Manning Marable's reflections on the 1984 US elections stand as a sensitive analysis of the dynamics of party realignment and racial polarization during the second Cold War, in the wake of Reagan's reelection and Jesse Jackson's first primary campaign. His essay is worth revisiting today, in the context of a primary season that in some ways reflects the grim persistence of the forces Marable identified thirty years ago, and in others seems to promise the final unraveling of the coalitions that have structured the major parties since the early 1970s. Parts I and II are below. Read Part III here.





First published in The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook (1985), edited by Mike Davis, Fred Pfeil, and Michael Sprinker, and later included in Beyond Black and White (Democratic National Convention, San Francisco, 1984. Photo by Thomas F. Arndt

The reelection of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 was not a watershed in American electoral history, but it did accelerate deep trends in popular political culture which could produce an authoritarian social order in the very near future. This chapter is an examination of various political currents and social blocs competing for power within the bourgeois state apparatus. Although there is a brief overview of the political dynamics of the Democratic Party primaries, the emergence of the Rainbow Coalition of Jesse Jackson, and the general election, my principal concern here is to examine the increased racial polarization within elements of both the American left and right as part of a broader process of electoral political realignment of the party system. Most Marxists seriously underestimate the presence of racism as an ideological and social factor of major significance in the shape of both American conservative and liberal centrist politics — in the pursuit of US foreign policies, particularly in the Caribbean and Africa, and as an impediment to the development of a mass left alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties. Although class prefigures all social relations, the burden of race is a powerful and omnipresent element that has helped to dictate the directions of contemporary politics.

An explicitly racist aspect of the Reagan agenda manifested itself domestically and internationally. Black workers suffered disproportionately from both unemployment and social-service reductions. In 1983, for example, 19.8 percent of all white men and 16.7 percent of all white women were unemployed at some point; for blacks, the figures were 32.2 percent for men, and 26.1 percent for women workers. Between 1980 and 1983, the median black family income dropped 5.3 percent; an additional 1.3 million blacks became poor, and nearly 36 percent of all African-Americans lived in poverty in 1983, the highest rate since 1966. The Reagan administration slashed aid to historically black universities and reduced student loans, forcing thousands of black youth out of schools. The US Commission on Civil Rights and Office of Federal Contracts Compliance Programs were transformed into bulwarks for racial and sexual discrimination. In its foreign affairs, the Reagan administration authorized a policy of “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa. In 1981 Reagan asked Congress to repeal the Clark amendment prohibiting covert military aid to Angolan terrorists; authorized the US training of South Africa’s Coast Guard; and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning South Africa’s illegal invasion of Angola. In 1982 the Reagan administration rescinded controls on “non-lethal” exports to apartheid’s military and police; voted for a $1.1 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to South Africa; sent 2,500 electric-shock batons to the South African police; and appointed a pro-apartheid US executive, Herman Nickel, ambassador to Pretoria. The next year, the administration established offices in downtown Johannesburg to promote accelerated US investment in the regime, and granted a license for US firms to service South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power plant. By 1984 about 6,350 US corporations held direct subsidiaries or did some form of business inside the racist regime. US firms supplied 15 percent of the state’s imports, and absorbed 8 percent of its exports, amounting to $4 billion.

