“A PROGRESSIVE HISTORY OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY SINCE 1945: AMERICAN DREAMS, HARD REALITIES”
By Chris J. Magoc
Routledge ($42.95)
The end of World War II, Chris Magoc reminds us, seemed likely to mark the beginning of an “American Century,” characterized by peace, prosperity, and widely shared democratic values. In 2022, the United States is plagued with intractable crises, social, cultural, and political polarization, and “an embrace of illiberalism unprecedented in our national experience.”
In “A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945: American Dreams, Hard Realities,” Magoc addresses a question haunting citizens across the ideological spectrum: how did we land here? Informed by his experiences as an organizer, activist, and professor of history at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa, Magoc’s chronicle of events, he acknowledges, is not “clinically objective.”
A gifted storyteller, Magoc fills his narrative with emblematic details. The Freedom Train exhibition, a railway museum of 133 documents and objects spanning American history, which toured 300 cities in 1947, we learn, did not include the Wagner Act, which legalized collective bargaining for workers, because the American Heritage Foundation, whose board was dominated by bankers and businessmen, rejected the recommendation of National Archives curators.
In 1958, 73% of citizens believed the federal government would act in their best interest, “all or most of the time.” During the Vietnam War, Magoc writes, thousands of young men avoided the draft by enrolling in college, joining the Peace Corps and Vista, declaring themselves Conscientious Objectors, going to prison, moving to Canada, “inserting hypodermic needle marks for a drug addiction ruse, and dropping ink on cigarettes to produce spots on the lungs… Shooting yourself in the foot was not off limits.” And in the 1980s, the AIDS quilt grew to 48,000 names, each memorializing a lost loved one.
Not surprisingly, Magoc’s analysis tends to reflect his unabashedly progressive perspective. He deems the challenging promise of “participatory democracy” in the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “enthralling.” Despite, or perhaps, because the social movements of the 1960s endangered the political order, Magoc maintains that they “demonstrated the resilience of American democracy” during a constitutional crisis.
Magoc places Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the context of “the rise of an image-driven cultural celebrity that increasingly distorted, even vanquished, reality.” He demonstrates that the claim that tax cuts and deregulation fueled new business investment, spurring job creation” is one of the era’s great myths. Internal documents of Charles Keating’s company, Lincoln Savings and Loan, Magoc reveals, told employees: “Always remember that the weak, meek, and ignorant are good targets.”
More surprising, it seems to me, is Magoc’s assertion that John F. Kennedy was an anti-imperialist, who broke with Cold War orthodoxy. Magoc also gives too much credit to the Nuclear Freeze Movement for convincing Reagan to negotiate a comprehensive arms reduction treaty with Gorbachev. And too little credit to George H.W. Bush for his handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War.
Magoc concludes his book with a brief chapter on 21st-century politics, “America Under Attack.” Having already indicated that “amid the corrosive confluence of deregulated corporate greed,” celebrity culture, and white victimhood in the 1980s, Donald Trump had launched “the bamboozle that would take him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Magoc emphasizes that Trump was “the logical Republican endgame of a pattern going back decades.”
This is what unswerving support from the MAGA base looks like: “If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and tells me Trump is with Russia,” declared one of the true-believers, “I would tell him, ‘Hold on a second, I need to check with the President if it’s true.’”
That said, Magoc gives the last word to progressives, who despite profound trepidation, express hope, irrepressible hope, in America.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
First Published: April 23, 2022, 4:00 a.m.