Of course, if you look at the places that are de-industrialized, they are overwhelmingly Trump, with a small remnant of local union leaders who are more likely to be Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren types. So the thing we’re seeing in both parties is, in large part, economic grievances. But the problem is that for 20 years there was no political leadership on that. There was leadership in the unions to a certain extent, but they were really in a defensive crouch. The rest was kind of marginal lefty movements like William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. So there was a lot of space for new leadership to come in, and these are the J.D. Vances and Donald Trumps of the world, who have been capitalizing on the economic discontent of deindustrialization. Part of the appeal of Make America Great Again is its suggestion of industrial might and good jobs.
But even more important is the notion of we’ve been betrayed. If you read any of the journalistic writing about post-industrial communities now, there is such a huge sense of betrayal. We were sold out. I think they’re not wrong. They were sold out. And that was part of the new wave Clintonian Democrats’ efforts to recapture the support of the educated and professional classes and, very importantly, big business interests. But it’s more complicated than that.
Unions
L: Could you talk more about how the decline in both union membership and the political influence of unions affected that?
H: Yeah, well, [the neoliberal consensus] made unions really, really marginal to policy debates. In the 1980s to 2000s, unions didn’t have the clout to make much of a difference. Certainly they could make a marginal difference; it still matters who the AFL-CIO or Teamsters or SEIU [Service Employees International Union] endorse. It matters because they still try to mobilize their members (although particularly on electoral politics there is often a split between the leadership and the rank-and-file). So that loss of clout is part of how we get the situation where NAFTA is the policy of the Democratic Party. They didn’t have to listen to the unions. Also, because unions have been so on the defensive, there is not a whole lot of leadership shaping the way union members think about the major issues.
L: In that sense of the union leadership vs. rank-and-file divide, it seems that union rank-and-file are, in many cases, very responsive to Trump and his messaging, and that it’s very hard for union leaders to convince them otherwise. I recently saw a reporter talk to a local chapter leader in Pennsylvania who was trying to convince members that Biden policies had been really helpful and that they should support Harris, but his case was really falling on deaf ears. So, do you think it’s that union leaders don’t have as much power? That they’re maybe not as charismatic or persuasive, particularly in the face of Trump? Or what is your view: how did we get to the place where unions are so squeezed out and marginalized in the political system?
H: Yeah, well, they can’t deliver as much either. I’m not quite sure what all the internal dynamics are. It may have to do with continuing caution on the part of the more established labor unions, which has been a problem since the 1960s or even the 1950s. After Watergate, there was a huge bunch of young candidates in the Democratic Party who said: ‘okay, it’s a losing game to ally ourselves with social movements, with civil rights aims, with affirmative action,’ but also with unions. So those are people who actually started to appeal to middle-class people, professionals, people living in the suburbs, white people. The strategy was largely to count on black, and, in the West, Mexican people as a completely captive constituency: ‘we don’t really have to deliver much to them: they’re going to vote for us anyway.’ It’s the same thing that Republicans did with black people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: ‘we emancipated them, we don’t have to do anything else, here we’ll distribute some patronage–’
L: Party of Lincoln, yeah.
H: The New Democrats latched on to new kinds of mobilization: citizens’ movements in the 1970s—consumer movements, environmental movements. They self-consciously distanced themselves from civil rights and the labor movement, and indeed with advocacy of working-class interests. Instead they started talking about “middle-class people” or an “opportunity economy.” This should be familiar rhetoric to you know: it’s still the rhetoric Kamala Harris uses. And most of the time it’s the rhetoric that Biden uses. Even though he’s the most pro-labor guy, he was one of the founders of the New Democrats as a Senator. So were Clinton and Al Gore a little later. And it’s understandable, because they were getting their asses kicked by Reagan and the Reaganites. And they were in a triangulating mode: an explicit strategy of the Clinton White House to steal the thunder from the right by addressing the same issues as Republicans. This is where you get: ‘we’re going to end welfare as we know it‘. Taking a Republican talking point and creating a Democratic version of it.
