Harvey J. Kaye: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

 

We now mark a publishing event: the first book I’ve seen that came to reviewers with a publicity packet including not only the usual blurbs, bio, and boilerplate hype, but a list of “talking points.” Sheltered creature that I am, I’d associated talking points with documents enlivened by cartoon elephants and donkeys, cheerful notices to partisans offering hints on how to talk persuasively to relatives and neighbors. But here we have something that at least looks like a history, complete with 60 pages of endnotes, yet accompanied by a bullet list of things-done-and-to-do, to wit:

• “In 1930, Franklin Roosevelt stated that Americans needed to make America ‘fairly radical for a generation.’ And through the labors and struggles of the New Deal and then in the course of World War II that is exactly what they did….

• “In 1941, FDR articulated their progressive accomplishments and aspirations in the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from want and fear….

• “Moreover, at war’s end they made the United States the strongest and richest nation on earth….

• “After 35 years of deepening inequalities and insecurities, of declining industries and decaying public infrastructures—indeed, of denying who we are—we need to do what our parents and grandparents did….

• “We need to harness the powers of democratic government in favor of progressive policies and programs….

• “We need to mobilize, organize, and bolster progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Bill de Blasio. We need to make American radical for at least a generation.”

I especially admire that use of the word “need,” which recalls its deployment at sub shops and diners in my adopted home of Michigan. In those lighthouses of the liberal portion, “Do you need cheese on that?” really means, “Do you want cheese on that?” O reason not the need, Cordelia of The Coney Hut, and slap some right on.

What’s not to like, with this talking points stuff? How much better our world might be, had the publicity mavens at the University of Chicago Press gotten off their verandas back in 1975 and issued

Talking Points for THE ARGUMENT AND THE ACTION OF PLATO’S LAWS

• In early fourth-century BCE, Plato penned his most political and pious work, asking himself, ‘What would have happened if Socrates had gotten out of jail, free, instead of drinking poison?’

• If he were alive today, Plato would have told us that goodness and kinship are two very different things and therefore all is not in the family, the Bunker archē notwithstanding.

• Infants are crazy, but lately they’ve been getting tenure-track positions.

• The best and truest kind of equality can be called monarchic, since the sole rightful ruler is the Intellect.

• Military training of women and, more generally, equal education of both sexes is to counteract the misplaced or excessive piety to which the female sex is prone.

• No man’s nature is sufficient for knowing what is conducive to political life and, if knowing it, for always being able and willing to do what is best.

• Many members of the Nocturnal Council that rules the city will lack the ability to raise and answer the most important questions—the true art of conversation.

• In the end, the Laws points back to the lesson of the Republic: Don’t let your mouth write a check your body can’t cash.

With ammo like that, President Ford’s National Endowment of the Humanities director Robert A. Goldwin might have won the culture wars, fending off the Carter Administration before it even got elected. And—theoretical wisdom being timeless and universal—many of these points make perfect sense for use in publicizing Professor Kaye’s book, with obvious application not only to monarchic Franklin and pious Eleanor, but to the science of administration the New Deal dealt out.

Speaking of the will to power, Nietzsche would have classified this book as monumental history, a hero tale of Progressivism. This presents a problem of sorts. If neither God nor nature guides human conduct, if we take our moral and political bearings from history—conceived no longer so much as a literary genre or a mode of inquiry but as the course of events, unfolding in a lawful way toward an end or purpose—then the most authoritative thing lives not above us in Heaven or in and around us in nature but ahead of us in time. According to Progressivism, the most authoritative thing is the Future. But a history—a narrative of the course of events—looks to the past. What’s a good Progressive to do, especially if, like Professor Kaye, he wants to call us to remembrance of glories lost? “We need to remember what conservatives have never wanted us to remember and what liberals have all too often forgotten”—namely, that “we are the children and grandchildren of the men and women who rescued the United States from economic destruction in the Great Depression and defended it against fascism and imperialism in the Second World War,” a generation whose greatness consisted precisely in doing those things on behalf of the “Four Freedoms” enunciated by President Roosevelt in his Annual Message to Congress, of January 6, 1941. That is, the United States the greatest generation rescued and defended was most particularly the New Deal state, about which FDR’s Attorney-General and Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Jackson said, “We too are founders,” and “We too are makers of a nation.”

