Social Democrats USA

SOCIAL DEMOCRATS USA. One of three socialist organizations to emerge from the 1972-1973 fracturing of the Socialist Party (SP), the Social Democrats USA quickly became known as the most conservative of the three (SP, DSOC, SDUSA) smallish entities. With a mostly older constituency, SDUSA declined steadily until it dissolved in 2005. A very small, would-be successor bore little resemblance to the original.

Positioned within the AFL-CIO leadership and later within sections of the US foreign policy establishment, the Social Democrats pursued an agenda of trade-unionism, civil rights, and anti-Communism, each defined in unique ways. Most of SDUSA’s notable founding members, including Albert Glotzer, Don Slaiman, Tom Kahn, Rachelle Horowitz, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Irwin Suall, Sandra Feldman, and Norman Hill, had long been followers of Max Shachtman. Those old enough had supported Shachtman and the Third Camp against orthodox Trotskyists in the split of 1939. The split prepared the Workers Party to enter the leadership the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the rank-and-file opposition to the World War II no-strike pledge supported by the Communists, and then to battle the influence of Communists at all levels of the union. Shachtman lieutenant Don Slaiman came to lead the Shachtmanites’ rise into UAW staff positions.

By the mid-1950s, the Shachtmanites, fewer in number and renamed the Independent Socialist League (ISL), remained close to UAW president Walter Reuther. Leaders of the small but well-placed ISL focused their attention upon envisioning a labor party. Kahn and Horowitz, recruited to the ISL’s Young Socialist League, had by 1956 become assistants to Rustin. Under his leadership, the two began organizing civil rights demonstrations in collaboration with the prestigious Randolph. Suall, a longtime Socialist Party (SP) member, facilitated the Shachtmanites’ entry into the SP in 1958. The leading faction of the Shachtman group then used the SP as an organizing base to catalyze what they expected to be the realignment of the Democratic Party into a social-democratic labor and civil rights party. Events seemed, for a time, to be on their side. Playing key roles in the logistics of the 1963 March on Washington, they envisioned and helped to plan the steering of the labor-civil rights coalition into Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Democratic presidential campaign. A dissident faction, led by Hal Draper, rejected this plan as an abandonment of the labor party for a strategy no longer remotely socialist.

Working within the wings of the Johnson administration, Shachtman’s lieutenants became advisors to AFL-CIO president George Meany. They sought to bridge the labor and civil rights movements in pursuit of a social-democratic program, but with an increasing anti-communist emphasis as the Vietnam War expanded. Meany hired Kahn as a speechwriter, Hill as an Industrial Union Department staffer, and Slaiman to head the AFL-CIO’s civil rights department. Albert Shanker, the Meany-aligned president of the New York American Federation of Teachers (AFT), hired Feldman along with Shachtman’s wife, Yetta Barsh, on his staff. In turn, Meany endowed the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which issued Rustin’s 1966 “Freedom Budget.” Intended as a social-democratic embodiment of Johnson’s Great Society, the Freedom Budget called for full employment, a guaranteed minimum income, national health insurance, repeal of Taft-Hartley, and social welfare spending increases. The Freedom Budget sidestepped growing controversy over the Vietnam War by rendering its proposed expenditures consistent with continued military funding. AFL-CIO leaders, most of them never warm to drastic social change, declined to add it to their legislative calendar, and the Budget quietly disappeared.

Viewing Communism as a greater evil than the US role in the Third World, Shachtman’s followers supported the Vietnam War ever more aggressively. The Socialist Party organ, New America, earlier the voice of Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington among others, became increasingly an epicenter of hawkish views. The SP, small compared to the antiwar movement on campuses and many communities and divided in its own views on the war, loyally supported Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election. The peace-oriented challenges to the Democratic mainstream for the nomination had meanwhile raced from the campuses into much of middle-class life and beyond, to artists and intellectuals awakened by events. The disastrous 1968 Democratic Party convention, highlighted by police violence and a manipulated outcome, damaged Humphrey badly and arguably cost him the presidency. As far as the group around Shachtman was concerned, the students and peaceniks of every kind, including many at the highest levels of American liberalism, had proved themselves disloyal both to union constituencies and to the nation. The revolutionary rhetoric of the New Left seemed to the Meany office decisive proof that Stalinism had returned, despise any notable presence of their own past bete noir, the Moscow-loyal Communist Party.