So the big irony is this: I agree with the Democrats that they are better representatives of middle-class economic interests than the Republicans are, but increasingly the center of their constituency is people like me [professors], highly educated, making a good salary, not economically insecure. And every now and then, people like Hillary Clinton and even Obama to an extent would say something which revealed a kind of cultural condescension—
L: “Basket of deplorables”—
H: Yeah, that’s the ultimate version of that. But the “clinging to guns and religion” comment by Obama was a milder version as well. And at the same time, Republicans have been playing up a politics of fear and cultural resentment against elites since the late 1960s and early 1970s. That wasn’t true of all Republicans back then, but it became the dominant tone of Republicans during the 1990s, for a lot of reasons. One was the leadership of Newt Gingrich in Congress. But also the rise of talk radio and Fox News. And evangelicals: ‘we’re fighting a culture war with people who hate us, who think they’re superior to us.’ So this economic discontent is linked to opposition to civil rights advances and a belief that white people are now discriminated against. And men. Affirmative action for women matters a lot here because white women have been the number one beneficiaries of affirmative action.
And you’ve got a leadership who are preaching a language of cultural resentment that sounds like class resentment, and that fits in nicely with class resentment. So it appeals to people who have this amalgam of cultural and class resentments! It’s a very effective message. And all of this happened at a moment where immigrants have been coming into the United States in really large numbers (largely because of NAFTA, by the way, because it’s that agreement that destroyed the peasant sector in Mexico). So the kinds of people who work in factories—meatpacking plants, rubber plants, things like that—well over half of workers in meatpacking right now are immigrants, and the wages are low. So it’s possible to convince many white people that they are being displaced by immigrants, and that’s pretty appealing to people who already have lots and lots of resentments towards black people.
Coalitions
L: So you gave us a good sense of how the Republican Party created this new language of resentment in reaction to various movements. But let’s go back to the other side of the story, which is how Democrats changed during the same period. In our class [U.S. Political History, 1900-Present], we have talked a lot about the New Deal Democratic coalition, in which the relationship between constituents and policymakers was very active and participatory. People felt that they were working directly with the federal government (in many cases they were employed by the federal government). There seemed to be a self-awareness that it was a coalition. But in today’s Democratic Party it’s far looser, for many of the reasons you’ve just mentioned— it’s the party for educated elites and the non-white working class but there’s not much of a sense of connection or commonality between those groups. So maybe this is just a larger question about what a political party really is, and what a political party should be. Has it often been the case where American political parties are actually loose coalitions of people have totally different interests and totally different reasons for voting for the same people, and something like the New Deal coalition, which was held together by a largely shared vision of liberal government, is rather the exception?
H: Well, certainly during and immediately after the Great Depression and World War II there was a huge sense of common purpose among Democrats in this steamroller of policy revolution. Also important there is that at the height of the New Deal coalition in the 1940s and 1950s you also have a lot of very, very strong institutions that were cultivating a sense of connection between constituencies and between a particular constituency and the Democratic Party and the liberal agenda. Civil rights organizations are a massive example of that. So are labor unions. So even though parties had been getting weaker since around just before 1900, and voter involvement in politics had been getting weaker since 1900, the New Deal sort of reversed that for a while. Especially in the big cities there were also Democratic machines, a really important institution tying people in. But by now all those institutions have been atrophying for a long, long time. For unions you have to go back to probably the late 60s, early 70s, for civil rights organizations the mid-70s, and, I’m not aware of a good book on the decline of urban democratic machines, but one of the reasons was probably suburbanization—
L: That would make sense.
H: A lot of the voters were just leaving these areas that are well-organized by the Democratic Party. But also in the late 1960s and 1970s those machines came into huge disrepute, especially with–
L: Daley?
H: With Daley and the violence of the Chicago police against the demonstrators in ‘68. But that [disrepute] was part of a more general thing because the labor unions got a bad rap from the construction unions which were closing ranks to fight affirmative action and demands for equal opportunity, including for women. They got a really bad reputation for that.