Now, to charge that conservatives have never wanted us to remember the New Deal or the Progressive ideology that animated it is surely unfair. In fact, conservative scholars have been the ones to revive scholarly interest in Progressivism, as seen in books and articles beginning at least as far back as Paul Eidelberg’s 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship, and continuing in the work of Paul Marini, Dennis Mahoney, Sidney Milkis, Ronald J. Pestritto, along with many others. But such a whining complaint ignores the obvious: meticulous engagement with the scholarly literature is not the purpose of Professor Kaye’s project, which leans toward the inspirational.

It is impossible to reproduce the full range of his revival-sermon voice, but here are some highlights. The Roaring Twenties was “a time of economic growth and prosperity,” but only “for a certain class of people”—by which Professor Kaye means the rich, not the middle class and the urban working class. For those who would leap up to cite pesky stats about middle- and working-class real wages rising 20% in that decade, or the mass production of consumer goods that sharply increased Americans’ buying power, what don’t you understand about monumental history? Please be quiet. To continue: luckily, as the rich got richer, polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt convalesced under the benevolent eye of his wife, receiving a “continuing ‘liberal education,’ dispensed by Eleanor, even as she herself became more active in politics and reform efforts”—an imagined scenario which, I must confess, brings out my inner Alice Roosevelt Longworth a bit too much for the ease of my conscience. Be that as it may, the (talking) point is that while greedy, bathtub-gin-swilling jazz-age bacchanalians careened toward The Crash, the soberer souls of Hyde Park were steeling themselves for the struggles to come.

And they were ready. “Roosevelt and the New Dealers… initiat[ed] a revolution in American government and public life” by means of the stronger regulation of capital, “relief on a grand scale,” and “pursuing social- and industrial-democratic policies and programs,” thereby “redrawing the nation’s constitutional order” and aiming at  bringing “the nation ever more progressively toward social and industrial democracy”—all in the face of those villains, the “economic royalists” and “Tory Republicans” who sought to defend their “industrial dictatorship” and “economic autocracy.” True, for a short time the Nine Old Men on the Supreme Court stood, palsied, in History’s way, but FDR’s eventual appointment of seven new justices began “nothing less than a Constitutional Revolution.” The vast benefits of this revolution rippled long past the world war; America’s postwar decades of economic prosperity occurred, thanks to the prior “investments” in infrastructure by the New Dealers, the G.I. bill, and “the profits, savings, and technical investments and ‘know how’ accumulated in the fight against fascism and imperialism.” What, you ask, of America’s sheer physical advantages over bombed-out Europe and Japan, and the postwar tax-cuts. Don’t be silly; such stuff deserves no place on the honor roll of economic causation.

Alas, “Harry Truman was no FDR.” He began the Cold War, while the labor movement’s purges of communists from their organizations made it “cease to be the militant progressive force it had been.” Just as bad, liberals and progressives (read: Henry Wallace and his allies) “differed critically over how to handle the Soviets and America’s own communists”; “the horrors of fascism, Nazism, and communism” led even some ‘Left’ intellectuals “to question the prospect of giving too much power and authority to the state.” And with that heresy, things only got worse. President Lyndon Johnson, a loyal New Dealer, nonetheless failed “to break the Cold War’s grip,” supporting “the authoritative and corrupt U.S.-created South Vietnamese state” against “the Communist North and revolutionary Viet Cong”—who, if my own memory serves, were merely mass-murderers and tyrants. After the “infamous red-baiter,” Richard Nixon, defeated “liberal and antiwar” George McGovern in 1972, and then fell victim to his own corrupt thuggery, Democratic President Jimmy Carter could do not better than to invoke God’s help—a call “as vacuous as it was ineffectual.” This opened the door for that slow-cured old Hollywood ham, Ronald Reagan, who had the effrontery to praise the Greatest Generation even as he jettisoned “what made the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader truly great”: the social and industrial democracy implied by the Four Freedoms.

And today? After some promising campaign rhetoric, President Obama has failed, not because he “ask[ed] too much of Americans” but because “he asked too little,” compromising on national health care and worrying about the federal deficit—to the extent of saying such a thing as, “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford o we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” After an outburst like that, we should probably start calling him Barack Harding Obama. No wonder we “need” to “get radical”—and not just “fairly” radical—”for at least a generation.” Such an extensive list of sins will take a long time to purge.

A reader might ask, what is the real point of this militant nostalgia for a past future that never quite was? Professor Kaye would like to do two thing which run just slightly under the cover of his rhetoric. He would like to revive the old Popular Front strategy of the mid-1930s, whereby leftists united—at least they seemed to unite—against those nasty conservative, reactionary, corporate crypto-fascist elites. Ah, for the golden year of 1935, when “Communist intellectuals, who had previously scorned liberal democracies and other leftists… receiv[ed] welcomed new party directives from Moscow” to “promote the causes of labor and democracy.” In those days, Pete Seeger breathed free.

