New Deal coalition

New Deal coalition
Prominent membersFranklin D. Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Henry A. Wallace
Harry S. Truman
Alben W. Barkley
Lyndon B. Johnson
Estes Kefauver
John F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy
Ted Kennedy
Adlai Stevenson II
Hubert Humphrey
Eugene McCarthy
James Farley
Wayne Morse
Edmund Muskie
W. Averell Harriman
Pat Brown
FounderFranklin D. Roosevelt
Founded1932
Dissolved1970s
Succeeded byProgressive Party (1948)
Dixiecrats (1948)
IdeologyEarly phase:
Big tent
Social liberalism
Pro-New Deal
Laborism
Later phase:
Modern liberalism
Anti-communism
Pro-civil rights
Political positionCenter-left[1]

The New Deal coalition was an American political coalition that supported the Democratic Party beginning in 1932. The coalition is named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and the follow-up Democratic presidents. It was composed of voting blocs who supported them. The coalition included labor unions, blue-collar workers, big city machines, racial and religious minorities (especially Jews, Catholics, and African Americans), white Southerners, and intellectuals. Besides voters the coalition included powerful interest groups: Democratic Party organizations in most states, city machines, labor unions, some third parties, universities, and foundations. It was largely opposed by the Republican Party, the business community, and rich Protestants.[2] In creating his coalition, Roosevelt was at first eager to include liberal Republicans and some radical third parties, even if it meant downplaying the "Democratic" name.[3] By the 1940s, the Republican and third-party allies had mostly been defeated. In 1948, the Democratic Party stood alone and survived the splits that created two splinter parties.

The coalition made the Democratic Party the majority party nationally for decades. Democrats lost control of the White House only in 1952 and 1956 during the broadly popular Eisenhower presidency. They typically controlled both Houses of Congress before the 1990s. The coalition began to weaken with the collapse of big city machines after 1940, the steady decline of labor unions after 1970, the bitter factionalism during the 1968 election, the turn of White Northern ethnics and Southern Whites toward conservatism on racial issues, and the rise of neoliberalism under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, with its opposition to regulation.[4][5][6]

  1. ^ Sebastian Berg, ed. (2017). Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Re-orientation in the British and the American Left. Transcript Verlag. p. 35. ISBN 9783839434185. Hence the center-left of U.S. politics, symbolized by the New Deal Coalition which had given the Democrats comfortable majorities in Washington for a long time, disintegrated from the mid-1960s onwards.
  2. ^ Sean J. Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945 (2014), pp 103–128.
  3. ^ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt vol 3: The Politics of Upheaval (1957) p. 592.
  4. ^ Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945 (2014). pp 183–187.
  5. ^ Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (2022) pp. 204–244.
  6. ^ Ronald Radosh, Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964–1996 (1996).

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