So there is a continuing series of splits in the Democratic coalition, continuing after the 1960s and 1970s, between working-class whites, sometimes through the labor movement and sometimes through homeowners’ associations, who don’t want black people moving into their neighborhoods or competing with white people for jobs. That plus general resentment about the labor movement. At the same time, politically conscious, movement-type black people, even though the movement was attenuating, got really skeptical of the labor movement. Many young graduates of the New Left, the student movement, got really skeptical of the labor movement—
L: Because of race issues or—
H: Yes, because of the racism that was a problem in almost every union. In the CIO industrial unions, the top leadership tended to be supportive of equal opportunity, but the trade unions—the carpenters, the firemen, the police unions—oh my god, really opposed to civil rights in the workplace.
L: So I can see why the decline of a lot of these institutions offers a good explanation for why the current Democratic coalition is pretty loosely tied together, or why Democratic voters have a fairly weak sense of identification with the Democratic Party. Do you think that for Republicans it’s almost the reverse: a story of strengthening institutions, like in the evangelical movement, to create MAGA? Although, of course, a lot of Republicans are non-MAGA, reluctant Republicans.
H: Certainly what I can say is that for a whole lot of the MAGA rank-and-file, part of the appeal of MAGA is the fact that they hate the Republican establishment. They just despise them—this ‘I’m going RINO hunting’ culture. That’s a really big appeal. So a lot of the energy behind MAGA, in the rank-and-file, and at the level of leadership, if you look at people like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz or even less crazy people, they know their constituents, they know they need to win the primary and to do that they can’t be seen as falling in line with establishment Republicans. And the incentives have changed as well because of social media: Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Boebert, they’re doing fine, they’re not going to run out of money until their shtick loses its appeal, right? They’re not going to lose a primary, because their antics bring in small-dollar donations in large numbers. So the incentives are changing. These are the people going on Steve Bannon’s talk show: that’s another incentive, getting a national audience. And that’s a solvent of party. So if Fox News, although Fox News is less important than it used to be. Fox News is now playing catchup to Steve Bannon.
L: Do you think, in general, that grassroots movements, whether it’s MAGA or, for instance, anti-abortion, are stronger on the right? Or is that Trump has been more responsive to the grassroots and that’s why these well-organized movements have been so successful?
H: I don’t know how to characterize MAGA. There’s clearly a lot of grassroots enthusiasm and there’s important elements of grassroots organization there, but it’s not like the civil rights movement. There’s a wonderful book about the Tea Party by Theda Skopcol [The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism] and what she says is really there were three Tea Parties: one was the grassroots movement which really was a spontaneous emanation of discontent with immigration, a free-spending Congress, a perception that the Constitution was being ignored. That’s one wing. Another was Dick Armey and all the establishment Republicans who created organizations to channel that movement, to create bus tours for grassroots organizations, to mobilize and turn those people into canvassers for the Republican Party on election day. And a third is the media, Fox News was central to the emergence of a popular movement.
But my point is that we’re talking about a new kind of movement. I’m not even sure I want to call it a movement. There’s elements of a movement, but there’s a whole lot of centralized control. There’s money coming from libertarian donors like the Locke Foundation and the Koch Brothers. But they don’t have the same agenda as the people on the grassroots, who still want to preserve Social Security and the Koch Brothers want to roll it back.
L: Also tax cuts—
H: Yeah, deregulation and tax cuts. So you’ve got this uneasy coalition between this old constituency of business Republicans—neoliberals—and a formerly submerged constituency that, before 2008, you last saw appearing in the John Birch Society and the Citizens’ Councils fighting civil rights. And all of that was appealed to a lot by George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Agnew, and in a different way by Newt Gingrich and his crowd. Certainly by Pat Buchanan. You’ve got a revitalized populist, nativist, sometimes explicitly racist, sometimes dog-whistle racist constituency who are really organizing around immigration and paranoid fantasies of what the Democrats are gonna do. I was in Ireland in May and in Irish druidic mythology you put your appeals to the spirit world on a little piece of paper and you hang it on a hawthorn bush. And I read one there, it just caught my eye: it said “please save our once great United States from the Democrats.”
L: The existential threat conversation that both sides feel but on the right–
H: On the right there is an industry for stirring up stories that appeal to fear.
L: 100%.
H: They’ve turned it into an occupation. And Democrats are stirring up fear, too, but they take fewer liberties, and they tell more plausible stories.