As a second task, Professor Kaye evidently wants to undo at least some of the tortured doings of the intellectual Left of the past two generations: the ‘postmodern,’ too-ironical, dubious-about-the-white-collar-bureaucratic New Left. After all, it wasn’t only conservatives, libertarians, and postwar, ‘vital-center’ liberals who question the Progressive-New Deal confidence in the possibility of combining populism with the science of administration. Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman made that attack while trying to form a new kind of radical Left, one that rightly made all the components of the old Popular Front coalition exceedingly nervous. Professor Kay would like to overcome the odd combination of cynicism and millennialism the New Left has left us, and do it with nothing less than that old-time, New-Deal religion.

My guess? Some of what he says may find its way into the speeches of Hillary Clinton, as the former Madam Secretary weaves her way back toward the White House, blogospherics flaring—and watched by at least one earnest, enthusiastic democratic-socialist professor, his soul in a condition of mesmerized agony.

For if—as FDR maintained—we must fight the economic Titans, are not Titans followed by Olympians? And what if, after the fight, the Titans of industry prudently marry the Olympians of the administrative state? Will their offspring not grow into rebellious adolescents who eventually mature into academic and corporate-welfare careerists? Careerists named Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example—those adepts of rearranging the deck chairs on our new ship of state. No myth of a high-flying Icarus will hold them back, but they sure can use the myth.

Originally published in Constituting America, June 21, 2016.

Republished with permission.

 

After defeating the challenge to natural-rights based commercial republicanism in the 1860—first at the polls, then on the battlefields—Americans faced the next challenge to their regime and its principles when Progressivism gathered adherents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This turned out to be much less deadly, but far subtler and more effective than anything the Southern plantation oligarchy had devised. Progressives first won positions in the universities, where they educated the new generation of American lawyers, scientists, clergymen, and writers in a moral and political doctrine that rejected natural rights in favor of historical rights. In this historicist view, all of nature, including human nature, continually evolves; nature is part of ever-changing history. Human beings think of new rights for themselves, and invent new governmental powers to secure them. Because there are no permanent standards by which anyone can judge these claims, the project has no real limits.

Such men as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt intended a vast expansion of governmental powers in order to enforce an ever-expanding menu of rights suggested by never-ending social and political progress. Under the ‘progressive’ dispensation, presidents become not statesmen, heading the executive branch of the federal government, but leaders of public opinion, pointing us to a brighter tomorrow. To supplement this opinion leadership, Progressivism posits a need for an administrative state —a set of bureaucracies staffed by tenured professional experts who will gather executive, legislative, and judicial powers in their hands in order to implement policies enacted by the elected opinion leaders. In effect, this means that the United States has instituted a new form of aristocracy—based not on the martial and civic virtues admired and sometimes embodied by the old aristocracies of Europe, but on purportedly scientific knowledge of how to effect change in human societies.

To make this project seem constitutional, Progressives needed a new theory of constitutional interpretation. Their own evolutionary or developmental theory of human rights suggested one: the “elastic” Constitution (as Wilson called it) or, more famously, the “living” Constitution—a phrase deployed by scholars and judges for at least the past half-century. Under this dispensation, Supreme Court judges are entitled to go beyond the letter of constitutional law, beyond the intentions of the Framers, and make up new civil rights or bless new governmental powers when those rights and powers comport with what the judges deem to be in accord with historical progress.

No civil war resulted from this challenge because the Progressives didn’t need one and never did anything so rash as to bring one upon themselves. They only needed opportune circumstances in which their well-defined doctrines would seem attractive, first in the tumultuous early years of the movement, when labor strife crested, then in the Great Depression, then in the Second World War, and finally in an ever-expanding list of civil rights—rights conceived as the results of historical change rather than defenses of permanent natural rights. Constitutional law responded to whatever social changes seemed to be ‘in the air.’

For more than a century, our presidential elections have often seen disputes deriving from the tension between the old Constitution—which after all has not been entirely jettisoned—and the new, living, evolving constitution, a constitution written not so much in formal amendments as in an ever more complex array of Supreme Court decisions, administrative regulations, executive orders, and treaties. Both political parties have had their hand in this, although the Democrats have proven the most full-throated Progressives, especially (to take the post-World War II presidencies) in the Johnson and Obama administrations.