The small youth cadre recruited to the pro-war cause faced the reality of campuses wrenched by the draft and the stories of brothers, cousins and boyfriends unwillingly serving in a mistaken war. Undaunted, the hawkish youngsters included leading personalities of the following decades around what would become SDUSA. Penn Kemble rose to chair the SP’s Young People’s Socialist League, where he recruited his successor, Joshua Muravchik, as well as Carl Gershman, who rose to vice chairman. With avid support from the rising Israel lobby, these youngsters formed the Youth Committee for Peace and Democracy in the Middle East (YCPDME) to combat growing criticisms of Israel on American campuses and beyond.

By 1972, the Democratic Party stood divided between “two Georges,” George Meany and George McGovern. The two sides had overlapping if deeply conflicting domestic constituencies and severely conflicting records on the Vietnam War, not to mention US policies in Latin America, Africa and other parts of Asia. McGovern’s forces diminished the AFL influence within the Democratic Party by introducing quotas for black, women, and youth convention delegates as representatives of a rising “New Politics” social movement coalition. Seeking to defend the predominance of the AFL-CIO and his own political views, Meany avidly supported two Johnson coalition politicians, Humphrey and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, for the presidential nomination. Jackson, more extreme in his views, had not only supported the war during the 1960s (along with most union presidents), but had long been known as the “Senator from Boeing,” a lobbyist for the defense industry. McGovern, Jackson’s opposite in every way, became a standard-bearer for the war’s opponents, who by 1970 or so included many dissident labor activists and labor leaders including Walter Reuther. Civil rights leaders became similarly divided by the war, leaving Rustin in the minority still supporting the war and seeking to hold the more hawkish section of the original Johnson coalition together.

Past successes and current crises drove the small but increasingly fractious SP into a near-terminal crisis. The “Coalition Caucus” behind McGovern supported a realignment pf progressives of all kinds, feminists and environmentalist with labor and civil rights groups, under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. They coalesced against Meany’s hawks, increasingly rankled by feminism and environmentalism among other differences. The equally antiwar Debs Caucus, led by David McReynolds, adamantly opposed the de facto dissolution of the socialist movement into the Democratic Party. The remaining. Meany-aligned Shachtmanites shored up their small movement by merging the SP with Charles Zimmerman’s small and aging Democratic Socialist Federation in March, 1972.

This last merger had its own peculiar legacies. The DSF had grown out of the split of the Socialist Party during the 1930s, aligning union leaders and (a few years later) founders of New York’s Liberal Party against the socialist mainstream led by Norman Thomas. The splitters had taken away some membership, but more important, had also taken the Forverts, the Jewish Daily Forward and a handful of labor functionaries within and around the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

The merger coalition had also gained the support of the Jewish Labor Committee of the AFL-CIO, an increasingly powerful, avidly pro-Israel bloc of more conservative union leaders.To these circles came still others, intellectuals with a rising prestige, such as Senator’s Jackson’s chief strategist, political analyst Ben Wattenberg.

Within months, the three blocs had become three organizations. The merged Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation’s December, 1972, convention voted to change its organization’s name to Social Democrats, USA. Within months, McReynolds’s Debs Caucus left SDUSA to form the Socialist Party USA, and Harrington’s Coalition Caucus left SDUSA to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).

Bayard Rustin and Charles Zimmerman co-chaired the consolidated SDUSA, with Carl Gershman as executive director and Paul Feldman editing what had become its own tabloid monthly, New America. Shachtman’s death in November, 1972, left a vacuum never filled. Most of its leaders, including George Meany, “went silent” on the election, a de facto support of Nixon. The 1972 election was, then, a disaster for all concerned, although arguably worst for the supporters of George McGovern, who gained back some support but not enough from the subsequent Watergate scandal, the resignation of the President and the disgrace of the Republican Party.

A low membership figure of between 1,000 and 2,000 boded ill for the new SDUSA, but membership figures could be deceiving. Its leaders considered themselves well-positioned within the AFL-CIO. Albert Shanker in particular remained a steadfast supporter and eventually served on SDUSA’s National Advisory Council. In 1974. he selected loyalist Sandra Feldman to succeed him when he rose to head the national AFT, which lent prestige and finances to SDUSA during his tenure. SDUSA also retained senior organizers within the Michigan UAW, and ties to the upper levels of the Steelworkers, Bricklayers, and International Ladies Garment Workers unions. The A. Philip Randolph Institute linked the Social Democrats to a nationwide network of organizations of non-white trade unionists, notwithstanding SDUSA’s avid opposition to any enforcement of Affirmative Action.