L: As you have outlined, in these coalitions we have some seriously strange bedfellows, where, in the Republican Party, the most pro-deregulation, pro-tax-cut type of businesspeople are voting for the Trump-Vance ticket, which advocates for 50–100% tariffs on goods, not just from China, but from anywhere, and J.D. Vance, one of the only bills he really was particularly involved on in the Senate was the Failed Bank Executives Clawback Act, which he worked on with Elizabeth Warren. And in that sense, a lot of people talk about how the Republican Party has abandoned conservatism. If you’re truly an ideological conservative who favors a small, laissez-faire government, it doesn’t make much sense to vote for them for that reason, if that’s what you really care about. But I am struck by—in our class we have charted the history of liberalism in the 20th century—and so much of what we have talked about today would also lead you to think that the Democratic Party is not the party of liberalism, in the same sense that the Republican Party is not really the party of conservatism. How true do you think that is? Is it ideal to have a party of liberalism and conservatism?
H: Well, I don’t think liberalism and conservatism are these unchanging things. I agree with you that the Republican Party has largely abandoned 1980s and 1990s style conservatism, although not all of it. They were opposed to civil rights back then and they still are. They also remain more restrictionist on immigration than Democrats, so there are some continuities, and it is just as legitimate to call it conservatism if they want to, but it doesn’t seem like Trump wants to call it that.
L: To be more specific, I suppose I do mean the 1980s Reagan conservatism as the overarching “conservatism”—strong national defense, small government. The conservatism that people grew up with and subsequently called themselves conservatives because they endorsed those views— they would say that that’s gone.
H: “Inherited conservatism,” yeah. But not all of it [is gone]. If all you care about is deregulation and tax cuts at the upper end, it’s a no-brainer to go with the Republicans. A lot of the MAGA wing is screwing that constituency but it is still a captive constituency, to a certain extent, unless they decide that other things, like democracy, are more important to them. But much more emphasis on protectionist economic nationalism and culture war.
L: And for the Democrats? OK, maybe there is no single definition of “liberalism” now, but there certainly were some key tenets for a long time—let’s say New Deal to Great Society— and what is the definition of “liberalism” now? How far away from an active political representation is that, if that’s your creed?
H: Yeah, well, Democrats are coming out of a really long period of having no real line of march. From 1980 on, Democrats were playing defense. There were always some—Paul Wellstone, Sherrod Brown—who stuck to the old New Deal liberalism, in updated versions, but most were more like Biden, back in the 80s and 90s where you embrace free markets and are very skeptical of civil rights, are very careful not to align yourself with social movements. You’re very technocratic. And that’s still a really powerful legacy among the Democrats, although at the same time there is a reassertion and a revival of the old liberal agenda, with the Squad–—
L: On economic issues?
H: Economic and racial. The Green New Deal—massive government intervention to try to solve an existential crisis in capitalist society but that uses the crisis to only to try to resolve to the immediate environmental crisis, although this is not really a crisis that is amenable to effective government action, but also to raise livings standards among the bottom half of the American population. That’s very left-wing of Lyndon Johnson’s coalition kind of move. At the same time, a lot of them are really in favor of Palestinian rights. Vehemently anti-racist. Approaching that in new ways. Maybe that’s inherited more from movement liberalism or leftism than the old Democratic Party.
L: At least for the race stuff there are good arguments that these kind of viewpoint-based academic things–-like critical race theory or strategic essentialism—come not from a previous political platform, but more from universities and then spillover into workplaces—
H: And that’s not unprecedented either. For instance, there’s the influence of the University of Wisconsin on Wisconsin Progressives. But there’s a coming together of different streams of thought, part of which is old Democrat liberalism and part is movement liberalism.
L: So then what would you make of Kamala Harris distancing herself from that “liberalism,” such as the Green New Deal, that she voted for? Aside from the fact that she’s trying to win a general election. The policies she has outlined in the campaign, these various tax-credits, how are those “liberal” in the traditional FDR and LBJ sense?
