On the surface, the Democratic Party has a long history of partisan bickering. Is it any surprise it’s happening again? Maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

There is the most famous walkout of them all, the 1948 Dixiecrat rebellion when Strom Thurmond led a block of Southern states out of the convention to protest the Party’s Civil Rights stance. Then came the 1964 delegate fight in Atlantic City over the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Four years later there was Chicago.

Compared to those turbulent elections, the recent past has seemed relatively strife free, with perhaps only the 2000 Nader revolt the only sign of turmoil within the Party. Yet there is something about the Democratic Party’s lack of recent conflict and its past history that cannot help but make you wonder. Those fights of 1948, 1964 and 1968 were over serious matters the Party needed to confront: Civil Rights and the Vietnam War.

Both 1948 and 1964 revolved around the issue of whether the Democrats would continue their century-long hypocrisy over segregation. Essentially the Party had struck a Devil’s bargain where in exchange for the votes of what was then referred to as the “Solid South,” it refused to confront racial bigotry and murder.

It tolerated the vilest creatures including one Theodore Bilbo, a notorious Mississippi racist who was the author of the book Take Your Choice, Separation Or Mongrelization. A short, bespeckled man whose pictures show him as being almost as wide as he was tall, Bilbo had a long career peppered with charges of corruption, but his race baiting made him notorious even in Mississippi. In one speech he said, “One drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and strikes palsied his creative faculty.”

The beginning of the end of the Devil’s bargain came slowly, but 1948 and then 1964 signaled that its time was ending. In 1948 it was Harry Truman who coined the term Dixiecrats to describe the dissident segregationists. In the middle of the 1948 campaign, Truman took the courageous step of desegregating the military. When a friend asked him to “go easy” on the South during the campaign, Truman wrote back:

The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and for themselves. (see David McCullough’s Truman, p. 722)

By 1964, Civil Rights dominated the Democratic Convention. The compromise reached in Atlantic City was, in Fannie Lou Hamer’s words, “No compromise at all,” but still it said unequivocally to those Bilbo’s who were left that the Democratic Party that their days were numbered. The 1964 convention was followed by the Civil Rights legislation of the Johnson Administration including the Voting Rights Act.

The 1968 Chicago convention has earned its place as one of the most contentious in history, in part because those inside the convention hall were determined not to let the voices that protested outside disrupt the supposed “unity” of the Party. Their determination extended to fomenting a “police riot” that left the smell of tear gas drifting up to very doors of the convention and cracked skulls bleeding on the street in an eerie repetition of the actions used against Civil Rights marchers in the South.

Yet Chicago also sent a message: the Vietnam War had to stop. Hubert Humphrey, who had equivocated about Vietnam in Chicago and helped to kill the convention’s anti-Vietnam War plank, broke with Lyndon Johnson, urging a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.

Looking back on those contentious campaigns and conventions, there seems little question that they were all but inevitable. The Democratic Party could not keep trying to live “half slave; half free,” nor could it continue to pretend that only a tiny group of “left wing agitators” opposed the Vietnam War.

I have written several essays over the last year about the need for unity in the Democratic Party, but last night during one of my all-too-familiar after midnight battles with pain, I lay awake wondering if maybe I have been wrong. Perhaps this year’s contentious battle is about something more than two candidates aggressively trying to win the nomination. The controversies over Reverend Wright and what happened on Hillary Clinton’s flight to Bosnia and whatever the press push as next week’s revelation are really sideshows to something more fundamental.

If you review the history of the Party over the last few decades, the Democrats have embraced another Devil’s bargain in the name of Party unity almost as passionately as they tolerated segregation. That Devil’s bargain has earned the disparaging nickname of “Republican Lite.”

