Radical Democrats: Ideology and Political Change in California in the Post-World War Two Era

从第二次世界大战结束到1970年代，工业化国家政府对社会政策和经济增长问题的看法发生了巨大变化。这本书的项目旨在调查温和的左翼政治在这几十年里在美国发展到什么程度。这项研究将使占主导地位的战后美国政治史学复杂化，后者往往强调制度和政治限制，阻碍了新政之后的中左翼政治激进主义。加利福尼亚州之所以重要，是因为它不仅是一个幅员辽阔、发展迅速的州，而且也是上世纪50年代和60年代发生重大政治变革的地方，清楚地证明了社会变革与我想要探索的政治意识形态之间的联系。加利福尼亚州的民主党在20世纪50年代建立了一个新的政治基础，利用草根激进主义动员了一个跨阶层的选民联盟，支持一个中间偏左的计划，该计划将推动民主党取得政治主导地位。我认为，在加利福尼亚州，左翼意识形态有相当大的发展空间，可以将工人阶级成员与中产阶级活动人士团结在一起，以巩固1958年后垂死的民主党的执政地位。新一代民主党人对美国人的人权进行了广泛的解读，包括无论就业状况如何都有权获得收入，以及种族和性别平等的权利。本研究将考察20世纪50年代和60年代加州民主党委员会、民主党俱乐部运动以及州立法机构中民主党人的立法纲领的建立和发展，以评估当时主流政党政治与激进政治激进主义之间的联系。这本书将探讨加州自由派圈子关于福利国家和经济增长问题的辩论如何为他们提供了解释公民和性权利等更广泛问题的政治语言，在许多情况下，这些问题是在20世纪70年代权利革命爆发之前进行的。因此，这个项目试图在美国的背景下解释战后几年社会民主思想和实践的成功和失败。发达世界其他地区的社会民主党派和活动家相信，公民有社会责任，通过一般税收支持福利计划，并支持个人不分性别、种族和性别享有公民平等的权利。在英国和其他地方，战后时代的左翼政党不得不重新调整他们的政治纲领，以适应一个富裕的时代，托尼·克罗斯兰(Tony Crosland)的著作《社会主义的未来》(The Future of社会主义，1956)就强调了这一点。从这个角度来看，加州福利法在20世纪60年代初的大幅自由化等发展可以与其他地方的类似发展相提并论。然而，这一重大政治变革的动态是美国和加州所特有的。对加州民主党政策制定和激进主义的调查揭示了主流政治如何适应不断变化的社会观念的过程，包括对福利和“应得的”穷人、性取向、个人权利和资本主义监管的态度。战后金州人口和经济的快速增长，以及它独特的种族和阶级动态，使得致力于公民和社会权利的温和左翼新政治的出现成为政治变革的一个特别重要的案例研究，帮助我们理解现代民主党的起源以及近几十年来它越来越多地接受社会差异的动力。这本书为我们理解现代美国政治与社会变革有关做出了独到的贡献。

The era between the end of World War Two and the 1970s witnessed dramatic changes in the way governments in the industrialized world perceived questions of social policy and economic growth. This book project aims to investigate the extent to which a moderate left-wing politics developed in the United States in these decades. This study will complicate the dominant historiography on postwar American politics, which tends to stress institutional and political constraints hampering left-of-centre political activism in the wake of the New Deal.The state of California is important as not only is it a large and rapidly growing state in this period, but it is also the site of significant political change in the 1950s and 1960s that clearly demonstrates the link between social change and political ideology that I want to explore. The Democratic Party in California built a new political base in the 1950s that used grass-roots activism to mobilize a cross-class coalition of voters behind a left-of-center program that would propel the Democratic Party to political dominance. I argue that in California there was considerable scope for the development of an ideology of the left that could unite elements of the working class with middle class activists in order to entrench the previously moribund Democratic Party in power after 1958. This new generation of Democrats interpreted the human rights of Americans broadly to include the right to an income regardless of employment status, and the right to racial and sexual equality. This study will examine the establishment and development of the California Democratic Council, the Democratic Club movement, and the legislative program of the Democrats in the state legislature in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to evaluate the link between mainstream party politics and radical political activism in those years. The book will explore how debates in liberal circles in California about questions of the welfare state and economic growth gave them the political language with which to interpret broader questions of civil and sexual rights, in many cases before the explosion of the rights revolution in the 1970s. Thus this project seeks to explain the successes and failures of social democratic thought and practice in the postwar years in an American context. Social democratic parties and activists in other parts of the developed world believed in the social responsibility of citizens to act for the common good by supporting welfare programs through general taxation and in the right of the individual to civil equality regardless of sexuality, race, and gender. In the UK and elsewhere parties on the left in the post-war era had to reconfigure their political programs for an age of abundance, emphasized by works such as Tony Crosland's The Future of Socialism (1956). In this light, developments such as the great liberalization of California's welfare laws in the early 1960s can be seen in parallel with similar developments elsewhere. Yet the dynamics of this important political change were particular to the United States and to California. An investigation of Democratic Party policymaking and activism in California sheds light on the processes through which mainstream politics adapted to changing conceptions of society, including attitudes to welfare and the 'deserving' poor, sexuality, individual rights, and the regulation of capitalism. The rapid population and economic growth of the Golden State in the postwar era, together with its particular dynamics of race and class, make the emergence of a new politics on the moderate left committed to civil and social rights a particularly important case study of political change that helps us understand the origins of the modern Democratic Party and the dynamics of its growing acceptance of social difference in recent decades.This book makes an original contribution to our understanding of modern American politics as it relates to social change.