H: I have to say I haven’t read them, but the impression I’ve been getting is that her main strategy is to be as light on specifics as possible–
L: I think that’s generally true, but she did release an economic plan [after receiving criticism for a lack of specific policy proposals]. Most of it is these tax-credits, for first-time homebuyers, expanding the child tax credit—
H: See, that strikes me as a less cautious version of Clintonite policymaking, where you take a really narrow approach to a really big problem to show people that you are acting on their grievances. It’s so limited! How many people will it help? 50,000?
L: And “no tax on tips,” which was originally a Trump proposal that Harris has embraced—obviously most restaurant workers don’t make enough to pay income tax anyway, so it’s kind of pure sound—
H: And that’s part of the game. My impression here is that Kamala Harris is a really smart politician and she is way better at electioneering in this context than Biden was. But, I saw a big part of the Democratic National Convention and it’s as much an appeal on the basis of “vibe” and spirit than it is on policy. And that’s always been the case. Policy has never won or lost elections except maybe during the Great Depression, in moments of crisis. As far as policy is concerned, I don’t know how committed she is to anything. I’m convinced she’s a liberal in some general way. And in terms of winning the election it’s probably pretty smart, but it shows that when deciding policy issues, at least during an election, political considerations are very, very important. And that leads me to say, where is she going to land? And where she lands on the spectrum of center to left policies may just be a series of tactical decisions.
L: And what she chooses to pursue as president—the scope of a “liberal” agenda—may also just hinge on whether she has control of both houses of Congress. Proposing the tax credits on housing and childcare, for example—that is in lieu of proposing a potential legislative ambition like a federally funded childcare system or a federal effort to fix housing supply. Would she do a bill like that? Well, maybe if she had the votes, and it would be her Obamacare.
H: Yeah that would take a lot of political courage, and will she have the votes? That’s right. And these are two separate but linked issues: one is putting political chips on the table for really fundamentally addressing an issue and the other is does she have the votes. And you’d have to be a stupid politician to put your chips on the table if you don’t have the votes.
L: This makes me think a little bit of [John F.] Kennedy, actually, particularly in terms of the presumptive attitude here towards the ability to get something done in Congress. And confusion about what their highest goal is, or whether there is a commitment to particular values. Again, hard to know what she thinks.
H: I think that’s exactly right. It was hard to know what Kennedy thought. He was a cautious guy.
L: And both Kamala Harris and Kennedy had reasonably long careers in public office (thirteen years in Congress for JFK, four years as Senator for Kamala, and her previous elected positions). which are still not particularly helpful records because they were somewhat cautious then as well, so it’s hard to tell.
H: As far as political practice is concerned, the Democratic Party is the “conservative” party. Right now, the Democratic Party seems pretty committed to the old way of doing politics, and they have a pretty good chance of winning the White House and winning both houses of Congress.
But I am convinced that MAGA under Trump is a truly reactionary movement. Corey Robin wrote a book called The Reactionary Mind, and he says that a number of things distinguish reactionary movements since the French Revolution. One of them is an absolute commitment to upholding old privilege, restoring privilege that was slipping way, whether it was to the French nobility or now to white cultural supremacy, I guess. In the South, it was rule by very wealthy white men and absolute racial subordination and a political system founded on violence. The romance of violence is a big part of reactionary movements. Another is, although they’re trying to maintain a beloved ancient regime, in their methods they are as innovative as the revolutionaries. The theme is: to save the old order, we have to destroy it. The most advanced reactionaries of the early 19th century in Europe used the same methods of mass mobilization that the French revolutionaries used. I think MAGA is like that, too. They’re extremely innovative, and they’re experimenting all the time with new ways of building movements. And they’re really good at mass mobilization.
L: So do you think MAGA has maybe convinced its constituents that they are restoring some desirable old order while they’re actually creating a political reality that no one really has experienced before? Deliberate or not, it does seem that while the rhetoric is often about restoration, the policies frequently are not.
H: It’s complicated. I think there is a particular disconnect in MAGA between appeals and policies. And that’s one of the reasons why [libertarian donors] are behind Trump. He delivered in his first term for the advocates of deregulation and lower high bracket taxes. He really delivered, just like he did for evangelicals. But I see them as a genuinely reactionary movement.
L: Thanks for talking to me.