Given the unambiguously racist, sexist, and anti-labor character of the Reagan offensive, oppositional social movements were inevitable. In September 1981 the AFL-CIO broke with tradition to stage a massive “Solidarity” march against the administration. On 12 June 1982 over one million Americans demonstrated in favor of a freeze on the production and deployment of nuclear weapons. Black middle-class formations such as the NAACP and Operation PUSH combined with black nationalist, left and peace forces, holding a march on Washington DC on 27 August 1983 that brought more than 300,000 demonstrators to the capital. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party was, for several reasons, ill-prepared to accommodate the new militancy of women, national minorities and trade unionists. For nearly half a century, the Democrats had controlled Congress, a majority of state legislatures, and most major municipal governments. Unlike the Republicans, the Democratic Party had consciously attempted to bring together a broad spectrum of social forces and classes — trade unions, small farmers, national minorities, eastern financial and industrial capitalists, southern whites, the unemployed. It was a capitalist party, in that its governing ideology of Keynesian economics and Cold War liberalism benefited sectors of the ruling class. But in the absence of a mass labor or social-democratic party, it also functioned as a vehicle for minorities’ and workers’ interests to be represented, if in a limited manner. This governing coalition was first seriously weakened by democratic social movements of African-Americans in the late 1950s and 1960s, which forced the destruction of legal segregation and increased the number of black elected officials from 100 in 1964 to over 5,000 in 1980. The black freedom movement combined with the anti-Vietnam War movement to contribute to the defection from the party of millions of southern segregationists and conservatives. By the late 1960s, a political backlash against social reforms developed among many white ethnic, blue-collar workers who had long been Democrats. Although the economic recession of 1973–1975 and the Watergate scandal temporarily set back the Republicans and contributed to Carter’s narrow electoral victory in 1976, the general trend among whites to the right in national political culture continued. This was most evident in an analysis of the racial polarization in presidential elections between 1952 and 1976. During this period, the average level of electoral support for Democratic presidential candidates among blacks was 83.4 percent, against 43.7 percent among white voters. The results in 1980 were even more striking: 85 percent of all blacks and 59 percent of Hispanics voted for Carter, while only 36 percent of all white voters supported his re-election. Not since 1948 had a majority of white Americans voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.



The defections of major electoral groups from the Democrats had reduced the party to four overlapping social blocs. The first tendency, which was clearly subordinated within the coalition, was the democratic left: African-Americans, Latinos (except Cuban-Americans), feminists, peace activists, liberal trade unionists, environmentalists, welfare-rights and low-income groups, and ideological liberals. In national electoral politics, they were best represented by the Congressional Black Caucus and a small group of white liberals in the House and Senate. To their right was the rump of the old New Deal coalition, the liberal centrists: the AFL-CIO, white ethnics in urban machines, some consumer-goods industrialists and liberal investment bankers, and Jewish organizations. This tendency’s chief representative in national politics was Minnesota senator and former vice president Hubert Humphrey. Following Humphrey’s death in 1977, his protégé, Walter Mondale, assumed leadership of this bloc. A third tendency, which exhibited the most independent posture toward partisan politics, comprised what some have called the “professional managerial class” and sectors of the white, salaried middle-income strata. These white “neo-liberals” tended to oppose US militarism abroad and large defense expenditures. But on economic policies, they tended toward fiscal conservatism and a reduction of social-welfare programs. They were critical of nuclear power, and favored federal regulations to protect the environment; but they also opposed “special interests” such as organized labor. This constituency was behind the unsuccessful presidential campaigns of Morris Udall in 1976 and John Anderson in 1980. Its principal spokesman in the Democratic primaries was Colorado senator Gary Hart, who as early as 1973 had proclaimed that “American liberalism was near bankruptcy.” At the extreme right of the party were those moderate-to-conservative southern Democrats who had not yet defected from the party, and a smaller number of midwestern and “sunbelt” governors and legislators who had ties to small regional capitalists, energy interests, and middle-income white constituencies. The most prominent stars of this tendency in the 1970s were Carter, Florida governor Reubin Askew, millionaire Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, and Ohio senator John Glenn. All of these groups, in varying degrees, opposed the general agenda of the Reagan administration. But only the democratic left, and most specifically the African-American community, mounted a sustained series of social protests against literally every initiative of the Republican president.



In the Democratic presidential primaries of 1984, each of these tendencies was represented by one or more candidates. Conservative Democrats Glenn, Askew, and former segregationist Ernest Hollings, currently senator of South Carolina, were in the race; the “yuppies” and white neo-liberals gravitated to Hart; Mondale drew the early endorsement of the AFL-CIO, and most of the party apparatus. Three candidates split the forces of the democratic left. California senator Alan Cranston, a strong advocate of the peace movement, received support from many freeze candidates and western liberals. Former senator George McGovern drew backing from traditional liberals, some feminists and peace activists. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, president of Operation PUSH and the central political leader within the black community, was the last candidate to announce. The Jackson and Hart campaigns were far more significant than the others, including Mondale’s. Jackson’s decision to run was made against the advice of most of the black petty-bourgeois leadership, the NAACP and the Urban League, who had already committed themselves to Mondale. Even the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, which on economic matters was a good deal to the left of the NAACP elite, supported Mondale.