Realignment

REALIGNMENT. While various political currents on the Left, including the Communist Party, have held similar strategies, the policy known as “realignment” came out of the Shachtmanite tendency and refers to making the Democratic Party, in effect, a European-style social democratic party. Like the Socialist Workers Party, both the Workers Party (1940–1949) and the Independent Socialist League (1949–1958), led by Max Shachtman, had denounced the Democratic Party as a capitalist party and urged workers and minorities to form their own labor party. Reluctantly, however, the Shachtmanites came the conclusion that the labor movement, including its rank-and-file and minority members, identified with the Democratic Party. A small socialist movement, then, had no serious alternatives. In time, labor might actually create a de facto labor party of sorts within the Democratic Party. Communists, in their own ways, had arrived at similar conclusions a generation earlier, albeit without the Cold War assumptions.

In 1958, when they entered the Socialist Party, the Shachtmanites began to promote the policy of realignment. They envisioned the fall of city machines through development of a mass labor movement and an advanced welfare state. They identified a key political task in expelling the southern racists from the Democratic Party. Once these two goals were met they believed, labor, minorities, and middle-class progressives form a coalition to take control of the Democratic Party, with the labor movement at its center.

Realignment strategies along these lines reached an apex in 1978 as Michael Harrington and others in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee sought with apparent success to influence the programs and proposals of the mid-term Democratic convention of 1978. These expectations were, however, rapidly dashed. The Rainbow Coalition, led by Jesse Jackson, revived a version of these hopes for a decade from the leftward edges of a Democratic Party actually shifting further rightward. Progressive strategies once again appeared successful or at least promising with the Obama 2008 nomination campaign and election, but progressives grew increasingly disillusioned. Hopes for a kind of realignment took on an almost startling new life thanks to the 2015-2016 nomination campaign of independent socialist Bernie Sanders, hopes predictably dashed by the nomination of Hillary Clinton, but renewed by the sudden and skyrocketing growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Supporters of Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aligned with Rev. William J. Barber, II, in the rise of a yet newer interracial movement in the South, among other hopeful signs, fairly highlighted the highest anticipations for Realignment since the days of New Deal and the 1960s.

Day, Meagan and Micah Uetricht. Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. New York: Verso, 2020.

Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.