In the 2016 election, once again the Constitution is at issue, although in some ways less clearly than in 1912, 1932, or 1964. The one candidate who based his campaign squarely on the hope of restoring the original understanding of American constitutionalism, Senator Ted Cruz of Arizona, has now dropped out of the running. This leaves us with the two likely nominees, former New York Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New York real estate developer Donald Trump. How do they understand the United States Constitution?

Their campaign websites reveal a lot about their view–in some ways more than they may have intended.

Secretary Clinton’s website features “112 reasons (and counting!) Hillary Clinton should be our next president.” By the time you read this, I am sure many more will have been conceived. One of them is that the next president will likely nominate several Supreme Court justices—it being clear to Secretary Clinton that she will make wiser choices than her opponent. Overall, however, it must be said that the Constitution does not loom large on the list. Solar panels, background checks for gun purchases, student loans, health care, removal of “sentence disparity between crack and powder cocaine” all get a shout-out. What is more, “She has made LGBT rights a priority of U. S. foreign policy.” And perhaps above all, Secretary Clinton is “a progressive who gets things done”—that last phrase a slap at her Democratic primary opponent, Senator Sanders, a socialist whose record of legislative achievement has not furnished him with any major talking points. It is fair, then, to say that Secretary Clinton self-identifies with Progressivism and therefore with the notion of an “elastic” or “living” Constitution. Her list of legislative proposals never says, but merely assumes, that they are constitutional. In the immortal words of her Progressive ally in the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, upon being asked if nationalized health insurance is constitutional, “Are you kidding?” Don’t we all know that we have moved from Chief Justice John Marshall’s interpretive principle, that judges “say what the law is,” to the new principle, that judges (and professional administrators, and presidents issuing executive orders) tell us what the law is?

In 2013 Secretary Clinton became the proud recipient of the Liberty Medal, awarded annually be the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The Center selected her “in recognition of her lifelong career in public service and her ongoing advocacy effort on behalf of women and girls around the glove.” That is, the Constitution Center honored her for nothing specifically constitutional. Nor is the award intended anyone necessarily American. Last year, it went to the Dalai Lama—an estimable man, but a Tibetan or, if you prefer, ‘a citizen of the world.’ Judging from this pattern, globalism trumps both nationhood and constitutionalism at the National Constitution Center.

Speaking of trumping, the website of the presumptive Republican nominee turns out to be an interestingly mixed bag, as far as the Constitution is concerned. First of all, it actually mentions the Constitution—at least, one part of it, the Second Amendment. And it doesn’t merely assert the right to bear arms. It goes further, saying where the right does not come from: “The Constitution doesn’t create that right—it ensures that the government can’t take it away.” The right to bear arms “is about self-defense, pure and simple.” If we already have a right to defend ourselves, prior to our Constitution-writing—and in fact we were defending ourselves when we declared our independence from the British Empire, eleven years before the Philadelphia convention—then where does the right come from? Mr. Trump’s website doesn’t say, but at least it doesn’t contradict the fundamental principles of the Founders, that rights exist by nature.

Similarly, the website is consistent with, without clearly enunciating, the idea that the American Union rests on a social contract among its members. The sentence “A nation without borders is not a nation” implies that human beings come together to form nations, and not that nations arise from ‘blood and soil’—a European notion that has caused no end of trouble in the past two centuries The call to “end birthright citizenship” similarly suggests a contractual rather than a biological bond, and that the widespread interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as establishing birthright citizenship is mistaken. This means that Mr. Trump disagrees with the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in U. S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the source of the birthright-citizenship claim.

Extending the search beyond the website itself, we learn that Trump is no Progressive when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution itself. In a televised interview, Anderson Cooper asked, “Do you see the Constitution as a living, breathing document, or do you see it as something set in stone a long time ago?” A college professor might object that the dichotomy is false and prejudicially stated. The Constitution isn’t “set in stone”; it has been amended 27 times. And the phrase “a long time ago” implies that it is somehow irrelevant to this day, outmoded. But true to his tendency to go ahead and gulp down his interrogator’s bait, then dare him or her to reel him in, Trump went right ahead and replied, “I see the Constitution as set in stone.” A prominent member of the construction industry, he may not mind the idea of a firm foundation.

