Radical Democrats: Ideology and Political Change in California in the Post-World War Two Era

The era between the end of World War Two and the 1970s witnessed dramatic changes in the way governments in the industrialized world perceived questions of social policy and economic growth. This book project aims to investigate the extent to which a moderate left-wing politics developed in the United States in these decades. This study will complicate the dominant historiography on postwar American politics, which tends to stress institutional and political constraints hampering left-of-centre political activism in the wake of the New Deal.
The state of California is important as not only is it a large and rapidly growing state in this period, but it is also the site of significant political change in the 1950s and 1960s that clearly demonstrates the link between social change and political ideology that I want to explore. The Democratic Party in California built a new political base in the 1950s that used grass-roots activism to mobilize a cross-class coalition of voters behind a left-of-center program that would propel the Democratic Party to political dominance. I argue that in California there was considerable scope for the development of an ideology of the left that could unite elements of the working class with middle class activists in order to entrench the previously moribund Democratic Party in power after 1958. This new generation of Democrats interpreted the human rights of Americans broadly to include the right to an income regardless of employment status, and the right to racial and sexual equality. This study will examine the establishment and development of the California Democratic Council, the Democratic Club movement, and the legislative program of the Democrats in the state legislature in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to evaluate the link between mainstream party politics and radical political activism in those years. The book will explore how debates in liberal circles in California about questions of the welfare state and economic growth gave them the political language with which to interpret broader questions of civil and sexual rights, in many cases before the explosion of the rights revolution in the 1970s.
Thus this project seeks to explain the successes and failures of social democratic thought and practice in the postwar years in an American context. Social democratic parties and activists in other parts of the developed world believed in the social responsibility of citizens to act for the common good by supporting welfare programs through general taxation and in the right of the individual to civil equality regardless of sexuality, race, and gender. In the UK and elsewhere parties on the left in the post-war era had to reconfigure their political programs for an age of abundance, emphasized by works such as Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956). In this light, developments such as the great liberalization of California's welfare laws in the early 1960s can be seen in parallel with similar developments elsewhere. Yet the dynamics of this important political change were particular to the United States and to California. An investigation of Democratic Party policymaking and activism in California sheds light on the processes through which mainstream politics adapted to changing conceptions of society, including attitudes to welfare and the 'deserving' poor, sexuality, individual rights, and the regulation of capitalism. The rapid population and economic growth of the Golden State in the postwar era, together with its particular dynamics of race and class, make the emergence of a new politics on the moderate left committed to civil and social rights a particularly important case study of political change that helps us understand the origins of the modern Democratic Party and the dynamics of its growing acceptance of social difference in recent decades.
This book makes an original contribution to our understanding of modern American politics as it relates to social change.