Sat 17 Nov 2007
Yes, that last post was a bit childish, even for this blog. As penance, I offer this review of Professor David Carlin’s latest book about Catholicism and American politics. A version of it ran earlier this year in the Catholic World Report:
Still a Democrat after All These Years
by Jeremy Lott
David Carlin is a professor of philosophy and sociology; a former majority leader in the Rhode Island state senate and candidate for Congress; and a one-time columnist for the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal whose belief in the goodness of government still burns bright. He writes not as a would-be Republican but as an “authentic Democrat” broken up about the direction his Party has taken.
He exhibits false modesty when he apologizes for the autobiographical bits in the book. Carlin explains, “autobiographies should be written by important people.” He grants, however, that he might serve as an important “example of a kind of individual: the old hardcore Catholic Democrat who faces a conflict between his party and his religion. The story I have to tell is a story that could be told by millions of others.”
The aw shucks approach camouflages a penetrating intellect. It’s Tocqueville dressed up as Tom Sawyer. Carlin was born in 1938 into a “working-class family in Pawtucket, Rhode Island — a gritty, blue-collar town, devoid of the loveliness that Plato says should surround children as they grow up.”
The local industry was textile manufacture, though the mills eventually folded or moved South. The town’s most populous group was, like Carlin, of Irish Catholic extraction. And those poor immigrants and first generation Americans were, by and large, Democrats.
Carlin understands how hard it is to argue with a story and uses that insight to great effect. He introduces us to the corrupt Democratic Party machines of yesteryear by taking a stroll into a local bar with his late father. The old man often stopped off there at the end of the workday. One day he brought his son David along, “no doubt intending to contribute to my sociological education.”
That education proceeded like so: “We walked the entire length of the long, narrow barroom and went into a back room, where I saw something I had never seen before and wouldn’t see again until I visited Nevada a couple of decades later — something whose existence I had never even suspected: many, many slot machines with men standing in front of them, inserting coins and pulling levers.”
He eventually figured out that the powers-that-be understood what was going on. The bar was popular and only a few hundred yards from city hall and police department headquarters — both located on a street that Democrats in local government had renamed “Roosevelt Avenue.” Such flagrantly illegal operations could be allowed to continue only if somebody was being paid off. The grease helped to keep the “moving parts of the local political machine well lubricated.”
What’s more, most everybody was in on the secret. Leaders of the Pawtucket Democratic machine would occasionally “ritually deny any corruption,” but few believed them.
Voters didn’t get too worked up about it. They understood that “petty — and sometimes not so petty — corruption had long been an essential ingredient in municipal politics.” It was seen as “part of the American Way. So why fight it?”
“Nor is it likely that the corrupt Catholic politicians themselves had strong feelings of guilt,” Carlin speculates. After all, they went to Mass on Sundays. The town’s civic leaders “were (mostly) faithful to their wives. They were responsible fathers. They gave a portion of their ill-gotten gains to charity. They helped poor people by means of their control of city hall. Moreover, how did their ‘wrongdoing’ hurt anybody?”
By framing that rationalization as if machine leaders had proposed it, Carlin distances himself from the question while leaving it out there for us to ponder. In a footnote, he allows that such actions did indirect harm by undermining “the principle of integrity in government,” but he points out that the alternative to a “crooked Democratic machine” was a “crooked Republican machine,” like the earlier one the Pawtucket Democrats displaced.
Can a Catholic Be a Democrat? isn’t an unqualified apology for machine politics, but it does help explain why so many Catholics have a residual fondness for the Democratic Party. It used to be a genuine working class Party — a confederation of local machines that was much more of a bottom-up affair than the arrangement that exists today.
Machines helped to connect constituents to their representatives and made sure that they got out to the polls on election day. They also provided opportunities for smart but otherwise unconnected men to make something of themselves. Carlin argues, for instance, that the machines forced President Franklin Roosevelt to dump then-Vice President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman — a man with machine support — for the 1944 elections.
That turned out to be one of history’s more important personnel decisions. Truman assumed office when FDR died and ushered in the Cold War by refusing to allow Joseph Stalin to get his way in East Germany.
Wallace attacked Truman’s anti-Communism and ran against him in 1948 as the Progressive Party presidential candidate. He later felt it necessary to publish the statement “Where I Was Wrong,” in which he recanted his support for the Soviet Union.
Working class Catholic Democrats had little trouble siding with Truman over Wallace. Their Party was “proudly patriotic” and believed that government could do a lot of good. Internationally, it was anti-Nazi, then anti-Communist. Economically, Carlin believes the philosophy behind the New Deal “coincided with the social teachings of the Church” because it sought a “via media” between socialism and the free market.