His critics are not so sure he sees the Constitution as set in stone. For example, when challenged on his stated intention to expand the libel laws to protect public figures such as himself, he cited not the U. S. Constitution but English common law, which does indeed put the burden of proof of libel on the accuser and not the accused. The obvious problem (as a patriot like Trump should see) is that this isn’t England. And when Mr. Trump threatened Senator Cruz with legal action for one of his campaign charges, Cruz ended the discussion by saying he would welcome the opportunity to depose Trump in a courtroom. Other critics have remarked Mr. Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for a rather expansive definition of eminent domain, one that seems to include takings of property not merely for clear-cut public goods—a roadway, for example—but for the benefit of private developers (such as himself) whose acquisitions would lead to increased revenues for the municipality in which the development was located and therefore (so his argument goes) serve the public good. That strikes many observers as a bit of a stretch.

Probably the most intense unease about Mr. Trump’s constitutional bona fides arises from the general tone of his campaign. Entertaining and unforgettable it has been. But even his most devoted supporters find it hard to claim that he has elevated the level of American political discourse. A candidate who takes pride in refusing to keep a civil tongue in his head raises pardonable worries about his respect for the framework of civil society itself. The rule of law, including constitutional law, requires an underlying tone of law-abidingness and civility if we are to sustain it.

On this 240th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, a year away from the 220th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, we see a presidential election between two candidates who give constitutionally-minded Americans cause for worry. The Democratic Party candidate gives every sign of continuing the longstanding Progressive effort to replace American moral and political principles, in part by making the constitution malleable. The Republican Party candidate articulates a reasonably sound basic understanding of the nature of American constitutionalism, but also veers off that foundation in ways that do not build confidence in what might be called his constitutional temper.

In this, Americans have reaped what academia has sown. Whether we consider the original Progressivism of Wilson’s generation—with its elastic or living constitution—or the state-building, centralizing New-Deal Progressivism of FDR and LBJ, or the denigration of civility seen in the New-Left politics that has ensconced itself in academia and in the realms of entertainment and the news media in the past half-century, American educators have poorly served their fellow citizens. This underlying moral and intellectual decay cannot be remedied by an election.

Originally published in Constituting America, May 2016.
Republished with permission.

 

The primary elections of 2016 have invited comparisons to political factions in American politics that haven’t appeared in such clear focus for nearly seventy years. Although the Republican Party of 1948 had papered over its divisions between moderate-to-liberal business interests on the East Coast—represented by New York Governor Thomas Dewey—and Middle-Western conservatives—represented by U. S. Senator Robert Taft and, behind him, Herbert Hoover—Democrats split bitterly into three groups. The mainstream of the party nominated President Harry Truman; the left wing (which included democratic socialists and some communists) ran Henry Wallace on the ticket of the Progressive Party; and the segregationist, southern Democrats ran South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond on the ticket of the States’ Rights Democratic Party or “Dixiecrats.” In one of the most famous upsets in American political history, Truman overcame his party’s fracturing and defeated Dewey, although the Dixiecrats won the combined 38 electoral votes of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. The Progressives failed to win a single electoral vote.

Today, the inheritor of the Progressive—but really socialist—legacy of the Democratic Party, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, might easily trace his ideological lineage to Wallace and, even more clearly, to Eugene V. Debs, who ran a surprisingly credible campaign on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912. Some observers have linked Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign in the Republican party to the Dixiecrats, but there the pieces don’t fit so neatly.

True enough, many disaffected southern Democrats eventually made their way into the Republican Party, beginning with the 1964 presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. In 1968, Richard Nixon fashioned his successful “Southern Strategy” to consolidate Goldwater’s gains. However, the real Dixiecrat of 1968 was Alabama Governor George Wallace, a man unrelated to Henry either by blood or ideas. Like Thurmond, Wallace was a segregationist Democrat who wanted nothing to do with the Party of Lincoln. Wallace made the political last stand of the Lost Cause of the old Confederacy, which had persisted in a sort of radioactive half-life in the decades after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

From its beginnings the Democratic Party had fought not just partisan battles but battles over the character of the American regime itself. Often these battles centered on the meaning of the United States Constitution. The party’s first presidential nominee, Thomas Jefferson, had accused the Federalist Party of monarchic sympathies, winning election in 1800 on a surge of democratic-republican sentiment. In the more recognizably modern election of 1828, Andrew Jackson defeated his fellow-Democrat, John Quincy Adams, on a platform excoriating ‘aristocratic’ financial interests. Meanwhile, John C. Calhoun was defending another and more insidious form of aristocracy, the way of life of southern plantation slaveholders, in explicit opposition to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And of course the ever-worsening controversies leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction centered on constitutional questions at the deepest level: not only the meaning of various clauses in the U. S. Constitution itself, not only the character of American federalism, but the basic question Americans had raised in the first place, namely, are all men really created equal with respect to their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

