Political branding is not always a very good guide to what lies underneath: President Eisenhower called himself a “progressive conservative,” whatever in hell that hopes to mean. As a matter of substance, the actual voting records of the so-called conservative Democrats in the South reveal a party faction that was broadly onboard with the progressive program of the time, with the main exception of labor-related issues.
“And race,” you might be tempted to add. But in fact the progressive movement was as riven as the Democratic party itself over segregation and what Senator Russell straightforwardly and proudly described as “white supremacy.” Woodrow Wilson, the godfather of American progressivism, was a segregationist and a hardcore Klan man. He was, as Vox puts it, “extremely racist even by the standards of his time,” a president who sought to amplify presidential power and who used that power to, among other things, resegregate the parts of the federal government that had been desegregated. Racist politics did not suddenly vanish from the progressive movement when Wilson finally assumed room temperature. Progressives did not overcome external racist opponents: They liberated themselves, over time, from the racism that had long been intertwined with the rest of their movement. That matters enormously to an accurate understanding of what is, after all, still one of the dominant tendencies in American political thinking.
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