Morally, the Democratic Party of Carlin’s youth was what you might call normal. Party leaders advocated reforms to improve people’s incomes but were careful not to challenge social and religious mores.
Part of their hesitation came from the nature of their business. They were, after all, in a morally complicated line of work. But the larger reason was that Democratic politicians tended to share those mores.
To get an idea of just how much things have changed, imagine what would happen if we took a random sample of Democratic politicians from 1948, put them through a time warp and ran them for office in the 2008 elections.
Voters would find their economic ideas baffling: “Wage and price controls — didn’t those flop in the ’70s?” “Top marginal tax rates above 70 percent — you are joking.” And they would find some of our social conflicts just as bizarre, of course: “Heather has two what?” “What is partial birth abortion?”
The other question that our time-warped Democratic pols might ask is “What happened to my Party?” Carlin charges that it “has ceased to be a genuinely democratic party” because it no longer speaks for the common man. He blames the decline in voter turnout on the fact that poor people no longer feel the Democrats are looking out for them.
It’s “no wonder,” he writes, that many poor voters who “do vote often vote Republican.” Republicans will slight the “economic interests of these people” but then so “very probably, will the Democrats; and at least the Republicans promise to take care of many of their moral and cultural concerns.”
The why of it is complicated but the book manages to cover a lot of ground in a few pages. The machine system gradually fell apart in most places because, as people’s incomes rose, so did their standards of honesty in government. They were less reliant on government; they could afford to be picky.
The increased economic opportunities also meant that people who would have been drawn into government in the past decided to pursue other lines of work.
The machines’ last hurrah, Carlin argues, came when party bosses managed to give the presidential nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the ‘68 Democratic convention in Chicago. Senator Eugene McCarthy had won more delegates in the relatively open primaries but most states, including Carlin’s Rhode Island, held caucuses that were easier for party leaders to influence.
Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon by a razor thin margin led to calls for reform of the caucus system. Many states heeded those calls and switched to primaries, thus ending the era of the machines.
Carlin blames Senator George McGovern’s ‘72 campaign for the big donor domination of Democratic primary politics but this is cherry picking. The antiwar candidacy of McCarthy, which Carlin supported, was made possible because a few rich donors wrote large checks.
After the ‘72 elections, there were three large constituencies vying for control of the Democratic Party: old school New Deal (or Great Society) Democrats; civil rights activists; and a new group: moral liberals. The newcomers wanted more personal freedoms, including the right to abortion; government-mandated tolerance; and an end to the Vietnam War. Critics accused then, rightly, of favoring “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
The Party’s big tent could accommodate the first two groups, but moral liberalism complicated things. Take civil rights: “Old liberals of the New Deal type, for whom social equality for the working class was a central value, tended to see the civil-rights movement as mainly an equality movement.” President Lyndon Johnson saw it that way and sold to Congress on the idea, which led to the historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
Carlin argues that moral liberals saw things differently: “For them it was principally a movement of liberation. Blacks… were freeing themselves from the bonds of racism in much the same way as moral liberals were freeing themselves from the bonds of conventional morality and sexual repression.” In other words, these mostly rich white liberals viewed it through the lens of race rather than class.
Over time, moral liberals in the Democratic Party have had staying power as the other parts of the coalition have receded. Unionization continues to decline. America’s economy is dynamic enough that people who would’ve resented the rich in another era can take a shot at riches instead. Blacks still vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats but the influence of their leadership on the Party has diminished.
Economic populism is not dead but it is not what really moves Democrats these days — cultural issues now dominate. New York Senator Hillary Clinton is a likely candidate for president in ‘08 who would like to hike taxes and replace America’s healthcare system with Canada’s, ideally; she would crawl across broken glass to vote against an abortion restriction.
Gay marriage loses almost everywhere when it is put to a public vote, and it probably cost Senator John Kerry the ‘04 presidential election, but courts continue to push the issue and Democrats continue to work with them to flout popular sentiment.
Moreover, Carlin charges in the book’s subtitle that the thoroughgoing moral liberalism of his Party has made it “the enemy of my religion.” He understands that this is an incendiary charge so he introduces lay readers to a form of argument called modus tollens to illustrate.
The form goes like this: “If p, then q. But not q. Therefore not p.” He plugs it into the real world to show how moral liberal claims might undercut the Catholic religion: If Catholicism is true, then its claims about sexual ethics are true. But we contend that its claims about those things are false. Therefore…
Therefore, a great number of people need to read this engaging little book. Its subject should be of interest to most Catholics of voting age. And the question mark in the title is a real one, posed by an old man who’s still wrestling with the problem. At this point Carlin expects to “die a Democrat, albeit not a very happy one” but it’s possible he’s written his own political obituary too early.