The early Progressives of the Woodrow Wilson era had managed to avoid this issue and also to keep southern Democrats firmly within the Democratic Party. Wilson himself was a southern man, born in Virginia and raised in Augusta, Georgia. Like many Progressives, he took ‘race science’—the notion that human ‘races’ identifiable by skin color could be ranked hierarchically in terms of intellect and even moral sentiments—as cutting-edge science, that is, as a part of what it meant to be ‘progressive.’ But Progressives more fundamentally supposed that human nature itself was malleable, subject to evolutionary change, and this belief, coupled with their faith in democracy, in egalitarianism, reinforced by the research of anthropologists, began to turn the next generation of Progressives against racism. By the time of the New Deal, tensions between Progressives (now calling themselves ‘liberals’) and southern Democrats had begun to build.

Under the masterly political management of Franklin Roosevelt, the coalition of northern and southern Democrats nonetheless held firm, at least for the purpose of winning national elections. Southern segregationists could tolerate the complaints of northern liberals so long as the New Deal meant the Tennessee Valley Authority and other Depression-era public-spending programs in the South. But when FDR died, the Depression ended, and Harry Truman backed legislation enforcing civil rights for all Americans, many southern Democrats began to reassess their place in the coalition, even as their ancestors had reassessed their place in the Union. In July 1948 thirty-five southern Democrats walked out of the party convention in Constitution-proud Philadelphia, then met in Birmingham, Alabama to form a new party.

For decades since the Civil War, southern Democrats had claimed that the war had been fought not over slavery but over the right of the constituent states of the Union to govern themselves without interference from the federal government. This claim conveniently overlooked the actual content of the Southerners’ arguments (beginning with Calhoun), which had firmly linked states’ rights to the defense of the slaveholders’ way of life—their ‘domestic institutions,’ as the euphemism went. But a politically useful story may have stronger legs than an embarrassing truth, so the Dixiecrats had a ready-made tale to tell.

They told it in their platform, published at the convention of the States’ Rights Democratic Party held in August in Oklahoma City. Celebrating the United States Constitution as “the greatest charter of human liberty eve conceived by the mind of man,” the platform condemned what it called “the totalitarian, centralizing bureaucratic government” and “police nation” which “the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions” had “called for.” The delegates laid out the (red) meat of the document on its three central planks. First, “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race” against “the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statues, [and] control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.” Second, “We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.” Finally, Dixiecrats predicted, “the enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.”

These claims proved to be overwrought. The eventual enactment and enforcement of laws outlawing legal segregation of races and of religious congregants in no way impeded the economic development of the American South, which was given a rather substantial boost by the proliferation of air-cooling machines in the same period. As for miscegenation, it was at least as prevalent under slavery itself, and it didn’t spell apocalypse once it was legalized, either.

It is hard to resist the observation that the Dixiecrats fought the wrong battle for the wrong reason. Centralized, bureaucratic government had indeed carried the day against the legitimate political rights of the states. But to use ‘states’ rights’ as an implausible cover story for the defense of racial domination—especially when Southerners had raised few if any objections to federal bureaucrats when they came bearing gifts in the form of infrastructure projects and public-health programs—did no service to the lost cause of federalism. It enabled advocates of bureaucratic centralization to claim that they were the true defenders of American principles, although they were no such thing.

In the year 2016, Mr. Trump’s campaign has had little if anything to do with the Dixiecrats. For starters, the Dixiecrats are dead—quite literally. The last of the important ones, Strom Thurmond, passed away more than a dozen years ago at the age of 101, after one of the longest careers in the United States Senate in the history of the Republic. Legal segregation is every bit as dead, and Trump shows not a speck of interest in reviving it. He seems rather more to be running against another dimension of Progressivism: the rule of the administrative state and its cadre of technocrats—the ‘aristocracy’ of our own day, itself in uneasy regulatory alliance with business-corporation oligarchs. One need not overlook Mr. Trump’s numerous peccadillos and eccentricities to see that this dimension of his campaign speaks to a real issue, in danger of being lost in his noise, and that of his opponents.

As for the American regime the Dixiecrats sought to alter, it has veered not toward the racial politics of segregationists but toward the racial politics of ‘diversity’—a catchword of the Left, not the Right. This too contradicts the Declaration of Independence, but in 1948 it was unheard.