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Divided They Fell

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Radosh traces the roots of the shift within the Democratic party from one of shared community and mutually acknowledged ethics, for the empowerment of those in need, to one of class warfare cant and socialist dreams. Just as Ronald Reagan averred that he didn't leave the Democratic party, it left him, Radosh offers his concurrence. Radosh assigns the outset of the shift as having its roots in the McGovern candidacy for president in the 1972 election campaign. He foreshadows this event with musings on the 1960's and the highpoint of its madness, the 1968 riots in Chicago at the Democratic party convention. For reference an interested reader should be encouraged to read "the Dark Side of the Left" by Richard Ellis, "America's 30 year's war" by Balint Vazsonyi, and "the Long March" by Roger Kimball. These books also traverse the same timeline as "Divided They Fell" and offer a meaty stew for the cogitative mind.

Radosh is a former red-diaper-baby from Queens, NY who suffered the "shock of recognition", re Sidney Hook in "Out of Step", during this transformative process. Radosh points out how the party has lost its former core constituency while morphing into a party of grievance for varied and sundry, one issue obstructionist, special interest groups. The entire process has been driven by progressive-socialist utopian intellectuals who, unable to create a communist style revolution in America, have engaged in what Radosh would agree to and what Roger Kimball refers to as the long march through the institutions. Radosh recounts these measures in sequence providing his readers with continuity and substance. He leads us along the way to understanding more fully why America is the politically divided nation that it is today. He's a very conversational writer who takes his readers seamlessly through events without Pretension or bombast. I enjoyed the book immensely and you will to.

In 2000, Al Gore carried on a tradition of Democratic Presidential nominees that dates back to 1964: he failed to garner a clear majority of the popular vote (ie., 51% or better). Throughout this 36-year period, only Jimmy Carter was able to amass even 50% of the vote, a rather tepid showing, coming as it did, less than two years after the national nightmare of Watergate and Ford's wildly unpopular pardon of Nixon.

All in all, it's been a precipitous come down for the proud party of FDR and Truman and JFK.

Ronald Radosh opens a window on the problems that have plagued the national Democratic Party these many years. In an incisive history penned prior to the 1996 election, he traces the demise of the Democratic majority to the Party's capture by Far Left, or New Politics, factions that would dominate its agenda from the late 1960s to the advent of Clinton in the early 1990s.

Radosh's book is an excellent chronicle of a Party that lost touch with its core constituencies, and as it moved increasingly to placate highly vocal Radicals on its Left fringe, encouraged the en masse defection of Middle Class voters, some of whom have never returned.

The increasing Far-Left tilt of the Democractic Party in the 1970s and 1980s engendered a realignment that continues to affect the political landscape two decades later.

It is 1996. Will Bill Clinton be re-elected. We know the answer now and we know that Democratic Party gains arguably were forfeited by personal misconduct on the part of the President. What we don't know is why the party was so weak between 1964 and 1996, a thirty-two year span. This book purports to tell us what happened. Ronald Radosh identifies himself as a registered member of the party who is right to center.

Mississippi had led the nation in beatings, lynching, and mysterious disappearances. African Americans were registered to vote there at the lowest rate in the United States. The Mississippi Free Democratic Party was prepared to take over the state's delegation to the 1964 national convention. The Freedom Democrats were pledged to support the convention's expected choice, Lyndon Johnson.

The arguments favoring seating of the Freedom Democrats gave rise to the New Left. The fight between the two Mississippi delegations and Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Joseph Rauh, and Walter Reuther foreshadowed splits within the Democratic Party over Vietnam and the break-up of the old liberal-labor coalition. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. The danger to the Democratic Party was that demands of the most radical adherents would come to dominate its ranks.

At a Conference on the New Politics held at the Palmer House in Chicago, Martin Luther King called for a new coalition of conscience. One observer said that the convention was transformed to a morality play on race relations. Allard Lowenstein, for one, is profiled. The reform of the Democratic Party in 1972 was undertaken by New Politics types. The author takes us through problems created by the Vietnam War, the candidacies of McGovern, McCarthy, Mondale, and Dukakis, and the presidencies of Clinton and Carter. The Democratic Party is apt to read the public mood inaccurately.

The book is both dated and biased on one hand and packed with good and useful analysis on the other hand. Some of the issues are still pertinent. It is hoped the Democratic Party will experience revival.