The affiliated or supportive circles of various kinds within and around SDUSA had grown to nearly two hundred by the end of the 1970s. Social Democratic locals met in Miami, the Twin Cities, Washington, D.C., and a few other cities. But with a function generally narrowed to organizing labor support for Jackson-Humphrey Democrats and opposing the “New Politics” coalitions of urban reform, peace advocacy and environmentalism, the SDUSA’s grassroots presence gradually diminished, its membership concentrated ever further in union officialdom and letterhead organizations. The surge of local “New Politics” progressives affiliated or close to DSOC to mayoralities, city council seats and such in California, Oregon, Wisconsin, New York and Vermont, dramatized the contrast between the competing entities.

Unable to prevent Nixon’s drawing-down of U.S. military commitment in Vietnam, the Social Democrats initially turned the Arab-Israeli conflict into a proxy for the McGovern-Meany divide. Meany’s close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had been based not only upon a shared anti-Communist geopolitics but also upon a common vision of organized labor exercising governing power in a democratic society. The Israeli Labor Party advanced a social-democratic program as Israel’s dominant party between 1968 and 1977 and Israel’s labor federation, the Histadrut, influenced virtually all aspects of social and economic life, including a model of universal military conscription inimical to America’s campus counterculture. Israel thus served as an ideal towards which American Social Democrats aspired. By contrast, the Arab states that attacked Israel in 1973 were regarded by Social Democrats as authoritarian in politics, non-trade-unionist in social base, and Soviet-aligned, characteristics shared, according to Social Democrats, with McGovern’s more radical supporters in the United States. The Palestinians, isolated and faced with displacement by incoming settlers in the West Bank, seemed to SDUSAers a distraction if not a threat, and unworthy of support.

By 1973, SDUSA’s YCPDME began accepting annual payments of $5,000 from the Anti-Defamation League (where Suall served as intelligence czar) to furnish reports on US left-wing and mainstream political organizations and individuals critical of Israel, on and off campus, throughout the United States. Over subsequent decades, the Social Democrats would support only those American politicians who regarded U.S. military power as necessary to combat Communism and to defend Israel against all perceived threats. Harrington was to interpret these American socialists’ fidelity to Israel as a function of their personal backgrounds as Jews, but others viewed the move more broadly. Leading figures in SDUSA, entering coalitions with supporters of Ronald Reagan’s policies, joined hands with opponents of affirmative action along with the opponents of what they dubbed environmentalist “extremism.” In doing so they remained faithful, up to a point, to the classical social democratic vision of NATO’s European partners, including Sweden, if not to the changing views of younger European Social Democrats touched by the New Left.

In December, 1972, coinciding with SDUSA’s founding convention, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) was founded as an SDUSA front group by Wattenberg, Kemble, and Muravchik. Behind a program of pro-labor domestic policy, anti-détente foreign policy, and rolling back McGovern’s 1972 Democratic convention reforms, the CDM brought together key constituencies. These included anti-Communist labor officials, above all, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Lane Kirkland, and the leaders of the emerging neoconservative movement, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and Elliott Abrams, also politicos like Max Kampelman and Max Green. Decter, one of the most vocal and polemical opponents of feminism among American intellectuals, effectively attached her cause to SDUSA. Jack Joyce, president of the bricklayers, became the most prominent opponent of abortion rights within the labor movement. The pages of New America bristled with their views, distancing the SDUSA further from younger and more liberal Americans.

Backed by the CDM and the Liberal Party, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1976 senate campaign for nomination for the Democratic candidate in the New York senatorial race against peacenik Bella Abzug, succeeded grandly. Abzug, a darling of feminism and the peace movement, had been vanquished for a hawk whose famous Moynihan Report had explained black poverty as based in culture rather than discrimination. Senator Henry Jackson’s own presidential bid failed, however, as would Walter Mondale’s CDM-backed presidential run eight years later. Beyond the scope of SDUSA and CDM, but definitely not beyond their sphere of influence, Mondale’s rise and his defeat prompted the 1985 formation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The fading CDM sought to join the DLC as its labor arm, but was turned away. The DLC’s power grew with the election of its consummate “New Democrat,” Bill Clinton, scarcely beholden to labor. The power and influence of the CDM and with it the role of SDUSA in the Democratic Party, had effectively eclipsed. SDUSA’s survivors would urge and support the US assault upon Iraq, but by that time, they had been scattered and badly diminished by age.

