What a Real Midterm Convention Once Looked Like

Just as the Holy Roman Empire proved to be neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, so the Republican midterm convention, which will meet over the next two days in Dallas, will be neither a convention nor, at least in a way that will help the party in the November elections, Republican. As to its status as a convention, it will feature no delegates, or even a delegate selection process; it will merely have attendees. As to Republicans, it’s clear that Republicans facing serious election challenges are opting to stay away, as the event will really only seek to put the Trump stamp even more emphatically on a party that now, rather belatedly, wishes it would go away. Far from going away, Trump himself will harangue the attendees not once but twice in the next two days, with his increasingly delusional, narcissistic, and Fidel Castro–length rants.

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The event will, however, definitely be midterm. To the best of my knowledge, there have been only two major-party midterm conventions in American history: those held by the Democrats in 1974 and 1978, which the party created in the brief period when its official bodies were controlled by liberal reformers who’d opposed the Vietnam War. The ’74 convention didn’t amount to much, but the ’78 midterm, held in Memphis in December after the Democrats had been shellacked in the elections, featured a serious challenge to Jimmy Carter’s presidency, more particularly to his post– (and in some ways, anti–) New Deal economic policies. With nearly a half-century’s worth of hindsight, those battles may now appear more significant, or at least more telling, than they did at the time.

By the mid-’70s, America’s postwar economic domination was beginning to erode, with imports beginning to challenge the nation’s domestic industries. The liberal, labor, and left wings of the party were pushing for the government to ensure full employment through federal job creation. The chair of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC)—Michael Harrington, who by then had earned a megaphone that reached into mainstream media—argued that it was the full-employment policies of the Scandinavian socialists that had enabled those nations to adopt and embrace the environmental and social reforms advanced in the 1960s, as they didn’t threaten the jobs of Scandinavian workers. This was a play to build links between the Old Left of the New Deal era and the New Left of the ’60s, which had been severed by the Vietnam War.

Harrington understood that the future of American liberalism depended on reconnecting the two in common cause. To that end, DSOC created a coalitional formation called Democratic Agenda, with considerable support from the small number of major unions—the UAW, AFSCME, and the Machinists—that were hiring New Left activists and clashed regularly with George Meany’s AFL-CIO over Cold War mania and continuing opposition to the movements of the ’60s.

But Carter opposed the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill, the centerpiece of the labor-liberal agenda. (Only after the bill was gutted of its substance did Carter sign it into law.) Carter had also declined to line up the 60 Senate votes required to reform labor law so that workers could once again organize without fear of being fired; at least one of his top aides worked against the bill.

DSOC realized that the upcoming midterm convention provided an avenue for Democrats to contest Carter’s policies. Delegates were selected in congressional district caucuses, and to the administration’s astonishment, DSOC activists and Democratic Agenda staff (which basically consisted of one New York–based activist, Marjorie Phyfe) collected the signatures of the required one-quarter of the delegates to put four resolutions before the convention and allot time for debate on them. Those resolutions called for governmental-guaranteed full employment, an anti-monopolistic policy to curtail inflation (as opposed to retrenchment of public services), more progressive taxation, and the establishment of the kind of universal health care that was common to virtually every other nation with an advanced economy.

Harrington led the floor fights for these resolutions; the administration designated Arkansas’s attorney general, who’d just been elected governor one month earlier (a guy named Bill Clinton) to lead the opposition. The resolutions lost, but nonetheless managed to secure the votes of 40 percent of the delegates.

The most memorable speech at the convention didn’t come from Carter, but from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose impassioned argument for national health care was met with such overwhelming enthusiasm (the delegates were standing and cheering straight through his concluding three minutes, not to mention for many more minutes when he’d finished) that it surely played a role in his deciding to challenge Carter for the party’s nomination in 1980.

Harrington repeatedly made clear that nothing that Democratic Agenda was calling for was in any way socialist; they were simply progressive or social democratic policies that had ample antecedents in the history of American liberalism. Instead, the Democratic Party of Carter and Clinton never escaped from the broad configurations of economic policy laid down by conservatives like Ronald Reagan.

In 1978, DSOC had only a few thousand members, but that was enough to mobilize the core of progressive and labor activists who supplied the Democratic Agenda delegates at Memphis. Today, America’s revived socialist movement—the Democratic Socialists of America—has more than 100,000 members, and when it works within what is still our only quasi-social democratic party—the Democrats—it has enough precinct walkers and phone-bankers to elect public officials running on economic platforms not all that dissimilar from Democratic Agenda’s in 1978.

In case you’re wondering, the ’78 midterm so distressed the Democrats’ establishment that they turned the convention into a conference in 1982 and abolished it thereafter.

Postscript: Yesterday, I attended the wake for my friend Skip Roberts, who, like Marjorie Phyfe and me, worked the floor for Democratic Agenda at the Memphis midterm. It was also Skip who presented the signatures requiring the Democratic National Committee to have the midterm debate and vote on those four resolutions to a very unhappy DNC. As a Marine fighting in the trenches in Vietnam, Skip had assembled 80 of his fellow grunts to issue, while still in the field, a condemnation of the war and its toll on both Americans and the Vietnamese. He later was a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and for decades was a political staffer for a host of progressive unions, as well as an activist for veterans and his fellow gays, and, within DSOC and later DSA, for linking American democratic socialists with their counterparts in other lands.