What lead me to write the book The Strange Death of Liberal America and continue this blog is the belief that what the press refers to as the conservative movement in the Republican Party is actually a Counterrevolution against the ideals that brought us the New Deal and the reforms of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

In the book I wrote:

In essence whether under the guise of Strom Thurmond’s Southern Manifesto, Reagonomics or the Bush tax cuts, the Counterrevolution believes that a tilted playing field is best for the economy and society. In their “survival of the fittest” view of the world lies a sense that the steeper the tilt, the more those who master this climb by whatever means become stronger, in turn strengthening society.

As far back as the turn of the century William Jennings Bryan defined the difference between the GOP and the Democrats in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

I have termed this idea as a belief in the level playing field. Since 1984, the Democratic Party has moved deliberately away from this idea, becoming an echo of the GOP. Walter Mondale’s loss in which he captured only one state, his own, lead directly to the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council and the philosophy of what has become known as the New Democrats.

The New Democrats resembled the nineteenth century Bourbons of Grover Cleveland in their capitulation to the main philosophy of the Republican Party. Cleveland’s Democrats believed in the laissez faire capitalism that ruled the Gilded Age. The New Democrats sounded as though they were channeling Ronald Reagan when they agreed less-government is better and embraced a pro-business philosophy not unlike Grover Cleveland’s.

At the center of this was Bill Clinton. He played a large hand in crafting the basic platform of the New Democrats which stated:

We believe the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

We believe the Democratic Party’s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government.

We believe that all claims on government are not equal. Our leaders must reject demands that are less worthy, and hold to clear governing priorities.

We believe that economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone. The free market, regulated in the public interest, is the best engine of general prosperity.

This philosophy guided the Clinton Presidency and the campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. Yet not everyone bought into this idea which is what fueled the Nader revolt of 2000 and the candidacy of John Dean in 2004.

Although the mainstream media have framed the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton mostly in terms of policy differences about health care plans and Iraq, I have come to believe that the contentiousness of this contest has nothing to do with differing “plans” and everything to do with the still unresolved conflict between the New Democrats and level playing field ideals of Bryan, Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman.

This contest is really about whether the Democratic Party will have four more years of the Democratic Leadership Council or affirm a new beginning based on the idea of the level playing field. Frankly, Barack Obama has yet to fully embrace this ideal, but I believe that much as it fueled the candidacy of John Dean, it is fueling Obama’s run. It is as if the pent up frustrations of years of DLC “me-tooism” and triangulation have finally boiled over.

Two events have helped to stoke this fire: the Iraq War and the mortgage crisis. With Iraq, many people saw for the first time that “me-tooism” and triangulation extended even to supporting one of the most misguided and immoral foreign policy mistakes in American history. With the mortgage crisis they have begun to see how the DLC’s support for measures such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act has brought us not economic prosperity but to the edge of a potential Depression.

Most of all, while think tanks such as the Brookings Institution have churned out report after report about our growing inequality and our dismal international rankings in everything from education to health care, people have looked around them and seen rising gas prices, too many “For Sale” signs, bridges collapse and heard someone they know relate a horror story about the perils of American health care which is not only expensive but mediocre.

Barack Obama has become a lighting rod for these frustrations, but he himself has yet to capture that lightning. To switch metaphors in mid-stream, Obama is currently riding a tiger and the question is how long will he stay on top? His much-discussed speech on race demonstrated how he could reframe a much-needed discussion. Now the question is can he reframe the debate over the level playing field? He has given the equivalent of John Kennedy’s Houston Ministerial Speech to deal with the issue of his race, now he needs to deliver the equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” speech to deal with the level playing field.

Whether he does so or not, whether he is merely another Kerry, will play out over the next few months. But the larger battle between the New Democrats (who are really old Republicans) and a rebirth of the ideals of what Paul Wellstone referred to as the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” will not go away. The Nader and Dean candidacies brought it out into the open, but this year it has ignited flames that will not be so easy to put out.

In 1968, the Democratic Party tried to pretend there was no large conflict even as the battle raged in Grant Park. This year no matter how hard the Party denies there is a conflict, it will be hard to keep it off the convention floor. Anyone have a “Cross of Gold” speech ready?

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