The Republican Party proved, as least temporarily, more amenable to Social Democratic penetration. Sidelined by the Carter administration in favor of McGovernite appointments, Social Democrats joined Kirkpatrick to found the Committee on Present Danger (CPD) on the CDM model. In a 1979 Commentary article, Kirkpatrick argued that Carter had facilitated the rise of totalitarian forces abroad by undermining pro-American, albeit authoritarian rulers of assorted nations, including those placed into power by military coups and kept in power by repression. Assessing the prospects for democratizing regimes of the two varieties, neoconservatives including Kirkpatrick nevertheless seemed to maintain more foreign-policy realism than Social Democratic advocates of confrontation of US military action, notably Tom Kahn. Yet these two blocs maintained a united front against the common enemy: détente. Meanwhile, the public presence of SDUSA, New America, closed its doors. SDUSA had become unique within the history of American socialist movements: its prestige and influence centered upon its power within the Beltline, its membership small but its apparent access to resources substantial.

Within the Beltline, Social Democratic credentials and backing mattered, especially in career opportunities. With the Irving Kristol’s support, Wattenberg, Kampelman, Muravchik, and Gershman took positions with the American Enterprise Institute. There, they forged ties to a Republican establishment that had welcomed Jackson-Humphrey Democrat defectors in 1980. Social Democrats thereby secured foreign policy positions under the Reagan administration. Kampelman joined the State Department in various roles; Gershman began a lifetime tenure heading the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); SDUSA member Adrian Karatnycky became Executive Director of Freedom House. Green served as Reagan’s liaison to the Jewish community. While Social Democrats opposed Reagan’s policies on labor, welfare, and trade, they shared his opposition to quota-based affirmative action in hiring and his support for “values-based” instruction in schools. Casual readers of New America , before its closure, could be impressed by the editorial overlap with the pages of Commentary. A few years later, an editor of the AFT organ proclaimed proudly that thanks to her leadership, her union now had a true conservative paper.

In the name of anti-communism, SDUSA notables supported Reagan’s reversal of détente during “Cold War II,” with leading SDUSA members joining Decter’s Committee for a Free World. As the membership of the AFL-CIO fell precipitously, SDUSA resisted even more determinedly any and all union leaders who sought democratization of leadership and other internal reforms in the labor movement. Views energetically by labor reformers, the Machinists’ William Winpisinger and the Screen Actors Guild’s Ed Asner, both members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council and supporters of the new Democratic Socialists of America, naturally seemed anathema to the SDUSA.

If the Shachtmanite path from World War II-era wildcat strike champions to Cold War II-era “State Department Socialists” has been widely interpreted as right-wing drift, this interpretation risks oversimplification, obscuring in part the grounds on which Social Democrats still self-identified as socialists, if not as leftists, into the twenty-first century. Social Democrats identified the interests of the working class with the interests of the trade-union movement, and the interests of the trade-union movement with the interests of the leadership of the labor leadership. To SDUSA’s critics (be they Marxist or McGovernite), SDUSA’s political logic amounted to a kind of trade-unionist “substitutionism" of working people by union leaders. Social Democrats, more tolerant of authoritarian but pro-American regimes, viewed trade unions under Communist governments as appendages of the same party-state bureaucracy that employed the workers. Worse than even the worst business unions, Social Democrats argued, these “so-called trade unions” enforced a regime tantamount to slave labor, imprisoning or otherwise punishing workers for organizing independently of the party-state. By 1972, the Shachtmanites’ conception of socialism had already shifted from proletarian control of production to electoral representation for the trade-union movement as an interest group within a mixed economy, reconciling their own enmeshment within a Keynesian state. SDUSA shared this broad political perspective with many fellow member organizations of the Socialist International, especially those within NATO. But the depth of their own involvement within US foreign policy circles and the military-industrial economy naturally made them unique, as did their lack of a membership base for their views.

It was on this ideological basis that Social Democrats had taken leading roles in prosecuting the AFL-CIO’s heavily funded opposition to global Communists. Led by ex-Communist Jay Lovestone, the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Department (IAD) had channeled millions of dollars to anti-Communist trade-unionists worldwide by the 1960s, with funding derived from both union dues and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Kirkland and Shanker viewed Lovestone’s work as a venerable tradition of working-class solidarity worth continuing. Kirkland, following Meany, continued to deny that the AFL-CIO accepted CIA funds, even in the face of continued revelations. Most controversially, the AFL leadership inclined to support the destabilization or overthrow of all governments, elected or otherwise, likewise all social movements anywhere and everywhere, viewed as enemies to US interests.

Fortuitously, in 1980. Kirkland directed Kahn to organize support for the Polish trade union Solidarity. Kahn’s campaign proceeded despite discouragement from the Carter administration, which feared that it would prompt a Soviet invasion of Poland. It was a very high point in an otherwise spotty record.

As the AFL and CIO leaders had welcomed the overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in 1953 and of Salvador Allende in 1973 in Chile, labor leaders supported the Nicaraguan Contras, whom Abrams illegally funded via the State Department and CIA labor partners throughout Latin America. Contra leader Alfonso Robelo keynoted SDUSA’s 1985 convention. Kahn’s international efforts received support from Gershman’s NED, which financed the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, and from the deeply conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy (IAD), led by Kemble. While the Reagan administration approved of these partnerships, the AFL-CIO occasionally exercised an international politics at odds with Reagan’s. Following a 1986 delegation to South Africa and perhaps stung by the widely-reported “security” alliance of Israel and the Apartheid regime, Kirkland urged Congress to abandon Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement” and to use sanctions rather than diplomacy to apply pressure against apartheid. Kahn, meanwhile, was promoted to Lovestone’s former position in 1986. His triumphant Polish campaign culminated in Lech Walesa’s 1989 address to the AFL-CIO convention in the wake of Solidarity’s electoral sweep, a major incident within the fall of Soviet Communism and the East Bloc.

The post-Cold War landscape rendered the Social Democrats doubly obsolete. Bad habits returned, as in the wake of the Russian leadership collapse, when heavily-funded efforts to establish new Russian unions loyal to Washington (and the AFL-CIO) fell flat. The “Shock Doctrine” impoverished the Russian population beyond all expectations. Foreign policy Establishment pride at bringing Yeltsin to power would turn into embarrassment and outrage at his successor, Vladimir Putin. Lane Kirkland and others in his circle had expected a world eager to congratulate American labor for its global role. Instead, a world of employers, unleashed by the global market, saw little reason for further interference with business prerogatives.

The terms of the new century had already been set. Endorsed by CDM, President Bill Clinton had turned decisively away from SDUSA’s hoped-for revival of New Deal style economic policies. The AFL-CIO proved powerless to block NAFTA, endorsing even Democrats who led the fight for the new treaty. The organized labor movement had lost the chance to reverse the flight of American jobs to non-democratic countries such as China, or to prevent the imposition of capitalist “shock therapy” upon the wider East European landscape. By 1995, opposition to the fumbling leadership of Lane Kirkland had grown into a coalition of labor progressives and worried moderates. Ridiculed as incompetent, Kirkland registered a first in labor: he proved powerless to choose his own successor. After a floor-fight led by pragmatists but also by DSAers, SDUSA choice Tom Donahue fell to John Sweeney, who announced his membership in DSA. The AFL-CIO membership, under the leadership of Meany and Kirkland, had already sunk so far downward that any near-time revival had become unlikely. Sweeney’s victory represented SDUSA’s loss to its longtime rivals in the labor movement. Adopting positions on the environment, gender and race that SDUSA had bitterly opposed, the new administration seemed to sweep out the old entirely.

Following the demands of labor reformers, Sweeney and his team proceeded to downsize the AFL-CIO’s international arm, sweeping into retirement most it not all of those SDUSA supporters identified with CIA activities. The foreign policy establishment likewise found Social Democrats increasingly irrelevant. In a 2003 address to Gershman’s NED, George W. Bush announced “global democratic revolution” as his newest justification for the recent invasion of Iraq. Neoconservatives rather than Social Democrats dominated Bush’s state department and it was they who enjoyed the closest relationships with the much-strengthened Israel lobby. While Gershman and Muravchik came to identify as neoconservatives themselves, some remaining Social Democrats did not do so. Kemble and David Horowitz, for example, avidly supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but complained that US military occupation had not properly prepared the democratization of the devastated, if presumably liberated, country.

Kemble planned on his deathbed the historic SDUSA’s terminal 2005 conference. Gershman officially dismantled the organization shortly thereafter. Scattered former members have attempted to revive SDUSA on a national basis since 2009. Prospects appear limited, however. By another irony of history, the Communist Party USA, nearly vanishing in the wake of one last split in 1991, later revived on a modest level and its small membership found themselves in an affable partnership with the DSA in a variety of projects, but especially the support of past AFL nemesis Bernie Sanders and of the growing progressive camp within labor.

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